But certainly most of the town was now pouring into the narrow, upright building that was the Church of the Fiery Vision. Once Nickie got past the crush of people at the door, she saw a long room filled with rows of wooden pews. High in the walls were windows of stained glass, but because the sky outside was growing dark, she couldn’t make out the pictures in them. The light inside the church was dim, too. It came from candles placed in dozens of spots around the room. They lit up the aisles and the seats, but the space above, up to the ceiling, was a gulf of darkness.
Quickly and quietly, people filed into the pews and sat down. Nickie sat toward the back. Then came long moments when nothing happened. People whispered and rustled, waiting. At last a door opened behind the pulpit, and Mrs. Beeson came out. She climbed up the steps to the pulpit and stood there looking out at the crowd. The whispering immediately died down.
There was no hat of any kind today. Mrs. Beeson’s hair was fluffed out in a cloud around her head, and she wore a red dress with her round blue Tower button pinned to the front. She stood looking out at them in silence for a long time, her eyes flitting from one face to another. At last she spoke. There was a wave of creaks and rustles as everyone leaned forward to hear.
“Well, friends,” she said, “we’re in a dark time.”
There was a murmur of agreement from the crowd.
“Our Prophet has seen a dreadful disaster in the world’s future. It could be the war that might be coming. It could have to do with the terrorist in our woods.”
The crowd murmured again.
“But she’s also tried to tell us how to be safe from this disaster. I call that a miracle. It’s like being taken under God’s wing.”
Mrs. Beeson smiled, and Nickie could tell that the people in the room were feeling that smile’s warm glow.
“And so most of us,” Mrs. Beeson went on, “have done our best to do what our Prophet tells us to do. It’s not always easy to know what that is. Sometimes the Prophet says things that even I can’t interpret. She says ‘No words,’ for example. Unless she means swearwords, which we don’t say anyhow, I must admit I’m mystified. And there’s something else she says that until now I’ve thought I must be hearing wrongly. But as danger comes closer, I’m forced to believe she means exactly what she says.”
Mrs. Beeson paused. She stood still, her blue eyes scanning the crowd. She looked like a queen, Nickie thought, in her ruby red dress, with the light from the candles gilding her hair. The people in the church seemed to hold their breath.
Finally, Mrs. Beeson squared her shoulders and spoke. “What I am about to say is for the good of us all,” she said. “We must be obedient, whether we understand or not. God’s ways are beyond our knowing.” She paused again, for a long time. Tension twisted in Nickie’s stomach. People sat so still that the whole room was utterly silent.
When Mrs. Beeson spoke next, her voice was hardly above a whisper, but it was so fierce that you could hear every word. “Althea has said it over and over, but I haven’t wanted to hear it. ‘No dogs,’ she says. ‘No dogs.’ It’s quite clear. Somehow, our dogs are standing in the way.”
“What?!” cried a woman a few rows up, but someone else shushed her.
Mrs. Beeson’s voice rose. “Yes,” she said. “I see it now. I see it in myself, in my own feelings for my little Sausage.” She leaned forward, gripping the pulpit with both hands. “Why should we give an animal love that should go to our families? Why should we give an animal love that should go to God? We have to act, my dear friends. I know it’s hard, but the dogs—all of them—must go.”
Nickie’s heart started rapid-fire beating. Dogs must go? What was she saying?
A clamor arose from the people in the church. Voices cried, What? and No! but Mrs. Beeson spread her arms out and stood like an angel about to rise. “Listen!” she cried.
Everyone grew silent again.
“It’s painful, I know,” she said. “But terrible times demand extraordinary sacrifices. Seems to me what the Prophet is saying to us is this: the more we say no to the things of the world, all those things we’re too attached to, the more we can say yes to God. It’s what I’ve told you before: when you have faith that you’re right—you know it from the bottom of your soul—you’re willing to do anything for it. Anything.”
