The List Of Seven (22 page)

"Good Lord ..." said Doyle softly, wiping a tear from his eye. "Good Lord, Jack ..."

Sparks seemed singularly unmoved by the story. He calmly took a drink and then continued: a cold, dispassionate recitation. "The next summer, the woman discovers she is once again with child. The news is kept from the boy, but as a precaution Alexander is packed up and sent away to boarding school the moment her condition becomes visibly self-evident, months before the child is expected. This proves no hardship to Alexander. He is more than ready to expand his sphere of influence beyond the confines of the garden walls. Fresh meat, he says, looking about hungrily at the new world that greets him; populated not just with adults, who he can already manage easily enough, but boys his own age, whole battalions of them, as pliant and malleable to his tools as uncut stone. And they are, none of them, parents or headmasters alike, witting enough to realize they have crowned the fox and set him up a palace in the henhouse. The next spring, hidden from his view and far from the reach of Alexander's grasp, a second son is born."

This time Doyle's question was left unspoken.

"Yes, Doyle. My entrance onto the stage."

"Did they ever let him near you?"

"Not for the longest time, for years, was he even aware of my presence, nor I of his. Alexander stayed at school through terms and all the holidays, even Christmas. Summers he was sent to stay with distant relations overseas. My parents paid a visit only once a year, every Easter week. My father, who had been serving all this time in the diplomatic corps, retired to stay close to myself and my mother. In spite of the damage done, I believe they were able to find some small measure of happiness in the home we made together. It certainly seemed that way to my unknowing senses; I was well and fairly loved. I suspected nothing of my brother's existence until I was near ready for schooling myself, when a man who worked in the stables, my confidant and favorite among the staff, let slip some reference to a boy named Alexander who'd ridden there years before. My parents had never spoken his name, but when I confronted them with my discovery of another boy riding at our stable, they admitted his existence to me. I did not interpret their reticence as having anything at all to do with their feelings toward Alexander— needless to say, no mention was ever made of my late sister—but once I learned that I had an unknown older brother, my curiosity became insatiable. After realizing my parents were not to be more forthcoming, I pumped the servants endlessly for news about this mysterious boy. They were clearly under orders to tell me nothing, and this blanket of silence surrounding Alexander only served to increase my eagerness. I ached to know him. I tried in vain to secretly gain his address so I might write to him. I prayed that God would soon acquaint me with the boy who I was convinced existed solely in order to serve as my companion, protector, and coconspirator."

"They never let you, did they?" asked Doyle, alarmed at the prospect.

"Only after two years of relentless campaigning and six months of bargaining—I was never to write to or accept letters from him; I would never be alone in his company: I eagerly accepted every one of their conditions. That year we paid our Easter visit to my brother's public school together. I was seven. Alexander was thirteen. We greeted each other formally, shaking hands. He was a striking boy: tall, sturdy, with black hair and riveting eyes. He seemed to me the soul of comradeship. Our parents were not prepared to leave us alone even for an instant, but after a few hours in which he exhibited such polite and openhearted enjoyment of both my company and theirs, their vigilance relented as we walked back from dinner through the gardens. As we turned a hedge ahead of them, Alexander pulled me from view, pressed a note into my hand, urging me to conceal it from our parents at all costs and to read it only when my absolute privacy was secured. Along with it he gave me a black polished stone, a talisman, which he assured me was his most treasured possession, and which he fervently wished me to have. I accepted the terms of his offerings gladly and, for the first time in my life, willfully concealed an event of such import from my parents. The first wedge between my life and theirs had been driven, the narrowest gap opened that had never before existed, and it was of my brother's conscious design."

"What did the letter say?"

