The Home

TWENTY-FIVE

Six hundred pounds of night sky pressed down, the mountains closed in, the trees were bad things that wanted to strangle him.

Just like that, standing by the fence with the whole world against him, Freeman jumped the elevator into the down cycle, no stops. He was smart enough to tell the difference these days, thanks to Dr. Krackpot's treatments. Sure, depression was only a bad mix of brain chemicals and crossed wires, but he couldn't stop thinking of it as God's idea of a good joke.

Only moments before, he'd known everything, he was smarter than God, he could triptrap into every skull in the world if he wanted. Now there was nothing but big dark.

The path by the lake was tar, his feet as heavy as stumps. The black blanket of depression over his head dulled his senses and choked off the oxygen to his head. Seeing the electrified fence had flipped the big switch in his brain. He was stuck at Wendover, hopeless, helpless, just another stooge in the loser factory.

Even worse. He was starting to shrink himself and trying to figure things out. The good old enemy within. The troll under the bridge.

"Freeman?"

Oh, no.

Not her.

Not now.

All he wanted was to be alone, to slink back to his mattress and burrow under the pillow in the fart-filled wonderland known as the Blue Room. To be alone with bleak thoughts. Him and his misery, a match made in heaven.

"Freeman, I'm sorry."

Sorry. That was a good one. The word that everybody went for after they'd screwed you over and messed you up. Sorry was one of his dad's favorite words, right after shithead and motherfucker and sausage-brains and all his other pet names.

Freeman moved past Vicky in the darkness, letting despair drag him back toward Wendover. The lake caught the silver moon and soft ripples whispered forgotten names, as if the water held the spirits of those long dead. Let the ghosts come and eat him up or pull him down with them for all he cared. Maybe he belonged with those crazy fucks.

"Freeman, talk to me. Don't be like this."

Like what? He wasn't being like anything. She didn't need to follow him. Why couldn't she find somebody else to worry about, somebody who gave half a damn?

He walked on, and the path may as well have been waste-deep mud. Depression. Tidy little name the shrinks had for it. They were so goddamned smart. Depression, like sinking into a hole.

"I can't triptrap you, Freeman. You're shielded. So you have to tell me. What's going on?"

Triptrap was for idiots. Who cared what anybody else thought? When you walked across the bridge into somebody else's head, all you saw was their fuck-ups and problems and pain and sorrow. He had a Pandora's box worth of troubles tucked away in his own head. Why go out of his way to find more?

Vicky grabbed his arm and tugged He blinked out of his stupor of self-pity and saw they were on the Wendover lawn, the few lighted windows of the building gazing like monster eyes. Off to the left, almost hidden beneath the trees, were the counselors' cottages. The buildings were dark and silent.

She tugged again. "Freeman. I'm scared. Talk to me."

Oh, God. Defender of the Weak, Protector of the Innocent. What a crock. Defending the weak had almost cost Clint his neck in The Outlaw Josey Wales.

Still, Vicky had been nice to him, or at least acted like it. Damn, he hated when they were as good at pretending as he was.

"Forget about it," he said. "We're all stuck here."

"Stuck? Just a few minutes ago, you were all excited about making a run for it."

"They outsmarted us. They always win. No matter what you do, they're one step ahead. Haven't you figured that out yet?"

"No, Freeman. There's always hope."

Freeman swallowed a laugh. It turned his stomach and he almost choked. Maybe he'd ask Vicky to give him some pointers on self-induced vomiting so he could get rid of all the lies they had fed him over the years.

"Let me explain," he said. "There's a bunch of crazy dead people in the basement, electric razor wire on the fences, and the key to the front gate is in the pocket of a man who zaps little kids for fun. And the Trust is behind it all. I thought the Trust was out of my life forever, once Dad was booked into a rubber room. But they're back and I have this bad feeling they brought me to Wendover for more of their fun and games. Now what part of that is supposed to make me break into a chorus of 'Tomorrow'?"

Vicky stopped him. "I thought you were special, but you're just like all the rest, aren't you? Aren't you?"

He had to look at her. He owed her that much, at least. He wished he hadn't, because those big dark eyes caught the moon just like the lake water had. That's all he needed, for her to squeeze out a few tears here in the middle of the night. If he lived a million years, which was a million more than enough, he'd never be able to figure out girls. Even when he could get right inside their heads, they still made no sense.

"Come on, let's go." Freeman took Vicky's arm. "All we're going to do is get in trouble. And that dead guy in the lake back there might decide he's lonely."

She jerked free. "You're so stuck on your own problems that you don't see everybody else has them too. And sometimes you're the cause of their problems."

