Witch and Wizard_ The Fire - James Patterson [51]
The floor creaks below my feet, and my heart leaps out of my chest. I strain to listen for a hint of voices approaching, but all I can hear is the blood surging in my ears. I search the corners for hidden cameras and expect to trip a booby trap with every movement. I’ve never been so jumpy in my life.
I know I have to buck up, get it together, do what I came here to do, but all I keep thinking is, The One tortures kids for minor infractions and curses thousands of people with bleeding, open sores. What kind of horrors await a staff member caught snooping in his most personal items?
In the bathroom mirror ( gold-framed, enormous), a lost-looking, frightened girl stares back at me, threatening to bolt, but I see my parents’ faces there, too, pleading and hopeful. I splash my face in the ice-cold water of the stainless-steel sink, swallow my fear, and carefully open a cupboard.
It’s strange, you don’t think of evil people having personal things, and it’s impossible to imagine what The One might have stored in these bathroom drawers, what ghastly souvenirs from a lifetime of cruelty. But the items I do find — including dentures and Technicolor contact lenses — are bizarrely mundane and almost funny in the way they suggest self-consciousness.
I’m pawing through these ordinary articles, fascinated, when a floorboard creaks in the hallway. I don’t dare breathe as the footsteps get louder, louder, almost upon me … and then echo down the hall toward the other apartments. I sigh, turning back to my task.
Peering into the cupboard again, I notice a tiny box that I somehow missed before, and inside it, a silver key. It seems impossible that I could locate what door or safe this small key unlocks, but I remember a desk by the entryway, and when I walk across the apartment and slide the key into the hole in the drawer, it turns with a satisfying click.
When they say “too easy,” this is what they mean.
Inside there’s an odd collection of mementos, none of them mind-blowing, but apparently important to The One nonetheless. They’re special. Personal. Human, as hard to believe as it seems.
There’s an award for extraordinary abilities in a science contest, a picture of a young and smiling One with a small girl (possibly his sister?), and a certificate of artistic appreciation recognizing young talent. Buried farther down, I also find a report of difficulties in social development, a handwritten note from a teacher about “disturbing demonstrations” that frightened other students, and a letter of expulsion.
I want to keep digging, want to find more about the boy who would grow up to be the greediest, most powerful being in the Overworld, but time is running out and I haven’t even cleaned anything yet.
I carefully replace all of the documents, but as I start to close the drawer, I glimpse the yellowed edge of a photograph caught in the side. I bite my lip, checking my watch. It’s a risk, but one last look couldn’t hurt.
It takes me several minutes to work the picture out of the crack it’s jammed in, and when I do, I draw a sharp intake of breath. I lean against the desk, mesmerized.
It appears to be another family photograph. This one is taken from farther away, when The One was a bit older but still a boy. There’s an older man in the picture, with jutting cheekbones and an upright posture. The man is smiling — wide but strangely lacking emotion, as if the grin is taped on.
The man’s hand is on the boy’s shoulder, near his neck, gripping at the kid’s clothing and pressing him forward for the pose. Gripping hard.
The boy in the picture — The One, which is still weird to think about — is not smiling. At all. His eyes are different than in the earlier photo with the young girl, too. They understand more. Those eyes have seen terrible things.
And here’s the part that’s most chilling: the older man’s eyes