bearer, a carrier of death. He had eaten nothing all day since the chicken Richard had brought him from the dining room,
but he wasn’t hungry. Jack sat in numb misery. He brought
destruction wherever he went.
3
Then there were footfalls in the corridor once more.
From the floor above, Jack now dimly heard the thud thud thud of a bass pattern, and then again recognized it as being from a record by Blue Oyster Cult. The footsteps paused outside the door. Jack hurried to the door.
Richard stood in the doorway. Two boys with cornsilk hair
and half-mast ties glanced in and kept moving down the corridor. The rock music was much more audible in the corridor.
“Where were you all afternoon?” Jack demanded.
“Well, it was sort of freaky,” Richard said. “They cancelled all the afternoon classes. Mr. Dufrey wouldn’t even let kids go back to their lockers. And then we all had to go to basketball practice, and that was even weirder.”
“Who’s Mr. Dufrey?”
Richard looked at him as if he’d just tumbled out of a
bassinette. “Who’s Mr. Dufrey? He’s the headmaster. Don’t
you know anything at all about this school?”
“No, but I’m getting a few ideas,” Jack said. “What was so
weird about practice?”
“Remember I told you that Coach Frazer got some friend of
his to handle it today? Well, he said we’d all get punishment laps if we tried to cut out, so I thought his friend would be some Al Maguire type, you know, some real hotshot. Thayer
School doesn’t have a very good athletic tradition. Anyhow, I thought his replacement must be somebody really special.”
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“Let me guess. The new guy didn’t look like he had any-
thing to do with sports.”
Richard lifted his chin, startled. “No,” he said. “No, he
didn’t.” He gave Jack a considering look. “He smoked all the time. And his hair was really long and greasy—he didn’t look anything like a coach. He looked like somebody most
coaches would like to step on, to tell you the truth. Even his eyes looked funny. I bet you he smokes pot.” Richard tugged at his sweater. “I don’t think he knew anything about basketball. He didn’t even make us practice our patterns—that’s
what we usually do, after the warm-up period. We sort of ran around and threw baskets and he shouted at us. Laughing.
Like kids playing basketball was the most ridiculous thing
he’d seen in his whole life. You ever see a coach who thought sports was funny? Even the warm-up period was strange. He
just said, ‘Okay, do push-ups,’ and smoked his cigarette. No count, no cadence, everybody just doing them by themselves.
After that it was ‘Okay, run around a little bit.’ He looked . . .
really wild. I think I’m going to complain to Coach Frazer tomorrow.”
“I wouldn’t complain to him or the headmaster either,”
Jack said.
“Oh, I get it,” Richard said. “Mr. Dufrey’s one of them.
One of the Territories people.”
“Or he works for them,” Jack said.
“Don’t you see that you could fit anything into that pattern? Anything that goes wrong? It’s too easy—you could explain everything that way. That’s how craziness works. You
make connections that aren’t real.”
“And see things that aren’t there.”
Richard shrugged, and despite the insouciance of the ges-
ture, his face was miserable. “You said it.”
“Wait a minute,” Jack said. “You remember me telling you
about the building that collapsed in Angola, New York?”
“The Rainbird Towers.”
“What a memory. I think that accident was my fault.”
“Jack, you’re—”
Jack said: “Crazy, I know. Look, would anyone blow the
whistle on me if we went out and watched the evening news?”
“I doubt it. Most kids are studying now, anyway. Why?”
Because I want to know what’s been happening around here,
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Jack thought but did not say. Sweet little fires, nifty little earthquakes—signs that they’re coming through. For me. For us.
“I need a change of scenery, Richard old chum,” Jack said,
and followed Richard down the watery green corridor.
31
Thayer Goes to Hell
1
Jack became aware of the change first and recognized what
had happened; it had happened before, while Richard was
out, and he was sensitized to it.
The screaming heavy metal of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Tattoo
Vampire” was gone. The TV in the common room, which had
been cackling out an episode of Hogan’s Heroes instead of the news, had fallen dormant.
