Стивен Кинг. Клетка (engl)
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...e only other. While Clay was taking off his shoes, there was aperfunctory 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-- "
"Just a minute," Clay said. "Stay right there."
He went back to his third-floor room and snatched his sketch off the
desk. This time Tom's eyes sprang open. He looked around with a mixture of
fright and disorientation, then fixed on Clay and relaxed. "Back to
reality," he said. Then, rubbing a hand over his face and getting up on one
elbow: "Thank God. Jesus. What time is it?"
"Tom, did you have a dream? A bad dream?"
Tom nodded. "I think so, yeah. I heard crying. Was that Jordan?"
"Yes. What did you dream? Do you remember?"
"Somebody called us insane," Tom said, and Clay felt his stomach drop.
"Which we probably are. The rest is gone. Why? Did you-- "
Clay didn't wait for any more. He hurried back out and down the stairs
again. Jordan looked around at him with a kind of dazed timidity when Clay
sat down. There was no sign of the computer whiz now; if Alice looked eleven
with her ponytail and sunburn, Jordan had regressed to nine.
"Jordan," Clay said. "Your dream . . . your nightmare. Do you remember
it?"
"It's going away now," Jordan said. "They had us up on stands. They
were looking at us like we were . . . I don't know, wild animals . . . only
they said-- "
"That we were insane."
Jordan's eyes widened. "Yeah!"
Clay heard footfalls behind him as Tom came down the stairs. Clay
didn't look around. He showed Jordan his sketch. "Was this the man in
charge?"
Jordan didn't answer. He didn't have to. He winced away from the
picture, grabbing for Alice and turning his face against her chest again.
"What is it?" Alice asked, bewildered. She reached for the sketch, but
Tom took it first.
"Christ," he said, and handed it back. "The dream's almost gone, but I
remember the torn cheek."
"And his lip," Jordan said, the words muffled against Alice's chest.
"The way his lip hangs down. He was the one showing us to them. To them." He
shuddered. Alice rubbed his back, then crossed her hands over his shoulder
blades so she could hold him more tightly.
Clay put the picture in front of Alice. "Ring any bells? Man of your
dreams?"
She shook her head and started to say no. Before she could, there was a
loud, protracted rattling and a loose series of thuds from outside Cheatham
Lodge's front door. Alice screamed. Jordan clutched her tighter, as if he
would burrow into her, and cried out. Tom clutched at Clay's shoulder. "Oh
man, what the fuck-- "
There was more rattling thunder outside the door, long and loud. Alice
screamed again.
"Guns!" Clay shouted. "Guns!"
For a moment they were all paralyzed there on the sunny landing, and
then another of those long, loud rattles came, a sound like rolling bones.
Tom bolted for the third floor and Clay followed him, skidding once in his
stocking feet and grabbing the banister to regain his balance. Alice pushed
Jordan away from her and ran for her own room, the hem of the shirt
fluttering around her legs, leaving Jordan to huddle against the newel post,
staring down the stairs and into the front hall with huge wet eyes.
29
"Easy," Clay said. "Let's just take this easy, okay?"
The three of them stood at the foot of the stairs not two minutes after
the first of those long, loose rattling sounds had come from beyond the
front door. Tom had the unproven Russian assault rifle they had taken to
calling Sir Speedy, Alice was holding a nine-millimeter automatic in each
hand, and Clay had Beth Nickerson's .45, which he had somehow managed to
hold on to the previous night (although he had no memory of tucking it back
into his belt, where he later found it). Jordan still huddled on the
landing. Up there he couldn't see the downstairs windows, and Clay thought
that was probably a good thing. The afternoon light in Cheatham Lodge was
much dimmer than it should have been, and that was most definitely not a
good thing.
It was dimmer because there were phone-crazies at every window they
could see, crowded up to the glass and peering in at them: dozens, maybe
hundreds of those strange blank faces, most marked by the battles they had
been through and the wounds they had suffered during the last anarchic week.
Clay saw missing eyes and teeth, torn ears, bruises, burns, scorched skin,
and hanging wads of blackened flesh. They were silent. There was a kind of
haunted avidity about them, and that feeling was back in the air, that
breathless sense of some enormous, spinning power barely held in check. Clay
kept expecting to see their guns fly out of their hands and begin to fire on
their own.
At us, he thought.
"Now I know how the lobsters feel in the tank at Harbor Seafood on
Twofer Tuesday," Tom said in a small, tight voice.
