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knapsack under his pillow, and fallen asleep holding the big marble that in the other world was a Territories mirror. There had been a suggestion of music, an almost cinematic touch—
fiery alert bebop, at a volume so low Jack could just pick out that the lead instruments were a trumpet and an alto saxophone. Richard, Jack drowsily thought, tomorrow I should be seeing Richard Sloat, and fell down the slope of the rhythm into brimming unconsciousness.
Wolf was trotting toward him across a blasted, smoking
landscape. Strings of barbed wire, now and then coiling up
into fantastic and careless barbed-wire intricacies, separated them. Deep trenches, too, divided the spoiled land, one of
which Wolf vaulted easily before nearly tumbling into one of the ranks of wire.
—Watch out, Jack called.
Wolf caught himself before falling into the triple strands of wire. He waved one big paw to show Jack that he was unhurt, and then cautiously stepped over the wires.
Jack felt an amazing surge of happiness and relief pass
through him. Wolf had not died; Wolf would join him again.
Wolf made it over the barbed wire and began trotting for-
ward again. The land between Jack and Wolf seemed mysteri-
ously to double in length—gray smoke hanging over the
many trenches almost obscured the big shaggy figure coming
forward.
—Jason! Wolf shouted. Jason! Jason!
—I’m still here, Jack shouted back.
—Can’t make it, Jason! Wolf can’t make it!
—Keep trying, Jack bawled. Damn it, don’t give up!
Wolf paused before an impenetrable tangle of wire, and
through the smoke Jack saw him slip down to all fours and
trot back and forth, nosing for an open place. From side to side Wolf trotted, each time going out a greater distance, with every second becoming more evidently disturbed. Finally
Wolf stood up again and placed his hands on the thick tangle of wire and forced a space he could shout through. —Wolf
can’t! Jason, Wolf can’t!
—I love you, Wolf, Jack shouted across the smouldering
plain.
—JASON! Wolf bawled back. BE CAREFUL! They are
COMING for you! There are MORE of them!
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—More what, Jack wanted to shout, but could not. He
knew.
Then either the whole character of the dream changed or
another dream began. He was back in the ruined recording
studio and office at the Sunlight Home, and the smells of gunpowder and burned flesh crowded the air. Singer’s mutilated body lay slumped on the floor, and Casey’s dead form
drooped through the shattered glass panel. Jack sat on the
floor cradling Wolf in his arms, and knew again that Wolf was dying. Only Wolf was not Wolf.
Jack was holding Richard Sloat’s trembling body, and it
was Richard who was dying. Behind the lenses of his sensible black plastic eyeglasses, Richard’s eyes skittered aimlessly, painfully. —Oh no, oh no, Jack breathed out in horror.
Richard’s arm had been shattered, and his chest was a pulp of ruined flesh and bloodstained white shirt. Fractured bones
glinted whitely here and there like teeth.
—I don’t want to die, Richard said, every word a super-
human effort. Jason, you should not . . . you should not have . . .
—You can’t die, too, Jack pleaded, not you, too.
Richard’s upper body lurched against Jack’s arms, and a
long, liquid sound escaped Richard’s throat, and then Richard found Jack’s eyes with his own suddenly clear and quiet
eyes. —Jason. The sound of the name, which was almost ap-
propriate, hung softly in the stinking air. —You killed me, Richard breathed out, or you killed ’e, since his lips could not meet to form one of the letters. Richard’s eyes swam out of focus again, and his body seemed to grow instantly heavier in Jack’s arms. There was no longer life in that body. Jason DeLoessian stared up in shock—
3
—and Jack Sawyer snapped upright in the cold, unfamiliar
bed of a flophouse in Decatur, Illinois, and in the yellowish murk shed by a streetlamp outside saw his breath plume out
as luxuriantly as if exhaled from two mouths at once. He kept himself from screaming only by clasping his hands, his own
two hands, and squeezing them together hard enough to crack a walnut. Another enormous white feather of air steamed out of his lungs.
