Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [85]
The long-haired boy said, “What about you?”
“My parents died,” the older boy said. “In a car crash. I knew it was coming, only I didn’t tell them.”
“That’s mean,” one of the girls said.
“Is it? I was only four. What did I know? I didn’t know people died like that,” the older boy said.
“Don’t you feel bad?” Michael asked.
“Why should I? I didn’t make them die. It was an accident.”
“But you saw it coming.”
“There’s a lot of things I see coming,” the older boy said, looking at the boy with the long hair.
(A voice outside of the memory, Julie’s, “Who are they? What are their names?” and it jolted her off one memory screen and onto another.)
There was an isolation booth. A glassed-in cage, but with a doorway that led into a larger room that was the testing room.
(“Why is this important?” Julie asked.
“Something bad happened here,” Michael said.)
Then, another memory: the older boy and three girls and one other boy stood on the stairs in the schoolhouse, blocking the way for Michael to pass.
“You can’t come up,” the older boy said.
“Why not?”
“We’re testing someone.”
“You’re testing someone? You’re not supposed to run the tests. Where’s Dr. Stone?”
“Getting a taste,” one of the girls—a tall, wiry one with braces, “of his own medicine.” She and one of the other girls giggled.
“If you know what’s good for you,” the boy said, “you’ll just go back downstairs.”
Michael noticed the way the five of them had carved spirals and things on their bodies. “Why’d you do that?” he pointed to the girl’s arm.
“We’re a special secret club now,” she said.
“You can’t join,” the older boy said, quickly.
“Why not?”
“You’re not good enough,” he said. “You’re fake. You’re one of the twenty-six percenters. We don’t want you. We want the ninety-nine percenters.”
Another memory screen:
Michael was weeping, wiping his eyes out as he walked down the corridor, and when he came to the Sleep Room, he looked through the door window and saw something that almost made him laugh, and then it scared him.
(“What is it? What did you see?”)
In each of the narrow beds, the doctors and teachers and the parapsychologist, all lying down as if sleeping, polka dots on their foreheads. Michael tried to make his mind roam into the room, but something blocked him. Why were they just lying there? What had done this?
His mind sped through possibilities—thinking of his classmates, and he knew it was the older boy. Something terrible. Something they had done: the ones who gathered at the top of the stairs. They had scrambled the minds of their teachers, of their doctors, and of Mr. Boatwright, and maybe even his own father.
They weren’t dead, he was sure. Their eyes were open, and their lips seemed to open and close as if they were fish pulled from water, dying on dry land.
And then, Julie heard what sounded like an explosion and saw a little girl screaming as she tried to open the door to a glass booth—inside it was an inferno. The door finally opened, and a boy, on fire, came running out.
And then, Julie felt other things. She felt a sense of benevolence like she’d never experienced. She felt kindness. She felt something sacred. Michael’s voice in her mind, “I died, Julie. I died then. You’re with me, feeling that. Don’t forget it. Don’t ever forget what you’re feeling. It’s not a terror. Death is not a terror. It is the doorway to something sacred. See, how I felt it? Stay with me. Stay with it.”
Wave after wave of elation seemed to sweep through her. “It’s the human soul,” he said, with her inside him. “It’s the human soul, inviolate. Don’t ever forget that, Julie. Don’t. Death is just a stop along the way.”
Then, she