Book of Knowledge

by Slater, David Michael

  Branwen came out and did exactly that. So did Wren and Teal. All three of them had misty eyes.

  All other eyes were devouring the developing scene, which is exactly how Daphna hoped it would go.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said.

  Then she turned and walked casually backstage, briefly recalling the similar way her father’s eyes had looked after his first encounter with Asterius Rash behind another curtain. Rash, she thought. Perfect.

  Daphna found the edge of the fabric, slipped behind it and located the cord. It was wrapped around a hook mounted on the wall. With deliberate care, Daphna unwrapped the cord and let it be pulled up and away.

  Seconds later—she didn’t look—there was a tremendous splash, like a tidal wave crashing on a dock. Dead silence ensued for just an instant, then came three horrified screams.

  And after that—laughter. Gales of hilarious, jeering laughter.

  The slow-motion was even slower now. Daphna had entered some sort of dream world. She walked along the edge of the backstage area until she discovered an entrance to the main floor of the house. Light as air, she walked through a series of luxurious sitting rooms until she found her way to the front door.

  She let herself out.

  CHAPTER 21

  study buddy

  When Daphna left, Dexter went down to his room to think about how he might best practice his new Word. He didn’t want to try it out on anyone in public again for fear of being noticed, but there didn’t seem to be any other way. He wished someone was there with him, someone other than Daphna, of course. He needed what his goofy third grade teacher always called a “Study Buddy.”

  She had another expression she used all the time, too, especially with Dex because he often told her he wished he didn’t have to go to school: Be careful what you wish for. Dex had never really understood the expression. That is, until about a second after he remembered it.

  Which was when Antin, blackened by soot from head to toe like a coal miner, appeared on the basement steps. Daphna must’ve left the door unlocked.

  Despite the urge to panic, Dex remained sitting at his desk. He sensed a golden opportunity, never mind that his life was probably at stake. It helped that Antin looked dead on his feet. On the other hand, his eyes were even more crazed and jumpy than they’d been the last time he paid a house call to the Wax’s.

  “Gimme my money,” Antin spat, flicking open his knife and glancing quickly back over his shoulder. “Figures you’d just leave it sitting there in the open. Should’ve come here right away, but I figured you’d have cops crawling all over the place. Should’ve known you were too stupid—What did you say?”

  “I said, put the knife away,” Dex ordered. Actually, he’d spoken his new Word, and as forcefully as he could. Antin blinked, looked down at his blade, then back at Dexter. Then he looked over his shoulder and snapped the knife shut, just like that.

  Dex grinned—his first try! But then Antin shook his head as if to clear cobwebs and the blade shot out again. He stepped forward.

  Dex nervously repeated his Word. Then he repeated the order. Antin screwed up his eyes and closed the knife again, but just as quickly opened it and took another step forward. Dex stood up and backed away. He called out his Word several times and shouted, “Put it away!” Antin finally obeyed again, but once again, only for a few seconds.

  A harrowing tug-of-war ensued in which the blade went in and out, and an increasingly frustrated Antin came closer and closer to Dexter.

  Soon enough, Dex was up against the wall.

  “I got no idea what game you’re playing,” Antin growled, “but I promise you, I can’t be played. You’ve ruined my life,” he said after looking over his shoulder, “so I’m gonna ruin yours.”

  Antin looked Dexter in the eye then and leaned forward with the knife.

  Dex screamed.

  Antin stopped.

  The tip of the knife rested against Dex’s shoulder, but did not penetrate. It wasn’t moving, Dex realized, and neither was Antin. He’d been frozen. Dex had involuntarily called out the Word he’d used to freeze Evelyn.

  He sighed, slipping around Antin after pushing the blade carefully aside. He knew what he was going to do now, so he pulled his chair across the room and sat down to wait.

  Antin remained frozen for a few minutes, which was fortunate because Dex needed some time to recover. It didn’t matter that he’d been that close to Antin’s knife before. The experience wasn’t something you got used to. He took some slow, deep breaths until his heartbeat slowed.

