Shadows - By John Saul Page 0,42

didn’t talk like other children, didn’t act like them. Instead, he kept to himself, seeming more interested in what was going on within his own mind than in the outside world.

Finally, when the boy had stopped talking altogether, Eustace Barrington had taken his son to the family doctor, then to every other doctor he could find.

All of them had shaken their heads.

“Just slow,” one of them had said.

“He’ll grow out of it,” another had assured him.

“Perhaps you should put him somewhere,” someone else had suggested, and given him the name of a place on the other side of the country, where he’d never have to see his son again.

Instead, Eustace Barrington had built this house, and constructed a special place for his son deep beneath the basement, accessible only by the elevator from his private suite, a suite that jutted up above the roof line of the rest of the house, allowing all the light that could never reach the chambers below the basement to fill these rooms, as if by compensating for his son’s lack of sunlight, he could ease the pain he felt for all these years.

Still, Eustace Barrington was certain he’d done the right thing, for when his son had finally withdrawn so deeply into himself that he no longer responded to the outside world, and when the Barringtons’ friends had begun to talk about the boy as if he were some kind of inanimate object to be disposed of unless a reason for keeping him could be found, Eustace had brought him here.

He’d moved the boy into the subterranean chambers, which he’d furnished with far more care than he’d given to the rest of the house, making sure his son would be comfortable, and have everything he could possibly need, and couldn’t accidentally hurt himself.

The main room contained the boy’s bed, and enough furniture so the two of them could be comfortable while the man sat with the boy, and talked to him, disregarding the near certainty that his son no longer heard him.

In another room was a dining table and two chairs, where he took his son’s meals every day, and ate with him.

He took them himself. Never a servant, because he did not trust servants.

No one but Eustace Barrington knew the boy was there at all, for he had decided long ago that it would be better for this child to be kept at home, where he would be loved and left to whatever mystic thoughts he may have, than to be turned over to the care of strangers who would neither love, nor understand him.

His son, Eustace Barrington was convinced, was a genius.

Though the boy never spoke except to mutter numbers, and seemed to be both blind and deaf, Barrington was still certain that his son’s mind was special, not insane.

Sometimes, when he could make out the numbers his son spoke, he wrote them down, and spent hours alone at his desk, working out the relationships of the numbers to each other.

What his son was apparently calculating in his head in seconds, it took Eustace Barrington hours to work out on paper.

Today, though, he was worried.

He, after all, would be ninety-six on his next birthday.

His son was only fifty-five.

And it had been fifty years since his son had been taken to live in the suite of rooms beneath the basement

Eustace Barrington, after all his years, had only one wish left.

That he would outlive his son, so the boy would never have to be delivered into the hands of strangers.

But if he died before his son, there was something else he would do.

He would find a way to destroy anyone who might threaten the boy beneath the basement.

The boy who lived in shadows.

If the boy were harmed, so also would others be harmed ….

“Has he ever come back?” Josh MacCallum breathed when the story was over. “Has he actually done anything?”

Jeff Aldrich smiled mysteriously. “Maybe he has,” he whispered. “Maybe sometimes he comes back in the night, and creeps around the house, looking for his son. And they say,” he went on, his voice dropping so it was barely audible, and his gaze fixing on Josh, “that when he finds the right boy, he’ll take him away with him. In fact, last year—”

“That’s enough, Jeff,” Hildie Kramer cut in, breaking the ghostly mood with a laugh. “You don’t want to scare poor Josh away on his very first night with us, do you?”

“It’s okay,” Josh protested. “I like ghost stories!” As Jeff Aldrich gazed