Overcomer - The Battle by Judy Colella (best management books of all time txt) 📖

you made yet another blunder when you showed yourself to him in his sleeping state.”

“How?”

“How? Hmmmm. How indeed. Because. . .” The silence between them grew tighter, crackling with dry tension, and then. . . “NOW HE KNOWS WHO YOU ARE!” howled the Dark Lord. “HE SEES YOU AS YOU REALLY ARE! HE KNOWS-HOW-TO-STOP-YOU!”

If Moloch had had ears, it would have covered them.

“If you lose your battle with him,” continued its Master in an almost reasonable tone, “I will take great pleasure in opening the portal through which your useless energy will be thrown, so that you may join the other howlers in the outer darkness. And I shall immediately replace you with another.”

The now discomfited demon seethed. “Who? Who can possibly take my place?”

“Does it matter? You won’t be around to see it anyway. Leave me, and try to think of a way to restore the advantage you’ve lost, fool.”

“I don’t –“

“LEAVE ME AT ONCE!!!”

Moloch made what might be described as a disembodied bow of obeisance, and vanished into the darkness to do the Master’s bidding.

THREE

 

Morning sunlight, even filtered by translucent white curtains, was still bright enough to disturb Cian’s sleep. He shifted, stretched, yawned, and opened his eyes. While still rather tired, he felt much better than he had when he’d fallen into bed the night before.

He frowned and sat up. Somehow, it seemed like he’d been sleeping for much longer. He got out of bed, stretching again because now he actually felt stiff and a little achy. As if he’d been in one position for a very long time. The house was extremely quiet, probably because everyone was already at breakfast –

“Oh, no! I’m late!” He went into the hall, grabbing a towel from the linen closet on his way to the bathroom.

As he stood under the stream of warm water, he tried to remember what had happened before he went to sleep. He recalled the Croghan driving him home and telling him not to worry about Mr. Geller’s reaction to his being back so late, and then coming into the house. . .oh, yes. It turned out the two men knew each other well, and Cian was told to go to bed, that he’d been. . .some word Mr. Geller had used that basically meant he’d been pardoned, forgiven, something like that.

He also remembered climbing the stairs and feeling suddenly more exhausted than he’d ever felt in his life, but after that – nothing. Well, maybe something, something about a really bad dream, but he couldn’t bring it to the forefront of his mind, so decided to give up for now. Usually things returned if they were left alone.

His shower done, he dried himself off vigorously in the chilly air – Mr. Geller kept the thermostat at sixty-nine during the colder months to offset the heating costs – then went back to his room, dressed quickly in black jeans and a dark grey cable-knit pullover sweater, and toweled off his hair as he searched for a matching pair of socks. Tomorrow would be laundry day, and he’d worry about pairing them up then. “Here we go,” he muttered, finding two black ones. He threw the towel onto the radiator, sat on the edge of the bed, and put them on. “Where are my . . .ah.” Having found his shoes under the bed, he shoved his feet into them, laced them up, and stood. He was about to leave when someone knocked.

“Come in.”

Mr. Geller opened the door and stood there in silence, frowning at the boy.

“Am I in trouble?” Cian asked. “I’m pretty sure I overslept.”

“Overslept. . .huh. No, it isn’t that. Do you know what day it is?”

“Uh, Sunday?”

“No, Cian. It’s Monday.”

With a look of disbelief, Cian said, “That can’t be right.”

“Well, if it isn’t, then everyone else in the house is wrong, too, and they’re all at school wondering where the teachers and other students are.”

Then Cian remembered the dream, the nightmare, the horrible encounter with a creature so powerful and vile – the recollection caused him to sit, hard, on the chair at his desk.

“Are you okay?” Geller came further into the room, alarmed.

Cian had gone dead white and his heart was racing. He closed his eyes, forcing himself to utilize the breathing techniques they’d given him at the Marcus Institute in Georgia to help with anxiety attacks or other unexpected fears. A moment later, he took a last, deep breath, relaxed, and looked up at Mr. Geller. “Sorry. I suddenly remembered something, um, well, it was a, uh . . .”

“Gerald said you were having some kind of intense nightmare,” Geller offered, seeing the boy’s uncertainty about telling him.

Cian nodded and looked away. “Yeah, you could call it that.” No wonder I felt so achy when I got up!

“Must’ve been one hell of a bad one.” The man, crossing his arms, was gazing down at the boy with deep concern.

“Doesn’t matter.” Cian stood up. “Should I go to school?”

Mr. Geller shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll leave that up to you. Are you feeling well enough?”

The boy thought about that for a moment, then nodded. “I’m fine. But, um, could I maybe have something to eat first?”

“Sure.” Joe Geller smiled openly now. His mother had always insisted that the best indication that the sick were getting better was the return of their appetite.

