7. Heute Nacht oder nie
Jean
It is hot and snowing. Big, fat snowflakes fall around me, catching in my hair, swirling into the burning pit at my feet. No, they aren't snowflakes. They are ashes from the chimneys, burned skin and fat, gray and greasy beneath my feet. They are people. They are Magda, maybe. Too many people choking up the ovens. They had to dig a pit over here for more bodies. They picked me from the line to help burn them. They point their guns at me and I stand by the heat of the pit and stoke the fires and sprinkle lime on the bodies. There are tracks, little rails nearby, for carts. Others push the cart to me. The cart is full of Anjas. Her pale, cold little body, naked — stripped of anything valuable — multiplied. Again and again. I lift her tiny, frail body out of the cart and toss her into the pit, and sprinkle some lime, and when I am done, I pick her up again and throw her in again, and the cart never empties. It is always full. There are always more Anjas, and the ashes rain down, more and more, and the pit full of Anjas burns bright in the smoke and the haze.
In the dark, someone's screaming "ANJA!" and I gradually realize that it's me. The covers are unbearably hot; I rip them off, panting, shaking, soaked in sweat. It was a dream. I'm Jean Grey. I'm in Salem Center, in my dorm room, in October. And yet, the nightmare won't end. I flash between the crematorium and the dorm room, sometimes one superimposed over the other, and I can't make it stop. I close my eyes and Anja's still burning. I rip off the covers and I still feel the heat of the fire.
My feet hit the floor and slip on ashes of human skin and fat as I run down the hall to the boys' wing, towards the visions, and they become stronger. I find the right door and yank it open and the oven door clanks open and I throw myself onto Mr. Eisenhardt's bed where he's thrashing and crying and the room is full of corpses.
"WAKE UP!" I scream, shaking him by the shoulders. "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WAKE UP!"
Mr. Eisenhardt awakens with a yell. I collapse on the bed next to him. The corpses disappear. The fires go out. Everything is silent but my gasps and the pounding of feet into the room. A light switches on; I look up and see Anja's enormous face floating above the bed. I yelp and jump back a moment before I realize it's a portrait hanging on the wall.
"Is everything okay?" I turn my head the other way. The St. James Killer is standing in the doorway in pajamas and glowing red sunglasses.
"I... I'm sorry. I had a — he had — Mr. Eisenhardt had a nightmare. And I... I guess I accidentally..." I turn back to Mr. Eisenhardt. "I'm sorry I woke you up. I just... I had to make it stop."
"I know the feeling," Mr. Eisenhardt says quietly.
"What's going on?" Now Bobby's standing in the doorway.
Behind him, Wanda, her hair in curlers, clutching her robe, staring at me with wide eyes. This is why people don't trust telepaths, she thinks.
"Jean absorbed a nightmare," Scott explains.
"Oh great, can she see all our dreams? 'Cause... sometimes I dream stuff that I don't think is appropriate for a lady to see."
"Scott, Bobby, thank you for your concern. Everything's fine. Go back to bed," Mr. Eisenhardt says.
"Only if she promises not to read my mind while I sleep, please," Bobby says.
"I'll try not to," I say.
"Just saying, if you do, I'm not responsible for any of it. That's all subconscious stuff."
Bobby walks back down the hall to his room, but Scott lingers in the doorway. "Are you sure you're okay?" he asks. "You seem pretty shaken up."
I hide my trembling hands under folds in the covers. "I'm fine, thank you."
"Go back to bed, Scott," Mr. Eisenhardt says gently. Scott hesitates for a moment longer, then follows Bobby down the hall. Mr. Eisenhardt gets up and throws on a robe. "I'm sorry you had to see the horrors in my head."
"No, I'm sorry. I was reading your mind. I shouldn't have."
"I know you didn't mean to. Don't ever apologize for your gift. You'll learn to control it in time. For now, I'll try not to have so many nightmares. Better for me anyway. Want some tea?"
I stare at him. "Tea?"
