THE CHILD WALKED slowly along the high mesh fence where the playground and the thick belt of varicolored woodland met. He stood for a moment, his back to the others who ran and screamed in the dusty yard; he stood staring out to where the trees surrendered to the highway that went through Albany and on to the city. Then he turned and, leaning against the fence, watched the others scrambling after a wildly thrown football.
Two other children approached him. One was heavy-set with thick black hair and prominent teeth, the other was a thinner child with hair the color of dirty sand and deep-set, hollow blue eyes. The sandy-haired child said, "That four-eyes is a bitch."
Baal remained silent. He wove his thin fingers through the metal mesh. "This place is a prison," he said after another moment. "They're frightened of us. Can't you feel it? So in their fear they hope to cage us. But they cannot keep us here much longer."
"How can we get away?" the sandy-haired child asked.
His black eyes glittered. "Already you doubt me?"
"No. No, Baal. I believe you."
"All in its time," Baal said quietly. "I will choose my friends and take them with me. The rest will perish."
"Take me with you, Baal," the heavy-set child whined. "Please."
Baal grinned but his black eyes remained lifeless. He reached out and, tangling his fingers in the boy's curly black hair, drew his face toward him until his glistening eyes were only inches away. "Love me, Thomas," whispered Baal. "Love me and follow what I say. If you do this I can save you."
Thomas was trembling. Saliva dribbled from his open mouth, hung from his chin by a silvery thread. His eyes blinked back tears that threatened to break over his cheeks. He said, "I love you, Baal. I don't want you to leave me."
"Saying you love me is not enough. You must show me; and you will."
"I will," Thomas said. "I will."
The two children stood transfixed. His eyes would not free them.
Someone called, "Jeffrey! Jeffrey!"
Baal blinked. The two boys lowered their heads and ran away across the playground.
Someone approached him; a nun in a flowing black habit, Sister Rosamond. She reached him and, smiling, said, "Jeffrey, you're going to be excused from your reading class. Father Robson would like to see you."
Baal nodded. He followed her silently as she walked across the yard, through a screaming knot of boys who instantly parted when they saw him, and into the dark corridors of the rambling orphanage. He watched her buttocks as they swayed beneath the material of the habit.
Sister Rosamond was probably in her early thirties. She had a high-browed oval face and very clear greenish-blue eyes. Her hair would probably be golden with a slight tinge of red. She was very much unlike the other gray-fleshed, thick-glassed women at the boys home; she was, in Baal's eyes, attainable. She was the one sister who encouraged the children to come to her with their personal problems; with wide, reassuring eyes, she would sit and listen to their stories of drunken fathers and whorish mothers and beatings and drugs and on and on. Baal wondered if she ever fucked.
They climbed the wide stairway. Sister Rosamond looked to make sure he was following; she saw his eyes flicker from her haunches up to her face and back again.
She didn't want to look at him. She could feel his eyes ripping away the habit and running up and down her full thighs like fingers on a keyboard, pressure here, pressure here, pressure here. Her lips were drawn and white; her hands trembled at her sides. Beneath her habit the eyes of the child reached her undergarments and slid relentlessly toward the triangle between her legs. She whirled, finally unable to maintain her composure, and said, "Stop that!"
"Stop what?" the child asked.
Sister Rosamond stood shaking, her lips moving without making sounds. She was new to the orphanage, yet she understood the harmless pranks and dirty street language of the children. She understood all that. But this child... this child she could not understand. There was something intangible about him that both attracted and repelled her. His incurious gaze and coldly calculating eyes now sent chills of fear skittering toward her throat.
They stood before the closed doors of the upper-floor library. Wincing at the sound of her own strained voice, Sister Rosamond said, "Father Robson wants to speak with you."
She watched as he stepped through the doorway and then turned to smile faintly into her face, like the cat that stalks a caged canary. She caught her breath and let the door swing shut.
In the library Baal breathed the smell of old paper and book bindings. Library period had not yet begun; the bookshelves were undisturbed, everything in its proper place. Chairs were arranged neatly around circular reading tables. After sweeping the room, Baal's eyes finally came to rest on the back of a man who stood in a corner, his finger brushing the spines of books on a shelf.
Father Robson had heard the door close. He had watched the child from the corner of his eye; now he turned slowly from his appraisal of the bookshelves and said, "Hello, Jeffrey. How are you today?"
The child remained motionless. Somewhere in the library a clock ticked; a pendulum swung back and forth, back and forth.
"Come sit down, Jeffrey. I'd like to talk with you."
The child still didn't move. Father Robson had no indication at all that what he'd said had even registered with Jeffrey.
"I won't bite," Father Robson said. "Come over here."
"Why?" the child asked.
"Because I don't like to talk over a distance. If I did I would've called you on the downstairs telephone."
"You should have. Then you wouldn't have wasted your time."
Father Robson grunted. Damn. Hard as nails. He managed another smile and said, "I understand you're quite interested in books. I thought you'd be comfortable here."
"I would be," the child said, "if you would leave."
"Aren't you at all curious as to why I wanted to speak with you?"
"No."
"Why not?"
The child didn't answer for a moment. Father Robson, peering through the shadows thrown across the library floor, was almost certain he saw a brief flash of red in the eyes of the child. It was so sharp and sudden that he was momentarily dizzied. He blinked and looked again, but the child had lowered his gaze. "I already know," Baal said. He stepped toward a bookshelf and began looking at the illustrations on the dust jackets. "You were sent here to talk to me because I am what you call an 'incorrigible.' Sister Miriam calls me a 'delinquent.' Father Gary calls me a 'troublemaker.' Isn't that right?"
