Cameron Lee stood in front of a large canvas, featuring a bright orange sunset on the Serengeti, one of his latest works on display at Obscure, an aptly named art gallery just off Hawthorne in southeast Portland, far from the tonier showrooms of the Pearl District or the established culture of the Alberta Arts District in the northeast section of the city. He nodded and smiled, occasionally shook hands as patrons made their way to the door. The show was winding down, and Mr. Dorian, the gallery owner, subtly herded people out. He had his daughter’s twelfth birthday party to attend. An older lady with big blue-tinged hair slipped away from him and walked over to Cam.
“Young man, you absolutely made the correct decision switching your focus to African landscapes. The palette is breathtaking and the composition divine. You can almost feel the sun on your skin and the wind sweeping through your hair,” the lady said. “Whatever inspired such a radical shift in your work? I mean, going from that dizzying abstract work to this marvelous, peaceful elegance is absolutely incredible.”
Cam half bowed and said, “You’re very kind, Mrs. Klein. I just felt it was time to try something new.”
“Mr. Dorian tells me that you were on that dreadful flight that crashed into the river a couple months ago. Surviving traumatic events like that can certainly motivate us to take a fresh look at our lives. Don’t you agree?”
“It certainly gives you a whole new perspective on things,” he said.
The front door closed with a rattle and a click, as Mr. Dorian turned the dead bolt. He flicked a switch on the wall nearby, and most of the lights went out, hanging over the large window facing the street. He walked over and stood with Cam and Mrs. Klein in front of the orange landscape. “Excellent show, Cam. Twelve pieces sold. That should help out with next semester’s tuition. Don’t you think?”
Cam held out his hand. “Absolutely. I can’t thank you enough for doing this. You have got to be the only gallery owner in the world who would put on a show just to help an employee pay for school.”
Mrs. Dorian nodded. “That is very kind of you.”
“Nonsense. There would not have been a show if there was no talent to display, I can assure you of that. However, if you are looking for a way to thank me, you can close up the place, so I can get out of here before my wife and daughter kill me.” He nodded to Mrs. Klein and added, “If you’ll forgive me, I’m going to sneak out the back.”
“I understand completely,” she said. “I’ll just have this handsome young artist walk me out.” She held out her arm to Cam.
While the gallery owner walked toward the back of the building, Cam escorted their customer to the front door.
“So, I’m really curious. Why the sudden and dramatic switch in your work?” Mrs. Klein asked. “The old stuff was good, but this new work of yours is in a whole different league.”
Cam looked down, a little sheepish. “I don’t want to sound like an angst-filled artist—or a stereotype of any kind for that matter.” He unlocked the door and opened it.
“Oh, just go ahead and say what you feel. That’s the whole point of art, isn’t it?” She patted his arm and crossed the threshold.
“The surrealism just seemed impersonal to me, not a part of me. I wanted to explore my African-ness, I guess. This show was focused on landscapes, but I’m working on some portraits, some other pieces that reflect African design and culture, even some African-inspired abstracts.”
“That’s wonderful. If the other work is anything like these brilliant landscapes, you are doing the right thing,” she said. She smiled and slipped on a pair of gloves. “You have a good evening and make sure you take a moment to enjoy your success.”
He thanked her again and closed the door, waving through the window as she turned away. Once she got in the awaiting cab, he pulled down the blind and leaned his back against the door. Gazing into the gallery full of his art, he sighed, sounding content and tired. He debated whether to run a dust mop over the floors but decided against it. The employees would be setting up the next exhibit the following morning, tracking in and out, so the place would get a thorough cleaning after that. Besides, it was still relatively early on a Saturday night, and he had earned at least a nightcap.
As he pushed off from the door, on his way to kill the lights, he noticed something moving out of the corner of his eye. A swirl of darkness in the center of the Serengeti landscape. Cam gasped. At first it looked like something burning through the canvas, but that wasn’t right. It was actually in front of the painting, in the air before it, a growing black tear, as if someone had run a knife through space. A breeze pulled at Cam, causing his lapel to flap. He ran his hand over it, pressing it down. When he looked up again, the dark opening had grown wider, the wind more insistent. Something clattered to his right. Smaller canvases across the room swung on their wires, strained to jump off the wall. A flock of brochures fluttered off the table next to the front door, danced in the air for a moment, then flew into the blackness.
Cam staggered back toward the door, resisting the pull of the wind. After two steps, he felt static run up the back of his head. After another two steps, he felt it on his arms. When his backside bumped into the door, he could make out a light blue sheen in the air just inches from his nose. Some kind of electrical field. He looked side to side, then upward. It’s a sphere. He reached up to touch it with a finger.
But his finger was gone, or rather, his fingertip was. It was dissolving into a fine luminous mist. And it streamed toward the black hole than now covered the Serengeti painting.
From out of its depths, a deep baritone said, “It’s time to come home.”
Cam’s mind went blank.
