Shepherd stared at me long and hard and I could have sworn that at that moment the lights dimmed. "I'd be disappointed if you didn't try," he said.

"Whatever game you're playing, Myles, this time you've overplayed your hand. All I have to do is pick up the phone and-"

"He won't take your call. Ingraham, that is. That's who you were going to call, isn't it? Chief of Staff Ingraham? He won't take your call."

His comment knocked me off balance. How did he know I was thinking of Chief of Staff Ingraham?

"I'm . . . I'm sure you won't mind if I don't take your word for it," I stammered.

"And that cell phone number the president gave you at Camp David? Disconnected."

"How . . . how . . . do you know about that? No one knows about that, not even Ingraham."

"The president knows."

Pushing back his chair, Shepherd rose to full height. He looked every inch the self-satisfied prig I'd loathed for years.

"And that cute little number," he continued, "what's her name? Chrissy? No, Christina. Ingraham's aide. Despite your little dalliance, she won't take your calls either. You're cut off, Grant."

Shepherd's matter-of-factness unnerved me. At this point I had but a single thought-get away from him. Alarms were going off inside of me, warning me to get out now. I took a step toward the door.

"Besides," Shepherd said, easing around his desk, "informing the president about an attempt on his life would be a waste of time."

I took another step back.

"Do you want to know why?" He smiled his gladiator smile. "Because he already knows about it. In fact, he's the one who's planning it. Ingenious, no? A president who plots his own a.s.sa.s.sination."

A cold chill poured over me like ice water. His little bombsh.e.l.l was one of those statements that are so outrageous, so unbelievable, so farfetched that you wanted to dismiss them as frivolous, but in your gut you knew they were true.

Shepherd rubbed his hands together in a that-settles-that manner. "Now, let's talk about the literary style of the a.s.sa.s.sination chapter. You'll want to avoid the pedantic tone you used in the first five chapters of the biography."

My knees went weak. Only with effort did I take another step back.

"Don't go, Grant. We're not finished."

My feet stopped moving. I didn't stop them.

"Poor Grant," Shepherd said. "You've been in over your head from the beginning."

I tried to move my feet. Couldn't. "Oh yeah?" My voice quivered as I tried to break free. "Well . . . I'll find a way to stop you . . . somehow. Count on it."

I began to panic. Maybe I was overreacting, but losing control of the ability to move my legs has that effect on me. "I . . . I . . . don't . . . know what you've gotten yourself mixed up with, Shepherd . . . but I'll expose you . . . I'll alert the Secret Service . . . I'll phone the media . . . I'll . . . I'll . . . I'll tell the princ.i.p.al!"

I've never been good at trash-talking. It always comes out sounding like a two-year-old's tantrum.

Shepherd chuckled. It was a deep, throaty rumble that made the cinder-block walls shudder and the picture frames rattle. "You can't stop us," he said. "We've been doing this for millennia."

About now I was wishing I'd taken the high road and left immediately following the a.s.sembly. I didn't know how Myles Shepherd was doing this, but I was obviously no match for it. I kept throwing verbal jabs, hoping one of them would land. "We . . . you keep saying we," I said. "I suppose now you're going to tell me you're part of some ancient brotherhood, like the Knights Templar, or the Illuminati, or some other puerile organization of losers with secret handshakes, blood-drinking initiations, and decoder rings. Do you know how perverted that is, Myles? Most of us grew out of that stuff in junior high."

Shepherd's smile faded. As it did, the room grew darker, which was odd because it was nearly noon. Behind me, the sun streamed into the cla.s.sroom. But it stopped at the office threshold, as though afraid to come in.

A movement caught my eye. High in the corner, above the file cabinet, wedged between ceiling and wall, grotesque figures took shape. Three-dimensional shadows with sunken eyes leered at me like medieval castle gargoyles. One of them dropped silently onto the top of the file cabinet and clutched the tennis trophy like it was a doll.

I blinked and they were gone.

"Something wrong, Grant?" Shepherd asked. "Where's that smug superiority you brought with you into the room?"

I swallowed hard. Every instinct within me screamed for me to run. My heart banged against my chest, desperate to get out of the room, with or without me.

"I suppose you should feel honored, Grant," Shepherd said. "We've been grooming you for this task most of your miserable, pathetic life. You've been the perfect p.a.w.n. Predictable to a fault."

The shadow gargoyles reappeared. There were more of them this time, cl.u.s.tered in the corner, shoulders pressed against greasy shoulders. They glared at me with intense, hungry eyes, straining to get at me like hounds on a leash.

Clouds of darkness billowed across the ceiling while the fluorescents continued humming happily. Standing beside his desk, Myles Shepherd appeared to have grown a foot taller and twice as handsome-with a radiant glow.

