Garden of Evil (10 page)

But Jim had the strongest intuition that this was very different. He couldn't yet understand why, but what was happening here felt a thousand times more powerful, and a thousand times more frightening, because this was a warning that life as we know it was soon going to come to an end. These young people were a countdown. Two so far. How many more would be nailed up to ceilings or trees to warn of the coming catastrophe? And what would happen when it finally arrived?

Jim couldn't help thinking of Summer's nightmare. ‘
I dreamed that I was standing in line with all of these hundreds of people and it was all dark all around us. Up ahead, though, I could see this orange light, like a bonfire? And it was hot, too, like a bonfire. Well, more like a furnace.
'

He was still standing there when a hand was clapped on his shoulder.

‘Mr Rook! You shouldn't be here!'

He turned around. ‘I think this is the one place that I
should
be, Detective.'

‘Oh, yes? And why is that, exactly? Can you see something here that the rest of us can't see?'

‘No, detective, I can't. But I can
feel
something. This isn't the work of some weirdo, or some gang of weirdos. This wasn't done by some serial killer with a penchant for white paint and Persian cats.'

‘Meaning what?' asked Detective Brennan.

‘Meaning that these killings aren't an end in themselves. They're a warning of something very much worse to come.'

‘Now, why would anybody who was going to do something very much worse than this feel the need to warn us about it? After all, you never know, we might be clever enough to work out what it is that he's warning us about, and stop him before he can carry it out. We didn't get any warnings, did we, about the World Trade Towers? If we had, we might have been able to catch the bastards before they did what they did.'

He paused, and sniffed, and then he said, ‘Besides, what the hell could be worse than this?'

Jim silently recalled what the man standing in line had said to Summer in her dream:
He said, ‘We have to be here. It's the end.' So I said, ‘The end of what?' And he said, ‘It's the end of all of us. It's arrived.'

Meanwhile, Detective Brennan said, ‘'Preciate it if you'd return to your classroom for now, Mr Rook. Detective Carroll and me, we'll come up to see you later. Meanwhile, we have to get this poor young guy down from the tree, and try to find out who he is.'

Jim was tempted to tell him about Bethany's membership of the Church of the Divine Conquest, but he decided against it for now. He wanted to find out more about Simon Silence and the Reverend John Silence before he did so. The church's beliefs seemed to be somewhat unusual – all this talk of Lilith in the Garden of Eden, and her equality to Adam – but there were plenty of other churches with beliefs that were ten times wackier than that.

He looked up at the whitewashed body nailed to the tree. The young man's mouth was partly open, and a thin string of blood was dangling from it, just like Bethany's. Jim couldn't imagine what they both must have suffered before they died.

‘OK, Detective,' he said, ‘I'll talk to you later.'

Detective Carroll looked at him sharply before he left and said, ‘You
are
feeling OK, Mr Rook?'

‘Sure. Just a little shaken, that's all.'

‘Did you go visit Bethany's mother?'

‘Yes, I did.'

‘And?'

‘You know what L.P. Hartley said, Detective. “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”'

‘OK,' said Detective Carroll. It was obvious from the look on her face that she didn't have a clue who L.P. Hartley was, or what Jim had meant to tell her, but she grasped his arm and gave him a squeeze of reassurance, and that was more than he could have asked for.

Jim went upstairs to Art Studio Four. As he climbed the stairs, he passed Sheila Colefax coming down – dressed, as usual, in a high-necked blouse and a black pencil skirt.

‘Jim,' she said. ‘I thought you'd left for the day. I'm so glad I bumped into you.'

‘What is it, Sheila? I'm kind of tied up right now.'

‘Well, I suppose it can wait. But I was wondering if you'd like to come to a concert with me.'

Jim stared at her. ‘Sheila – do you know what's happening outside? Do you know why the whole place is crawling with cops and paramedics and firefighters and media?'

Sheila looked confused. ‘No. Not really.'

‘Well, please, do me a favor and ask me some other time, would you?'

‘Oh. All right,' she said. She still looked confused.

Jim carried on climbing the stairs.

