Richard looked reluctantly in. The common room was a shambles. Chairs were overturned. The cushions on the couch had been slashed open. The oil portrait of Elder Thayer on the far wall had been defaced - someone had crayoned a pair of devil's horns poking out of his neat white hair, someone else had added a moustache under his nose, and a third had used a nail-file or similar implement to scratch a crude phallus on his crotch. The glass of the trophy case was shattered.
Jack didn't much care for the look of drugged, unbelieving horror on Richard's face. In some ways, elves trooping up and down the halls in glowing, unearthly platoons or dragons over the quad would have been easier for Richard to take than this constant erosion of the Thayer School he had come to know and love . . . the Thayer School Richard undoubtedly believed to be noble and good, an undisputed bulwark against a world where nothing could be counted on for long . . . not even, Jack thought, that fathers would come back out of the closets they had gone into.
'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 coc**ne 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 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 beginning to look ragged, weedy, and unkempt - and savaged anything 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 furniture, 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.'
'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.