  And so Dex was ready when, like an un-paused character in a video game, Antin came to life. Outraged to find his victim gone, he wheeled round, and at the sight of Dex sitting calmly in his chair, he charged. Dex spoke his new Word right away, then ordered Antin to stop. It worked, and for slightly longer this time. When it wore off, Antin came at Dex again, his face contorted with furious incomprehension. Dex stopped him again, and six times after that before the knife got too close. At that point, Dex froze Antin again.

  Not bad, Dex thought to himself. He was getting better.

  With Antin immobilized, Dex walked back across the room and set up a second chair. Then he sat down to wait. It took fifteen minutes this time, but eventually Antin turned and charged. Dex stopped him nine times, and on each occasion, for almost half a minute. When the knife got close, Dex froze Antin yet again and went back to the other chair.

  This process went on for well over an hour: Antin charging, stopping, freezing; charging, stopping, freezing, all the while growing nearly apoplectic with rage and confusion. His teeth were bared and his body shook with each new attempt to get at Dexter.

  With each round, Dex found himself growing in confidence. The Word was somehow feeling more and more comfortable, like a baseball glove getting broken in.

  Finally, like a beaten fighter, Antin gave up. Glaze-eyed, he dropped his switchblade and slumped into one of the chairs. Dexter was astonished with himself. Never before in his life, in any situation, had he ever felt—he didn’t even know a word for it—mastery? The only thing was, now that he’d won, Dex had no idea what to do.

  What do winners do? he wondered, tossing the switchblade into the trash. On second thought, he picked the knife back up and tossed it into the mess in his closet under the stairs. Antin remained slouched in the chair, utterly undone.

  “Ahh—” Dex said after clicking the door shut, “So—um—”

  “I can’t be played!” Antin snapped, though it came across like a feeble strike from a de-fanged snake. His voice was strained to the breaking point. The pleasant thought occurred to Dex that Antin might very well cry, like the rest of his gang at the police station.

  “I’m gonna kill you,” Antin said, still sagging in his chair. “I wasn’t gonna kill you before, but I’m gonna kill you now, and then I’m going to burn down this house.”

  “Wow,” Dex replied, feeling smug. “Didn’t your parents ever tell you it’s rude to kill people and burn down their houses?” Another thought occurred to him then. If he suggested that Antin have a little accident in his pants, the victory would be complete.

  “My parents are dead.”

  “I—I’m sorry about that,” Dex said. He’d been taken completely off guard. Antin looked at Dex, but didn’t reply.

  “My mom’s dead, too,” Dex added without deciding to. “My dad killed her.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Antin. He was curious, plain and simple. “Wait a minute, your father?” he said. “That freaky old book dude?”

  “He pushed her over a cliff in some cave,” Dex explained. “I was like, two months old or something. I didn’t know, though. I just found out the other day.”

  “Well, well, well,” said Antin.

  “What happened to yours?” Dex asked, aware that he was suddenly trembling.

  Antin shot a glance over his shoulder, then answered. “My dad left my mom before I was ever born,” he said. “He never cared about he
r, not even for one second. He was a thief. Got killed in prison.”

  “Oh,” Dex said, awkwardly. “He didn’t kill your mom, did he?”

  “Nah. My mom had to work, like, four crappy jobs or something to try to support me ’cause she never went to school. She got really sick working in some foodpacking plant, in the refrigerators. She couldn’t afford a doctor or to miss work, so she died. I don’t remember it, though. They shipped me to a foster home after that. They were pretty nice, but I was a jerk so they booted me out. I got sent to another one—to some tough guy who said he didn’t mind me being a jerk. That turned out to be ’cause it gave him an excuse to beat on me all the time.”

  “I—I—” was Dexter’s only response.

  Antin took an uncharacteristically long look over his shoulder. Dex could tell he hadn’t meant to say so much. A strange air was in the room. Dexter had never had a conversation like this with anyone, not even Latty, though she’d tried about ten million times to get him to talk to her. He did when he was little of course, but even then he’d been careful to avoid the real depths of his frustrations. But just now, everything he’d ever been frustrated about seemed slightly shabby.

