A pretty school, with a big house set on a broad lawn, shaded by the biggest trees Timmy had ever seen.
Redwood trees.
He’d never seen trees that big before his parents had brought him to the school.
Nor had he ever had friends before.
Friends like himself, who could do things with their brains that other children couldn’t.
But now something had happened to him.
What?
He tried to remember.
He’d been in his room.
His room on the third floor.
He’d been asleep.
And before that, he’d been crying.
Crying, because he’d felt homesick, missing his mother and father, and even his little brother, whom he didn’t even really like.
He’d cried himself to sleep, wondering if everyone was going to tease him the next morning, because he’d burst into tears in the dining-room, and run out, and up the stairs, slamming his door and not letting anyone in all evening.
Then, sometime in the night, he’d awakened and heard something.
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.
1
The 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.
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
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.
