A Knight Of The Word

When he woke, he knew at once what he would do. The woman had said that one of the men spoke to someone who wasn’t there. He knew from experience that it would be a demon, a creature no one but the man could see. He knew that a demon would have inspired this event, that it would have used it to rip apart the fabric of the community, to steal away San Sobel’s sense of safety and tranquillity, to erode its belief that what happened in other places could not happen there. Once such seeds of doubt and fear were planted, it grew easier to undermine the foundations of human behaviour and reason that kept animal madness at bay.

It was late winter, and time was already short when he left for California. He reached San Sobel more than a week before April I, and he felt confident that he had sufficient time to prevent the impending tragedy. There had been no further dreams of this event, but that was not unusual. Often the dreams came only once, and he was forced to act on what he was given Sometimes he did not know where the event would happen, or even when. This time he was lucky; he knew both. The demon would have set things in motion already, but Ross had come up against demons time and again since he had taken up the cause of the “Word. and he was not intimidated. Demons were powerful and elusive adversaries, relentless in their hatred of humans and their determination to see them subjugated, but they were no match for him. It was the vagaries of the humans they used as their tools that more often proved troubling.

There were the feeders to be concerned about, too. The feeders were the dark things that drove humans to madness and then consumed them, creatures of the mind and soul that lived mostly in the imagination until venal behaviour made them real. The feeders devoured the dark emotions of the humans they preyed upon and were sustained and given life by. Few could see them. Few had any reason to. They appeared as shadows at the corner of the eye or small movements in a hazy distance. The demons stirred them into the human population as they would a poison. If they could infect a few, the poison might spread to the many. History had proved that this was so.

The feeders would delight in a slaughter of innocents, of children who could barely understand what was wanted of them by the men John Ross would confront. He could not search out these men; he had no way to do so. Nor could he trace the demon. Demons were changelings and hid themselves with false identities. He must wait for the men and the demons who manipulated them to reveal themselves, which meant that he must be waiting at the place he expected them to strike.

So he went to San Sobel Preparatory Academy to speak with the headmaster, He did not tell the headmaster of his dream, or of the demon, or of the men the demon would send, or of the horror that waited barely a week away. There was no point in doing that because he had no way to convince the headmaster he was not insane. He told the headmaster instead that he was the parent of a child who would be eligible for admission to the academy in the fall and that he would like some information oat the school. He apologised for his appearance-he was wearing jeans and a blue denim shin under his corduroy jacket with the patches on the elbows and a pair of worn walking shoes-but he was a nature writer on assignment, and he was taking half a day off to make this visit. The headmaster took note of his odd walking staff and his limp, and his clear blue eyes and warm smile gave evidence of the fact that he was both sympathetic and understanding of his visitor’s needs.

He talked to John Ross of the school’s history and of its mission. He gave Ross materials to read. Finally, he took Ross on a tour of the buildings-which was what Ross had been waiting for. They passed down the shadowed corridors from one classroom to the next and at last to the auditorium where the tragedy of the dream would occur. Ross lingered, asking questions so that he would have time to study the room, to memorise its layout, its entries and exits and hiding places. A quick study was all it took. When he was satisfied, he thanked the headmaster for his time and consideration and left.

He found out later in the day that a boy named Aaron Pilkington attended the academy, that he was enrolled in the third grade, and that his parents had been made enormously wealthy through his father’s work with microchips.

That night, he devised a plan. It was not complicated. He had learned that by keeping his plans simple, his chances of successfully implementing them improved. There were small lives at stake, and he did not want to expose them to any greater risk than necessary.

It seemed to him, thinking the matter through in his motel room that night, that he had everything under control.

He waited patiently for the days to pass. On the morning of April 1, he arrived at the school just before sunrise. He had visited the school late in the afternoon of the day before and left a wedge of paper in the lock of one of the classroom windows at the back of the main building so the lock would not close all the way. He slipped through the window in the darkness, listening for the movement of other people as he did so. But the maintenance staff didn’t arrive for another half hour, and he was alone. He worked his way down the hallway to the auditorium, found one of the storage rooms where the play props were kept at the rear and side of the stage, and concealed himself inside.