Donny honked his idiot laugh, only now even his laugh was nearly beautiful. Some of the other boys came to their doors and stared at Donny in wonder. His face was bathed in the sunlight from that one clear, ephemeral ray, and one of the other boys would whisper to a close friend that night that for a moment Donny Keegan had looked like Jesus.
The moment passed; the clouds moved over that weird clear place in the sky, and by evening the snow had intensified into the first big winter storm of the season. Donny had known - for one brief moment he had known - what that feeling of love and triumph actually meant. That passed quickly, the way dreams do upon waking . . . but he never forgot the feeling itself, that almost swooning sensation of grace for once fulfilled and delivered instead of promised and then denied; that feeling of clarity and sweet, marvellous love; that feeling of ecstasy at the coming once more of the white.
3
Judge Fairchild, who had sent Jack and Wolf to the Sunlight Home, was no longer a judge of any kind, and as soon as his final appeals ran out, he would be going to jail. There no longer seemed any question that jail was where he would fetch up, and that he would do hard time there. Might never come out at all. He was an old man, and not very healthy. If they hadn't found the damned bodies . . .
He had remained as cheerful as possible under the circumstances, but now, as he sat cleaning his fingernails with the long blade of his pocketknife in his study at home, a great gray wave of depression crashed over him. Suddenly he pulled the knife away from his thick nails, looked at it thoughtfully for a moment, and then inserted the tip of the blade into his right nostril. He held it there for a moment and then whispered, 'Oh shit. Why not?' He jerked his fist upward, sending the six-inch blade on a short, lethal trip, skewering first his sinuses and then his brain.
4
Smokey Updike sat in a booth at the Oatley Tap, going over invoices and totting up numbers on his Texas Instruments calculator, just as he had been doing on the day Jack had met him. Only now it was early evening and Lori was serving the evening's first customers. The jukebox was playing 'I'd Rather Have a Bottle in Front of Me (Than a Frontal Lobotomy).'
At one moment everything was normal. At the next Smokey sat bolt-upright, his little paper cap tumbling backward off his head. He clutched his white T-shirt over the left side of his chest, where a hammering bolt of pain had just struck like a silver spike. God pounds his nails, Wolf would have said.
At the same instant the grill suddenly exploded into the air with a loud bang. It hit a Busch display sign and tore it from the ceiling. It landed with a crash. A rich smell of LP gas filled the area in back of the bar almost at once. Lori screamed.
The jukebox speeded up: 45 rpms, 78, 150, 400! The woman's seriocomic lament became the speedy gabble of deranged chipmunks on a rocket-sled. A moment later the top blew off the juke. Colored glass flew everywhere.
Smokey looked down at his calculator and saw a single word blinking on and off in the red window:
TALISMAN-TALISMAN-TALISMAN-TALISMAN
Then his eyes exploded.
'Lori, turn off the gas!' one of the customers screamed. He got down off his stool, and turned toward Smokey. 'Smokey, tell her - ' The man wailed with fright as he saw blood gushing from the holes where Smokey Updike's eyes had been.
A moment later the entire Oatley Tap blew sky-high, and before the fire-trucks could arrive from Dogtown and Elmira, most of downtown was in flames.
No great loss, children, can you say amen.
5
At Thayer School, where normality now reigned as it always had (with one brief interlude which those on campus remembered only as a series of vague, related dreams), the last classes of the day had just begun. What was light snow in In-diana was a cold drizzle here in Illinois. Students sat dreaming and thoughtful in their classes.
Suddenly the bells in the chapel began to peal. Heads came up. Eyes widened. All over the Thayer campus, fading dreams suddenly seemed to renew themselves.
6