The Caleb Collection Read online

  Caleb and Leiah were where he’d left them, behind the stage. Caleb was playing with some marbles on the floor while stagehands walked about barking orders in their walkie-talkies and adding to the general confusion. The boy seemed more comfortable with his surroundings than he had a week earlier.

  Leiah looked up and grinned deliberately. The incident at Jim’s Fish House had brought an awkwardness to their interaction, Jason thought. She’d pulled back. Not that they were close before, but at least they’d never had trouble speaking their minds. During the last four days their candor had been replaced by a sort of insecurity. A shyness. The kind of feeling you might have returning to a swimming pool the day after having the water suck your trunks off on a particularly spectacular dive that you knew darn well they were all watching.

  The feeling was compounded by his budding certainty that she was terrified of his interest and was kindly withdrawing. Which in turn made him wonder if he really was interested. It felt like a nasty downward spiral.

  He grinned and dipped his head.

  To his right Donna’s voice broke his train of thought. “Hello, Jason. You ready for this?” She’d entered from the floor, smiling wide, obviously in her element. He glanced at the door she walked through. A guard stood by biting one of his fingernails. He’d have to talk to Nikolous about security. If Donna could just waltz in, so could the black avengers out there.

  “I don’t know, Donna. Depends what this is. There’s gonna be a lot of disappointed people if he decides not to walk on water tonight.”

  “He won’t. I don’t think he knows the difference between water and land. By the way, I interviewed Crandal yesterday. If you didn’t catch it, the whole thing’s being rebroadcast on the late edition tonight.”

  She winked and walked by.

  “And? You asked him?”

  She turned back, smiling coy. “I did and he’s clean. If anything, the boy might have helped deliver him his presidency.”

  “What?”

  “Late Edition, Jason. Eleven o’clock. Watch it.” She headed for Nikolous and was gone.

  He stared dumbly after her. She was wrong. Crandal was involved like hydrogen was involved with water. They might not see it, but it was there.

  The organ music suddenly swelled and the lights dimmed. Nikolous was starting his show.

  They started with the fog machines behind the curtain even before Nikolous had finished his upgraded and considerably longer speech of introduction. Jason couldn’t see the crowd, but he could almost hear their rapt silence. The new stage managers had improved the sound system, he noted. He could feel his spine rattling with the sustained note. And the light show was nothing to laugh at either. Ten new banks of lights hung from the high ceiling, shifting colored hues that leaked onto the stage despite the lowered curtain. They had most definitely gone Hollywood.

  The Greek strutted offstage, and Leiah reluctantly let Caleb go. The boy did a sweet thing then. At the entrance to the stage he reached up and kissed her on the cheek. A bank of fog about six inches deep covered the stage as he walked out to the microphone, giving the illusion that he was walking on a cloud.

  They didn’t lift the curtain until he stood still in the center. Then the purple curtain rose on its cables, and for the second time the world looked at the small boy on the stage of the Old Theater.

  Caleb just stood there, gazing out at the lights, and Jason wondered if he would walk back again. But he didn’t. Instead he put his hands behind his back and walked slowly to his right, away from them.

  They had lowered the music to a whisper, and you could hear the collective breathing of the crowd. Caleb reached the end of the stage and then turned and walked back to their end, slowly, like a schoolmaster studying a group of misfits gathered for detention.

  He stopped and looked out for a long time—enough time for a few voices to begin whispering. He suddenly turned around and Jason saw his face. Caleb’s cheeks were wet with tears. But it was the only sign that he was crying. He was reacting to the crowd in their wheelchairs. Jason swallowed.

  The boy suddenly turned and walked back to Leiah, who’d stepped up to the side curtain. She dropped to a knee and took the boy in her arms. But Caleb didn’t want consoling; he wanted to talk to her. He put his mouth by her ear and began to whisper.

  She stood and looked at Nikolous. “He wants me to go out with him.”

  The Greek hesitated. He waved her out quickly. “Go then. Go.”

