"Why not? What happened?"

"Nothing. He's just not right."

And then he was out the door and gone.

Bill was stunned. He stared at the slowly closing door in mute confusion, then turned to Nicky who was leaning against the far wall, looking at his shoes.

"What did you do this time?"

"Nothing."

"Bull! Let's hear it!"

"I caught him cheating at chess!"

"Oh, come on, Nicky! Give me a break!"

"It's true! Everything was going great until we started playing chess. I was winning with that bishop's gambit you showed me. He sent me out to the kitchen for another cup of hot chocolate, and when I came back, he had moved his queen's knight one square to the left."

"And you accused him of cheating?"

"Not right away. I just told him that the knight wasn't where it was when I'd left the room. He got all huffy and said, 'I'm sure you're mistaken, young man.' "

"Then what?"

"Then I called him a cheat!"

"Damn it, Nicky!" Bill felt his anger shooting straight to the boiling point, but he kept a lid on it. "Did it ever occur to you that you could be mistaken?"

"You know I don't make mistakes like that!" Nicky said, tears starting in his eyes.

That did it. Bill picked up Nicky's duffel bag and shoved it into the boy's arms. His jaw ached as he spoke through his teeth.

"Get out of the good clothes, put them back in the dress-up closet, then go to your room and stay there. Don't show your face till dinner."

"But he cheated!" Nicky said, his lips quivering.

"So what! Are you so damn perfect you can't overlook that?"

Nicky turned and ran toward the dormitory.

Bill watched him go. Then, for lack of anything better to do, he headed for his office. Once there, he lifted the blotter, pulled out the letter from Loyola High School, and sat there staring at it.

Damn, damn, damn!

He felt like a heel for yelling at Nicky like that. If there was one thing you could say about that kid, it was that he didn't lie. Another thing you could say was that his memory was damn near perfect—eidetic, in fact. He could picture entire pages of a book in his mind and read the text back verbatim. So Bill knew that if Nicky was concentrating on a chess game, he would have the position of every piece etched in his mind.

Which meant that Professor Calder had cheated.

So… the prof was a pompous toad whose ego wouldn't allow him to be defeated in chess by a bright ten-year-old kid, and Nicky was stupid for not letting the guy have his petty, tainted victory. And Bill had promised to stay on at St. Francis until Nicky was adopted.

What a screwed-up mess!

In spite of himself, he had to admire Nicky's intellectual honesty in calling Professor Calder out. Maybe he didn't want to be adopted by a phony and a cheat, but for chrissake, everybody made compromises in life! Nicky could have looked the other way!

His frustration finally reached the overflow point. With an angry growl Bill balled up the letter from Loyola High and bounced it off the far wall of his office.

I'm never getting out of here!

Which might not be an exaggeration, he realized. If he turned down this post, who knew when he'd get another offer of a teaching job?

There was only one thing to do: Take the job.

He scouted the floor of his office, found the letter, and flattened it out on the desk. He knew he had made a promise to Nicky, but he couldn't be bound by it if Nicky wasn't going to hold up his end. Maybe Nicky didn't want to leave St. F.'s. Okay, that was fine. But Bill Ryan wasn't going to rot here in Queens when there was so much to be done out there in the real world.

He began composing the letters he would have to write.

Sunday, March 10

1

You walk through the moaning forest outside Targoviste and revel in its beauty. Its splendid trees straddle the road that leads to the south, the road on which the Turks will approach. A young forest, only a few days old, yet numbering twenty thousand trees. When you grip the trunk of one of its saplings, the tips of your thumb and middle finger meet on the far side.

The wind does not sigh through the boughs of this forest. It screams.

Twenty thousand saplings, all freshly planted. Never have you experienced such a concentrated dose of agony. It is making you lightheaded, giddy. You lift your gaze to the upper levels of this forest where dear Vlad's impaled enemies—real and imagined, men and women and children, dead and dying, Romanians, Turks, Germans, Bulgarians, and Hungarians— all await Muhammad II.

It is a still forest, this. Although cries of pain fill the air, there is little or no motion among the boughs. For each victim has learned of the agony beyond bearing that attends the slightest movement. In their subjective time the nightmare started an eternity ago, when a long, sharp—but not too sharp—stake was driven deep into an anus or a vagina or down a throat, or simply poked through the abdominal wall, after which the hapless man, woman, or child was hoisted into the air upon that stake, which was then planted along the side of this road.

In the fortunate ones, the point of the stake quickly found a vital organ or artery, and death rescued them. You curse their limp, silent, blissful death. But in so many others, the stake moves more slowly, in short hops, remorselessly forging a path of torture through the innards as the weight of the body pulls it relentlessly downward. Sometimes there is a respite of sorts, as when the point lodges against a bone and its progress is halted. Then every movement, even the slightest shudder of pain, must be avoided. And a breeze is the most dreaded thing of all.

You hear soft whimpering from just above your right shoulder. The pain-mad eyes of a young girl look down at you pleadingly. Evidently the stake within her has run up against something that will not let it pass. The eyes beg for help. You smile. Yes, you will help. You grasp the stake and shake it violently. You are rewarded by hoarse, mindless screeching as her body suddenly slips three inches lower. Blood rushes down the stake and runs over your hand.

You lick your fingers…

Carol awoke and ran to the bathroom, retching uncontrollably. These dreams! Tonight's was the worst, the sickest, the most real of all! What was wrong with her? Please, God! These dreams… when were they going to stop?

2

She was feeling better now, but the lingering memory of the dream had left her queasy. They'd run out of milk, so she'd gone down to Stan's Market for a quart, but now the waxed container sweated unnoticed in one hand along with the five-dollar bill and the box of Entenmann's doughnuts in the other as she stood at the counter and stared at a headline on one of the tabloids. She felt her mouth go dry as she read the words that filled The Light's entire front page.