The Talisman

Richard said with great, shuddery relief. ‘I knew it.’
    ‘But you don’t believe it,’ Jack said. ‘Drugs didn’t change your school, Richard. And the dogs—’
    ‘Send him out, Sl . . .’ the Etheridge-thing’s voice was fading, fading.
    When the two boys looked down again, it was gone.
    ‘Where did your father go, do you think?’ Jack asked softly. ‘Where do you think he went when he didn’t come out of the closet, Richard?’
    Richard turned slowly to look at him, and Richard’s face, usually so calm and intelligent and serene, now began to shiver into pieces. His chest began to hitch irregularly. Richard suddenly fell into Jack’s arms, clutching at him with a blind, panicky urgency. ‘ It t-t-touched muh-me-eeee! ’ he screamed at Jack. His body trembled under Jack’s hands like a winchwire under a near-breaking strain. ‘It touched me, it t-touched m-me, something in there t-t-touched me AND I DON’T NUH-NUH-KNOW WHAT IT WAS!’
    2
    With his burning forehead pressed against Jack’s shoulder, Richard coughed out the story he had held inside him all these years. It came in hard little chunks, like deformed bullets. As he listened, Jack found himself remembering the time his own father had gone into the garage . . . and had come back two hours later, from around the block. That had been bad, but what had happened to Richard had been a lot worse. It explained Richard’s iron, no-compromise insistence on reality, the whole reality, and nothing but the reality. It explained his rejection of any sort of fantasy, even science fiction . . . and, Jack knew from his own school experience, technies like Richard usually ate and drank sf . . . as long as it was the hard stuff, that was, your basic Heinlein, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven – spare us the metaphysical bullshit of the Robert Silverbergs and Barry Malzbergs, please, but we’ll read the stuff where they get all the stellar quadrants and logarithms right until it’s running out of our ears. Not Richard, though. Richard’s dislike of fantasy ran so deep that he would not pick up any novel unless it was an assignment – as a kid, he had let Jack pick out the books he read for free-choice book reports, not caring what they were, chewing them up as if they were cereal. It became a challenge to Jack to find a story – any story – which would please Richard, divert Richard, carry Richard away as good novels and stories sometimes carried Jack away . . . the good ones, he thought, were almost as good as the Daydreams, and each mapped out its own version of the Territories. But he was never able to produce any frisson , any spark, any reaction at all. Whether it was The Red Pony , Dragstrip Demon , The Catcher in the Rye , or I Am Legend , the reaction was always the same – frowning, dull-eyed concentration, followed by a frowning, dull-eyed book report that would earn either a hook or, if his English teacher was feeling particularly generous that day, a B–. Richard’s Cs in English were what kept him off the honor roll during the few marking periods when he missed it.
    Jack had finished William Golding’s Lord of the Flies , feeling hot and cold and trembly all over – both exalted and frightened, most of all wishing what he always wished when the story was most particularly good – that it didn’t have to stop, that it could just roll on and on, the way that life did (only life was always so much more boring and so much more pointless than stories). He knew Richard had a book report due and so he had given him the lap-eared paperback, thinking that this must surely do it, this would turn the trick, Richard must react to the story of these lost boys and their descent into savagery. But Richard had plodded through Lord of the Flies as he had plodded through all the other novels before it, and wrote another book report which contained all the zeal and fire of a hung-over pathologist’s post-mortem on a traffic accident victim. What is it with you? Jack had burst out, exasperated. What in God’s name have you got against a good story, Richard? And Richard had looked at him, flabbergasted, apparently really not understanding Jack’s anger. Well, there’s really no such thing as a good made-up story, is there? Richard had responded.
    Jack had gone away that day sorely puzzled by Richard’s total rejection of make-believe, but he thought he understood better now – better than he really wanted to, perhaps. Perhaps to