  Leiah quickly straightened her scarf and, with a final furtive glance at Jason, walked out onto the stage with Caleb.

  He led her by the hand, he wearing his red bow tie and she her red scarf, and Jason wondered about the coincidence. They walked through the fog and stopped before the microphone. Caleb looked at her and she bent again. She listened for a few seconds and then stood. Leiah looked back at Jason one last time. He tried to give her an encouraging smile, but his heart was slamming away in his chest and he wasn’t sure what his face actually did. Whatever it was it seemed to work. She lifted the microphone from its stand and spoke to the audience.

  “Caleb is from Ethiopia, as you know. His mother tongue is Ge’ez, and although he speaks some English he says he would rather that I speak for him, since I am very good at English.”

  A few chuckled at that, but it was an oh-isn’t-that-cute chuckle and Jason found himself joining it.

  “Those are his words, of course. He wants me to ask you if you believe in God . . .” Caleb was pulling on her arm and she bent to him, listened, and then straightened again.

  “I’m sorry; he wants me to ask you if you believe in the kingdom of God.” The room remained silent, and she looked down at him for further instruction, but Caleb seemed satisfied. He looked to the crowd, waiting for some kind of response.

  They waited in an awkward silence for about ten seconds. And then Caleb looked up at Leiah again, and he whispered in her ear for a long time.

  When she stood, they were leaning forward in their seats to hear her words. The boy’s words.

  “He says that’s what he thought. Because he has seen a lot of anger and meanness and bad things, and he doesn’t understand them. There is darkness and there is light, and he doesn’t understand why so many people would want to walk in the darkness. He says that when Jesus walked on the earth he walked in the light, and Caleb thinks it would be very good if all of you would start to walk in the light as well.”

  Caleb was pulling on her arm before she finished. Leiah dipped for his words.

  “He wants to know if anyone really wants to walk in the kingdom of God, because anyone who really wants to enter the kingdom of God can. It is a simple matter of belief. Of faith.”

  Another tug, another whisper, another nugget.

  “Whoever follows the Spirit into the kingdom becomes a son of God. His dadda taught him that. It is inside you, and everywhere, through the narrow gate. But it is very nice in that place. He thinks you should all go there and be sons of God.”

  For what seemed like a full minute, no one spoke. The boy stood very still and Leiah kept looking at him for more, but he just looked at the people. Someone on the front row had a bad chest cold and coughed loudly. Jason imagined he could hear the combined whir of the cameras, but it could just as easily have been the buzz of lights above.

  Caleb tilted his head up to Leiah and spoke again, quickly this time.

  “He wants to know . . .” She stopped and bent to Caleb for clarification.

  Leiah started again. “He wants to know who draws the pictures that move.”

  Still no one responded. They were star-struck, Jason thought. Absolutely flummoxed. It was the first time the boy had spoken of his faith, and no one seemed to know what to make of it. Jason certainly didn’t. The kingdom stuff was clearly something out of a storybook or something.

  Leiah was bent over Caleb yet again, and now they exchanged whispers several times. Fresh tears wet the boy’s face, and he kept looking out to the audience. When Lei
ah straightened she took a small step away from him. Her voice held a tremble.

  “It seems very important to him for you to know that this kingdom is not a matter of eating or drinking or walking or even breathing. His dadda taught him that too. It is about peace and happiness and doing right.” She paused and shifted.

  “He will ask his Father if he wants to do some things for you now.”

  It was the boy’s way of saying he was going to pray for them, Jason thought. He was tying his power to a faith; that much was clear. God and Jesus and this kingdom of his—Dadda’s words for how things worked.

  Caleb had closed his eyes and lifted his chin, and it occurred to Jason that something might actually happen now. Oddly he hadn’t really prepared himself for a repeat of the last meeting, maybe because it still seemed so farfetched. He had been thrown from his feet, true enough. But it had been a distant place, like in a dream. Real, but only momentarily real, if that made any sense.

