Whenever he was completely alone, Peter would close his eyes and shut off awareness of everything around him. He would control his own mind as he had never demonstrated at the clinic. He guessed that a lot of the children kept the extent of their gifts hidden. If the other kids would fight back, Dr. Adams could never win. So today, hiding behind the jetty with his bare feet in a tide pool, Peter tried to contact one of the other children. After a few moments, an image flickered quickly, then disappeared. Peter thought it was a face, but whose?
Ralph had once told him that Dr. Adams thought there was a mental link between all the children in the LaMane Center. Peter didn’t know how far the link would hold, but in his efforts over the past two days he’d picked up bits and pieces of information. The faces were always vague, so he couldn’t be sure they belonged to anyone from LaMane. But he kept trying, obsessed with carrying out a plan he had conjured up from the moment the police took his father away from the hospital.
Today would be the day his wish was fulfilled.
The face came back into view. Peter recognized one of the boys from the LaMane Center—Bobby Whitelock. Bobby was standing near a fence of some kind . . .
No, it was a corral. A horse came up to the boy, and Bobby backed away a little. Then he carefully approached the Apaloosa and reached up to run a hand along his hide.
Bobby?
In his mind, Peter saw his friend jump a little.
Who is that? Mom, is that you?
It isn’t your mother, Bobby. It’s Peter—I mean, Michael Colpan. What happened to everybody? You’re the first person I’ve been able to contact.
The image of Peter’s mind was as clear as the picture on a movie screen. Bobby turned in a circle, looking very frightened. When Peter heard him speak, his mouth didn’t move.
Where are you, Michael?
Can’t tell you that. You tell me where you are.
I—I don’t think we’re supposed to talk to you guys. What happened to Jenny and Tommy? What did you guys do? Dr. Adams was really mad—he said you screwed everything up.
Where is Dr. Adams?
I don’t know.
You’re lying!
I can’t tell you. He told my family to hide somewhere, so now we’re on my aunt’s farm in Iowa.
The mind-image of Bobby’s face went pale.
I shouldn’t have said that!
I won’t tell on you, Bobby. But why can’t you tell me where Dr. Adams is? I just want to contact him, to let him know we’re okay.
He said you’re devils. He said we’d be punished if we ever told what happened. If he finds out I’m talking to you, he’s going to take me to the middle of the lake and knock me overboard. I don’t want that to happen.
Peter cringed. So, the fear they’d put in Bobby’s head had been drowning. For Michael, it was falling from the tower.
Dr. Adams will never know. Is he there with you?
He—he comes here sometimes.
When’s he gonna—
Shhh! Someone’s coming.
With his eyes closed, Peter watched a scene that was taking place a thousand miles away. Two men were approaching Bobby, but he could only see from the back. When they stopped and turned, Peter gasped. Bobby made the very same sound. It was Dr. Adams.
Through Bobby’s mind, Peter listened to the conversation.
“Bambi tells us you are in contact with Michael Colpan,” Dr. Adams says.
“I am not,” Bobby insisted.
“Bambi Freed does not tell lies,” Dr. Adams said. “She’s my most promising subject. You know she can read minds best of anyone. If she says you are in contact with Michael Colpan, then you must be. Don’t lie to us, Robert. You wouldn’t want to be punished . . .”
“The lake is mighty cold this time of the year,” another man said.
Bobby’s face went pale. “What—what do you want me to do?”
“Find out where he is,” Dr. Adams said.
Tell him I’m in a place called Gull’s Flight, Massachusetts. I’m staying at the Emersons’ house. It’s Jenny Segal’s real family.
You’re kidding. You really want me to say that?
Tell him to come here and get me.
You’re crazy, Michael!
I’m waiting for him. You tell him that! You tell him.
Peter broke contact with the boy in Iowa. He didn’t know if his plan would work, but he was willing to wait. Slowly, he stood up and shook a kink out of his leg. Then he climbed back over the jetty and walked toward his friends. He didn’t say a word of what had happened, but the look on Laura’s face told him she had somehow picked up bits on his mind-talk with Bobby.
