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  “But what of the third rule of writing?” Paul asked.

  The simpleton was still too shocked to take any of this seriously.

  Paul continued.“How can any of this lead to love, or to the Creator? It’s all in the third rule, remember? Like Samuel said in class yesterday.”

  Billy’s snarl surprised even him. “Forget Samuel! Samuel’s a dope!”He sat back and took a breath. “If you understand that we create our stories, then technically we do abide by the third rule because we are creators. We discover love by discovering ourselves.”

  There, he’d said it. He’d repeated the theory that someone left in his locker, encouraging him to descend into the tunnels.

  They stared at him, blinking.

  “And Raul is right. Stories without proper conflicts are boring. In the real world, the story of life starts with conflict. I could challenge the prevailing rules here and win with my arguments. Maybe I will.”

  They didn’t respond to that. How could they, blinded by denial?

  “So when did you go below?” Darcy asked, glancing around nervously.

  “Last two nights.”

  “Two times?”

  “I had to, Darcy. The dungeons call. It’s as if they know my name and call to me. None of the halls up here speaks to me like the dungeons. None of them calls me.”

  “Dungeons?”

  “Figure of speech. Tunnels. Subterranean halls. I’ve found a study that contains hundreds of books to be read. I’m telling you, take the enjoyment of reading or writing or eating or anything you do up here, and down there it’s ten times better. Try it once and you’ll see.”

  “If you think Paul or I would go down there, you’ve lost your mind. Proof positive that the ‘dungeons,’ as you appropriately call them, have rotted your mind.”

  Billy just grinned.

  “What you’re doing isn’t only prohibited, it sounds nasty, and I for one will have no part in it.” Darcy scooted her chair back and stood.

  Paul followed her lead. “Sorry, Billy. I do believe she’s right.”

  “Well, don’t either of you forget what I said. We have no boundaries, so don’t go and flap your jaws about this. I’m entitled to do whatever I choose.” He caught Darcy’s eye. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

  Billy watched them go, past the tray table toward the entry. Idiots. Stupid fools. And yet he had resisted the impulse at first, hadn’t he, just like Darcy and Paul were doing now.

  A voice spoke behind him. “Good morning, Billy.” Billy twisted to face Samuel. The last student eating across the cafeteria while he’d spouted off about Samuel being a dope had been none other than Samuel himself.

  Billy turned back to the table and clenched his eyes for a moment, hoping that Samuel hadn’t been listening.

  “Morning, Samuel.”

  Samuel stepped around the table and sat down. “You okay, Billy?”

  “Sure, Samuel. I’m just fine. And you?”

  “I’m good. Are you sure you’re okay? You’ve seemed a bit upset lately.”

  Upset? And when had he looked upset? Billy’s face grew a little hotter. “Well, I haven’t been upset.”

  “You’re struggling with something, Billy. It’s written all over you. Part of me wants to tell you to snap out of it. Quit licking the floor and stand up.” He paused. “But most of me just wants to tell you that we all go through struggles. We can help each other.”

  “What do you care, Samuel? What difference does it make to you?”

  A few seconds passed before the answer came. “Everything each of us does affects the others. None of us lives in a vacuum. We’re simply children on a quest to gain the highest forms of wisdom without being compromised in the process. But when one is compromised, the others are compromised. You see that, don’t you?”

  Billy waved his fork at the blond boy. “Each of us can do whatever he or she wants. You can’t take that away.”

  “You’re right. But do you think there aren’t consequences to what you say or do?”

  “And what would the consequence be if I told you to shut up, Samuel?”

  Samuel just looked at him. There was something in his eyes, a look Billy could have identified a week ago, but which now just looked vague. Maybe it was hurt.

  Billy thought of the halls below, running with worm gel. He had to get back.

  “Just shut up,” he said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PARADISE

  Thursday afternoon

  JOHNNY’S PREDICAMENT had gone from bad to worse.

