Torren looked wary. “Fine,” he said.
“Good,” said Ben. He stroked his beard. Lina wondered if that was all he had to say.
Torren filled the silence. “Is your arm still attached to you?” he said.
“Yes,” said Ben. “Just barely.” He started to frown into the air again and then thought better of it. He sat down on a bench. “Well,” he said. “I thought I’d just come and see you. Haven’t seen you for a while.”
“Years,” said Torren.
“Well, yes. Busy life, you know, being a town leader. Many decisions to make. Matters of right and wrong to . . . to grapple with.”
“Oh,” said Torren. Lina could tell he was thinking the same thing she was: Why has he come?
“Sometimes one makes the right decision,” said Ben. “Sometimes not.”
“I guess so,” said Torren.
Ben readjusted his bandaged arm. Lina saw that his beard was not as neatly trimmed as usual. Probably he had a hard time doing it with his left hand. She was pretty sure Ben didn’t have a wife—she’d never heard mention of one.
“Well,” said Ben. “You were fortunate, weren’t you, getting pulled out of that tree?”
“Yes,” said Torren.
“I am forced to acknowledge,” said Ben, “that it was my fault. That fire.”
“I guess so,” said Torren.
“An accident,” said Ben, “but one that did not have to happen.”
“Uh-huh,” said Torren.
Ben got to his feet with painful slowness. “So,” he said. “Enjoyable talking with you. No doubt we should get to know each other. You must come by for a visit sometime, though of course I’m rarely home.”
“You’re very busy,” said Torren.
“That’s right,” said Ben. He made his way toward the gate with his limping step. As he went out, he waved over his shoulder with his good hand, but he didn’t turn around. Slowly, he started back toward the village.
“That was an apology,” Lina said to Torren when Ben was gone. “He’s sorry for doing what he did. I guess he’s sorry for not being a good uncle, too—for not taking you to live with him.”
“Live with him?” said Torren. He made a horrible face.
“Well, I thought you weren’t happy living with Dr. Hester,” Lina said. “You never seem very happy.”
“I am too happy,” said Torren crossly. He sat down on the bench that Ben had just left and pulled the hunk of bread from his pocket. A few little birds were hopping nearby. Absently, Torren tossed them some crumbs. He seemed to be thinking. “I like it here,” he said to Lina, and he looked up at her with his eyes all round, as if he had only just discovered this himself.
The next day, Doon came to the door of the doctor’s house carrying a sack. Kenny was with him, standing slightly behind Doon and peering curiously past him into the room.
“I have to show you this,” Doon said to Lina. “I made it with the present you brought me.”
“He’s kind of a genius,” Kenny said. “He already showed me.”
Doon set the sack on the window seat. It was only just after dinnertime, but the days were shorter now, and the sun was nearly down. Dr. Hester had already lit two candles. She and Mrs. Murdo and Maddy were sitting at the table shelling lima beans. Poppy was sitting with them, tearing the bean pods into little pieces. All four came over to see what Doon had brought.
Torren came, too. He was actually more interested in showing Doon what he had than in seeing what was in the sack. “I got a present from Caspar,” he said.
“Great,” said Doon, but he wasn’t really listening. Lina could see how excited he was about whatever he had in the sack. His eyes shone in the candlelight, and his hands fidgeted impatiently with the string around the sack’s neck. When he got it untied, he reached into the sack and brought out a small device made of wood and metal—some sort of machine, Lina thought. It had a coil of wire, and inside the coil she saw the magnet she’d given Doon. There was a handle that looked as if it would make something turn. Lina, not being much interested in machines, was a little disappointed.
It was clear that Torren was disappointed, too. “Want to see my present from Caspar?” he said.
“In a minute,” said Doon. “Let me show you this first.”
“What does it do?” Lina asked.
“Is it some kind of a can opener?” asked Mrs. Murdo.
“Or maybe it’s a sort of mixer?” said the doctor.
“Or a drill?” said Maddy.