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Richard.
Wolf running across that dead world, calling out . . . what?
Jason.
The boy’s heart executed a quick, decided leap, with the
kick of a horse clearing a fence.
29
Richard at Thayer
1
At eleven o’clock the next morning an exhausted Jack Sawyer unshouldered his pack at the end of a long playing field covered with crisp brown dead grass. Far away, two men in plaid jackets and baseball caps labored with leaf-blower and rake down on the stretch of lawn surrounding the most distant
group of buildings. To Jack’s left, directly behind the redbrick backside of the Thayer library, was the faculty parking lot. In the front of Thayer School a great gate opened onto a tree-lined drive which circled around a large quad crisscrossed with narrow paths. If anything stood out on the campus, it was the library—a Bauhaus steamship of glass and
steel and brick.
Jack had already seen that a secondary gate opened onto
another access road before the library. This ran two-thirds the length of the school and ended at the garbage Dumpsters
nested in the round cul-de-sac just before the land climbed up to form the plateau of the football field.
Jack began to move across the top of the field toward the
rear of the classroom buildings. When the Thayerites began to go to dining hall, he could find Richard’s room—Entry 5,
Nelson House.
The dry winter grass crunched beneath his feet. Jack
pulled Myles P. Kiger’s excellent coat tightly about him—the coat at least looked preppy, if Jack did not. He walked between Thayer Hall and an Upper School dormitory named
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Spence House, in the direction of the quad. Lazy preluncheon voices came through the Spence House windows.
2
Jack glanced toward the quad and saw an elderly man,
slightly stooped and of a greenish-bronze, standing on a
plinth the height of a carpenter’s bench and examining the
cover of a heavy book. Elder Thayer, Jack surmised. He was
dressed in the stiff collar, flowing tie, and frock coat of a New England Transcendentalist. Elder Thayer’s brass head inclined over the volume, pointed generally in the direction of the
classroom buildings.
Jack took the right-angle at the end of the path. Sudden
noise erupted from an upstairs window ahead—boys shouting
out the syllables of a name that sounded like “Etheridge!
Etheridge!” Then an irruption of wordless screams and
shouts, accompanied by the sounds of heavy furniture moving across a wooden floor. “Etheridge!”
Jack heard a door closing behind his back, and looked over
his shoulder to see a tall boy with dirty-blond hair rushing down the steps of Spence House. He wore a tweed sport
jacket and a tie and a pair of L. L. Bean Maine hunting shoes.
Only a long yellow-and-blue scarf wound several times
around his neck protected him from the cold. His long face
looked both haggard and arrogant, and just now was the face of a senior in a self-righteous rage. Jack pushed the hood of the loden coat over his head and moved down the path.
“I don’t want anybody to move!” the tall boy shouted up at
the closed window. “You freshmen just stay put!”
Jack drifted toward the next building.
“You’re moving the chairs!” the tall boy screamed behind
him. “I can hear you doing it! STOP!” Then Jack heard the
furious senior call out to him.
Jack turned around, his heart beating loudly.
“Get over to Nelson House right now, whoever you are, on
the double, post-haste, immediately. Or I’ll go to your house master.”
“Yes sir,” Jack said, and quickly turned away to move in
the direction the prefect had pointed.
“You’re at least seven minutes late!” Etheridge screeched
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at him, and Jack was startled into jogging. “On the double, I said!” Jack turned the jog into a run.
When he started downhill (he hoped it was the right way; it was, anyway, the direction in which Etheridge had seemed to be looking), he saw a long black car—a limousine—just beginning to swing through the main front gates and whisper up the long drive to the quad. He thought that maybe whatever
sat behind the tinted windows of the limousine was nothing
so ordinary as the parent of a Thayer School sophomore.
The long black car eased forward, insolently slow.
No, Jack thought, I’m spooking myself.
Still he could not move. Jack watched the limousine pull