Cell Page 21

  "It came untied, honey," he said. "It came untied and fell off."

  "I lost it?" Her eyes, unbelieving. The first tears. "Are you sure?"

  "Pretty sure, yeah."

  "It was my luck," she whispered, the tears spilling over.

  "No," Tom said, and put an arm around her. "We're your luck."

  She looked at him. "How do you know?"

  "Because you found us first," Tom said. "And we're still here."

  She hugged them both and they stood that way for a while, the three of them, with their arms around each other in the hall with Alice's few possessions scattered around their feet.

  25

  The fire spread to a lecture building the Head identified as Hackery Hall. Then, around four a.m., the wind dropped away and it spread no farther. When the sun came up, the Gaiten campus stank of propane, charred wood, and a great many burnt bodies. The bright sky of a perfect New England morning in October was obscured by a rising column of gray-black smoke. And Cheatham Lodge was still occupied. In the end it had been like dominoes: the Head couldn't travel except by car, car travel was impossible, and Jordan would not go without the Head. Nor was Ardai able to persuade him. Alice, although resigned to the loss of her talisman, refused to go without Jordan. Tom would not go without Alice. And Clay was loath to go without the two of them, although he was horrified to find these newcomers in his life seemed at least temporarily more important than his own son, and although he continued to feel certain that they would pay a high price for what they'd done on Tonney Field if they stayed in Gaiten, let alone at the scene of the crime.

  He thought he might feel better about that last at daybreak, but he did not.

  The five of them watched and waited at the living room window, but of course nothing came out of the smoldering wreckage, and there was no sound but the low crackle of fire eating deep into the Athletic Department offices and locker rooms even as it finished off the bleachers above-ground. The thousand or so phone-crazies who had been roosting there were, as Alice had said, crispy. The smell of them was rich and stick-in-your-throat awful. Clay had vomited once and knew the others had, as well--even the Head.

  We made a mistake, he thought again.

  "You guys should have gone on," Jordan said. "We would have been all right--we were before, weren't we, sir?"

  Headmaster Ardai ignored the question. He was studying Clay. "What happened yesterday when you and Tom were in that service station? I think something happened then to make you look as you do now."

  "Oh? How do I look, sir?"

  "Like an animal that smells a trap. Did those two in the street see you?"

  "It wasn't exactly that," Clay said. He didn't love being called an animal, but couldn't deny that was what he was: oxygen and food in, carbon dioxide and shit out, pop goes the weasel.

  The Head had begun to rub restlessly at the left side of his midsection with one big hand. Like many of his gestures, Clay thought it had an oddly theatrical quality--not exactly phony, but meant to be seen at the back of the lecture hall. "Then what exactly was it?"

  And because protecting the others no longer seemed like an option, Clay told the Head exactly what they'd seen in the office of the Citgo station--a physical struggle over a box of stale treats that had suddenly turned into something else. He told about the fluttering papers, the ashes that had begun circling in the ashtray like water going down a bathtub drain, the keys jingling on the board, the nozzle that fell off the gas-pump.

  "I saw that," Jordan said, and Alice nodded.

  Tom mentioned feeling short of breath, and Clay agreed. They both tried to explain the sense of something powerful building in the air.

  Clay said it was how things felt before a thunderstorm. Tom said the air just felt fraught, somehow. Too heavy.

  "Then he let her take a couple of the fucking things and it all went away," Tom said. "The ashes stopped spinning, the keys stopped jingling, that thundery feeling went out of the air." He looked to Clay for confirmation. Clay nodded.

  Alice said, "Why didn't you tell us this before?"

  "Because it wouldn't have changed anything," Clay said. "We were going to burn the nest if we could, regardless."

  "Yes," Tom said.

  Jordan said suddenly, "You think the phone-crazies are turning into psionics, don't you?"

  Tom said, "I don't know what that word means, Jordan."

  "People who can move things around just by thinking about it, for one thing. Or by accident, if their emotions get out of control. Only psionic abilities like telekinesis and levitation--"

  "Levitation?" Alice almost barked.

