James Axler – Keepers of the Sun

It was totally silent.

All of the outer windows had the impenetrable shutters bolted over them, making it impossible to see out. But the patterned glass in the front door of the house was clear, showing bright sunlight. The light streamed through the stylized stained glass, with a picture of waves of cherry-tree blossom and a long-legged stork with a fan of feathers in its tail.

“Should check upstairs,” Jak said, his brilliantly white hair catching the soft pinks and greens of the filtered sun through the glass.

Ryan was at the bottom of the wide flight of uncarpeted stairs. He stooped to look at them, running his finger through a layer of reddish dust. “No need, Jak. Nobody been up or down in a good few days.”

“Or months,” Doc said. “As a great man once said, you don’t have to worry about dusting after five years, since the dust gets no thicker.”

“What great man?” Krysty asked distrustfully, suspecting that the old man had made the quote up himself.

“I forget.”

Mildred smiled. “I know. For once Doc’s actually telling the truth. It was an amazing person called Quentin Crisp. A gay Englishman and style guru. Used to live in New York.”

Ryan shook his head, lifting the hand with the SIG-Sauer. “Enough chat,” he said.

There was another little Buddhist shrine just inside the door, with its own clump of smoking incense sticks tucked into a pierced copper bowlmusk flavored, this timeand a tiny bronze model of a grasshopper.

“We really going to be in Japan when you open that door, lover?” Krysty breathed. “Sure this isn’t all some kind of a jump dream?”

“If it is but a dream, madam, then it is a dream which we all share.” Doc rapped on the floor with the ferrule of his swordstick. “Solid enough, I believe. No ecto-plasmic imitation of reality.”

Ryan took the doorknob and turned it slowly. He eased the heavy front door open an inch, his good eye to the crack and checked outside.

“Looks like we’re on top of a hill,” he said. “Fire-blast! The air doesn’t taste all that clean.”

The others could smell it now.

“Prefer the musk,” Mildred said. “You know that’s a sort of familiar stink. Like L.A. on a hot, smoggy afternoon when the air turns orange and your eyes sting and your breath catches in your throat. Sort of polluted smell. All my time in Deathlands, I never did smell anything like that before.”

Ryan blinked again, feeling a sharp prickling behind his right eye. “Formal garden that could do with weeding. Lot of stones, as well.”

He opened the door a little wider, feeling more secure now that there was no sign of human life outside. “Trees. Pine and some little apple and plums. Few big oaks and Don’t know what that sort of weepy tree is.”

“Cypress,” Mildred told him. “And those are beautiful azaleas beyond the dry fountain.”

A rectangular area of raked gravel was covered with dead leaves and patterns of larger stones, some of them as large as a man’s head.

“I believe it’s a Zen garden,” Doc said. “Though certainly a little neglected.”

“Can’t see anything beyond the trees and bushes.” J.B. took off his glasses and wiped them, then put them on and sniffed. “Doesn’t make it much better. Definitely a nasty sort of haze in the air.”

Ryan finally stepped out, finding himself on a narrow porch that ran the whole considerable length of the front of the house. There was a wickerwork sofa, designed as a garden swing, at one end, though it had ripped away from one of the rusted couplings and scraped back and forth in the light breeze.

All the windows along that flank of the property were concealed by shutters, and when Ryan stepped down onto the garden path, he was able to look back and up and see that all the second-floor windows were also sec shuttered.

He also noticed that there had once been a flagpole fitted above the door, though wind, weather and time had contrived together to remove it.

“I bet your fedora full of fresh-minted jack that this place used to be some kind of official U.S. residence,” he said. “And Old Glory must have flown from up there. See where the pole used to be fixed?”