  Now he wasn’t sure what he’d seen yesterday. Actually he was sure—he’d seen Black kill Cecil, but he wasn’t sure why he’d seen it. Didn’t feel right, but it was possible that Black’s explanation in the bar was the truth. The others were swallowing it, hook, line, and sinker. Didn’t feel right, but that was supposedly Black’s point.

  Maybe he’d misjudged the man. His ways were strange to be sure, but again, that was his point. He didn’t smell right, look right, or talk right. But he did look and talk more normal this morning than he had yesterday.

  And all of that was his point.

  Johnny’s mother still hadn’t returned from Junction. No surprise there. She’d be home this afternoon. She hadn’t taken any of the stuff Black was handing out. Her exposure, like his own, was limited to whatever the preacher had put in the water supply. She’d be able to tell him what was up.

  And maybe Roland and Fred would be straight in the mind. He’d know in a few minutes when they met behind the old theater.

  Johnny glanced at the clock. Time to go. He was dressed in a blue Nike T-shirt with a faded brown button-down shirt hanging unbuttoned and tails out over his thin frame. Good to go.

  The minute the door slammed shut behind him, he reconsidered taking the trek down Main Street to the Starlight, which loomed two hundred yards off. He’d been so eager to get home from the bar that he hadn’t noticed just how odd the town looked.

  For starters it was deserted. Not a soul.

  Somewhere a screen door was banging in the wind. Wind-blown silt smothered the town in a dull gray-brown haze. Leaves danced by.

  Bang, bang, bang.Whose door was that? Across the street stood the church. Closed. No cars in front of Smither’s Saloon or All Right Convenience. Didn’t mean no one was at either place, just no visitors.

  Johnny walked deliberately, ignoring his throbbing leg. Off the sidewalk, under the large maple that shaded their house, down the side of Main Street. He crossed it.

  When he reached the middle, at the point Black had turned toward him and Cecil yesterday, he again thought that the alley would have been a better choice. He was alone out here. Stranded. The wind tore at his hair and the dust whipped his pants and he was sure that at any moment something impossible would happen.

  Paradise had become the town of impossibilities.

  That was yesterday. That was the preacher’s point.

  Johnny picked up his pace, staring straight ahead, and then ran the last few steps along the old theater’s wall. He rounded the back corner and pulled up in front of Roland, Fred Mars, and Peter Bowers, all sitting in a circle, protected from the wind by the large building.

  They stared at him as if he’d come out of a snowstorm.

  “Hey,” he said.

  They wore blue jeans and ratty T-shirts, except Fred, who wore a sun-bleached plaid farmer’s shirt that looked like it had been found on a rocky riverbank.

  “Hey,” Roland said.

  Johnny walked forward.

  “Hey, Johnny,” Peter said. The Bowers boy was big, like his father, Claude.

  Johnny stopped. There was something out of whack with Fred and Peter. Dark circles under their eyes. Tired faces, as if they hadn’t slept a wink last night.

  “You gonna sit down?” Fred asked.

  “You get any sleep last night, Fred?”

  He shrugged. “Sure.” But he didn’t look so sure.

  “What do you think about the prea
cher?” Fred asked.

  Johnny settled to the ground next to Roland.

  “I think . . .” Johnny stopped. Actually, he didn’t know what to think anymore. “He’s pretty weird, that’s for sure.” No one disagreed.

  The mood was gloomy, which was strange because Johnny figured they’d find a way to rip the preacher to shreds with feeble attempts at humor.

  “They say Chris was dying before the preacher healed him,” Fred said. “Nothing like that’s ever happened around here. The preacher’s probably pretty close to God. Like Moses. That’s what my parents think, anyway.”

  “Moses?” Peter said. “Moses was a prophet, not some preacher who walked into town growing warts in people’s mouths.”

  “What do you call the plagues?”

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” Roland said. “Just because someone does something great doesn’t make them a great person. Look at Hitler. Everybody liked him in Germany at one time, and look what he did to the Jews.”

  “What do you mean everybody liked Hitler?” Fred demanded, face red. “Nobody liked Hitler.”

  “Settle down,” Peter said. “What gives, man?”