  Dex wanted the conversation to continue, but he didn’t know how to keep it going. Antin was just sitting there now, looking down at his knees. Finally, he jerked his head up and glared at Dexter. His pupils were tiny black balls of anger again.

  “What’s going on?” he demanded. “Why did I tell you that?”

  Dex didn’t know why. Antin’s eyes were clear. Dex said his Word, then asked, “Did you get away from that guy? I mean, are you in another foster home now?”

  Antin, his eyes softened into a haze, said, “I moved on after I burned his house down about a year ago.”

  “Oh.”

  “He busted me up when I was a jerk, but most of the time he did it for no reason, whenever I wasn’t expecting it, just for fun, to keep me on my toes. Once he threw a telephone book at my head when I was sleeping. Your dad ever beat you?”

  “Um—no,” Dex admitted. “He was never around.”

  “Lucky you, then.”

  “I—I guess,” Dex answered. He couldn’t tell if Antin was sharing this additional information because he wanted to, or because Dex’s Word was still holding sway. His eyes already seemed clear again.

  “So—” Dex fumbled, “you burned down the house to get revenge?”

  “Sort of. Mostly, I was sick of waiting to get hit. First I tried doing stuff to tick him off on purpose, you know, so I could always know when it was coming. But then I realized that was stupid.”

  “Ah—well—yeah,” Dex stuttered. He was pretty sure Antin was talking under his own power now. Dex desperately wanted it to stay this way, but his brain seemed incapable of finding appropriate things to say. “Have you been just, like, living around town since then?” he managed.

  “Here and there—wherever.”

  “But you don’t have a job or anything, right?”

  “Been stealing stuff, small time things, money from kids around here. The cops haven’t been able to do too much, but I just turned eighteen. That’s why I’m taking this money and leaving town for good. I’ve been looking for something big for a long time now, something to get me gone.”

  “Do you believe in God?”

  Dex heard these words come out of his mouth, but he hadn’t been thinking about God, and even if he had, he’d have kept such an embarrassing question to himself. Dex felt his face burn with shame. What was the matter with him? He’d better order Antin to forget the entire conversation and get rid of him once and for all.

  “There is no God,” said Antin, jolting Dex before he got the chance to use his Word.

  The casual certainty of Antin’s reply was even more shocking to Dex then his having asked the question in the first place. “How—how do you know?” he asked.

  Antin stood up and started walking around the room with a cryptic smile on his blackened face. He never stopped checking back over his shoulder all the while.

  “You know what’s funny?” he said. “Those first people I lived with, the ones that weren’t so bad, they always tried to talk to me about God. I told ’em God was dead, which I guess was one of the things that really made ’em mad. When I did bad stuff, they’d always say I might be able to fool them, but God knows everything. He knows everything that ever was or ever would be. So I said, if he knows all the bad stuff that’s gonna happen and doesn’t do anything about it, then he can go to Hell. That didn’t go over too good.”

  “Yeah, I’d expect not—”

  “My mom was real religious,” Antin said. “That’s about the only thing I remember about her, how much she believed God was watching over us. She told me so every night before she put me to bed and made me thank him for all the good things in our life, even though we didn’t have jack.

  “If there’s a God, then he just kicked back and watched while our life got ruined and she got dead. If there’s a God, then he’s kickin’ back right now while kids are gettin’ starved to death and locked in closets and whipped with belts—or whatever. You name it, and I know a kid it happened to. You wanna believe in a God like that, Wax? Innocent kids!”

  Dex opened his mouth to say, he didn’t know what, but Antin didn’t wait.