  And yet here he was, facing the boy who had his chin lifted, presumably praying to some God in the heavens. He swallowed and instinctively steadied himself with a hand on the wall.

  Leiah stared at the boy, and she took another step back. The tears were drying on his small cheeks, and his hands hung loosely by his sides. He stood like a lost child in the middle of the large stage, with wisps of fog floating by his feet and a serene blue stage light illuminating the tall palms and pillars behind him. For a moment the scene was perfectly peaceful and as still as a painting.

  For a moment.

  The light came first, a jagged finger of white lightning that started above the stage and reached to the back of the arena. Jason jerked back and threw a hand up to his face. The light stuttered above them; silent for a brief blinding moment, it seemed to hang in the air.

  The sound followed, a deafening thunderclap, as if a bomb had detonated twenty feet above the stage. With the clap, the lightning blinked to black. Scattered voices cried out, but for the most part, they crouched, frozen.

  If Jason wasn’t mistaken, lightning had just struck—in the building.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw that Leiah had dropped to her seat with her legs in front of her. He was aware that the hair on his arms stood out.

  Caleb stood unmoved in the blue light. A smile now curved his lips, but his eyes were still closed.

  The lightning sputtered again, but not with the same force as the first time. It cracked once, then twice. Jason felt the air feather his face and lift his bangs. A force tickled his skin and brushed through . . .

  No, it wasn’t a force. It was wind! A warm wind was blowing over them!

  Jason looked out to the boy again. He stood with his arms wide now, facing the wind head-on, smiling ear to ear with an open mouth, like a kid on a joyride. And suddenly the wind was more of a gale, rushing through the auditorium on its way to the stage.

  The wind whipped at Caleb’s shirt and hair, flapping both back. Loose sheets of paper and wrappers spun by him. The wind gathered strength, howling loudly now. One of the camera tripods crashed to the ground. Camera crews were desperately holding on to their equipment, but they dared not interrupt their signals; this was all live. The tall palm trees bent backward and then began to fall, smashing to the plywood floor. Leiah lay flat on her back, arms spread wide. Jason thought she might be laughing.

  And then the wind suddenly died.

  A large orange poster with Caleb’s silhouette on it floated lazily down like a tossed feather.

  And then it began again, with a loud roar. Only this time, the wind had reversed direction and rushed from the stage toward the audience.

  Caleb was laughing out loud now. His hair flew past his face, and his little shoulders shook in laughter that pealed above the rush.

  There were over three thousand people on the main floor, most of them sitting in wheelchairs or holding oxygen bottles or holding their walking devices with white knuckles. The wind blew through them head-on, and nobody really saw exactly what happened to them. Some things, sure. Bodies were falling over backward, and arms were flailing, and pillows and blankets and hair clips and all sorts of loose objects were flying through the air. They all saw that. But no one really saw the healing.

  But suddenly the wind was gone again, and the kind of stillness that comes right after a storm settled on them while they cleared their heads. Caleb was hopping on the stage. Laughing and jumping, ecstatic.

  It took all of one second for the crowd to understand what had happened. To see and feel their whole bodies. To come to the brutal realization that they had been totally and completely healed. All of them.

  Pandemonium had broken out on the floor. The cameras swung and jerked to catch this one and that one, dancing or jumping, mouths screaming and arms lifted. The press lines were swarmed by people eager to try out their limbs. Three of the minitowers toppled, including CNN’s.

  Caleb began to run back and forth, thrilled, hands raised to the sky, giggling and generally beside himself.

  Jason watched the scene with an open jaw. It had all happened in less than sixty seconds. Maybe two minutes if you started from the time Caleb had closed his eyes. Apart from a healthy dose of hair raising, nothing had happened to him. But out there where the people had come to feel the boy’s power, they had felt it and their lives had been changed. At least in part.

  This time Nikolous let the boy run around on the stage for fifteen minutes while the auditorium went nuts. Then he collected him, ushered him into the protected limousine, and whisked him off to that dungeon they called his home.