"Predominantly innocent schoolboy chat—his daily rou-

tines recounted in prosaic detail, victories and tribulations in the classroom and on the playing fields, anecdotes about his colorful collection of classmates, what to expect of school myself, the clubby whys and wherefores of getting on with both teachers and chums—all in the confident tone of the wiser, worldlier brother advising a young charge on the eve of embarking on his own educational career. It assumed a comfortable familiarity that played as if we'd known each other all our lives. Friendly, generous, evenhanded, more than a little funny—in short, precisely the sort of letter I had dreamed about receiving from the idealized older brother I'd imagined. Nothing overt that would have upset my parents if they had ever found it, which I took every precaution to prevent. There was no self-pity, bemoaning our parents' abandonment of him. No complaints at their lack of interest. To the contrary, he wrote about them with the greatest consideration and affection, grateful for the opportunities they had given him at this wonderful school, how proud he hoped to one day make them, how he longed to repay their kindnesses to him a thousandfold. Not until the last paragraph did he conceal the hook around which he had spun the fiction. The ingenuousness, the absence of rancor toward my parents, his heartfelt openness toward our mutual discovery—all evidence of a clever, cunning, even exceptional personality. It wasn't until this last reference that the full extent of his malignant genius was manifest."

"What was it?"

" 'Although it seems clear that we must face all the difficult trials of our lives alone, just to know that you are alive, my brother, gives me the secret strength I have always sought to carry on.' " Sparks spoke the words quietly, with grave exactitude. "The stoic bravery, the hinted-at but unnamed difficult trials—how magnified, how operatic, they became in my imagination—and the suggestion that I could in my small, seven-year-old way somehow ease the pain of this shining exemplar was irresistible to my freshly minted mind. I was far too green to resist such an appeal. It whispered that he must know my capacities better than I knew myself. That in time, in his wisdom, he would reveal them to me, leading me to the discovery of my true identity, which I of course hoped would be in partnership with him, united against the world. If he had asked me even then, in that first letter, I would have thrown myself onto a bayonet."

"How did you respond?"

"He ended with instructions on how, if I so desired, I might safely write him back. The school had strict orders from my parents to intercept and return to them all of Alexander's arriving correspondence. I was to address the letter to a classmate of his—a fiercely devoted cadre of boys had served him unswervingly since his arrival; their number increased every year—and the letter would be discreetly passed on. Of course, the clandestine nature of it only served to amplify my enthusiasm: I wrote him back at once, emptying the contents of my heart; the longing I had for just such a champion in my life came running out of me like spring water. I made a sweet, simple fool of myself."

"You were only a boy," said Doyle.

Sparks showed himself no such clemency. His eyes were reduced to black pinpricks of self-directed rage. Draining his brandy, he promptly called for another. "I've never told any of this to another soul. Not a word."

Doyle knew Jack would accept no solace from the hollow sympathies he had to offer. Sparks's drink arrived. He fortified himself before continuing.

"I sent my letter to him. He of course anticipated my letter and had seen to it that arrangements allowing an exchange to continue were already in place—his writing back to me was problematic; sending it directly was out of the question. With an embroidered account of parental cruelty, he had recruited one of his adjutant's cousins, a quiet, reliable youth who lived in the village near our home. Under his cousin's signature, the man would receive Alexander's letters—which, once the dam broke, arrived at a steady rate of at least two a week— bicycle out to our estate, and leave them in a biscuit tin I had buried near an ancient oak, a landmark on our property that I frequented, well out of sight from the main house.

"So my correspondence with my brother began. It was from the start voluminous, the contents academically vigorous and far-reaching. Alexander's interest in and ability to penetrate the deeper workings of the world, and in turn make them explicable to me, was astonishing. His command of history, philosophy, art, and science, prodigal. He was able to

engage his schoolmasters on a level of discourse that far surpassed what most had experienced at university and to do so in such a charming, unassuming manner that Alexander was generally regarded as more colleague to them than student. His school had in its halcyon past produced generations of MPs and a handful of prime ministers—you can see how effortlessly this sort of thinking takes root; here was the sort of boy, they swooned, who appears once in a generation.

