Free The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown Page A

haunted his soul.
    Release your hatred,
Silas commanded himself.
Forgive those who trespassed against you.
    Looking up at the stone towers of Saint-Sulpice, Silas fought that familiar undertow . . . that force that often dragged his mind back in time, locking him once again in the prison that had been his world as a young man. The memories of purgatory came as they always did, like a tempest to his senses . . . the reek of rotting cabbage, the stench of death, human urine and feces. The cries of hopelessness against the howling wind of the Pyrenees and the soft sobs of forgotten men.
    Andorra,
he thought, feeling his muscles tighten.
    Incredibly, it was in that barren and forsaken suzerain between Spain and France, shivering in his stone cell, wanting only to die, that Silas had been saved.
    He had not realized it at the time.
    The light came long after the thunder.
    His name was not Silas then, although he didn't recall the name his parents had given him. He had left home when he was seven. His drunken father, a burly dockworker, enraged by the arrival of an albino son, beat his mother regularly, blaming her for the boy's embarrassing condition. When the boy tried to defend her, he too was badly beaten.
    One night, there was a horrific fight, and his mother never got up. The boy stood over his lifeless mother and felt an unbearable upwelling of guilt for permitting it to happen.
    This is my fault!
    As if some kind of demon were controlling his body, the boy walked to the kitchen and grasped a butcher knife. Hypnotically, he moved to the bedroom where his father lay on the bed in a drunken stupor. Without a word, the boy stabbed him in the back. His father cried out in pain and tried to roll over, but his son stabbed him again, over and over until the apartment fell quiet.
    The boy fled home but found the streets of Marseilles equally unfriendly. His strange appearance made him an outcast among the other young runaways, and he was forced to live alone in the basement of a dilapidated factory, eating stolen fruit and raw fish from the dock. His only companions were tattered magazines he found in the trash, and he taught himself to read them. Over time, he grew strong. When he was twelve, another drifter—a girl twice his age—mocked him on the streets and attempted to steal his food. The girl found herself pummeled to within inches of her life. When the authorities pulled the boy off her, they gave him an ultimatum—leave Marseilles or go to juvenile prison.
    The boy moved down the coast to Toulon. Over time, the looks of pity on the streets turned to looks of fear. The boy had grown to a powerful young man. When people passed by, he could hear them whispering to one another.
A ghost,
they would say, their eyes wide with fright as they stared at his white skin.
A ghost with the eyes of a devil!
    And he felt like a ghost . . . transparent . . . floating from seaport to seaport.
    People seemed to look right through him.
    At eighteen, in a port town, while attempting to steal a case of cured ham from a cargo ship, he was caught by a pair of crewmen. The two sailors who began to beat him smelled of beer, just as his father had. The memories of fear and hatred surfaced like a monster from the deep. The young man broke the first sailor's neck with his bare hands, and only the arrival of the police saved the second sailor from a similar fate.
    Two months later, in shackles, he arrived at a prison in Andorra.
    You are as white as a ghost,
the inmates ridiculed as the guards marched him in, naked and cold.
Mira el espectro! Perhaps the ghost will pass right through these walls!
    Over the course of twelve years, his flesh and soul withered until he knew he had become transparent.
    I am a ghost.
    I am weightless.
    Yo soy un espectro . . . pálido como una fantasma . . . caminando este mundo a solas.
    One night the ghost awoke to the screams of other inmates. He didn't know what invisible force was shaking the floor on which he slept,