“Well, who are you, this … group you have?”
“Ah, thank you. We are enthusiasts for the reality that is proven by the very longing of the human heart. Much of that longing is channeled into religion, and that is wondrous. But a fine distillation of that longing, the romantic, the hunger for other worlds, needs other direction. That’s why they say myths and legends come about.”
“I — uh — see.”
“The rarest thing, however, is discovery for oneself that such a world indeed exists. A world more palpable than these objects, more amenable to feeling and to sight than our present world, more real that the drear plains we traverse daily.”
He paused to catch his breath. “And so we study here. Our foundation is the art of belief itself.”
Cadence noticed a single ring on the man’s hand. The stone in it caught the light. Arcs of opal-blue seemed to flow out from the stone, filling the air with sparkly dust motes. She blinked and made a decision.
“Hey, I gotta go. I’ll stop by again. Thanks. Nice place.”
“It’s no trouble. Please sign our guest book and I’ll escort you out. We’ve had other visitors lately.”
The little man gestured toward a bound ledger on a counter. She went to it hurriedly and searched for a pen.
She heard the quick thumb-click of a ball point pen, followed by a different voice. “I have a different guest book for you to sign, Cadence.”
She looked up. Across the counter stood the man she knew was Barren. She turned, but the munchkin proprietor had positioned himself in a wrester’s stance, set to bar her way.
She bowled him over like a sock’em balloon.
She reached the door. The main lever handle seemed locked, held down by a cogged gearwheel turned by a polished rotary handle. She thought of a fine millwork for making cake flour, or the innards of a talking doll. She thought a thousand things while she fumbled with it.
A hand slammed flat against the door next to her face.
“First, we have a bit of commerce to complete.”
She couldn’t really move. She opted, instead, to study the intricacies of the grainy oak inches from her face.
“Will you hear the offer? Or should we kill your grandfather now?”
A thin cloak fell over her head. Cadence felt the world drop out beneath her feet. Wind rustled the cloak as she began to freefall. Images came to her — first still, then moving like pictures in a thumb-operated flicker book. She knew that she was dreaming as she was falling, falling to depths where oblivion was an unknown word, so dense was the darkness.
In the dream, her father faced a blazing man at the edge of a fire. He sought to pass to freedom, but the blazing man, shaped by furious black coils of smoke and the reek of hot diesel oil and burning flesh, barred him. There was talk of commerce which no path could warrant.
Her father said
The blazing man held out a steaming oilcan.
Her father nodded.
The smoking eyes, darker in the flameface, narrowed and the indescribable contents of the can were poured on the ground.
As if at the snap of a hypnotist’s fingers, Cadence woke up, clearheaded and sitting in a chair. She was not surprised that her adversary was sitting across from her.
From the smells and style of the room and the furnishings around her, she guessed that she was still somewhere within the little shop of talismanic horror. She had the chance to study him. She realized that he had also been the strange cab driver. He had those same oily, dark eyes, but he was clean-shaven, the Mohawk gone, and his hair was buzz-length and neatly trimmed. He wore a loose-knit, orange polo shirt, nice pants, and a pair of khaki-colored Air Jordans. Almost as if for effect, he held a pair of wire-rimmed glasses in his manicured hands.
She said the first thing that came into her head.
“You learn fast.”
“That is my core competence.”
She tried to move, but while each of her parts moved and felt fine, the act of getting up from the chair just would not happen. One of the objects from the exhibition case, the backward-running clock face, lay on her lap. Was the wrong-way whirr and sweep somehow keeping her sitting there? She wondered if she could scare this weirdo.
“You and the munchkin are going to be in some kind of trouble when the cops arrive.”
“I don’t think we need to worry about being interrupted here. He glanced around, gesturing magnanimously with his glasses, saying in effect
“I have an idea.”
“Please, tell me.”
“Crawl back in your spider hole.”
“Now, now. No reason to be unsociable. At least, not yet. Perhaps we should clear up just who I am so that it doesn’t get in the way of us getting to know one another. I am known locally as Mr. Peaches. In my own country, I am called Mr. Barren or, simply, Barren. Before that, my name was Seax. My employer values my skills, which he sees as considerable. He too believes that I learn fast, and thus he chose me to make this trip and straighten this whole thing out. That, and the fact that I can be charming or one mean son of a bitch. I am to use my discretion, as he put it, although not exactly in those terms.”
Cadence stalled while she looked around for the door. “And just where is this employer, and who is he?”
“Far away, yet close. Down a road, across a bridge, burned in the words of a book, or behind a secret gate. My employer is powerful and used to getting his way.”
“Is he a wizard?”
“If you believe in such things.”
“I’m not into believing in things I can’t see.”
“I’m right here. The other pieces you’ve already seen, if you allow them to fit together.”
She started to get up, but nothing happened. The watch with the backward-running dial stirred in her lap like a purring cat.
“You’re a fake!” she spat out.
“You seem to have some issues here beyond me, Cadence. Forget about fire, for which I know you have a weak spot. To get to the point, you seem to be troubled by what’s real and what isn’t. Are you a doubter? Does your doubt insure that your world is made up of low hopes and petty requests? That is to say, barren?”
She looked at him.
“Don’t think I don’t know the meaning of my name. And yet my world is rich beyond your imagining. I not only believe it, I live it! A philosophy you might wish to embrace if you ever get out of this. Now, in any case, I’ve come to like this place. The perks aren’t as good, but there’s lots shaking.”
“All right, I’ve heard enough. I want to go.”
“Yes, yes. That has already been arranged. Do you want to know where?”
“Yeah, home. Out of here.”
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple. We, you and I, have some beez-ness to conduct.”
“What’s that?”
“A simple contract. Very little to negotiate. All it really is, I offer and you accept.”
“I know some lawyers.”
“Don’t threaten, child, it’s unbecoming. It’s also futile. Let me proceed as I have planned. Now, pay attention! My profession is to humble men much tougher than you, hard men who are used to ranging in the wilds and spying on my employer’s interests. I can break you. Now, what I’m offering you is as good as it gets. Far better than Les Inspecteurs.” He caricatured the name in phony French. “I implore you, don’t go down the path of your