Damn. She was crying.

Freeman was helpless. If he were on an up, he might have sneaked into her head and tried to relate to her. Even though he'd be doomed to failure. Girls never said what they really meant, and they never even thought what they really meant. When you tried to fix one thing, it turned out to be something completely different mat was broken.

He reached out to pat her shoulder, something even Clint Eastwood could manage, but she turned her back. What to do now?

She took several slow steps away. He thrust his hands into his jeans pockets and looked at the stars. Insects fiddled among the trees and two bullfrogs swapped croaks across the banks of the lake. He wished he could dissolve into the night, do like the old man's ghost and melt away like a fog. But he couldn't, because he was made of God's stuff, flesh and bone and blood.

Damn.

He was the troll beneath the bridge, and she was the little goat Gruff.

He was gobbling her up.

Him and his evil mouth, his bad teeth, his stupid mean claws.

Freeman went for that word, the one he'd heard too many times and hardly ever used himself. "Sorry."

"You're only sorry for yourself."

"No, really. I didn't mean to hurt you."

She spun so fast that he almost fell over backwards. She came on like a two-fisted prizefighter, De Niro as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, Clint as Dirty Harry, Pacino as Michael Corleone in the Godfather movies, her words stinging like uppercuts and jabs. "Didn't-mean-to-hurt-me! You're the goddamned champion of hurt, Freeman. I never met anybody like you. And I never wanted to, either."

Then she stormed off across the grass heading toward Wendover, small and lost against the dark structure. Freeman followed, his heart like a trapped bird against the cage of his ribs.

They were nearly to the building and Freeman was thinking of something to say, maybe ask what was the best way to sneak inside, when Vicky stopped.

Freeman thought she was going to give him more pieces of her mind, but she pointed to a window on the second floor, one of the few that wasn't dark. A shadow moved against the muted light, a head ducking back. Someone had been watching them.

"Who was it?" Freeman asked.

"Couldn't tell."

"Do ghosts have shadows?"

"Maybe ghosts are the shadows."

"Vicky, this place is major messed up."

"It was bad enough back when it was just us kids with all our problems. Even without the disappearing man and the people in the basement, and now you're babbling about some Trust that's behind all this. I don't think I can take anymore, Freeman."

They approached the back stairs, the night cool with crickets. The moon stretched the dark shadows of trees across the lake. Freeman took Vicky's arm and she didn't stop him; he let her lean against him as they headed up the steps. Freeman felt lighter now, as if some of the world's weight had fallen from his shoulders.

He stopped in his tracks. Realization, big time.

Depression didn't just slink away, even for a rapid cycler. Depression clawed its way to the surface from a spot deep in your guts. Yet Freeman felt something so rare that he had to pinch himself to make sure he wasn't sleepwalking into a good dream.

The feeling wasn't happiness, exactly. He'd known little enough of that in his life, but he could recognize it from a safe distance. And it wasn't joy. And it sure as heck wasn't the L-word. But being with Vicky was starting to feel like a habit. A good habit.

"Don't get weird on me, Freeman."

He smiled in the night. A smile. Yeah, that was weird, all right.

Her hand pressed against his. She was giving him something. He took it and closed his palm around it. A penny.

"Don't make me have to come in there," she said.

The trouble was, she was already in. She was attached to almost every thought he had lately, at least when he wasn't depressed. He could close his eyes and smell her soap, see the freckle two inches below her left eye, feel the fine bones of her fingers. She was in way too deep, and he didn't know how to get her out.

Could you vomit thoughts, clean out your skull and make it all nice and empty? Brain bulemia? Start from scratch, with no past and no Dad and no scars and no feelings? No ESP?

Would God, if the bastard was as real and caring as Starlene made Him out to be, let a boy have a new beginning, this time without playing against a stacked deck?

No.

That was what they called hope, and Freeman knew the word was nothing but a loaded gun in a shrink's arsenal. Hope didn't exist in the real world, where ghosts walked and little kids got shock treatment and barbed wire marked the edges of the universe.

"I'm not thinking anything," he said, squeezing the penny and wishing he had the guts to say something strange, deep, and tough-soft, like maybe Pacino in Scent of a Woman or Sea of Love.

"Don't hold out on me. You know you can trust me."

"I'm thinking we ought to be getting back inside before someone notices we're gone. All we need is for Bondurant to be breathing down our necks. He'd probably sign us up for an extra session in Kracowski's secret little room."

"Or else give us a spanking," Vicky said.

"Spare me."

"Think we should try to get in through the basement?"

Freeman heard a sound from beneath the landing. "I don't think so," he whispered.

