Midnight

back and drove his elbow through the eight-inch-square pane in the lower-right corner of the window grid. Glass broke and clattered to the floor with an awful racket. Maybe he had forgotten to bring his tape.

He reached through the empty pane, felt for the locks, disengaged them, and went inside first. Chrissie followed him, trying not to step on the broken glass.

Sam switched on the flashlight. He didn't hood it quite so much as he had done outside, though he was obviously trying to keep the backwash of the beam off the windows.

They were in a long hallway. It was full of the cedar-pine smell that came from the crumbly green disinfectant and dust-attractor that for years the janitors had sprinkled on the floors and then swept up, until the tiles and walls had become impregnated with the scent. The aroma was familiar to her from Thomas Jefferson Elementary, and she was disappointed to find it here. She had thought of high school as a special, mysterious place, but how special or mysterious could it be if they used the same disinfectant as at the grade school?

Tessa quietly closed the outside door behind them.

They stood listening for a moment.

The school was silent.

They moved down the hall, looking into classrooms and lavatories and supply closets on both sides, searching for the computer lab. In a hundred and fifty feet they reached a junction with another hall. They stood in the intersection for a moment, heads cocked, listening again.

The school was still silent.

And dark. The only light in any direction was the flashlight, which Sam still held in his left hand but which he no longer hooded with his right. He had withdrawn his revolver from his holster and needed his right hand for that.

After a long wait, Sam said, 'Nobody's here.'

Which did seem to be the case.

Briefly Chrissie felt better, safer.

On the other hand, if he really believed they were the only people in the school, why didn't he put his gun away?

10

As he drove through his domain, impatient for midnight, which was still five hours away, Thomas Shaddack had largely regressed to a childlike condition. Now that his triumph was at hand, he could cast off the masquerade of a grown man, which he had so long sustained, and he was relieved to do so. He had never been an adult, really, but a boy whose emotional development had been forever arrested at the age of twelve, when the message of the moonhawk had not only come to him but been imbedded in him; he had thereafter faked emotional ascension into adulthood to match his physical growth.

But it was no longer necessary to pretend.

On one level, he had always known this about himself, and had considered it to be his great strength, an advantage over those who had put childhood behind them. A boy of twelve could harbor and nurture a dream with more determination than could an adult, for adults were constantly distracted by conflicting needs and desires. A boy on the edge of puberty, however, had the single-mindedness to focus on and dedicate himself unswervingly to a single Big Dream. Properly bent, a twelve-year-old boy was the perfect monomaniac.

The Moonhawk Project, his Big Dream of godlike power, would not have reached fruition if he had matured in the usual way. He owed his impending triumph to arrested development.

He was a boy again, not secretly any more but openly, eager to satisfy his every whim, to take whatever he wanted, to do anything that broke the rules. Twelve-year-old boys reveled in breaking the rules, challenging authority. At their worst, twelve-year-old boys were naturally lawless, on the verge of hormonal-induced rebellion.

But he was more than lawless. He was a boy flying on cactus candy that had been eaten long ago but that had left a psychic if not a physical residue. He was a boy who knew that he was a god. Any boy's potential for cruelty paled in comparison to the cruelty of gods.

To pass the time until midnight, he imagined what he would do with his power when the last of Moonlight Cove had fallen under his command. Some of his ideas made him shiver with a strange mixture of excitement and disgust.

He was on Iceberry Way when he realized the Indian was with him. He was surprised when he turned his head and saw Runningdeer sitting in the passenger seat. Indeed he stopped the van in the middle of the street and stared in disbelief, shocked and afraid.

But Runningdeer did not menace him. In fact the Indian didn't even speak to him or look at him, but stared straight ahead, through the windshield.

Slowly understanding came to Shaddack. The Indian's spirit was his now, his possession as surely as was the van. The great spirits had given him the Indian as an advisor, as a reward for having made a success of Moonhawk. But he, not Runningdeer, was in control this time, and the Indian would speak only when spoken to.

'Hello, Runningdeer,' he said.

The Indian looked at him. 'Hello, Little Chief.'

'You're mine now.'

'Yes, Little Chief.'

For just a brief flicker of time, it occurred to Shaddack that he was mad and that Runningdeer was an illusion coughed up by a sick mind. But monomaniacal boys do not have the capacity for an extended examination of their mental condition, and the thought passed out of his mind as quickly as it had entered.

To Runningdeer, he said, 'You'll do what I say.'

'Always.'

Immensely pleased, Shaddack let up on the brake pedal and drove on. The headlights revealed an amber- eyed thing of fantastic shape, drinking from a puddle on the pavement. He refused to regard it as a thing of consequence, and when it loped away, he let it vanish from his memory as swiftly as it disappeared from the night-mantled street.

Casting a sly glance at the Indian, he said, 'You know one thing I'm going to do some day?'

'What's that, Little Chief?'

'When I've converted everyone, not just the people in Moonlight Cove but everyone in the world, when no one stands against me, then I'll spend some time tracking down your family, all of your remaining brothers, sisters, even your cousins, and I'll find all of their children, and all their wives and husbands, and all their children's wives and husbands … and I'll make them pay for your crimes, I'll really, really make them pay.' A whining petulance had entered his voice. He disapproved of the tone he heard himself using, but he could not lose it. 'I'll kill all the men, hack them to bloody bits and pieces, do it myself. I'll let them know that it's because of their relation to you that they've got to suffer, and they'll despise you and curse your name, they'll be sorry you ever existed. And I'll rape all the women and hurt them, hurt them all, really bad, and then I'll kill them too. What do you think of that? Huh?'

'If it's what you want, Little Chief.'

'Damn right it's what I want.'

'Then you may have it.'

'Damn right I may have it.'

Shaddack was surprised when tears came to his eyes. He stopped at an intersection and didn't move on. 'It wasn't right what you did to me.'

The Indian said nothing.

'Say it wasn't right!'

'It wasn't right, Little Chief.'

'It wasn't right at all.'

'It wasn't right.'