Shadow of the Past Read online

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  rofessor Charles Xavier adjusted the plaid woolen blanket that covered his legs and looked out over the rolling, green hills of the Westchester Hills Cemetery. There were gravestones as far as the eye could see under the crisp, blue autumn sky.

  Xavier gazed at the nearest of them, a simple rounded marker that stood at the head of an empty, rectangular grave. He inspected the words carved into it, studied the texture of the stone, and sighed.

  Not that he was any stranger to death. Xavier had lost his parents to it, many years earlier. He had lost one of his most promising students to it. He had even lost his son. But he had never quite gotten used to the finality of it

  After all, he was a man of considerable resources, assets and abilities, which far outweighed the liability of his crippled legs. He found it difficult to accept defeat of any kind, even when his opponent was the most implacable adversary of all.

  So as Xavier sat in his wheelchair by the open grave of an old friend, autumn sunlight filtering through the branches of a tall old hemlock, he couldn't help feeling he should have done something to rescue Jeremiah Saunders. He couldn't help feeling that the man's death was somehow his fault

  “Looks like we're early," said a voice behind him.

  Xavier looked back over his shoulder at Bobby Drake, the baby-faced young man who had been one of the very first students at his Xavier Institute for Higher Learning. "So it would seem," he replied.

  They were silent for a moment. The professor heard the wind rustling brittle autumn leaves.

  "Is this good?" asked Bobby.

  “Good?" Xavier echoed. It took him a moment to divine his companion's meaning, but he finally understood what Bobby meant. "You mean am I close enough to the grave?"

  It was only after he had said it that he realized the question could have been taken two ways. The thought gave him a bit of a chill.

  "Are you?" asked Bobby, apparently oblivious to the double entendre the professor had uttered.

  "Yes," said Xavier. “I am fine, Bobby, thank you.”

  “You're welcome," said the young man. “Let me know if you change your mind, all right?”

  "I will," Xavier assured him, as grateful for Bobby's company as he was for his assistance.

  They waited for another couple of minutes, during which time the professor adjusted his blanket twice more. He wasn't pleased with the wait, but he was used to it. It was the price of punctuality.

  Finally, others began to approach the gravesite in twos and threes-perhaps a couple dozen people in all, each one dressed in an appropriately dark suit or dress. Next came the long, black hearse, backing up to the empty grave so the

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  cemetery workers could haul the mahogany coffin out and lay it on the hard, cold ground.

  Finally, a silver-haired, walrus-moustached man in a gray corduroy sports jacket made his bowlegged way through the gathering. Xavier recognized the fellow asTristam Carter, the dean of Empire College and one of the deceased's longtime colleagues.

  “Thank you for coming," said Carter in a gravelly voice. He looked around at the assembled mourners. "All of you.” He took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. “I'll try not to be too long-winded."

  A breeze came up, ruffling the leaves again. This time, it had the smell of distant hearth fires about it.

  "Jeremiah Saunders had a good, long run," the dean began. "He did what he wanted to do with his time on Earth, and he did it better than anyone else I know. Certainly, Jeremiah's Nobel Prize is ample proof of that. After Watson and Crick. I can’t think of anyone who contributed more to the understanding of human genetics."

  It was no exaggeration, thought Xavier. Even he had a long way to go before he could eclipse Saunders' efforts.

  "Jeremiah wasn't a religious man," Carter said. "He made mention of that several times in the seventeen years in which we worked together. He didn't believe in empty rituals, he would often say.

  “And yet," the dean continued, “Jeremiah believed very strongly in the existence of a divine plan. How else, he would ask me, could everything in nature fit together.so perfectly? How could it all work, despite the complexity of the challenge? And he believed that nowhere was this plan manifested more splendidly than in his chosen field ... genetics."

  Xavier recalled the first time he had attended one of Saunders' classes. Barely in his forties, the dark, intense-

  looking Saunders was already one of the country's leading experts on genetically-linked diseases.