* * *
Rory, the cab driver, grunted, as he leaned over his belly to hang up his radio. He took a right onto Hawthorne Boulevard, heading east to pick up a fare going to the airport. The road ahead looked clear of jaywalking pedestrians, which were not uncommon around here, thanks to all the restaurants and bars, so he pressed the accelerator a bit. A quick pickup might lead to a good tip. Just as he passed the speed limit by about five miles, a man in a suit and tie ran out of the shadows of a darkened storefront, directly into the path of his yellow Crown Victoria.
Rory slammed on the brakes, sending the car shimmying side to side, but still careening forward with a loud squeal that ended with a sickening thump. The suited man’s body flew more than twenty feet down Hawthorne, where it landed facedown on the center line between the lanes.
Before the cab driver could heave himself from the taxi, several pedestrians from both sides of the street ran into the middle. When Rory approached, he said to the group, “Any of you guys a doctor or nurse? If not, you folks need to back up and give the guy some air. I’ve got the cops and an ambulance on the way.”
A tall college kid in an orange hoodie squatted down, turned over the body and said, “This guy isn’t going to need an ambulance.”
Rory sucked in his breath, bracing himself for the worst, and pulled the college kid out of the way. Lying on the pavement, face up, was the man in the suit. On his lapel was one of those stick-on label name tags with Cameron handwritten on it. Except it wasn’t a man. Where his face should have been was a mass of metal filaments, circuitry and what looked like flickering optical fiber. His legs and hips looked more warped than broken, and there was no blood, although something wet and milky leaked out of his ears.
A loud piercing scream made Rory jump.
A few feet beyond the crowd, which had parted to see what the commotion was about, stood a woman pointing a trembling finger at some debris on the roadway. “It’s his face!”
CHAPTER 11
Mara shook her head while slipping her laptop into its carrying case, which she had on the end of her bed. Rumbles ran through the walls and giggles floated up from downstairs as Sam chased his daughter from the kitchen into the living room. Mornings certainly seemed much noisier with a brother from an alternate realm and a niece from the future in the house. Mara zipped
up the case, pulled the strap over her shoulder and turned to walk from her bedroom.
The leather book, the Chronicle of Continuity, sitting on the corner of her desk, caught her eye. She had not given it much thought over the weekend.
She picked it up. Absentmindedly she cradled it in the crook of her hand and flipped open the cover. A couple pages fanned into the air and then settled, displaying one of the passages in Mara’s handwriting. She frowned at it. This haiku had not been there before.
Forget all the fears
Preventing you from learning.
Exchange memories.
She flipped forward and found nothing but blank pages. This was the only addition to the book, sitting on the page across from the previous passage about passengers, dragon’s folly and trails of mist.
From the kitchen downstairs, Diana yelled, “Sam, turn on the TV, and see what the weatherman says about this afternoon. If it’s going to be really bad, I may need to take Hannah shopping for something a little more insulated and waterproof than the jacket she has.”
The commotion downstairs snapped Mara back to reality. She closed the book and slid it into the side pocket of her laptop case. Walking down the stairs, she said to no one in particular, “I guess the quiet Monday mornings are gone forever.”
Diana met her at the bottom of the stairs with a cup of coffee and said, “You’re late. If you want something to eat, you’ll need to fix it yourself and make sure you clean up your mess before you go.”
Mara took the cup. “This will do me.”
She followed her mother into the living room and sat next to her on the couch. They glanced at the muted television set for a second, but an oatmeal commercial was on.
Across the room Sam and Hannah sat together wedged into an armchair. He held something between two fingers above the girl’s open mouth, teasing her. “Whattaya say?”
“I promise not to bite?” she said.
“No.”
“Please?”
“There you go.” He dropped a shiny green pellet into her mouth.
She chewed and then pondered for a second. “That was a green jelly bean.”
He tickled her and said, “You’re a green jelly bean.”
“I’m sweet like a green jelly bean.” She laughed.
Sam stood up. “Come on, bean. We can get one more, before I leave for school.”
They ran into the kitchen, where Mara could hear them rummaging in the closet for something. She gave her mother a questioning look.
“Halloween candy. He’s in charge of making sure she doesn’t gorge herself and start bouncing off the walls,” Diana said.
“Who’s going to stop him from eating it all himself?”
Diana laughed. “Sam’s going to be a great dad—you can just see it in the way he interacts with her. He’s a natural.”
“Sure seems like it.” Mara nodded.
Her mother glanced back toward the kitchen. “I am a little concerned though. Obviously he’s not ready for this, and, while she seems well-adjusted, she needs to be with her family, her actual family, not a bunch of relatives from the past.”
“What’s your point, Mom?”
“Well, how long is she going to be here? Should we be thinking of a way to send her back? Is that even possible?”
Mara leaned toward her mother and lowered her voice. “I don’t know. The whole thing makes absolutely no sense to me. It just doesn’t seem like something I would do, sending a child back in time just to save my own skin and to deliver a book with a few cryptic words in it. There has to be something else going on, some other reason for all this.”
Sam and Hannah returned from the kitchen. While she sat in the armchair, he walked over to the end table next to the couch and picked up the television remote to activate the sound. “You guys are missing the weather,” he said, pointing toward the screen.