“Michael,” she whispered, “what are you up to?”
“I’m up to fixing things,” Peter replied. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Then he walked up to the house to have dinner, go to bed, and wait for Dr. Adams to walk into the trap he had set.
The doctor arrived in Gull’s Flight the very next day. Peter felt his presence growing stronger and stronger. Though he did not have direct mind-contact with the doctor, he could almost imagine him on the flight from Des Moines to Boston. No doubt he would be checking into a hotel, then driving a rented car into Gull’s Flight. Knowing the name of Jenny Segal’s real family, the Emersons, he would only have to look up their address to find him. But even though Dr. Adams was a maniac, he wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t just walk up to the doorbell and ring it. Somehow, Peter had to lure him to the house.
Danny Emerson got all the children, and most of the adults, involved in a game of touch football. Peter’s habit of staying alone prevented them from becoming suspicious when he insisted upon staying inside. He went to the phone book in the Emersons’ kitchen and turned to the Yellow Pages listing of local motels. It wasn’t hard to find—Gull’s Flight boasted only one small inn. Peter dialed the number quickly, afraid someone would come into the kitchen and catch him.
Within minutes, he was talking to Dr. Adams.
“It’s awful here,” he said. “You were right about the Outsiders—they all hate us. Please come and get me, Dr. Adams. I’m scared and I want to go home.”
“Calm down, Michael,” Adams said. Peter could almost see the evil smile on his face. “I can’t just come and take you away—not with all the adults that are there. Can you meet me?”
“Sure,” Peter said. “There’s an abandoned boat house right down the road. You take Main Street out of town and get off at Saltwater Lane. Then you drive to the third stop sign and make a left turn. The boat house is a little ways down the road. How fast can you get here, Dr. Adams? I really want to leave.”
“I’ll be there in half an hour,” Adams said. “You wait for me, Michael. I’ll take care of you.”
Dr. Adams hung up the line.
Peter hung up his own end, smiling wickedly. If anyone was to be taken care of . . .
His sister walked in through the back door at that moment, her cheeks flushed and bits of leaves in her long red hair. She went to the sink for a drink of water, then turned to look at him.
“Peter, what’s that weird smile?” Beth asked.
Peter looked at his twin, seeing almost a mirror image of himself. He’d always thought he was kind of goofy-looking, with his messy red hair and freckles. But on Beth, the features made her really cute. Having her with him filled a void he had lived with for years. He wanted to share his secret with her, and with Laura, but he didn’t want to risk their getting hurt.
“I’ve just been thinking,” Peter said.
“You do a lot of thinking,” Beth retorted. “I just wish you’d talk to me.”
“I will,” Peter promised, “when I’m finished. Beth, if our mother is looking for us, I’ve gone for a walk down the road.”
Beth watched him go to the hall closet and pull on his jacket. It was strange how he referred to their parent as “our mother,” as if to stress Natalie was someone they shared.
Outside, Peter began to walk
down the road to the boat house. With Halloween just a day away, almost all the Cape Cod homes along the road were decorated with scarecrows, pumpkins, and ghouls. Halloween was something new to Peter, since they rarely celebrated holidays at the center. Ghouls, on the other hand, were quite familiar.
After the last house on the road, there was a twenty-yard stretch of foxtails, and then the remains of a long-abandoned boat house. Its roof was almost completely gone, the windows had been shot out with slingshots and BB guns, and the big doors hung crookedly on their hinges. When they had passed it for the first time on their way to Laura’s house, Danny had warned the children that it was a dangerous place and they were never to go inside.
Peter looked left and right down the road, and once he determined he was alone, he pulled one of the doors open. He walked inside and studied his surroundings by the sunlight that seeped in through cracks in the rotted wood walls. The floor was cement, sloping down into the water that still sloshed into the house from the bay. Peter went to its edge and watched clumps of debris move gently back and forth. There was a strong smell of rot in here; it was icy cold and dark.