  Jordan paid no mind. "--are only branches. The trunk of the psionic tree is telepathy, and that's what you're afraid of, isn't it? The telepathy thing."

  Tom's fingers went to the place above his mouth where half of his mustache was gone and touched the reddened skin there. "Well, the thought has crossed my mind." He paused, head cocked. "That might be witty. I'm not sure."

  Jordan ignored this, as well. "Say that they are. Getting to be true telepaths, I mean, and not just zombies with a flocking instinct. So what? The Gaiten Academy flock is dead, and they died without a clue of who lit em up, because they died in whatever passes for sleep with them, so if you're worrying that they telepathically faxed our names and descriptions to any of their buddies in the surrounding New England states, you can relax."

  "Jordan--" the Head began, then winced. He was still rubbing his midsection.

  "Sir? Are you all right?"

  "Yes. Fetch my Zantac from the downstairs bathroom, would you? And a bottle of the Poland Spring water. There's a good lad."

  Jordan hurried away on the errand.

  "Not an ulcer, is it?" Tom asked.

  "No," the Head replied. "It's stress. An old... one cannot say friend... acquaintance?"

  "Your heart okay?" Alice asked, speaking in a low voice.

  "I suppose," the Head agreed, and bared his teeth in a smile of disconcerting jollity. "If the Zantac doesn't work, we may resuppose... but so far, the Zantac always has, and one doesn't care to buy trouble when so much of it is on sale. Ah, Jordan, thank you."

  "Quite welcome, sir." The boy handed him the glass and the pill with his usual smile.

  "I think you ought to go with them," Ardai told him after swallowing the Zantac.

  "Sir, with all respect, I'm telling you there's no way they could know, no way."

  The Head looked a question at Tom and Clay. Tom raised his hands. Clay only shrugged. He could say what he felt right out loud, could articulate what they surely must know he felt--we made a mistake, and staying here is compounding it--but saw no point. Jordan's face was set and stubborn on top, scared to death just beneath. They were not going to persuade him. And besides, it was day again. Day was their time.

  He rumpled the boy's hair. "If you say so, Jordan. I'm going to catch some winks."

  Jordan looked almost sublimely relieved. "That sounds like a good idea. I think I will, too."

  "I'm going to have a cup of Cheatham Lodge's world-famous tepid cocoa before I come up," Tom said. "And I believe I'll shave off the rest of this mustache. The wailing and lamentation you hear will be mine."

  "Can I watch?" Alice asked. "I always wanted to watch a grown man wail and lament."

  26

  Clay and Tom were sharing a small bedroom on the third floor; Alice had been given the only other. While Clay was taking off his shoes, there was a perfunctory knock on the door, which the Head followed without pause. Two bright spots of color burned high up on his cheekbones. Otherwise his face was deathly pale.

  "Are you all right?" Clay asked, standing. "Is it your heart, after all?"

  "I'm glad you asked me that," the Head replied. "I wasn't entirely sure I planted the seed, but it seems I did." He glanced back over his shoulder into the hall, then closed the door with the tip of his cane. "Listen carefully, Mr. Riddell--Clay--and don't ask questions unless you feel you absolutely must. I am
going to be found dead in my bed late this afternoon or early this evening, and you will say of course it was my heart after all, that what we did last night must have brought it on. Do you understand?"

  Clay nodded. He understood, and he bit back the automatic protest. It might have had a place in the old world, but it had none here. He knew why the Head was proposing what he was proposing.

  "If Jordan even suspects I may have taken my own life to free him from what he, in his boyishly admirable way, regards as a sacred obligation, he may take his own. At the very least he would be plunged into what the elders of my own childhood called a black fugue. He will grieve for me deeply as it is, but that is permissible. The thought that I committed suicide to get him out of Gaiten is not. Do you understand that?"

  "Yes," Clay said. Then: "Sir, wait another day. What you're thinking of... it may not be necessary. Could be we're going to get away with this." He didn't believe it, and in any case Ardai meant to do what he said; all the truth Clay needed was in the man's haggard face, tightly pressed lips, and gleaming eyes. Still, he tried again. "Wait another day. No one may come."