“Nope,” said Doon happily, and Kenny, his face shining with the shared secret, whispered, “Nope,” too. “You won’t believe it,” Doon went on, “but it makes electricity. I found the directions for it in a book called Science Projects, but I couldn’t try it out before because I didn’t have a magnet. I didn’t even know what a magnet was. But then you brought me one, Lina! And just the other day I remembered about this project.” He took the machine over to the table and set it down. “What you do is, you turn this crank, and that turns the magnet, and that generates the electricity and runs it down these wires. It’s supposed to be enough to light a light bulb. The trouble is, I can’t test it because I couldn’t find any light bulbs that weren’t broken.”
Torren started jumping up and down. He pounded on Doon’s arm. “My present from Caspar! My present from Caspar!” he yelled. He bolted into the medicine room.
“What’s the matter with—” said Doon, but Lina broke in.
“Doon!” she said. “His present from Caspar was a light bulb! Unused!”
Torren came out of the medicine room carrying the light bulb encased in both hands, walking now, fast but with stiff legs, being extremely careful. “You won’t break it, will you?” he said to Doon. “Your experiment won’t blow it up, will it?”
Doon gazed at the light bulb as if it was the most wonderful thing he’d ever seen. Gingerly, he reached for it. “I’ll be very, very careful,” he said. “You can help me, Torren. Hold the light bulb right here.” He showed Torren where to put the bulb, and he wound two loose wires around its metal end.
“Now,” he said. “Blow out the candles.”
Lina blew them out. The room went dark.
Doon began turning the crank of his machine.
At first nothing happened except that the magnet turned around. Doon cranked faster. And faster. And a glimmer appeared in the light bulb, first a glimmer and then a glow, and then the bulb shone with a faint but steady white light.
Lina shrieked. Poppy shrieked, too, because Lina had, and both the doctor and Mrs. Murdo gasped and broke into applause. Kenny beamed, glancing between the light bulb and Doon’s face. Torren was being too careful to make a noise, but his eyes grew wide and his mouth dropped open.
For almost three minutes, until his hand got tired, Doon turned the crank of his machine around and around. The doctor wagged her head in wonder, Mrs. Murdo turned her face away to hide her tears, and Torren held on tight to the light bulb even though it was getting very warm. Lina gazed at the light shining on everyone’s faces. Full to the brim with hope and love and joy, she watched the little light bulb shining like a promise in the night.
Acknowledgments
My gratitude to my patient agent, Nancy Gallt, my skilled editor, Jim Thomas, and my unfailingly supportive friend Susie Mader.
THE PROPHET
OF
YONWOOD
Jeanne DuPrau
RANDOM HOUSE NEW YORK
Contents
Master - Table of Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
THE VISION
1. The Inheritance
2. The Third Floor
3. The Girl in the Closet
4. Break-In
5. The Fiery Vision
6. Mrs. Beeson’s Idea
7. The Short Way Home
8. A Crack in the Sky
9. At the Prophet’s House
10. The Photograph and the Journal
11. Trouble Spots
/>
12. Inside the Backyard Shed
13. The Perfect Living Room
14. Someone in the Basement
15. Up to the Woods
16. The Snake’s Dinner
17. Hoyt McCoy’s Horrible House
18. What Grover Saw
19. Blue Envelopes
20. Orders
21. Getting Ready for the Open House
22. An Indoor Universe
23. The Emergency Meeting
24. The Bracelet
25. The Open House
26. Catastrophe
27. The Chase
28. One More Trip to the Woods
29. The Last Day
30. Nickie and the Prophet
31. Love
WHAT HAPPENED AFTERWARD
Acknowledgments
The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
—J.B.S. Haldane
_________________
The Vision
On a warm July afternoon in the town of Yonwood, North Carolina, a woman named Althea Tower went out to her backyard to fill the bird feeder. She opened her sack of sunflower seeds, lifted the bird feeder’s lid—and that was when, without warning, the vision assailed her.
It was like a waking dream. The trees and grass and birds faded away, and in their place she saw blinding flashes of light so searingly bright she staggered backward, dropped her sack of birdseed, and fell to the ground. Billows of fire rose around her, and a hot wind roared. She felt herself flung high into the sky, and from there she looked down on a dreadful scene. The whole earth boiled with flames and black smoke. The noise was terrible—a howling and crashing and crackling—and finally, when the firestorm subsided, there came a silence that was more terrible still.
