Cell: A Novel Read online

  “Why are their hands and feet all smudgy?” a timid voice asked. They looked around. It was Jordan. Clay himself hadn’t even noticed the soot and char on the hands of the silent hundreds out there, but before he could say so, Jordan answered his own question. “They went to see, didn’t they? Sure. They went to see what we did to their friends. And they’re mad. I can feel it. Can you feel it?”

  Clay didn’t want to say yes, but of course he could. That heavy, charged feeling in the air, that sense of turning thunder barely contained in a net of electricity: that was rage. He thought about Pixie Light battening on Power Suit Woman’s neck and the elderly lady who’d won the Battle of the Boylston Street T Station, the one who’d gone striding off into Boston Common with blood dripping out of her cropped iron-gray hair. The young man, naked except for his sneakers, who had been jabbing a car aerial in each hand as he ran. All that rage—did he think it had just disappeared when they started to flock? Well, think again.

  “I feel it,” Tom said. “Jordan, if they’ve got psychic powers, why don’t they just make us kill ourselves, or each other?”

  “Or make our heads explode,” Alice said. Her voice was trembling. “I saw that in an old movie once.”

  “I don’t know,” Jordan said. He looked up at Clay. “Where’s the Raggedy Man?”

  “Is that what you call him?” Clay looked down at his sketch, which he was still carrying—the torn flesh, the torn sleeve of the pullover, the baggy blue jeans. He supposed that Raggedy Man was not a bad name at all for the fellow in the Harvard hoodie.

  “I call him trouble, is what I call him,” Jordan said in a thin voice. He looked out again at the newcomers—three hundred at least, maybe four hundred, recently arrived from God knew which surrounding towns—and then back at Clay. “Have you seen him?”

  “Other than in a bad dream, no.”

  Tom shook his head.

  “To me he’s just a picture on a piece of paper,” Alice said. “I didn’t dream him, and I don’t see anyone in a hoodie out there. What were they doing on the soccer field? Do they try to identify their dead, do you think?” She looked doubtful at this. “And isn’t it still hot in there? It must be.”

  “What are they waiting for?” Tom asked. “If they aren’t going to charge us or make us stick kitchen knives in each other, what are they waiting for?”

  Clay suddenly knew what they were waiting for, and also where Jordan’s Raggedy Man was—it was what Mr. Devane, his high school algebra teacher, would have called an aha! moment. He turned and headed for the front hall.

  “Where are you going?” Tom asked.

  “To see what they left us,” Clay said.

  They hurried after him. Tom caught up first, while Clay’s hand was still on the doorknob. “I don’t know if this is a good idea,” Tom said.

  “Maybe not, but it’s what they’re waiting for,” Clay said. “And you know what? I think if they meant to kill us, we’d be dead already.”

  “He’s prob’ly right,” Jordan said in a small, wan voice.

  Clay opened the door. Cheatham Lodge’s long front porch, with its comfortable wicker furniture and its view of Academy Slope rolling down to Academy Avenue, was made for sunny autumn afternoons like this, but at that moment the ambience was the furthest thing from Clay’s mind. Standing at the foot of the steps was an arrowhead of phone-crazies: one in front, two behind him, three behind them, then four, five, and six. Twenty-one in all. The one in front was the Raggedy Man from Clay’s dream, his sketch come to life. The lettering on the front of the tattered red hoodie did indeed spell out HARVARD. The torn left cheek had been pulled up and secured at the side of the nose with two clumsy white stitches that had torn teardrops in the indifferently mended dark flesh before holding. There were rips where a third and fourth stitch had pulled free. Clay thought the stitching might have been done with fish-line. The sagging lip revealed teeth that looked as if they had been seen to by a good orthodontist not long ago, when the world had been a milder place.

  In front of the door, burying the welcome mat and spreading in both directions, was a heap of black, misshapen objects. It could almost have been some half-mad sculptor’s idea of art. It took Clay only a moment to realize he was looking at the melted remains of the Tonney Field flock’s ghetto blasters.

