The Talisman

bed.
    ‘Well, you sure are nervous,’ Richard agreed, shaking his head in refusal when Jack offered him the last cookie. ‘Paranoid, actually. It comes from spending the last couple of months on the road. You’ll be okay once you get home to your mother, Jack.’
    ‘Richard,’ Jack said, tossing away the empty Famous Amos bag, ‘let’s cut the shit. Do you see what’s going on outside on your campus?’
    Richard wet his lips. ‘I explained that,’ he said. ‘I have a fever. Probably none of this is happening at all, and if it is, then perfectly ordinary things are going on and my mind is twisting them, heightening them. That’s one possibility. The other is . . . well . . . drug-pushers.’
    Richard sat forward on Albert the Blob’s bed.
    ‘ You haven’t been experimenting with drugs, have you, Jack? While you were on the road?’ The old intelligent, incisive light had suddenly rekindled in Richard’s eyes. Here’s a possible explanation, a possible way out of this madness , his eyes said. Jack has gotten involved in some crazy drug-scam, and all these people have followed him here .
    ‘No,’ Jack said wearily. ‘I always used to think of you as the master of reality, Richard,’ Jack said. ‘I never thought I’d live to see you – you ! – using your brains to twist the facts.’
    ‘Jack, that’s just a . . . a crock, and you know it!’
    ‘Drug-wars in Springfield, Illinois?’ Jack asked. ‘Who’s talking Seabrook Island stuff now?’
    And that was when a rock suddenly crashed in through Albert Humbert’s window, spraying glass across the floor.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
RICHARD IN THE DARK
----
    1
    Richard screamed and threw an arm up to shield his face. Glass flew.
    ‘Send him out, Sloat!’
    Jack got up. Dull fury filled him.
    Richard grabbed his arm. ‘Jack, no! Stay away from the window!’
    ‘Fuck that,’ Jack almost snarled. ‘I’m tired of being talked about like I was a pizza.’
    The Etheridge-thing stood across the road. It was on the sidewalk at the edge of the quad, looking up at them.
    ‘Get out of here!’ Jack shouted at it. A sudden inspiration burst in his head like a sunflare. He hesitated, then bellowed: ‘ I order you out of here! All of you! I order you to leave in the name of my mother, the Queen! ’
    The Etheridge-thing flinched as if someone had used a whip to lay a stripe across its face.
    Then the look of pained surprise passed and the Etheridge-thing began to grin. ‘She’s dead, Sawyer!’ it shouted up – but Jack’s eyes had grown sharper, somehow, in his time on the road, and he saw the expression of twitchy unease under the manufactured triumph. ‘Queen Laura’s dead and your mother’s dead, too . . . dead back in New Hampshire . . . dead and stinking .’
    ‘ Begone! ’ Jack bellowed, and he thought that the Etheridge-thing flinched back in baffled fury again.
    Richard had joined him at the window, pallid and distracted. ‘What are you two yelling about?’ he asked. He looked fixedly at the grinning travesty below them and across the way. ‘How does Etheridge know your mother’s in New Hampshire?’
    ‘ Sloat! ’ the Etheridge-thing yelled up. ‘ Where’s your tie? ’
    A spasm of guilt contracted Richard’s face; his hands jerked toward the open neck of his shirt.
    ‘ We’ll let it go this time, if you send out your passenger, Sloat! ’ the Etheridge-thing yelled up. ‘ If you send him out, everything can go back to the way it was! You want that, don’t you? ’
    Richard was staring down at the Etheridge-thing, nodding – Jack was sure of it – quite unconsciously. His face was a knotted rag of misery, his eyes bright with unshed tears. He wanted everything to go back to the way it had been, oh yes.
    ‘ Don’t you love this school, Sloat? ’ the Etheridge-thing bellowed up at Albert’s window.
    ‘Yes,’ Richard muttered, and gulped down a sob. ‘Yes, of course I love it.’
    ‘You know what we do to little punks who don’t love this school? Give him to us! It’ll be like he was never here!’
    Richard turned slowly and looked at Jack with dreadfully blank eyes.
    ‘You decide, Richie-boy,’ Jack said softly.
    ‘He’s carrying drugs, Richard!’ the Etheridge-thing called up. ‘Four or five different kinds! Coke, hash, angel-dust! He’s been selling all of that stuff to finance his trip west! Where do you think he got that nice coat he was wearing when he showed up on your doorstep?’
    ‘Drugs,’