Heard what?
Timmy couldn’t remember.
He concentrated harder, and a memory—so fleeting it was barely there at all—stirred.
A rattling sound, like the old elevator that went from the first floor all the way up to the fourth floor.
Then—nothing!
Until he’d awakened in the shadows.
Awakened, to find that there was still nothing.
Once more, he tried to reach out, but his body refused to respond, refused, even, to acknowledge the commands his mind issued.
Paralyzed!
His entire body was paralyzed!
Now the panic that had been entangling him in its grasp gripped him with an irresistible force, and he screamed out.
Screamed out—silently.
He tried to scream again, when out of the shadows, lights began to shine. Brilliant lights, in a spectrum of colors he’d never beheld before in his life.
Sounds, too, burst forth out of the silence that had surrounded him from the moment of his awakening, a cacophony of achromatic chords, layered over with the screeches and cries of the damned souls of Hell.
The sound built, along with the blazing lights, until Timmy Evans was certain that if it didn’t stop, his eyes would burn away, and his eardrums would burst.
Crying out once more, he tried to turn his mind away from the sights and sounds that assaulted him, to turn inward, and bury himself among the numbers that still streamed through the far reaches of his consciousness.
But it was too late.
He couldn’t find the numbers, couldn’t make sense of the gibberish he found where only a few short seconds ago the order of mathematics had been.
Then, as the sensory attack built to a crescendo, Timmy Evans knew what was happening to him.
Just as he realized what was happening, the last moment came.
The lights struck once more, with an intensity that tore through his brain, and the howling cacophony shattered his weakening mind.
In a blaze of light, accompanied by the roaring symphony of a thousand freight trains, Timmy Evans died.
Died, without ever remembering exactly what had happened to him.
Died, without understanding how or why.
Died, when he was only eleven years old.
Died, in a manner so horrible no one would ever be told about it.
T
he first day of school was even worse than he’d thought it would be. Part of it was the weather. It was one of those perfect days when any normal ten-year-old boy would rather be outside, poking around in the desert that surrounded Eden, searching for horny toads and blue-bellies, or just watching the vultures circling in the sky, then maybe going to hunt for whatever had died.
But Josh MacCallum wasn’t a normal ten-year-old, and it didn’t seem as though anyone was ever going to let him forget it.
Not his mother, who was always bragging about him to her friends, even though she could see him squirming in embarrassment every time she went on about how he’d been slapped.
Skipped
.
Like it was some kind of terrific thing, something he should be proud of.
Except it wasn’t neat—it wasn’t neat at all.
All it meant was that you were some kind of freak, and when you came into the room on the first day—the room where you didn’t know anybody because all the kids you’d gone to school with last year were in another room in another building—they all stared at you, and started whispering and rolling their eyes.
It had started even before he got to school that morning,
when he’d tried to talk to one of the guys who was going to be in his new class.
“What’s Mrs. Schulze like?” was all he’d said that morning as he’d run into Ethan Roeder on his way out of the ugly little row of apartments they both lived in.
Ethan had barely glanced at him. “What do you care? All the teachers
love
you, don’t they?”
While Josh’s face burned with the rebuff, Ethan yelled to a couple of his friends, then took off without even a backward glance. Josh had struggled to hold back his tears. For one brief moment he’d felt a burning urge to pick up a rock and throw it at Ethan, but in the end he’d just thrust his hands in his pockets and started trudging by himself through the dusty streets toward the cluster of sun-baked brown buildings that was Eden Consolidated School.
Eden.
Even the name of the town was a crock.
He’d figured out a long time ago that the name of the town was just a publicity stunt, thought up by some developer to fool people into thinking there was something here besides cactus and dirt.
It was like Greenland, which he’d read was just a big sheet of ice, named Greenland by some long-gone huckster in the hope that people would move there.
Well, they sure hadn’t moved to Eden, even if it was in California.
The town looked as lonesome as Josh felt, and as he’d approached the school that morning, he’d thought about just walking on by, and straight out to the freeway five miles across the desert, where he might be able to hitch a ride to somewhere else.