Richard turned toward Jack, opening his mouth to speak.
“I don’t like it, Gridley,” Jack said first. “The native tom-toms have stopped. It’s too quiet.”
“Ha-ha,” Richard said thinly.
“Richard, can I ask you something?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Are you scared?”
Richard’s face said that he wanted more than anything to
say No, of course not—it always gets quiet around Nelson House this time of the evening. Unfortunately, Richard was utterly incapable of telling a lie. Dear old Richard. Jack felt a wave of affection.
“Yes,” Richard said. “I’m a little scared.”
“Can I ask you something else?”
“I guess so.”
“Why are we both whispering?”
Richard looked at him for a long time without saying any-
thing. Then he started down the green corridor again.
The doors of the other rooms on the other corridor were ei-
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ther open or ajar. Jack smelled a very familiar odor wafting through the half-open door of Suite 4, and pushed the door all the way open with tented fingers.
“Which one of them is the pothead?” Jack asked.
“What?” Richard replied uncertainly.
Jack sniffed loudly. “Smell it?”
Richard came back and looked into the room. Both study
lamps were on. There was an open history text on one desk,
an issue of Heavy Metal on the other. Posters decorated the walls: the Costa del Sol, Frodo and Sam trudging across the cracked and smoking plains of Mordor toward Sauron’s castle, Eddie Van Halen. Earphones lay on the open issue of
Heavy Metal, giving out little tinny squeaks of music.
“If you can get expelled for letting a friend sleep under
your bed, I doubt if they just slap your wrist for smoking pot, do they?” Jack said.
“They expel you for it, of course.” Richard was looking at
the joint as if mesmerized, and Jack thought he looked more shocked and bewildered than he had at any other time, even
when Jack had shown him the healing burns between his fin-
gers.
“Nelson House is empty,” Jack said.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Richard’s voice was sharp.
“It is, though.” Jack gestured down the hall. “We’re the
only ones left. And you don’t get thirty-some boys out of a dorm without a sound. They didn’t just leave; they disappeared.”
“Over into the Territories, I suppose.”
“I don’t know,” Jack said. “Maybe they’re still here, but on a slightly different level. Maybe they’re there. Maybe they’re in Cleveland. But they’re not where we are.”
“Close that door,” Richard said abruptly, and when Jack
didn’t move quickly enough to suit him, Richard closed it
himself.
“Do you want to put out the—”
“I don’t even want to touch it,” Richard said. “I ought to
report them, you know. I ought to report them both to Mr.
Haywood.”
“Would you do that?” Jack asked, fascinated.
Richard looked chagrined. “No . . . probably not,” he said.
“But I don’t like it.”
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“Not orderly,” Jack said.
“Yeah.” Richard’s eyes flashed at him from behind his
spectacles, telling him that was exactly right, he had hit the nail on the head, and if Jack didn’t like it, he could lump it.
He started down the hall again. “I want to know what’s going on around here,” he said, “and believe me, I’m going to find out.”
That might be a lot more hazardous to your health than
marijuana, Richie-boy, Jack thought, and followed his friend.
2
They stood in the lounge, looking out. Richard pointed to-
ward the quad. In the last of the dying light, Jack saw a bunch of boys grouped loosely around the greenish-bronze statue of Elder Thayer.
“They’re smoking!” Richard cried angrily. “Right on the
quad, they’re smoking! ”
Jack thought immediately of the pot-smell in Richard’s
hall.
“They’re smoking, all right,” he said to Richard, “and not
the kind of cigarettes you get out of a cigarette machine, either.”
Richard rapped his knuckles angrily on the glass. For him,
Jack saw, the weirdly deserted dorm was forgotten; the
leather-jacketed, chain-smoking substitute coach was forgotten; Jack’s apparent mental aberration was forgotten. That
look of outraged propriety on Richard’s face said When a bunch of boys stand around like that, smoking joints within touching distance of the statue of the founder of this school, it’s as if someone were trying to tell me that the earth is flat, or that prime numbers may sometimes be divisible by two, or something equally ridiculous.