The Caleb Collection Page 17

  “Are you okay, Caleb?” Leiah asked. “You really don’t have—”

  “You’ll be fine, Caleb,” Jason interrupted, kneeling by him. What was Leiah thinking? The boy’s own survival depended on this. “Go on,” he said, but the encouragement fell flat.

  Caleb turned from them and started the long trek out to the microphone a second time. He was putting on a brave front, but he could neither hide the sweat that beaded his little face, nor the tremor that clung stubbornly to his bones. He reached center stage and faced the crowd. Three thousand sets of lizard eyes held him in their stares. The organ drew long, low, eerie notes.

  And nothing happened.

  Caleb had been at the microphone twenty uneventful seconds, staring dumbly at the crowds, when the music suddenly stopped, midrefrain, as if someone had bumped the needle on a record. A loud static sounded for a moment and then total silence. Someone snickered in the crowd. Things were not proceeding as planned.

  Nikolous cursed in Greek under his breath, grabbed the butler by the arm, and jerked him toward the deeper shadows. The skinny man stumbled and would have fallen but for the other’s grip. “Get someone in a wheelchair up there!” Nikolous snapped. “Tell them to grab one of the ill ones and get them on the stage immediately!”

  The butler barked his order into the radio, loudly enough for at least the first dozen rows to hear. Fortunately he spoke in Greek.

  Caleb looked their way, clearly at a loss. Leiah paced and gnawed at her fingers, and Jason thought she might run out and collect the boy at any moment. He glanced toward the NBC crew and saw that they’d crossed their arms and were shifting uneasily. The camera’s green light blinked steadily; they were still on camera, though he doubted very much that they were live. Back at the studios, the anchor, presumably a good-looking fellow named Jeff, was probably talking about the smog alert that day or some other tidbit that preempted this fiasco.

  Jason felt the drumming of his own heart, and he wiped his palms. It could be his own son, Stephen, out there, dying in front of the crowd. He and Ailsa had ignored their better judgment and agreed to put little Stephen onstage at the church once. It was before ALS had crippled him beyond standing; before the saints had decided they would rid his little boy of the disease if they had to beat it out of him. The pastor had interviewed him, and Stephen had frozen.

  Like Caleb.

  A surge of remorse swept through Jason’s chest, and he ground his molars. If the stakes were not what they were, he would go out there and tell them all what they could do with their lizard eyes.

  Then again, for the most part the crowd stared quietly at this small boy, who stood innocently on the stage before them. He wasn’t blowing their minds, to be sure, but he was pulling at their sympathies, Jason thought. Otherwise there would be catcalls and whistles.

  A commotion on the far side caught his attention. Three stagehands had a wheelchair-bound man in his midtwenties hoisted shoulder-high and were jogging him down the left side at a frightening clip. They’d evidently found a willing participant in response to Nikolous’s demand. He was paraplegic by the look of his spindly legs that flopped about uncontrolled as they ran. If the man agreed to a trip up front, Jason doubted he’d bargained for the route his bearers had chosen.

  The young man began to protest loudly ten yards from the stage, but by then it was already too late. The three men hoisted the red sports chair over the lip of the stage and pushed the paraplegic out onto the floor without aim. The chair rolled across the stage and stopped with its back to Caleb, twenty feet from where Jason and Leiah stood.

  The man’s left leg had fallen out of its rest and hung like a loose wire capped with its black shoe. His face turned white with mortification, and his lips wrinkled in a sudden fit of anger. He grabbed at his wheels and spun his chair around to face the boy, ignoring his loose leg for the moment.

  Silence swept through the arena, until Jason could hear only his own pulse and the gentle murmur of the air units high above. The crowd shifted forward on their seats or raised on their tiptoes for a better view. Jason felt Leiah’s hand circle his elbow and squeeze. She was trembling. Maybe it was just his arm trembling.

  For a moment he thought the paraplegic might rush Caleb, but he didn’t. He just faced him, like a gunfighter with his hands on either wheel. The boy looked back, but he didn’t turn. Beyond them the television camera flashed a steady green, and Donna had a mike to her unmoving lips. For an eternity it stayed just like that.