"Just take it easy," Clay repeated. "Let them make the first move."
But there was no first move. There was another of those long, rattling
thumps-- the sound of something being off-loaded on the front porch was what
it sounded like to Clay-- and then the creatures at the windows drew back,
as if at some signal only they could hear. They did this in orderly rows.
This wasn't the time of day during which they ordinarily flocked, but things
had changed. That seemed obvious.
Clay walked to the bay window in the living room, holding the revolver
at his side. Tom and Alice followed. They watched the phone-crazies (who no
longer seemed crazy at all to Clay, at least not in any way he understood)
retreat, walking backward with eerie, limber ease, each never losing the
little envelope of space around him- or herself. They settled to a stop
between Cheatham Lodge and the smoking remains of the Tonney soccer stadium,
like some raggedy-ass army battalion on a leaf-strewn parade ground. Every
not-quite-vacant eye rested upon the Headmaster's residence.
"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 would 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 downtown 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.
So they dug the grave in the Head's garden behind the Lodge and buried
him among the beans and tomatoes. Tom and Clay lowered the shrouded form
into the hole, which was about three feet deep. The exercise kept them warm,
and only when they stopped did they notice the night had grown cold, almost
frosty. The stars were brilliant overhead, but a heavy ground-mist was
rolling up the Slope. Academy Avenue was already submerged in that rising
tide of white; only the steeply slanted roofs of the biggest old houses down
there broke its surface.
"I wish someone knew some good poetry," Jordan said. His cheeks were
redder than ever, but his eyes had receded into circular caves and he was
shivering in spite of the two sweaters he was wearing. His breath came out
in little puffs. "The Head loved poetry, he thought that stuff was the shit.
He was . . ." Jordan's voice, which had been strangely gay all night,
finally broke. "He was so totally old-school."
Alice folded him against her. Jordan struggled, then gave in.
"Tell you what," Tom said, "let's cover him up nice-- cover him against
the cold-- and then I'll give him some poetry. Would that be okay?"
"Do you really know some?"
"I really do," Tom said.
"You're so smart, Tom. Thank you." And Jordan smiled at him with weary,
horrible gratitude.
Filling in the grave was quick, although in the end they had to borrow
some earth from the garden's nether parts to bring it up to dead level. By
the time they were finished, Clay was sweating again and he could smell
himself. It had been a long time between showers.
Alice had tried to keep Jordan from helping, but he broke free of her
and pitched in, using his bare hands to toss earth into the hole. By the
time Clay finished tamping the ground with the flat of his spade, the boy
was glassy-eyed with exhaustion, all but reeling on his feet like a drunk.
Nevertheless, he looked at Tom. "Go ahead. You promised." Clay almost
expected him to add, And make it good, seсor, or I weel put a boolet in you,
like a homicidal bandido in a Sam Peckinpah western.
Tom stepped to one end of the grave-- Clay thought it was the top, but
in his weariness could no longer remember. He could not even remember for
sure if the Head's first name had been Charles or Robert. Runners of mist
curled around Tom's feet and ankles, twined among the dead beanstalks. He
removed his baseball cap, and Alice took off hers. Clay reached for his own
and remembered he wasn't wearing one.
"That's right!" Jordan cried. He was smiling, frantic with
understanding. "Hats off! Hats off to the Head!" He was bareheaded himself,
but mimed taking a hat off just the same-- taking it off and flinging it
into the air-- and Clay once more found himself fearing for the boy's
sanity. "Now the poem! Come on, Tom!"
"All right," Tom said, "but you have to be quiet. Show respect."
Jordan laid a finger across his lips to show he understood, and Clay
saw by the brokenhearted eyes above that upraised finger that the boy had
not lost his mind yet. His friend, but not his mind.
Clay waited, curious to see how Tom would go on. He expected some
Frost, maybe a fragment of Shakespeare (surely the Head would have approved
of Shakespeare, even if it had only been When shall we three meet again),
perhaps even a little extemporaneous Tom McCourt. What he did not expect was
what came from Tom's mouth in low, precisely measured lines.
"Do not withhold Your mercy from us, O Lord; may Your love and Your
truth always protect us. For troubles without numbers surround us; our sins
have overtaken us and we cannot see. Our sins are more than the hairs of our
heads, and our hearts fail within us. Be pleased, O Lord, to save us; O
Lord, come quickly to help us."
