– 4 –
Mr. and Mrs. Evans die in a fiery car crash. From that point forward Linus Evans is raised by his black dog. He isn’t sure where the black dog came from. It pretty much just appeared.
. . .
It dissatisfies him.
The bleak emptiness that had filled Linus in his childhood starts to fray at the edges. He wants to write brooding, Gothic poetry, which he does, but he also wants somebody to read it, which the dog can’t do.
It tries.
Linus shows the dog his brooding, Gothic poetry. He explains how to sound out words like “loneliness” and “blood.” The dog barks. The dog licks his face. The dog vanishes. Later, the dog reappears, carrying a steak sandwich that it drops at his feet for him to eat.
The dog, it cannot understand.
. . .
Linus Evans stares out a rain-streaked window in his melancholy. The wall bleeds gently behind him. He lowers his head onto the windowsill and sighs.
He makes a little sign. He photocopies it using a photocopier brought to him by his black dog. He posts it here and there.
“Found,” it says. “One boy. May be the antichrist. Looking for someone to read Gothic poetry and love him. Also there is a dog.”
He draws a picture of himself. He draws a picture of the dog. He puts his phone number on it.
Then he waits.
Not far away — just three miles or so, as the crow flies — live Amelia Friedman and her son Tom.
Tom’s almost as lonely, because he knows that he’s going to destroy the world one day.
He tells his Mom. He explains his concerns.
“I made a time machine,” he says, “and had a fabulous adventure in the future. But everyone says, ‘That’s right, Tom! You’re the one who killed off all humanity and warmed the Earth!’”
“And what was I doing?” asks Amelia.
He looks blankly at her.
“I mean, in the future?”
“I killed humanity, Mom.”
She chews on her lip. She says, thoughtfully, “I was probably just in a zeppelin.”
. . .
“I don’t want to kill humanity,” says Tom Friedman, “but now it’s a historical necessity!”
Amelia takes his hand. She looks at his fingers. She wiggles them even though he is perfectly capable of wiggling them on his own.
“I should sleep with somebody and get you a baby brother,” she says. “You’re too isolated!”
“Mom!”
“You shouldn’t be alone like this,” she says. “Always hiding in your room and brooding about how you’re going to inevitably destroy the human race or whatever. It’s not healthy! A boy your age should be hanging out with other kids and running and playing and going on archaeological expeditions and cultivating a spirit baby!”
“I’m not cultivating a spirit baby!”
“I worry about your yang energy,” explains Amelia.
“Don’t worry about my — God, Mom!”
Tom storms off. He goes up to his room. He locks his door.
. . .
“Though really,” Amelia says, “a baby brother would be too young. Maybe some sort of playmate. I could get a robot!”
She does not know how to build robots. She is a renegade alchemist and not a smith. She doesn’t even know about Eldri, despite living in the same country as him — that’s how insular she’s become!
. . .
Amelia dusts off her skills at networking. She tries them out.
She calls Bertram. She consults the papers. She talks to her expeditionary colleagues. She gets a line on a disreputable orphanage. She learns the names of possible boon companions in the rough vicinity of her home. She summons up evil djinn of smoke and interrogates them regarding child-raising practices, because she cares.
Even with all that, though, it isn’t until she finds Linus’ lonely scrap of paper, half-covered in coupons and other advertisements, that she conceives of her big Idea.
“A home,” she says. “I can make a home for all of them.”
Her eyes brighten. Nowhere there is a toad.
. . .
(Well, OK, there are toads, I mean, the species isn’t extinct or anything. One toad can die without affecting all the others you know. That’s the anti-ecological web! But that’s NOT THE POINT.)
. . .
“For all of them,” she says. “For all of the children destined to destroy the world, I can make a home. That way my Tom will never be alone.”
She talks to the city’s housing authority. She rechristens her street . . . Doom Lane.
. . .
Amelia Friedman bustles from out of nowhere into the house of Linus Evans, who will be Mr. Enemy, producing a startled, hungry growl from his dread black dog. She ignores it. When you drink mercury every day, evil black dogs stop seeming threatening and start being a little fun.
