“Good,” said Nickie. “Because I found out Crystal doesn’t like dogs. We have to be extremely careful.”
“Okay,” said Amanda. “I’ll put him under the covers with me tonight.”
Nickie gave Otis one more pat and hurried back downstairs. For a while, she and Crystal sat in the front parlor and watched the news.
A local announcer was talking. “Several residents in Hickory Cove and Creekside,” he said, “have reported signs of unusual activity in nearby wooded areas. A hiker claims to have caught a glimpse, in a remote part of the woods, of a man wearing a white or light tan coat. Residents of the area are advised to be alert to anything out of the ordinary, including unknown persons arriving in town; evidence of tampering with buildings, pipelines, or electrical equipment; and strange behavior of any kind.”
Then the president came on. Nickie didn’t like listening to him because his voice always sounded too smooth. He said something about the Phalanx Nations and missile deployment and fourteen countries and Level Seven alerts. Crystal frowned. “It gets closer every day,” she said.
“What does?”
Crystal just shook her head. “Big trouble,” she said.
The president ended with his usual sentence: “Let us pray to God for the safety of our people and the success of our endeavors.” Nickie always wondered about this. The idea seemed to be that if you prayed extremely hard—especially if a lot of people prayed at once—maybe God would change things. The trouble was, what if your enemy was praying, too? Which prayer would God listen to?
She sighed. “Crystal,” she said, “I’m so sick of the Crisis.”
“I know,” said Crystal. She flicked off the TV. “We all are. But it doesn’t help to worry. All we can do is keep our wits about us. Not let fear take over. And try to be good little people and not add to the badness.” She smiled at Nickie and stood up. “Tired?”
Nickie nodded.
“Which room would you like to sleep in?” Crystal asked. “You can have first pick.”
The room she really wanted was the one on the third floor, but right now it was occupied. So Nickie chose one of the bedrooms on the first floor, and Crystal took the one next to it. They found sheets and blankets in a linen closet and made up the beds, and they unpacked their suitcases and hung their clothes in the closets. Nickie put her nightie on and slid between the sheets of the enormous bed. She thought about Amanda and the little dog, hidden away upstairs. They would be going to bed now, too. It would be nice, she thought, to sleep with a dog curled up next to you.
The bed’s black posts rose toward the ceiling; in the darkness, they looked like two thin soldiers standing guard. Nickie wondered who this room had belonged to in years past. Who else had lain here looking at those posts, and at the violet-flowered wallpaper, and the stains on the ceiling? She wished she could know about their lives—not just her grandfather’s but all the lives of this house, all those ancestors she’d never known.
This is how Nickie was: she wanted to know about everybody and everything—not just encyclopedia-type information, but ordinary things like what people did at their jobs and what their houses looked like inside and what they talked about. When she passed two or three people walking together on the street, she always hoped to catch an intriguing bit of conversation, like “I found her lying there dead!” Or “…and he left that very day without telling a soul and was never seen again!” But almost always, all she heard were the dull, connecting bits of the conversation, things like “And so I said to her…” and “Yeah, I think so, too,” and “So it’s really kind of like…” And by the time they said whatever came next, they were out of earshot.
She also wanted to know about things that weren’t so ordinary, strange extraordinary things like, Were there people on other planets? Was ESP real? Were there still places on Earth where no one had ever been? Were there animals that no one had yet discovered? In a magazine, she had come across a photograph of a dust mite taken with an electron microscope. A dust mite was much too small to see with the naked eye, but when you took its picture and magnified it many times, you could see that it was as complicated and weird as a monster in a science-fiction movie, with fangs and feelers and bristles.
When Nickie saw this picture, she suddenly understood that a whole other world existed right alongside the world of things she could see. In the dust under the furniture, in between the strands of the carpet, even crawling on her very own skin and inside her guts were creatures of unbelievable strangeness. She loved knowing this. She took the dust mite picture with her everywhere she went.