When the vision finally faded, it left Althea stunned. She lay on the ground, unable to move, with her mind all jumbled and birds pecking at the spilled birdseed around her. She might have lain there for hours if Mrs. Brenda Beeson had not happened to come by a few minutes later to bring her a basket of strawberries.
Seeing Althea on the ground, Mrs. Beeson rushed forward. She bent over her friend and spoke to her, but Althea only moaned. So Mrs. Beeson used her cell phone to call for help. Within minutes, four of her best friends—the doctor, the police chief, the town mayor, and the minister of the church—had all arrived. The doctor squatted beside Althea and spoke slowly and loudly. “Can you tell us what’s wrong?” he said. “What is it?”
Althea shivered. Her lips twisted as she tried to speak. Everyone leaned in to hear.
“It’s God,” she whispered. “God. I saw…I saw…” She trailed off.
“Merciful heavens,” said Brenda Beeson. “She’s had a vision.”
Of course they didn’t know at first what her vision had been. They thought maybe she’d seen God. But why would that frighten her so? Why would she be muttering about fire and smoke and disaster?
Days went by, and Althea didn’t get better. She lay on her bed hardly moving, staring into the air and mumbling. Then, exactly a week later, a clue to the mystery came. The president of the United States announced that talks with the Phalanx Nations had reached a crisis. Their leaders would not give in on any of their demands, and the leaders of the United States would not give in on theirs. Unless some sort of agreement could be reached, the president said, it might be necessary to go to war.
Brenda Beeson made the connection right away: War! That must be what Althea Tower had seen. Mrs. Beeson called her friends, they told their friends, the newspaper wrote it up, and soon the whole town knew: Althea Tower had seen the future, and it was terrible.
All over Yonwood, people gathered in frightened clusters to talk. Could it be true? The more they thought about it, the more it seemed it could be. Althea had always been a quiet, sensible person, not the sort to make things up. And these were strange times, what with conflicts and terrorists and talk of the end of the world—just the kind of times when visions and miracles were likely to happen.
Brenda Beeson formed a committee to take care of Althea and pay attention to anything else she might say. People wrote letters to the newspaper about her and left flowers and ribbons and handwritten notes in front of her house. The minister spoke of her in church.
After a few weeks, nearly everyone was calling her the Prophet.
CHAPTER 1
__________________
The Inheritance
Nickie Randolph’s first sight of the town of Yonwood was a white steeple rising out of the pine forest that covered the mountainside. She leaned forward, gazing through the windshield of the car. “Is that it?”
Her aunt Crystal, who was driving, put one hand up to shield her eyes from the rays of the setting sun. “That’s it,” she said.
“My new home,” said Nickie.
“You have to get that notion out of your mind,” said Crystal. “It’s not going to happen.”
I’m going to make it happen, thought Nickie, though she didn’t say it out loud. Crystal’s mood was already bad enough. “How long till we get there?” she asked.
“We’ll be there in twenty minutes, if nothing else gets in our way.”
A lot had gotten in their way so far. The Streakline train was closed down because of the Crisis, so they’d had to drive. They’d been on the road for seven hours, though the trip from Philadelphia should have taken no more than five. But long lines at gas stations, detours around pot-holed or snow-covered stretches of highway, and military roadblocks had slowed them down. Crystal didn’t like delays. She was a fast-moving, efficient person, and when her way was blocked, she became very tense and spoke with her lips in two hard lines.
They came to the Yonwood exit, and Crystal turned off the highway onto a road that wound uphill. Here the trees grew thick on either side, and so tall that their bare branches met overhead, making a canopy of sticks. Drops of rain began to spatter the car’s windshield.
After a while, they came to a sign that said, “Yonwood. Pop. 2,460.” The trees thinned out, and the rain fell harder. They passed a few storage sheds, a collapsing barn, and a lumberyard. After that, houses began to appear on the side of the road—small, tired-looking wooden houses, their roofs dripping. Many of them had rockers or couches on the front porch, where people would no doubt be sitting if it weren’t the dead of winter.