  “If Roland wouldn’t be so stupid—”

  “I’m not being stupid! I’m just saying that Moses wasn’t Hitler. And that maybe this guy isn’t Moses either. He could be, I’m just saying he might not be.”

  Watching Fred, Johnny felt uneasy. He spoke as much to stop their bickering as to fill them in.

  “I saw him this morning.” They looked at him. “He was in the bar with the others.”

  Roland pushed. “And?”

  “And he was . . . different. He said that he put something in the drinking water to make us all loopy. And that everything he did was just a trick.”

  “He said that?” Fred’s eyes widened. “Why would he do that?”

  “Loopy?” Peter Bowers said. He pulled a bottle from his pants. “You mean this?”

  It was the bottle that Black had showed them in the bar, only now it was empty. Peter was grinning.

  Johnny reached for it. “Where’d you get that?”

  “My mom.”He snatched it out of Johnny’s reach, twirled off the lid, and lifted the bottle to his nose. “She said it was some good stuff.”

  “Good stuff? She tell you it came from Black?”

  “Course she did. Why, does that scare you?”He stuck his tongue into the narrow neck and made a show of trying to lick the inside, but his tongue was too fat for the bottle.

  “That’s the stuff?” Roland asked.

  Peter pulled the bottle off his tongue and licked his lips. “Tastes like toe sludge.”

  “Sick!” Fred grabbed the bottle from Peter’s hand and shoved it up to his nose. “Doesn’t smell bad. You taste this?”

  “Course I did. It tastes like toe sludge.”

  “Yeah, right.” Fred put his finger into the bottle, withdrew some of the residue, and touched it to his tongue. Satisfied it wasn’t as disgusting as his friend had insisted, he licked his finger clean.

  “Tastes like nothing.”

  “Let me see,” Roland said, reaching for the bottle.

  “I wouldn’t,” Johnny said.

  “Come on, Johnny, don’t be such a wimp. It’s probably just water.”

  Peter dove for the bottle, but Fred rolled out of his way, laughing. He came to his feet and jumped back, sticking his finger in for another sample.

  “Knock it off!” Peter yelled. By the looks of the vein sticking out of his neck, he wasn’t too happy. He stood, brushing dust from his shirt. “Give it back.”

  “What for?”

  They faced off, Fred taunting, Peter scowling. But in a flash, that changed. For no apparent reason, both Fred and Peter spun toward the theater’s back wall and stared at it wide-eyed.

  Their mouths dropped open.

  “What?” Roland said, looking at the wall with Johnny. Weathered, once white boards ran vertically in bad need of fresh paint, but nothing seemed out of place.

  “Holy . . .” Peter was whispering. He took a step back and Fred followed suit.

  “What is it?” Roland demanded again.

  Peter’s mouth twisted, formed a grin. He stared at the wall. “Wow . . .”

  “Wow,” Fred echoed.

  Johnny scrambled to his feet. It’s the bottle. Black was right, the stuff in the bottle makes people see things. That’s what was . . .

  Peter was yelling in terror. He stumbled backward.

  Fred screamed, white-faced. He whirled and ran. Straight into Peter. The boys crashed to the ground with grunts and yells. But both were too distracted by whatever they had seen to make anything of the collision. They scrambled to their feet, cast a quick glance at the wall, and ran for the corner, where they disappeared behind the theater.

  They weren’t screaming anymore. They were just running. The wind swallowed the sound of their feet.

  Roland looked at Johnny, then back at the wall. “You see anything?”

  “I’m telling you, it was the stuff in that bottle. What did I say? It makes people loopy.”

  Roland grinned crooked and walked to the wall. He put his hand on the boards. “What do you think they saw?”

  Johnny kicked at the bare dirt behind the Starlight. He didn’t want to be here and he didn’t want to go home alone. Black might be good, Black might be bad, but whatever was happening in this town was officially terrifying.

  “The preacher talked about helping people see another reality. Maybe they saw . . .” A thought occurred to him.“Maybe we should leave.”