Forty minutes later, the social worker dropped Cian off in front of the school with an excuse note, telling him to stop worrying about the laundry; he’d gather everything up for the boy, something everyone was supposed to do Sunday night, and put it in the laundry room in the basement for him.

“By the way,” the man called out as Cian started toward the front doors of the school, “whose coat are you wearing, and where is yours?”

“Huh? Oh, sorry. I left mine at work on Saturday morning.”

“At work? But I thought – never mind. You can explain it to me this afternoon when you get home.”

Cian waved and ran up the steps. He’d already missed first period, but at least it was a class he had no trouble handling. Algebra II was easy for him; History, however, was an entirely different matter, because although he had experienced snippets of historical moments during his life, he’d never been formally taught history in a linear sort of way. In fact, most of it was completely unknown to him, and he still wasn’t sure how to deal with that. At least they’d been studying the Celts, something he did know a little about. Biology, on the other hand…

“Good morning, Mr. MacDara,” exclaimed an inordinately pleased-looking Mrs. Crozier when he entered the science classroom ten minutes later.

“Sorry I’m late.” He handed her the slip they’d given him at the office.

“Not to worry, dear,” she said with a giggle that set the whole class’ teeth on edge.

He gave her a tight smile and turned away, rolling his eyes when he knew she couldn’t see them. Most of the other boys gave him sympathetic grins.

“All right, kids. Last semester we did some serious dissecting and I had you pair up. This term, as you know, we’ll be dealing with cells in the human body. You’ve already done the preliminary work at your desks, but now it’s time to experiment, so I’ll need to pair you up again.”

Almost instantly, every girl spun around, turned sideways, or leaned forward toward Cian, making him want to crawl under his desk. Instead, he looked at the floor, willing himself to turn invisible, which... didn’t work.

“Hey, MacDara – ” It was Tyler, a student who had already proven himself to be a good friend the week before. “I need a lab partner with some intelligence,” he called, coming to the boy’s rescue, and Cian nearly ran back to the lab table where Tyler sat grinning. Groans of disappointment echoed throughout the room.

“I can’t stand this,” Cian murmured through clenched teeth, refusing to look around.

“Okay, the rest of you,” the teacher said loudly, “find partners – right now.”

People got up, desks were shifted, muffled shouts of, “No way! Not with you!” were heard, but finally, after about five minutes of subdued chaos, everyone had found a lab partner and was sitting in one of the chairs at the back lab tables.

If Cian had thought things couldn’t have gotten any worse than they were when he’d first walked into the room, he now realized he’d thought wrong. What is this stuff? He was staring at racks of glass tubes, small covered glass dishes, stacks of small glass rectangles, and an instrument he’d seen depicted in a book, but that meant absolutely nothing to him. His education during the previous seven years had been non-existent, except for semi-private tutoring given by the Georgia foster care system during the ten months before his transfer to Connecticut.

The look on his face must have given away some of what he was feeling because after a moment or two, Tyler smacked him on the arm with the back of one hand. “What’s the matter? You look like someone just handed you a diseased octopus.”

Cian stared at him. “Right,” he said a few seconds later.

Now Tyler looked confused. “Didn’t you have science in your last school?”

“Yes, but not – not like this. I mean, I studied Earth Science and a little geology, but I guess we hadn’t gotten to this stuff yet.”

“You didn’t have to do any lab work?”

Lab work? Like getting my blood drawn and analyzed? “Uh, we didn’t have classrooms that had these – ” he waved at the equipment, “ – in it.”

“So, you never had to dissect a frog.”

“Why would I do that?”

Tyler cracked up. “I love it!” He turned to Jerry Marx, a large boy from gym class. “I asked MacDara if he ever dissected a frog and he said, ‘why would I do that?’!”

Jerry chuckled appreciatively. “Good question!”

“Anything I need to know about?” asked Mrs. Crozier, walking up the aisle toward their table.

“No, ma’am,” said Cian politely. “It was my fault – I’ve never had to do, er, lab work before, and we were, uh, discussing it.”

“I see. Well, let me know if there’s anything at all I can do to help, Mr. MacDara.” She gave him a brilliant smile, stared at him for a few moments, then wandered off back down the aisle as if she’d forgotten why she had been there in the first place.

“Y’know, if you were a girl,” Tyler whispered, “I’d kiss you.”

“What?!”

“I’m kidding.” The other boy grinned. “You’re good to have around sometimes, that’s all.”

The rest of the period was easier – once some things were explained to him, Cian had little or no trouble doing his work, and in fact, found it quite enjoyable. The concept of invisible things was nothing new, but with the aid of the device on the desk (a microscope, Tyler called it) he found he could now see them, and it fascinated him. He learned how to adjust the eye piece, and was astonished by what looked, unaided, like nothing more than a smear of dirt on the glass rectangle (a slide, he was told). Through the powerful lenses of the microscope, however, he saw perfect, beautiful structures, and even some movement of extremely small objects with unique shapes. As a child, this kind of thing would have been relegated to the