“Who did this?” Richard asked angrily. “Those freaks did
it,” he answered himself. “That’s who.” He looked at Jack, a great, cloudy suspicion beginning to dawn on his face. “They might be Colombians,” he said suddenly. “They might be
Colombians, and this might be some sort of drug-war, Jack.
Has that occurred to you?”
Jack had to throttle an urge to bellow out mad gusts of
laughter. Here was an explanation which perhaps only
Richard Sloat could have conceived. It was the Colombians.
The cocaine range-wars had come to Thayer School in
Springfield, Illinois. Elementary, my dear Watson; this problem has a seven and a half percent solution.
“I guess anything’s possible,” Jack said. “Let’s take a look upstairs.”
“What in God’s name for?”
“Well . . . maybe we’ll find someone else,” Jack said. He didn’t really believe this, but it was something to say. “Maybe someone’s hiding out up there. Someone normal like us.”
Richard looked at Jack, then back at the shambles of the
common room. That look of haunted pain came back into his
face again, the look that said I don’t really want to look at this, but for some reason it seems to be all I DO want to look at right now; it’s bitterly compulsive, like biting a lemon, or scratching your fingernails across a blackboard, or scraping the tines of a fork on the porcelain of a sink.
“Dope is rampant in the country,” Richard said in eerie
lecture-hall tones. “I read an article on drug proliferation in
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The New Republic just last week. Jack, all those people out there could be doped up! They could be freebasing! They
could be—”
“Come on, Richard,” Jack said quietly.
“I’m not sure I can climb the stairs,” Richard said, weakly querulous. “My fever may be too bad for me to climb stairs.”
“Well, give it the good old Thayer try,” Jack said, and continued to lead him in that direction.
6
As they reached the second-floor landing, sound bled back
into the smooth, almost breathless silence that had held inside Nelson House.
Dogs snarled and barked outside—it sounded as if there
were not just dozens or scores of them now, but hundreds. The bells in the chapel burst into a wild jangle of sound.
The bells were driving the mongrel dogs racing back and
forth across the quad absolutely nuts. They turned on each
other, rolled over and over on the grass—which was begin-
ning to look ragged, weedy, and unkempt—and savaged any-
thing within mouthshot. As Jack watched, one of them
attacked an elm tree. Another launched itself at the statue of Elder Thayer. As its biting, snapping muzzle collided with the solid bronze, blood splashed and sprayed.
Jack turned away, sickened. “Come on, Richard,” Jack
said.
Richard came willingly enough.
7
The second floor was a jumbled confusion of overturned fur-
niture, shattered windows, fistfuls of stuffing, records that had apparently been thrown like Frisbees, clothes that had been tossed everywhere.
The third floor was cloudy with steam and as warmly
moist as a tropical rain-forest. As they got closer to the door marked SHOWERS, the heat went up to sauna levels. The mist
they had first encountered creeping down the stairs in thin tendrils grew foglike and opaque.
“Stay here,” Jack said. “Wait for me.”
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“Sure, Jack,” Richard said serenely, raising his voice
enough to be heard over the drumming showers. His glasses
had fogged up, but he made no effort to wipe them off.
Jack pushed the door open and went in. The heat was
soggy and thick. His clothes were soaked at once from sweat and the hot, foggy moisture. The tile-lined room roared and drummed with water. All twenty of the showers had been
turned on, and the driving needle-spray from all twenty had been focused on a pile of sports equipment in the middle of the tiled room. The water was able to drain through this crazy pile, but only slowly, and the room was awash. Jack took off his shoes and circled the room, sliding under the showers to keep himself as dry as possible, and also to keep himself from being scalded—whoever had turned on the showers hadn’t
bothered with the cold faucets, apparently. He turned all of them off, one by one. There was no reason for him to do this, no reason at all, and he scolded himself for wasting time in such a way, when he should be trying to think of a way for
them to get out of here—out of Nelson House and off the
Thayer School grounds—before the axe fell.
