Showdown (26 page)

She broke into a wide grin. “And trust me, it's very cool. I listened to the holy robed ones for twelve years without questioning their rules. Well, now I've earned the right to spend a few days checking out the competition, just to round out my education, if you know what I mean.”

She glanced over at Samuel. “Holy-boy here may not want you to vote for Billy, and that's okay, because he's confused too. He just won't admit it. But you owe it to yourselves, to all that is right, to vote for Billy if you're the least bit confused or even suspect there may be some ambiguity in the rules.”

She stepped aside.

The students stared at Samuel with blank expressions. He caught an encouraging nod from Tyler and began his rebuttal.

“Hello,my friends. Two simple questions should be considered in all this mess. One, Billy speaks of ambiguity. Did any ambiguity rest with the rules before you heard him speak this morning? Not for me. In fact, I can't think of anything I am so certain of as the third rule. The rules are the basis for everything at the monastery. Without them, we're just orphans from the street. Your vote may return us there—to the streets.”

He waited for any sign of approval. None.

“And second, if you want to judge the words of Billy, just look at the product of his words.” He lifted an arm to Darcy. “Do you notice anything strange in this girl? Anything wrong or repelling? You'll have to judge for yourselves, but as I see it, whatever's eating at her flesh should remain in the dungeons where it belongs.”

He lowered his hand. It was time to vote.

“All those who side with Christine in this matter should follow me, through the curtains to my left,” Samuel said. “All those who side with Billy should follow Darcy to your left. Choose carefully.” He turned and walked through the curtains.

The back room was empty except for several stacks of chairs against one wall. Samuel lifted his hands and saw that his fingers trembled. He clenched them and pushed his damp bangs from his forehead. He wanted to leave this place—to run and find his father and hug him and tell him it had all worked out after all.

The curtains brushed open behind him and he spun around. “Tyler!”He reached out for him, and they clasped hands. “Thank God!” he breathed. He looked to the curtains anxiously. “What do you think?”

Tyler took a deep breath. “I don't know, Samuel.”

The curtains parted again and Marie walked in, followed by Kevin and Brandon. One by one Samuel grabbed them by the shoulders. “Good! Good!” he said. Then they came in. Three more, in a group. Then two. “Good! Good!” Samuel felt a great weight begin to lift.

Another child walked in, smiling. And another. And then the curtains hung still. “Good,” Samuel said, expecting at any second for the long, pleated fabric to move—to
part and allow another child to pass.

But it hung still.

He spun around and counted the children with a shaking finger. “. . . ten, eleven.”

Eleven!

Himself and Christine. Thirteen! He spun back to the curtains. That left twenty-four, and twenty-four would constitute a binding two-thirds majority. But that couldn't be!

His chest felt tight, suffocating. The musty air made slow passage through his nostrils while he willed the curtain to move.
Just move. Please move.
Please just one more and we can pretend that this never happened. Just one!

But the curtains hung straight, and long seconds crept by like snails along a razor, headed toward certain death.

FIFTEEN OF the twenty-four dissenters agreed to follow Billy, Darcy, and Paul down to the lower levels right then, after the vote was finalized. The rest would quickly follow. Like the rest, they entered the main door with tentative steps, trembling like tiny high-strung dogs.

“Move it, you fools!” Billy snapped at the huddling newcomers. Their eyes bugged white from taut faces. They stopped when he yelled at them, and he realized they were so terrified they couldn't process his request. He adopted a different tack.

“Come on, you guys. Everything will be fine. I promise.”

Within ten minutes they were running through the dark passage, intent on their discovery.

The entourage of defectors had been underground for about an hour when one of the boys yanked Billy from the study and insisted that a monk wanted to meet with him. “In that last tunnel,” he said breathlessly. “The one on the far end.”

A monk? The masked monk had shown himself to this boy?