  Roland turned back. “What? Like a ghost or something?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good. I think we should go.”

  Roland slapped the boards. “There’s nothing here, man. That’s freaky. What’s the world coming to?”

  “Good question. You notice anything strange around here today?”

  “Yeah, Fred and Peter.”

  “Not just Fred and Peter. You have any nightmares last night?”

  That caught Roland off guard. “What do you mean, nightmares?”

  “I mean did you dream about Black?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Johnny shrugged. “I did.”

  “So did I.”

  “You ever see clouds like that this time of year?” Johnny asked, looking up. Flat clouds hung abnormally low, like someone had painted the sky dark gray just above the town.

  Roland’s gaze followed Johnny’s. “Yeah. Pretty strange.”

  “There wasn’t a cloud in the sky yesterday.”

  “You really think Black has anything to do with the weather?”

  “Have you seen him today?”

  “Actually, I did. My mom left her watch on the sink at Nails and Tan and wanted me to get it. Didn’t want to talk to Katie. They had an argument yesterday or something. Maybe you didn’t hear this, did you? I told Fred and Peter about it before you got here.”

  “Black was at Nails and Tan? When was this?”

  “On my way here.” Roland grinned. “He was there all right. He practically had his tongue down Katie’s throat. Freaked me out, man.”

  The revelation stunned Johnny. “He was kissing her?”

  “Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration. I couldn’t actually see her because his back was to the door, but they were definitely close. Laughing.”

  “You tell anyone else about this?”

  “Just Fred and Peter. I guarantee you my mom would flip.”

  “And you don’t find that just a little bit strange, for a preacher to do that?”

  Roland looked at the wall again. “Like you said, he’s trying to get people’s attention. Look at what just happened to Fred and Peter. The whole thing is pretty freaky, but you have to admit, it’s kinda cool.”

  “Maybe. And maybe not,” Johnny said.

  “What do you mean, maybe or maybe not? It’s either cool or it’s not.”

  “Maybe. But that
doesn’t mean it’s good.”

  “Has he done anything bad yet?”

  Johnny thought about that. Fact was, scaring people to make a point wasn’t a bad thing. All preachers did that at times, right? The Bible did that. What do you call God sending a whale to swallow Jonah? Maybe Black was that whale, going to towns to swallow them up so they would change their minds.

  “Maybe not,” Johnny said. “But we can’t tell.”

  “Well, Peter said Black’s gonna be at his house tonight.” A thin smile tugged at Roland’s lips. “You ever spy?”

  “Spy on Black?”

  “Come on, you know that half the people around here leave their shades open at night. You just sneak up and look in. You’ve done it.”

  “Not for a few years I haven’t. And not on Black. What if we get caught?”

  “We won’t get caught.”

  “I don’t know . . . he’s . . .”

  “He’s Marsuvees Black. Come on, Johnny. He’s just a crazy preacher who’s messing with people’s heads a bit. So we check him out.”

  Johnny glanced at the sky. Black, black, everything was black. “When?”

  Roland shrugged. “Eight? After dark.”

  “Okay.”

  Roland grinned. “Cool.”

  “Cool,” Johnny said.

  But it didn’t feel cool. Nothing about Black felt cool.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE MONASTERY

  Thursday afternoon

  DARCY SAT in the rear of the class, looking at thirty-six heads covered with blond and brown and black hair. And one covered in red hair. Billy stuck out three rows over on her left, the monastery’s cherry.

  Billy glanced over with those green eyes of his, and she turned her head back to Raul, who was rambling on about the second rule.

  Rambling? Not rambling as in boring. Rambling as in We’ve heard this a million times, old man. Get on with some good stuff. In truth, he was speaking eloquently about greatness in purity. On the other hand, it was rather boring. It bothered her that she thought so.

  She stole a quick look at Billy and saw that he was fidgeting, probably bored out of his skull, waiting for class to end so he could sneak down to the dungeons and play with his ghosts. She was surprised to be thrilled at the idea and turned back to Raul. She pinched the bridge of her nose to concentrate on the overseer’s words.