The Witch of the Wood (12 page)

He put his hands in the prayer position and rested his nose between his thumbs.

He had played the role of everyone’s “other” for so many years that he’d forgotten what it was like to feel this way, so personally connected to someone. It felt like starving, like dying.

His head suddenly burst inside with Wolfie’s indicator, and it made him jump.

He grabbed his thumb hungrily. He had forced himself not to impose this voyeuristic tool from the start, invitation only, and it had been the most difficult when Wolfie had first gone off by himself in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. One thing was for certain: whatever powers Wolfie did have over others, he had a shut-off switch. No one besides Rudy noticed him leave for the other facility, not even his lacrosse girls.

Wolfie had been invisible for all intents and purposes. Rudy was aware that the kid was walking the aisles with a cart and taking down books by the foot-pound, but none of his students paid him any attention. Nor did the regular library traffic alter its pattern, and by the time Rudy gathered everyone at the exit Wolfie was long gone.

Following that, the real worrying started.

Rudy had driven home aching to pull over and grab his thumb, but resisted with everything he had. That would be cheating, imposing. Still, as he’d said to Wolfie initially, he was almost paralyzed with the fear that his boy would meet up with someone or something not specified in the biography, forcing him to expose himself too early. The kid was mortal, after all. And what of this Dark Guardian? Rudy had a feeling that it was his job as father and protector to watch out for this beast, as it was fate that Rudy aid his son at least in the process of discovery.

He gripped his thumb so hard it must have turned violet.

In front of him, he saw a piece of notebook paper on a desk at a slight angle. Wolfie’s handwriting was at the top.

Rudy laughed, and felt tears well in his eyes. He could hear the sounds of the science library in the background, a copy machine’s side cover being pushed back into place after an obvious paper jam, an elevator bell, Wolfie’s breathing. The boy’s hands and forearms came into the vision, and he started writing furiously.

Rudy let go of his thumb. Sweat had beaded up on his temples. Most of it he hadn’t understood even a little bit, but he’d gotten enough of the ground floor to be awestruck. A new existence with father and son as the new “Adams” roaming like gods through a world full of “Eves.” And of course, the check and balance, the alternate selves. Rudy had seen enough
Star Trek
episodes to know that usually those were not happy unions. This whole thing was an exercise in revenge, power, sex, and duality, a saga meant to sustain itself over generations. Whoever it was that said science wasn’t directly linked to the literary arts was a madman.

And then there was the prequel to all this, the man-to-man holocaust, the bloodbath to come, the cleansing of the earth from its “virus” in the three-year window. This was going to be no dusty, unopened history book, no remote stanza of poetry, no disconnected mathematical formula. It was to be played out, live, right before Rudy’s eyes, at the hands of his son. Any new existence would always be plagued by these horrific stains on Rudy’s conscience, and he didn’t think he could do it. In cold and factual terms, he’d only known Wolfie for a day. He had to destroy him before this went to the next level.

The alarm sounded in his head again. He jerked to an erect posture and re-affixed his grip.

The paper before him read:

Wolfie’s hands came into view, and he had a pocket mirror, slightly smudged in the right corner, bordered by pink plastic. Clearly, the boy had made a lady friend and borrowed (or stolen) the thing from her purse. His face came into view in the reflective rectangle, and he whispered to his father,

“Shh!” someone hissed.

Wolfie put his hand over his mouth, eyes laughing.

Rudy signed off and sighed. Though he had trouble picturing himself as anyone’s “Adam,” he was no Dark Guardian either. If anyone was going to stop this beautiful, complicated boy from carrying out his mother’s revenge, it wasn’t going to be Rudy Barnes.

He tried to read, and couldn’t.

He tried to eat, and wasn’t hungry.

Wolfie hit the indicator a few more times through the night, sometimes with new equations and theorems, and others, while he was staring at some slender coed, like the tall one with the low-cut jeans and the dragon tattoo at the edge of her hip, squatting to get to the bottom row of a bookshelf, or the honey blonde at the reading table, casually taking her long hair and flipping it back over her shoulder while she studied (one of Rudy’s favorite maneuvers, even if the breast beneath was fully covered by a high neckline). Rudy got his fair share of high thong straps and tight jeans, cleavage, and eye shadow, believe it, and each time Wolfie provided him these treats, Rudy somehow knew the boy was laughing, at least to himself.

Kids.

When he and his son were sharing these moments, Rudy’s more universal concerns blew off to the far corners of his mind, and he felt almost happy.

Wolfie came in at 2:30, and when they bedded down, Rudy felt at peace with his boy in his arms. When the sun rose, Wolfgang Barnes was going to go off to high school, Franklin Heights, the institution that graduated Rudy back in 1985.

The boy had three years to study the system, to infiltrate and learn the infrastructure, to wind up in prison, to call men to arms against one another, to wipe out the virus, and here in the semi-darkness of the apartment it felt nebulous, like a distant dream.

But Wolfie’s first day of classes was anything but vague and impersonal.

And Rudy was amazed at how quickly this shit really started to go down.

Wolfie’s schedule was morning-friendly, as Rudy had been lucky enough yesterday when he got home from Penn to connect with a sweet and sympathetic counselor named Emily Chung, who was cognizant of paving a nice path for such a promising new senior. He had a “free” first block (no class, just go to the library and make a friend or two), homeroom and AP Physics second block, B-lunch, which split third block photography into two forty-five-minute sessions, and AP English for the last hour and a half. He was also supposed to drop off paperwork to the office and the nurse, stop by counseling to say hello, and meet with his mentor teacher (a formality for all new students) a Mr. Bond / Room 129 for the first ten minutes or so of photography, from which he’d need to secure a hall pass and a return note.