  And then Caleb turned to face the man in the wheelchair. Neither moved. From the back of the arena it might have looked like a confrontation, a standoff of some kind. But up close it was a melding, Jason thought. They were looking into each other’s eyes, and what they saw was slowly making the rest of their surroundings fall away.

  If the boy had been frozen a minute ago, he was now thawed. Jason watched him for a few seconds before realizing that Caleb was actually crying. The amber light glinted off thin trails that ran down each cheek. His wide eyes seemed to droop, and he tilted his head ever so slightly. Caleb stared at the man with a kindness and empathy Jason had never seen. He swallowed and fought to control his emotions.

  The young man’s hair was short, standing straight up an inch, and it was suddenly quivering. His entire body began to shake. A single restrained sob escaped him, and it echoed through the auditorium like a gunshot. Heat washed down Jason’s spine. The lady on the front row with the fan whispered a teary, “Lord, have mercy on him.”

  The paraplegic’s hands fell off his wheels and hung limply. His whole body began to convulse with sobs and the boy just stared at him, weeping silently. The man suddenly dropped his head back and sagged in his chair. His mouth gaped, and he wept without air in a torturous silence. When he came to the end of himself, he gasped loudly and sobbed again, long and silent.

  Caleb closed his eyes, spread his arms out, and tilted his head to face the ceiling. His mouth opened in a silent cry. And then he closed his mouth and spoke a single word in his mother tongue. “Hara.”

  Yes.

  Jason felt a pulse rush through his body with that word. As if the boy had detonated a small bomb on stage and its concussion had slammed through his body. He caught his breath. Then it was gone.

  Gasps and cries of alarm filled the auditorium. The NBC crew were look- ing around in a stupor. Donna was frantically mouthing something to the man behind the camera, and he ducked his head back to the eyepiece. They were going live. Beside him Leiah released a sob.

  The boy lowered his head and strode purposefully to the man, a grin splitting his face now. He had that look, the one of desperate eagerness that Jason had seen at the convention hall. The paraplegic met the boy’s onrush as if they’d agreed it was a good thing. By the time Caleb reached the man, he’d picked up good speed. He slid a good four feet on his shiny new black shoes before coming to a stop and grasping the man’s hands.

  They clasped each other’s hands, and Caleb was speaking in Ge’ez. Their bodies shook as if an electric current had juiced them up. The man suddenly gasped and held his breath. His left leg—the loose one without a shred of muscle—shot straight out and stuck there with the shoe flopped to one side. The man took his eyes off Caleb and stared at it, aghast.

  They all watched that leg, and there could be no mistaking the matter— it was changing. Growing. Getting fatter. The blue slacks lost their stick look and swelled. The shoe snapped straight, and in a span of ten seconds the paraplegic’s leg looked like any leg outfitted in blue slacks.

  Caleb was laughing. A child at play.

  The cheap seats had nearly emptied, and the audience flooded the floor now. Mutters of exclamation and astonishment rippled through the arena.

  Caleb began to hop up and down with excitement. He suddenly yanked on the man’s arm and pulled him from the chair.

  But the man did not stand.

  Jason watched in horror as they fell together—Caleb backward and the man on top of him, sprawling li
ke tangled newborn colts.

  Cries of alarm erupted about the stadium. Angry shouts of protest.

  Caleb and the man rolled over once and then the boy sprang to his feet. He began to hop again as if it were all part of a great game. The man looked up at him, drew his feet under his body, and stood slowly on wobbly legs.

  That shut the crowd up.

  A grin cracked the young man’s face. A chuckle. He took a step forward. Then another. He gripped his legs and felt through the cloth, and they watched like hound dogs, in breathless silence.

  The man suddenly threw back his head and let out a bloodcurdling scream. “Yaaaahoooo!”

  Even Jason jumped.

