I go back to the door and throw one shoulder against it and it does not give at all, just shudders and throws me backward and I land in the hay with my broken ribs screaming. I struggle up and try it again, and the pain is even worse—and again—and again. I imagine Cortez back in Rotary, working on the sealed floor, while I work on this chained barn door, the two of us pushing and pushing, and wouldn’t it be something if he was somehow on the opposite side of this door, and I’ll smash through just as he smashes through and we’ll tumble into each other like slapstick comedians.
I turn away from the door, hunched over and heaving breaths, my sweat dripping from my forehead into the dirt and the hay. Houdini meanwhile is utterly outclassed by the mouse. It runs right by his nose and he watches it, his wet eyes flickering as the thing scampers past.
*
I climb slowly, wincing with each step, my rib ends jabbing at tender spots in my lungs or intestines. Then I’m poking my head up over the lip of the loft and what’s up here is a private universe, the second hidden paradise I’ve stumbled upon in two days. Four bales of hay arranged into a semicircle around a three-legged wooden stool. Milking stool, some old part of my memory announces. That right there is a milking stool. I manage to wrestle my ungainly battered body the rest of the way up, to examine the small transistor radio seated on the stool. A plastic metal rectangle with a circular mesh face over the speaker, antenna like a stiffened tail, jutting up at a sharp angle.
I lift the radio, feel the weight of batteries inside. Flick it on—nothing—it’s a paperweight. I switch it off. I set it back down.
I can see a little better up here; I’m closer to the row of tiny roof windows, and the moon is getting higher and brighter. On the hay-strewn floor of the loft, nestled facedown beside one of the bales, is a small handheld mirror. I lift it and examine my face in the smudged and cloudy glass: a haggard and gaunt old man, eyes red-rimmed and sunken. My mustache is overgrown, the rest of my beard coming in uneven, like wild grass on a cliff. I look crazy, lycanthropic. I lower the looking glass.
There are cigarette butts in a little wooden cup. Like a dice cup, from a board game. I tip the butts out into my palm. Store bought, generic, hand-rolled. Months old. Dried out by summer heat. Stale and crumbling.
I take a look back down at the main floor. Houdini is asleep. No sign of the mouse. I’m the only one left awake, way up high; surveying my domain—the suffering king of the spooky old barn.
I settle down on one of the bales of hay, fight fiercely against a fresh urge of tiredness. A dead radio, a bunch of old smokes, a smudged mirror. This was someone’s hideout, someone’s private place, sometime not too long ago. A young Amish girl by herself in the darkness of the barn, smoking secret cigarettes and listening to forbidden music from somewhere far away.
I can’t help it, I’m picturing this kid looking like Nico, like Nico as she was in high school, doing her own sneaking off, her own romantic dreaming, sipping Grandfather’s eye-watering spirits out in the barn. It’s like what Cortez said, about me, about the girl with the tiger problem, everything reminds you of your sister.
I have an idea, a terrible idea, but as soon as I think of it I know that it’s what I’m going to do. The only thing I can do, really, the only option available.
There was a fire in the jail. Creekbed Penitentiary. The quick unbearable story that Billy told me. The prisoners were getting restless and desperate because the world had abandoned them, left them trapped, waiting forgotten until the end.
My terrible idea is radiant and bright.
I cannot stay in here for three days, growing hungry and going mad with waiting. I cannot suffer four nights and three days and then still die not knowing where she is or why.
I have to do this next thing, and whatever happens as a result is just what happens, and that’s all there is to it.
“How did you light them, kiddo?” I ask the phantom of the girl in the hayloft. “How did you light your smokes?”
It doesn’t take long to find them. Black twisted stumps of matches like tiny little burned-down trees, surrounding the dirt beneath the bale. The rest of the matches are close by, two half-used-up books tucked together beneath one of the legs of the stool. The matchbooks are as old as the cigarettes, the sticks crumbling and breaking. But I try one, and it lights right away.
I stare at the dancing match light until it burns my fingers and I blow it out. Maybe this is rash. Maybe it’s all a hallucination, maybe I’ve dreamed up the whole thing: an issue in the prefrontal cortex, neurons firing wild. Nico is fine. I’m fine. I was given an early retirement from the Concord force, late last year, because I was succumbing to some genetic predisposition for mental illness, driving my department Impala up onto the sidewalk, screaming to strangers about an interstellar object the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs.
Not so, though. It isn’t so.
It’s out there. Closer, now. Closer than the sun; closer than Venus. Our nearest neighbor, the author of our destruction. Accelerating in accordance with Kepler’s third law: the closer it gets, the faster it comes. A ball player hurtling for home, a horse breaking into a gallop when it smells the barn.