‘It's only a folk concert,' she called after him. ‘The Woolspinners. It's just that I have two tickets and my friend can't come.'

But Jim was already out of sight. He walked along the corridor until he reached Art Studio Four and opened the door.

Usually, when Special Class Two was left alone, they would be playing classroom basketball or listening to hip-hop music or playing poker or polishing their nails. This afternoon, though, the class was almost completely silent. All of his students were sitting at their places, writing.

Simon Silence stood up as Jim came in. ‘I didn't know if you were coming back today, sir.'

‘Yes, well, I decided I would. You've lost enough time already this semester, and it hasn't even begun.'

DaJon Johnson stuck up his hand. ‘What's happening out there, man – I mean sir? All those po-lice cars and fire trucks and stuff. I axed one of the other teachers but all she said was that nobody had told her squat.'

‘I have no idea what's going on, either,' said Jim. ‘All I know is that there's been some kind of an incident and we have to stay inside until the police say it's OK for us to leave.'

Jim didn't like to lie to his students, but he didn't want to upset them, either, before he knew more about the young man's body nailed to the tree. He looked around and said, ‘What's everybody writing?'

Simon Silence gave Jim a challenging smile. ‘I set them all a short essay, sir. I hope you don't mind.'

‘You set them an
essay
?'

‘Yes, sir. Only half a page. “My Idea of Paradise.”'

‘Oh. I see. OK, then. You might as well carry on. The results might be . . . well, interesting, to say the least.'

He paced up and down the classroom. He had never seen any Special Class Two writing with such concentration, even if Jesmeka Watson did seem to be rubbing out what she had written almost as fast as she was writing it, and the table around her was covered in thousands of gray eraser crumbs.

As he walked back toward his desk for a second time, he noticed that Kyle Baxter was missing – Dictionary Dude, as he had already nicknamed him, for his own benefit.

Kyle Baxter was missing, but on the table where he had been sitting this morning lay a pair of spectacles, with a grubby lump of Band-Aid holding them together.

J
im sorted through his briefcase and found a letter that he had received last week from his mother in Mill Valley. He folded the envelope like a paper glove to pick up Kyle Baxter's spectacles from the bench.

‘OK, I'm just going to take these down to the cops outside.'

‘Hey, Mr Rook?' asked Rudy Cascarelli. ‘You don't think that nothing's happened to that Kyle kid, do you?'

‘I sure hope not, Rudy. But if he's missing, his spectacles may help the cops to identify him. You know – DNA.'

‘You're not saying he's
dead
, are you, sir?' put in DaJon Johnson. ‘Is that what all this emergency thing is all about? They found another student
dead
? Shit, man, this has to be most dangerous seat of learning I ever sat in!'

Jim said, ‘I'm not saying anything, DaJon. Just let me take these down to the cops so that they can make absolutely sure.'

He went toward the classroom door, but as he did so it suddenly opened and Kyle Baxter walked in, blinking.

He frowned at his spectacles which Jim was holding up in his folded envelope; and then he frowned at Jim.

‘I, ah – Kyle!' said Jim. ‘Where the heck have you been?'

‘I went to the bathroom,' Kyle Baxter told him, obviously baffled.

‘Oh – I see. You just went to the bathroom! Sure, yes, OK. No problem with that! The only thing was, I didn't know if you were coming back or not, so I was taking these down to the lost property room, in case they got broken.'

‘They're broken already, sir.'

‘Yes, well, I can see that. But you still wouldn't want to lose them, would you?'

‘I'll be getting my new ones tomorrow, sir.'

‘Good. Great. Anyhow, why don't you sit down, Kyle, and finish off your essay about Paradise?'

Jim looked around the rest of Second Class Two, daring them to tell Kyle that he had been thinking of taking his spectacles down to the CSI. One or two of them smirked and looked away. DaJon Johnson slowly tilted his chimney-stack hair from side to side in amusement, and Simon Silence smiled an even more self-satisfied smile than usual.

