“I don’t know who this is,” I whispered, “but I need help. Your bad monkey is right outside my back door.”
“No,” the voice on the phone said. “He’s in the house.”
Down the hall in my uncle’s study, a board creaked.
“Now don’t panic,” the voice advised. “He won’t expect you to be armed. Just hold the gun steady in both hands…”
I hung up. From the phone to the porch door was about a dozen steps, but my feet didn’t touch the floor more than twice.
The door wouldn’t open, even after I remembered to unlock it. Something—one of the porch chairs, probably—had been jammed under the knob on the other side.
Behind me, another board creaked: he was coming down the hall. I whirled around and raised the gun, even as his silhouette filled the kitchen doorway.
The NC gun doesn’t make any noise when you fire it. I didn’t realize that at the time, though, because just as I pulled the trigger, the lightning came again, striking so close behind the house that there was no pause before the thunder. The kitchen filled up with sound and light, so bright that the janitor himself seemed to glow like a real angel, an angel with a flaming dagger in one hand and a sparkling wire halo in the other. I screamed, and he screamed too, and by the time the brightness failed he was already falling.
In the dark I heard his body hit the floor. I lowered my aim and pulled the trigger again, but this time there was nothing, not even a click.
The rain stopped. The thunder and lightning moved off, and after a while the power came back on. I could see him, then, sprawled on his back in the kitchen doorway, not moving. He was just a man now; his eyes were glassy, and he had a new expression on his face.
He looked surprised.
Now, this next part may be a little hard to believe.
Really.
You know normally, if you shoot an intruder in your house, especially a serial killer, the first thing you do afterwards is call the police.
Right.
Or just run like hell to the neighbors’.
Right.
Right. But I didn’t do either of those things.
What did you do?
I got sleepy. I mean, the guy was dead—I kicked him a couple times to make sure—so it’s not like notifying the cops was urgent anymore. And now that I knew I was safe, I just really felt like lying down for a while. I thought, my aunt and uncle will be home in a few hours, and we can deal with the aftermath then.
So I went upstairs to my room. I barricaded the door with my dresser—just in case—and lay down. I slipped the NC gun under my pillow. I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, it was morning. My bedroom door was wide open, and I could hear my aunt making breakfast in the kitchen. I got up and went downstairs, and stood in the empty doorway where the janitor’s body had been.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” my aunt said. “Would you like bacon with your eggs?”
The porch door was open too, and I could see my uncle out back, walking around the remains of a lightning-blasted tree.
“Hold off on the bacon,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I ran upstairs and looked under my pillow.
The gun was gone too, wasn’t it?
Yeah. But there was something else in its place. A coin. A gift from the pistol fairy, maybe.
It was the size of a quarter, but thicker and heavier. It looked like gold. It had the same image on both sides, a hollow pyramid with a glowing eye inside of it, you know, kind of like the capstone from the pyramid on the dollar bill. Running around the rim of the coin was a three-word slogan: OMNES MUNDUM FACIMUS.
My Latin is rusty. Mundum means “world”?
Yeah. I got a Latin dictionary from the school library and worked it out. Omnes is “all of us,” and facimus, that’s “create” or “make,” so omnes mundum facimus is like, “We all make the world.” That’s how it translates; as for what it meant, though, that was trickier. It was a puzzle, see? A sort of aptitude test, like the hidden message in the crossword, only much harder, so it took me a lot longer to get it.
How much longer?
Twenty-two years.
white room (ii)