The One Safe Place (12 page)

Devin shook his head.

Ansel bounced the soccer ball a couple of times, his head low.

“Did they really play in front of the whole world?” Devin asked, trying to cheer him up.

“You bet!” Ansel said, immediately brightening. “My dad said the crowd roared so loud you could hear it from twenty miles away. Imagine that. Everyone together, feeling the same thing.”

“You’ll have to teach me to play sometime,” Devin said.

Ansel grinned. “Never played soccer!” he said. “How’ve you lived?”

Devin watched him jog away, moving the ball along with small, lightning movements of his feet.

Devin decided to visit the small farmyard. It made him feel homesick, but it was a good sort of homesickness—if such a thing was possible. It reminded him of happiness and of belonging. He walked along, keeping his head down. The day before, he’d been frantic to find Kit, but now he didn’t want to see her, wherever she was. He thought of the rapt way she had stared at herself and how in that moment she’d seemed not beautiful at all, but consumed by a kind of greed that was almost ugly.

The farmyard was all the way on the other side of the Home. Devin took the route that led behind the dormitories. He passed the ice-cream truck and the recreation hall and then paused by the entrance to the corn maze. He could hear voices, thin and inquiring. A group of Visitors was approaching, two or three men and a woman in a motorized chair that made a whining, wheezing sound as it rolled along. Devin remembered how the old people had stared at the kids in the gym, the concentration on their faces. Without hesitating, thinking only of avoiding them, he plunged into the maze.

The maze was made of corn, the stalks rising to a height two or three feet above his head. It wasn’t ripe yet—the ears were still tightly wrapped—but the leaves were tired and dry-looking, and they made a shifting, rustling sound that seemed to come from every direction, despite the stillness of the air. Devin trotted rapidly down the first dusty path, and, within seconds, the entrance was lost to view.

Inside the maze, the rustling was much louder. Grass made a red sound when the breeze passed over it, but the sound of the corn was a dull, speckled mustard that was not nearly as nice. He turned left at a fork, heading for the center, which was marked by a flag, visible above the tops of the plants. He was just about to slow down when he heard the Visitors again, the old lady’s voice high-pitched, excited.

“Are we having an adventure? Oh dear, oh dear.”

They must have come into the maze behind him. Perhaps it was part of the tour. Devin set off running again. The path twisted and then forked once more, seemed to double back on itself, and then continued in the wrong direction. Ordinarily he would have had no trouble at all finding his way through, but panic had seized him.

“Oh dear, oh dear, dear, dear . . .”

The voices were behind and then in front, cutting him off. He thought it must be his hearing. Old people couldn’t move that fast. Devin was sure they hadn’t seen him entering the maze. But still, he wanted to get away from them.

He turned around frantically and retraced his steps. The second fork again—had he turned left or right? Every turn looked exactly the same. He plunged left and then left again, feeling sure that he was on the right track until he came around a narrow corner and saw he had arrived at a dead end.

He stood very still, listening. There was no sound but the rustling of the corn. Then he heard it, the faint, ugly whine of the motorized chair. It was growing louder by the second.

Devin turned blindly and pushed his way into the hedge of corn, stepping deep into the tight, dark forest, moving as quietly as he could. He thought he could hear voices, but they were distant and soon vanished. His heart was beating hard. He put his hand on his chest to steady himself. They had gone, he thought. He was safe. They hadn’t found him.

But so what if they had found him? Now that he was calmer, Devin began to feel a little silly, cowering in the dark. He couldn’t imagine how he could have thought he was lost. The maze was simple; the exit was only a few turns up ahead. He was just about to push his way out of the corn and forget about the whole thing when he stopped short.

Someone was walking on the other side of the hedge.

He saw shoes. The corn stalks were too thick to see more than a vague shape of a figure. But the shoes he saw. They were men’s shoes, shiny and elegant, the toes slightly tapered, the laces tied in a perfect bow. They were moving extremely slowly, coming toward him. There was a cane too. Devin saw the tip of it, a dull gold color, as it was placed by the side of the shoes.

He froze instinctively, his breath catching in his throat.

The shoes were very close now. Devin was near enough to see the tiny puff of dust as the cane came down with each slow step.

The shoes came level with his hiding place, and then they stopped. Devin slowly raised his eyes. Then the corn was moving in front of him, being parted. He saw the cane first and then the man holding it, using it to push the plants aside.

The man’s face was all bones, as if the juice had been sucked clean out of it. He wore a dark suit that hung from his shoulders the way clothes hang on a scarecrow that is made of nothing but stick and straw.

“I see you,” the Visitor said in a soft, playful, singsong voice.

For a moment, Devin was too terrified to speak.

“Playing hidey-and-seek, are you?”

“I was just . . . I was just . . . ,” Devin stammered.

The old man lowered his cane.

“Just having fun?” He chuckled lightly, the sound crackling in his throat. “Just playing, were you?”

Devin stared at him.

“I got left behind,” the Visitor explained. “Old legs not what they used to be.” His throat crackled again. “Not like yours, eh?”