  By that time, the teenaged Xavier had come to realize he was no normal human being-and that his differences lay somewhere in his genetic makeup. As a result, he was far and away the most attentive student in the entire cavernous lecture hall.

  By the end of the hour, the younger man knew he had found his calling. And Professor Saunders was the one he had to thank for it.

  "Jeremiah wasn’t very outgoing,” Dean Carter noted. “He didn't make many friends in his lifetime. But the friendships he made were genuine. They were true and lasting. And as you know-or you wouldn't be here today, mourning Jeremiah's passing—he prized the people closest to him as if they were chests of precious treasure."

  With that, the dean turned to a tall, handsome young man with dark, wavy hair, who had a stocky, red-haired woman at his side. The fellow was standing in stunned silence by Saunders' coffin, his eyes lowered as if unable to look at the polished surface of the mahogany box.

  His name was Jeffrey. He was the genetics professor's grandson, whom Saunders had raised from the age of three and a half.

  Certainly, the death of his only caregiver would have been reason enough for the youngster to seem dazed and confused. But the problem went deeper than that, Xavier knew.

  It wasn’t just grief and shock that muddled Jeffrey's thoughts as he stood in the autumn light. The young man suffered from what his grandfather had sometimes called "a condition."

  Saunders had always employed the same words, the same euphemism for Jeffrey's problem. It was as though his

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  grandson were afflicted with something too horrible to speak of out loud, or else something too insignificant to even bother naming.

  Strange, Xavier thought, that a man of science-a man whose expertise was in genetics—would be so circumspect in his description of mental retardation. And yet, that was the way in which Jeremiah Saunders had chosen to deal with his grandson's situation.

  Why? Xavier asked himself. He had never pressed the matter, so he didn't know the answer.

  But now, with his friend gone, he was inclined to guess. Was it the knowledge that, with Jeffrey's parents deceased, the professor's brilliance would never be passed on? Or did it hurt too much to look at such an undeniably handsome boy and be forced to accept his limitations? Xavier sat back in his wheelchair and wished that he asked. He should have imposed on their friendship at least that much, if only to understand his friend a little better.

  "I don’t know how much of this you can understand," Carter told Jeffrey, "but we all thought a great deal of your grandfather. He was as kind to each of us as he was to you. And though you were the apple of his eye, we like to think we were planted somewhere in that orchard as well.”

  That drew a few chuckles from the other mourners. But not from Jeffrey. He didn't even seem to know the dean was addressing him.

  Xavier pressed his lips together. The last time he had seen Jeffrey, just a few months earlier, the boy was playing basketball in Saunders' yard. His tee shirt was on backwards and his shorts were a couple of sizes too small, but his grace and athleticism had been nothing short of startling.

  "Jeffrey's become quite the basketball player," Xavier had o
bserved between sips of lemonade.

  Saunders had nodded his head, an unmistakably proud and loving gleam in his otherwise filmy, bespectacled eyes. “Yes," he had responded. “Quite the basketball player indeed."

  But that was all that he had said.

  And even now, as the young man stood beside his grandfather's grave, a stranger would never have suspected his deficiency. A casual observer would have said that Jeffrey was a lucky fellow, one who was likely popular with the opposite sex.

  Xavier sighed. How wrong that observer would be, he thought. How hopelessly, tragically wrong.

  As learned as he was, as learned as Jeremiah Saunders had been, there was so much about the science of genetics that they didn’t understand. Which minute twisted strand of genetic material caused one child to be born with a deadly hole in his heart, another with Downs Syndrome, and still a third with spina bifida?

  Or the ability to fly at great speeds and great altitudes, or cloud the minds of others with illusions, or turn his flesh into a substance as hard as titanium? How did that all work?

  To find the answer was to unlock a future where a thousand deadly or heartbreaking conditions could be prevented. It had been Jeremiah Saunders’ dream to provide the key to that future.

