Nightmare Academy (4 page)

2

ON THE DARKSIDE

A
ND THAT, UNFORTUNATELY, WAS THE END OF NORTON,” Nate Springfield read aloud, smiling at the strange similarity his daughter's characters bore to a real family—theirs. He looked up from the manuscript. “Norton?”

His sixteen-year-old daughter, Elisha, blond and pretty, grinned sheepishly across the dining table. “Well . . .”

“I mean, your mother, Sarah, gets to be Susan, Elijah gets to be Elias, you get to be Lisa—but
Norton?"

“It's the first name I thought of that started with an
N.
I can change it.”

Nate waved that aside. “No, Norton's fine. I'm resilient. I can recover.”

“So what do you think?”

Nate deliberately took a long pause, cleaning his reading glasses, stretching his big frame a bit, checking the weather out the window. He leafed through his daughter's writing assignment again, page by page. This was Elisha's last home school assignment for the year, and she was late turning it in. Now, as a matter of discipline, she had to finish it before she could go horseback riding with her brother. And Nate, a former Montana lawman who used to “wait” confessions out of suspects, thought a little anxiety would do his daughter good. “Mm. You split an infinitive here.”

She looked where her father was pointing. “But Dad, that's in a quote. The character doesn't have perfect English.”

“I notice that character's your brother.”

Elisha squirmed but grinned. “No. He's Elias. Fictional character. Elias.” She was quick to add, “But I said he had finely toned muscles!”

Nate tried to stifle a laugh but could only stifle half of it. “Okay, I'll give you that.” He went to the next page. “Huh, what's this? The sudden pounding told them where the monster was at . . .”

Even Elisha was horrified to see the sentence in her own writing. “I can't believe I did that.”

“It's not in a quote this time, sweetheart.”

Elisha was mortified. “No. It sure isn't.”

“Never put where and at . . . ,” he began and she joined in unison with her father, “in the same sentence.”

“So what should it be?”

She made the correction even as she said it. “The sudden pounding told them where the monster was.”

“Very good.”

Nate laid the pages down on the table in front of him and leaned back. “So tell me. What does the monster represent?”

Elisha was disappointed. “You don't get it?”

Nate smiled. “I want you to tell me.”

She twisted her mouth in thought, then answered boldly, “Mankind without truth, without God-given morals. He has strength, he can think, he can even feel things emotionally—but if he isn't given a good, solid standard for right and wrong, then there's nothing to keep him from using strength and reason and feelings in selfish ways, even destructive ways.”

“So, on the one hand, we tell ourselves that none of us are subject to any moral law outside of ourselves, and then we wonder . . . ,” Nate prompted.

“We wonder why people do such evil things, why there's so much violence in the world, why people rob and cheat and betray each other. But when we erase truth from our thinking and say there's no right or wrong except for what each person thinks is right or wrong, well, we get the kind of world we deserve.”

“And who ends up making the rules when we reject truth?”

Elisha adopted a grim, guttural voice. “The biggest, meanest, toughest dude.” She used her own voice to add, “Whoever has the most power—the biggest army, the most money, the most votes, the most newspapers or television networks. When there's no truth that applies to everyone, then there's no way to argue for the rightness or wrongness of anything, and when that happens, whoever has the most power calls the shots.”

“Like a monster running amok.”

She brightened. Her father got the point. “Right.”

Nate nodded, quite satisfied. “Well done, Elisha. Very well done.” She grinned from ear to ear. “And now, I'm sure your brother would like to get some riding in before the day's gone.”

“Yes!” Elisha exclaimed, jumping up, hugging her father, grabbing her cowboy hat, and heading for the door.

“Don't slam the screen—”

The screen door shut with a bang.

Elijah Springfield, Elisha's twin—the one with the “finely toned muscles"—had saddled the horses. His own steed, a chestnut named Charlie, stood patiently, oh so patiently, in the center of the Springfields' big barn, waiting for Elijah to make still another attempt at an experiment. Holding a long rope suspended from a ceiling beam, Elijah stood atop a towering stack of hay bales, staring, thinking, and staring again at the straw-strewn floor of the barn, then at the high, post-and-beam walls surrounding him, then at the ceiling beam to which the rope was secured, and then at his horse—still standing obediently, but only for so long.

