The Talisman

dorms and the library just as usual, Richard.’
    ‘That’d be so great,’ Richard said with a wistfulness that was heart-breaking.
    ‘Okay, you ready?’
    ‘I guess so,’ Richard said.
    ‘Run to The Depot. Freeze against the wall on this side. Low, so those bushes screen you. See them?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Okay . . . go for it!’
    They broke away from Nelson House and ran for The Depot side by side.
    11
    They were less than halfway there, breath puffing out of their mouths in clear white vapor, feet pounding the mucky ground, when the bells in the chapel broke into a hideous, grinding jangle of sound. A howling chorus of dogs answered the bells.
    They were back, all these were-prefects. Jack groped for Richard and found Richard groping for him. Their hands linked together.
    Richard screamed and tried to pull him off to the left. His hand tightened down on Jack’s until the fingerbones grated together paralyzingly. A lean white wolf, a Board Chairman of Wolves, came around The Depot and was now racing toward them. That was the old man from the limousine, Jack thought. Other wolves and dogs followed . . . and then Jack realized with sick surety that some of them were not dogs; some of them were half-transformed boys, some grown men – teachers, he supposed.
    ‘ Mr Dufrey! ’ Richard shrieked, pointing with his free hand ( Gee, you see pretty well for someone who’s lost his glasses, Richie-boy , Jack thought crazily). ‘ Mr Dufrey! Oh God, it’s Mr Dufrey! Mr Dufrey! Mr Dufrey!’
    So Jack got his first and only look at Thayer School’s headmaster – a tiny old man with gray hair, a big, bent nose, and the wizened, hairy body of an organ grinder’s monkey. He ran swiftly along on all fours with the dogs and the boys, a mortarboard bobbing crazily up and down on his head and somehow refusing to fall off. He grinned at Jack and Richard, and his tongue, long and lolling and stained yellow with nicotine, fell out through the middle of his grin.
    ‘Mr Dufrey! Oh God! Oh dear God! Mr Dufrey! Mr Du—’
    He was yanking Jack harder and harder toward the left. Jack was bigger, but Richard was in the grip of panic. Explosions rocked the air. That foul, garbagey smell grew thicker and thicker. Jack could hear the soft flupping and plupping of mud squeezing out of the earth. The white wolf which led the pack was closing the distance and Richard was trying to pull them away from it, trying to pull them toward the fence, and that was right, but it was wrong, too, it was wrong because it was The Depot they had to get to, not the fence. That was the spot, that was the spot because this had been one of the three or four biggest American railheads, because Andrew Thayer had been the first one to see the potential in shipping west, because Andrew Thayer had seen the potential and now he, Jack Sawyer, saw the potential, as well. All of this was of course only intuition, but Jack had come to believe that, in these universal matters, his intuition was the only thing he could trust.
    ‘ Let go of your passenger, Sloat! ’ Dufrey was gobbling. ‘ Let go of your passenger, he’s too pretty for you! ’
    But what’s a passenger? Jack thought in those last few seconds, as Richard tried blindly to pull them off-course and Jack yanked him back on, toward the mixed bunch of mongrels and boys and teachers that ran behind the big white wolf, toward The Depot. I’ll tell you what a passenger is; a passenger is one who rides. And where does a passenger begin to ride? Why, at a depot . . .
    ‘Jack, it’ll bite!’ Richard screamed.
    The wolf outran Dufrey and leaped at them, its jaws dropping open like a loaded trap. From behind them there was a thick, crunching thud as Nelson House split open like a rotten cantaloupe.
    Now it was Jack who was bearing down on Richard’s fingerbones, clamping tight and tighter and tightest as the night rang with crazy bells and flared with gasoline bombs and rattled with firecrackers.
    ‘Hold on! ’ he screamed. ‘ Hold on, Richard, here we go! ’
    He had time to think: Now the shoe is on the other foot; now it’s Richard who is the herd, who is my passenger. God help us both .
    ‘ Jack, what’s happening? ’ Richard shrieked. ‘ What are you doing? Stop it! STOP IT! STOP— ’
    Richard was still shrieking, but Jack no longer heard him – suddenly, triumphantly, that feeling of creeping doom cracked open like a black egg and his brain filled up with light – light and a sweet