Doctor Who_ Warchild - Andrew Cartmel [122]
He could have been reading pages at random from the phone book. It wouldn’t have mattered. The crowd would have listened with the same rapt attention. He had them. He held them in the palm of his hand. He could feel the strange energy flowing back and forth between himself and the crowd. Like invisible threads binding him to them. Tug on the threads and make the crowd move.
They didn’t cough because Ricky didn’t let them cough.
Ricky began to sense pockets of variation in the crowd’s response, and he realized that he could play on these variations, shifting his attention here and there, altering the tone of his voice. Subtly applying pressure to them. He was like a conductor summoning different responses from different sections of the orchestra. Feeling it respond to his command.
Ricky was shocked by the power of the relationship he felt with the crowd. Every passing second seemed to reveal new secrets to him, to increase his understanding of the phenomenon. And as his understanding increased, so did his power over the crowd.
Luckily it was only a short statement. When he’d finished he turned away and walked across the stage. The toe of his shoe caught a minuscule crack in the stage flooring and for a second he stumbled comically.
The crowd remained silent.
Then Ricky tripped as he began to descend the stairs off the stage. He waggled his arms in a ridiculous fashion as he struggled to recover his balance.
No one laughed.
Ricky felt panicky. It was too late. None of the old tricks worked. It was as if Ricky had lost his belief in them, so the crowd didn’t believe the tricks either. Fake clumsiness didn’t convince them anymore. They weren’t going to be thrown off.
The tricks wouldn’t work.
Ricky realized that they’d probably never work again.
Every person in the room watched him as he walked off the stage.
Ricky realized that they would never stop watching him now.
Behind the stage there was a set of fire doors.
Descending the stairs it was possible to turn right and go back into the hall or turn left and go through the doors. Ricky turned left and went through them, hurrying out into the corridors of the school.
Running for his life.
Behind him the school bell rang to signal the start of the first lesson of the day. The crowd seemed to give a collective sigh, and began to shake itself awake. The kids stood up and conversations began as they filed out from among the rows of chairs.
Amy stood staring at the fire doors through which Ricky had fled, as if Ricky’s presence still lingered there. The man who called himself Retour stood beside her, staring in the same direction.
‘That’s my boy,’ he said, finally.
‘That was extraordinary,’ sighed Amy.
‘It was the boy. He’s a natural. We just have to put him in the right situations and let him rip.’
‘You’re pretty good at coming up with the right situations,’
said Amy. Her curiosity was getting the better of her. ‘How did you learn about this?’
‘Would you believe through extensive studies in the animal kingdom?’ The man stared at the door through which Ricky had disappeared, shaking his head happily.
‘Just imagine what he’ll be like when we get him in front of the cameras.’ The man chuckled. ‘They’ll never want to vote for anyone else.’
Ricky fled through the school. After what had happened in the assembly hall he thought he would run and run, and never stop.
But there was a comforting familiarity to these corridors; his pace gradually slowed and he began to calm down surprisingly quickly.
Ricky had only been at Scopes High a few days, but he had already begun to feel familiar with the place. It was a school. If you’ve seen one school you’ve seen them all. And Ricky had seen plenty of them in his young life.
He had already settled into this one. He’d begun to adapt to the particular rhythms of the place and even to feel at home here.
As he’d got to know the school, got to know the mood of it, he’d begun to find places where he could relax, ways he could hide in the anonymity of the institution and the kids who filled