At that, the people grew silent again. A few stood up and left the church—one man shouted “She’s wrong!” as he went out the door—but all the rest stayed. Nickie saw some of them look at each other with stern, brave looks and nod. Then they looked back at her again, waiting for instructions.
“It will be like this,” she said. “The day after tomorrow, I will send a bus to all dog-owning households. You will put your dog aboard the bus, and the driver will take the dogs to a wild place many miles from here, where the dogs will be free to go back into nature, where they belong. No animal will be harmed, and we here in Yonwood will have followed our instructions to the letter. We will be free to love God with all our hearts.”
Nickie felt as if she’d been set on fire. They won’t take Otis, she thought. Never.
But she realized after a moment that she didn’t have to worry about Otis. No one knew that Greenhaven was “a dog-owning household.” The only people besides herself who knew about Otis were Amanda and Grover, and they wouldn’t hurt him. She would keep him safe—she’d be extra super careful when she took him out to pee—and when the house was sold, she’d take him away with her, back to the city.
Because she knew now that she would fail at her Goal #1, which was to live at Greenhaven with her parents. She still loved Greenhaven, and Yonwood, too, but she no longer wanted to live in a place where Mrs. Beeson and her Prophet delivered instructions from God.
CHAPTER 24
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The Bracelet
On Friday morning, as Grover was on his way to school, two men had jumped him as he passed the car-repair garage. They’d been standing behind a gate that led into an alley beside the building, and when Grover came past they simply stepped out into his path and blocked his way. Before he realized what was happening, each of them grabbed one of his arms. One of them whipped the bracelet out of his pocket, snapped it around Grover’s right wrist, clicked a button on a remote control, and the bracelet was activated. It started up its noise: MMMM-mmmm-MMMMM-mmmmm.
He wrenched free and ran, but by then, of course, it was too late. The noise screamed from his wrist. He shook his arm as if the thing were a scorpion biting him, as if it were a cloud of bees attacking, but there was no stopping it. Get away, get away, was all he could think. He ran around the far side of his house and down Woodfield Road, where there were fewer people, though the few he passed stared at him in horror. He didn’t look at them. Get away, get away. He ran past the school, staying far out at the edge of the playing fields, past the end of Main Street, where the windows of the Cozy Corner Café were still dark, and then, all the time with the noise streaming out behind him like a kite tail, he ran up the path into the woods.
When he’d run uphill for ten minutes or so, he stopped. The whine of the bracelet—MMMM-mmmm-MMMMM-mmmmm—zinged around his head like a monster mosquito. He had to do something about it. Though the morning was cold, he was warm from running. So he took off his jacket and the sweatshirt he was wearing underneath it. He put his jacket back on, and he wrapped the sweatshirt around his wrist, tying it as tightly as he could by the sleeves. It made his arm into a sort of club, with a great lump at the end. The sound was deadened, but not silenced. He could still hear it, and of course anyone walking in the woods—human or animal—would be able to hear it, too. So he unwound the sweatshirt. He took off his jacket and his T-shirt, put his jacket back on (because he wouldn’t be able to once he’d made his hand into a club), and wrapped the T-shirt around the bracelet as a first layer. Then he wrapped the sweatshirt around that. This made a wad as big as a soccer ball. His arm looked like a giant lollipop. It might make a good weapon, he thought. Too bad
Teddy Crane and Bill Willard weren’t around for him to clobber.
The double wrapping muted the noise of the bracelet down to a faint hum. It was good enough. Grover strode on.
What he was going to do he didn’t know. He had no plan, other than to escape the town and all the pitying, tut-tutting faces that would be trained on him—people on the street, his teachers, the other kids at school. No. He would figure out a way to get the thing off. He wouldn’t go home until he had.
He climbed fast, fueled by rage. After half an hour or so, he came to the place he’d been a few days before, where the path led down to the stream. This was a good spot to stop for a moment, he thought. He was thirsty. He’d have a drink.