I found it increasingly difficult to concentrate. I stood transfixed, my eyes locked on Shepherd. I couldn't turn my head aside, nor could I close my eyes. Myles Shepherd wanted me to see something, and I wasn't sure I wanted to see it. "What's happening to me?" I cried.

Shepherd laughed. It was a laugh not of this world, sounding like a thousand wind chimes of such clarity and tone it brought tears to my eyes; a laugh that sp.a.w.ned laughter, bubbling in my gut, rushing to the surface in an explosion of guffaws. I couldn't stop it. I laughed like a madman. I laughed so hard I thought my belly would burst.

My ability to speak-the only weapon I had left-was being swallowed by convulsive spasms of mirth. I had to fight it. Somehow, I had to force myself to speak. "This . . . is . . . about . . . the tennis . . . trophy . . . isn't it?" I managed to say.

"What?" Shepherd barked.

I'd landed a blow. The satisfaction was exhilarating. It spurred me on. Two can play the taunting game, Mr. Shepherd. "The trophy," I stammered. "We all . . . knew . . . you cheated . . . to win . . . it. We laughed . . . at . . . you . . . behind . . . your back . . . for . . . selling . . . your soul . . . for a cheap . . . plastic . . . trophy."

Shepherd's jaw clenched in anger.

The floor trembled. The desk shook. Towers of papers and notebooks toppled over. From the corner, the shadow creatures screamed silently at me.

Scared out of my skin, if I'd had any sense I would have stopped goading him. "And our . . . chess . . . matches?" I continued. "We . . . let . . . you . . . win . . . Everyone . . . knew . . . you were . . . a sucker . . . for the . . . Sicilian . . . defense."

The quaking intensified. Books rained down from shelves. My feet still firmly fixed to the floor, I could barely stand.

Shepherd roared. "You insignificant worm! You cannot begin to know the nauseating pain I endure simply by being in your presence!"

"Whining, Myles? How unattractive."

The floor undulated like the sea.

I pressed on. "As . . . for . . . Jana? It's . . . a . . . shame . . . you . . . weren't . . . man enough . . . to . . . keep . . . her. After . . . she dumped . . . you, she . . . told . . . me . . . kissing . . . you . . . was like . . . kissing . . . a . . . trash . . . can. Ever . . . hear of . . . breath mints, Myles?"

The lights went out. The room was pitch-black while behind me the cla.s.sroom remained flooded with sunlight. I could hear books falling all around me.

A ray of light shot past me.

Then another.

And another.

They came from Shepherd. Originating from inside him, they shot through his clothing, which took fire but wasn't consumed. The fabric transformed to . . . to what? The folds and seams remained intact, but it looked like no cloth I'd seen before. They appeared to be folds of pure color. We're talking laundry-detergent-commercial special effects here-the reddest reds and bluest blues I'd ever seen.

The intensity of the colors vied for supremacy, growing ever brighter until something had to give. They began to chase each other around him, swirling around the shape that had once been Myles Shepherd, slowly at first, then faster, and faster, blending with each other until they became a dazzling white, a hurricane of radiance.

What was happening here? Was I hallucinating? I hoped I was, because the alternative was that Myles Shepherd, my constant rival, was not of this world. The idea that I'd gone to high school for four years with ET and never knew it was hard to admit to myself.

Overhead, the gargoyle shadow creatures-now looking mossy green and solid-stared at Shepherd with expressions of awe and adoration and painful longing.

I knew exactly how they felt. I felt the same way. Whoever, whatever, stood before me was mesmerizing.

Think of a perfect starlit night when you're lost in your lover's eyes, a moment suspended in time and bliss. Multiply that euphoria by ten thousand times, and you'll begin to grasp the beauty that lay just beyond my reach.

The attraction was so intense I had to grab a bookshelf to keep from dropping to my knees and worshipping it.

Here was an elegance wondrously strange. I wanted it to go on forever. Tears marked my cheeks. I mumbled incoherently. I dared not blink lest I lose a fraction of this marvel.

But then the light reversed itself. Blasts shot past me a second time as the glorious hurricane became a swirling accretion feeding on the colors in the room. Instead of giving off light, it began swallowing it, gulping it greedily.

How do I describe what I saw?

It was a vortex. A black hole. All at once wondrous and comical.

The red slashes on the graded exams lifted off the paper and, like snakes, slithered their way toward the vortex and were swallowed up. So, too, rivers of Times Roman font lifted from the papers, streamed to the vortex, and disappeared. t.i.tles from books followed, peeled from the spines of the volumes on the shelves.

The file cabinet was stripped of its yellow color, reduced to a pale ghostly white. Even the blue of my tie was sucked off, and the color lifted from my cla.s.s ring, leaving the ruby crystal clear.

The colors made the vortex-formerly Myles Shepherd, though he no longer bore any resemblance to a man-pulse with nightmarish power.