Los Angeles maybe, where his father was living.
Or at least had been living the last time Josh had heard from him.
The urge to keep on walking hadn’t lasted any longer than the urge to throw a rock at Ethan Roeder, though, and Josh had gone into the middle school building, found Mrs. Schulze’s room, and finally gone in.
It was just like what had happened the last time he’d been skipped.
He’d stayed outside until the last possible second, and when he finally slipped through the door, hoping to sink unnoticed into a seat in the last row, Mrs. Schulze had spotted him and given him a too-bright smile.
“Well, here’s our little genius now,” she’d said. Josh cringed at the word, wishing he could disappear through a hole in the floor, but his wish came no closer to coming true than any of the other wishes he’d fervently sent out over the years to whatever powers might be looking after him.
If there were any powers looking after him, which he’d decided he doubted, despite what they told him in Sunday School every week.
He’d stared straight ahead as the rest of the kids, all two years older than himself, had turned to gaze at him. He hadn’t had to look at them to know the expressions on their faces.
They didn’t want him there.
They didn’t want him getting perfect scores on all the tests, while they could barely answer the questions.
It hadn’t been so bad until two years ago, the first time he’d been skipped a grade.
Back then—and it seemed like an eternity to Josh—the rest of the kids were his own age, and he’d known them all his life. He’d even had a best friend back then—Jerry Peterson. And no one seemed to care that Josh always got the best grades in the class. “Someone’s gotta be a brain,” Jerry had told him more than once. “At least it’s better that you’re it, instead of some dumb girl.”
Even then, when he was only eight, Josh had known better than to point out that if the smartest kid in the class had been a girl, she certainly wouldn’t have been dumb.
And then he’d gotten skipped the first time. By the middle of the next year Jerry had a new best friend.
Josh didn’t.
Nor had he found one, because when you’re nine, a year makes a big difference. All the boys in his new class already had plenty of people to pal around with. And they sure didn’t want a “baby” hanging around.
For a while he’d hoped that maybe someone new would
come to school, but that didn’t happen either—people didn’t come to Eden; they went away from it.
Now he’d been skipped again, and the kids in his class were two years older than he, and the boys were a lot bigger.
Now, as his teacher’s voice penetrated his reverie, he could feel them watching him, feel their smoldering anger.
And hear their snickers as they realized he hadn’t been paying attention to the teacher.
His mind sped, instantly replaying Mrs. Schulze’s all-but-unheard question. “Come now, Josh,” she’d said. “Surely you remember the date of the attack on Fort Sumter?”
“April twelfth, 1861,” Josh blurted out. “Two days later, the garrison at the fort surrendered, and the Civil War began.”
The snickering died away, but Josh felt angry eyes fixing on him from all over the classroom.
What was so wrong with being smart? It wasn’t his fault he remembered everything he read, and could do algebra in his head. And it wasn’t as if anybody else had been able to answer the question. He hadn’t been waving his hand in the air like some kind of kiss-up! Besides, he’d spent most of the summer reading books about American history, and the questions the other kids hadn’t been able to answer at all had seemed pretty easy to him.
So it was going to be another endless year of being bored in class and lonely outside of class.
When the noon bell finally rang, Josh busied himself with his book bag until all the rest of the kids were gone, then slid out of his seat and started for the door. Before he could escape, the teacher’s voice stopped him.
“Josh?”
He stopped, but didn’t turn around. He could hear Mrs. Schulze’s heavy footsteps coming down the aisle toward him. When he felt her hand on his shoulder, he once again wished the floor would open and the earth would swallow him up.
“I just wanted to tell you how happy I am to have you in
my class this year,” Rita Schulze said. “I know it’s not going to be easy for you—”
Before she could finish, Josh spun around and stared up at her, his stormy eyes brimming with tears. “No you don’t,” he said in a voice that trembled with emotion. “You don’t know if it’s going to be easy or hard. And you don’t care, either! All you care about is that I can answer the stupid questions!” His voice rose as he lost control of his tears. “And that’s what they are, too—stupid, stupid,
stupid!”