  The jubilant man, now with full use of his legs, began to yell and jump with Caleb. “My legs, my legs, my legs!” he repeated over and over. He picked the boy up and squeezed him tight and then spun in circles. Caleb giggled in high pitch and Jason laughed with them. It was infectious.

  Suddenly the boy was on his seat and the man leapt for his red chair. He picked it up, swung it around once, and hurled it through the air. It smashed into the back wall and clattered noisily to the floor. Caleb leapt to his feet and began to hop again.

  They were like two children. They were two children, for all meaningful purposes, dancing this dance of theirs while three thousand people gaped in awe. A general roar filled the place. Voices of praise, voices of amazement, voices of doubt, voices of outrage—the voice of humanity all mixed together in one messy ball.

  “Praise the Lord! Praise the blessed Lord!” the old woman in the front row cried.

  “It’s a sham! That’s nothin’ but a sham,” the skinny nerd next to her said, but he was staring nonetheless. The two teenagers watched the stage with wide eyes. The whole place was on its feet and shouting in confusion.

  But the boy was ecstatic.

  He ran around the healed man, who was bouncing like a pogo stick, and the volume of outcry rose.

  What had happened this far was enough to spawn a thousand interesting debates over coffee, but what happened next made Caleb a household name.

  Jason didn’t know if it was all the noise or simply the boy’s enthusiasm that triggered his next move, but one second Caleb was rounding the man, and the next he was rushing the front of the stage. His aqua eyes were fired with excitement, and he still grinned mischievously.

  He slid to a stop at the edge of the stage, scanned the audience with a single sweep of his head, and then threw his head back and sang to the sky.

  The note that broke from his throat was pure and high, and it pierced the air like an arrow slicing though the fog.

  It’s Ge’ez, Jason thought.

  But it was all he thought, because the boy’s song seemed to spin his mind backward. The world fell into slow motion about him. Caleb was there, head jutted out to the crowd, eyes closed, singing with lips round like a Cheerio. The camera was winking green at him, and a thousand onlookers had their mouths open, but all of it seemed to have slowed to a crawl.

  And the sound was gone.

  Except for the song. Caleb’s notes filled his soul.

  For a brief moment everything froze. And then something hit Jason’s chest and he crumpled to his knees, dazed and numb. He slumped against the stage entrance, fighting against a thick sea of energy. But his strength was gone. That was all.

  But it wasn’t only him. Leiah lay facedown beside him, as though she were dead. A body nudged his heel, and he saw that it was Nikolous. The Greek was on his back.

  Jason forced his head up. The man who’d tossed his wheelchair lay on his back, facing the ceiling for the second time. And the audience . . .

  The audience was collapsing before his eyes!

  Jason’s mind screamed with alarm, but his body didn’t flinch. He simply watched the madness unfold. It was like an invisible wave of raw power that started on the left and rolled across the auditorium, tossing whatever stood in its path to the floor. If they were standing, as many of them were, they crashed to their seats or crumpled to the floor. If they were seated, they slumped in their chairs. The wave approached the NBC camera, which had spun to face it. Donna staggered and then fell to her side as if unable to hold a large weight that had been dropped on her back. The cameraman slumped in his seat, jerking the camera badly. Jason watched as he slipped out of his seat and thumped to the floor. The wave took no more than two seconds to cover the auditorium.

  And then there was absolute stillness.

  From the corner of his eye, Jason saw the yellow light on the NBC dish and he knew they were live. The world was watching.

  Caleb looked over the crowd and spoke in English. “You should not doubt the power of God.” Then he grinned again.

  They heard it. Sure they did, because Jason heard it, clear as day.

  Jason stood to his feet slowly. The world was still woozy; a warm contentment had settled in his mind. He thought it would be good to sit, so he eased himself out on the stage and sat. He swung his legs over the lip and faced the mess.

