Mysterium

The door sprang open. Dex said, “Be my guest.”

Howard pulled a long watchman’s flashlight out of the deeps of his jacket and entered the store.

Dex stayed outside, watching the alley. He calculated that this trip from the Cantwell house to the computer store had taken no more than twenty minutes, though it seemed like much longer. Thank God, the deed was nearly done. Here we are, he thought, two of the least likely break-and-enter artists ever to jimmy a lock in the town of Two Rivers. And the least competent.

Now that the adrenaline rush had faded, he was cold. He rubbed his hands together and warmed them with a breath. Alone here, he was uncomfortably aware of the perilous distance between himself and safety. Until the close call with the patrol car there had been an edge of excitement to this trip; that was gone, replaced by a sour anxiety.

The wind rattled a loose doorway down the alley. Winter at the heels of a wind like that, Dex thought. When he came here five years ago he had been startled by the severity of the northern Michigan winter. He wondered how much of Two Rivers would survive the season and what would be left of it by spring. The question was unanswerable but the possibilities were mainly bleak.

He heard a percussive rattle and whirled to face it, but the culprit was only a dog, a hound nosing a trash barrel overturned by the wind. The dog looked at Dex with an expression of rheumy indifference and shivered from the neck down. I know how you feel, Dex thought.

He looked at his watch, then peered into the dim interior of the store “Hey, Howard, how you doing in there?”

No answer. But Dex could see the beam of Howard’s flashlight poking around—a little too vigorously, Dex thought. He took a step inside. “Howard?”

Nothing.

“Howard, it’s cold out here! Bag your loot and let’s get going, all right?”

He felt something touch his leg. Overcome by a sudden sense of unreality, Dex looked down. Here was Howard: crouched behind the cash counter with sweat beading on his pale forehead. Howard had grabbed Dex’s ankle and was waving some panicked, indecipherable signal.

Dex guessed this ought to be frightening, but for a long moment it was only confusing. He said out loud, “What the hell?”

And the flashlight beam continued to probe the darkness—but not Howard’s flashlight.

Another presence loomed in this dark arcade of shelves and desks, suddenly visible as Dex’s eyesight adjusted to the dark. He turned to face the rear door just as the beam of light pinned his shadow to the wall. He saw his shadow ride up toward the ceiling, as loose-jointed and comical as a marionette. Then there was a flash and a deafening bang, a pressure and a pain that knocked him off his feet.

He heard Howard shouting something: it might have been Don’t shoot! or God damn! And he felt his left arm twitch in a useless, distant fashion, and the wet warmth of blood.

And then footsteps.

And then a sudden, second light—the brightest yet.

∞

Clifford decided to ride home by way of Powell Road, which crossed Beacon north and uphill from the business district.

It was a short ride down the park path and out the gate onto Powell. Home from the park was a gravity-assist all the way. The bicycle bearings shrilled into the dark and Clifford felt the wind on his face like a barrage of needles. The big houses near the park blurred past on each side of him, fading behind him like an elegant dream.

He leaned on the hand brakes at the corner of Beacon and came to a stop beside a tall privet hedge.

Curiosity and prudence had begun a pitched battle in the pit-of Clifford’s stomach. Curiosity had the advantage. He peered around the hedge, downhill toward the shops south of Oak.

There was not much to see from this distance; only a distant light, a headlight, which winked out when he looked at it: another patrol car.

Would it be dangerous to try to get closer? Well, obviously it would. No doubt about that. He had seen the bodies on that wooden cart outside City Hall last June, and the memory put a jog into his heartbeat. People had been killed for what he was doing right now.

But it was night and he was agile and he could always hide or run… and anyway, it wasn’t him they were after.

He wheeled down Beacon almost all the way to Oak, keeping close to the trees and hedges of these big lawns, most of which had grown high and weedy over the summer.

At Oak, Clifford pulled up next to a dark automobile parked at the curb and noticed with a sudden shock of fear that it was a military patrol car and that he had come abreast of it with the idiotic boldness of a four-year-old. He dropped his bike and was about to run for the cover of a leafless willow tree when he saw the car was unoccupied; both soldiers must have crossed Oak and gone down Beacon, where he could dimly see a motion, a commando-style jog from storefront to storefront, and the dance of several flashlight beams.