The Mirrors (part forty)

The Mirrors

(part forty)

Godfrey fidgets and sweats. Leonce has an idea. He might count it a holy vision. “God. Old man’s in there…”

Godfrey looks bloodshot at Leonce.

“Nobody’d ever know it, in the morning when the fires burn down, and they start clearing out the rubble, how someone or some other got killed.”

A waft from the inferno touches him, and he steps to put Godfrey between himself and the rising shouts. He has spoken of the devil twice; now the riot seems ready to run before dark. Leonce can’t help grinning. Granddaddy caught upstairs, no time to scuttle up his hill. “Don’t it all belong to you? If the old man dies…”

“No. It belongs to Charleton.”

“Oh, now, that’s true. Easy touch, though…Charleton. Try to lift you up, if you kneel down and repent.”

He watches a smile play at Godfrey’s upper lip. Whelp. Makes him curl his own. He shoves Godfrey along the walk. The shank Leonce keeps in the seam of a sleeve tumbles the old man’s private lock, his body blocking Godfrey’s view. “You go in say hello. I’ll be right down the hallway. God!”

Godfrey farts with the suddenness of his arrested feet, and mutters, “Fuck you!”

“What you got on you?”

“Hell you need money for?”

Leonce chuckles, very inwardly. He withdraws to the stoop, pleased to, points to the brick that serves as stopper. “Don’t have to take that, but you ought.”

God is too stupid not to come pick it up himself.

You peer at an upper landing, a floor once a factory loft. Noises of watchfulness, anxious rustles under sheets. Curtained partitions are all you see; but that voice, you hear. “By all means. Take up your bed and walk.”

He laughs, his affable, colonial laugh. “Or stay. This is an easy way to earn money, lying on your back. I would think a simple enough equation to work out for yourself. And if the medicine makes you woozy, the effect won’t last.”

You hear a slither of metal. Papers being paged aside.

“On consideration, however, I’ll dismiss you. I can’t use you if your heart’s not in it. And so I can tell you that you’ve been on the placebo. Young man, your symptoms are imaginary.”

“But,” the young man says. “I get paid.”

Grandfather doesn’t answer.

You reverse yourself, to the closet at the foot of this flight. He is coming down, coming this way, passing by. You pad from the closet and follow.

Leonce, you observe, makes no move, and the old man flits off, spry. A peek ahead shows him in the lobby, able to work a lock faster than your partner. You stand foolish in your spying place, no one of consequence…and none to see your clumsy issue. You burst, staggering on the waxed floor. Hold yourself a moment, waiting laughter.

A silent hall. The rumbling tension from outdoors, closing on you. Kill Leonce another time…but he’s gone and left.

85

The Mirrors

The Mirrors (part forty-one)

(2020, Stephanie Foster)