  And it was that. A mess. Bodies lay strewn over each other where they had fallen. Half had pushed themselves to their feet, but few had found the resolve to stand. The old woman up front lay flat on her back, wearing a huge grin that made Jason smile. Her granddaughter sat at her feet staring up at Caleb with round eyes. The vocal nerd to their right had his face planted on the floor, and his hands and legs spread wide to either side. The two teenagers lay next to each other like twins, still oblivious to the world. And the businessman at the end of the row had somehow ended up with his feet on his chair and his back on the floor. He didn’t seem in a hurry to reverse the arrangement.

  It was a mess. But it wasn’t a bad mess.

  A woman had stood and was picking her way to the front. In her arms lay a young boy, perhaps three or four years of age. Even from where he was, Jason could see that the child’s legs were crippled. He’d seen legs like those before. A vise seemed to squeeze Jason’s chest.

  She brought the child to the floor directly in front of Caleb, who watched her silently. The cameraman had managed to climb back on his stool, and he swung the camera back to the boy. Donna had pulled herself into a seat and was talking into a mike, dazed. She was telling them what had happened. Of course that was absurd, because she knew no more than Jason did about what had just happened.

  Either way it had happened. That was the point. It had really happened, right in front of a camera hot-wired into twenty million homes.

  And now another thing was happening. Now the mother was laying her child at the feet of Caleb, and the boy was looking desperate again. Caleb dropped to his knees, placed his hands on the child’s face, and muttered excitedly in Ge’ez.

  Then he stood, stepped to one side adjacent to the child, and faced the crowd. Beside him the young child stirred and sat up, dazed. His mother began to wail. If Caleb noticed, he didn’t show it. He raised his hands to the crowd and spoke a long string of words in his own language.

  Beside him the four-year-old stood up on quaking legs. Caleb lowered his hands and began to skip across the stage. The cries came from all across the auditorium, then sudden exclamations of surprise as those who had come with illness discovered that they were no longer ill. And those who came with debilitating handicaps were no more handicapped than the young man who’d thrown his wheelchair across the stage, or the young child who now walked in small circles while his mother wept uncontrollably.

  16

  THE MEETING LASTED ANOTHER HOUR, but mostly it was over ten minutes later, when Nikolous strode out and ushered Caleb offstage without any further words. The rest was aftermath.

  Donna made her way through the crowd interviewing those interested in telling their tale. As far as they could tell, ninety-eight people had come to the meeting suffering from some sort of ailment, and all ninety-eight left totally whole. A dozen theories were offered as to the cause of the wave that knocked them all over, and a dozen more as to the source of the boy’s power. And t
hat on the floor of the arena, before the talking heads on television had a chance to sink their teeth into what they saw.

  The spectacular footage captured by NBC’s crew was broadcast live on over two hundred affiliates, and then picked up and rebroadcast on all the other major networks and cable channels before the ten-o’clock hour. By midnight Eastern time over forty million households had either seen the small boy named Caleb or heard his story.

  As it turned out, it wasn’t the paraplegic who’d thrown his chair, or even the sudden inexplicable crumpling of the entire audience (cameraman included), that captured the greatest attention. Although mind-numbing enough, both could have been staged, a dozen commentators quickly pointed out. But it was the small boy who’d been laid at Caleb’s feet that pretty much shut the commentators up. The camera had zoomed in on his naked, twisted legs after Caleb had touched him. They all saw the bones twist and straighten and grow, close up, as if it were a special effect from a science-fiction flick.

  Only it wasn’t a special effect. It was live footage shot by a high-definition camera manned by a card-carrying NBC cameraman named Phillip Strantz, who’d been working for the network a good twelve years.

  Shown together with the young man hurling his red chair and the wave knocking them all into a definitive silence, the footage took the country by storm.

  Jason and Leiah left the Old Theater at ten that night.

  It occurred to Jason that Leiah hadn’t been healed of her scars. But then she’d insisted before that she didn’t need anybody’s help. She really didn’t need to be healed, did she? No, she did not.

  Stewart Long was in the garage messing with a stripped socket wrench at ten o’clock Tuesday night when Barbara hollered through the kitchen.

  “Stew! Stew get in here . . . you have to see this.”