The Talisman

sluggishly across the floor toward them.
    ‘Bugs, Jesus, we have to get out, we have to—’
    ‘Thank God, this kid finally sees the light,’ Jack said.
    He slung his knapsack over his left arm and grabbed Richard’s elbow in his right hand. He hustled Richard to the door. White bugs squashed and splattered under their shoes. Now they were pouring out of the brown patches in a flood; an obscene, ongoing multiple birth that was happening all over Albert’s room. A stream of the white bugs fell from a patch on the ceiling and landed, squirming, on Jack’s hair and shoulders; he brushed them away as best he could and hauled the screaming, flailing Richard out the door.
    I think we’re on our way , Jack thought. God help us, I really think we are.
    9
    They were in the common room again. Richard, it turned out, had even less idea of how to sneak off the Thayer campus than Jack did himself. Jack knew one thing very well: he was not going to trust that deceptive quiet and go out any of Nelson House’s Entry doors.
    Looking hard to the left out of the wide common-room window, Jack could see a squat octagonal brick building.
    ‘What’s that, Richard?’
    ‘Huh?’ Richard was looking at the gluey, sluggish torrents of mud flowing over the darkening quad.
    ‘Little squatty brick building. You can just barely see it from here.’
    ‘Oh. The Depot.’
    ‘What’s a Depot?’
    ‘The name itself doesn’t mean anything anymore,’ Richard said, still looking uneasily out at the mud-drenched quad. ‘Like our infirmary. It’s called The Creamery because there used to be a real dairy barn and milk-bottling plant over there. Until 1910 or so there was, anyway. Tradition, Jack. It’s very important. It’s one of the reasons I like Thayer.’
    Richard looked forlornly out at the muddy campus again.
    ‘One of the reasons I always did, anyway.’
    ‘The Creamery, okay. How come The Depot?’
    Richard was slowly warming to the twin ideas of Thayer and Tradition.
    ‘This whole area of Springfield used to be a railhead,’ he said. ‘In fact, in the old days—’
    ‘Which old days are we talking about, Richard?’
    ‘Oh. The eighteen-eighties. Eighteen-nineties. You see . . .’
    Richard trailed off. His nearsighted eyes began moving around the common room – looking for more bugs, Jack supposed. There weren’t any . . . at least not yet. But he could already see a few brown patches beginning to form on the walls. The bugs weren’t here yet, but they would be along.
    ‘Come on, Richard,’ Jack prompted. ‘No one used to have to prime you to get you to run your mouth.’
    Richard smiled a little. His eyes returned to Jack. ‘Springfield was one of the three or four biggest American railheads during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. It was geographically handy to all the points of the compass.’ He raised his right hand toward his face, forefinger extended to push his glasses up on his nose in a scholarly gesture, realized they were no longer there, and lowered the hand again, looking a bit embarrassed. ‘There were main rail routes leaving Springfield for everywhere. This school exists because Andrew Thayer saw the possibilities. He made a fortune in rail shippage. Mostly to the west coast. He was the first one to see the potential in shipping west as well as east.’
    A bright light suddenly went on in Jack’s head, bathing all of his thoughts in its harsh glare.
    ‘West coast?’ His stomach lurched. He could not yet identify the new shape that bright light had shown him, but the word that leaped into his mind was fiery and utterly clear:
    Talisman!
    ‘ West coast, did you say?’
    ‘Of course I did.’ Richard looked at Jack strangely. ‘Jack, are you going deaf?’
    ‘No,’ Jack said. Springfield was one of the three or four biggest American railheads . . . ‘No, I’m fine.’ He was the first one to see the potential in shipping west . . .
    ‘Well, you looked damn funny for a minute.’
    He was, you might say, the first one to see the potential of shipping stuff by rail to the Outposts.
    Jack knew, utterly knew , that Springfield was still a pressure point of some kind, perhaps still a shipping point. That was, perhaps, why Morgan’s magic worked so well here.
    ‘There were coal-piles and switching yards and roundhouses and box-car sheds and about a billion miles of tracks and sidings,’ Richard was saying. ‘It covered this whole area where Thayer School is now. If you dig