The Book of the King (5 page)

Lives can turn on simple decisions. If Owen had known what was brewing, if he had known who was searching for him and who was trying to keep him from being found, he would have been more obsessed with the rest of his story than he was with the speech he was to give that day—or even his issue with Gordan.

Stanley pulled a newspaper from the bin in the hallway. “Wasn't too flattering what you put in the sports section.” He read aloud: “‘Showing the arrogance and ego of a more talented wrestler, Gordan Kalb subdued his lack of character and decorum every bit as much as he did his opponent, pinning him in record time.'”

Owen turned. “I didn't write that. I wouldn't even know how to write a sentence like that.”

“You're the best writer in the paper,” Stanley said.

Owen snatched the paper from Stanley. “I'm serious. That's not what I wrote. Some of it is mine—but not this part about how he made weight using laxatives. Who would have changed this? And why?”

Owen wanted to march right into the office of the advisor, Mrs. Rothem, who always had nice things to say about his writing. She was his favorite teacher. She couldn't have set him up. She liked him too much.

Owen watched Stanley disappear into the sea of students, then felt the air gush from his lungs, his shirt yanked tight around his neck. He was dragged into the restroom, and someone stepped in front of the door.

Someone shoved Owen against a tile wall. A fist flew. Soon he was on the floor staring at a pair of shoes in the farthest stall. Converse All Stars.

A foot planted in his stomach. Then against his ribs. He curled into a ball like a grub.

Someone close. Bad breath. “Put anything like that in the paper again and I'll break your fingers.”

Another kick. A door swinging shut. People came and went.

Someone over him now. Talking. The assistant principal. “Owen, can you hear me?” He snapped his fingers. “Sit up, son. Can you stand?”

Owen was taken to the nurse's office. Someone placed an ice pack on his eye, but there was nothing they could do for his stomach and chest.

“Who did this to you?” was the repeated question.

The answer was the same each time. He hadn't seen. It had happened too fast. There were no witnesses—at least that could be found in the school.

A female voice. Clara had been running an errand for her teacher and noticed him in the nurse's office. “What happened to you?” she whispered. “Did this happen last night?”

“No, I got away last night, thanks to you. This just happened.”

“Who did it?”

Owen frowned.

“I can guess,” she said. “You should stay away from those guys.”

Owen lay back and closed his eyes, enjoying the perfume that lingered after Clara had gone. His face was afire, but somehow her visit had made the suffering worth it.

“Do you want us to call your father?” the nurse said. “You should have those cuts looked at by a doctor.”

“I'll just go home,” Owen managed. “It's not far. My dad is busy today with inventory.”

Owen limped to the front door, down the stairs, and out the back gate, avoiding, at least for one more day, his speech in science class.

It is this decision that changes our story, for if Owen hadn't been attacked, if he had let the nurse call home, if he had stayed and faced his fear of speaking, or if any of a dozen small choices had not been made, our story might have ended here. But history turns on such chance.

Owen hobbled home defeated, raw from aloneness. Being alone at the bookstore was one thing, but this was a pain so deep that all Owen could do was try to stop his trembling chin and hope his father might say something to ease his suffering. Cuts and bruises would heal, but the turmoil in his heart and mind bubbled and foamed, roiling and boiling as if there was no end to it.

A lesser reader might see this broken, beaten, limping figure and turn to something more pleasant. But not you. You're not one of those who cannot envision any good coming from his story; you realize that every warrior must face defeat and that defeat does not define the warrior any more than words define the heart of a lion.

What Owen liked most about his favorite books was that they told stories without a lot of boring stuff. And so, in honor of him, that is our aim too.

With everything else that had befallen our hero, should he have been surprised at the freezing rain that blew sideways into his bruised face? He limped under the awning of Tattered Treasures, one eye swollen shut. On the front door a sign read Closed—Will Return after Lunch.

Owen had forgotten his key, but he and his father hid one above the trim over the back door in the alley. He hunched his shoulders against the biting cold and lurched to stand under the awning over the entrance to Blackstone Tavern. He intended to cut through their kitchen to the back, but if he ran into old man Sloven instead of Petrov . . .

Owen skirted the entrance and went all the way around the building and through the alley, the rain freezing him to his freshly injured bones. He located the key and hurried inside, hanging his thin jacket on the back of the door, droplets ticking on the linoleum, gathering in a puddle.

Owen heard a noise. “Dad? I got hurt at school.” Without turning on the lights, he entered the long fiction section, past fantasy and mystery to his left, mainstream fiction to his right. He paused at the fireplace, near the tribute to Ernest Hemingway, and listened for voices as he squinted in the darkness to scan the display of Hemingway titles and the pictorial history that showed the novelist holding dead animals in Africa and sitting in some French bistro.

Shivering, Owen gingerly tiptoed upstairs to the kitchen, where he found a package of peas in the freezer. He put this over his swollen eye and moved back downstairs.

Whispers.

Owen stopped dead, a sliver of frost sliding in slow motion off the melting bag to the floor.

Whispers.

In the walls. Behind books. From the rafters.

Owen was glued to the spot near the cash register, as if his feet were in cement. The place, so familiar, felt eerie in the low light. He wished his father were here. He wished anyone were here—even Connie, the little pest who bugged him when her mother brought her to the store. Her real name was Constance, but Owen called her Constant, as in Constant Pain.

