‘Read and ride,’ said Shep.
‘Read and ride,’ Dylan assured him. ‘I’ll get your book.’
Leaving his brother beside the towel dispenser, Dylan retrieved Great Expectations from the shelf above the sinks.
Shep stood where he’d been left, head still raised even though Dylan’s supporting hand had been removed. Eyes closed, but busy.
Carrying the book, Dylan went to the first stall. He tried the door. It wouldn’t open.
‘Here, there,’ Shep whispered. Standing with his eyes closed, arms slack at his sides, and hands open with both palms facing front, Shepherd had an otherworldly quality, as though he were a medium in a trance, bisected by the membrane between this world and the next. If he had risen off the floor, his levitation would have conformed to his appearance so completely that you would not have been much surprised to see him floating in the air. Although Shep’s voice remained recognizably his own, he almost seemed to speak for a séance-summoned entity from Beyond: ‘Here, there.’
Dylan knew that no one could be in the first stall. Nevertheless he dropped to one knee and peered under the door to confirm what he understood to be a certainty.
‘Here, there.’
He got up and tried the door again. Not just stuck. Locked. From the inside, of course.
A faulty latch, perhaps. Loose, the drop bar might have fallen into the latch channel when no one had been in the stall.
Maybe Shepherd had approached this first compartment, as Dylan had seen him do, but had found it inaccessible, and had at once moved to the fourth without Dylan noticing.
‘Here, there.’
The chill found bone first, not skin, and radiated through Dylan from the core of every limb. Fear iced his marrow, although not fear alone; this was also a chill of not entirely unpleasant expectation and of awe inspired by some mysterious looming event that he sensed much in the manner that a storm petrel, winging under curdled black clouds, senses the glorious tempest before being alerted by either lightning or thunder.
Strangely, he glanced at the mirror above the sink, prepared to see a room other than the lavatory in which he stood. His expectation of wonders outstripped the capacity of the moment to deliver them, however, and the reflection proved to be the mundane facts of toilet stalls and urinals. He and Shep were the only figures occupying the reversed image, though he didn’t know who or what else he might have expected.
With one last puzzled glance at the locked stall door, Dylan returned to his brother and put one hand on his shoulder.
At Dylan’s touch, Shepherd opened his eyes, lowered his head, let his shoulders slump forward, and in general reassumed the humble posture in which he shuffled through life.
‘Read and ride,’ Shep said, and Dylan said, ‘Let’s roll.’
20
Jilly waited pensively near the cashier’s station, by the front door, gazing out at the night, as radiant as a princess, perhaps the heir of a handsome Roman emperor who had ventured in conquest south of Sidra’s shores.
Dylan nearly stopped midrestaurant to study her and to lock in his memory every detail of the way she looked at this moment in the dialed-down, bevel-sheared light from the cut-glass ceiling fixtures, for he wanted to paint her eventually just as she stood now.
Always preferring to remain in motion in any public place, lest a hesitation should encourage a stranger to speak to him, Shepherd allowed no slightest pause, and Dylan was drawn after his brother by their invisible chain.
Bringing hand to hat brim, a departing customer graciously tipped his Stetson to Jilly as she stepped aside to give him easier access to the door.
When she looked up and saw Dylan and Shep approaching, palpable relief chased the pensive expression from her face. Something had happened to her in their absence.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked when he reached her.
‘I’ll tell you in the truck. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go.’
Opening the door, Dylan put his hand on fresh spoor. Bleakness, an oppressive sense of solitude, a dark-night-of-the-soul loneliness pierced him and filled him with an emotional desolation as blasted, burnt, and ash-shrouded as a landscape in the aftermath of an all-consuming fire.