The Prophet of Yonwood

by Jeanne DuPrau

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2006 by Jeanne DuPrau

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Dust mite photo courtesy of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology.

  Chang and Eng photo courtesy of Picture History.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  DuPrau, Jeanne.

  The prophet of Yonwood / by Jeanne DuPrau.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  SUMMARY: While visiting the small town of Yonwood, North Carolina, eleven-year-old Nickie makes some decisions about how to identify both good and evil when she witnesses the townspeople’s reactions to the apocalyptic visions of one of their neighbors.

  [1. Prophecies—Fiction. 2. Conduct of life—Fiction. 3. Fantasy—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.D927Pro 2006 [Fic]—dc22 2005022423

  eISBN: 978-0-375-84070-8

  v3.0_r1

  _______________

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  THE VISION

  1. The Inheritance

  2. The Third Floor

  3. The Girl in the Closet

  4. Break-In

  5. The Fiery Vision

  6. Mrs. Beeson’s Idea

  7. The Short Way Home

  8. A Crack in the Sky

  9. At the Prophet’s House

  10. The Photograph and the Journal

  11. Trouble Spots

  12. Inside the Backyard Shed

  13. The Perfect Living Room

  14. Someone in the Basement

  15. Up to the Woods

  16. The Snake’s Dinner

  17. Hoyt McCoy’s Horrible House

  18. What Grover Saw

  19. Blue Envelopes

  20. Orders

  21. Getting Ready for the Open House

  22. An Indoor Universe

  23. The Emergency Meeting

  24. The Bracelet

  25. The Open House

  26. Catastrophe

  27. The Chase

  28. One More Trip to the Woods

  29. The Last Day

  30. Nickie and the Prophet

  31. Love

  WHAT HAPPENED AFTERWARD

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

  —J.B.S. Haldane

  _________________

  The Vision

  On a warm July afternoon in the town of Yonwood, North Carolina, a woman named Althea Tower went out to her backyard to fill the bird feeder. She opened her sack of sunflower seeds, lifted the bird feeder’s lid—and that was when, without warning, the vision assailed her.

  It was like a waking dream. The trees and grass and birds faded away, and in their place she saw blinding flashes of light so searingly bright she staggered backward, dropped her sack of birdseed, and fell to the ground. Billows of fire rose around her, and a hot wind roared. She felt herself flung high into the sky, and from there she looked down on a dreadful scene. The whole earth boiled with flames and black smoke. The noise was terrible—a howling and crashing and crackling—and finally, when the firestorm subsided, there came a silence that was more terrible still.

  When the vision finally faded, it left Althea stunned. She lay on the ground, unable to move, with her mind all jumbled and birds pecking at the spilled birdseed around her. She might have lain there for hours if Mrs. Brenda Beeson had not happened to come by a few minutes later to bring her a basket of strawberries.

  Seeing Althea on the ground, Mrs. Beeson rushed forward. She bent over her friend and spoke to her, but Althea only moaned. So Mrs. Beeson used her cell phone to call for help. Within minutes, four of her best friends—the doctor, the police chief, the town mayor, and the minister of the church—had all arrived. The doctor squatted beside Althea and spoke slowly and loudly. “Can you tell us what’s wrong?” he said. “What is it?”

  Althea shivered. Her lips twisted as she tried to speak. Everyone leaned in to hear.

  “It’s God,” she whispered. “God. I saw…I saw…” She trailed off.

  “Merciful heavens,” said Brenda Beeson. “She’s had a vision.”

  Of course they didn’t know at first what her vision had been. They thought maybe she’d seen God. But why would that frighten her so? Why would she be muttering about fire and smoke and disaster?

  Days went by, and Althea didn’t get better. She lay on her bed hardly moving, staring into the air and mumbling. Then, exactly a week later, a clue to the mystery came. The president of the United States announced that talks with the Phalanx Nations had reached a crisis. Their leaders would not give in on any of their demands, and the leaders of the United States would not give in on theirs. Unless some sort of agreement could be reached, the president said, it might be necessary to go to war.

  Brenda Beeson made the connection right away: War! That must be what Althea Tower had seen. Mrs. Beeson called her friends, they told their friends, the newspaper wrote it up, and soon the whole town knew: Althea Tower had seen the future, and it was terrible.

  All over Yonwood, people gathered in frightened clusters to talk. Could it be true? The more they thought about it, the more it seemed it could be. Althea had always been a quiet, sensible person, not the sort to make things up. And these were strange times, what with conflicts and terrorists and talk of the end of the world—just the kind of times when visions and miracles were likely to happen.

  Brenda Beeson formed a committee to take care of Althea and pay attention to anything else she might say. People wrote letters to the newspaper about her and left flowers and ribbons and handwritten notes in front of her house. The minister spoke of her in church.

  After a few weeks, nearly everyone was calling her the Prophet.