The big question: Launching from this location, would he have enough inertia to kick off from the north wall, swing over to the west wall, swing in a downward spiral, and finally return to where Charlie was waiting at the very limit of the rope's decaying swing, thus coming into contact with the saddle while in a state of near weightlessness? If Charlie felt nothing, and mostly, if Elijah felt nothing, then his prediction based on the available data would be correct and the experiment would be a success—not a Nobel prize winner, but a success. He could see the trajectory in his head, as clearly as if he'd drawn it on his eye's view of the barn with bright yellow chalk.

Ready.

He gripped the rope tightly, checked the diagram in his mind one last time, and then started with a quick run off the hay bales.

He was flying, suspended, the north wall approaching, the rope moaning against the beam.

BAM!
His feet hit the wall, his legs flexing like springs, and he bounded off like a billiard ball. Perfect angle.

He was lower now. The arc of the swing was decaying, but that was all in the plan. The west wall was coming at him.

BAM!
Second rebound successful. I
should work for NASA.

Now, one last spiral down, coming back toward his starting point, but below it now, right along the base of the hay bales, and there was Charlie's hind end, like the planet Earth from a spacecraft window, and just above it, the saddle, ready for a soft landing . . .

The approach of a leg-kicking, blue-jeaned, leather-brimmed spacecraft spooked planet Earth, and he trotted out the barn door just as Elijah reached the last, dying inch of the rope's swing, that minuscule moment of weightlessness when a landing would have been perfect. . . .

He was flying, suspended,
the north wall approaching,
the rope moaning against the beam.

With a cry of frustration and despair, he clung to the rope as it carried him backward. He let go and fell into a pile of soft straw carefully placed there—in case something went wrong. By this time, although he hadn't mastered a weightless landing in a saddle, he had become quite skilled at landing in straw when something went wrong. He rolled into it, head over heels, half disappearing under the swishing stuff, the world going dark as his cool leather hat with the rattlesnake band scrunched down over his eyes.

With an angry growl he sat upright, brushing the straw off his arms and shoulders. “Charlie! You keep throwing variables into the equation!” He lifted his brim, letting the daylight back in. “If you'd only spook at a uniform rate—”

There stood his sister, weight shifted to one hip, hat cocked back on her head, watching him with great amusement.

“Hey, Einstein, let's do some riding.”

“It's about time, Hemingway!”

She gave him a hand up. “So let's go, before something else stops us.”

They hurried out of the barn. Charlie and Pardner, saddled and ready, awaited them by the fence. The afternoon sun was still high and the Montana sky deep blue. There would be time to ride the ridge behind the ranch, and maybe even get as far as the tree line where they'd spotted bear tracks just two days ago. Elijah mounted Charlie in quite the conventional way—Charlie didn't mind
that.
Elisha put her foot in the stirrup—

And the dinner bell rang. Not for dinner. This was a special ring, calling them to the house for something important. Elisha, her hand on the saddle horn, wilted, and then let go. “I hope it's you this time!”

Elijah dismounted, slightly miffed. “Hey, I turned in my paper yesterday, and I fixed that fence rail! I owe no man any­thing!”

They came around the barn and looked across the pasture toward the big log ranch house. A rental car was parked in front, and Mom and Dad stood on the veranda with . . .

Was
that Mr. Morgan?

They gathered in the lofty, rough-hewn family room—Nate and Sarah Springfield, Elijah and Elisha, and the rarely seen Mr. Morgan—settling into the couch and chairs and on the big stone hearth while Morgan showed them photographs, documents, and other information he and his little Washington staff had gathered. Then he slipped a DVD into their home entertainment system.

“The clips you're about to see were videotaped at Harborview Hospital in Seattle by a friend of mine, Dr. Madison. I sent this footage to the White House along with our proposal, and you've seen the response I got: Under no circumstances were we to investigate this. Then lo and behold, within minutes, 1 found the entire contents of the videotape copied onto this DVD and hidden between the pages of my morning newspaper, along with a handwritten note.”