Alice was holding her sneaker and weeping at the foot of the grave. Her
head was bowed. Her sobs were quick and low.
Tom pressed on, holding one hand out over the new grave, palm extended,
fingers curled in. "May all who seek to take our lives as this life was
taken be put to shame and confusion; may all who desire our ruin be turned
back in disgrace. May those who say to us, 'Aha, aha!' be appalled at their
own shame. Here lies the dead, dust of the earth-- "
"I'm so sorry, Head!" Jordan cried in a breaking treble voice. "I'm so
sorry, it's not right, sir, I'm so sorry you're dead-- " His eyes rolled up
and he crumpled to the new grave. The mist stole its greedy white fingers
over him.
Clay picked him up and felt the pulse in Jordan's neck, strong and
regular. "Just fainted. What is it you're saying, Tom?"
Tom look flustered, embarrassed. "A rather free adaptation of Psalm
Forty. Let's take him inside-- "
"No," Clay said. "If it's not too long, finish."
"Yes, please," Alice said. "Finish. It's lovely. Like salve on a cut."
Tom turned and faced the grave again. He seemed to gather himself, or
perhaps he was only finding his place. "Here lies the dead, dust of the
earth, and here are we the living, poor and needy; Lord, think of us. You
are our help and our deliverer; O my God, do not delay. Amen."
"Amen," Clay and Alice said together.
"Let's get the kid inside," Tom said. "It's fucking freezing out here."
"Did you learn that from the holy Hannahs at the First N.E. Church of
Christ the Redeemer?" Clay asked.
"Oh, yes," Tom said. "Many psalms by heart, good for extra desserts. I
also learned how to beg on street corners and leaflet a whole Sears parking
lot in just twenty minutes with A Million Years in Hell and Not One Drink of
Water. Let's put this kid to bed. I'm betting he'll sleep through until at
least four tomorrow afternoon and wake up feeling a hell of a lot better."
"What if that man with the torn cheek comes and finds we're still here
after he told us to go?" Alice asked.
Clay thought that was a good question, but not one he needed to spend a
lot of time mulling over. Either the Raggedy Man would give them another
day's grace or he wouldn't. As he took Jordan upstairs to his bed, Clay
found he was too tired to care one way or the other.
2
At around four in the morning, Alice bid Clay and Tom a foggy goodnight
and stumbled off to bed. The two men sat in the kitchen, drinking iced tea,
not talking much. There seemed nothing to say. Then, just before dawn,
another of those great groans, made ghostly by distance, rode in on the
foggy air from the northeast. It wavered like the cry of a theremin in an
old horror movie, and just as it began to fade, a much louder answering cry
came from Gaiten, where the Raggedy Man had taken his new, larger flock.
Clay and Tom went out front, pushing aside the barrier of melted
boom-boxes to get down the porch steps. They could see nothing; the whole
world was white. They stood there awhile and went back in.
Neither the death-cry nor the answer from Gaiten woke Alice and Jordan;
they had that much to be grateful for. Their road atlas, now bent and
crumpled at the corners, was on the kitchen counter. Tom thumbed through it
and said, "That might have come from Hooksett or Suncook. They're both
good-sized towns northeast of here-- good-sized for New Hampshire, I mean. I
wonder how many they got? And how they did it."
Clay shook his head.
"I hope it was a lot," Tom said with a thin and charmless smile. "I
hope it was at least a thousand, and that they slow-cooked them. I find
myself thinking of some restaurant chain or other that used to advertise
'broasted chicken.' Are we going tomorrow night?"
"If the Raggedy Man lets us live through today, I guess we ought to.
Don't you think?"
"I don't see any choice," Tom said, "but I'll tell you something,
Clay-- I feel like a cow being driven down a tin chute into the
slaughterhouse. I can almost smell the blood of my little moo-brothers."
Clay had the same feeling, but the same question recurred: If
slaughtering was what they had on their group mind, why not do it here? They
could have done it yesterday afternoon, instead of leaving melted boom-boxes
and Alice's pet sneaker on the porch.
Tom yawned. "Turning in. Are you good for another couple of hours?"
"I could be," Clay said. In fact, he had never felt less like sleeping.
His body was exhausted but his mind kept turning and turning. It would begin
to settle a bit, and then he'd recall the sound the pen had made coming out
of the Head's eyesocket: the low squall of metal against bone. "Why?"
