by John Saul
And he had always given in.
So wherever he was going tonight, it couldn’t be any worse than it was here.
After all, wherever he was going, Jeff wouldn’t be there. At least not for a while.
Picking up his virtual reality helmet, he placed it on his head once more.
A second later he was lost in the world conjured up by the computer, a world that was nothing more, or less, than a projection of what it would be like to be inside the computer itself, to be an electron whizzing through the minute circuitry, exploring the endlessly complex world contained on the surface of the microchip.
That’s what I should have been, Adam told himself.
I never should have been born at all.
I should have been something else, something that doesn’t feel any pain.
Tonight, he reflected with a cold shiver of anticipation, he would run away from the pain. And never come back.
9
Adam Aldrich waited until thirty minutes after the Academy’s ten-thirty lights-out before he rose from his bed and, without turning on the light, quickly pulled on his clothes, choosing a pair of jeans that were all but worn-out, and a bright red shirt that he’d never liked. Unlike Jeff, Adam had never much cared about clothes. Clothing was just stuff, and stuff had never mattered to him at all. The only thing that really mattered to Adam was the world inside his own brain, and, once he’d discovered it, the world inside his computer. And the only person who mattered at all to Adam was Jeff.
Jeff
The one person who knew him almost better than he knew himself.
The person who could talk him into absolutely anything.
The person with whom he had been closest all his life.
And who, tonight, was sending him away.
But maybe, somehow, they’d be together again. At least they would be if it was anything like Adam thought it was going to be.
It.
That was how he always thought about what he’d decided to do. Even tonight, when the time had finally come, he still put no other name to it.
Dressed, he moved to his computer and turned on the screen. It glowed softly in the dark, and Adam sat down at the keyboard. When the menu came into focus, a menu Adam had designed himself, he stared at it for a few seconds, then chose one of his utilities programs from the list.
Slowly, almost regretfully, he began deleting all the files from the eighty-megabyte hard drive in the computer. Finishing the task, deleting the directories and subdirectories one by one, he stared silently at the new directory tree, which now showed nothing more than the utility program he was using.
He could still change his mind. After all, the files weren’t really gone yet—all he’d done was erase the first letter of the file names. The data itself was still there on the hard drive. If he wanted to, he could recover it all in just a few more minutes.
He hesitated, then made up his mind.
His fingers working quickly, he typed in the commands that would begin washing the disk, going through the whole drive, recording a series of randomly selected digits over all the existing data.
The computer would go through the process three times. When it was done, nothing at all would remain except the single utility program.
It would be gone, all of it. All the programs he’d learned to use in the five years since he’d gotten his first computer, all the data he’d compiled, all the games he’d not only loved, but reconstructed to suit himself, reworking the codes so that no one but he could play them.
In a way, it was as if he was wiping his life out, obliterating it, so that no one would be able to search for clues as to why he’d done what he’d decided to do.
After all, it wasn’t anybody else’s business—it was his life, and he could do anything he wanted to with it.
The computer beeped softly, indicating that its task was completed.
Adam dropped the utility program out of memory, and when the “C:” prompt appeared, typed a single line:
C ERASE* *
He pressed the enter button, and a question appeared:
ARE YOU SURE? ALL FILES WILL BE ERASED. N (Y)
For a fleeting moment he was once again tempted to change his mind. Then, taking a deep breath, he hit the Y key. When the final question reappeared, giving him one last chance to reverse his course, he pressed it again.
A second flicked by, and then the “C:” prompt reappeared. Though the computer was still functioning, there was nothing it could do, for Adam had stripped away everything that made it useful. Now it was nothing more than a blank memory, waiting for data to fill it up.
Adam typed for a few seconds, then turned off the monitor, plunging the room again into total darkness. Moving silently to the door, he opened it a crack and peered out into the dimly lit hallway that ran the length of the second floor.
The hall was empty, and he could hear nothing.
He stepped into the corridor, pulling the door closed behind him, its soft click resounding in his ears with an unnatural loudness. He froze, half expecting the doors along the hall to open as the other kids peered accusingly out at him.
Nothing happened.
The silence of the building closed around him like a shroud.
He crept to Jeff’s door, pausing for a moment. Should he go in and say good-bye to his brother?
No.
Better just to disappear into the darkness of the night.
Moving silently down the hall, he came to the top of the broad staircase that curved down to the floor below and listened once more.
Silence.
The chandelier hanging in the entry hall had been dimmed for the night, casting only a soft glow through the spacious room. For a moment Adam gazed at the crack under Hildie Kramer’s office door.
Was there a light on inside?
He wasn’t sure.
He crept down the stairs, clinging to the wall as if its mass could somehow shelter him from any eyes that might be watching, waiting for him.
