Brain Child Page 0,77
for you to be there with us?” He sat back, his arms folded across his chest, and Ellen knew he was going to say no more until Alex came up with some kind of answer to his question.
Alex sat still at the table, analyzing what his father had just said.
He’d made a mistake, just as he’d made a mistake with Lisa the other night. He could see from the look on his father’s face that he was angry, and now he had to figure out why.
And yet, in his mind, he knew why.
He’d hurt his mothers feelings, so his father was angry.
He was starting to understand feelings, ever since the dream he’d had about Mrs. Lewis. He could still remember how he’d felt in the dream, even though he’d felt nothing since. At least he now had the memory of a feeling. It was a beginning.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly, knowing the words were what his father wanted to hear. “I guess I wasn’t thinking.”
“I guess you weren’t,” his father agreed. “Now, I suggest you get yourself upstairs and into your suit, and when you go to that funeral—which you will do—I will expect you to act as if you care about what happened to Marty Lewis. Clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Alex said. He rose from the table and left the kitchen. But as he started up the stairs, he could hear his parents’ raised voices, and though the words were indistinct, he knew what they were talking about.
They were talking about him, about how strange he was.
That, he knew, was what a lot of people talked about now.
He knew what happened when he came into a room.
People who had been talking suddenly stopped, and their eyes fixed on him.
Other people simply looked away.
Not, of course, that it bothered him. The only thing that bothered him was the dream he’d had, but he still hadn’t figured out what it meant, except that it seemed that if he had feelings in his dreams, he should, sooner or later, have them when he was awake, too. And when he did, he’d be like everyone else.
Unless, of course, he really had killed Mrs. Lewis.
Maybe, after all, there was a reason to go to the funeral. Maybe if he actually saw her body, he’d remember whether or not he had killed her.
Alex stepped through the gate of the little cemetery, and immediately knew that something was wrong.
It was happening again.
He had a clear memory of this place, and now it no longer looked as it should have.
The walls were old and worn, and the lawn—the soft grass that the priests always tended so well—was gone. In its place was barren earth, covered only in small patches by tiny clumps of crabgrass.
The tombstones, too, didn’t look right. There were too many of them, and they, like the walls, seemed to have worn away so he could barely read the names on them. Nor were there flowers on the graves, as there always had been before.
He gazed at the faces of the people around him. None of them were familiar.
All of them were strangers, and none of them belonged here.
Then the now-familiar pain slashed through his brain, and the voices started, whispering in his ears.
“Ladrones … asesinos …”
Suddenly he had an urge to turn around and run away. Run from the pain in his head, and the voices, and the memories.
He felt a hand on his arm, and tried to pull away, but the grip tightened, and the touch of strong fingers gouging into his flesh suddenly cut through the voices.
“Alex,” he heard his father whisper. “Alex, what’s wrong?”
Alex shook his head, and glanced around. His mother was looking at him worriedly. A few feet away he recognized Lisa Cochran with her parents. He scanned the rest of the crowd: Kate Lewis stood next to the flower-covered coffin, with Valerie Benson at her side. Over by the wall, he recognized the Evanses.
“Alex?” he heard his father say again.
“Nothing, Dad,” Alex whispered back. “I’m okay.”
“You’re sure?”
Alex nodded. “I just … I just thought I remembered something, that’s all. But it’s gone now.”
His father’s grip relaxed, and once more Alex let his eyes wander over the cemetery.
The voices were silent now, and the cemetery suddenly seemed right again.
And why had he thought about priests?
He gazed up at the village hall that had once been a mission, and wondered how long it had been since there had been priests here. Certainly there hadn’t been any since he was born.
Then why had