"Because if they decide to kill us today, I'd rather go my way than
theirs," Tom said. "I've seen theirs. You agree?"
Clay thought that if the collective mind which the Raggedy Man
represented had really made the Head stick a fountain pen in his eye, the
four remaining residents of Cheatham Lodge might find that suicide was no
longer among their options. That was no thought to send Tom to bed on,
however. So he nodded.
"I'll take all the guns upstairs. You've got that big old .45, right?"
"The Beth Nickerson special. Right."
"Good night, then. And if you see them coming-- or feel them coming--
give a yell." Tom paused. "If you have time, that is. And if they let you."
Clay watched Tom leave the kitchen, thinking Tom had been ahead of him
all the time. Thinking how much he liked Tom. Thinking he'd like to get to
know him better. Thinking the chances of that weren't good. And Johnny and
Sharon? They had never seemed so far away.
3
At eight o'clock that morning, Clay sat on a bench at one end of the
Head's victory garden, telling himself that if he weren't so tired, he'd get
up off his dead ass and make the old fellow some sort of marker. It wouldn't
last long, but the guy deserved it for taking care of his last pupil, if for
nothing else. The thing was, he didn't even know if he could get up, totter
into the house, and wake Tom to stand a watch.
Soon they would have a chilly, beautiful autumn day-- one made for
apple-picking, cider-making, and touch-football games in the backyard. For
now the fog was still thick, but the morning sun shone strongly through it,
turning the tiny world in which Clay sat to a dazzling white. Fine suspended
droplets hung in the air, and hundreds of tiny rainbow wheels circulated in
front of his heavy eyes.
Something red materialized out of this burning whiteness. For a moment
the Raggedy Man's hoodie seemed to float by itself, and then, as it came up
the garden toward Clay, its occupant's dark brown face and hands
materialized above and below it. This morning the hood was up, framing the
smiling disfigurement of the face and those dead-alive eyes.
Broad scholar's forehead, marred with a slash.
Filthy, shapeless jeans, torn at the pockets and worn more than a week
now.
HARVARD across the narrow chest.
Beth Nickerson's .45 was in the side-holster on his belt. Clay didn't
even touch it. The Raggedy Man stopped about ten feet from him. He-- it--
was standing on the Head's grave, and Clay believed that was no accident.
"What do you want?" he asked the Raggedy Man, and immediately answered
himself: "To. Tell you."
He sat staring at the Raggedy Man, mute with surprise. He had expected
telepathy or nothing. The Raggedy Man grinned-- insofar as he could grin,
with that badly split lower lip-- and spread his hands as if to say Shucks,
't'warn't nuthin.
"Say what you have to say, then," Clay told him, and tried to prepare
for having his voice hijacked a second time. He discovered it was a thing
you couldn't prepare for. It was like being turned into a grinning piece of
wood sitting on a ventriloquist's knee.
"Go. Tonight." Clay concentrated and said, "Shut up, stop it!"
The Raggedy Man waited, the picture of patience.
"I think I can keep you out if I try hard," Clay said. "I'm not sure,
but I think I can."
The Raggedy Man waited, his face saying Are you done yet?
"Go ahead," Clay said, and then said, "I could bring. More. I came.
Alone."
Clay considered the idea of the Raggedy Man's will joined to that of an
entire flock and conceded the point.
"Go. Tonight. North." Clay waited, and when he was sure the Raggedy Man
was done with his voice for the time being, he said, "Where? Why?"
There were no words this time, but an image suddenly rose before him.
It was so clear that he didn't know if it was in his mind or if the Raggedy
Man had somehow conjured it on the brilliant screen of the mist. It was what
they had seen scrawled in the middle of Academy Avenue in pink chalk:
KASHWAK=NO-FO
"I don't get it," he said.
But the Raggedy Man was walking away. Clay saw his red hoodie for a
moment, once again seeming to float unoccupied against the brilliant mist;
then that was gone, too. Clay was left with only the thin consolation of
knowing that they had been going north anyway, and that they had been given
another day's grace. Which meant there was no need to stand a watch. He
decided to go to bed and let the others sleep through, as well.
4
Jordan awoke in his right mind, but his nervy brilliance had departed.
He nibbled at half a rock-hard bagel and listened dully as Clay recounted
his meeting with the Raggedy Man that morning. When Clay finished, Jordan
got their road atlas, consulted the index at ...