"Tea, yes. Well, I'm not going back to sleep. Are you?"
"Probably not," I admit.
"So let's go downstairs and have some tea and talk about it."
"How much of that was real?" I hold the steaming mug with both hands, more for comfort than to actually drink.
Mr. Eisenhardt stirs some sugar into his mug. His sleeve lifts a little to reveal the numbers on his arm. "Too much. When we first arrived, they sorted me into one line, my wife and little daughter into another. They gave me a job, to help… dispose... of the bodies. Anja was among them, that first batch I buried. That was the last time I saw her." His voice comes out in a monotonous, emotionless mumble. He never looks up from his mug. "She was too young to be useful, so they gassed her."
"Did... did Magda survive?"
"The camps, yes. It was life afterward that she couldn't survive. We moved to New York and had three more children — that you already know."
"Right. Of course." I press down on my tea bag with my spoon. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't know this. It's none of my business."
"Stop apologizing. You just need more training with Professor Xavier."
"How much more training do I need before people can stop being afraid to dream in the same house as me?"
"Be patient with yourself. You're very powerful, you know. Don't tell him I told you this, but the professor's never seen a more powerful telepath than you. Not even he is more powerful, or as powerful, even. You're only 16, as well, so it will naturally take some time to learn how to control such a gift."
"Lucky me," I mutter.
"Yes." Mr. Eisenhardt's looking at me very seriously. "It doesn't feel like it now, but yes, you are lucky. We're all lucky to have these gifts. You could use your gift to do great things for the world. It's not all other people's nightmares." He gulps down the rest of his tea. "I'm going to give sleep another shot. What about you?"
"I think I'll nurse this tea a while longer," I say, fiddling with my spoon.
He stands up and pats me on the shoulder. "I don't blame you. Don't worry, I don't have so many nightmares. You just got bad luck. I'll have better dreams and you'll have better control and with some luck we won't find ourselves back down here at one in the morning again any time soon. Good night, Miss Grey."
"Good night."
I hear him pad back up the steps. A moment later, I hear somebody else padding very slowly and quietly up the steps. I spin around to see a slender figure with a soft red glow emanating from his face sneaking upstairs from the hallway.
"What are you doing here?" I demand. "Were you listening to us?"
Scott flinches. He turns around to face me, and heads back down the stairs and into the kitchen. "I'm sorry," he whispers. "I know it was rude, but... you were on his bed. Screaming. I thought... I thought he might be hurting you. So I didn't want to leave you alone with him, just in case." He stands there in front of the table, rubbing the back of his neck. "But it looks like I didn't have to worry."
"You know him better than I do," I point out. "He designed those glasses you're wearing, right? Would he really be the type to do something like that? He seems so nice."
"Everybody seems nice until they surprise you," Scott says. "I don't mean to say... I mean, some people really are nice. But I don't like to be surprised."
"Well, thanks for checking up on me, I guess. I'm sorry for waking you up."
"It's okay, I couldn't sleep anyway." He stands around awkwardly for a little, then says, "Well, I guess I'll head on back to bed."
"Will you be able to sleep now?"
"No, I'll probably just read a book for a while."
"Come have some tea, then. Keep me company."
"You sure?"
"Yeah."
Scott chews his lip and looks over at the kettle on the stove. "...Okay."
"I don't blame you," I tell him as he's fixing his tea. "For what happened at the orphanage."
He flinches again, but doesn't turn around. He just dips his tea bag in his mug over and over again. "Thank you, but it was my fault."
"You didn't mean to kill them."
"Doesn't make a difference to them. Doesn't make them any less dead."
"It also doesn't mean you deserve to have everyone hate you."
Scott's run out of things to do with his tea, and he seems to have grudgingly resigned himself to the fact that now he'll have to sit down at the table with me. So he turns around to face me, leaning back against the counter. "You read that article in Life, I guess."
"Of course I did. What Mutant didn't? And anyway, by the time it came out, Professor Xavier was already visiting me, working with me, so if he made the cover of Life, of course I'd have a look. It was good to see that he was helping other Mutant kids. I thought I was the only one, just being an hour away, but to see what he did for you out in Nebraska, well..."