Now she listened to the rain pattering steadily at the windows and closed her eyes. She thought about the spirits of all the people who had lived here. Maybe they were still hovering around, wondering who was coming next. It’s going to be me, she told them silently. I’m going to live here. And this reminded her of something she’d forgotten to do. She sat up and turned the light back on. In the drawer of the bedside table, she rummaged around until she found a stubby pencil and a scrap of paper. On the paper she wrote:
1. Keep Greenhaven.
2. Fall in love.
3. Help the world.
Her three goals. She was determined to accomplish them all.
CHAPTER 4
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Break-In
Sometime in the middle of that night, as the rain fell and Nickie slept, someone—or something—came out of the forest above the town. The night was dark and moonless, and whoever it was came so quietly that no one heard him. Wayne Hollister, who ran the Black Oak Inn at the north end of town, glanced out the window when he got up to go to the bathroom around 2:00 a.m., and he was pretty sure he saw something moving on the road, but he didn’t have his glasses on, so he couldn’t tell what it was. Maybe a man in a raincoat.
Early the next morning—it was a Friday—a boy named Grover Persons was walking up the alley in back of the Cozy Corner Café, hunting for a particular kind of wildlife on his way to school, when he noticed that the glass window next to the café’s back door was broken. He stopped to investigate. He could see that the window must have been punched in from the outside. A few fragments lay on the ground below the window, but most of the glass was inside, scattered across the restaurant’s kitchen counter. Some jagged shards remained in the window frame, and something else was there, too: it looked like a white dish towel snagged on the broken glass. On the towel was a dark stain. Grover peered at it. It looked like blood.
He went around to the front of the restaurant, where Andy Hart, the manager, was just opening up.
“Andy,” said Grover, “someone broke your back window last night.”
Andy stood stock-still and gaped at him for a second. Sunlight, which shone through gaps in the leftover rain clouds, flashed on his glasses and lit up his high, shiny forehead. Then he charged around to the back, with Grover behind him. When he saw the broken window and the stained cloth, he let out a shriek that brought people running from all around. In minutes, the entire four-man police force and ten or twelve other people had gathered behind the Cozy Corner. They stared at the broken window, which looked like a great snaggle-toothed mouth with a bloody tongue hanging out the bottom.
“Stay back,” said Chief of Police Ralph Gurney. “Don’t touch anything. This is a crime scene.”
People moved back. Grover could hear them murmuring to each other in worried voices.
“Andy, you in there?” called Officer Gurney through the window. “What’s been taken?”
From inside, Andy called, “Nothing much. It looks like just a package of chicken.”
“So,” said Officer Gurney. “This must be either a prank or a threat.”
Again came the uneasy murmurs from the crowd.
At another time, this broken window might have seemed like a minor incident. After all, no one was hurt; not much was stolen. But people were already on edge. It had been more than six months since Althea Tower had had her terrible vision, a
nd every day that vision seemed closer to coming true. Just last night, the Phalanx Nations had announced that they had missiles deployed in fourteen countries. The United States had replied by raising the alert level to Seven. Everyone knew that terrorists were all over the place. It seemed that the evils of the world were coming far too close for comfort.
Officer Gurney ran a strip of yellow tape around the back area of the café, roping it off so no one could disturb the site. Then he scanned the crowd. His eyes lit on a comfortably plump woman wearing a red down jacket that made her look even plumper. She had a short brownish-blond ponytail that stuck out through a hole in her red baseball hat.
“Brenda,” said Officer Gurney. “What do you think?”
Grover was in danger of being late for school by this time. He’d already been late twice this month. If he was late again, he might get a note sent home to his parents. But he had to risk it. This was too interesting to miss.
The woman stepped forward. Grover knew her, of course; everyone did. Mrs. Brenda Beeson was the one who had figured out the Prophet’s mumbled words and explained what they meant. She and her committee—the Reverend Loomis, Mayor Orville Milton, Police Chief Ralph Gurney, and a few others—were the most important people in the town.