She squats down to look at Linus.
“Hey,” she says.
He looks at her. She looks at him. He draws back, nervously.
“You’re that antichrist kid,” she says.
“. . . yes,” he whispers.
She straightens. She holds out her hand.
“Come on,” she says. “I’ve pushed through an adoption.”
“What?”
She gestures vaguely. “I used a love potion variant,” she says. “Their eyes got all starry. ‘Of course you can adopt him!’ they said. ‘That’s so sweet!’ One or two of them even fluttered away to Heaven.”
“Uh —”
. . .
“I’m going to raise you,” she says. “Unless — you don’t want to? I have a son. He’s going to kill the world too. You’ll get along like cheese and crackers.”
Linus licks his lips.
“I don’t understand,” he says.
“I saw your poster.”
“I — but — I’m the antichrist,” he explains. “I wasn’t serious. I wasn’t seriously thinking that you would appear. Besides you don’t look like I imagined.”
Linus' imagination. o O
Let us pause here to sketch the woman Linus had imagined:
She is at least seven feet tall and has a face like a chip of stone. Her hair is tied back tightly into a bun. She frowns disapprovingly at everything she sees and corsets until not only can she not breathe but her lungs have had to be extracted, like a mummy’s lungs, through her nose. Such a woman would, naturally, listen to his Gothic poetry only out of purest social obligation, but would still thrill — on some deep level — to knowing that she was raising, and would eventually be slaughtered by, the antichrist.
Brunhilda, most likely, would have been her name.
“My name’s Amelia,” Amelia explains.
. . .
“I don’t understand this at all,” Linus complains, taking her hand and walking out to the car with her. “Do you even like Gothic poetry?”
“Well,” she says, “I listen to Evanescence sometimes. But also to Toybox. Actually, I can listen to anything I want to now. So the matter is ambiguous!”
“Because I was thinking,” says Linus Evans, “that everybody wants to kill or fight or imprison me; and I clutch, bleakly, at the walls of my home; I fall, like a sparrow; but God’s eyes, that would watch a sparrow, don’t watch me.”
“That’s just aces,” says Amelia distractedly, causing Linus Evans to love her from that moment on.
– 5 –
“Seriously?” asks Tom.
He looks Linus up and down. Linus shrinks back.
“Mom, you adopted the antichrist? You didn’t think you might, like — you know, mention?”
“Can’t handle it?” asks Amelia, wryly.
“I’d just like a trial period!” Tom pro-tests.
. . .
“It’s very nice to meet you,” says Linus, after a moment.
Tom flashes him an infectious smile — as if to say, this isn’t about you — before going right back to glaring at his Mom. Linus wobbles a little.
“This is supposed to be a house of science,” Tom says.
“I’m a renegade alchemist!”
Tom looks away. He stares at a dust bunny skittering across the floor.
“Do you even know how to feed him?” He glares back up at Amelia. “An antichrist is a big responsibility! What if he needs human souls, huh?”
Amelia breaks down laughing. She leans against the counter.
“You can’t share my room,” says Tom, to Linus. “Well, you can’t have the good half, anyway. And no soul-eating! That’s strict house policy!”
“I don’t eat souls,” says Linus.
“Me neither,” says Tom. He glares at his mom. “This isn’t over, snowflake.”
“My name,” says Amelia, inaccurately, “is mother.”
“Bah,” says Tom. He glares at her and then to Linus. “Do you want to see my chemistry set?”
. . .
“I —”
“I’ve been experimenting with biochemistry,” says Tom. He grabs Linus’ hand. The black dog growls. Tom throws the dog one of the sedative-laced dog biscuits he keeps on him at all times. The dog gulps it out of the air in what it considers to be a badass manner and goes back to growling and then, with a surprising lack of transition, to snoring. Tom drags Linus off. “I’ve been seeing if I can add parasitic snake DNA to soldier ants. But they always come out ordinary snake-ants! Oh, well. I’ll get that problem licked or I’m not a boy adventurer!”
“I — poetry —”
The antichrist gives up on talking and lets Tom Friedman drag him off.
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