Стивен Кинг - Cell

We made a mistake, he thought again.

"You guys should have gone on," Jordan said. "We would have been all right—we were before, weren't we, sir?"

Headmaster Ardai ignored the question. He was studying Clay. "What happened yesterday when you and Tom were in that service station? I think something happened then to make you look as you do now."

"Oh? How do I look, sir?"

"Like an animal that smells a trap. Did those two in the street see you?"

"It wasn't exactly that," Clay said. He didn't love being called an animal, but couldn't deny that was what he was: oxygen and food in, carbon dioxide and shit out, pop goes the weasel.

The Head had begun to rub restlessly at the left side of his midsection with one big hand. Like many of his gestures, Clay thought it had an oddly theatrical quality—not exactly phony, but meant to be seen at the back of the lecture hall. "Then what exactly was it?"

And because protecting the others no longer seemed like an option, Clay told the Head exactly what they'd seen in the office of the Citgo station– a physical struggle over a box of stale treats that had suddenly turned into something else. He told about the fluttering papers, the ashes that had begun circling in the ashtray like water going down a bathtub drain, the keys jingling on the board, the nozzle that fell off the gas-pump.

"I saw that," Jordan said, and Alice nodded.

Tom mentioned feeling short of breath, and Clay agreed. They both tried to explain the sense of something powerful building in the air.

Clay said it was how things felt before a thunderstorm. Tom said the air just felt fraught, somehow. Too heavy.

"Then he let her take a couple of the fucking things and it all went away," Tom said. "The ashes stopped spinning, the keys stopped jingling, that thundery feeling went out of the air." He looked to Clay for confirmation. Clay nodded.

Alice said, "Why didn't you tell us this before?"

"Because it wouldn't have changed anything," Clay said. "We were going to burn the nest if we could, regardless."

"Yes," Tom said.

Jordan said suddenly, "You think the phone-crazies are turning into psionics, don't you?"

Tom said, "I don't know what that word means, Jordan."

"People who can move things around just by thinking about it, for one thing. Or by accident, if their emotions get out of control. Only psionic abilities like telekinesis and levitation—"

"Levitation?" Alice almost barked.

Jordan paid no mind. "—are only branches. The trunk of the psionic tree is telepathy, and that's what you're afraid of, isn't it? The telepathy thing."

Tom's fingers went to the place above his mouth where half of his mustache was gone and touched the reddened skin there. "Well, the thought has crossed my mind." He paused, head cocked. "That might be witty. I'm not sure."

Jordan ignored this, as well. "Say that they are. Getting to be true telepaths, I mean, and not just zombies with a flocking instinct. So what? The Gaiten Academy flock is dead, and they died without a clue of who lit em up, because they died in whatever passes for sleep with them, so if you're worrying that they telepathically faxed our names and descriptions to any of their buddies in the surrounding New England states, you can relax."

"Jordan—" the Head began, then winced. He was still rubbing his midsection.

"Sir? Are you all right?"

"Yes. Fetch my Zantac from the downstairs bathroom, would you? And a bottle of the Poland Spring water. There's a good lad."

Jordan hurried away on the errand.

"Not an ulcer, is it?" Tom asked.

"No," the Head replied. "It's stress. An old . . . one cannot say friend . . . acquaintance?"

"Your heart okay?" Alice asked, speaking in a low voice.

"I suppose," the Head agreed, and bared his teeth in a smile of disconcerting jollity. "If the Zantac doesn't work, we may resuppose . . . but so far, the Zantac always has, and one doesn't care to buy trouble when so much of it is on sale. Ah, Jordan, thank you."

"Quite welcome, sir." The boy handed him the glass and the pill with his usual smile.

"I think you ought to go with them," Ardai told him after swallowing the Zantac.

"Sir, with all respect, I'm telling you there's no way they could know, no way."

The Head looked a question at Tom and Clay. Tom raised his hands. Clay only shrugged. He could say what he felt right out loud, could articulate what they surely must know he felt— we made a mistake, and staying here is compounding it —but saw no point. Jordan's face was set and stubborn on top, scared to death just beneath. They were not going to persuade him. And besides, it was day again. Day was their time.

He rumpled the boy's hair. "If you say so, Jordan. I'm going to catch some winks."

Jordan looked almost sublimely relieved. "That sounds like a good idea. I think I will, too."

"I'm going to have a cup of Cheatham Lodge's world-famous tepid cocoa before I come up," Tom said. "And I believe I'll shave off the rest of this mustache. The wailing and lamentation you hear will be mine."

"Can I watch?" Alice asked. "I always wanted to watch a grown man wail and lament."

Clay and tom were sharing a small bedroom on the third floor; alice had been given the only other. While Clay was taking off his shoes, there was a perfunctory knock on the door, which the Head followed without pause. Two bright spots of color burned high up on his cheekbones. Otherwise his face was deathly pale.

"Are you all right?" Clay asked, standing. "Is it your heart, after all?"

"I'm glad you asked me that," the Head replied. "I wasn't entirely sure I planted the seed, but it seems I did." He glanced back over his shoulder into the hall, then closed the door with the tip of his cane. "Listen carefully, Mr. Riddell—Clay—and don't ask questions unless you feel you absolutely must. I am going to be found dead in my bed late this afternoon or early this evening, and you will say of course it was my heart after all, that what we did last night must have brought it on. Do you understand?"

Clay nodded. He understood, and he bit back the automatic protest. It might have had a place in the old world, but it had none here. He knew why the Head was proposing what he was proposing.

"If Jordan even suspects I may have taken my own life to free him from what he, in his boyishly admirable way, regards as a sacred obligation, he may take his own. At the very least he would be plunged into what the elders of my own childhood called a black fugue. He will grieve for me deeply as it is, but that is permissible. The thought that I committed suicide to get him out of Gaiten is not. Do you understand that?"

"Yes," Clay said. Then: "Sir, wait another day. What you're thinking of. . . it may not be necessary. Could be we're going to get away with this." He didn't believe it, and in any case Ardai meant to do what he said; all the truth Clay needed was in the man's haggard face, tightly pressed lips, and gleaming eyes. Still, he tried again. "Wait another day. No one may come."

"You heard those screams," the Head replied. "That was rage. They'll come."

"Maybe, but—"

The Head raised his cane to forestall him. "And if they do, and if they can read our minds as well as each other's, what will they read in yours, if yours is still here to be read?"

Clay didn't reply, only watched the Head's face.

"Even if they can't read minds," the Head continued, "what do you propose? To stay here, day after day and week after week? Until the snow flies? Until I finally expire of old age? My own father lived to the age of ninety-seven. Meanwhile, you have a wife and a child."