  Then Alice shrieked. A few of the heat-warped boomboxes had fallen over when Clay opened the door, and something that had very likely been balanced on top of the pile had fallen over with them, lodging half in and half out of the pile. She stepped forward before Clay could stop her, dropping one of the automatic pistols and grabbing the thing she had seen. It was the sneaker. She cradled it between her breasts.

  Clay looked past her, at Tom. Tom gazed back at him. They weren’t telepathic, but in that moment they might as well have been. Now what? Tom’s eyes asked.

  Clay turned his attention back to the Raggedy Man. He wondered if you could feel your mind being read and if his was being read right that second. He put his hands out to the Raggedy Man. The gun was still in one of them, but neither the Raggedy Man nor anyone in his squad seemed to feel threatened by it. Clay held his palms up: What do you want?

  The Raggedy Man smiled. There was no humor in the smile. Clay thought he could see anger in the dark brown eyes, but he thought it was a surface thing. Underneath there was no spark at all, at least that he could discern. It was almost like watching a doll smile.

  The Raggedy Man cocked his head and held up a finger—Wait. And from below them on Academy Avenue, as if on cue, came many screams. Screams of people in mortal agony. Accompanying them were a few guttural, predatory cries. Not many.

  “What are you doing?” Alice shouted. She stepped forward, squeezing the little sneaker convulsively in her hand. The cords in her forearm stood out strongly enough to make shadows like long straight pencil-strokes on her skin. “What are you doing to the people down there?”

  As if, Clay thought, there could be any doubt.

  She raised the hand that still held a gun. Tom grabbed it and wrestled it away from her before she could pull the trigger. She turned on him, clawing at him with her free hand.

  “Give it back, don’t you hear that? Don’t you hear?”

  Clay pulled her away from Tom. During all of this Jordan watched from the entryway with wide, terrified eyes and the Raggedy Man stood at the tip of the arrow, smiling from a face where rage underlay humor and beneath the rage was… nothing, as far as Clay could tell. Nothing at all.

  “Safety was on, anyway,” Tom said after a quick glance. “Thank the Lord for small favors.” And to Alice: “Do you want to get us killed?”

  “Do you think they’re just going to let us go?” She was crying so hard it had become difficult to understand her. Snot hung from her nostrils in two clear strings. From below, on the tree-lined avenue that ran past Gaiten Academy, there were screams and shrieks. A woman cried No, please don’t please don’t and then her words were lost in a terrible howl of pain.

  “I don’t know what they’re going to do with us,” Tom said in a voice that strove for calm, “but if they meant to kill us, they wouldn’t be doing that. Look at him, Alice—what’s going on down there is for our benefit.”

  There were a few gunshots as people tried to defend themselves, but not many. Mostly there were just screams of pain and terrible surprise, all coming from the area directly adjacent to Gaiten Academy, where the flock had been burned. It surely didn’t last any longer than ten minutes, but sometimes, Clay thought, time really was relative.

  It seemed like hours.

  30

  When the screams finally stopped, Alice stood quietly between Clay and Tom with her head lowered. She had put both automatics on a table meant for briefcases and hats inside the front door. Jordan was holding her hand, looking out at the Raggedy Man and his colleagues standing at the head of the walk. So far the boy hadn’t noticed the Head’s absence. Clay knew he would soon, and then the next scene of this terrible day w
ould commence.

  The Raggedy Man took a step forward and made a little bow with his hands held out to either side, as if to say, At your service. Then he looked up and held a hand out toward Academy Slope and the avenue beyond. He looked at the little group clustered in the open door behind the melted boombox sculpture as he did this. To Clay the meaning seemed clear: The road is yours. Go on and take it.

  “Maybe,” he said. “In the meantime, let’s be clear on one thing. I’m sure you can wipe us out if you choose to, you’ve obviously got the numbers, but unless you plan to hang back at Command HQ, someone else is going to be in charge of things tomorrow. Because I’ll personally make sure you’re the first one to go.”

  The Raggedy Man put his hands to his cheeks and widened his eyes: Oh dear! The others behind him were as expressionless as robots. Clay looked a moment longer, then gently closed the door.

