The Talisman

eerily silent.
    ‘I don’t want to talk about what’s outside,’ Richard said. ‘I just want that up front.’
    ‘Okay, Richard,’ Jack said soothingly. ‘We won’t talk about it.’
    ‘Good night, Jack.’
    ‘Good night, Richard.’
    Richard gave him a smile that was wan, and terribly tired; yet there was enough sweet friendliness in it to both warm Jack’s heart and wrench it. ‘I’m still glad you came,’ Richard said, ‘and we’ll talk about all of this in the morning. I’m sure it will make more sense then. This little fever I have will be gone then.’
    Richard rolled over on his right side and closed his eyes. Five minutes later, in spite of the hard floor, he was deeply asleep.
    Jack sat up for a long time, looking out into the darkness. Sometimes he could see the lights of passing cars on Springfield Avenue; at other times both the headlights and the streetlamps themselves seemed to be gone, as if the entire Thayer School kept sideslipping out of reality and hanging in limbo for a while before slipping back in again.
    A wind was rising. Jack could hear it rattling the last frozen leaves from the trees on the quad; could hear it knocking the branches together like bones, could hear it shrieking coldly in the spaces between the buildings.
    2
    ‘That guy’s coming,’ Jack said tensely. It was an hour or so later. ‘Etheridge’s Twinner.’
    ‘Huzzzat?’
    ‘Never mind,’ Jack said. ‘Go back to sleep. You don’t want to see.’
    But Richard was sitting up. Before his eye could fix on the slumped, somehow twisted form walking toward Nelson House, it was abducted by the campus itself. He was profoundly shocked, deeply frightened.
    The ivy on the Monkson Fieldhouse, which had that morning been skeletal but still faintly green, had now gone an ugly, blighted yellow. ‘ Sloat! Give us your passenger! ’
    Suddenly all Richard wanted to do was to go back to sleep – go to sleep until his flu was all gone (he had awakened deciding it must be the flu; not just a chill or fever but a real case of the flu); the flu and the fever that was giving him such horrid, twisted hallucinations. He should never have stood by that open window . . . or, earlier, allowed Jack through the window of his room. Richard thought this, and was then deeply and immediately ashamed.
    3
    Jack shot a quick sideways glance at Richard – but his pallid face and bulging eyes suggested to Jack that Richard was edging farther and farther into The Magical Land of Overload.
    The thing out there was short. It stood on the frost-whitened grass like a troll that had crawled out from under some bridge, its long-clawed hands hanging almost to its knees. It wore an Army duffel coat with ETHERIDGE stencilled above the left pocket. The jacket hung unzipped and open. Beneath it, Jack could see a torn and rumpled Pendleton shirt. A dark stain which might have been either blood or vomit was splashed over one side. It was wearing a rumpled blue tie with tiny gold upper-case E ’s woven into the rep fabric; a couple of burrs were stuck on it like grotesque tie-tacks.
    Only half of this new Etheridge’s face worked right. There was dirt in its hair and leaves on its clothes.
    ‘Sloat! Give us your passenger!’
    Jack looked down at Etheridge’s freakish Twinner again. He was caught and held by its eyes, which were somehow vibrating in their sockets, like tuning forks moving rapidly in their lab-mounts. He had to work to drag his eyes away.
    ‘Richard!’ he grunted. ‘Don’t look in its eyes.’
    Richard didn’t reply; he was staring down at the grinning troll-version of Etheridge with drugged and pallid interest.
    Scared, Jack butted his friend with his shoulder.
    ‘Oh,’ Richard said. Abruptly he snatched up Jack’s hand and pressed it against his forehead. ‘How hot do I feel?’ he demanded.
    Jack pulled his hand away from Richard’s forehead, which was a bit warm but no more.
    ‘Pretty hot,’ he lied.
    ‘I knew it,’ Richard said with real relief. ‘I’m going to the infirmary pretty soon, Jack. I think I need an antibiotic.’
    ‘Give him to us, Sloat!’
    ‘Let’s get the bureau in front of the window,’ Jack said.
    ‘You’re in no danger, Sloat!’ Etheridge called. It grinned reassuringly – the right half of its face grinned reassuringly, anyway; the left half only continued its corpselike gape.
    ‘How can it look so much like Etheridge?’ Richard asked with unsettling, eerie calmness. ‘How can