  After all, he had seen the way his son and daughter-in-law, Richard and Jamie, had suffered when they learned of Jeffrey's condition. The way they had looked at their perfectly formed little baby and tried to accept the profound imperfections inside him.

  An imperfect mind in a superior body, Xavier reflected.

  He shook his head. He had an inkling of how the boy felt. After all, his was a superior mind trapped inside a decidedly imperfect body.

  And what made his mind so superior? Not just his capacity for reason, though he compared favorably in that regard with anyone on the planet. Not just his insatiable thirst for knowledge.

  Charles Xavier could do things with his brain that other people couldn't even imagine.

  He could read minds and control the actions of others. He could project his consciousness beyond his body to the four corners of the Earth. When necessary, he could launch mental assaults or guard against the assaults of others.

  In short, he was a mutant-a being whom nature had randomly separated from the crowd, designating him as the next step in human evolution.

  It more than made up for the loss of Xavier's ability to walk and the pain his damaged spine cost him. It even made up for the stares and whispers of pity that seemed to accompany him wherever he went.

  Even now, he saw, a middle-aged woman was gazing at him out of the corner of her eye, wondering how he had been laid low. She was sympathizing with his disability, trying to imagine how he felt. Xavier didn't want or need the woman's pity.

  With all the possibilities his mutant mind made available to him, his confinement to a wheelchair wasn’t really a handicap at all. It was simply a challenge-one of many that he faced every day, and not the greatest of them by a long shot.

  Dean Carter looked around at the mourners. "As you may

  know," he went on, "Jeremiah was partial to the poetess Emily Dickinson, who said, 'Dying is a wild night and a new road.'" He glanced at the coffin. "If that's so, we wish our friend a good trip.”

  Saunders' friends began to disperse, some of them holding tissues or handkerchiefs to their eyes. A few gathered around the dean to congratulate him on his speech. And still others lingered near Jeffrey, not certain if it was wise or proper to express their condolences to the young man.

  But Xavier was certain. Beckoning for Bobby to follow him, he rolled his wheelchair towards Jeffrey. The boy—

  No, the professor thought, correcting himself. Jeffrey isn't a boy at all. It was easy to fall into the trap of thinking of him as a child because of his demeanor, because of the innocence that shone in his bright blue eyes. But he was an adult, a man of nearly twenty.

  The wan, then, stood with his back to the grave, looking at no one and nothing in particular. He looked displaced, disoriented ... and more than a little frightened.

  It wasn't difficult to understand. Jeffrey's grandfather, the man with whom he had lived nearly all his life, was gone. From his point of view, there was no telling what might come next.

  His life had changed-and changed radically. That was enough to make anyone afraid, much less a retarded man.

  Xavier stopped his wheelchair in front of Jeffrey Saunders, but the youth didn't appear to notice him. The professor looked up at his face. “Jeffrey?" he said softly.

  The fellow blinked. Then he turned to Xavier with a look that tore at the older man's heart-a look that told the professor he knew something more than people gave him credit for. He may not have understood death completely, but he had an inkling of what had happened to him.

  He knew that he had lost something-something pre-cious-and that it could never be replaced.

  "Jeffrey," Xavier said, reaching out to take the young man's hand. Despite the magnitude of his intellect, he found it difficult to find the right words. “I'm sorry," he said.

  Jeffrey blinked once again, and the professor saw that his eyes were wet with tears. His fingers closed on the older man's, gripping them tight with surprising strength.

  Again, Xavier groped for words... and failed. Even if he had succeeded, words seemed to hold little meaning for Jeffrey. Fortunately, the professor had other options.

  With the simplest of efforts, he cast an emotion out to Jeffrey Saunders, a pure feeling free of the trappings of artifice and intent. I feel sad too, his feeling said. Like you, I have lost a friend.

  The professor's mind and that of the retarded man came together for the briefest of instants, but the effect was clearly visible. Jeffrey stiffened, almost as if someone had struck him a physical blow. Then he blinked rapidly, confusion clouding his face.