It was a perfect place to kill Dr. Adams.
There were hooks along several of the walls and shelves that had once held boat equipment. But what interested Peter the most was an old staircase that led to a three-foot ledge. A rusted clamming rake explained what had been stored up there, out of the way. Carefully, Peter climbed up the stairs. He was light enough so that they wouldn’t break under his weight, but still he held fast to hooks he found on the wall as he walked out to the end of the ledge. He wouldn’t let himself look down, even though the water was barely ten feet below him. Memories of being hung upside down from the watch tower tried to crowd his mind. He forced them away and sat down, rolling himself into a ball.
What happened in the next half-hour was not done by the little boy Ralph Colpan had loved so much and Stuart Morse had died for, that Natalie and Beth Morse adored. It was done by a child who had suffered years of subtle torture at the hands of a madman whose twisted mind helped him justify all his crimes. It was done by a child who saw no end to his nightmare other than this.
The door creaked open and sunlight poured into the boat house. Peter stiffened—and looked down at the shining white hair of the doctor. His stark eyes seemed to glow in the dark.
“I’m up here, Dr. Adams,” Peter said.
The doctor looked up at him, the pale eyes going wide. He opened his arms and beckoned the child down. But Peter shook his head vehemently.
“I’m scared,” he said, a tremor in his voice. “I think they might come looking for me, and I don’t want them to find me.”
“Then we must hurry,” Dr. Adams said. “Let me take you back with the others and we’ll start all over again.”
Peter stared down at him. “Come up and get me, Dr. Adams.”
“You can walk down by yourself,” the doctor insisted. “Those stairs won’t support me.”
“Yes, they will,” Peter insisted. “They’re sturdy. I want you to come up here, Dr. Adams. I want you to help me down. I’m afraid of high places, you know.”
The doctor’s eyes thinned now and his jaw set firmly. “Yes, I suppose you are,” he said. “We’ll have to work on eradicating that, won’t we?”
Peter nodded.
“Come up and get me, Dr. Adams.”
The voice was different this time, strangely deep for a young boy. Almost guttural.
Dr. Adams started toward the stairs, then froze. “What do you think you’re doing, Michael?” he demanded.
“Walk up the stairs.”
Deep. Guttural. Unable to be ignored.
Dr. Adams felt his feet lifting up. He tried to resist, but before he knew it, he was at the top of the stairs. He gazed down the ledge at the small boy on the other end. None of the children had ever used their powers to control him. He was stronger. He had perfected Neolamane and had complete power over its subjects. He had to resist.
“Walk over to me, Dr. Adams. Come and get me. Come here . . . c’mon . . .”
In his mind, the doctor fought the child’s demands. But his body obeyed and he walked slowly across the ledge. How had Michael become so powerful? Was it because he had left the center? Suddenly, Adams smiled a delighted smile. What exciting possibilities for study—letting the children infiltrate the real world. Perhaps their powers were boundless, and if he could turn them over to the armed forces when they were of legal fighting age, what formidable weapons they would be. Oh, it was almost too exciting to . . .
Adams jerked his head up, looking into Michael’s eyes. The boy had said something, but he hadn’t heard. He stopped short to find a rusted lobster trap in his way. Its wooden handle was broken in half, and many of the tines were missing or rusted. Adams started to kick it away, but Peter called out in his strange voice: “Pick up the rake, Dr. Adams.”
The doctor obeyed without question.
“Now, stand there and listen to me. Don’t talk and don’t move.”
In an instant, Peter’s expression changed from one of grim coldness to the twisted features of a heartbroken child. Tears welled up in his green eyes, and his lower lip quivered. His voice was his own.
“I hate you, Dr. Adams,” he said. “I hate you for taking me away from my real parents, for killing my mom from the center, and for killing my real dad. I hate you ’cause now my dad Ralph is in big trouble and he’ll never get out of jail no matter what anyone says and I’ll never see him again. You hurt me with those stupid wires and tests and that stupid big green chair and making me hurt other people and animals and telling me I was bad if I didn’t and telling me you were gonna take me to the watch tower and making my friends do bad things, too.”
