The God Project Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t even try to pretend he hadn’t stolen it. His face pale, his eyes brimming with tears, he’d stammered out an apology and promised never to do it again.
    But Mr. Higgins hadn’t let the matter go. He’d called the Eastbury police and explained that while he didn’t want to press charges, he thought it would be a good idea if someone put the fear of God into Randy Corliss. “A good scare,” Randy had heard him say into the phone. “That’ll straighten him out.” Randy had been taken to the police station, and shown a cell, and told that he might have to spend the night there. Then they’d fingerprinted him and taken his picture, and warned him that if he ever tried to steal anything again, he’d be sent to prison.
    When they let him go, Randy was shaking. That night, he began to think about running away.
    Nobody liked him, and his mother never seemed to have any time for him. The only person who cared about him, he decided, was his father. He’d called his father, and begged him to come and get him, but Jim Corliss had told him that he couldn’t, not yet. Then his father had asked to speak to his mother, and Randy had listened to his mother arguing with his father, telling him that she’d never let Randy go, and that his father better not try to take him. Finally, when the fight was over, he’d talked to his father again.
    “I’ll see what I can do,” Jim had promised. “But there are laws, Randy, and if I just came and got you, I’d be breaking them. Can you understand that?”
    Randy tried, but he couldn’t. The only thing he could understand was that he hated Eastbury, and he hatedhis mother, and he hated his friends-who-weren’t-his-friends-anymore, and he wanted to go live with his father. Then he got the idea. Maybe his father couldn’t come and get him, but what if he went to his father?
    Two days later he had made up his mind. When he was sure his mother was asleep, he dressed and sneaked out of the house. He knew where his father lived—it was only five miles away, if you didn’t stay on the roads. And he knew the woods; he’d been wandering in them all his life. He figured it would take him an hour or two to get to his father’s.
    What he hadn’t figured was how different the woods would look at night For a while he walked rapidly along, lighting his way with the flashlight he’d taken from the kitchen drawer, enjoying the adventure. But when the path forked, he began to get confused.
    In the daylight, it would have been easy. Everything would have been familiar—the trees, the rocks, the stream that wound its way through the woods toward Langston, where his father lived. But in the darkness, with shadows dancing everywhere, he wasn’t sure which way to go. Finally, he made up his mind and told himself everything was fine, even though he didn’t believe it.
    A little while later he came to another fork in the path. This time he had no idea at all which way was the right way. He stood still for a long time, listening to the sounds of the night—birds murmuring in their sleep, the rustlings of racoons foraging in the underbrush—and finally decided that maybe going through the woods hadn’t been a good idea after all. He turned back and started toward home.
    Another fork in the path.
    Now Randy was getting worried. He didn’t remember this fork at all. Had he really passed it before?
    The sounds around him were suddenly becoming ominous. Was there something in the darkness, just beyond the beam of the flashlight, watching him?
    He spun around, sweeping the woods with the light, and flashes of light came back to him.
    There
were
eyes in the night—glowing yellow eyes—and now Randy was frightened. He began running down the path, no longer thinking about where he was going or which path he was on. All he wanted was to get out of the woods.
    And then, ahead of him, he saw a light moving in the darkness. Then another, and another. He hurled himself toward the lights, but they