From a small brick shelter at the side of the road, a policeman stepped out holding a red stop sign. He held it up and waved it at them. Crystal slowed down, stopped, and opened her window. The policeman bent down. He had on a rain jacket with the hood up, and rain dripped off the hood and onto his nose. “Hello, ma’am,” he said. “Are you a resident?”
“No,” said Crystal. “Is that a problem?”
“Just doing a routine entry check, ma’am,” the man said. “Part of our safety program. Had some evidence lately of possible terrorist activity in the woods. Your purpose here?”
“My grandfather has died,” Crystal said. “My sister and I have inherited his house. I’ve come to fix the house up and sell it.”
The man glanced at Nickie. “This is your sister?”
“This is my niece,” said Crystal. “My sister’s daughter.”
“And your grandfather’s name?” said the man.
“Arthur Green,” said Crystal.
“Ah, yes,” the policeman said. “A fine gentleman.” He smiled. “You be careful while you’re here, now. We’ve had reports indicating there may be agents of the Phalanx Nations traveling alone or in small groups in parts of the area. Have you been spoken to by any suspicious strangers?”
“No,” said Crystal. “Just you. You seem very suspicious.”
“Ha ha,” said the man, not really laughing. “All right, ma’am,” he went on. “You may go. Sorry for the delay, but as you know there’s a crisis. We’re taking every precaution.”
He stepped away, and they drove on.
“Terrorists even here?” Nickie said.
<
br /> “It’s nonsense,” said Crystal. “Why would a terrorist be wandering around in the woods? Pay no attention.”
Nickie was so tired of the Crisis. It had been going on now for months. On TV and the radio, it was all you ever heard about: how Our Side and Their Side had come almost, but not quite, to the point of declaring all-out war. In the last week or so, the radio had started broadcasting frightening instructions every hour: “In the event of a declaration of war or a large-scale terrorist attack, cities will be evacuated in an orderly fashion…. Residents will be directed to safe locations…. Citizens should remain calm….”
It seemed to Nickie that everything in the world had gone wrong—including her own family. Eight months ago, her father had left on a government job. He couldn’t tell them where he was going or what he was supposed to do, and he warned that he might not be able to get in touch with them very often. This turned out to be true. She and her mother had had exactly one postcard from him. The postmark had been smudged, so they couldn’t tell where the card came from. And the message was no help, either. It said, “Dear Rachel and Nickie, I am working hard, everything is fine, don’t worry. I hope you’re both doing well. Love, Dad.”
But they were not doing well. Nickie’s mother missed Nickie’s father and couldn’t bear not knowing where he was. She worried about losing her job, and so she worked too hard, and so she was always tired and sad. And Nickie hadn’t felt happy or safe for a long time. She hated Philadelphia. Something awful seemed always about to happen there. The emergency sirens blasted night and day. Government helicopters circled overhead. In the streets, where trash blew in the wind, dangerous people might be around any corner. And school—a tall, grim building with stinking bathrooms—was just as bad. The books were older than the students, the teachers were too tired to teach, and mean kids prowled the halls. Nickie hated being at school.
But she didn’t much like being at home, either, in the big tenth-floor condo where she and her mother lived, with its dusty, unused rooms and its huge plateglass windows that gave a frightening view straight down to the tiny street below. She was home alone too much lately. She was nervous and restless. She’d read half a book and set it down. She’d work on her Amazing Things scrapbook and get bored after pasting in just one picture. She’d gaze through her binoculars at people going by on the street below, which she used to do for hours, but even her endless curiosity seemed to have faded, and she’d turn away after a few minutes. When she was really desperate, she’d turn on the TV, even though there was almost nothing on but news, and the news was always the same: grim government spokesmen, troops in camouflage dashing around in foreign places, and the skeletons of blown-up cars and buses. Sometimes the president would come on, his white hair always brushed perfectly smooth, his neat white beard giving him a look of wisdom. “These are dangerous times,” he would say, “but with the help of God we will prevail.”