Jim sat down at his desk and took out the book that he had been trying to finish for the past seven months,
The Human Goldfish
, a novel about a man who wakes up every morning with no memory of what happened to him the day before. The trouble was, Jim had very little spare time to read any book that wasn't included in his curriculum, and when he did get time, he was usually too tired to manage more than two or three pages before he fell asleep. In the morning, just like the main character in
The Human Goldfish
, he had almost always forgotten what he had read.

After fifteen minutes, he checked the clock and said, ‘Right . . . you should have had enough time by now. Let me take a look at what you've written, and get to know you people at the same time. I'm sorry we've had such a screwed-up start to this semester. Let's try to get back to normal, shall we?'

First he took her paper from Jesmeka Watson, the pretty African-American girl who sat right in front of his desk. Jesmeka had rubbed out her essay so many times that there was a ragged hole in the middle of the page, but she had managed to write ‘Paradise 4 me is 2 B lik MIA singin n dansn n pantn picshuz n also bein mega famus.'

‘So . . . paradise for you would be singing and dancing and painting pictures like MIA? She's very good, MIA, very original. Very talented.'

‘Most of all mega famous, though,' put in Jesmeka, pointing at the words ‘mega famus' in her essay with a purple-frosted fingernail. ‘I just want to stand up in front of all of those thousands and thousands of people and they all, like, adore me.'

For some reason, Jim found himself glancing across at Simon Silence when Jesmeka said that. Simon Silence was talking to the Hispanic boy next to him, and both of them were grinning. Jim couldn't understand why he found Simon Silence so disturbing. He kept feeling that there was an undercurrent in this classroom, silent communications flowing from one student to the next – communications to which he wasn't quite tuned in.

Kyle Baxter was next. He had written, ‘Paradise is happiness/ bliss/ ecstasy/ rapture/ cloud nine/ seventh heaven/ dreamland. Paradise is knowing words all where to put them. Paradise is me cleverer around me all than idiots/ fools/ cretins/ morons/ imbeciles/ halfwits/ clowns/ muggins/ boobies/ dopes/ dumbbells/ boneheads/ saps.'

‘So, Kyle . . . Paradise for you is being smarter than everybody else in the class, and all of them giving you full credit for it?'

‘No, sir.'

‘Oh. Maybe I misunderstood what you've written here. You want to explain it to me?'

‘I don't just want everybody in the class to know that I'm smarter, sir,' he said, under his breath, but with fierce intensity. ‘I want
everybody
to know that I'm smarter.'

‘Like everybody on the planet?'

Kyle nodded so enthusiastically that his spectacles nearly dropped off. Jim gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder and moved on to the next student, who was sitting at Kyle's right elbow. He was a Chinese-American boy whose glossy black hair was cut into a bowl shape, with a fringe so low that Jim could hardly see his eyes. He was wearing a black T-shirt with a large white number 8 on the back, and he had red-and-green dragon's-tail tattoos all the way up his left arm, disappearing into his sleeve.

His essay was five lines written in a strange spidery handwriting. ‘Paradise will come on the day when Wo Hop To is gone and Chung Ching Yee is gone and also Vietnamese Boyz and all is Wah Ching. On that day I will walk like a god.'

Jim said, ‘What's your name, son?'

‘Xiao Chang but everybody calls me Joe.'

‘All right, Joe,' said Jim, holding up his essay. ‘These Chinese names you have here – Wo Hop To and Chung Ching Yee, etcetera – these are all Chinese street gangs. Apart from the Vietnamese Boyz, anyhow, and half of
them
are Chinese.'

Joe Chang nodded, and kept turning his pencil over and over, end to end.

‘Are you a member of Wah Ching?'

‘Not any more, sir. When I live with my parents in Monterey Park I was Wah Ching. But now my father move to West Grove, I don't hang out with them no more.'

‘But you'd still like to? That's your idea of Paradise?'

Joe Chang clenched his fist. ‘In Wah Ching,' he said, ‘I always felt like I got
strength
,' although he pronounced it ‘
strempf
.'

‘Nobody stand in our way. Nobody. They dreaded us, is why. They dreaded us! Strength like that,
that's
Paradise.'

‘Wow, OK. I see. Maybe it's Paradise for you. But how about the people who dread you? Not exactly Paradise for them, is it?'