At last he came to the front door. He twisted the knob slowly, as if even the faint sound of its sliding bolt might betray him. Pulling the door only wide enough to slip through the narrow opening, he moved out onto the porch, waiting in the deep shadows of the loggia until he was certain no one was on the grounds in front of the house. Then, at last, he made his move, darting across the lawn, scuttling from tree to tree like a small animal exposed to predators. Only when he was through the gate did he allow himself to breathe easily.
When his pulse, racing from the tension of his clandestine departure from the Academy, finally settled into a normal rhythm, he moved off into the night. Though the air was unseasonably warm, even for mid-September, he felt a chill run through him.
But his mind was made up.
Twenty minutes later he stood in front of the house he’d grown up in, the old shingled two-story house his parents had bought when he was only two years old. Three blocks from the beach, it was surrounded by a neat lawn that was his father’s pride, with enormous camellia bushes growing on either side of the front porch. Adam’s eyes drifted over the house, pausing briefly at the second floor, on the room that had once been his. A lot of his stuff, he knew, was still in that room, waiting for him when he came home.
Now it would wait forever. He would never come back to this house again.
Another tiny doubt assailed his mind. For just a second he had an urge to go into the house and wake up his mother. Maybe he should talk to her about what he was going to do
No!
Jeff’s threats rang in his mind, and Adam knew what she’d do.
Call the doctor and have him taken away.
Away, where he’d never be able to do what he wanted again.
He turned away from the house and moved on to the town’s small business area, pausing in front of the stores to look at the displays in their windows. There was nothing in any of them he wanted, nothing he would miss.
He walked on, glancing warily arou
nd every few seconds, ducking into deep shadows whenever a car approached. He couldn’t get caught now, not when he was so close.
He started back toward the Academy, moving quickly now, feeling every minute passing. He came to the gate, edging through it, then skirting around the lawn, staying near the fence. Finally he moved toward the mansion itself.
He gazed at the darkened windows of the enormous house, and then his eyes moved up to the fourth floor, to the odd cupola perched atop the structure almost like a bird hunching above its prey.
He could see lights glowing in Dr. Engersol’s windows.
He stared at those lights, shining brilliantly while the rest of the Academy slept.
The rest of it, except for him.
Ducking his head and hunching his shoulders, he shoved his hands into his pockets.
It was time to get on with it.
The train moved fast down the track, for it was barely a train at all. Nothing more than an engine, a couple of empty cars, and a caboose. There would be no stops on the trip—there never were—for this was no more than one of the weekly runs the train made up the spur from Salinas, moving through Santa Cruz, then running up to the end of the track. It was a pointless run, except for one thing.
It kept the right of way open, protected the Barrington Western Railroad’s right to use it.
It was a boring run, the only interesting part of it being the northern leg, when the train ran steadily backward, creeping slowly along while a member of the crew stood in the caboose, watching the track and giving an unbroken stream of all-clear signals to the engineer. But once it reached the dead end forty miles north of Barrington and started back, the crew was tired, more inclined to watch the moonlight playing on the sea than the track ahead.
After all, in the twenty-five years the engineer had been making the run, there had never been an event worth reporting to his supervisor. So tonight, as the train hit sixty along the straightaway north of Barrington, and the engineer prepared to begin his slow deceleration to the fifteen mile speed limit through the town itself, he wasn’t really pitying too much attention to the track ahead.
Not that it would have made any difference, for by the time he saw the object on the track as he came around a curve, it was far too late to stop the train anyway.
Still, he slammed on the brakes and shouted to the fireman. “Jesus Christ! Looks like some idiot dumped a bag of garbage on the track!”
The train began to slow, the brakes screaming as the engineer pulled hard on the lever.
Then, as the brilliance of the headlight caught the object in the full glare of its beam, he realized that the object wasn’t a bag of garbage at all.
It was a person, crouched down between the tracks, hunched over, his back to the train.
The engineer hit the horn, and a blast of noise tore the night, rousing a flock of sparrows from their roosts in the trees along the track. They burst into flight, disappearing instantly into the night.
The person on the railroad tracks didn’t move.
The engineer felt a sheen of sweat break out over his whole body as he realized what was about to happen, and that there was no way on earth he could avoid it. The inertia of the big diesel engine was enough that even if he managed to lock the brakes completely, the machine would lunge on, steel skidding against steel, sparks flying.
But it would not be enough.
The train bore down on the object, losing speed with every second. For just a split second the engineer prayed for a miracle.
It didn’t come.
The engine struck the person on the tracks, and as the body flew into the air, the engineer realized it was a boy.
A young boy, dressed only in worn jeans and a red shirt.
Oddly, he found himself wondering if the boy had worn the red shirt on purpose, so the blood wouldn’t show as much when the train struck him.
Not that it mattered, the engineer reflected as the train finally ground to a stop two hundred yards farther on. Red shirt or not, the force of the blow when the train hit him would have turned the boy into little more than an unrecognizable mass of torn flesh and broken bones.
Instinctively, the engineer looked at his watch. It was almost half past four in the morning.
A miserable time to die.