He finally forced himself to move into the next room, back to a chair near the fireplace and a picture of Hemingway displaying a fresh-caught fish bigger than Owen. He sat down and laid the pea bag over the arm of the chair, something for which his father would have scolded him. He willed the whispers to go away, but they only grew louder.

Strange. The rug in the corner in front of the biggest bookcase in the store had been pulled back.

Owen grabbed the bag of peas and slid from the chair, whispers surrounding him. He knelt and scooted silently toward a vent in the floor. He put his ear close to the opening and strained, but he could make out only bits and pieces, sentence fragments.

“. . . must keep him away . . .”

“. . . dangerous to the cause . . .”

“. . . never know what could happen . . .”

“. . . Master will not like it. . . .”

“. . . not accept failure . . .”

It seemed to Owen as if his heart stopped when he heard his father's voice. He had never heard him like this. The man was usually brusque and dismissive, often harsh. Now he had a whine in his voice and was nearly weeping. “I have done everything you've asked. Why must you torture me like this?”

Owen quietly, painfully stretched out and lay next to the vent, putting the frozen bag to his injured eye. His mind raced—the same way it had when he was younger and he imagined monsters in his room, slithering demons with hideous faces and scaly bodies. He would cower under the covers for what seemed like days before mustering the nerve to reach for the tiny flashlight on his desk. He was sure the monster was waiting to pounce, to bite off his hand as he groped for the light. But it came back whole, along with the flashlight.

In the end, the monster had simply been a cover he had draped over a chair. Its nose was the round arm of the chair. He would leave the light on awhile to settle his mind.

But now, this, this was no imaginary monster. Something was going on somewhere close. Owen had always believed his father was just a grumpy, sad bookstore owner with bad business sense. So what was all this about?

Was his father such a loner because he was a wanted man? Had he once been a spy for some secret government organization, and now they wanted him for one more job?

What if Owen's mother, instead of dying the day Owen was born, had actually been killed in a secret operation to overthrow some dictator, and after that his father had gone into hiding?

What if his father was actually a bank robber? That would explain how he had enough money to buy the bookstore and not care how many books he sold. And what if Owen's mother had been killed assisting some terrorist action?

Suddenly the whispers stopped and footsteps approached.

A draft reached the huge dictionary lying on its side at the end of a shelf, and its thousand pages began to flap, opening to the
D
section. Had you been a fly on the wall, you would have noted that at the top of the page was the word
deathbed
and at the bottom of the next,
deceit
.

Owen quickly became aware of the musty, pungent aroma that had greeted him before, smoky and dank, like something burning. He tried to shut down his breathing and wanted to open a window or a door. But that was impossible, because as much as he abhorred the smell and as much as he wanted to escape, he was transfixed. For at that very moment the huge bookcase in the corner, the only one built into the wall of the old building, moved.

Impossible as it seems, the floor-to-ceiling shelving loaded with the heaviest volumes inched out toward the pulled-back rug, creaking under the weight of all those pages, all those words.

Breath held, heart hammering, Owen silently leaped to his feet and moved into hiding behind a shelf shrouded in darkness, peering over duplicate copies of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
.

A flame flickered from the dark passage beneath the massive bookshelf, and a puff of dusty air shot from the opening, as if a tent flap had just closed or the wings of some giant bird had just flapped.

Owen stared at the shadows of giant figures reflected on the stone walls as they ascended. Owen's father led the way, followed by three cloaked figures who looked as if they had walked straight out of the third stave of Charles Dickens's
A Christmas Carol,
cousins of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Owen's father reached high and grasped an ivory bookend in the shape of Medusa, the Greek mythological figure with snakes' heads protruding from her own. With one tug, the bookcase began its slow, groaning close.

The mysterious other three followed Owen's father toward the next room, allowing Owen to breathe. But the last of the intruders, the tallest and leanest, paused before leaving the fiction room. He stopped and tilted his head to inspect the small wet spot on the floor. He ran a pale, skeletal hand across the arm of the chair where Owen had placed the bag of peas. The being lingered, then joined the others. Soon Owen heard the tinkling of the bell over the entrance as the door opened and shut.

In all the stories Owen had read, in all the novels and short stories about children and their fathers, he had never encountered anything like this.

Anyone else in this situation may have waited until the beings had left and confronted his father, demanding the truth. But Owen is not like other people. He stored this scene in his mind, slipped out the back door, and tossed the bag of frozen peas into the Dumpster. He retraced his steps all the way around the building, made sure the hooded beings were gone, and, seeing the Come In; We're Open sign, reentered.

His father looked up from his desk, clearly startled.

Owen explained what had happened at school, showed his father his scrapes and bruises, and followed him upstairs. No questions about the fight. No calls to the school about protection from bullies.

Though Owen's father had never been what Owen would have called a tender man, he seemed skilled enough in tending to the boy's cuts and scrapes. He searched the freezer, appearing puzzled, and finally placed a handful of ice in a plastic bag. “Put this on your eye and rest in your bedroom.”

As Owen left the kitchen he turned to watch his father rub his neck.

He retreated to his room, small and Spartan. His bed was his biggest piece of furniture. In the opposite corner, under a dingy window that looked out on the alley and the Dumpster, stood a small desk with three drawers and just enough space to hold a notebook and an opened book or two.

Owen's closet showed the effects of life without a mother. His clothes were piled high—dirty and clean in an unholy alliance.