As he knelt by the stream and splashed water into his mouth with his left hand, he remembered the person he’d seen moving through the woods when he was last here—the pale patch off in the distance. For a second, with water dripping down his chin, he stopped moving and listened for footsteps. But as soon as he wasn’t making the noise of footsteps himself, crunching over twigs, rustling in the leaves, all he could hear was the thin whine of the bracelet, sounding through its wrappings: MMMM-mmmm-MMMMM-mmmmm, like a faraway siren.
So he wiped his wet hand on his pants and walked on. He thought of singing really loud to cover up the noise. But if there was some evil person lurking up here, singing would just attract his attention. He tried to tune his ears to the tweeting of the birds instead.
The path wound up the mountainside. Every now and then he came to a place where the trees thinned out and he had a view over the town below. School would have started by now. They’d notice he wasn’t there. Would Bill and Teddy have gone to his house after they’d clapped the bracelet on him and told his parents? Would anyone come looking for him?
By midday, he was close to the top of the ridge, and he was starting to feel hungry. He happened to have a couple of stale crackers in his jacket pocket, so he ate those. But it wasn’t much of a lunch. At this season of the year, he wouldn’t be able to find much in the woods that he could eat. The berries would be gone, and although there were lots of mushrooms, he didn’t know enough about them to tell the edible ones from the poisonous. He’d just have to be hungry for a while, that’s all. Good thing he’d had a big breakfast.
When he came to a small open field, he decided to stop for a while and attack the bracelet. There was a shelf of rock at the edge of the field, large and low. Here he sat down. He unwrapped the sweatshirt from around his wrist, and then the T-shirt. The hideous noise wailed out into the air. Grover winced. It was like having skewers poked in his ears.
The bracelet was a flat metal band about a quarter of an inch thick, a dull silver color. There was a small hinge at one point on it, and a couple of grooves that went all the way around. The sound came from inside, but Grover couldn’t see any way of getting at it—no switch or slot or sliding panel.
Maybe he could just slip the thing off. He curled his hand into a tube shape and tried to work the bracelet over his knuckles—but it wouldn’t go. He slipped the fingers of his left hand under it and pulled as hard as he could, hoping to break the hinge, but all he accomplished was to make the edge of the bracelet dig into his skin. In furious frustration, he banged the bracelet against the rock, but the silver surface of it was barely even scratched. The noise went on without a pause, MMMM-mmmm-MMMMM-mmmmm, making him want to scream.
One more try. He found a rock about the size of a baseball and, placing his wrist on the bigger rock, smashed at the bracelet over and over. After five minutes of pounding, he’d made a tiny dent in the bracelet’s surface and a sizable scrape on his hand. With a yell, he flung the rock away and gave up. He put the wrappings back on his wrist. Failure.
He lay back on the warm rock and stared at the sky, where a hawk was circling far, far above. What had he done wrong? Nothing. Who was he hurting? No one. So why was he being tortured? He didn’t know. Had Althea Tower muttered something about snakes? Was there a law against snakes in some holy book? He didn’t know. And he didn’t know what he could do about any of it.
Stymied, he closed his eyes. The sun shone on him, and he grew sleepy and dozed off.
When he woke up, he could see that it was late afternoon. The shadows of the trees crept across the field, and the air had grown chillier. Grover felt bleak. What was he going to do when night came? What would he do tomorrow? He was hungry, and he was cold, too, because with his T-shirt and his sweatshirt wrapping up his wrist, all he had on was a flannel shirt and his jacket. Which was better, to be warm and have that noise screaming at him, or be cold and without the noise? He decided to be cold, at least for the moment.
For the first time, he realized that he was going to spend the night up here. He hadn’t really thought about it before, when all he wanted was to get away. But he saw that he would have to. Darkness would fall before he could get down the trail—and he didn’t want to be back in town anyway.
So he’d better use the daylight that was left to get ready. He’d make himself some sort of den to sleep in, and he’d look as hard as he could for some nuts or shriveled-up berries to eat.
