Cell: A Novel (27 page)

“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.