Word & Void 02 - A Knight of the Word (6 page)

He was my youngest child
, she said.
My boy, Teddy. He was six years old. We had enrolled him in kindergarten the year before, and now he was finishing first grade. He was so sweet. He had blond hair and blue eyes, and he was always smiling. He could change the light in a room just by walking into it. I loved him so much. Bert and I both worked, and we made pretty good money, but it was still a stretch to send him here. But it was such a good school, and we wanted him to have the best. He was very bright. He could have been anything, if he had lived
.

There was another boy in the school who was a little older, Aaron Pilkington. His father was very successful, very wealthy. Some men decided to kidnap him and make his father pay them money to get him back. They were stupid men, not even bright enough to know the best way to kidnap someone. They tried to take him out of the school. They just walked right in and tried to take him. On April Fools’ Day, can you imagine that? I wonder if they knew. They just walked in and tried to take him. But they couldn’t find him. They weren’t even sure which room he was in, which class he attended, who his teacher was, anything. They had a picture, and they thought that would be enough. But a picture doesn’t always help. Children in a picture often tend to look alike. So they couldn’t find him, and the police were called, and they surrounded the school, and the men took a teacher and her class hostage because they were afraid and they didn’t know what else to do, I suppose.

My son was a student in that class
.

The police tried to get the men to release the teacher and the children, but the men wouldn’t agree to the terms the police offered and the police wouldn’t agree to the terms the men offered, and the whole thing just fell to pieces. The men grew desperate and erratic. One of them kept talking to someone who wasn’t there, asking, What should he do, what should he do? They killed the teacher. The police decided they couldn’t wait any longer, that the children were in too much danger. The men had moved the children to the auditorium where they held their assemblies and performed their plays. They had them all seated in the first two rows, all in a line facing the stage. When the police broke in, they started shooting. They just … started shooting. Everywhere. The children …

She never looked at him as she spoke. She never acknowledged his presence. She was inaccessible to him, lost in the past, reliving the horror of those moments. She kept her gaze fixed on the school, unwavering.

I was there
, she said, her voice unchanging, toneless and empty.
I was a room mother helping out that day. There was going to be a birthday party at the end of recess. When the shooting began, I tried to reach him. I threw myself … His name was Teddy. Theodore, but we called him Teddy, because he was just a little boy. Teddy …

Then she went silent, stared at the school a moment longer, turned, and walked off down the broken sidewalk. She seemed to know where she was going, but he could not discern her purpose. He watched after her a moment, then looked at the school.

In his mind, he could hear the sounds of gunfire and children screaming.

When he woke, he knew at once what he would do. The woman had said that one of the men spoke to someone who wasn’t there. He knew from experience that it would be a demon, a creature no one but the man could see. He knew that a demon would have inspired this event, that it would have used it to rip apart the fabric of the community, to steal away San Sobel’s sense of safety and tranquillity, to erode its belief that what happened in other places could not happen there. Once such seeds of doubt and fear were planted, it grew easier to undermine the foundations of human behavior and reason that kept animal madness at bay.

It was late winter, and time was already short when he left for California. He reached San Sobel more than a week before April 1, and he felt confident that he had sufficient time to prevent the impending tragedy. There had been no further dreams of this event, but that was not unusual. Often the dreams came only once, and he was forced to act on what he was given. Sometimes he did not know where the event would happen, or even when. This time he was lucky; he knew both. The demon would have set things in motion already, but Ross had come up against demons time and again since he had taken up the cause of the Word, and he was not intimidated. Demons were powerful and elusive adversaries, relentless in their hatred of humans and their determination to see them subjugated, but they were no match for him. It was the vagaries of the humans they used as their tools that more often proved troubling.

There were the feeders to be concerned about, too. The feeders were the dark things that drove humans to madness and then consumed them, creatures of the mind and soul that lived mostly in the imagination until venal behavior made them real. The feeders devoured the dark emotions of the humans they preyed upon and were sustained and given life by. Few could see them. Few had any reason to. They appeared as shadows at the corner of the eye or small movements in a hazy distance. The demons stirred them into the human population as they would a poison. If they could infect a few, the poison might spread to the many. History had proved that this was so.

The feeders would delight in a slaughter of innocents, of children who could barely understand what was wanted of them by the men John Ross would confront. He could not search out these men; he had no way to do so. Nor could he trace the demon. Demons were changelings and hid themselves with false identities. He must wait for the men and the demons who manipulated them to reveal themselves, which meant that he must be waiting at the place he expected them to strike.

So he went to San Sobel Preparatory Academy to speak with the headmaster. He did not tell the headmaster of his dream, or of the demon, or of the men the demon would send, or of the horror that waited barely a week away. There was no point in doing that because he had no way to convince the headmaster he was not insane. He told the headmaster instead that he was the parent of a child who would be eligible for admission to the academy in the fall and that he would like some information on the school. He apologized for his appearance—he was wearing jeans and a blue denim shirt under his corduroy jacket with the patches on the elbows and a pair of worn walking shoes—but he was a nature writer on assignment, and he was taking half a day off to make this visit. The headmaster took note of his odd walking staff and his limp, and his clear blue eyes and warm smile gave evidence of the fact that he was both sympathetic and understanding of his visitor’s needs.

He talked to John Ross of the school’s history and of its mission. He gave Ross materials to read. Finally, he took Ross on a tour of the buildings—which was what Ross had been waiting for. They passed down the shadowed corridors from one classroom to the next and at last to the auditorium where the tragedy of the dream would occur. Ross lingered, asking questions so that he would have time to study the room, to memorize its layout, its entries and exits and hiding places. A quick study was all it took. When he was satisfied, he thanked the headmaster for his time and consideration and left.

