Cell. Part 21

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 m.u.f.fled 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 f.u.c.king 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 GAITEN ACADEMY and ' and 'A Young Mind Is A Lamp In The Darkness. 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. 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 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. 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 h.o.m.o 'Ecce h.o.m.o-insa.n.u.s.' And the crowd-thousands of them-had roared back, And the crowd-thousands of them-had roared back, 'DON'T TOUCH!' '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, 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 'Ecce femina-insana.' Above Jordan, Above Jordan, 'Ecce puer 'Ecce puer-insa.n.u.s.' Each time the response had been the same: Each time the response had been the same: 'DON'T TOUCH!' '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 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. 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 n.o.ble 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 m.u.f.fled, 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, Out for the count, Clay thought. He opened the door, slipped through, and closed it behind him. Clay thought. He opened the door, slipped through, and closed it behind him.

Alice, wearing a Gaiten Academy T-s.h.i.+rt 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? 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?' 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 G.o.d. 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 m.u.f.fled against Alice's chest. 'The way his lip hangs down. He was the one showing us to them. To them.' them.' He shuddered. Alice rubbed his back, then crossed her hands over his shoulder blades so she could hold him more tightly. 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 f.u.c.k the f.u.c.k-'

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 s.h.i.+rt 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 a.s.sault 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 gla.s.s 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 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. 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 s.p.a.ce around him- or herself. They settled to a stop between Cheatham Lodge and the smoking remains of the Tonney soccer stadium, like some raggedy-a.s.s 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 G.o.d 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! aha! moment. He turned and headed for the front hall. 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 doork.n.o.b. '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 st.i.tches that had torn teardrops in the indifferently mended dark flesh before holding. There were rips where a third and fourth st.i.tch had pulled free. Clay thought the st.i.tching 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

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? Now what? Tom's eyes asked. 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? 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 c.o.c.ked 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. 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?' '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?' 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, 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 please don't please don't and then her words were lost in a terrible howl of pain. 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 was relative. 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. 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 cl.u.s.tered in the open door behind the melted boombox sculpture as he did this. To Clay the meaning seemed clear: Then he looked up and held a hand out toward Academy Slope and the avenue beyond. He looked at the little group cl.u.s.tered 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. The road is yours. Go on and take it.