Free A Quiet Belief in Angels by R. J. Ellory Page A

first time I was scared of the world. The war frightened me—if only from the perspective Miss Webber forwarded.
    “We know, as a race of peoples, that we are in trouble when war simply becomes a matter of dropping bombs from planes and killing hundreds, if not thousands of people. History has shown us one thing: that as we become more technologically advanced, we also become more able to kill more people without ever seeing their faces. One day, I am sure, someone will invent a bomb that is capable of destroying a whole town, if not a county. And that, sure as anything, will mark the point at which this civilization begins its slow and inevitable decay.”
    So said Miss Webber, but despite her disturbing prediction the war was still something that wasn’t even being fought in my own country, it was something that existed many thousands of miles away. Even the attack on Pearl Harbor had resulted in American soldiers leaving the United States. The war was not being fought on American soil, and so—in a way—we managed to convince ourselves that it was something that did not involve us.
    The killings were different. The killing of the four girls was right there amongst us. They were children I had known, and that—despite the smallness of its reality compared to the European front—was all the more terrifying.
    One day, another day I stayed behind to wash the blackboard rags, I told Miss Webber of my fears.
    She smiled and shook her head. “So write your heart out,” she said. “Writing can be an exorcism of fear and of hatred; it can be a way to overcome prejudice and pain. At least if you can write you have a chance to express yourself . . . you can put your thoughts out into the world, and regardless of whether anyone actually reads them or understands them they are no longer trapped inside of you. Bottle them . . . bottle them up, Joseph Vaughan, and one day you’re likely to just explode.”
    Later, many years later, how accurate her words would prove. But then, all of fourteen years old, I just wanted to understand why these things frightened me so much. I believed if I could understand the man then I would no longer fear him. The man who had done these terrible things to these little girls. I tried to imagine what life he might have led, how he would see the world, ostensibly the same world I saw, but somehow different. When I saw sunlight, did he merely see shadows? When I woke from a nightmare, relief washing through me like sea-foam, did he attempt to claw his way back into the nightmare to experience even more of it?
    I gritted my teeth. I clenched my fists. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine how crazy you’d have to be to kill someone. To kill a child. And I wrote:
    His eyes were swollen from crying, or maybe from looking for something. Or maybe his eyes were swollen because he was a crazy man, kind of man you’d keep a picture of to scare children when they were bad.
    Smacking hard against the bad edge of life. Smacking hard against the corners, against the rougher angles, the angles that should have been smoothed down by such things as love and tolerance and patience.
    And people would watch him from the corners of their eyes, and they would ask themselves what it would take to make a man so dark and crazy. Scattered hair, pinpoint eyes, brooding lips, a strong jawline—but strong with anger and passion, not the strength that comes from character and determination. Man like that would know darkness, they’d think. Man like that would know shadows and hidey-holes, cellars and dungeons and catacombs, and he’d know all too well the chingle-changle chains dragged by headless horsemen as they galloped into dreams.
    Man like that you didn’t talk to, didn’t make eye contact, didn’t even think that he was there when he walked right by you. Give him thoughts and he’d see them, know you were thinking about him, and it would be like an energy magnet that pulled him in. And once he’d got you,