He looked good: dark tan jeans, black designer T-shirt with soft reddish untucked flannel over the top. Casual, but neat. Handsome as hell. He’d slung his new backpack over his shoulder and was muttering something about sneaking in his iodine in an emptied bottle of Snapple, getting his little mentor interview over with during his “free” if the guy had a spare minute, and the fact that he needed an iPad, a pair of iPhones (Dad, your Samsung is simply archaic), and a laptop, pronto.

“Facebook, Dad. Tweets. Trending. That’s the way the kiddies do it. If I’m going to infiltrate the system, I have to be an integral part of the communication network.”

Rudy pushed away from the table and put his plate of half-eaten scrambled eggs and catsup in the sink.

“All true. I just don’t relish your stepmother having a conduit, that’s all.”

“She’ll be the first one I text.”

“Funny.”

“Not kidding. Bye.”

He kissed his father on the cheek and made for the door.

“Take it slow on your first day,” Rudy said. “Measure the field.”

Wolfie did neither.

Rudy was in the middle of explaining Hemingway’s subtle illustrations of formalized masculine rites of passage to his Widener Comp 102 students when he got the indicator. His left palm shot to his ear and Greg Hynman looked up from his notes with half a grin. A couple of girls in the front stopped chewing their gum and stared. Rudy winced, recovered quickly, and told everyone to write a response paragraph illustrating all the theatrical elements exposed in italicized pre-chapter six of
In Our Time
. He was going out to his car to get an aspirin while they did the assignment, and he was collecting.

Rudy rushed off to the bathroom down at the end of the hall, hoping it was vacant. It was a safe bet. By 8:10 A.M. all the early morning classes were in high gear, and students didn’t often excuse themselves that early in the session. It wasn’t polite. He ripped open the door and headed for the corner stall, the indicator wailing in his head for a second time. His eyes bulged. In the back of his mind he registered that he’d left his roll book back on the podium. Not professional; there were grades in it, and it was too late now. He grabbed his left thumb.

He saw what Wolfie was looking at and gasped. It was a polished block wall in what felt like the far corner of a dark basement hallway, and there was graffiti here, old sayings merged with the new, a layered kaleidoscope of word pollution. Standing out at eye level was, “Until the year we graduate, Franklin Heights is three years of hell,” but the “Until the year we graduate, Franklin Heights is” and “years of hell” portions were faded and dull. Pronounced was the “three,” more so because the artist had scrawled it as the Roman numeral “III.”

“What does it mean?” Rudy said out loud. It echoed there in the stall, and he hoped no one had come in to take a piss in the last fifteen seconds or so. Of course, Wolfie couldn’t hear him, but Rudy knew he was thinking along the same lines. The number three was supposed to be his timeline to architect the future massacre, not some prophetic piece of wall-art here in the present.

Wolfie turned to the left, and there was a thick steel door, deep maroon with a small dark window at the top, that had diamond wire crossed inside of it. Above the jamb was the room number 129. His mentor teacher, Mr. Bond.

Wolfie’s hand closed on the knob and pulled.

It was the wood and metal shop: two stationary bandsaws in the center of the space, a lathe, a portaband station with the oblong tool mounted bottoms-up on a stand, a pegboard to the left with power tools, their cords wrapped neatly with wire-ties, and a wall of steel saw blades hung by size and tooth number, as the taped and retaped label-tabs indicated. Wolfie moved forward across a cracked and oil-stained concrete floor with a drain grate in the middle, slightly sunken where the rinse-hose had worn the cement down to its aggregate over time. In the far corner there were a couple of industrial basins, paint-splattered and shadowed with old grease and soot, and a worktable along the back wall with a huge bench vise. Over at the other end of the worktable facing away, there was a man bending slightly and welding something, sparks jumping on either side of him.

Wolfie approached, and the man must have sensed him, turning slowly, blowtorch hissing in his hands.

He had on a welding helmet with a dome light affixed above the tinted eye plate. Behind him in the catty-corner, the wall had old rubber soundproofing material glued to it, black with sparkles in the design. A “cloak of darkness” that shimmered.

“Move!” Rudy cried out to no one.

Of course, Wolfie didn’t hear him, but he’d recognized the tools and trappings of the Dark Guardian most probably sooner than had his father. The edge of the vision Rudy was connected to actually bristled red, and Wolfie closed in fast. Rudy was gripping his thumb so hard he thought he might have been cutting off his circulation. The vision was slanted a bit and for a horrible moment Rudy associated what he was experiencing with the original audience for Carpenter’s
Halloween,
not watching Michael Myers, but taking the steps
as
Michael Myers after he put on the mask.

Mr. Bond had been playing possum, and he swiped the welding torch right in Wolfie’s face at the moment before contact. Rudy didn’t feel the heat of course, but he knew Wolfie had at least gotten a first-degree burn across the nose from it.

Bastard! Even if he couldn’t kill him, he’d planned to maim him, weaken him by nullifying his weapon of beauty!

Wolfie’s right hand came into view at the bottom corner of Rudy’s vision, and it was tensed and hooked into a claw-shape. Then it slashed up across Mr. Bond’s chin and neck area, ripping the helmet clean off the head.

The rest was a flurry of slash and gouge, Wolfie’s hands windmilling across the vision he shared with his father in a blur of slants and angles that raked deep furrows and curled the skin along the sides of each, rending so quickly and in such fury and cross-hatch that it was difficult to picture what Bond had looked like the moment before. He was suddenly ribbons on bone. There were exposed tendons that had held like stubborn circus wires on the left side of his neck and beneath the right cheek, and both lips were sheared clean, the teeth beneath grinning with the bloody residue they repelled, like dewed-up moisture on a car recently waxed.