Jack’s heart was full of pity for his friend, but it was also full of admiration for an attitude which must seem so reac-tionary and even eccentric to his school-mates. He wondered again if Richard could stand the shocks which might be on
the way.
“Richard,” he said, “those boys aren’t from Thayer, are
they?”
“God, you really have gone crazy, Jack. They’re Uppers. I
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recognize every last one of them. The guy wearing that stupid leather flying hat is Norrington. The one in the green sweat-pants is Buckley. I see Garson . . . Littlefield . . . the one with the scarf is Etheridge,” he finished.
“Are you sure it’s Etheridge?”
“Of course it’s him!” Richard shouted. He suddenly turned the catch on the window, rammed it up, and leaned out into
the cold air.
Jack pulled Richard back. “Richard, please, just listen—”
Richard didn’t want to. He turned and leaned out into the
cold twilight.
“Hey!”
No, don’t attract their attention, Richard, for Christ’s sake—
“Hey, you guys! Etheridge! Norrington! Littlefield! What in the hell is going on out there?”
The talk and rough laughter broke off. The fellow who was
wearing Etheridge’s scarf turned toward the sound of
Richard’s voice. He tilted his head slightly to look up at them.
The lights from the library and the sullen furnace afterglow of the winter sunset fell on his face. Richard’s hands flew to his mouth.
The right half of the face disclosed was actually a bit like Etheridge’s—an older Etheridge, an Etheridge who had been
in a lot of places nice prep-school boys didn’t go and who had done a lot of things nice prep-school boys didn’t do. The other half was a twisted mass of scars. A glittery crescent that
might have been an eye peered from a crater in the lumpy
mess of flesh below the forehead. It looked like a marble that had been shoved deeply into a puddle of half-melted tallow. A single long fang hooked out of the left corner of the mouth.
It’s his Twinner, Jack thought with utter calm certainty.
That’s Etheridge’s Twinner down there. Are they all Twinners?
A Littlefield Twinner and a Norrington Twinner and a Buckley Twinner and so on and so on? That can’t be, can it?
“Sloat!” the Etheridge-thing cried. It shambled two steps
toward Nelson House. The glow from the streetlights on the
drive now fell directly onto its ruined face.
“Shut the window,” Richard whispered. “Shut the window.
I was wrong. It sort of looks like Etheridge but it’s not, maybe it’s his older brother, maybe someone threw battery acid or
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something in Etheridge’s brother’s face and now he’s crazy, but it’s not Etheridge so close the window Jack close it right n—”
Below, the Etheridge-thing shambled yet another step to-
ward them. It grinned. Its tongue, hideously long, fell out of its mouth like an unrolling party favor.
“Sloat!” it cried. “Give us your passenger!”
Jack and Richard both jerked around, looking at each other
with strained faces.
A howl shivered in the night . . . for it was night now; twilight was done.
Richard looked at Jack, and for a moment Jack saw some-
thing like real hate in the other boy’s eyes—a flash of his father. Why did you have to come here, Jack? Huh? Why did you have to bring me this mess? Why did you have to bring me all this goddam Seabrook Island stuff?
“Do you want me to go?” Jack asked softly.
For a moment that look of harried anger remained in
Richard’s eyes, and then it was replaced by Richard’s old
kindness.
“No,” he said, running distracted hands through his hair.
“No, you’re not going anywhere. There are . . . there are wild dogs out there. Wild dogs, Jack, on the Thayer campus! I
mean . . . did you see them?”
“Yeah, I saw em, Richie-boy,” Jack said softly, as Richard
ran his hands through his formerly neat hair again, mussing it into ever wilder tangles. Jack’s neat and orderly friend was starting to look a little bit like Donald Duck’s amiably mad in-ventor cousin, Gyro Gearloose.
“Call Boynton, he’s Security, that’s what I have to do,”
Richard said. “Call Boynton, or the town police, or—”
A howl rose from the trees on the far side of the quad,
from the gathered shadows there—a rising, wavering howl
that was really almost human. Richard looked toward it,
mouth trembling in an infirm old person’s way, and then he
looked pleadingly at Jack.
“Close the window, Jack, okay? I feel feverish. I think
maybe I’ve gotten a chill.”
“You bet, Richard,” Jack said, and closed it, shutting the
howl out as best he could.
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1
“Help me with this, Richard,” Jack grunted.
“I don’t want to move the bureau, Jack,” Richard said in a
childish, lecturing voice. Those dark circles under his eyes were even more pronounced now than they had been in the
lounge. “That’s not where it belongs.”
Out on the quad, that howl rose in the air again.
The bed was in front of the door. Richard’s room was now
pulled entirely out of shape. Richard stood looking around at this, blinking. Then he went to his bed and pulled off the blankets. He handed one to Jack without speaking, then took his and spread it on the floor. He took his change and his billfold out of his pockets, and put them neatly on the bureau. Then he lay down in the middle of his blanket, folded the sides over himself and then just lay there on the floor, his glasses still on, his face a picture of silent misery.
The silence outside was thick and dreamlike, broken only
by the distant growls of the big rigs on the turnpike. Nelson House itself was eerily silent.
“I don’t want to talk about what’s outside,” Richard said. “I just want that up front.”
“Okay, Richard,” Jack said soothingly. “We won’t talk
about it.”
“Good night, Jack.”
“Good night, Richard.”
Richard gave him a smile that was wan, and terribly tired;
yet there was enough sweet friendliness in it to both warm
Jack’s heart and wrench it. “I’m still glad you came,” Richard said, “and we’ll talk about all of this in the morning. I’m sure it will make more sense then. This little fever I have will be gone then.”
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Richard rolled over on his right side and closed his eyes.
Five minutes later, in spite of the hard floor, he was deeply asleep.
Jack sat up for a long time, looking out into the darkness.
Sometimes he could see the lights of passing cars on Springfield Avenue; at other times both the headlights and the streetlamps themselves seemed to be gone, as if the entire Thayer School kept sideslipping out of reality and hanging in limbo for a while before slipping back in again.
A wind was rising. Jack could hear it rattling the last
frozen leaves from the trees on the quad; could hear it knocking the branches together like bones, could hear it shrieking coldly in the spaces between the buildings.
2
“That guy’s coming,” Jack said tensely. It was an hour or so later. “Etheridge’s Twinner.”
“Huzzzat?”
“Never mind,” Jack said. “Go back to sleep. You don’t
want to see.”
But Richard was sitting up. Before his eye could fix on the slumped, somehow twisted form walking toward Nelson
House, it was abducted by the campus itself. He was pro-
foundly shocked, deeply frightened.
The ivy on the Monkson Field House, which had that
morning been skeletal but still faintly green, had now gone an ugly, blighted yellow. “Sloat! Give us your passenger! ”
Suddenly all Richard wanted to do was to go back to
sleep—go to sleep until his flu was all gone (he had awakened deciding it must be the flu; not just a chill or fever but a real case of the flu); the flu and the fever that was giving him such horrid, twisted hallucinations. He should never have stood by that open window . . . or, earlier, allowed Jack through the window of his room. Richard thought this, and was then
deeply and immediately ashamed.
3
Jack shot a quick sideways glance at Richard—but his pallid face and bulging eyes suggested to Jack that Richard was
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edging farther and farther into The Magical Land of Over-
load.
The thing out there was short. It stood on the frost-
whitened grass like a troll that had crawled out from under some bridge, its long-clawed hands hanging almost to its
knees. It wore an Army duffel coat with ETHERIDGE stencilled above the left pocket. The jacket hung unzipped and open.