Free The Paradise War by Stephen R. Lawhead

it.
    Trained monkey, indeed!

7
M AD N ETTLES
     
    M y plan, as far as I had one, was simply to carry on as if nothing had happened. Business as usual. If anyone rang up and asked Simon’s whereabouts, I’d tell them he’d run off to Wolverhampton with a shop assistant from Boots. Serve him right, the toad.
     
    The way I figured it, he was probably waiting until I panicked and blabbed to the police or something. He wanted to see his name in the headlines, and me looking like a fool explaining to reporters how he’d crawled into a cairn and disappeared. Well, he could just wait until hell froze over. I did not intend on giving him the satisfaction.
    For the next few days, I carried on my life in the ordinary way. I behaved exactly as before. I took my meals, browsed at the bookstalls, loitered in the library, lounged in my adviser’s office, chatted with acquaintances, pawed through my mail . . . In short, I sallied boldly forth into the frantic free-for-all of academic life I had come to know and love so well.
    But work was impossible. How could I work? I could not, truly, ignore Simon’s disappearance any more than I could ignore the nose on my face—however hard I tried. The days passed and Simon did not return. The phone did not ring. Doubt began taking a toll on me. I kept thinking: What if it is no joke? What if something happened to him? What if he really is gone?
    Each day that passed brought a new worry. I lurched like a lopsided pendulum between anger and anxiety. Anger at his absurd prank, and anxiety over his safety. Day and night, I suffered a relentless rain of questions: Where was Simon? What was he doing? Where had he gone? Why was this my worry? Why me?
    “When Simon comes back,” I promised myself, “I’ll kill him. I’ll cheerfully twist off his arms and beat him with the bloody ends. No, I won’t. That wouldn’t be civilized. I will, instead, sit him down and tell him calmly and rationally what a terrible, tasteless thing he has done. And then I will shoot him through his small, black heart.”
    As the days passed into weeks, I grew steadily more listless, disheveled, ill-tempered, and cranky; I yelled at the scout whenever she poked her nose in, until at last she got fed up and stopped coming by. I roamed aimlessly around the streets, muttering to myself and cursing a great deal. My socks didn’t match. I didn’t wash.
    If anyone observed my increasingly debilitated state, they gave no sign. I could not have occasioned less comment if I were a dust ball under the bed. I found myself deeply tempted to grow a hunchback and start swinging from the bell in Tom Tower.
    My rapid descent into the slough of despond was matched by an equally steep decline in mental stability. I did not sleep well. Odd dreams troubled me—visions of leafy green men and extinct oxen rampaging through my bedroom, of wandering lost in a dark forest and the ground opening up beneath me and swallowing me whole, of being hunted down and pierced through the thorax by antique spears, of wolves howling in a forest dark, and a hideous horror with a face of grinning death, pursuing me relentlessly over a cold and desolate land—disturbing images that melted upon waking, leaving me exhausted and all the worse for my night’s rest.
    I knew the cause of my slide into oblivion: my conscience was pulling overtime trying to attract my attention. From the moment I crawled into the cairn and realized Simon had vanished, my subconscious had begun hand-to-hand combat with my reason. The object? Getting me to admit to myself that what might have happened actually did happen, and that I had done absolutely nothing about it.
    Still, it wasn’t so much Simon’s disappearance that hastened my decline. Unnerving as that was, the object of my inner conflict was not Simon’s vanishing act; it was his destination. Where, then, had Simon gone? That was the sixty-four-trillion-dollar question. And I knew the answer.
    But I didn’t like to