The Talisman

you’ll let me call my dad and get him here to take you back, I’ll try to grab some extra food for you.’
    ‘I’m willing to talk about anything with you, Richieboy. Anything. I’ll talk about going back, sure.’
    Richard nodded. ‘Where in the world have you been, anyhow?’ His eyes burned beneath their thick lenses. Then a big, surprising blink. ‘And how in the world can you justify the way you and your mother are treating my father? Shit, Jack. I really think you ought to go back to that place in New Hampshire.’
    ‘I will go back,’ Jack said. ‘That’s a promise. But I have to get something first. Is there anyplace I can sit down? I’m sort of dead tired.’
    Richard nodded at his bed, then – typically – flapped one hand at his desk chair, which was nearer Jack.
    Doors slammed in the hallway. Loud voices passed by Richard’s door, a crowd’s shuffling feet.
    ‘You ever read about the Sunlight Home?’ Jack asked. ‘I was there. Two of my friends died at the Sunlight Home, and get this, Richard, the second one was a werewolf.’
    Richard’s face tightened. ‘Well, that’s an amazing coincidence, because—’
    ‘I really was at the Sunlight Home, Richard.’
    ‘So I gather,’ said Richard. ‘Okay. I’ll be back with some food in about half an hour. Then I’ll have to tell you who lives next door. But this is Seabrook Island stuff, isn’t it? Tell me the truth.’
    ‘Yeah, I guess it is.’ Jack let Myles P. Kiger’s coat slip off his shoulders and fold itself over the back of the chair.
    ‘I’ll be back,’ Richard said. He waved uncertainly to Jack on his way out the door.
    Jack kicked off his shoes and closed his eyes.
    3
    The conversation to which Richard had alluded as ‘Seabrook Island stuff,’ and which Jack remembered as well as his friend, took place in the last week of their final visit to the resort of that name.
    The two families had taken joint vacations nearly every year while Phil Sawyer was alive. The summer after his death, Morgan Sloat and Lily Sawyer had tried to keep the tradition going, and booked the four of them into the vast old hotel on Seabrook Island, South Carolina, which had been the site of some of their happiest summers. The experiment had not worked.
    The boys were accustomed to being in each other’s company. They were also accustomed to places like Seabrook Island. Richard Sloat and Jack Sawyer had scampered through resort hotels and down vast tanned beaches all through their childhood – but now the climate had mysteriously altered. An unexpected seriousness had entered their lives, an awkwardness.
    The death of Phil Sawyer had changed the very color of the future. Jack began to feel that final summer at Seabrook that he might not want to sit in the chair behind his father’s desk – that he wanted more in his life. More what? He knew – this was one of the few things he did truly know – that this powerful ‘moreness’ was connected to the Daydreams. When he had begun to see this in himself, he became aware of something else: that his friend Richard was not only incapable of sensing this quality of ‘moreness’, but that in fact he quite clearly wanted its opposite. Richard wanted less. Richard did not want anything he could not respect.
    Jack and Richard had sloped off by themselves in that slow-breathing time composed at good resorts by the hours between lunch and cocktails. In fact they had not gone far – only up to the side of a pine-tree-covered hill overlooking the rear of the inn. Beneath them sparkled the water of the inn’s huge rectangular pool, through which Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer smoothly and efficiently swam length after length. At one of the tables set back from the pool sat Richard’s father, wrapped in a bulging, fuzzy terry-cloth robe, flip-flops on his white feet, simultaneously eating a club sandwich and wheeling and dealing on the plug-in telephone in his other hand.
    ‘Is this sort of stuff what you want?’ he asked Richard, who was seated neatly beside his own sprawl and held – no surprise – a book. The Life of Thomas Edison .
    ‘What I want? When I grow up, you mean?’ Richard seemed a little nonplussed by the question. ‘It’s pretty nice, I guess. I don’t know if I want it or not.’
    ‘Do you know what you want, Richard? You always say you want to be a research chemist,’ Jack said. ‘Why do you say that? What does it mean?’
    ‘It means that I want to be a research chemist.’