"Alexander had polished himself to a shine very bit as supremely dazzling in the social graces as he was natively in the academic. He realized his ultimate goals, which were at this stage of his life already remarkably articulated, would require of him an uncommon brilliance of form as well as mind: manners, voice, wardrobe. As a result, he could at the age of twelve not only pass muster but positively thrive in any class or social setting far exceeding his years. To develop the physicality he would need to meet his objectives, he followed a brutally rigorous regimen of exercise, spending the hours other boys squandered in play or with their families alone in the gymnasium. He stayed to this discipline so single-mindedly that by the time he reached thirteen Alexander was frequently mistaken for a man of twenty. The full, lustrous benefit of his effort at self-improvement—his religion, if you will: The conventional observances of Christianity he was required to endure he treated as an inconvenience, if not an outright joke—he of course passed on in his letters to me. He portrayed himself as the avatar of self-perfection, the first of a new breed: the Superior Man. In crucial but unobtrusive ways, by design untraceable to him by my parents, I embraced his guidelines for self-improvement; they became the keystone of my early life. I wholeheartedly intended to recreate myself in his image. I became his disciple."

"Not altogether to your detriment."

"By no means. The developments and skills he outlined have been in and of themselves supremely beneficial. I would without hesitation recommend their employment as the foundation of any ambitious educational system. But having once achieved them, to the pursuit of what ends these advances were to be employed my brother never went so far to say. Nor did his instructors ever bother to inquire; dedicated excellence in and of itself is so rare and bewitching a quality in the humdrum world that they were blinded by Alexander's radiance."

"What was his purpose, Jack?"

"That has only become clear with time," said Sparks. "He never divulged a hint of it during those early years to me, let alone anyone else."

"You must have had your suspicions."

"I had no inclination to question his motives—"

"But surely his nature must have revealed itself, even inadvertently."

"There were signs along the way, but they remained so cleverly obscured that any connection between them or interpretation of them would have proved impossible for even the most determined observer."

"What kind of signs, Jack?" asked Doyle, feeling a collar of dread draw close around him again.

"Accidents. Happenstances. A month before we met, one of the boys in Alexander's class died mysteriously. They raised honey bees on the campus, part of a science study course. The boy was found one night near the hives. He'd been stung to death, stung thousands of times. A clumsy boy, given to pranks; he must have stirred the insects up in some way, provoked them, the school concluded. The boy had been a close confederate of my brother's, but not in a way that would generate undue scrutiny. No one knew that they had quarreled recently. No one knew that the boy had balked at one of Alexander's imperious commands, threatening to leave his circle of intimates and expose their secrets."

"What sort of secrets?"

"Blood oaths. Violent hazing of new schoolboys admitted to the group. Torture of small animals. All done in the manner of boys being boys, but each act consistently and progressively carried beyond the norm. That is, until this incident. No one knew the boy had been lured to the hives that night by a note from another of Alexander's lieutenants—written by Alexander himself in exact approximation of the boy's hand. Requesting a meeting. Voicing a similar desire to defect from Alexander's influence. When the boy arrived, he was knocked unconscious, the note removed, and his body hurled into the hives."

"He must have told you all this," said Doyle.

"I'll come to that. When we first met, I remember being drawn to a curious necklace Alexander was wearing: a bee, preserved in amber."

Doyle shook his head in wonder.

"There's more. In the fall of Alexander's thirteenth year, in the town near the school, a series of strange sightings were recorded. A number of young women, all from respectable homes—this was for the most part a comfortable, upper-middle-class community—reported that while walking late at night they felt they were being followed. Some thought they were being watched inside their bedrooms. They never saw a face, and only on rare occasions a dark shape, dressed all in black—a man, a good-sized man, of this they were certain. He maintained distance, never approached them, never directly posed a threat, but the sense of menace the figure imparted was nonetheless considerable.

"One night, one of these girls awoke to find this shape standing over her bed: She was paralyzed with fright, unable to cry out, and the figure fled silently out an open window. This incident was sufficient to incite the local constabulary to swift, collective action. Young women were forbidden to walk at night alone. Curtains were shut, windows locked tight. Patrols organized in areas where the figure had been seen. It seemed effective; the sightings stopped abruptly, did not recur over the course of the winter, and as spring approached, the urgency of these extra measures taken months before grew tiresome: Windows were thrown open to the welcoming air, evening walks undertaken again with presumptions of safety.