  "You heard those screams," the Head replied. "That was rage. They'll come."

  "Maybe, but--"

  The Head raised his cane to forestall him. "And if they do, and if they can read our minds as well as each other's, what will they read in yours, if yours is still here to be read?"

  Clay didn't reply, only watched the Head's face.

  "Even if they can't read minds," the Head continued, "what do you propose? To stay here, day after day and week after week? Until the snow flies? Until I finally expire of old age? My own father lived to the age of ninety-seven. Meanwhile, you have a wife and a child."

  "My wife and boy are either all right or they're not. I've made my peace with that."

  This was a lie, and perhaps Ardai saw it in Clay's face, because he smiled his unsettling smile. "And do you believe your son has made peace with not knowing if his father is alive, dead, or insane? After only a week?"

  "That's a low blow," Clay said. His voice was not quite steady.

  "Really? I didn't know we were fighting. In any case, there's no referee. No one here but us chickens, as they say." The Head glanced at the closed door, then looked back at Clay again. "The equation is very simple. You can't stay and I can't go. It's best that Jordan go with you."

  "But to put you down like a horse with a broken leg--"

  "No such thing," the Head interrupted. "Horses do not practice euthanasia, but people do." The door opened, Tom stepped in, and with hardly a pause for breath the Head went on, "And have you ever considered commercial illustration, Clay? For books, I mean?"

  "My style is too flamboyant for most of the commercial houses," Clay said. "I have done jackets for some of the small fantasy presses like Grant and Eulalia. Some of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars books."

  "Barsoom!" the Head cried, and waved his cane vigorously in the air. Then he rubbed his solar plexus and grimaced. "Damned heartburn! Excuse me, Tom--just came up to have a natter before lying down a bit myself."

  "Not at all," Tom said, and watched him go out. When the sound of the Head's cane had gotten a good distance down the hall, he turned to Clay and said, "Is he okay? He's very pale."

  "I think he's fine." He pointed at Tom's face. "I thought you were going to shave off the other half."

  "I decided against it with Alice hanging around," Tom said. "I like her, but about certain things she can be evil."

  "That's just paranoia."

  "Thanks, Clay, I needed that. It's only been a week and I'm already missing my analyst."

  "Combined with a persecution complex and delusions of grandeur."

  Clay swung his feet up onto one of the room's two narrow beds, put his hands behind his head, and looked at the ceiling.

  "You wish we were out of here, don't you?" Tom asked.

  "You bet I do." He spoke in a flat and uninflected monotone.

  "It'll be all right, Clay. Really."

  "So you say, but you have a persecution complex and delusions of grandeur."

  "That's true," Tom said, "but they're balanced out by poor self-image and ego menstruation at roughly six-week intervals. And in any case--"

  "--too late now, at least for today," Clay finished.

  "That's right."

  There was actually a kind of peace in that. Tom said something else, but Clay only caught "Jordan thinks..." and then he was asleep.

  27

  He woke screaming, or so he thought at first; only a wild look at the other bed, where Tom was still sleeping peacefully with something--a washcloth, maybe--folded over his eyes convinced Clay that the scream had been inside his head. A cry of some sort might have escaped him, but if so it hadn't been enough to wake his roommate.

  The room was nowhere near dark--it was midafternoon--but Tom had pulled the shade before corking off himself, and it was at least dim. Clay stayed where he was for a moment, lying on his back, his mouth as dry as wood-shavings, his heartbeat rapid in his chest and in his ears, where it sounded like running footsteps muffled in velvet. Otherwise the house was dead still. They might not have made the switchover from days to nights completely yet, but last night had been extraordinarily exhausting, and at this moment he heard no one stirring in the Lodge. Outside a bird called and somewhere quite distant--not in Gaiten, he thought--a stubborn alarm kept on braying.

  Had he ever had a worse dream? Maybe one. A month or so after Johnny was born, Clay had dreamed he'd picked the baby up from the crib to change him, and Johnny's chubby little body had simply fallen apart in his hands like a badly put-together dummy. That one he could understand--fear of fatherhood, fear of fucking up. A fear he still lived with, as Headmaster Ardai had seen. What was he to make of this one?