Though the room was dark, so dark he couldn’t see anything at all, Jeff Aldrich knew he wasn’t alone. And the room was big, too. So big he couldn’t sense either the walls or the ceiling, though he was certain they were there.
He could, however, sense the other person in the room with him.
Adam.
It was Adam who was there, lost in the dark somewhere, looking for him.
Jeff called out to his brother, but there was no answer.
He took a tentative step forward, feeling his way in the dark, but touched nothing, felt nothing.
He called out again. “Adam? Hey, Adam, where are you?”
Though he’d shouted at the top of his lungs, his voice seemed tiny, constricting in his throat, the words barely audible, even to himself.
Now the fear began to close around him, reaching out of the darkness, touching him, its slender tentacles wrapping around him, seeming to draw him into the darkness itself.
“No,” he moaned. “I’ll find him. I’ve got to find him.”
He struggled against the fear, tried to run away from it, but now his feet seemed mired, as if he were caught in a thick, wet mud, or quicksand.
He struggled harder, screaming out again. “Adam? Adam, I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry, Adam!”
He began pulling himself free from the mud, and then he was running, running through the darkness as fast as he could. And around him the darkness changed.
He wasn’t in the room anymore. He was outside now, and though everything looked the same as it had before, it was still different.
And he was getting closer to Adam—he could feel it!
Finally, ahead, he saw a point of light.
The last of the fear drained out of him as he ran toward the light, his heart pounding, his legs aching from the effort. But he couldn’t slow down, for the light was Adam. If he could get to it—
It began to take shape then. No longer a point, it was a beam now, and it was shining down from overhead, though when he looked up, he couldn’t see the light’s source.
But in the beam, seeming almost to be suspended in midair, he could finally see Adam.
Adam was looking at him, his eyes accusing him.
Jeff stopped. “Adam?” He uttered the word uncertainly, for there was something different about his brother, something he didn’t understand.
He reached out, thrusting his hand into the beam of light, trying to touch his brother. But as his hand entered the beam, it disappeared, and Adam, still staring at him, began to laugh.
“You thought I wouldn’t do it, didn’t you?” Adam asked. “You thought I’d chicken out. You always thought I’d chicken out.”
Jeff felt a terrible wave of remorse wash over him. “N-No,” he stammered. “I didn’t think that I—”
But it was too late. Even as he spoke, the beam of light began to fade away and his brother’s image began to shimmer, then slowly disappear. As the last of the light died away, Jeff screamed out his brother’s name once more.
“Adam!”
• • •
In his room on the third floor Josh MacCallum lay wide awake. He’d been lying there for what seemed like an eternity, listening in the darkness.
Sometime earlier—he didn’t know how much earlier—he’d awakened, hearing a sound.
It hadn’t taken him more than a moment to realize what it was.
The elevator, its gears grinding, its cage rattling in its frame.
Instantly, Jeff Aldrich’s tale of the ghost of Eustace Barrington had popped back into his mind, and his first instinct had been to hide his head under the covers and try to blot the sound out of his ears. But then he’d realized what was happening.
&n
bsp; It was Jeff himself, riding the elevator in the darkened house, and no doubt laughing silently at the scare he was giving him.
So Josh had gotten up, pulled on his bathrobe, then gone out into the hall, creeping down the dark corridor until he came to the elevator shaft.
He could still hear the sound of the machinery.
But the elevator wasn’t moving. In fact, when he peered down the shaft, he could just make out the top of the cage barely illuminated by the chandelier in the foyer.
The sound had suddenly stopped. Josh had held his breath, afraid even to move.
Nothing had happened.
He’d waited for several seemingly endless minutes, half expecting the ghost of Eustace Barrington to appear on the stairs, floating toward him in the darkness. But at last, when nothing more occurred, he went back to bed.
And lay awake, listening.
Once more he heard the sound of the elevator, and once more he went to look.
The cage remained at the bottom of the shaft, exactly where it had been earlier.
Now, though, there was a new noise. Josh jerked upright, bolting into a sitting position. What had it been?
Then, coming in through his open window, he heard an anguished voice calling out.
“Adam, comeback!”
Jeff! It was Jeff’s voice.
Jumping out of bed, clad in his pajamas. Josh ran out of his room and raced down the hall to the stairs. Taking them three at a time, he arrived at the second floor in time to see sleepy faces peering out at him.
“What’s wrong?” someone asked. “What’s going on?”
Josh didn’t reply. He continued racing down the hall to Jeff’s room, where he pushed the door open and flipped on the light in one motion. And then he stopped, staring.
Sitting up in bed, his face pale, his whole body trembling, was Jeff.
Except for the curtains fluttering gently at the open window, the room was still and quiet.
“Jeff?” Josh breathed. “What’s wrong? You okay?”
Jeff Aldrich said nothing for a second, then managed to nod. “I—I had a nightmare. It was about Adam. He—He was gone. It was like he was dead or something, and it was my fault.”