  Jeffrey didn't know what had just happened. Xavier was certain of that. But he had felt the link, received the emotional message.

  And in its wake, he smiled.

  Xavier smiled back at him. Then he released the retarded man's hand. The professor would miss his friend Jeremiah Saunders for as long as he lived, and nothing would ever change that. But at least he had connected with the person Saunders loved most in the world.

  It wasn't all that much in the scheme of things, Xavier reflected. But it was something. And in times of grief, any gesture, no matter how small, could be of immense comfort. He knew that from experience.

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  Abruptly, Xavier felt a drop of rain on his hand. Then another, on the skin of his bald head. He looked up and saw a couple of dark clouds sliding over to blot out the sun.

  The redheaded woman came forward. "Hello," she told Xavier, "i'm Maryellen Stoyanovich. I'll be looking after Jeffrey at Westminster House." She smiled at the young man. "That's where his grandfather wanted him to stay when he passed away.”

  The professor nodded. Saunders hadn't had any blood relatives besides Jeffrey. It made sense that he would have made arrangements with an institution for extended care.

  "Is there a basketball court there?” Xavier asked.

  The woman's brow wrinkled. No doubt, she hadn't expected such a question. “Yes, there is, actually. Why?"

  "As you will find," the professor explained, recalling his conversation with his friend, "Jeffrey has become quite the basketball player."

  Mrs. Stoyanovich smiled again. “I’ll remember that."

  She would, too. Xavier could tell. He reached into his sport jacket and fished out a business card. "You can reach me at this number," he told the woman. "I would appreciate it if you would keep me appraised of Jeffrey's progress.”

  "I will,” Mrs. Stoyanovich promised. She read the information on the card. "You run a school?"

  “I do," Xavier answered.

  "My sister is looking for a private school for my nephew. He's quite bright, you know. Is your place very... exclusive?"

  "Very," the professor replied truthfully.

 
Mrs. Stoyanovich shrugged. "You should meet him. You might find he's just what you're looking for.”

  “I might at that," Xavier allowed.

  But he doubted it quite strongly-unless the redheaded woman's nephew was a budding mutant.

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  The rain began to come down harder and their conversation was necessarily ended. As Mrs. Stoyanovich guided Jeffrey toward an automobile waiting in the distance, the professor watched them go.

  He knew it wouldn't be easy for the retarded man to become accustomed to new surroundings. He just hoped that, over time, Jeffrey would grow to like Westminster House.

  Of course, only time would tell. No one's future was assured, Xavier reflected-least of all, his own.

  Finally, he glanced over his shoulder at Bobby, who had demonstrated admirable patience, and pointed to his own vehicle. "It appears it's time to go," said the professor,

  “Sure thing,” his student toid him, and wheeled him in the direction of their specially outfitted van.

  It took a few minutes for Bobby to raise Xavier's chair into the vehicle with a built-in hydraulic lift and secure it to customized metal foundations in the passenger compartment. But by the time the rain began coming down with real force, the professor was safely inside.

  Looking out the water-streaked window, he could see that the gravediggers were lowering Jeremiah Saunders' coffin into the ground. Xavier was sorry that they had to work in the rain, though they seemed dressed for it.

  "Back to Salem Center?" Bobby asked as he swung into the driver's seat and pulled his door closed.

  "I believe so, yes," said the professor. He smiled at his protege. "Thank you for accompanying me, Bobby. One should never be required to attend a funeral service alone."

  The younger man laughed. "Are you kidding? There's no way I would have let you go without me. Besides," he chuckled as he started the van and pulled out onto the cemetery's main road, "I wanted to see what some of my old professors look like these days."

  Bobby was joking, of course. He had graduated from Empire University not too long ago. His instructors couldn't have changed much in a short period of time.

  Xavier remembered visiting the university for the first time just a few days after Jeremiah Saunders had moved there from the city to teach. He remembered how much he had liked the rolling, tree-lined grounds and the quiet location.