Devin crept out of the corn.

The Visitor waved his cane. “Well, run along, then, don’t worry about me.”

Devin tried to smile, but he couldn’t. The man was staring at him with a fascination that was almost disturbing. Devin turned and hurried away, not looking back even once. But he could feel the man’s gaze on him watching, watching until he disappeared from view.

Eleven

MALLOY AND LUKE WERE
at the farmyard when he arrived, still shaken from his experience in the maze. He could tell at once, by the easy way Malloy held himself, that he had recovered from his visit to the Place and returned to normal. But what he was doing still seemed a little crazy. He was down on his hands and knees with his face pressed up to the fence of the pigsty. Through the cracks in the fence, Devin glimpsed the snout of a piglet. Malloy, he realized, was trying to kiss it.

“Malloy! I’m Devin, remember?”

Malloy turned his head and grinned. “Meet Fulsome,” he said, getting to his feet.

The piglet was only half grown but extremely fat. Its eyes were squeezed to pinpricks, and its tight pink belly almost scraped the ground. At the mention of its name it lifted its head and began to turn around and around on the spot, grunting in excitement.

“Poor impulse control,” Luke commented. “Just like Malloy.”

“Why’s he so fat?” Devin wanted to know.

“He’s not fat!” Malloy protested. “He’s pleasantly chubby.”

“No, he’s fat,” said Luke. “He’s a lump of lard. Malloy feeds him scraps all the time.”

“Here, Fulsome!” Malloy called. At once the pig came waddling over. “How many fingers am I holding up?” Fulsome grunted three times. “Good pig! And now?” The pig gave a single snort.

“Yes! What about now?” Malloy asked, putting both hands on top of his head. Immediately the pig, fat as he was, raised himself on two legs and began strutting around in the mud.

“Incredible!” Devin laughed.

“Malloy and that pig are soul mates,” Luke said.

“I’ve got a thing for animals,” Malloy boasted, pulling a large piece of toast from his pocket. “Watch this!” He positioned the toast in his mouth, bent down and allowed Fulsome to attach his jaw around the other end. For a few seconds, boy and pig were face-to-face, both steadily munching until Fulsome tossed his head impatiently and snatched the remaining bread away.

“Gross, right?” Malloy said.

“Sick,” agreed Luke. “Get him to do something else.”

“Throw that stick,” said Malloy.

Luke picked it up and tossed it to the far side of Fulsome’s pen. “Fetch it, Fulsome! Fetch it!”

The pig stared hard at Luke. Then he trotted over, took the stick in his mouth and returned it with a shake of his tail to Luke’s feet. Luke tossed him a scrap and Fulsome gobbled it greedily.

“He’s amazing,” Malloy said lovingly. “Cheers me up.”

“Everything cheers you up,” Luke pointed out. “He’s always happy,” he added, speaking to Devin. “That’s because unlike everyone else around here, he thinks his parents are going to come and get him.”

“That’s right, Professor Twitch,” Malloy said. “They’ll find me, all right. And if I could just get out of here, they’d find me a whole lot faster.”

Malloy’s parents, Devin learned, were Nomads. He had no idea what this meant until Luke explained that Nomads were people who had given up on the city and on struggling to make a living and instead lived in the middle of nowhere in tepees made out of sticks. They wanted to live close to nature because they thought the only way the planet could be saved was if they wandered around admiring rocks and trying to communicate with Mother Earth. Luke sounded rather scornful when he said this. Devin glanced at Malloy, but Malloy simply nodded.

“Yup, that’s pretty much it,” he agreed. “It’s kind of cool. Not much to eat, though . . .”

The other thing Nomads did was take long treks into the wilderness. Most of the time, they stayed in their camps, but every so often, they went off by themselves to a far-off canyon or the top of a mountain.

“It’s to gain wisdom,” Malloy explained solemnly. “It’s really important to us.”

Only adults went on the treks, so Malloy’s parents had left him with the rest of the camp when the time came for them to set off. They were gone for a long time. The treks were hazardous, with dangers of all kinds, including hunger and thirst and the perils of unfamiliar terrain. When Malloy’s parents still hadn’t come back after two months, other people in the camp started shaking their heads, first in worry and then in sorrow. A month after that, the whole group had to break camp and move on to find food. Malloy went with them, but he slipped away the first night and returned to the ruins of the old camp. He waited alone for his parents to come back.

“I knew they just got lost,” he explained. “My dad has a terrible sense of direction and my mom does everything he says cuz she thinks he’s great. I figured they were out there, walking in circles, making each other laugh like they always did . . .”

Behind Malloy’s back, Luke glanced at Devin and shook his head.

Malloy had waited in the camp for seven or eight days, living on tiny scraps of leftover food and searching for plants that were safe to eat. At last, hunger drove him to move on. One day he walked three miles to the south, finding nothing but dust and rocks and coyote tracks. He came down a bank of loose stones and found himself by the side of an empty road, stretching far into the distance. A single car, the sunlight glinting on its polished sides, was coming toward him. When it reached him, it stopped and the window glided down silently.