  “I’m sorry,” Alice said dully. “I just couldn’t stand listening to them scream.”

  “It’s okay,” Tom said. “No harm done. And hey, they brought back Mr. Sneaker.”

  She looked at it. “Is this how they found out it was us? Did they smell it, the way a bloodhound smells a scent?”

  “No,” Jordan said. He was sitting in a high-backed chair beside the umbrella stand, looking small and haggard and used-up. “That’s just their way of saying they know you. At least, that’s what I think.”

  “Yeah,” Clay said. “I bet they knew it was us even before they got here. Picked it out of our dreams the way we picked his face out of our dreams.”

  “I didn’t—” Alice began.

  “Because you were waking up,” Tom said. “You’ll be hearing from him in the fullness of time, I imagine.” He paused. “If he has anything else to say, that is. I don’t understand this, Clay. We did it. We did it and they know we did it, I’m convinced of that.”

  “Yes,” Clay said.

  “Then why kill a bunch of innocent pilgrims when it would have been just as easy—well, almost as easy—to break in here and kill us? I mean, I understand the concept of reprisals, but I don’t see the point in this—”

  That was when Jordan slid off his chair and, looking around with an expression of suddenly blossoming worry, asked: “Where’s the Head?”

  31

  Clay caught up with Jordan, but not until the boy had made it all the way to the second-floor landing. “Hang on, Jordan,” he said.

  “No,” Jordan said. His face was whiter, shockier, than ever. His hair bushed out around his head, and Clay supposed it was only because the boy needed a cut, but it looked as if it were trying to stand on end. “With all the commotion, he should have been with us! He would have been with us, if he was all right.” His lips began to tremble. “Remember the way he was rubbing himself? What if that wasn’t just his acid reflux stuff?”

  “Jordan—”

  Jordan paid no attention, and Clay was willing to bet he’d forgotten all about the Raggedy Man and his cohorts, at least for the time being. He yanked free of Clay’s hand and went running down the corridor, yelling, “Sir! Sir!” while Heads going back to the nineteenth century frowned down at him from walls.

  Clay glanced back down the stairs. Alice was going to be no help—she was sitting at the foot of the staircase with her head bent, staring at that fucking sneaker like it was the skull of Yorick—but Tom started reluctantly up to the second floor. “How bad is this going to be?” he asked Clay.

  “Well… Jordan thinks the Head would have joined us if he was all right and I tend to think he’s—”

  Jordan began to shriek. It was a drilling soprano sound that went through Clay’s head like a spear. It was actually Tom who got moving first; Clay was rooted at the staircase end of the corridor for at least three and perhaps as many as seven seconds, held there by a single thought: That’s not how someone sounds when they’ve found what looks like a heart attack. The old man must have botched it somehow. Maybe used the wrong kind of pills. He was halfway down the hall when Tom cried out in shock—“Oh my God Jordan don’t look”—almost as if it were one word.

  “Wait!” Alice called from behind him, but Clay didn’t. The door to the Head’s little upstairs suite was open: the study with its books and its now useless hotplate, the bedroom beyond with the door standing open so the light streamed through. Tom was standing in front of the desk, holding Jordan’s head against his stomach. The Head was seated behind his desk. His weight had rocked his swivel chair back on its pivot and he seemed to be staring up at the ceiling with his one remaining eye. His tangled white hair hung down over the chairback. To Clay he looked like a concert pianist who had just played the final chord of a difficult piece.

  He heard Alice give a choked cry of horror, but hardly noticed. Feeling like a passenger inside his own body, Clay walked to the desk and looked at the sheet of paper that rested on the blotter. Although it was stained with blood, he could make out the words on it; the Head’s cursive had been fine and clear. Old-school to the end, Jordan might have said.

  aliene geisteskrank

  insano

  elnebajos vansinnig fou

  atamagaokashii gek dolzinnig

  hullu

  gila

  meschuge nebun

  dement

  Clay spoke nothing but English and a little high school French, but he knew well enough what this was, and what it meant. The Raggedy Man wanted them to go, and he knew somehow that Headmaster Ardai was too old and too arthritic to go with them. So he had been made to sit at his desk and write the word for insane in fourteen different languages. And when he was done, he had been made to plunge the tip of the heavy fountain pen with which he had written into his right eye and from there into the clever old brain behind it.