  CHAPTER 1

  __________________

  The Inheritance

  Nickie Randolph’s first sight of the town of Yonwood was a white steeple rising out of the pine forest that covered the mountainside. She leaned forward, gazing through the windshield of the car. “Is that it?”

  Her aunt Crystal, who was driving, put one hand up to shield her eyes from the rays of the setting sun. “That’s it,” she said.

  “My new home,” said Nickie.

  “You have to get that notion out of your mind,” said Crystal. “It’s not going to happen.”

  I’m going to make it happen, thought Nickie, though she didn’t say it out loud. Crystal’s mood was already bad enough. “How long till we get there?” she asked.

  “We’ll be there in twenty minutes, if nothing else gets in our way.”

  A lot had gotten in their way so far. The Streakline train was closed down because of the Crisis, so they’d had to drive. They’d been on the road for seven hours, though the trip from Philadelphia should have taken no more than five. But long lines at gas stations, detours around pot-holed or snow-covered stretches of highway, and military roadblocks had slowed them down. Crystal didn’t like delays. She was a fast-moving, ef
ficient person, and when her way was blocked, she became very tense and spoke with her lips in two hard lines.

  They came to the Yonwood exit, and Crystal turned off the highway onto a road that wound uphill. Here the trees grew thick on either side, and so tall that their bare branches met overhead, making a canopy of sticks. Drops of rain began to spatter the car’s windshield.

  After a while, they came to a sign that said, “Yonwood. Pop. 2,460.” The trees thinned out, and the rain fell harder. They passed a few storage sheds, a collapsing barn, and a lumberyard. After that, houses began to appear on the side of the road—small, tired-looking wooden houses, their roofs dripping. Many of them had rockers or couches on the front porch, where people would no doubt be sitting if it weren’t the dead of winter.

  From a small brick shelter at the side of the road, a policeman stepped out holding a red stop sign. He held it up and waved it at them. Crystal slowed down, stopped, and opened her window. The policeman bent down. He had on a rain jacket with the hood up, and rain dripped off the hood and onto his nose. “Hello, ma’am,” he said. “Are you a resident?”

  “No,” said Crystal. “Is that a problem?”

  “Just doing a routine entry check, ma’am,” the man said. “Part of our safety program. Had some evidence lately of possible terrorist activity in the woods. Your purpose here?”

  “My grandfather has died,” Crystal said. “My sister and I have inherited his house. I’ve come to fix the house up and sell it.”

  The man glanced at Nickie. “This is your sister?”

  “This is my niece,” said Crystal. “My sister’s daughter.”

  “And your grandfather’s name?” said the man.

  “Arthur Green,” said Crystal.

  “Ah, yes,” the policeman said. “A fine gentleman.” He smiled. “You be careful while you’re here, now. We’ve had reports indicating there may be agents of the Phalanx Nations traveling alone or in small groups in parts of the area. Have you been spoken to by any suspicious strangers?”

  “No,” said Crystal. “Just you. You seem very suspicious.”

  “Ha ha,” said the man, not really laughing. “All right, ma’am,” he went on. “You may go. Sorry for the delay, but as you know there’s a crisis. We’re taking every precaution.”

  He stepped away, and they drove on.

  “Terrorists even here?” Nickie said.

  “It’s nonsense,” said Crystal. “Why would a terrorist be wandering around in the woods? Pay no attention.”

  Nickie was so tired of the Crisis. It had been going on now for months. On TV and the radio, it was all you ever heard about: how Our Side and Their Side had come almost, but not quite, to the point of declaring all-out war. In the last week or so, the radio had started broadcasting frightening instructions every hour: “In the event of a declaration of war or a large-scale terrorist attack, cities will be evacuated in an orderly fashion…. Residents will be directed to safe locations…. Citizens should remain calm….”

  It seemed to Nickie that everything in the world had gone wrong—including her own family. Eight months ago, her father had left on a government job. He couldn’t tell them where he was going or what he was supposed to do, and he warned that he might not be able to get in touch with them very often. This turned out to be true. She and her mother had had exactly one postcard from him. The postmark had been smudged, so they couldn’t tell where the card came from. And the message was no help, either. It said, “Dear Rachel and Nickie, I am working hard, everything is fine, don’t worry. I hope you’re both doing well. Love, Dad.”

  But they were not doing well. Nickie’s mother missed Nickie’s father and couldn’t bear not knowing where he was. She worried about losing her job, and so she worked too hard, and so she was always tired and sad. And Nickie hadn’t felt happy or safe for a long time. She hated Philadelphia. Something awful seemed always about to happen there. The emergency sirens blasted night and day. Government helicopters circled overhead. In the streets, where trash blew in the wind, dangerous people might be around any corner. And school—a tall, grim building with stinking bathrooms—was just as bad. The books were older than the students, the teachers were too tired to teach, and mean kids prowled the halls. Nickie hated being at school.