The weather girl stood next to a map of Oregon dotted with little rain clouds. “So expect heavy winds and rain through this evening, clearing overnight, before the next front comes in tomorrow afternoon. Now back to you, Jim. I hear you’ve got a report of a UFO over at Mount Hood.” She mugged and wiggled her eyebrows for the camera, and walked to the end of the anchor desk.
As she came into the frame, the anchorman grinned and pointed at the camera, a slight joust with his finger. “Not only do we have a report, we have some video as well. Take a look at this!”
A gray grainy image of Mount Hood, its summit hidden in low-hanging clouds, popped up on the screen. At first Mara thought the picture was a still, but then the clouds near the mountain on the left side appeared to ripple, as if stirred from above.
“Watch closely at the left of your screen,” Jim, the anchor, said. “Here it comes.”
Something large and rounded pushed from the clouds, and the video rapidly zoomed in on the object, turning it into a blur, as the camera struggled to focus. Once the camera adjusted, pixels solidified into what appeared to be two taloned feet and a tail, hanging below the cloud line. The feet kicked in the air, and a wing flapped down from the roiling clouds. It soared upward and disappeared.
“See it? See it, Janey?” he said.
The weather girl rolled her eyes. “Oh, I thought you meant like a flying saucer. That looked like it could have been a flock of birds or something. UFO! You almost had me there, Jim.”
They had a good chuckle and went to commercial.
Diana turned to Mara. “Tell me that was a flock of birds.”
With as straight a face as she could muster, she said, “That was a flock of birds.”
But she didn’t believe it.
CHAPTER 12
Ping’s contractors had replaced the front window of Mason Fix-It in less than two hours after Mara had gotten to work. By the time they were finished, she had dusted off and assessed the damage done to several of the gadgets on display. There was only one certain fatality, a cuckoo clock with a foot-shaped depression in its face. The antique mechanism inside had been pulverized, not to mention the little birdy. Everything else could be repaired—projects that could be done during the holiday slow period. She decided to wait a couple days before selecting new items and moving them into the window, to give the caulk or epoxy or whatever that held the window in place some time to settle.
The bell above the door jangled, and a man with a dolly walked in, shaking rain off his green uniform. He tipped his ball cap to Mara and said, “I’ve got a pickup for a Mr. Mickleson? That ring a bell for you?”
“Absolutely,” Mara said and walked to the end of the counter. She put her hand on the side of the grandfather clock. “It’s right here. But we’ll need to cover it, before you roll it out into the rain.”
“No problem,” he said, pointing to a stack of quilted blankets piled at the bottom of the dolly. “I came prepared.”
He unfolded several of the quilts, wrapped the tall clock and secured the bundle with small bungee cords. Mara held open the door, and he rolled out the dolly with another tip of his hat. As she closed the door, her heart skipped a beat. It occurred to her that Mr. Mickelson’s clock was the one Hannah had stepped out of, her portal back in time, so to speak. Hope that isn’t her only way back.
She returned to the counter and leaned over it, resting her head in her hands. She still had a couple hours before her half day of work was over. She picked up her phone, scrolled through her address book and tapped Detective Bohannon’s name.
He picked up on the first ring. “Mara Lantern. I was planning to check in on you and Mr. Ping this week to see how you are.”
“To be honest with you, I’m surprised we haven’t heard from you before now,” Mara said.
“My sources told me the two of you appeared unharmed after last week’s festivities, so I thought I would leave you alone for a while, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“Whatever it was that happened late Tuesday night. I get the feeling something squirrelly went down. I mean, there were do
zens of those shedding victims within a block or two of that little shop where you work, before they all fainted and had a remarkable recovery. And the ones who didn’t get there were headed in that direction. I assume you dispatched Mr. Prado somehow?”
“I wish it were that simple. Let’s just say, it appears I’ve traded one set of challenges for another. At least that’s how it seems at the moment.”
“We got some pretty strange reports from your vicinity that night.”
“I don’t doubt it. Look, are you back on the job this week, now that Denton Proctor healed your leg?” she asked.
“I too wish it were that simple. You’re not the only one who has traded one set of challenges for another.”
“What do you mean?”
“Since I was already scheduled to be off for the next couple weeks, my lieutenant wants to keep me off the books, so I can continue looking into things, you know, unofficially.”
“You mean, checking up on some of the passengers from Flight 559.”
“Yeah, just in case there’s another Prado out there somewhere. Not that there’s much we can do about it, if we find one.”
“What if I go with you?” There was a momentary pause. For a second Mara thought she’d lost the connection. “Detective? Bo?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Why the sudden change in tune? Up until now I’ve had to talk you into helping out, or Mr. Ping has.”
“Let’s just say, I’ve come to a realization that, if I don’t meet these issues head-on, they are just going to keep showing up at my doorstep, one way or the other. If you don’t feel comfortable taking me along, I will understand. I’m still a minor, and you might not want to be responsible for whatever happens. Regardless I’m going to be checking up on the passengers myself. I just thought it would be more efficient, maybe even safer, if we worked together.”
“Just so we are on the same page, we would not actually be ‘working’ in the sense that I work as a cop. The point is to have a few conversations with people, just visit, look around. That’s all I’m doing, like when we went to see the Proctors.”
Broken Dragon (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 3) Page 6