Shuttered Sky

bumped it aside. He chuckled nervously. Then moved his hand through her hair. Although her hair was short, it had a thick, rich texture. With the caress of his fingers, her hair renewed, taking on a smooth, dark sheen.

Just like Deanna’s.

But that was a thought he banished to a distant corner.

Maddy sensed the moment his kisses crossed from respectful to passionate, and it struck her that Dillon did know her. It was the first time since her first time that she let a man be the aggressor—and here, this young man moved from awkwardness to grace in a single breath. With his touch, she could feel herself changed by his spirit of creation, of rejuvenation. He undid the most soiled knots of her life with his body, and with each wave of sensation she could feel those old bonds tear free.

The sweaty, drunken face of the neighbor man, who had defiled her at thirteen.

The high school teacher she had chosen to seduce.

The scores of boys, then men she had conquered, and dismissed, taking from them, so they could never take anything from her. All her patterns, all her painful connections were smoothed by Dillon’s em­brace.

They shared a sanctuary from all of their troubles in each others arms, then as their tension released, Maddy saw that the dilapidated restaurant around them had been restored to the spotless moment it had been built. And she realized that, within her heart, the place where it truly mattered, she was a virgin once again.

14. Return of a thief

Hundreds of miles from The Crawfish Maw diner, at a train station in Atlanta, a small-time pickpocket was having a truly lousy day.

His moves had always been stealthy, and even when caught in the act, he was usually able to slither away with finesse, dissolving into the rush-hour crowds of the Atlanta train station. Those crowds, despite Atlanta’s southern belle reputation, were every bit as frenetic these days as crowds in any Yankee burg, and the molecular hustle of bodies always provided ample cover for a quick escape.

The train station was a fine locale for petty larceny. Better than New York, or PA, since there was less competition. He would usually slip past his marks just before they entered their respective trains, re­lieving them of their wallets and billfolds, and by the time they realized that they had been robbed, their train would already be barreling away from the city.

But today he had gotten greedy. His mark—a waddling, varicose-legged woman, clearly an old-money patrician, complained to the red­cap loading her luggage onto the train, as if the red-cap cared. And there it was: her Gucci clutch, protruding from an oversized coat pocket. It grabbed his focus and reeled him in. He simply had to have it.

Unfortunately this woman was no imbecile. She had learned the trick of wrapping her pocket accessories with a rubber band, and as he pulled on the edge of the clutch, it snagged on the pocket lining, instantly alerting the woman to his presence.

Some of his marks were gaspers, some were screamers. The wad­dling woman was definitely a screamer. She let loose with an ear-splitting camel call the moment she felt his hand in her pocket. He flinched, and hesitated, which he never normally did, then pushed her away, wrenching the clutch from her pocket.

He tried to slip into the crowd, but found his reflexes had slipped a beat behind the moment, and rather than cutting through the crowds, he crashed into them, each body becoming an obstacle impeding his progress toward the stairs.

“Stop him!” the woman screamed with such aristocratic command that he knew it would galvanize the crowd into that mad mob of outraged citizens that was known to beat and dismember poor inno­cent criminals like himself.

He kneed a business man who tried to stop him, and used his crumbling body as a vault onto the steps, taking them three at a time until he was up in the station.

But the open space of the station provided him with no cover either. Two police officers raced toward him, apparently more inter­ested in apprehending him than they were in the Krispy Kreme donut concession.

The pickpocket quickly calculated his most likely vector of escape, and took off. Unfortunately the direction he ran took him deeper into the building, rather than toward an exit. He used the woman’s clutch as a countermeasure, hurling it behind him, but the officers ignored it, continuing their pursuit, already pulling out their weapons, probably hoping he had one of his own, so they could plead self-defense when they blew him away.

No, this was not one of his better days.

There were two doors in front of him now. One was unmarked, except for a poster plastered across it advertizing a local revival of Cats. The other was the ladies’ room.

The lady or the tiger, the thought. He chose the lady.

Hurling himself through the restroom door, he pulled from his pocket a wooden doorstop that he kept for occasions such as this, and shoved it beneath the door as it closed, kicking it over and over, until it was wedged in deep. The officers were already on the other side of the door, pounding on it, trying to force their way in, so for good measure the pickpocket kicked the doorknob repeatedly until it tore free, and clattered to the ground like a Christmas ornament. He heard the knob fall on the other side of the door as well.

“Damnit!” he heard from beyond the door. The door bowed in­ward as the officers threw their weight against it, but it didn’t give.

There was a strange taste in his mouth—the ferric tang of blood, and he realized that he had bitten his lip while running from the police. Small injury, all considered. The pickpocket sized up his surroundings.

He was alone in the restroom, and although there were no other doors, there was a window above the furthest stall. It was a small, clouded-glass pane, its edges caked in the grime of thirty years of union cleaning. It would be a tight squeeze, but he could make it, hopefully before the boys in blue took down the door.

But as he made his way toward the window there was something in the bathroom mirror that caught his attention. His reflection wasn’t right—but it wasn’t his reflection, it was the mirror itself. Its surface rippled like a pool of mercury, turning his reflection into a shifting fun-house image.

Then all at once a hand thrust out of the mirror, reaching for him like a cheap gag in a 3-D matinee.

He was a gasper, not a screamer, and so he gasped, throwing himself away from the hand, hitting the tile wall behind him.

The mirror had not broken, for it was no longer rigid—it was now more membrane than glass. There was a vertical tear in the surface, only about six inches wide, now stretching wider, creating fleshy folds of silver as a second hand pushed itself through, and a groan came from beyond the breach. He could see a mass of dark stringy hair forcing its way through, stretching this hole in the world even wider.

Now he screamed, instinctively knowing that it was more than his life lying in the balance now, and suddenly the police outside the door became the lesser of two evils. He returned to the door, only to find that he had successfully sealed himself in the room—he couldn’t kick the doorstop free, and even if he could have, the doorknob was too damaged to fit back into place.

So he raced toward the window, once more passing the creature that was pushing its way through the mirror. Its head was out now, and one shoulder. Long black hair dangled over a tortured face. It made eye contact with him. It was human, but its eyes were wild— almost mad, and those mad eyes held his gaze before returning to its task of birthing itself into this world.

He bolted into the stall, and pounded on the small window until it shattered, then pulled himself up into it, ignoring the cuts across his palms left by the jagged lip of glass. He could hear the thing grunting and groaning behind him. The pickpocket stuck his head out into the dim alley. He reached his hands through, pulled his shoulders through one at a time, praying he could be born into the alley before that thing was born into the restroom.

He had gotten to his hips and was almost free, when he felt the ghoul grab his ankles, and pull him back inside.

“No!”

As he fell, his head struck the pipe that fed the toilet, and although the pain was sharp, he barely noticed it, because his other senses were too overwhelmed to care. The thing grabbing at him was only mar­ginally human. Most of its face was hidden beneath the caul of dark, sodden hair, and its body was covered with mottled, leopard-