Officer Gurney raised the yellow tape so Mrs. Beeson could duck under it. She stood before the window a long time, her back to the crowd, while everyone waited to see what she would say. Clouds sailed slowly across the sun, turning everything dark and light and dark again.
To Grover, it seemed like ages they all stood there, holding their breath. He resigned himself to being late for school and started thinking up creative excuses. The front door of his house had stuck and he couldn’t get it open? His father needed him to help fish drowned rats out of flooded basements? His knee had popped out of joint and stayed out for half an hour?
Finally Mrs. Beeson turned to face them. “Well, it just goes to show,” she said. “We never used to have people breaking windows and stealing things. For all our hard work, we’ve still got bad eggs among us.” She gave an exasperated sigh, and her breath made a puff of fog in the chilly air. “If this is someone’s idea of fun, that person should be very, very ashamed of himself. This is no time for wild, stupid behavior.”
“It’s probably kids,” said a man standing near Grover. Why did people always blame kids for things like this? As far as Grover could tell, grown-ups caused a lot more trouble in the world than kids.
“On the other hand,” said Mrs. Beeson, “it could be a threat, or a warning. We’ve heard the reports about someone wandering around in the hills.” She glanced back at the bloody rag hanging in the window. “It might even be a message of some sort. It looks to me like that stain could be a letter, maybe an S, or an R.”
Grover squinted at the stain on the cloth. To him it looked more like an A, or maybe even just a random blotch.
“It might be a B,” said someone standing near him.
“Or an H,” said someone else.
Mrs. Beeson nodded. “Could be,” she said. “The S could stand for sin. Or if it’s an R it could stand for ruin. If you’ll let me have that piece of cloth, Ralph, I’ll show it to Althea and see if she has anything to say about it.”
Just then Wayne Hollister happened to pass by, saw the crowd, and chimed in about what he’d seen in the night. His story frightened people even more than the blood and the broken glass. All around him, Grover heard them murmuring: Someone’s out there. He’s given us a warning. What does he mean to do? He’s trying to scare us. One woman began to cry. Hoyt McCoy, as usual, said that Brenda Beeson should not pronounce upon things until she was in full possession of the facts, which she was not, and that to him the blotches of blood looked more like a soupspoon than an R. Several people told him angrily to be quiet.
But Grover had lost interest now that he’d heard Mrs. Beeson’s verdict. If he ran really fast, he might not be late after all. He took off.
When he got to school, he told the first person he saw about the break-in, and then he told the next person, and pretty soon kids were crowding up around him. His friend Martin handed him a piece of paper and told him to draw the blood blot on it, exactly the way it was.
“I can’t remember it exactly,” he said. “But it was more or less like this.” He drew a gloppy string of blotches.
“That’s supposed to look like a letter?” Martin frowned, peering at Grover’s drawing through his thick-framed glasses.
“Well, I’m not drawing it perfect. Maybe it was more like this.” He drew a different blob. “That’s not it, either.” He laughed.
But Martin frowned again. “Do it right,” he said. “I don’t appreciate the way you’re clowning around.”
Grover drew it again, as well as he could remember.
“And she said it was an S or an R?” Martin wanted to know.
“She wasn’t sure which,” said Grover.
“And what did she say it stood for?” someone asked.
He told them, and he answered a lot of other questions, too, showing how Officer Gurney had strung the yellow tape, and repeating what Mrs. Beeson had said, and imitating, with a few high-pitched screams thrown in, the sobs of the woman who’d been so frightened. He imitated Hoyt McCoy, too, copying his gloomy look so well that everyone laughed. “Hoyt McCoy said it looked like a soupspoon,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Martin, “but Hoyt McCoy is a weirdo.”
“Maybe so,” said Grover, “but Mrs. Beeson doesn’t know everything.”
