Нил Шустерман: Thief Of Souls

He never heard them approaching. He didn’t know they were there until their silhouettes eclipsed the light of the gray sky.

“He’s all right,” said a voice just above him. A fe­male voice.

Dillon gasped through his chattering teeth. The voice was familiar, and in his confusion, he felt sure he knew who it was.

“Tory?” he said. There were others around him now. “Winston? Lourdes? Michael?” He had hardly known the other four shards, and yet for months they had oc­cupied most of his thoughts. Only now did he realize how much he needed them—to talk to, to be with. He thought he saw their faces before him, and it filled him with comfort and gratitude.

He sat up, and as his blurred vision cleared, his heart sank like a boulder in the furious river.

“No,” said the voice. “It’s me, Carol Jessup.”

There were more gathering around him now. He was mistaken—these were not his friends, they were all res­idents of the town. He knew them all—the Kendalls, the McMillans, the Schwartzes. He had spent time with’ each of them, restoring the life of a loved one. He had entered each of their lives, and returned them back to order.

“We’re glad the police didn’t take you away from us,” said Carol.

Dillon began to feel his gut slowly churn and he knew it wasn’t just the cold.

“Don’t worry,” said her husband, taking his hand. “We’ll protect you.”

“We’ll take care of you,” said one of the others, rub­bing Dillon’s sleeve.

“We won’t let them hurt you,” said another, reaching out and touching Dillon’s hair.

This is wrong, Dillon thought. This is terribly, hor­ribly wrong.

“We’ll follow you,” said another voice. “And we’ll help you do your wondrous works.”

“We’ll tend to your needs,” proclaimed another.

“We’ll be your servants.”

“Because we’ve seen your glory.”

“We’ve been blessed.”

“And you’ll bless us again.”

“And again.”

More hands. Dozens of hands, reaching out, touching his skin, his hair, his clothes. He felt himself raised from the ground, and as he looked into the clouded sky, he realized why this all felt so wrong.

His unique talent for making connections showed him a new pattern emerging in the world around him now. There were always a million possible roads, and a million possible futures, but now, every road focused toward one end: a murky darkness of chaos and ruin.

A year ago, during his own dark time, Dillon had sought to trigger the ultimate act of destruction. A quiet whisper that would precipitate a massive chain reac­tion, eventually shattering every relationship, every connection, every mind until the entire world became like the maddened mobs in Burton. Dillon had thought he’d failed to achieve that final act . . . but now he wasn’t so sure. What if his “great collapse” had simply taken a different course? The swarming patterns of des­tiny he saw when he looked at these people around him seemed to scream back the same answer.

The destruction never ended.

It just hid, dormant until now—and all the fixing he had done would soon be overshadowed by a new threat.

Some bleak chain of events spreading forth from this moment, that not even he could foresee.

He wailed again in the pain of this revelation, but the crowd ignored all his protests, as they carried him off in the cradle of their happy, needy hands.

In the random rush of water, a pocket of stillness formed where the Columbia River had caressed Dillon Cole’s body. With Dillon’s passing, the entire river slowed . . . and a tiny portion of the river ceased its swirling, defied entropy and came to order, touched by Dillon’s unique gift. It became an oasis of focused calm, beneath the surface of the raging river.

The calm pocket carried within it the simplest of bac­teria, born from rotting leaves and dead salmon farther upstream. Only, now those bacteria didn’t swarm and divide haphazardly. Instead, the single-celled organ­isms drew toward one another, aligning and dividing in unison; positioning themselves in a choreographed mitotic dance—a perfect pattern, as if the millions of bacteria were all of a single mind.

Farther downstream, where the river spilled into the Pacific, plankton fed on the aligned bacteria, and in turn tiny shrimplike krill devoured the plankton. Far­ther from shore, a school of fish, ten thousand strong, gobbled up the krill with ease and swam south, their tight formation suddenly becoming more perfect, and more orderly than it was possible for a school of fish to be, as it headed south, toward shark-infested waters.

At nine a.m. Eastern Standard Time, Winston Pell bolted awake from a chilling dream to the sound of breaking glass. He knew the sound well by now—it came as regularly as clockwork. If it wasn’t his win­dow, it was Thaddy’s, or his mother’s, or the window in the living room.

Thaddy, who should have known better, came scur­rying into Winston’s room. “Stone! Stone! It happened again!” He yowled as his feet came down on the broken glass.

“Thaddy, your brain’s gotta be off in orbit.”

Thaddy hopped onto Winston’s bed. “Ow, ow, ow,” he whined, but let Winston look at his bleeding feet. Thaddy trusted his big brother’s judgment, now that his big brother had grown taller than him again.

“You’ll live,” said Winston.

“How’m I gonna walk?” Thaddy asked angrily. He frowned as if it was Winston’s fault. Winston sighed. Maybe it was. He patted Thaddy’s soles with a balled-up corner of the sheet. He wished he could heal Thaddy’s feet, but his own repertoire of gifts didn’t include Magical Suture.

Their mother walked in, turned on the light, and shook her head. First at the broken window, and then at Thaddy’s feet:

“We’re gonna make the glass-man rich,” she said, then carefully stepped over the glass toward Thaddy, examining his feet. “I just hope it won’t need stitches.”

The suggestion made Thaddy groan. She took Thaddy off to the bathroom for Bactine and butterflies.

Winston stepped into his slippers and gingerly crossed the floor toward the broken window.

A heavy branch had punched through the window like an elbow. Winston noticed that the tip of the elbow-shaped limb held new growth that hadn’t been there yesterday. The tree would have to be cut down to save the house. Just like the tree which had rooted up the septic tank, and the one which had lifted the home off its foundation.

The fact was, ever since Winston had come home from his mysterious journey west, he wasn’t the only thing growing like a weed. He stood five foot eight now, and while his predicted height was expected to top out at six foot one, the plants and trees around their home had no such limit. These days, his mother’s gar­den coughed up blueberries the size of tomatoes, to­matoes the size of cantaloupes, and cantaloupes the size of pumpkins. The grass had to be mowed on a daily basis, and you couldn’t see the house for the trees.

“Some green thumb you brought home with you,” his mother had said when they first began to notice how profound Winston’s effect was. “Guess we’re gonna get lifted to the clouds by a beanstalk one day.”

As he contemplated the tree invading his bedroom window, a feeling came to Winston’s limbs, like a fu­gitive breeze.

A cold river. A wail of agony. A cry for help.

What had he been dreaming about? It was coming back to him now, and the memory made the tight curls of his short-cropped hair feel as if they were curling tighter.

He was dreaming about Dillon Cole. Something was wrong in the dream; Dillon needed help. There were hands all around him. The hands meant to comfort, but did not. One thing more . . . Winston knew this was not a dream. Dillon had cried out, and Winston had heard it—it was not his imagination. It had to be a pretty nasty bit of business going on, if Winston could feel it this far away.