After the rambling sentence, he gulped in a shaky breath, then went on.
Dr. Adams remained silent and frozen.
“You took children from their real parents because some medicine you gave the mothers made weird babies. Kids like me. My dad gave me a file he stole, Dr. Adams. There weren’t any names, but I could guess who was who. Most of us are telepaths, aren’t we? Well, I’m gonna send thought messages to the other kids, and Laura and Ryan are gonna do it, too. You know who Laura and Ryan are, Dr. Adams? That’s Jenny and Tommy’s real names. And the other kids are gonna know their real names, too, and you aren’t gonna stop me because you’re gonna die. I’m gonna kill you.”
And suddenly, the child’s voice turned diabolical. “Pick up the rake, Dr. Adams. Pick it up.”
In jerking movements that showed he was fighting every step of the way, Adams picked up the rusted rake.
“Turn the points up to your chest. Stab the rake into your chest, Dr. Adams. Kill yourself the way you killed my real father and my mom. Kill yourself. Kill yourself!”
The doctor pulled the rake back, gazing at the quivering tines, his mouth dropped open in a silent scream. This was impossible. He was too brilliant a scientist to have been tricked by a ten-year-old boy. A boy who was one of his subjects. He wouldn’t let it happen. He couldn’t!
“Peter!”
At the sound of Beth’s voice, the spell was broken. In an instant, Dr. Adams jerked around and lost his footing. With a long scream he plunged into the mucky, icy water below the ledge. There was a splash, then silence. Peter moved toward the wall, covering his face. He didn’t want to look.
But Beth looked; she screamed and screamed.
Dr. Adams had fallen onto the rusted tines of the clamming rake. He floated facedown in the dark water, his body resting over the length of the rake as if it were a float. The tines pointed up toward the neck, where blood began to gush out with the flow of the water.
Beth’s screams brought the adults running. Natalie, without thinking of danger to herself, rushed up to her sobbing child and took him in her arms. Kate kept the other children out of the boat house while Danny went to look at the man floating in the water. He walked down the cement ramp until he was waist-deep, then
pulled the body back with him. When he turned him over on the cement, a sick feeling congealed in his stomach. The rake had shoved up under his chin, deep into his head. With his mouth still open, one of the tines was visible. Danny jerked off his coat and covered the body.
But before he did, Natalie took a look at it and let out a cry. “That’s Adams. That’s Dr. Adams.”
Danny looked up at the woman, holding her son tightly. “We—we’d better call the police,” he said softly. “Peter, come down now. Come down and tell us what the hell just happened here.”
Epilogue
One Year Later
WITH HER ARM AROUND HER SON, JILL WAITED AT THE entrance to Disney World and watched for their friends to arrive. In the year since Adams died, there had been no contact with others from the LaMane Center. To the frustration of everyone involved, the case was put on the back burner for lack of evidence. When Adams died, it seemed the whole sickening affair died with him. It would only live on in his victims, in the innocent children who had suffered at his hands, until another child came forward in search of his real past. But the past of three particular children—Laura, Peter, and Ryan—was something that the adults in their lives were trying to deal with. In spite of the memories, the children insisted upon keeping contact with one another. They had grown too close during their ordeal to forget their friendship.
There had been an investigation after Dr. Adams’ death. Peter had insisted he killed the doctor, but the police concluded from Beth’s eyewitness testimony that the man had intended to use the clam rake to kill the boy. Beth told them she saw him fall off the ledge. No matter what Peter said, no one would let him believe he had actually murdered the doctor. Peter, Beth, Natalie, and the Blairs had gone home to put their lives back together. Frequent letters and occasional phone calls convinced both the Emersons and Jill Sheldon that Peter was coming along as well as their own children.
Hear the Children Calling Page 33
