The Talisman

burning up!’ Richard protested.
    ‘They’re throwing stones, Richard.’
    ‘Hallucinations can’t throw stones, Jack,’ Richard said, as if explaining some simple but vital fact to a mental defective. ‘That’s Seabrook Island stuff. It’s—’
    Another volley of rocks flew through the window.
    ‘ Send out your passenger, Sloat! ’
    ‘Come on, Richard,’ Jack said, getting the other boy to his feet. He led him to the door and outside. He felt enormously sorry for Richard now – perhaps not as sorry as he had felt for Wolf . . . but he was getting there.
    ‘No . . . sick . . . fever . . . I can’t . . .’
    More rocks thudded against the bureau behind them.
    Richard shrieked and clutched at Jack like a boy who is drowning.
    Wild, cackling laughter from outside. Dogs howled and fought with each other.
    Jack saw Richard’s white face grow whiter still, saw him sway, and got up in a hurry. But he was not quite in time to catch Richard before he collapsed in Reuel Gardener’s doorway.
    5
    It was a simple fainting spell, and Richard came around quickly enough when Jack pinched the delicate webbings between his thumbs and forefingers. He would not talk about what was outside – affected, in fact, not to know what Jack was talking about.
    They moved cautiously down the hallway toward the stairs. At the common room Jack poked his head in and whistled. ‘Richard, look at this!’
    Richard looked reluctantly in. The common room was a shambles. Chairs were overturned. The cushions on the couch had been slashed open. The oil portrait of Elder Thayer on the far wall had been defaced – someone had crayoned a pair of devil’s horns poking out of his neat white hair, someone else had added a moustache under his nose, and a third had used a nail-file or similar implement to scratch a crude phallus on his crotch. The glass of the trophy case was shattered.
    Jack didn’t much care for the look of drugged, unbelieving horror on Richard’s face. In some ways, elves trooping up and down the halls in glowing, unearthly platoons or dragons over the quad would have been easier for Richard to take than this constant erosion of the Thayer School he had come to know and love . . . The Thayer School Richard undoubtedly believed to be noble and good, an undisputed bulwark against a world where nothing could be counted on for long . . . not even, Jack thought, that fathers would come back out of the closets they had gone into.
    ‘Who did this?’ Richard asked angrily. ‘Those freaks did it,’ he answered himself. ‘That’s who.’ He looked at Jack, a great, cloudy suspicion beginning to dawn on his face. ‘They might be Colombians,’ he said suddenly. ‘They might be Colombians, and this might be some sort of drug-war, Jack. Has that occurred to you?’
    Jack had to throttle an urge to bellow out mad gusts of laughter. Here was an explanation which perhaps only Richard Sloat could have conceived. It was the Colombians. The cocaine range-wars had come to Thayer School in Springfield, Illinois. Elementary, my dear Watson; this problem has a seven and a half per cent solution.
    ‘I guess anything’s possible,’ Jack said. ‘Let’s take a look upstairs.’
    ‘What in God’s name for?’
    ‘Well . . . maybe we’ll find someone else,’ Jack said. He didn’t really believe this, but it was something to say. ‘Maybe someone’s hiding out up there. Someone normal like us.’
    Richard looked at Jack, then back at the shambles of the common room. That look of haunted pain came back into his face again, the look that said I don’t really want to look at this, but for some reason it seems to be all I DO want to look at right now; it’s bitterly compulsive, like biting a lemon, or scratching your fingernails across a blackboard, or scraping the tines of a fork on the porcelain of a sink .
    ‘Dope is rampant in the country,’ Richard said in eerie lecturehall tones. ‘I read an article on drug proliferation in The New Republic just last week. Jack, all those people out there could be doped up! They could be freebasing! They could be—’
    ‘Come on, Richard,’ Jack said quietly.
    ‘I’m not sure I can climb the stairs,’ Richard said, weakly querulous. ‘My fever may be too bad for me to climb stairs.’
    ‘Well, give it the good old Thayer try,’ Jack said, and continued to lead him in that direction.
    6
    As they reached the second-floor landing, sound bled back into the smooth, almost breathless