Jerking away from the teacher, Josh turned and stumbled into the mercifully empty hall, then ran toward the boys’ room at its far end.
Five minutes later, his tears dried and his face washed, he emerged from the boys’ room and uttered a silent sigh of relief when he found the hall empty. He went to his locker, put his book bag inside and took out the brown paper bag containing his lunch. He was about to close the locker when he suddenly changed his mind and burrowed a hand into the bottom of his book bag, fishing out the copy of
Les Miserables
his mother had given him last week. Though he knew the cover wasn’t real leather, he still admired it for a moment, with its ornate gilt border surrounding a fleur-de-lis pattern.
Since he already knew he’d be sitting by himself in the cafeteria, he might as well try to read a few chapters.
In the cafeteria, he joined the tail end of the lunch line, silently moving forward until he was able to pick up a carton of milk, then edging toward the cash register. “Well, look who’s here,” Emily Sanchez said, smiling warmly as she rang up Josh’s purchase. “Seventh grade already. Next year, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re headin’ for high school!”
Josh managed a slight nod of his head, and held out his hand for the change from the dollar bill he’d given Emily. As she put the coins into his hand, Emily leaned toward him, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Any of them kids give you trouble, you let me know, okay? They ain’t so smart as they think they are, right?” She winked conspiratorially, but Josh didn’t see it, his flushing face already turned away as he hurried toward an empty table in the far corner.
No one spoke to him as he threaded his way between the tables, but he could feel them watching him.
He sat down with his back to the room, determined to ignore the rest of the kids, and opened his bag to pull out the peanut butter sandwich and small container of cottage cheese that invariably made up his lunch.
“I know it’s not interesting,” his mother had explained to him over and over again whenever he’d complained of the sameness of it. “But it’s good for you, and it’s all I can afford.”
And so he’d eaten it, day after day, through one school year after another. Today, though, as he contemplated the sandwich in the heat of the cafeteria, he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to choke it down.
Indeed, as he took the first bite, chewed it, and attempted to swallow it, it stuck in his throat, and he was finally only able to dislodge it by taking a long swallow of the milk. Opening the book, he began reading, and soon was lost in the tale of Jean Valjean, who was just then stealing a set of silver candelabra from the kindly priest who had taken him in.
Josh turned the pages rapidly, his eyes skimming over the text, taking in every word as he felt himself sinking deeper and deeper into the story. And then, with no warning at all, the book was snatched out of his hands. Startled, he looked up to see Ethan Roeder smirking at him, the book held just out of his reach.
“Watcha’, smart-boy?” Ethan’s mocking voice grated on his ears.
Josh shoved his chair back, rising to his feet. “It’s just a book. Give it back.”
“Why should I?” Ethan danced away, holding the book out of Josh’s reach. “Whatcha gonna do? Call a teacher?”
“Just give it to me,” Josh pleaded. “It’s not anything you’d like anyway!”
Ethan Roeder’s mocking sneer turned angry. “Says who? You think I’m too dumb to read it?” Keeping the book away from Josh’s frantic efforts to snatch it back, Ethan opened it.
For the first time, he realized the book wasn’t in English.
“Holy shit,” he cried. “The little creep’s reading some other language.”
“It’s French, all right?” Josh wailed. “It’s what the book was written in. So give it back, okay?” He reached for the book once more, but Ethan was too quick for him.
The older boy grabbed Josh’s arm, squeezing hard, his fingers digging into the younger boy’s flesh. By now the kids at the next table were staring at the confrontation, but none of them made a move to help Josh. Panicking, Josh glanced around wildly, searching for a friendly face, for someone who would help him. But no one moved. In that instant, as he realized that he was totally alone, something inside him snapped.
“Leave me alone, you asshole,” he yelled. Jerking hard, he pulled his arm free, then picked up his chair and swung it at Ethan. The bigger boy ducked, then grabbed one leg of the chair and twisted it out of Josh’s hands.