No reason for it, except that maybe Richard wasn’t the
only one with a need to create order out of chaos . . . to create order and to maintain it.
He went back into the hall and Richard was gone.
“Richard?” He could feel his heartbeat picking up in his
chest.
There was no answer. “Richard!”
Spilled cologne hung on the air, noxiously heavy.
“Richard, where the hell are you!”
Richard’s hand fell on Jack’s shoulder, and Jack shrieked.
8
“I don’t know why you had to yell like that,” Richard said
later. “It was only me.”
“I’m just nervous,” Jack said wanly.
They were sitting in the third-floor room of a boy with the strangely harmonious name of Albert Humbert. Richard told
him that Albert Humbert, whose nickname was Albert the
Blob, was the fattest boy in school, and Jack could believe it; his room contained an amazing variety of junk food—it was
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the stash of a kid whose worst nightmare isn’t getting cut from the basketball team or flunking a trig test but rather waking up in the night and not being able to find a Ring-Ding or a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. A lot of the stuff had been thrown around.
The glass jar containing the Marshmallow Fluff had been broken, but Jack had never been very wild about Marshmallow
Fluff, anyway. He also passed on the licorice whips—Albert
the Blob had a whole carton of them stashed on the upper shelf of his closet. Written across one of the carton-flaps was Happy birthday, dear, from Your Loving Mom.
Some Loving Moms send cartons of licorice whips, and
some Loving Dads send blazers from Brooks Brothers, Jack thought wearily, and if there’s any difference, Jason alone knows what it is.
They found enough food in the room of Albert the Blob to
make a crazy sort of meal—Slim Jims, pepperoni slices, Salt
’n Vinegar potato chips. Now they were finishing up with a
package of cookies. Jack had retrieved Albert’s chair from the hall and was sitting by the window. Richard was sitting on Albert’s bed.
“Well, you sure are nervous,” Richard agreed, shaking his head in refusal when Jack offered him the last cookie. “Paranoid, actually. It comes from spending the last couple of
months on the road. You’ll be okay once you get home to your mother, Jack.”
“Richard,” Jack said, tossing away the empty Famous
Amos bag, “let’s cut the shit. Do you see what’s going on outside on your campus?”
Richard wet his lips. “I explained that,” he said. “I have a fever. Probably none of this is happening at all, and if it is, then perfectly ordinary things are going on and my mind is
twisting them, heightening them. That’s one possibility. The other is . . . well . . . drug-pushers.”
Richard sat forward on Albert the Blob’s bed.
“You haven’t been experimenting with drugs, have you, Jack? While you were on the road?” The old intelligent, inci-sive light had suddenly rekindled in Richard’s eyes. Here’s a possible explanation, a possible way out of this madness, his eyes said. Jack has gotten involved in some crazy drug-scam, and all these people have followed him here.
“No,” Jack said wearily. “I always used to think of you as
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the master of reality, Richard,” Jack said. “I never thought I’d live to see you— you! —using your brains to twist the facts.”
“Jack, that’s just a . . . a crock, and you know it!”
“Drug-wars in Springfield, Illinois?” Jack asked. “Who’s
talking Seabrook Island stuff now?”
And that was when a rock suddenly crashed in through Al-
bert Humbert’s window, spraying glass across the floor.
33
Richard in the Dark
1
Richard screamed and threw an arm up to shield his face.
Glass flew.
“Send him out, Sloat!”
Jack got up. Dull fury filled him.
Richard grabbed his arm. “Jack, no! Stay away from the
window!”
“Fuck that,” Jack almost snarled. “I’m tired of being talked about like I was a pizza.”
The Etheridge-thing stood across the road. It was on the
sidewalk at the edge of the quad, looking up at them.
“Get out of here!” Jack shouted at it. A sudden inspiration burst in his head like a sunflare. He hesitated, then bellowed:
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