For not only was the room stripped of all color, it was stripped of every pleasure, every good feeling, leaving me bereft, emotionally bankrupt, despairing of hope and life. I was abhorrent to myself. Spasms of depression racked me. I craved annihilation, nonexistence, confident that my death would make the world a better place. I sobbed uncontrollably, begging the ent.i.ty to rid the world of me.

He consented.

He loosed the hounds.

The shadow gargoyles fell upon me with a vengeance, tearing into me, plunging into the inner depths of my being. They fed on me, occupied me with contentious voices.

My mouth contorted into a scream, but whatever sound I produced was instantly swallowed by the vortex.

I reached out to what had once been Myles Shepherd, begging him to make quick work of me. To unborn me, if that were possible. All I knew was that I was desperate to no longer be.

The last thing I remember were his words filling the room, sounding like a chorus of a thousand voices. He said, "I am Semyaza. Tremble before me."

My first sensation was cold tile against my cheek and the pungent odor of industrial floor detergent. It took several painful blinks before my eyes focused. I heard a moan. I think it came from me.

Memories like lost hitchhikers came straggling back. The high school a.s.sembly. The cla.s.sroom. Myles Shepherd seated behind his desk, then morphing into a whirlwind. The shadow creatures, straining to get at me, clawing onto me.

I cried out and raised an arm to defend myself. But there was nothing in the corner. My hand flew to my chest. They weren't there either. My heart hammered. I was alone in the room.

I moved slowly, working my way into a sitting position. My head swam with the effort. I glanced around. Everything was in its place. The towers of books. Stacks of papers. The trophy. The file cabinet was yellow. All the books had their t.i.tles.

I turned toward the doorway. The cla.s.sroom was as dark as the office. It was night.

Somehow I managed to get to my knees, then to my feet. I had to steady myself on the edge of the desk.

When I felt I could trust my legs again, I navigated a short distance away. My hand brushed my coat and tie. It hit something unexpected. I looked down.

Pinned to my tie was a square piece of pink notepad paper. I removed the pin. There wasn't enough light to read it, so I found the light switch and flipped it on. Fluorescents flickered, then burst to life. Light poked me rudely in the eyes. After several moments I gave the note another try- Grant, Let yourself out. Don't forget to lock up.

M.S.

Staggering between rows of chairs, I made my way out the cla.s.sroom door and stumbled into the night air.

The world smelled disgusting. Rancid. Like a pair of dirty gym socks. Wrinkling my nose, I glanced around. The spring gra.s.s was muddy green. The stars were depressingly dim. The air tasted greasy. It was all I could do to keep from retching.

An annoying squeak, squeak, squeak p.r.i.c.ked my ears as a potbellied janitor appeared pushing a mop pail. When he saw me, he started. "Hey! What's goin' on here?" he cried.

He looked repulsive. Flesh hung from his jowls and arms like algae on a shipwreck. His voice was a parrot's squawk.

"It's all right," I croaked, my throat as dry as parchment. "I was here earlier. Just came back for my car." I motioned feebly toward the parking lot.

"Are you drunk?"

Without answering him, I started toward the parking lot. The janitor watched my unsteady progress with a suspicious squint.

I was relieved to find my rental car still in the lot. As I unlocked the door I pacified myself with the thought that while Myles Shepherd may have won the battle, I had landed the last blow.

I didn't lock up.

CHAPTER 2.

The gra.s.s crunched like sour milk cartons beneath my feet. Imagine traversing a landfill that stretches from horizon to horizon, where everything you touch is filthy, with a slimy film to it, and you have an idea of what it was like for me to get to my car.

Climbing into the rental-a luxury-edition sedan with barely thirty-seven miles on the odometer-was like crawling into a garbage Dumpster. Windows up. Windows down. It didn't matter. The odors were suffocating.

I contributed to the stench. My flesh reeked. Not from lack of hygiene, mind you. I shower daily. My body had the odor of a carnivore. My skin was permeated with the stench of the dead flesh I'd consumed earlier-prime rib the night before, sausage for breakfast. Every time my hands came close to my face I winced. Each nauseating waft of decayed meat reminded me how pure, clear, and clean was the radiant presence in Shepherd's office.

But I couldn't think of that now. I had to warn the president about whatever or whoever attacked me in Myles Shepherd's office. Though I still hadn't figured out what I was going to say-"h.e.l.lo, Mr. President? Be on the lookout for a high school teacher who can dazzle you, then suck the life from you"-I felt an urgency to warn him. Whatever it was in that office, the power was incredible.

Another word came to mind. I didn't want to use it. It wasn't a word you used around educated folk, the kind who walked the halls of Washington, D.C. But something supernatural had taken place in that office. Whether I wanted to admit it or not.

Two a.m. I made my first call to Chief of Staff Harold Ingraham's direct line while sitting in the car in the parking lot. With the three-hour time difference, it was five o'clock in Washington. Ingraham should have answered. He didn't.