The class loudly assured her that she was right.
Mr. Enright surveyed the class, pausing to study each child's face, and it was the first time all morning that he had really looked at them. At last he smiled. "Mrs. Caswell, this is a wonderful thing you've got going here."
"Thank you," said Mrs. Caswell.
Mr. Enright shook his head, smiled more broadly, and winked. "Miss Attila the Hun indeed."
At that moment Jamie was so proud of Mrs. Caswell and so in love with her that he had to struggle valiantly to repress tears far more genuine than those of Melissa Fedder.
Now, on the last Monday morning in October, Jamie listened to Miss Attila the Hun as she told them what medical science was like in the Middle Ages (crude) and what alchemy was (lead into gold and all sorts of crazy-fascinating stuff), and in a while he could no longer smell the chalk dust and child scents of the classroom but could almost smell the terrible, reeking, sewage-spattered streets of medieval Europe.
IN HIS TEN-FOOT-SQUARE OFFICE AT THE FRONT OF THE HOUSE, JACK Caswell sat at an ancient pine desk, sipping coffee and rereading the chapter he'd written the previous day. He made a lot of pencil corrections and then switched on his computer to enter the changes.
In the three years since his accident, unable to return to work as a game warden for the department of forestry, he had struggled to fulfill his lifelong desire to be a writer. (Sometimes, in his dreams, he could still see the big truck starting to slide on the ice-covered road, and he felt his own car entering a sickening spin too, and the bright headlights were bearing down on him, and he pumped the brake pedal, turned the wheel into the slide, but he was always too late. Even in the dreams, he was always too late.) He had written four fast-paced detective novels in the last three years, two of which had sold to New York publishers, and he had also placed eight short stories in magazines.
Until Laura came along, his two great loves had been the outdoors and books. Before the accident, he had often hiked miles up into the mountains, to places remote and serene, with his backpack half filled with food, half with paperbacks. Augmenting his supplies with berries and nuts and edible roots, he had remained for days in the wilderness, alternately studying the wildlife and reading. He was equally a man of nature and civilization; though it was difficult to bring nature into town, it was easy to carry civilization — in the form of books — into the wild heart of the forest, allowing him to satisfy both halves of his cleft soul.
These days, cursed with legs that would never again support him on a journey into the hills, he had to be content with the pleasures of civilization — and, damn it, he soon had to make a better living with his writing than he had managed thus far. From the sales of eight stories and two well-reviewed novels spread over three years, he had not earned a third as much as Laura's modest teaching salary. He was a long way from reaching the best-seller lists, and life at the lower end of the publishing business was far from glamorous. Without his small disability pension from the department of forestry, he and Laura would have had serious difficulty keeping themselves housed, clothed, and fed.
When he remembered the worn brown cloth coat in which Laura had gone off to school that morning, he grew sad. But the thought of her in that drab coat also made him more determined than ever to write a breakthrough book, earn a fortune, and buy her the luxuries that she deserved.
The strange thing was that if he had not been in the accident, he would not have met Laura, would not have married her. She'd been at the hospital visiting a sick student, and on the way out she had seen Jack in the hall. He was in a wheelchair, sullenly roaming the corridors. Laura was incapable of passing an obviously depressed man in a wheelchair without attempting to cheer him. Filled with self-pity and anger, he rebuffed her; however, rejection only made Laura try harder. He didn't know what a bulldog she was, but he learned. Two days later, when she returned to visit her student, she paid a call on Jack as well, and soon she was coming every day just to see him. When he resigned himself to life in a wheelchair, Laura insisted that he work longer and harder with a therapist every day and that he at least try to learn to walk with braces and a cane. After some time, when the therapist had only moderate success with him, Laura wheeled him, protesting, into the therapy room every day and put him through the exercises a second time. Before long, her indomitable spirit and optimism infected Jack. He became determined to walk again, and then he did walk, and somehow learning to walk led to love and marriage. So the worst thing that had ever happened to him — the leg-crushing collision — had brought him to Laura, and she was far and away the best thing that had ever happened to him.
Screwy. Life sure was screwy.
In the new novel on which he was working, he was trying to write about that screwiness: the bizarre way that bad things could lead to blessings while blessings sometimes ended in tragedy. If he could thread that observation through a detective story in such a way as to explore the more profound aspects of it, he might be able to write not only a big-money book but also a book of which he could be proud.
He poured another cup of coffee and was about to start a new chapter when he looked out the window to the left of his desk and saw a dirty, dented jeep station wagon pull off the county road into his driveway.
Wondering who could be calling, he immediately levered himself up from the chair and grabbed his cane. He needed time to get to the front door, and he hated to keep people waiting.
He saw the jeep stop in front of the house. Both doors flew open, and a man and a woman got out.
Jack recognized the man, Teel Pleever, whom he knew slightly. Just about everyone in Pine County knew Pleever, but Jack figured that, like him, most folks didn't really know the man well.
The woman was vaguely familiar to him. She was about thirty, attractive, and he thought perhaps she had a child in Laura's class and that he had seen her at a school function. In only a housedress and an apron, she was not properly clothed for the chilly October morning.
By the time Jack caned halfway across the office, his visitors had begun to knock on the front door.
SEED PULLED OFF THE HIGHWAY AS SOON AS IT SAW THE NEXT DWELLING. After centuries of dreamy half-life, it was eager to expand into more hosts. From Pleever, it knew that five thousand people lived in the town of Pineridge, in which Seed intended to arrive by noon. Within two days, three at most, it would assume control of every one of the town's citizens and then would spread throughout Pine County, until it seized the bodies and imprisoned the minds of all twenty thousand residents in that entire rural area.
Although spread among many hosts, Seed remained a single entity with a single consciousness. It could live simultaneously in tens of millions or even billions of hosts, absorbing sensory input from billions of eyes and billions of ears and billions of noses, mouths, and hands, without risking confusion or information overload. In its countless millions of years of drifting through the galaxies, on the more than one hundred planets where it had thrived, Seed had never encountered another creature with its unique talent for physical schizophrenia.
Now it took its two captives out of the jeep and marched them across the lawn to the front-porch steps of the small white house.
From Pine County it would send its hosts outward, fanning across this continent, then to others, until every human being on the face of the earth had been claimed. Throughout this period, it would destroy neither the mind nor the individual personality of any host but would imprison each while it used the host's body and store of knowledge to facilitate its conquest of the world. Teel Pleever, Jane Halliwell, and all the others would be horribly aware during their months of total enslavement: aware of the world around them, aware of the monstrous acts they were committing, and aware of Seed nesting within them.