  “You know what else those people tried to tell me?” he said, getting worked up. “They said messed up things happen to people who did something to deserve it. You ever notice the only people who tell you that crap are people that messed up things never happen to? I told them they must’ve pissed God off big-time to deserve getting me. That was when they kicked me out. My old case worker always said that God works in mysterious ways, and we can’t understand his plans for us. I finally told him—it was a couple of weeks after my new ‘dad’ hit me with a golf club when I was watching TV—I said, ‘Good, then Antin works in mysterious ways, too.’

  “The next day I torched the place and took off. If God’s plans involve crooks getting everything and lyin’ and cheatin’ and killin’ and stealin’, then so do mine! ’Course I don’t really believe that. It don’t make sense. God wouldn’t be God if he was all screwed up like that. That’s how come I know ain’t there. That’s how come I say, you do what you gotta do to get by.”

  “I—ah—” Dex fumbled. The ferocity of Antin’s speech had rendered him nearly mute. He was amazed Antin had anything at all to say on the subject. He’d clearly thought about it a lot. Antin was obviously not what he appeared to be. Was anyone? Antin was crazy all right, and dangerous, too. But he wasn’t—evil. Daphna had tried to say as much about Emmet.

  Dex felt like pieces of his mind were coming loose and sliding, like the little rocks that fall down a slope before the whole landslide. Then a question came to mind.

  “What if—” Dex asked, “what if God just, you know, has something against you, personally? What if he just picks certain people out to kind of, I don’t know, mess with?”

  “Sure,” Antin sneered, “he must really hate all those kids who look like skeletons on those commercials in Africa. That makes a lot of sense. If there’s a God, Wax, he’s a screw-up. That would explain why he made a screwed-up world. But I still say there is no God. Or, here’s another idea: maybe he woke up one day and saw what a piece of crap he made and got depressed and knocked himself off.”

  Dexter shuddered as a thought struck him. “Or—or—maybe somebody killed him,” he croaked, looking at the Book of Nonsense sitting just a few feet away on his desk. Had God been killed for it? Was that even possible? Could Adem Tarik—his father—have killed God for that book?

  “Maybe,” said Antin. The idea seemed to impress him slightly. Then he shook his head.

  “Why don’t you tell me what the hell’s going on here,” he demanded, turning to face Dexter. “Why can’t I kill you and go? Why don’t I want to anymore?”

  “Look, Antin,” said Dex. His brain was actually hurting. He wanted to be alone.

  �
��What?”

  Dex got up and took a large bundle of cash out of the bag on the floor. Then he walked over and handed it to Antin. He whispered his Word one more time and said, “This is more than enough money for you to start over. I’m gonna tell my dad not to press charges. He’ll listen, I promise. Go and get yourself a place to live and then go back to school or get a job or something. And you don’t need to be on edge all the time. No one’s gonna hit you any more, not if you get it together.”

  Antin blinked. Then he put the stack of bills inside his shirt and walked up the basement steps.

  He left without looking back.

  CHAPTER 22

  school daze

  In the morning, Dex and Daphna met in the kitchen. Daphna was dressed reasonably in slacks and a light sweater, though she hadn’t made more than a token effort with her hair, and none at all with make-up. She was pretty sure she’d never do that again, at least not to fit in with a bunch of brainless, stuck-up, prima-donna piranhas.

  Dex’s decision to wear his usual shredded jeans and oversized sweatshirt was no surprise, but to Daphna it suddenly seemed almost like some kind of statement about not being phony—almost, that is. She’d never go that far. It’s one thing to be yourself, she thought, but if yourself is a slob, a little fitting in wouldn’t kill you.

  Neither of the twins were in the mood to talk while they ate cold cereal. Both were still too wrapped up in the events of the previous night.

  Daphna had no idea what to expect at school. Would she be treated like a hero? An outcast? She suspected what had happened was far too bizarre and confusing for anyone to understand, so she wasn’t too worried about having her new talents discovered.

  Dex, for his part, was trying to maintain the optimism that had kept him up half the night. After his incredible success with Antin, he’d been certain he could somehow make school manageable. But now that the reality of it was so close, he was losing confidence. A familiar, nauseating pool of revulsion was rising in his stomach with each passing minute.