  “They made him kill himself, didn’t they?” Alice asked in a breaking voice. “Why him and not us? Why him and not us? What do they want?”

  Clay thought of the gesture the Raggedy Man had made toward Academy Avenue—Academy Avenue, which was also New Hampshire Route 102. The phone-crazies who were no longer exactly crazy—or were crazy in some brand-new way—wanted them on the road again. Beyond that he had no idea, and maybe that was good. Maybe that was all for the best. Maybe that was a mercy.

  FADING ROSES,

  THIS GARDEN’S OVER

  1

  There were half a dozen fine linen tablecloths in a cabinet at the end of the back hallway, and one of these served as Headmaster Ardai’s shroud. Alice volunteered to sew it shut, then collapsed in tears when either her needlework or her nerve did not prove equal to such finality. Tom took over, pulling the tablecloth taut, doubling the seam, and sewing it closed in quick, almost professional overhand strokes. Clay thought it was like watching a boxer work an invisible light bag with his right hand.

  “Don’t make jokes,” Tom said without looking up. “I appreciate what you did upstairs—I never could have done that—but I can’t take a single joke right now, not even of the inoffensive Will and Grace variety. I’m barely holding myself together.”

  All right,“ Clay said. Joking was the farthest thing from his mind. As for what he had done upstairs… well, the pen had to be removed from the Head’s eye. No way were they going to leave that in. So Clay had taken care of it, looking away into the corner of the room as he wrenched it free, trying not to think about what he was doing or why it was stuck so fucking tight, and mostly he had succeeded in not thinking, but the pen had made a grinding sound against the bone of the old man’s eyesocket when it finally let go, and there had been a loose, gobbety plopping sound as something fell from the bent tip of the pen’s steel nib onto the blotter. He thought he would remember those sounds forever, but he had succeeded in getting the damn thing out, and that was the important thing.

  Outside, nearly a thousand phone-crazies stood on the lawn between the smoking ruins of the soccer field and Cheatham Lodge. They stood there most of the afternoon. Then, around five o’clock, they flocked silently off in the direction of downt
own Gaiten. Clay and Tom carried the Head’s shrouded body down the back stairs and put it on the back porch. The four survivors gathered in the kitchen and ate the meal they had taken to calling breakfast as the shadows began to draw long outside.

  Jordan ate surprisingly well. His color was high and his speech was animated. It consisted of reminiscences of his life at Gaiten Academy, and the influence Headmaster Ardai had had on the heart and mind of a friendless, introverted computer geek from Madison, Wisconsin. The brilliant lucidity of the boy’s recollections made Clay increasingly uncomfortable, and when he caught first Alice’s eyes and then Tom’s, he saw they felt the same. Jordan’s mind was tottering, but it was hard to know what to do about that; they could hardly send him to a psychiatrist.

  At some point, after full dark, Tom suggested that Jordan should rest. Jordan said he would, but not until they had buried the Head. They could put him in the garden behind the Lodge, he said. He told them the Head had called the little vegetable patch his “victory garden,” although he had never told Jordan why.

  “That’s the place,” Jordan said, smiling. His cheeks now flamed with color. His eyes, deep in their bruised sockets, sparkled with what could have been inspiration, good cheer, madness, or all three. “Not only is the ground soft, it’s the place he always liked the best… outside, I mean. So what do you say? They’re gone, they still don’t come out at night, that hasn’t changed, and we can use the gas lanterns to dig by. What do you say?”

  After consideration, Tom said, “Are there shovels?”

  “You bet, in the gardening shed. We don’t even need to go up to the greenhouses.” And Jordan actually laughed.

  “Let’s do it,” Alice said. “Let’s bury him and have done with it.”

  “And you’ll rest afterwards,” Clay said, looking at Jordan.

  “Sure, sure!” Jordan cried impatiently. He got up from his chair and began to pace around the room. “Come on, you guys!” As if he were trying to get up a game of tag.