  The last thing Jason saw before leaving with a grinning but otherwise unaffected Leiah was the black-clad avengers. The wind must have blown their picket signs away, but they still wore their hoods. The CBS crew was interviewing them and they weren’t smiling.

  20

  CALEB LAY ON HIS BED IN THE DARK.

  Well, it wasn’t really dark because the lights were flashing on his wall in reds and blues and greens. The television lights. But he was trying not to look at that.

  A day had passed since the meeting when the wind had come. He knew it was a day, because Jason and Leiah had visited once. Leiah was beginning to see, he thought. Or at least she wanted to see, which was just as good, because it all started with wanting. The wanting and then the surrendering.

  “Surrendering is like not wanting,” Dadda said.

  “You want and then you don’t want?”

  “You want to enter the kingdom and then you decide it’s worth everything in your life. You decide not to want your own kingdom. Like the man who sold all he owned for the field. See?”

  He saw, but he’d never really understood why Dadda should call it surrender, because it didn’t feel like giving anything up. It had always felt more like gaining.

  Until now. Now he was fighting; not watching the moving painting felt like Dadda’s surrender. And it was harder than he would have guessed.

  He wasn’t sure why watching was something he shouldn’t do, only that he shouldn’t. Well, for one thing, it was mean things and bad people over there on the picture. At least to him it felt bad. And that could not be good.

  He rolled onto his side and began to hum softly.

  He had been doing well with the witch, he thought. He was eating all of his dinner food, because it seemed to please her. The bitter mush was an every-night thing now, but with enough water, it really wasn’t that bad. At least she hadn’t hit him again.

  Martha had said that he’d go to two more meetings this week. They really liked that, didn’t they? Of course, who wouldn’t? The wind had been like God’s breath. Like something from the life of Elijah or Elisha, who were two of his favorite people. Not that he was really them; for one thing they were a lot older. And for another thing, they spoke to kings, and Caleb didn’t think he was really a prophet or anything like that. But when those prophets asked God, fire fell from heaven, and ax heads floated, and all kinds of amazing things happened. Things like God’s wi
nd blowing on the faces of the sick and healing them. He chuckled.

  Of course there was always Moses. Maybe he was more like Moses, and Moses was one of his favorites too. He didn’t speak well in front of people either, did he? He used Aaron instead. But when it came to calling down frogs and turning the sky black with insects and making the rivers red with blood, Moses didn’t seem to have a problem. He hit a rock once and water poured out— enough water to flood the monastery, Dadda said. That’s how much it would take for them all to drink. Maybe Ethiopia needed a Moses during the droughts.

  A shiver ran through Caleb’s bones at the thought, and he smiled. Elijah had once been fed by birds. Did that mean he liked birds too?

  Caleb had been walking in the kingdom a long time now, five years at least, but never had he seen how easily the kingdom could spill over into this world. Like light into darkness. But then he’d never seen so much darkness either. Definitely not in the monastery. By the way some of the people were acting in the theater, you would think that they no longer believed in people like Elijah and Moses. Or God, really. They no longer believed in God. At least not God, God.

  The miracles were God’s choice, of course. Father Nikolous might think he had something to do with what happened, but really Caleb had done what he’d done because his Father had given him the power to do it. And because his heart felt so heavy at seeing the people. He could have walked off the stage, but why would he? Not with so many hurting. And he knew that it was all a part of God’s plot for sure. He wasn’t completely sure of the plot, but it was unfolding like a thunderstorm, wasn’t it?

  An hour later Caleb was still thinking, not in meditation or in the light. Just thinking. In fact, he wasn’t really thinking about anything when he suddenly decided to sit up and look at the television.

  He watched the colors and the figures running around, and his heart began to pound. It was terrifying and exhilarating at once. And it was only looking. That’s all it really was. He wasn’t going into the picture and joining them; he was only studying them like he might a book.