  Whatever it meant, he didn't want to lose it, and he knew from experience that you had to act quickly to keep that from happening.

  There was a desk in the room, and a ballpoint pen tucked into one pocket of the jeans Clay had left crumpled at the foot of the bed. He took the pen, crossed to the desk in his bare feet, sat down, and opened the drawer above the kneehole. He found what he was hoping for, a little pile of blank stationery with the heading GAITEN ACADEMY and "A Young Mind Is A Lamp In The Darkness." on each sheet. He took one of them and placed it on the desk. The light was dim, but would serve. He clicked out the tip of the ballpoint and paused for just a moment, recalling the dream as clearly as he could.

  He, Tom, Alice, and Jordan had been lined up in the center of a playing field. Not a soccer field like Tonney--a football field, maybe? There had been some sort of skeletal construction in the background with a blinking red light on it. He had no idea what it was, but he knew the field had been full of people looking at them, people with ruined faces and ripped clothes that he recognized all too well. He and his friends had been... had they been in cages? No, on platforms. And they were cages, all the same, although there were no bars. Clay didn't know how that could be, but it was. He was losing the details of the dream already.

  Tom was on one end of the line. A man had walked to him, a special man, and put a hand over his head. Clay didn't remember how the man could do that since Tom--like Alice, Jordan, and Clay himself--had been on a platform, but he had. And he'd said, "Ecce homo--insanus." And the crowd--thousands of them--had roared back, "DON'T TOUCH!" in a single voice. The man had gone to Clay and repeated this. With his hand above Alice's head the man had said, "Ecce femina--insana." Above Jordan, "Ecce puer--insanus." Each time the response had been the same: "DON'T TOUCH!"

  Neither the man--the host? the ringmaster?--nor the people in the crowd had opened their mouths during this ritual. The call-and-response had been purely telepathic.

  Then, letting his right hand do all the thinking (his hand and the special corner of his brain that ran it), Clay began to stroke an image onto the paper. The entire dream had been terrible--the false accusation of it, the caughtness of it--but nothing in it had been so
awful as the man who had gone to each of them, placing his open palm-down hand over their heads like an auctioneer preparing to sell livestock at a county fair. Clay felt that if he could catch that man's image on paper, he could catch the terror.

  He had been a black man with a noble head and an ascetic's face above a lanky, almost scrawny body. The hair was a tight cap of dark ringlets cut open on one side by an ugly triangular gouge. The shoulders were slight, the hips nearly nonexistent. Below the cap of curls Clay quick-sketched the broad and handsome forehead--a scholar's forehead. Then he marred it with another slash and shaded in the hanging flap of skin that obscured one eyebrow. The man's left cheek had been torn open, possibly by a bite, and the lower lip was also torn on that side, making it droop in a tired sneer. The eyes were a problem. Clay couldn't get them right. In the dream they had been both full of awareness yet somehow dead. After two tries he left them and dropped to the pullover before he lost that: the kind the kids called a hoodie (red, he printed, with an arrow), with white block letters across the front. It had been too big for the skinny body and a flap of material lay over the top half of the letters, but Clay was pretty sure it said harvard. He was starting to print that when the weeping started, soft and muffled, from somewhere below him.

  28

  It was Jordan: Clay knew at once. He took one look back over his shoulder at Tom as he pulled on his jeans, but Tom hadn't moved. Out for the count, Clay thought. He opened the door, slipped through, and closed it behind him.

  Alice, wearing a Gaiten Academy T-shirt as a nightgown, was sitting on the second-floor landing with the boy cradled in her arms. Jordan's face was pressed against her shoulder. She looked up at the sound of Clay's bare feet on the stairs and spoke before Clay said something he might have regretted later: Is it the Head?

  "He had a bad dream," she said.

  Clay said the first thing that came to him. At that moment it seemed vitally important. "Did you?"

  Her brow creased. Bare-legged, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and her face sunburned as if from a day at the beach, she looked like Jordan's eleven-year-old sister. "What? No. I heard him crying in the hall. I guess I was waking up anyway, and--"