Billy brought a hand to his chest and scratched the blistering skin under his tunic. The rash was spreading. Something that sounded like an Indian war cry echoed down the dark hallway, and he spun to see a flame round the corner, bent back in the wind, held by a running girl. He stepped aside and she rushed by him, yelping.

Idiots! Behind him six students slouched around his study. If they tore up his library, he would have their necks. He turned up the tunnel toward the main entrance.

He would have to leave them because the boy said the monk wanted to see him. Who did they think he was, some monk's little puppy? And in the first tunnel to boot.

The worms seemed to have multiplied. They were thick on the walls, sliding around like massive hot dogs. They'd come from deeper in the tunnels, presumably attracted to the humans.

He left the study tunnel, as they were now calling it, passed four other large tunnel openings, shifted the flaming torch to his left palm, and stepped into the far hall. He'd stuck his head in here once but was so taken by the study since that he hadn't returned. Maybe he should have come back sooner.

The tunnel bored into the cliff for twenty feet and then veered to the left. Yellow stones the size of his fingernails glittered on the rough walls. Billy wondered if this tunnel might actually be a mining shaft running through a gold vein. A large worm slid across the ceiling, and he passed under it.

He walked down the hall, amazed at the number of gems flashing from the walls. Not just gold nuggets, but gold chains and trinkets buried among the gems. It looked as if the cavern had been a vault for jewels before a huge blast ripped through the place, driving the precious stones and metal into the wall.

“Billy.”

He jumped and swung his torch to the left. The monk stood in a darkened doorway, black mask reflecting Billy's wavering light. If he had used a torch to get here, he'd extinguished it.

“I have something to show you, my friend.” The tall man seemed unaware of the large worm that slid down the wall two inches from his right arm.

“What?” Billy felt quite confident, all things considered. He really didn't need this man now that he knew the tunnels and had won his debate. He wasn't even sure why the monk—assuming he was a monk—unnerved him.

“You did well,” the man said, making no move to show Billy anything.

“Who are you?”

“I am the man who made you.”

“And does this man have a name? What do you have to lose now? We've won!”

A pause. “I have more at stake here than the persuasion of a few students. Far more than one little valley or one small country. You'll see soon enough, my little friend.”

“Don't call me your little friend. For all I know, you are my enemy.”

Something about the man really did frighten Billy. What could he possibly mean by all this talk? Surely he didn't think he could control the students just because they'd come down here. Even if he did, he couldn't take over the world with them or anything so stupid.

“You don't control us,” Billy said.

No response.

“So what did you want to show me?”

The man turned and walked into the darkness behind him. Billy hesitated and then followed, staying clear of the worm that started to squirm when the overseer left. The monk pushed through a side door.

A large room opened up before them, lit by a dozen flaming torches mounted about the walls. They stood on a second-story balcony overlooking a long row of towering bookcases and round tables surrounded by chairs.

Billy caught his breath. The discussion out in the dark hall left his mind. The scene made his heart race. The bookshelves were filled with books. Even from his perch up on the balcony Billy could see they were all the same size, like the books in his study.

He swung to his right and dashed for the stairs that led down to the large library. He hurried out to the center of the room and ran a hand along the nearest round table. Amazing. The furniture looked like it had been hewn from mahogany, a thousand years ago before power tools made shaping wood so easy. He touched the spindles on a chair before him. Tiny chisel marks ebbed in the torchlight. And the cases!

He walked to the closest case. At first he thought the shelves were constructed of a blackened hardwood, but one touch and he knew these were made of iron. Black iron.

He stepped to the front of the cases. The books were firmly secured to the shelving by small chains. He gripped the spine of one and pulled, but he couldn't extract it past the links that held it.

Billy scrunched his brow and replaced the book,wondering how he could read books that couldn't be removed from their shelves. Maybe the man had a key. He ran his hand along the rough iron, captivated by the grandeur of the tall cases.

Billy stepped back to the tables and looked up at the balcony where the man overlooked the rail. “You like it?” the monk asked.