"He saved my life."
"He started this school for you."
"No, not just for me."
"Because of you, though. He brought Miss Adler out to teach you Braille, he brought Mr. Eisenhardt out to make you some glasses so you could see without hurting anyone, he brought Dr. MacTaggert out to testify at your parole hearing. And then a year later, he announces he's starting a school for Mutants and all those same people happen to be faculty members. I don't think that's a coincidence. We're all here because of you."
Scott smirks. "So it's my fault you're here to dream Mr. Eisenhardt's nightmares."
"Boy, you just have to take the worst possible point of view on everything, don't you?"
"I'll never be disappointed."
"You might be. You might miss out on all kinds of good things."
"I'll take my chances."
"Why couldn't you sleep?"
His head snaps back and he blinks very quickly; I can tell by the way his glasses flash dark for an instant. "What?"
"You said you couldn't sleep. Why not?"
Scott shifts awkwardly. "I don't like having a roommate."
"Does Warren snore or something?"
"No, I just... feel more comfortable on my own."
"You're afraid you're going to hurt him, aren't you?"
"Are you reading my mind right now?"
"I don't have to."
He finishes his tea and drops his cup in the sink without saying a word to me. "We should both go back to bed. We've got early classes tomorrow."
"Let's get out of here."
"What?"
"You and me. Right now." My tea is gone and my leg is bouncing up and down. "You don't want to go to sleep because you're afraid you'll accidentally hurt Warren. I don't want to go to sleep because I'm afraid I'll accidentally absorb another nightmare. So let's just get out of here. Let's drive out into the middle of nowhere, where there aren't any minds to read or people to hurt."
"I could hurt you."
"But you won't."
"How do you know?"
"Because you're a good person and you're very careful and I trust you."
"You just met me and it only takes the slightest slip-up for me to kill you."
"So what? I could kill you back."
"It's one in the morning."
"Who cares? We're not sleeping anyway. Let's go. You've lived here for a couple years, right? Where should we go?"
"What would we even do?"
"Drink tea! Not kill people! Come on, Scott, I can't be in this house anymore. Please. Indulge me."
It's impossible to know what kind of look he's giving me behind those glasses. But he looks at me for a while, then sighs. "Okay... I know a place we could go."
I've got a thermos of tea and a robe wrapped tight around me as I walk with Scott across the top of the Titicus Dam. "Are you sure we're allowed to be here?" I ask him.
"I don't know," he says. "Probably not." I laugh. He's leading me to a squat, square little stone house towards the middle of the dam, right before the falls. The walkway ends with a wrought-iron railing; I lean over it and watch the water trickle down. We haven't had very much rain lately, so it's nice and quiet. I tilt my head back and look up at the stars. It's a clear night and the moon is almost full. I can see the Milky Way in the sky above me, and its reflection in the water of the reservoir below.
"Thank you for taking me here," I say. "I really needed something like this. I'm still jumpy after... after everything."
"You're welcome," he says. Scott screws the thermos open and pours some tea into the cup. He hands the cup to me. It gleams red in the light of his eyes. "It was about the death camp, wasn't it?" he asks. "The dream, I mean."
"How did you know?"
"I figured. It was obviously very disturbing, and, well, it's Mr. Eisenhardt. He never really talks about it, but he has numbers tattooed on his arm and no extended family. It's not hard to put two and two together."
I shiver, pull my robe tighter around me, and hold the cup close to my face to let the hot steam waft up to me. "It was very vivid. It wasn't just... it was like I was there. Like I was living it. Experiencing someone else's thoughts, someone else's dreams, it's not like hearing them speak. It's like being there with them. And that's not a place I ever want to be again."
"That sounds terrible."
I hand him the cup, and he takes a sip. We look out over the reservoir in silence for a moment.
"Do you want a happy memory?" he asks suddenly.
"What?"