Someone spoke from the darkness below them. Freeman barely recognized the voice as Starlene's, it was so shaken.

Starlene spoke again, this time more clearly. "Hey, guys, what are you doing here? It's past Lights Out. You could get in big trouble."

Freeman almost wanted to laugh at that. Dead people coming out of the woodwork, and he was supposed to worry about having his dessert withheld.

"You shouldn't have gone down there," Vicky said.

Starlene came out of the dark hollow beneath the landing. "I just wanted to check out what you guys said."

Freeman and Vicky exchanged glances. A grown-up who acknowledged having doubts? What was the world coming to?

"What did you see?" Vicky asked.

"I'm not sure."

Freeman tried a triptrap on Starlene, but the air was too murky, his own thoughts too cloudy. He only gave himself a headache. If he knew what she'd seen, then maybe he could convince her that he wasn't crazy. Or maybe she had seen something that had her doubting her own sanity.

Nah. No counselor in the history of the human race had ever been less than perfect. Shrinks were the baseline from which sanity was judged. Though Starlene had shown glimpses of being human, when you got right down to it, she was still a hard-headed know-it-all who gave Jesus Christ credit for all good things and blamed her few failures on other people.

"Nobody's sure about anything lately," Freeman said. "What about Kracowski's machines?"

"All I can say is they look expensive. And they put off a lot of strange vibes."

"Listen," Vicky said. "You two can stand out here all night if you want. I'm going inside."

"You might get in easier with this." Starlene pulled a keychain from her pocket. "Unless you already know how to break in."

Vicky gave an innocent look, widening her eyes and letting her mouth go slack. Nothing looked as guilty as feigned innocence.

"Vicky's a saint," Freeman said. "It would never cross her mind to do anything against the rules."

"As if you've crossed her mind lately?" Starlene asked.

"I thought you didn't believe in ESP."

"I'm starting to believe in a whole lot of new stuff." She looked at her watch. "Almost eleven. You guys think you can sneak into your dorms without getting caught?"

"You mean you're not going to report us?"

"No. I'm on your side, remember?"

Starlene led them to the back door and unlocked it. Then she reached inside and keyed the pad deactivating the alarm.

"Whatever you do, stay away from the lake," Freeman said to Starlene.

"I know how to swim."

"I'm not talking about swimming. I'm talking about jumping into the water and looking for an invisible man."

"Hey, how did you… Oh."

"We aren't as dumb as we look," Vicky said.

They slipped down the hall, looking out for the night watch. Whoever had seen them from the upper window might be lying in wait for them. Bondurant was rumored to roam the halls in the middle of the night, paddle in hand. And that wasn't even considering the danger from crazy spooks who dangled from unseen strings and threw weird sentences into your skull.

Wendover itself seemed like a skull, a hard shell housing random and unexplained dreams. Freeman wondered if a building could be insane. If what Vicky said was true and this place had been a nuthouse back in the glory days of psychosurgery, then these walls had absorbed more than their share of screams. Freeman shuddered and wondered where screams went to die.

They slipped past the main offices. No light showed beneath the door, which either meant Bondurant was gone or else was sitting in the dark. Probably dreaming about the next kid he got to paddle. Freeman never wanted to triptrap into Bondurant's head again. He'd rather swap thoughts with a ghost than with something as vile as The Liz.

"Walk me to my door?" Vicky whispered. In the grim fluorescent light, her face was an unhealthy shade of greenish white.

"You scared?"

"No. I'm too dumb to be scared."

"Yeah. You're real dumb all right. So dumb that you play games with the security guards and you've got the counselors eating out of your hands."

"Sorry about that, back there," she said, sweeping her hair from her face, a gesture that made Freeman's heart pause. "When I got all emotional."

"Happens to the best of us."

"I'll try not to let it happen again."

"That would probably make life easier. Even if you have to fake it."

They were silent the rest of the way to the Green Room. The door was ajar, and Freeman thought about all the girls in their bunks wearing nothing but their underwear. The dormitory was dark, and Freeman didn't know if one of the counselors was inside waiting for Vicky to enter. He figured he'd best not hang around, no matter what.

Before he left, Vicky grabbed him and put her mouth to his ear. "Thanks for the walk," she whispered. Then she kissed him on the cheek.

What would Clint do?

Stand there like a wooden statue, that's what. He almost wished he had a big chew of tobacco, so he could lean over and spit on the floor in lieu of a response. Or wince and twitch one corner of his mouth. Feel nothing, even if you have to fake it.

She was through the door and gone before he could think of something to say, and he was glad, because he would have resorted to Clint's classic line from The Outlaw Josey Wales: Reckon so.