First the den. He wanted to be in among the trees, not out in the open. So he crossed to the west side of the field and made his way into the thicket of undergrowth, stamping down brush and breaking off twigs that got in his way. It was like burrowing through barbed wire, he thought, so many stickers and scratchers. Underfoot, the ground was leaf-littered and rocky and uneven. And damp. It wasn’t a great place for a campout.
But after creeping around for a while, he found a sort of scooped-out place in the ground surrounded by a group of pines. The pine needles were thick on the ground, and he mounded them up to make a mattress. This wouldn’t be too bad, he thought. Now for food.
A few rays of sunlight still fell across the top of the mountain and lit up the trees on the other side of the field. Grover started to make his way out of the woods, back through the brush the way he’d come. But just as he got to the edge of the clearing, he saw, within the trees on the opposite side, something white moving.
He stood still. The trees would hide him, he thought, if he didn’t move. If only he had binoculars! His heart began a quick, steady thudding. Could the terrorist hear the faint hum of the bracelet?
The white patch moved slowly. It seemed to be coming toward the clearing. Grover held his breath. He squinted, trying to see more clearly in the failing light. The white patch moved, stood still, moved again, and at last came out from the shelter of the trees and into the field.
And Grover’s heart gave a great lurch. This terrorist was not human. And it was not a terrorist, either. It was a bear. A white bear—something Grover had never seen nor heard of.
The bear came out into the field. It walked with a lopsided motion, as if maybe one of its feet hurt. Its nose was down; its head swung slightly from side to side. Its coat, Grover could see, was not pure white at all. It was a dirty cream color, smudged with gray.
It came closer. Grover held his breath. He didn’t really think the bear would attack him. He’d caught sight of bears up here before, and he knew that the main thing was not to take the bear by surprise. Make a noise, let it know you were there, and it would turn around and shuffle off. Still, he was nervous. It was almost night, he was all alone, and he was making a strange noise the bear would soon start to hear.
And as soon as he had that thought, the bear lifted its head. It stopped moving and looked straight toward Grover. The last rays of the sun shone on its small round ears, turning them pink.
So Grover did what he knew he should do. He stepped out from the trees and stood in the open. He raised his right arm, so that the humming ball at the end of it stood up in the air like a stop sign. In as strong a voice as he could muster, he called out: “Bear! Here I am! I’m your friend, not your dinner!”
They stared at each other. Grover saw that the bear’s nose was a pale tan, and its eyes shone in the slanting sunlight like little rub
ies. He called out again, waving his arm. “I see what you are!” he said. “You should get away from here! You’re not safe!”
And as if it understood, the bear turned away. It didn’t hurry. It turned around and trundled back the way it had come. In a few minutes, it had gone into the woods and disappeared.
Grover slept that night on his cushion of pine needles. He covered himself with more pine needles, and he used the wad around his wrist as a pillow. The bracelet whined in his ear and, when he finally fell asleep, made its way into his dreams as a screaming jet plane diving toward him and swooping away, over and over. When he awoke in the morning, he was very cold and very hungry, and he knew there was nothing to do but go home. At least it was Saturday; no one would try to make him go to school.
CHAPTER 25
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The Open House
The house looked beautiful on Saturday morning. Its floors were polished, its paint was bright, and the pieces of furniture that remained were the finest antiques of the lot, and dust-free. Big vases stood here and there, with artistically arranged pine branches and bare twigs arching out of them.
Now Crystal was scuttling among the downstairs rooms, looking for anything that might discourage a buyer. Was there a crack in the plaster? Cover it with an antique portrait in a gold frame! A scuffed place on the floor? Put a Persian rug there! She puttered and fussed, fixed and fidgeted, talking the whole time. “The Tiffany lamp! Here would be the perfect spot. And wait, these cushions…Nickie, would you get those green ones from the middle bedroom? That’s better. Really, it’s looking good. Except for…hold on a sec…maybe the leather-topped game table over here…Help me move it, Nickie.”