Indians once settled atop the hill because at certain times of the year, a pale-blue light rose sporadically from old volcanic fumaroles, shimmering and dancing in the air. Infrequently, loved ones long dead appeared briefly among the living, as if the past and the present were one. The ground must be sacred, so they said, and the tribe would be protected by both the ghosts of those lost and by the shining blue spirits.
The mystic, secretly an agent for the owner of the land, failed to tell Andrew Pendleton that the Native Americans eventually moved off the hill when they experienced a more vivid spectacle that filled the night—and their encampment—with a seeming horde of bright-blue spirits less benign than those that had come before them.
On that night, half the tribesmen disappeared forever. They came to me. I partook of them, for they were an affront to my existence.
When Andrew Pendleton, his wife, and his children were presented to me, I allowed him alone to live. In a sense, I owed my existence to him, because he chose to build on Shadow Hill. His Belle Vista became not merely a house but also a vehicle that brought me into the world.
I am the One, and there can be no other. They come to me, and I receive them as the meat they are. In time, all will come to me, and then what must be will be. Thereafter only I shall know the sun and the moon.
Soon the current residents of the Pendleton will appear before me, bewildered by my many manifestations. I know them, for I know everything. Not all will perish, but nearly all. I especially desire the children; I do not tolerate innocence, and I despise gentleness. The ex-marine will discover that the concepts of honor and responsibility are not rewarded under my dominion.
Those who might love one another will not be saved by love. The only love that matters is self-love, and the only self worth loving is the One.
Apartment 2–A
Almost-nine-year-old Winny was curled in an armchair in his bedroom, examining three books, deciding which one to read next. Officially a fourth grader, he could read at a seventh-grade level. He’d been tested. It was true. He wasn’t all puffed-up proud of it. He knew he wasn’t smart or anything. If he was smart, he would know what to say to people. He never knew what to say to people. His mom said he was shy, and maybe he was, but he also never knew what he should say, which a truly smart person would know.
The reason that he could read so well was just because he read all the time, ever since he could remember. First picture books with a few words. Then books with fewer pictures and more words. Then books with no pictures at all. He read mostly young-adult fiction these days. But in a couple years, he’d probably be reading thousand-page adult books, whatever, unless he just read so much that his head exploded, and that would be that.
His dad, who had homes in Nashville and Los Angeles, who came around way less often than the FedEx delivery guy, almost as seldom as Santa Claus, didn’t want Winny to get lost in books all the time. He said any boy who got lost in books all the time might turn into a sissy or even an autistic, whatever that was. His dad wanted him to be more into music. Winny liked music, but not as much as he liked reading and writing.
Besides, he was never going to work in music. His dad was a famous singer, and his mom was a semi-famous songwriter, and Winny never wanted to be famous for anything. Being famous and never knowing what to say would be the worst, everybody hanging on your every word but you didn’t have any words for them to hang on. That would be like falling facedown into manure in front of everybody like twenty times a day, every day of your life. Everyone in music always seemed to know what to say. Some never shut up. Forget music.
Winny might be a sissy like his dad worried he would be. He didn’t know. He liked to think he wouldn’t be. But he’d never been tested. Four days a week, he went to the Grace Lyman School, which was founded by Mrs. Grace Lyman, who died like thirty years earlier, but it was an exclusive school even though she was dead. Of course, she wasn’t still at the school. They didn’t keep her corpse around in a big jar or anything. That would have been cool, but they didn’t. He didn’t know where her corpse was. Nobody ever said. Maybe nobody knew. Grace Lyman was dead, but they still ran the school by her rules, and one of her rules was zero tolerance of bullies. If he never came face-to-face with a bully, he couldn’t be sure whether he was a sissy or not.
He might even be a killer. If some bully started pushing him around, really getting him worked up, maybe he would just go berserk and cut the guy’s head off or something. He didn’t think he was a berserk killer, but he had never been tested. One thing Winny had learned from books was that you had to be tested in life to discover who you were and what you were capable of doing. Hopeless sissy, noble warrior, maniac—he could be anything, and he wouldn’t know until he was tested.
One thing he could never be was Santa Claus. Nobody could be Santa Claus. Santa Claus wasn’t real like the FedEx guy. This was a recent discovery of Winny’s. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. At first, he was sad, he felt like Santa had died, but the sad thing didn’t last very long. A person who never existed couldn’t die, you couldn’t grieve for him. Mostly Winny felt like an idiot for having believed the whole stupid Santa thing as long as he had.
So now he couldn’t honestly say his dad came around as seldom as Santa Claus because in truth Santa Claus never came, but sometimes his dad did. Of course, he hadn’t seen his dad in a long time, so maybe it would turn out that his dad never existed, either. Winny got a phone call now and then, but that could be a fake-out, the guy on the other end could be anyone. If his dad came for a Christmas visit, he would bring Winny what he always brought: a musical instrument or two, a stack of CDs, not just his own but also CDs by other singers, and a signed publicity photo if he had a new one. Every time Farrel Barnett got a new publicity photo, he made sure that Winny received one. Even though Santa Claus didn’t exist, he brought better presents than Winny’s dad, who was most likely real, though you never could tell.
Winny had almost decided which of the three books to read when the floor and walls shuddered. The lamp on the table beside his chair had a pull chain, and it swung back and forth, clinking against the base. At the windows, draperies swished a little, as if stirred by a draft, but there was no draft. In the open shelf of his bookcase headboard, Dragon World action figures vibrated against the wood. They jiggled around as if they were coming to life. They were jiggling a lot. But of course they were even deader than old Grace Lyman.
Winny sat through the shaking, the bright blasts of lightning at the windows, and the booming thunder. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t going to wet his pants or anything. But he wasn’t calm and collected, either. He was in-between somewhere. He didn’t know the word for how he felt. The past couple of days, things were kind of strange in the Pendleton. Things were weird. But weird didn’t always have to be scary. Sometimes weird was really interesting. Last Christmas, his dad gave him a gold-plated saxophone, which was just about as big as Winny. That was more than a little weird, but it wasn’t either interesting or scary, just weird in a stupid kind of way.
He had kept secret the weird and interesting thing that happened to him twice in the past two days. Although he wanted to share his strange experiences with his mom, he suspected that she would feel she had to tell his dad. For all the right reasons, she was always trying to keep old Farrel Barnett involved in his son’s life. For sure, his dad would overreact, and the next thing Winny knew, he would be seeing a shrink twice a week, and there would be some kind of custody battle, and he would be in danger of Nashville or Los Angeles.
As the shaking came to an end, Winny glanced at the TV. It was dark and silent. Although the acrylic screen wasn’t polished enough to reflect