Midnight Voices by John Saul Page B

her leave.
    It’s me,
she told herself as she started back toward the elevator.
It’s me, and this creepy building.
But just as she was about to get back in the elevator cage, a man of perhaps sixty appeared at the head of the stairs. Tall, with thick iron-gray hair framing craggily handsome features, he wore a black suit and carried an old-fashioned medical bag. When he looked at Andrea she thought she saw something in his eyes.
    Surprise?
    Uncertainty?
    Or hostility?
    The moment passed so quickly she wasn’t certain it had happened at all; the man was already hurrying down the hall. A moment later he knocked at the door of Apartment 7-C.
    “Dr. Humphries!” she heard Alicia Albion say a moment later. “Thank you for coming. Rebecca’s in her room.” Andrea reached out and pressed the button that would take the elevator back to the lobby, but just before it began its descent she saw the black-clad man turn and look at her again. This time, she was quite sure she knew what she saw.
    It was, indeed, hostility.
    And from a man—apparently a doctor—she’d never seen before in her life.

    Even though he’d been at Columbus Middle School for almost four months, Ryan still hadn’t gotten used to it. “It’ll be all right,” his mother had promised when she told him he wouldn’t be going to the Elliott Academy anymore. “You’ll see—you’ll like it.”
    But he hadn’t liked it.
    He hadn’t liked it at all.
    That first day, when he’d stepped inside his classroom, everyone had stared at him, and made him feel like some kind of alien or something. But it wasn’t just that. A lot of the kids—girls as well as boys—looked like they were mad at him, even though they’d never even met him before. And at the very first recess, he found out why. The teacher had told them the one thing he’d hoped she wouldn’t: what school he’d come from. Only the week before he’d been walking home with some of his friends from the Academy, and suddenly a bunch of public school boys had come around the corner. Right away, they’d started yelling things at Ryan and his friends, trying to pick a fight. But Ryan—and all the rest of the boys from the Academy—had remembered what their teacher had told them. “Just ignore it—those children don’t know you, and they don’t want to know you. All they want is to pick a fight with you, and if you give in to them, you’ve sunk to their level. Just remember who you are, and walk away.” But that first day at Columbus Ryan was right there in the middle of them, all by himself, and there was nowhere to walk away to.
    Half a dozen boys had formed a circle around him, and started calling him names. He didn’t even know what some of the words they shouted at him meant, but not knowing exactly what they were calling him didn’t make it hurt any less. At first he’d tried to do exactly as Mr. Fields at the Academy had told him, and just walk away. But every time he tried to escape from the circle of his classmates, they shoved him back, more roughly every time, and finally he decided it was safer just to stand there and try to shut it all out.
    Now, four months later, nothing much had changed. Even though some of his classmates had stopped teasing him all the time, the kids from the next grade had started a game they called “Cryin’ Ryan” where the winner was the first guy who could make him start crying. He’d known better than to tell the teachers what was happening, certain that the best thing that would happen was that the teachers would tell him to fight back, and the worst was that the older kids would find out he’d told on them, and start beating him up after school. So he tried to just tough it out, figuring that maybe if he could just keep from crying, they’d get bored. But when he’d stopped reacting to their words, they’d started punching him instead, and it hadn’t taken long before he’d figured out that the safest thing to do was just start crying