The Talisman

scarf turned toward the sound of Richard’s voice. He tilted his head slightly to look up at them. The lights from the library and the sullen furnace afterglow of the winter sunset fell on his face. Richard’s hands flew to his mouth.
    The right half of the face disclosed was actually a bit like Etheridge’s – an older Etheridge, an Etheridge who had been in a lot of places nice prep-school boys didn’t go and who had done a lot of things nice prep-school boys didn’t do. The other half was a twisted mass of scars. A glittery crescent that might have been an eye peered from a crater in the lumpy mess of flesh below the forehead. It looked like a marble that had been shoved deeply into a puddle of half-melted tallow. A single long fang hooked out of the left corner of the mouth.
    It’s his Twinner , Jack thought with utter calm certainty. That’s Etheridge’s Twinner down there. Are they all Twinners? A Littlefield Twinner and a Norrington Twinner and a Buckley Twinner and so on and so on? That can’t be, can it?
    ‘Sloat!’ the Etheridge-thing cried. It shambled two steps toward Nelson House. The glow from the streetlights on the drive now fell directly onto its ruined face.
    ‘Shut the window,’ Richard whispered. ‘Shut the window. I was wrong. It sort of looks like Etheridge but it’s not, maybe it’s his older brother, maybe someone threw battery acid or something in Etheridge’s brother’s face and now he’s crazy, but it’s not Etheridge so close the window Jack close it right n —’
    Below, the Etheridge-thing shambled yet another step toward them. It grinned. Its tongue, hideously long, fell out of its mouth like an unrolling party favor.
    ‘Sloat!’ it cried. ‘Give us your passenger!’
    Jack and Richard both jerked around, looking at each other with strained faces.
    A howl shivered in the night . . . for it was night now; twilight was done.
    Richard looked at Jack, and for a moment Jack saw something like real hate in the other boy’s eyes – a flash of his father. Why did you have to come here, Jack? Huh? Why did you have to bring me this mess? Why did you have to bring me all this goddam Seabrook Island Stuff?
    ‘Do you want me to go?’ Jack asked softly.
    For a moment that look of harried anger remained in Richard’s eyes, and then it was replaced by Richard’s old kindness.
    ‘No,’ he said, running distracted hands through his hair. ‘No, you’re not going anywhere. There are . . . there are wild dogs out there. Wild dogs, Jack, on the Thayer campus! I mean . . . did you see them?’
    ‘Yeah, I saw em, Richie-boy,’ Jack said softly, as Richard ran his hands through his formerly neat hair again, mussing it into ever wilder tangles. Jack’s neat and orderly friend was starting to look a little bit like Donald Duck’s amiably mad inventor cousin, Gyro Gearloose.
    ‘Call Boynton, he’s Security, that’s what I have to do,’ Richard said. ‘Call Boynton, or the town police, or—’
    A howl rose from the trees on the far side of the quad, from the gathered shadows there – a rising, wavering howl that was really almost human. Richard looked toward it, mouth trembling in an infirm old person’s way, and then he looked pleadingly at Jack.
    ‘Close the window, Jack, okay? I feel feverish. I think maybe I’ve gotten a chill.’
    ‘You bet, Richard,’ Jack said, and closed it, shutting the howl out as best he could.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
    ‘SEND OUT YOUR PASSENGER!’
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    1
    ‘Help me with this, Richard,’ Jack grunted.
    ‘I don’t want to move the bureau, Jack,’ Richard said in a childish, lecturing voice. Those dark circles under his eyes were even more pronounced now than they had been in the lounge. ‘That’s not where it belongs.’
    Out on the quad, that howl rose in the air again.
    The bed was in front of the door. Richard’s room was now pulled entirely out of shape. Richard stood looking around at this, blinking. Then he went to his bed and pulled off the blankets. He handed one to Jack without speaking, then took his and spread it on the floor. He took his change and his billfold out of his pockets, and put them neatly on the bureau. Then he lay down in the middle of his blanket, folded the sides over himself and then just lay there on the floor, his glasses still on, his face a picture of silent misery.
    The silence outside was thick and dreamlike, broken only by the distant growls of the big rigs on the turnpike. Nelson House itself was