The Talisman

silence that had held inside Nelson House.
    Dogs snarled and barked outside – it sounded as if there were not just dozens or scores of them now, but hundreds. The bells in the chapel burst into a wild jangle of sound.
    The bells were driving the mongrel dogs racing back and forth across the quad absolutely nuts. They turned on each other, rolled over and over on the grass – which was beginning to look ragged, weedy, and unkempt – and savaged anything within mouthshot. As Jack watched, one of them attacked an elm tree. Another launched itself at the statue of Elder Thayer. As its biting, snapping muzzle collided with the solid bronze, blood splashed and sprayed.
    Jack turned away, sickened. ‘Come on, Richard,’ Jack said.
    Richard came willingly enough.
    7
    The second floor was a jumbled confusion of overturned furniture, shattered windows, fistfuls of stuffing, records that had apparently been thrown like Frisbees, clothes that had been tossed everywhere.
    The third floor was cloudy with steam and as warmly moist as a tropical rain-forest. As they got closer to the door marked SHOWERS , the heat went up to sauna levels. The mist they had first encountered creeping down the stairs in thin tendrils grew foglike and opaque.
    ‘Stay here,’ Jack said. ‘Wait for me.’
    ‘Sure, Jack,’ Richard said serenely, raising his voice enough to be heard over the drumming showers. His glasses had fogged up, but he made no effort to wipe them off.
    Jack pushed the door open and went in. The heat was soggy and thick. His clothes were soaked at once from sweat and the hot, foggy moisture. The tile-lined room roared and drummed with water. All twenty of the showers had been turned on, and the driving needle-spray from all twenty had been focussed on a pile of sports equipment in the middle of the tiled room. The water was able to drain through this crazy pile, but only slowly, and the room was awash. Jack took off his shoes and circled the room, sliding under the showers to keep himself as dry as possible, and also to keep himself from being scalded – whoever had turned on the showers hadn’t bothered with the cold faucets, apparently. He turned all of them off, one by one. There was no reason for him to do this, no reason at all, and he scolded himself for wasting time in such a way, when he should be trying to think of a way for them to get out of here – out of Nelson House and off the Thayer School grounds – before the axe fell.
    No reason for it, except that maybe Richard wasn’t the only one with a need to create order out of chaos . . . to create order and to maintain it.
    He went back into the hall and Richard was gone.
    ‘Richard?’ He could feel his heartbeat picking up in his chest.
    There was no answer. ‘Richard!’
    Spilled cologne hung on the air, noxiously heavy.
    ‘Richard, where the hell are you!’
    Richard’s hand fell on Jack’s shoulder, and Jack shrieked.
    8
    ‘I don’t know why you had to yell like that,’ Richard said later. ‘It was only me.’
    ‘I’m just nervous,’ Jack said wanly.
    They were sitting in the third-floor room of a boy with the strangely harmonious name of Albert Humbert. Richard told him that Albert Humbert, whose nickname was Albert the Blob, was the fattest boy in school, and Jack could believe it; his room contained an amazing variety of junk food – it was the stash of a kid whose worst nightmare isn’t getting cut from the basketball team or flunking a trig test but rather waking up in the night and not being able to find a Ring-Ding or a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. A lot of the stuff had been thrown around. The glass jar containing the Marshmallow Fluff had been broken, but Jack had never been very wild about Marshmallow Fluff, anyway. He also passed on the licorice whips – Albert the Blob had a whole carton of them stashed on the upper shelf of his closet. Written across one of the carton-flaps was Happy birthday, dear, from Your Loving Mom .
    Some Loving Moms send cartons of licorice whips, and some Loving Dads send blazers from Brooks Brothers , Jack thought wearily, and if there’s any difference, Jason alone knows what it is.
    They found enough food in the room of Albert the Blob to make a crazy sort of meal – Slim Jims, pepperoni slices, Salt ’n Vinegar potato chips. Now they were finishing up with a package of cookies. Jack had retrieved Albert’s chair from the hall and was sitting by the window. Richard was sitting on Albert’s