Cell

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 “AYoung 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.