“Like it? I love it. Is it for us?”

“It is for them.”

“Them?”

“The other children, Billy. So that you may continue in your study without being disturbed.”

Billy didn't know if he liked the idea. He gazed about again and imagined a dozen students strewn about this place. Then he imagined the same students running up and down the tunnels, yelling. Maybe the man had a point.

He would make the rest leave the study hall and come here, to the library, so he and Darcy could find some peace.

“When?”

“Tonight. Tell them to eat from the worms.”

Yes, of course, the worm sludge. He'd known all along that it held some great significance. “They already are.”

“Then have them eat more. And encourage them to write.”

“Write?”

“It feeds their minds
and keeps them out of trouble. Write your story. All of you.”

“It's
my
story.”

“You will make it theirs.”

“It's bad enough that Paul has—”

“Do it, boy. We need the children occupied. Nothing occupies the mind down here like writing. But even with writing, one requires a focus. Tell them what your story is and have them write. It will keep them quiet.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

PARADISE

Saturday afternoon

THE RED marble didn't budge for two hours, at least not that Johnny had seen, and he'd watched it pretty close. It wasn't that he was still so fascinated by the shooter, but that he was out of alternatives. He should be doing something to fix the predicament they were in, but he was at a loss.

He couldn't phone out. He didn't want to go out. He didn't want to stay in either, but that was all there was to do now. Stay in his room, a ball of frayed nerves, and watch the marble while his head spun through possibilities.

He thought he heard his mother stirring down the hall once, but he couldn't be sure with all the wind banging things against the house. And he wasn't sure he wanted to confront her now.

Black was bad.

Black was good.

Black was a demon from hell who'd come to destroy and kill and do whatever demons do.

Black was an angel sent from heaven to expose the evil in the hearts of Paradise and give them all a message of hope and grace.

No. Black was bad, period. Nothing good could possibly cause any of this, unless of course Paradise was a modern Sodom and Gomorrah and this was all a new kind of fire and brimstone.

Either way, Johnny was a boy caught in the middle, powerless to do anything about Black, regardless of whether he was a demon or an angel or just a psycho preacher who had drugged the town.

“What ya doin'?”

Johnny's eyes jerked away from the marble. Sally stood in the hall, staring at him. She wore one of the new outfits she'd bought in Grand Junction, brown slacks and yellow silky-looking blouse. She'd done her makeup and brushed her hair, even put on a gold necklace and hoop earrings.

“Nothing.”

She walked forward, smirking. “Is that so?” Her eyes weren't right. They were glassy and slightly bloodshot.

“Did you drink any more of the water?”

“Don't be silly, Johnny. Why wouldn't I drink the water, hmm? Because you turned it off, that's why. How do you expect me to flush the toilet?”

“You turned it back on?”

“Why not? Tastes just fine to me.”

Johnny felt nauseated. If his mother was gone . . .

“Why are you staring at the marble?” she asked, crossing slowly toward the dresser. “Hmm?”

“It . . . I don't know; I think it moved.”

Sally picked the red shooter up.“It did, did it?” She turned it around in her fingers. Then she lifted it up, pressed it against her right eye, and faced him.

She looked like a red-eyed dress-up doll.

Sally released the marble and let it fall to the carpet. It landed with a
thump
.

“Looks like a regular marble to me,” she said, walking toward the door.

“Where are you going?”

“I have to go,” she said.

Johnny scooted to the edge of his bed and dropped his feet to the floor. “Where? Outside?”

She turned around and curtsied. “I have a date, Johnny. You like?”

A date?

“With who?”

Sally winked, then turned and disappeared down the hall.

Johnny sat frozen to his bed. He didn't want to think anymore. The room shifted out of focus for a moment—the water was speaking. Or Black was speaking. Whatever it was, he thought that maybe he should just start listening because he didn't want to be alone anymore.