He found out later in the day that a boy named Aaron Pilkington attended the academy, that he was enrolled in the third grade, and that his parents had been made enormously wealthy through his father’s work with microchips.

That night, he devised a plan. It was not complicated. He had learned that by keeping his plans simple, his chances of successfully implementing them improved. There were small lives at stake, and he did not want to expose them to any greater risk than necessary.

It seemed to him, thinking the matter through in his motel room that night, that he had everything under control.

He waited patiently for the days to pass. On the morning of April 1, he arrived at the school just before sunrise. He had visited the school late in the afternoon of the day before and left a wedge of paper in the lock of one of the classroom windows at the back of the main building so the lock would not close all the way. He slipped through the window in the darkness, listening for the movement of other people as he did so. But the maintenance staff didn’t arrive for another half hour, and he was alone. He worked his way down the hallway to the auditorium, found one of the storage rooms where the play props were kept at the rear and side of the stage, and concealed himself inside.

Then he waited.

He did not know when the attack would come, but he did know that until the moment of his intervention, history would repeat itself and the events of the dream would transpire exactly as related by Teddy’s mother. It was up to him to choose just when he would try to alter the outcome.

He crouched in the darkness of his hiding place and listened to the sounds of the school about him as the day began. The storage room had sufficient space that he was able to change positions and move around so his leg didn’t stiffen up. He had brought food. Time slipped away. No one came to the auditorium. Nothing unusual occurred.

Then the doors burst open, and Ross could hear the screams and cries of children, the pleas of several women, and the angry, rough voices of men fill the room. Ross waited patiently, the storage door cracked open just far enough that he could see what was happening. A hooded figure bounded onto the stage between the half-closed curtains, glanced around hurriedly, and began barking orders. A second figure joined him The women and children filed hurriedly into the front rows of the theater in response to the men’s directions.

Still Ross waited.

One of the men had a cell phone. It rang, and he began talking into it, growing increasingly angry. He jumped down off the stage, screaming obscenities into the mouthpiece. Ross slipped out of the storage room, the black staff gleaming with the magic’s light. He moved slowly, steadily through the shadows, closing on the lone man who stood at the front of the stage. The man held a handgun, but he was looking at his captives. Ross could see a third man now, one standing at the far side of the room, looking out the door into the hallway.

Ross came up to the man standing on the stage and leveled him with a single blow of the staff. He caught a glimpse of the other two, the one on the phone still yelling and screaming with his back turned, the other wheeling in surprise as he caught sight of Ross. The children’s eyes went wide as Ross appeared, and with a sweep of his staff Ross threw a heavy blanket of magic over the children, a weighted net that forced them to lower their heads and shield their eyes. The man at the door was swinging his AK-47 around to fire as Ross hit him with a bolt of bright magic and knocked him senseless.

The third man dropped the phone, still screaming, and brought up a second AK-47. But Ross was waiting for him as well, and again the magic lanced from the staff. A burst from the man’s weapon sprayed the ceiling harmlessly as he went down in a heap.

Ross scanned the room swiftly for other kidnappers. There were none. Just the three. The children and their teacher and two other women were still crouched in their seats, weighted down by the magic. Ross lifted it away, setting them free. No one was hurt. Everything was all right …

Then he saw the feeders, dozens of them, oozing through cracks in the windows and doors, sliding out of corners and alcoves, dark shadows gathering to feast, sensing something that was hidden from him.

Ross wheeled about in desperation, searching everywhere at once, his heart pounding, his mind racing …

And police burst through the doors and windows, shattering wood and glass. Someone was yelling, Throw down your weapons! Now, now, now! The women and children were screaming anew, scrambling out of their seats in terror, and someone was yelling, He’s got a gun! Shoot him, shoot him, Ross was trying to tell them, No, no, it’s all right, it’s okay now! But no one was listening, and everything was chaotic and out of control, and the feeders were leaping about in a frenzy, climbing over everything, and there were weapons firing everywhere, catching the kidnapper who was just coming to his knees in front of the stage, still too stunned to know what was happening, lifting him in a red spatter and dropping him back again in a crumpled heap, and small bodies were being struck by the bullets as well, hammered sideways and sent flying as screams of fear turned to shrieks of pain, and still the voice was yelling, He’s got a gun, he’s got a gun! Even though Ross still couldn’t see any gun, couldn’t understand what the voice was yelling about, the police kept firing, over and over and over into the children …

He read about it in the newspapers in the days that followed. Fourteen children were killed. Two of the kidnappers died. There was considerable debate over who fired the shots, but informed speculation had it that several of the children had been caught in a crossfire.

There was only brief mention of Ross. In the confusion that followed the shooting, Ross had backed away into the shadows and slipped out through the rear of the auditorium into a crowd of parents and bystanders and disappeared before anyone could stop him. The teacher who had been held hostage told of a mysterious man who had helped free them, but the police insisted that the man was one of the kidnappers and that the teacher was mistaken about what she had seen. Descriptions of what he looked like varied dramatically, and after a time the search to find him waned and died.

But John Ross was left devastated. How had this terrible thing happened? What had gone wrong? He had done exactly as he intended to do. The men had been subdued. The danger was past. And still the children had died, the police misreading the situation, hearing screams over the kidnapper’s dropped cell phone, hearing the AK-47 go off, bursting in with weapons ready, firing impulsively, foolishly …

Fourteen children dead. Ross couldn’t accept it. He could tell himself rationally that it wasn’t his fault. He could explain away everything that had happened, could argue persuasively and passionately to himself that he had done everything he could, but it still didn’t help. Fourteen children were dead.