“Come,” I whispered.
Bastien’s father appeared at the top of the stairs. I had never seen him before. He was a short man and pudgy. Wearing pajamas that were too big for him. Rubbing his eyes, barely able to see without the glasses he’d left on his bedside table when the screams of hell and breaking glass had pulled him out of sleep.
“Oh, God.”
Bastien appeared behind him. Half-asleep but also half-smiling. Probably confident he was having a dream. He said, “What’s going on, Matt? What the hell—what’s going on?”
“Be still,” I said, and the pigs were still. Silent. Staring at Bastien and his father like the wise freaky semihuman creatures that they were.
And now, here, fear began to leak into Bastien’s face. The pigs had been a simple freak occurrence at first. What did he care what they did to a house they were about to move out of anyway? But now he knew that something else was going on. Something he had no explanation for. He thought maybe I really was something to be feared.
“What the hell are you?” he asked, and took another step forward, confidently, menacingly.
I was not, in fact, a movie monster. Movie monsters know what to say. Villains always have some terrifying retort up their sleeves—Your worst nightmare; The last thing you’ll ever see; You can call me Death, etc. Me, I just made the hogs roar. Wail. Shriek. Bellow.
Wondered if my father could hear them, wherever he was. If the sirens and bells would wake him up and he would know that they tolled for him, that the Angel of Death was making his way through the night to punish him.
“Bastien?” his father said, practically blind as a bat and looking for his son to explain all this away.
A twitch of my finger, and the hog closest to him made a sudden lunge, swung his head, grazed Bastien’s father’s calf with one tusk. He yelp-screamed, stepped back, but did not stumble. A fall would have been fatal. They would have torn him to shreds in an instant.
Bastien took a step forward. The last of his bravery fled from his face.
I saw how it would happen. Two hogs would go in for each leg. They would bring him down swiftly, pulling away great chunks of skin, and tugging in different directions once he was on the ground. His father would go down two and a half seconds later. His screams would bring the rest of the pack in, a dozen squealing roaring grunting animals cleaving and chomping bone and skin and muscle and inner organs.
And what would that change? What would killing them accomplish that I hadn’t already done? Better to let them live with this, with a story to tell, with psychological scars. Better to let them be haunted.
I turned and left. My pigs followed.
I shivered at how close I had come to murdering them.
Murder is special. The savage monstrous part of my brain that had taken control told me so. To kill someone is to enter into a relationship with them, one that will last as long as you live.
You should save it for someone really important to you.
By now our sleepy small-town night was as loud as noontime in Manhattan. I followed the smell of my father, faint but getting stronger, as I moved west. To the river. Through downtown, along Columbia Street, the poor part of town, where my pigs remained in tight formation and did not do the slightest bit of damage to people or property. Turning north on Second Street, down the hill, past the Shacks, across the train tracks, to the river.
He was there. Across the river. Could pigs swim? The only other way to cross would be to take a ten-mile detour, following the river south to the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, walking them to the other side, and then walking north again through Catskill and then Athens and who knew how many other towns standing between me and him.
But no, there were other options. Of course there were. I had all the power in the universe.
I knelt down. My knees scraped frozen mud, but the river itself moved too fast to freeze over. I stuck both hands into the water. A weaker boy would have winced at the sharp stabbing coldness of the water, but I was stronger than it was. I saw its secrets, saw how badly it wanted to be ice.
I stood. I raised both arms.
With a stretching sound, ice formed on the river in front of me. A small jagged triangle at first, but growing. Widening. Extending.
I stepped out onto it. Pushed my arms forward and watched the ice expand. Pigs stepped out. The lights of Athens sparkled like frozen fireflies on the black water ahead. Black stars filled the air. My mind balked at the magnitude of what I was asking it to do.
You can do this, I whispered, even as I staggered. I would level every city between me and him. I would reduce the whole Hudson Valley to shit-stinking rubble.
Again, I staggered. This time I dropped to one knee. The ice cracked and thinned beneath me. A piece broke off, and a pig fell, screaming, into the river.
Cracks formed around my hands, where they pressed against the thinning ice. Giant squids and white whales and plesiosaurs swam in the black water beneath. My mind in overdrive, summoning up new horrors, new monsters, snatching out of the ether anything that might be of some assistance in burning down the world.
Screaming for help.
I pulled myself back up. Stood there. Tried to take a step. Couldn’t.
“Please,” I whispered, possibly not out loud. And then: I felt the soft weight of a hand on my shoulder.
All the anger leaked out of me.
Because I knew whose hand it was.
I turned around, unbelieving, and whispered, “Maya?”
“I heard you calling me,” she said.
“You . . . how did you . . . ?”
“I can do things, too,” she said and wrapped both arms tight around me. “What, do you think you’re the only one?”
RULE #49
The worst thing that can happen to your body is not that it gets fat, or it gets sick, or even that it gets badly damaged. The worst thing that can happen to your body is when someone takes away your right to control it.
DAYS: -1–-27
AVERAGE DAILY CALORIES, APPROX.: 1800
Panic woke me up. Pain jolted me back to consciousness. I opened my eyes and barely registered that I was back in the hospital. Not that where I was mattered. What mattered was the tube down my throat, the blinding pain of it. I wanted to claw at it, rip it away, but I was so weak I could barely budge my arms. I coughed and heaved and thrashed. I grabbed hold of the tube and tugged, triggering raw pain all the way down to my stomach, hearing the gross wet gristly sounds it made against the walls of my esophagus.
Machines made noise. People came. Held me down. A nurse explained that I had passed out from malnutrition, that I was in critical condition. I tried to roar out my rage but the tube muffled the sound into an agonized gargle. I wanted to spew fire and break bones and paralyze people, but none of my powers worked. Someone stabbed me with a needle and all of it went away.