Fewer Each Time (3)

The cold went through his coat at once. He stood on the walk with his back to the door and his hands in his pockets and looked at the square.

It was Saturday night on the square in Sink Creek. The bank sign on the corner said 41 degrees and then said 8:49. The barbershop was dark, its speaker unplugged and brought in. A pickup went around the far side of the square with its radio going, slowed at the stop sign without stopping, and went on out toward the highway, and the sound of the radio went with it. The oak in front of the bank moved in the wind. Somebody's dropped glove lay in the gutter. His own truck was parked where he had left it at twenty minutes to nine that morning, across the square in front of the hardware store, with a skin of dew on the windshield.

The curb was empty. There was no one under the streetlight. There was no one on the square at all.

He could have walked across to the truck. He could have sat in it with the heater going and the doors locked and watched the road for Lorna Furr's headlights. He stood on the walk and thought about that, and he took out his phone to see whether she had sent him anything.

She had not. He opened the boy's messages instead, without meaning to, the way his thumb went to them now.

The photo of the window. Witch goes on the left. Always has. Finish the window after close tomorrow. The boy's answer. And under it the message he had sent that morning, call me when you're ready. you're not in trouble, and under that, in small gray letters, a word that had not been there before.

Read 8:50 PM.

He looked at the bank sign. It said 41 degrees. It said 8:51.

He called the number. He stood with the phone to his ear and put his other hand flat against the glass of his own front door and leaned his head against the cold of it to listen. In his ear the phone rang four times. Inside the shop there was nothing at all, only the counter lamp on the words, and the bowl, and the aisles going back into the dark. The boy's voice told him this was Wade and he knew what to do. Odell took the phone from his ear.

He looked at the glass a while longer. Then he took the key out of his pocket and let himself back in.

---

He went straight back through the shop to the stockroom without looking down the aisles, and turned on the light.

The cartons stood in their rows. The rolling ladder was parked against the end shelf. He walked every row and looked down every gap. He climbed three rungs of the ladder and looked along the tops of the shelves where the dust lay, and there was nothing in the dust. He went to the alley door. The long iron bolt was shot home, the way it had been in the morning, the way he had left it on Thursday, and it was stiff when he worked it back and stiff when he shot it home again. There was no other way out of the room but the door to the hall, and the hall was on the camera.

"Wade," he said.

The furnace ran under the floor. Nothing else.

He turned off the light and went across the hall to the office and sat down and found Friday again.

---

At 21:10 one child came up the walk. The papier-mâché face.

The woman with the stroller was not at the curb. She was halfway up the walk, the hood turned to the shop, and she had stopped there.

The boy came to the door without the bowl. He did not open it. He stood behind the glass with his hands at his sides and the child stood on the step with its bag held open. After a long time the child turned and went back to the woman, and the woman backed the stroller down the walk to the curb.

At 21:40 the boy was standing in the counter square, and his head came around toward the door all at once, the way a head comes around for a bell. The exterior square showed the step and the walk and the curb under the light. There was nobody on any of them.

Odell dragged the bar.

At 21:52 the boy was pulling shelves. He went down aisle three hand over hand, dragging the stock off onto the floor, and the shelving unit at the end tipped and leaned into the next.

At 23:30 the boy was on his knees at the stuffed-animal wall with his arm in the gap to the shoulder, and his face turned toward the camera without seeing it, listening.

At 00:58 the boy was sitting on the floor in aisle two among the dolls with his back against the shelving and his knees drawn up, and he was not moving at all. Odell let it run at its own speed. A minute went by, and another. The boy did not move.

At 01:14 the boy got up and went to the counter and took a marker out of the cup by the register. He pulled the cap off with his teeth. He wrote on the glass, leaning over it, in big letters, one after another, and when he got to the end he dragged the marker down hard. Then he stepped back from the counter and stood looking at what he had written, and he set the marker down beside the register with the cap still in his teeth.

At 01:16 the boy walked into the hallway square. He walked to the stockroom door and opened it and went in, and the door shut behind him.

Odell watched the stockroom door.

He dragged the bar slowly at first and then faster. The hallway square did not change. The counter square did not change. The aisle square showed the dolls on the floor and the shelves leaning, and nothing moved among them. The numbers in the corners ran on through two o'clock and three and four. Toward six the windows in the exterior square went from black to blue, and toward eight the gray light came in across the counter and lay on the words.

At 08:40 the front door opened, and an old man in a canvas coat stood in the doorway with his key still in the lock.

Odell watched himself take the key out of the lock and put it in his coat pocket. He watched himself take it out again and hold it.

The bell went.

---

One child stood on the step. The papier-mâché face, with the crack running down through the white of the forehead.

The woman was halfway up the walk.

She had stopped where she had stopped on the footage, and the hood of the stroller was turned toward the door. She was close enough now that the light from the counter lamp reached her. It lay on the front of her long coat and on the handle of the stroller, where her hands were, and stopped at her collar.

Odell stood a yard back from the door with the key in his fist inside his pocket. He did not take it out. The child held its bag open. The elastic of the mask went around the back of its head, and the hair under the elastic was flat and dark and did not move in the wind that was moving the oak across the square.

Across the square the bank sign changed its numbers, and changed them again.

The child turned away and walked down the walk to the woman, and the woman backed the stroller down to the curb, and they went out of the light along the square together.

He went back down the hall to the office. When he sat down the aisle square was showing aisle two the way it had all evening, gray and still, the train table at the end. At the edge of the frame, by the leg of the train table, something gray and dragging went out of the picture to the left, the way a sheet goes when somebody pulls it off a bed. Then the aisle was empty again.

The live clock in the corner said 21:12.

---

He sat there. Then he looked at his phone. Under Lorna Furr's name was a message he had not heard come in. It had been sent at 9:06.

Im out front. Where are you

He looked at the time on it. At 9:06 he had been standing at the front door, a yard back from the glass, looking out at the square.

He went up the hall to the front of the shop. He did not look down the aisles. He stood at the counter with his hands on the glass on either side of the words and looked out at the square for headlights, and none came. The bowl was at the end of the counter with a few pieces of taffy left in the bottom. The marker was by the register where the boy had set it down, and where he had capped it that morning and set it down again.

At some point he took off his coat. He hung it on the hook by the register, where it hung every day, and he stood at the counter in his shirt with the wax-paper wrapper still buttoned in the pocket.

The bell went at 21:40.

It came up through the floor and the shelving and the soles of his shoes, and he stood still until it stopped.

The step was empty. The walk was empty all the way to the curb. Under the streetlight there was no woman and no stroller, and across the square the oak went on moving and the bank sign went on changing its numbers, and nobody was there.

Behind him, on the hook, his coat pocket buzzed against the wall, and buzzed, and stopped.

Odell looked at the marker. It lay by the register beside the long dragged foot of the T. He looked at it for some time, and he did not pick it up.

He reached under the counter lamp and turned it off.

The shop went dark except for the streetlight coming in across the floor from the window, and the witch standing in it on the left side, where she belonged. Down the aisles the dark went all the way back.

He put his hands over his eyes.

"One," he said.

His voice went down the aisles and did not come back.

"Two," he said. "Three."

The furnace came on under the floor.

"Four," he said.

 

~End~