The Talisman

Sunlight Home, was no longer a judge of any kind, and as soon as his final appeals ran out, he would be going to jail. There no longer seemed any question that jail was where he would fetch up, and that he would do hard time there. Might never come out at all. He was an old man, and not very healthy. If they hadn’t found the damned bodies . . .
    He had remained as cheerful as possible under the circumstances, but now, as he sat cleaning his fingernails with the long blade of his pocket-knife in his study at home, a great gray wave of depression crashed over him. Suddenly he pulled the knife away from his thick nails, looked at it thoughtfully for a moment, and then inserted the tip of the blade into his right nostril. He held it there for a moment and then whispered, ‘Oh shit. Why not?’ He jerked his fist upward, sending the six-inch blade on a short, lethal trip, skewering first his sinuses and then his brain.
    4
    Smokey Updike sat in a booth at the Oatley Tap, going over invoices and totting up numbers on his Texas Instruments calculator, just as he had been doing on the day Jack had met him. Only now it was early evening and Lori was serving the evening’s first customers. The juke-box was playing ‘I’d Rather Have a Bottle in Front of Me (Than a Frontal Lobotomy).’
    At one moment everything was normal. At the next Smokey sat bolt-upright, his little paper cap tumbling backward off his head. He clutched his white T-shirt over the left side of his chest, where a hammering bolt of pain had just struck like a silver spike. God pounds his nails , Wolf would have said.
    At the same instant the grill suddenly exploded into the air with a loud bang. It hit a Busch display sign and tore it from the ceiling. It landed with a crash. A rich smell of LP gas filled the area in back of the bar almost at once. Lori screamed.
    The juke-box speeded up: 45 rpms, 78, 150, 400! The woman’s serio-comic lament became the speedy gabble of deranged chipmunks on a rocket-sled. A moment later the top blew off the juke. Colored glass flew everywhere.
    Smokey looked down at his calculator and saw a single word blinking on and off in the red window:
    TALISMAN-TALISMAN-TALISMAN-TALISMAN
    Then his eyes exploded.
    ‘ Lori, turn off the gas! ’ one of the customers screamed. He got down off his stool, and turned toward Smokey. ‘Smokey, tell her—’ The man wailed with fright as he saw blood gushing from the holes where Smokey Updike’s eyes had been.
    A moment later the entire Oatley Tap blew sky-high, and before the fire-trucks could arrive from Dogtown and Elmira, most of downtown was in flames.
    No great loss, children, can you say amen.
    5
    At Thayer School, where normality now reigned as it always had (with one brief interlude which those on campus remembered only as a series of vague, related dreams), the last classes of the day had just begun. What was light snow in Indiana was a cold drizzle here in Illinois. Students sat dreaming and thoughtful in their classes.
    Suddenly the bells in the chapel began to peal. Heads came up. Eyes widened. All over the Thayer campus, fading dreams suddenly seemed to renew themselves.
    6
    Etheridge had been sitting in advanced-math class and pressing his hand rhythmically up and down against a raging hard-on while he stared unseeingly at the logarithms old Mr Hunkins was piling up on the blackboard. He was thinking about the cute little townie waitress he would be boffing later on. She wore garter-belts instead of pantyhose, and was more than willing to leave her stockings on while they fucked. Now Etheridge stared around at the windows, forgetting his erection, forgetting the waitress with her long legs and smooth nylons – suddenly, for no reason at all, Sloat was on his mind. Prissy little Richard Sloat, who should have been safely classifiable as a wimp but who somehow wasn’t. He thought about Sloat and wondered if he was all right. Somehow he thought that maybe Sloat, who had left school unexcused four days ago and who hadn’t been heard from since, wasn’t doing so good.
    In the headmaster’s office, Mr Dufrey had been discussing the expulsion of a boy named George Hatfield for cheating with his furious – and rich – father when the bells began to jingle out their unscheduled little tune. When it ended, Mr Dufrey found himself on his hands and knees with his gray hair hanging in his eyes and his tongue lolling over his lips. Hatfield the Elder was standing by the door