John Saul - Shadows

Josh had been back in Eden for almost a week, and as he started home from school, his mind returned once more to what had happened at Barrington only a few days ago.

He found himself thinking about it more and more, despite the fact that his mother — and everyone else, too — had told him it was better not to think about it, but just to try to forget it.

But how could he just forget it?

He’d been there! He’d seen it!

Seen Hildie’s body in the elevator, and then Dr. Engersol and Jeff, lying on the floor down in the lab.

Adam’s brain, sitting in a puddle of water, dead.

And Amy’s brain, still alive in its tank, still hooked to the computer.

He’d even seen Amy’s brain die.

He’d never seen anyone die before, and the images on the monitors were still vivid in his mind, all their displays gone flat. He’d stared at them for a long time, then his eyes had drifted away from them, fixing instead on the mass of tissue suspended in the tank.

It hadn’t looked any different at all. The folds in the cortex all looked the same, the color was still the same gray hue shot through with the bluish network of blood vessels.

It didn’t seem right.

If Amy was dead, her brain should have looked different.

But it hadn’t, and finally, feeling Alan Dover’s hand on his shoulder, he’d looked up.

“Is she really dead?” he’d asked, his voice shaking.

“I’m afraid so,” the policeman had told him. “Come on. Why don’t you and I go outside? They don’t need us down here anymore.”

Riding up in the secret elevator, Josh had felt a chill go through him as he thought about what had happened to Hildie that morning.

Would he always think about it, every time he got into an elevator for the rest of his life?

When they’d gotten to Dr. Engersol’s apartment, he’d ignored the clanking old elevator that was still waiting at the fourth floor landing, choosing to go down the stairs instead.

“Someone called your mother, Josh,” Alan Dover had told him. “She’ll be here tonight to take you home.”

Josh had barely heard the words, for the emotions he’d held in check all morning had finally overwhelmed him. He began sobbing, throwing his arms around the police officer, despite the fact that all his friends were watching him.

“It’s all right,” Alan Dover had told him. “It’s all over now.”

But it hadn’t been over. He’d spent almost the whole day talking to the policemen, and the doctor, and a lot of people whose names he didn’t even remember. He’d answered all the questions he could, and explained over and over again what had happened when he’d put on the virtual reality mask and seen Adam in the computer. He’d even tried to show them, but when they’d gone up to his room, and he’d set up the computer and put on the mask and the glove, it hadn’t worked.

He knew what had happened: before she’d died, Amy had erased all the programs that Dr. Engersol had set up, all the programs that had let him actually see inside the computer.

For that, he was almost certain, had been what he’d been doing.

It hadn’t been a simulation at all.

The program had been set up so that Adam could show him what it would be like to be inside the computer, to have been part of the world that he and Amy had been taken into.

The world that had given him nightmares and made him feel that he was going insane.

When Josh had finally told them everything he could, and his mother arrived to help him pack his clothes and books, he’d said good-bye to the few kids who were still there.

All day long parents kept arriving at the school, packing things up as quickly as they could, taking their children away. Josh knew why they were doing it, but it still seemed strange to him, since the experiment Dr. Engersol had been working on was destroyed, and Dr. Engersol was dead.

Most of the kids hadn’t even been involved in the experiment. But their parents took them home anyway, saying the same thing his mother had told him: “I knew there was something wrong with this place! Right from the first minute I saw it, I knew something wasn’t right.”

Josh didn’t believe any of them. After all, the school still looked the way it always had, with the big green lawn spread out in front of the mansion, and the towering circle of redwood trees in the center of which he’d first met Amy.

When his mother had finally taken him away, down into the village and the little inn where they were going to spend the night, he’d looked back out the rear window as long as he could, knowing that he would never again see the Academy or any of the kids who had been his friends.

When he’d gone to bed that night, in the same room with his mother, he hadn’t been able to fall asleep for a long time.

He’d listened to the surf crashing on the beach below the inn, wondering how long it would be before he heard it again.

And what it was going to be like, going back to his old school in Eden.

There weren’t going to be any classes there like there were at the Academy, and he was going to have to sit quietly all day again, pretending to listen to a teacher talk about things he already knew.

He was going to have to listen to the taunts of all the other kids again, pretend he didn’t care about being teased, pretend it didn’t matter to him that he didn’t have a single friend he could talk to.

But at least no one in Eden would try to do to him what Dr. Engersol had done to Amy and Adam.

Now they were dead, and he was still alive, and going back to Eden.

He’d finally gotten to sleep just before the sun started to come up, and he hadn’t said much on the way home, curling up in the corner of his seat, staring out the window as his mother drove him back out into the desert.

And now, almost a week later, it was almost as if he’d never been away at all.

The desert hadn’t changed; the sun still blazed down out of the sky, the rolling landscape was still barren of everything except sun-baked earth and saguaro.

But now its simple familiarity made it look good to Josh.

School wasn’t quite the same, either; for some reason, he found it easier to pay attention in class, and the teacher didn’t seem to be singling him out anymore.

And today, as he left the school, he fell in beside three of his classmates. Instead of turning away from him, they actually spoke to him. He walked along with them for a while, even went with them to hunt for horny toads.

Finally he arrived home, climbing the stairs to the second floor and the little apartment he’d lived in as long as he could remember.

It wasn’t anything like the Academy had been, but it, too, offered the comforting safety of familiarity. He said hi to Mrs. Hardwick, who held a finger to her lips and pointed to Melinda, who was sleeping in her playpen. As he retreated to his room, Josh wondered why he was supposed to be quiet when the television was blaring loud enough that he’d been able to hear it as he came up the stairs outside.

But even that didn’t make him as mad as it used to. He tossed his books onto his bed, then went to his desk and switched on his computer.

The same computer he’d had at the Academy. They’d let him bring it home with him when he left.

“They’re only doing it so I won’t sue them,” his mother had told him. But she’d let him take it, and hadn’t even argued when he’d insisted on hooking the modem into the telephone line himself instead of waiting for the telephone company to do it.

“If you wreck that phone, I’m taking it out of your allowance,” she’d threatened.

Josh had only grinned. Five minutes later the modem had been working perfectly.