"It's right that they call you those things, yes," said Father Robson, moving a step closer to the child. "But I don't believe it's right that you are those things."
Baal's head swiveled around and his eyes flashed briefly, an illumination so uncanny that Father Rob-son stopped as surely as if he had walked into a wall. "Don't approach me," the child said quietly. When he saw that the man was going to obey, Baal turned back to the bookshelves. "You're a psychologist. What do you see in me?"
"I'm a psychologist but not a mind reader," he said, his eyes narrowed. Had he imagined that glimmer of red? Maybe the shadows had something to do with it, playing tricks with his vision. "If I cannot move toward you physically I certainly can't move toward you mentally."
"Then I will tell you what you see in me," Baal said. "You think I have a mental disorder; you think some experience or series of experiences in my past has affected me. Is that correct?"
"Yes. How did you know?"
"I'm quite interested in books," said Baal, glancing up. "Didn't you say so yourself?"
Father Robson nodded. This child was different from any he had ever seen before. He wondered at the strangeness of him; the body was that of a normal ten-year-old, clad in patched jeans and a sweater, but the extraordinarily intelligent mind was possessed of a clarity that suggested extrasensory perception. And this aura around the child, this aura of a heavy, demanding power. A presence, Father Robson told himself, that was utterly without precedent in his own experience. He said, "Why do you persist in denying your name, Jeffrey? Do you wish to deny your past?"
"My name is Baal. That is my one and only name. I do not deny it. You're referring also to an incident in my past that you believe has affected me. You believe I underwent a trauma that made me want to bury any recollection of the period in which it happened."
Father Robson took note of something behind the face of this child that, for all his years as a child psychologist, he could not identify. "What incident do you refer to?"
Baal looked at him steadily; a grin flickered across his face, and then was gone. "I seem to have... forgotten."
"You're playing games now."
"No," Baal said. "Only playing out the game you've begun."
"You're an intelligent young man," Father Robson said. "I won't talk to you as I would talk to the others. I'll lay it on the line for you. You've been with a half-dozen families and every time you've been returned to a children's home because of your disruptive attitude. I don't believe you want to go out."
Baal was silent, listening.
"What do you want? What is it you're waiting for? The time will come when you're old enough to leave the children's home system. What then?"
"Then..." said Baal, and Father Robson thought he was going to continue but the child's mouth closed slowly; he stood without saying another word, just watching the man across the shadow-dappled, musty library-No, this will not work, Father Robson said to himself. This child needs professional, full-time guidance. To build a bridge toward the child was a futile hope. He was not getting through at all. As a last effort, a throwaway attempt, he asked, "Why do you not attend chapel with the others?"
"I choose not to," Baal said.
"You're not religious?"
"I'm religious."
The answer surprised him. He had expected a curse instead of a curt reply. "Then you believe in God?" he asked.
"A god," said Baal, his eyes scanning the packed bookshelves. "Perhaps not yours."
"Is yours a different God?"
The child's head turned slowly. His lips were twisted into a cold grin. "Your god," said the child, "is one of white-steepled churches. That's all; beyond the chapel doors He has no strength. Mine is the god of the alley, the whorehouse, the world. Mine is the true king."
"My God, Jeffrey," said Father Robson, astonished at the outburst. "What's made you like this? Who planted these terrible things inside you?" He took a step forward to see the child's face more clearly.
Baal growled, "Stay back."
But he would not listen. He was going to move close enough to touch the child. He said, "Jeffrey..."
And that was all he said, for in the next second the child shrieked "Stay back I said!" in a voice that slammed the man back into the bookshelves, sending volumes toppling him to the floor. Father Robson struggled against something that seemed to be choking him, pinning him physically so that he could not move, could not breathe, could not think.
With one hand the child ripped books from their places and scattered them through the air, yellowed pages flying, bindings breaking. His teeth clenched and his breath rasping like that of an enraged animal, he tore into the shelves. Father Robson saw that he had reached the section of the library that housed religious books. As if in a mad frenzy, a terrible uncontrolled anger because the man had not obeyed, he tore the books to shreds and let their remains fall around him.
Father Robson tried to shout but his voice, weakened and strangled by the force that held him, came out only as a barely audible croak. His eyes were swimming in their sockets and his head felt bloated with blood, distorted like a freak's, ballooning and ready to explode.
But the child stopped. He stood amid the carnage of books and grinned at him with a savage ferocity that froze the blood in Father Robson's veins.
Baal slowly, gracefully, lifted his arm. Clutched in the hand was a Bible with a white binding. As Father Robson watched, the book seemed to smoke; vapors whirled around the child's head and moved up toward the ceiling lights. Baal opened his hand and let the book fall into the scattered heaps around him.
Baal said, "This conversation is ended." He turned abruptly and shut the doors behind him.
When the child left it seemed that the heavy force fell away from Father Robson. He felt his neck, certain that a hand had grasped his throat but knowing there would be no bruises. He waited for a moment until a spasm of trembling had passed and then he picked carefully through the litter of paper and bindings. The smell of heat, of burned paper, was still strong. He searched for its source.
He found the white-bound Bible the child had held above his head. There, scorched brown and curled around the front cover, was a sight that made him catch his breath as sharply as if the floor had suddenly given way beneath him.
A handprint.