  But she didn’t much like being at home, either, in the big tenth-floor condo where she and her mother lived, with its dusty, unused rooms and its huge plateglass windows that gave a frightening view straight down to the tiny street below. She was home alone too much lately. She was nervous and restless. She’d read half a book and set it down. She’d work on her Amazing Things scrapbook and get bored after pasting in just one picture. She’d gaze through her binoculars at people going by on the street below, which she used to do for hours, but even her endless curiosity seemed to have faded, and she’d turn away after a few minutes. When she was really desperate, she’d turn on the TV, even though there was almost nothing on but news, and the news was always the same: grim government spokesmen, troops in camouflage dashing around in foreign places, and the skeletons of blown-up cars and buses. Sometimes the president would come on, his white hair always brushed perfectly smooth, his neat white beard giving him a look of wisdom. “These are dangerous times,” he would say, “but with the help of God we will prevail.”

  She was lonely at home, with her father gone and her mother always at work, and she was lonely at school, because both her best friends had moved—Kate to Washington last year, and Sophy to Florida two months ago. Sometimes, late at night when her mother still wasn’t home, Nickie felt like someone in a tiny lifeboat, drifting by itself in a big, dark, dangerous sea.

  That was why, as soon as she heard about Greenhaven, her great-grandfather’s house in Yonwood, before she’d even seen it, she decided it would be her home. She loved its name; a haven was a safe place, and that’s what she wanted. The trouble was, Crystal and her mother wanted to sell it.

  “But why can’t we sell this place instead?” Nickie had said to her mother. “And get out of the horrible city and go live in a beautiful, peaceful place for a change?”

  Nickie had actually never been to her great-grandfather’s house in Yonwood, except for one time when she was too young to remember. But she’d made up a picture of Yonwood in her mind that she was sure must be close to the truth: it was rather like a Swiss ski village, she decided, where in the winter there would be log fires in fireplaces and big puffy comforters on the beds, and the snow would be pure white, not filthy and gray as it was in the city. In summer, Yonwood would be warm and green, with butterflies. In Yonwood, she would be happy and safe. She desperately wanted to go there.

  After days of arguing, she finally convinced her mother to let her at least see the house before it was sold. All right, her mother said. Nickie could take a couple of weeks off school, drive down with Crystal (her mother couldn’t leave work), and help her get the place fixed up and put on the market. Nickie agreed, but her real plan was different: somehow she would persuade Crystal to keep the house, not sell it, and she and her mother (and her father, when he came back) would go and live there, and everything would be different, and better.

  That was her Goal #1. But since she was sure this was going to be a life-changing trip, she thought she might as well add other goals as well. Altogether, she had set herself three:

  1. To keep her great-grandfather’s house from being sold so she could live in it with her parents.

  2. To fall in love. She was eleven now, and she thought it was time for this. Not to fall in love in a permanent way, just to have the experience of being madly, passionately in love. She knew she was a passionate person. She had a big love inside her, and she needed to give it.

  3. To do something helpful for the world. What that would be she had no idea, but the world needed help badly. She would keep her eyes open for an opportunity.

  They were driving now up the town’s main business street. It was in fact called Main Street—Nickie saw the name on a si
gn. They passed the church whose steeple Nickie had seen from the highway. In front of it was a two-legged wooden sign that said, in hand-painted letters, “Church of the Fiery Vision.” Nickie could tell, though, that the sign used to say something else; the old name of the church had been painted over.

  Beyond the church, the shopping district began. Probably it was pretty in summer, Nickie thought, but now, in February, it had a gray and shuttered look, as if the buildings themselves were cold. Some stores were open, and people walked in and out of them, but others looked permanently closed, their windows dark. There was a movie theater, but its ticket booth was boarded up. There was a park, but its swings and picnic tables were wet and empty.

  Crystal turned left, drove uphill for a block, and turned right on a street lined with old houses. On one side of this street—it was Cloud Street, its sign said—the ground sloped upward, so that the houses stood up high, at the crest of their lawns. They were huge houses, with columns and wide porches and numerous chimneys. The people in there, Nickie thought, would be sitting beside roaring fires on an evening like this, probably drinking hot chocolate.

  “It’s this one,” said Crystal, drawing in toward the curb.

  Nickie gasped. “This one?”

  “I’m afraid so.” Her aunt stopped the car, and Nickie gaped at the house, stunned. Rain poured down, but she opened the window anyway, to get a better look.

  It was more of a castle than a house. It loomed over them, immense and massive, three stories high. At one corner was a tower—round, with high windows. The steep slate roof bristled with chimneys. Rain ran down it in sheets, glistening in the last of the daylight.

  “You can’t sell this house,” Nickie said. “It’s too wonderful.”

  “It’s awful,” said her aunt. “You’ll see.”

  A gust of wind dipped the branches of a pine tree that grew close to the house, and Nickie thought she saw a light in a high window.