"Well, if reading someone's mind is like experiencing what they experienced, that's quite intense, right? And you saw something so horrible that... maybe it would help."
"Are you offering to let me read your mind?"
Scott is carefully not looking at me. "Yeah... just for this one memory. If you want it. If it would help."
"Sure. Turn your face towards me." I get closer to him, reach out, and touch my fingers to his temples.
"Does that help?" he asks.
"Can't hurt," I say. I close my eyes and concentrate. At first, I don't know if it's working or not because everything is still black, and I can still hear the water trickling over the dam. Soon I feel a warmth I didn't feel before, the warmth of a sunny summer day. I feel someone putting glasses on my face and steering me gently towards the railing. Before I can ask Scott what the heck he's doing, I hear Professor Xavier's voice.
"All right, Scott... open your eyes."
I hesitate. I haven't opened my eyes in over a year. At the Boys' Training School, it was that awful padlocked metal blindfold. Here, during the day, it's a folded handkerchief. At night, it's a sleep mask. I've always made sure to have something over my eyes to keep them closed, except in the shower when I squeeze them shut. The glasses feel odd; I can feel air against my eyelids. What if they don't work? What if I hurt someone again?
Professor Xavier interrupts my train of thought. "Do you trust me?" he asks.
He's done a lot for me. He visited me, wrote to me, made sure I got an education. He testified on my behalf at my parole hearing, wrote letters to the governor, wrote letters to the editor. He took me in. Why would he do all that? Why would anybody do all that for a stranger? What does he want from me?
"Do you trust that I would never want anyone to get hurt? That I would never want you to get sent back to reform school?" he asks.
I think on that for a long time. Why would he work so hard to get me out just to send me back? It doesn't make sense. "...Yes," I finally say.
"Then open your eyes."
At first, everything is blurry. It takes my eyes a while to adjust, but once I do, I am speechless. It's a bright, sunny day. The sky is a light lavender with puffy pink clouds, the trees bursting in shades of red, the reservoir a sparkling deep purple. I don't destroy anything. I just see. Everything's a slightly different color than it should be, but I'm seeing it, and it's all so beautiful I start to cry.
"Did he do it?"
"He did it! They work!"
Behind me, Mr. Eisenhardt and Dr. MacTaggert are whooping and cheering. Professor Xavier pulls me into a hug — awkward because of his wheelchair, but I bend over to wrap my arms around his shoulders. He's bald. I never knew he was bald. I keep my eyes open even as they well up with tears, trying to take in absolutely everything.
I open my eyes. It's dark but for the moonlight and the red glow of Scott's eyes. I remove my hands from his temples.
"Thank you," I breathe.
"Did it make you feel better?"
"Yes."
"Good."
"That was here."
"Right here." He looks back out onto the water. "I love this place."
"I think I love it too," I say.
Scott looks at his watch. Why is he wearing a watch? Does he wear it to bed? Did he remember to put it on before he went downstairs? He's such a strange guy. "It's almost three. We should be getting back soon. Do you think you could get to sleep if you tried?"
"I am really tired, but I don't know if I want to try going back to sleep in a house full of people," I say. "I could probably pass out in the backseat of the car."
"Why don't you do that?"
"Well, what would you do?"
"Wait for an hour or so, then wake you up and drive back while it's still early enough for us to sneak back in."
"You would do that? Just wait around for me?"
"Sure. I'll try to think only happy thoughts."
"You're a real great guy, you know that, Scott?"
Scott shrugs bashfully. I climb into the backseat of the car and curl up under my robes. The next thing I know, I feel a gentle tap on my shoulder. I open my eyes. It's lighter out, but the sun still hasn't come up.
"Hey — we're here," Scott whispers from the driver's seat. I sit up, rubbing my eyes. We're parked outside the school building.
"What time is it?"
"Around five. Did you have any more nightmares?"
"No. I didn't have any dreams at all."
"Good."
I climb out of the car, closing the door behind me as quietly as I can. And without another word, we sneak back up to our rooms.
