worse, he thought it might be as high as a hundred and five, possibly a hundred and six. He said he needed to go back to sleep.
“Richard, for Christ’s sake!” Jack roared. “You’re punking
out on me! Of all the things I never expected from you—”
“Don’t be silly,” Richard said, falling back onto Albert’s
bed. “I’m just sick, Jack. You can’t expect me to talk about all these crazy things when I’m sick.”
“Richard, do you want me to go away and leave you?”
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Richard looked back over his shoulder at Jack for a mo-
ment, blinking slowly. “You won’t,” he said, and then went
back to sleep.
8
Around nine o’clock, the campus entered another of those
mysterious quiet periods, and Richard, perhaps sensing that there would be less strain put on his tottering sanity now, woke up and swung his legs over the bed. Brown spots had
appeared on the walls, and he stared at them until he saw Jack coming toward him.
“I feel a lot better, Jack,” he said hastily, “but it really won’t do us any good to talk about leaving, it’s dark, and—”
“We have to leave tonight,” Jack said grimly. “All they
have to do is wait us out. There’s fungus growing on the walls, and don’t tell me you don’t see that.”
Richard smiled with a blind tolerance that nearly drove
Jack mad. He loved Richard, but he could cheerfully have
pounded him through the nearest fungus-rotted wall.
At that precise moment, long, fat white bugs began to
squirm into Albert the Blob’s room. They came pushing out
of the brown fungoid spots on the wall as if the fungus were in some unknown way giving birth to them. They twisted and
writhed half in and half out of the soft brown spots, then
plopped to the floor and began squirming blindly toward the bed.
Jack had begun to wonder if Richard’s sight weren’t really
a lot worse than he remembered, or if it had degenerated
badly since he had last seen Richard. Now he saw that he had been right the first time. Richard could see quite well. He certainly wasn’t having any trouble picking up the gelatinous
things that were coming out of the walls, anyway. He
screamed and pressed against Jack, his face frantic with revulsion.
“Bugs, Jack! Oh, Jesus! Bugs! Bugs!”
“We’ll be all right—right, Richard?” Jack said. He held
Richard in place with a strength he didn’t know he had.
“We’ll just wait for the morning, right? No problem, right?”
They were squirming out in dozens, in hundreds, plump,
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waxy-white things like overgrown maggots. Some burst open
when they struck the floor. The rest humped sluggishly across the floor toward them.
“Bugs, Jesus, we have to get out, we have to—”
“Thank God, this kid finally sees the light,” Jack said.
He slung his knapsack over his left arm and grabbed
Richard’s elbow in his right hand. He hustled Richard to the door. White bugs squashed and splattered under their shoes.
Now they were pouring out of the brown patches in a flood;
an obscene, ongoing multiple birth that was happening all
over Albert’s room. A stream of the white bugs fell from a
patch on the ceiling and landed, squirming, on Jack’s hair and shoulders; he brushed them away as best he could and hauled the screaming, flailing Richard out the door.
I think we’re on our way, Jack thought. God help us, I really think we are.
9
They were in the common room again. Richard, it turned out, had even less idea of how to sneak off the Thayer campus than Jack did himself. Jack knew one thing very well: he was not going to trust that deceptive quiet and go out any of Nelson House’s Entry doors.
Looking hard to the left out of the wide common-room
window, Jack could see a squat octagonal brick building.
“What’s that, Richard?”
“Huh?” Richard was looking at the gluey, sluggish torrents
of mud flowing over the darkening quad.
“Little squatty brick building. You can just barely see it
from here.”
“Oh. The Depot.”
“What’s a Depot?”
“The name itself doesn’t mean anything anymore,”
Richard said, still looking uneasily out at the mud-drenched quad. “Like our infirmary. It’s called The Creamery because there used to be a real dairy barn and milk-bottling plant over there. Until 1910 or so there was, anyway. Tradition, Jack. It’s very important. It’s one of the reason I like Thayer.”
Richard looked forlornly out at the muddy campus again.
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“One of the reasons I always did, anyway.”
“The Creamery, okay. How come The Depot?”
Richard was slowly warming to the twin ideas of Thayer
and Tradition.
“This whole area of Springfield used to be a railhead,” he
said. “In fact, in the old days—”
“Which old days are we talking about, Richard?”
“Oh. The eighteen-eighties. Eighteen-nineties. You see . . .”
Richard trailed off. His nearsighted eyes began moving
around the common room—looking for more bugs, Jack sup-
posed. There weren’t any . . . at least not yet. But he could already see a few brown patches beginning to form on the
walls. The bugs weren’t here yet, but they would be along.
“Come on, Richard,” Jack prompted. “No one used to have
to prime you to get you to run your mouth.”
Richard smiled a little. His eyes returned to Jack. “Springfield was one of the three or four biggest American railheads during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. It was geographically handy to all the points of the compass.” He
raised his right hand toward his face, forefinger extended to push his glasses up on his nose in a scholarly gesture, realized they were no longer there, and lowered the hand again, looking a bit embarrassed. “There were main rail routes leaving Springfield for everywhere. This school exists because Andrew Thayer saw the possibilities. He made a fortune in rail shippage. Mostly to the west coast. He was the first one to see the potential in shipping west as well as east.”
A bright light suddenly went on in Jack’s head, bathing all of his thoughts in its harsh glare.
“West coast?” His stomach lurched. He could not yet iden-
tify the new shape that bright light had shown him, but the word that leaped into his mind was fiery and utterly clear!
Talisman!
“West coast, did you say?”
“Of course I did.” Richard looked at Jack strangely. “Jack, are you going deaf?”
“No,” Jack said. Springfield was one of the three or four biggest American railheads . . . “No, I’m fine.” He was the first one to see the potential in shipping west . . .
“Well, you looked damn funny for a minute.”
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He was, you might say, the first one to see the potential of shipping stuff by rail to the Outposts.
Jack knew, utterly knew, that Springfield was still a pressure point of some kind, perhaps still a shipping point. That was, perhaps, why Morgan’s magic worked so well here.
“There were coal-piles and switching yards and round-
houses and boxcar sheds and about a billion miles of tracks and sidings,” Richard was saying. “It covered this whole area where Thayer School is now. If you dig down a few feet under this turf anywhere, you find cinders and pieces of rail and all sorts of stuff. But all that’s left now is that little building.
The Depot. Of course it never was a real depot; it’s too small, anyone could see that. It was the main railyard office, where the stationmaster and the rail-boss did their respective
things.”
“You know a hell of a lot about it,” Jack said, speaking almost automatically—his head was still filled with that savage new light.
“It’s part of the Thayer tradition,” Richard said simply.
“What’s it used for now?”
“There’s a little theater in there. It’s for Dramatics Club productions, but the Dramatics Club hasn’t been very active over the last couple of years.”
“Do you think it’s locked?”
“Why would anyone lock The Depot?” Richard asked.
“Unless you think someone would be interested in stealing a few flats from the 1979 production of The Fantasticks.”
“So we could get in there?”
“I think so, yes. But why—”
Jack pointed to a door just beyond the Ping-Pong tables.
“What’s in there?”
“Vending machines. And a coin-op microwave to heat up
snacks and frozen dinners. Jack—”
“Come on.”
“Jack, I think my fever’s coming back again.” Richard
smiled weakly. “Maybe we should just stay here for a while.
We could rack out on the sofas for the night—”
“See those brown patches on the walls?” Jack said grimly,
pointing.
“No, not without my glasses, of course not!”
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“Well, they’re there. And in about an hour, those white