“Grover!” said Martin. His voice rose, and his face turned almost the same red as his hair. “She took the Prophet’s vision seriously, even if you didn’t.”
The bell rang. Grover was late after all, and so was everyone who’d been listening to him. “Gotta go,” he said.
Martin scowled at him. “This will be my first late mark of the whole year,” he said.
“It’s not my fault,” said Grover. “You didn’t have to stand around talking to me.”
But Martin just turned away. He’d changed, thought Grover as he hurried toward his classroom. He used to be nicer than he was now.
CHAPTER 5
__________________
The Fiery Vision
That morning, Crystal poked around in the kitchen cupboards and found just about nothing fit to eat. “Would you feel like walking downtown and getting us a few groceries?” she asked Nickie. “I’ll start cleaning up this foul kitchen.”
So Nickie put on her jacket and went downhill two blocks to Main Street, thinking how nice it was to be out by herself, as she couldn’t safely be in the city. The stores were just opening. It was cold, but the sun came out sometimes from between the clouds, and the town looked washed clean. Quite a few people were already out. She noticed that nearly all of them held cell phones to their ears as they walked. Of course she was used to seeing cell phones in the city; there, half the people you passed were jabbering away. But here people weren’t talking into their phones; they were just listening. It was odd.
She passed a small restaurant called the Cozy Corner Café, where several people were standing outside, talking in excited voices, and a police car was just pulling away. Something must have happened there—maybe a customer had taken sick.
She passed a drugstore, a bakery, and a shoe store. She passed a closed-up movie theater, where a sign stuck over the ticket window said, “Pray instead!” In the window of a clothing store, she saw a display of white T-shirts that said, “Don’t Do It!” in big red letters on the front, and after that she kept noticing people on the street wearing these T-shirts. Don’t do what? she wondered.
As she passed an alley between a hardware store and a computer repair shop, she heard a strange sound. It was a kind of hum with a rhythm to it—MMMM-mmmm-MMMM-mmmm—a sound that a machine might make. She stopped and looked around, but she couldn’t see where it was coming from. She could tell that other people on the sidewalk noticed the sound, too. They frowned, but the
y didn’t seem puzzled by it, just annoyed, or maybe a little frightened—a few of them started walking faster, as if to get away. The sound faded after a moment. Nickie decided it must be some gadget in the computer shop.
Farther on, she found the Yonwood Market, and there she bought some bread, milk, eggs, and powdered cocoa. She bought a small box of dog biscuits, too, and tucked this under her jacket.
Nickie was just turning off Main Street on the way back to Greenhaven when, from high overhead, there came a distant roar that quickly rose to a piercing scream, and five fighter jets streaked across the sky. Jets came often these days; they scared her. She stopped walking, set down the bag of groceries, and put her hands over her ears until the jets were gone.
Then she felt someone touch her shoulder. She looked up to see an elderly woman standing over her. “It might be starting,” the woman said in a shaky voice. “It might be starting right now—you never know—but it’s best not to be scared if you can help it. You need to have faith; that’s what I say. We’ll be all right here because of what we’re doing, as long as we have faith, that’s the main thing.” The spidery hand patted Nickie’s shoulder. “So don’t worry, little girl, and remember to pray, and…” The woman glanced upward. “We’ll be all right, because…” She trailed off and tottered away, leaving Nickie feeling the opposite of reassured. Maybe people here were just as scared as they were in the city. That made her heart sink a little. But on the other hand, the woman had said, “We’ll be all right.” It was confusing.
Once she got back to Greenhaven, though, she forgot about it. She hid the dog biscuits in her bedroom and then went into the kitchen, where Crystal made hot chocolate for them. They sat at the huge, elegant dining room table. Crystal got out her to-do list.
“This room is so…majestic,” Nickie said. She had decided to point out good things about Greenhaven as often as she could, to change Crystal’s mind about selling it.