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“I want you to go open that front door. If it’s locked, the lock won’t hold. Move as gentle as you can. Don’t startle the fellow we brought along with us. ”
“Yes, ma’am. ”
He swallowed hard and left the group.
Moving with exaggerated slowness, as if to show that he was utterly harmless—never mind the ax—and that his task was wholly uninteresting to any creatures that may lurk in the fog … he approached the jail’s door.
Rector could see the doors from his vantage point pressed against Angeline’s back. Although someone had chained them years ago, the chain looked about as strong as wet twine. Eaten up with rust and moisture, it crumbled when Zeke gave it a tug and clattered to the ground, disintegrating into a puff of damp red dust and a pile of rubble.
“Sasquatch won’t follow us inside,” Houjin speculated.
Angeline told him, “You don’t know that. ”
Zeke disappeared over the lockup’s threshold. Angeline nudged Houjin and Rector to do likewise. Together they crept over the last of the rubble, Houjin holding forth the fish like a talisman, as if it could protect him—and Rector thought maybe it could. If Rector were a sasquatch, faced with the prospect of eating a boy or eating a fish, he believed he’d go for the fish first.
So he did what Angeline told him and stumbled backwards, forward, spinning slowly as they calibrated themselves to move together. And one by one—Rector first, then Angeline, then Houjin, who stayed at the threshold with the fish a moment longer—they stepped inside.
Darkness washed over them all, blinding them until their eyes adjusted.
“Huey, get in here. Keep showing him the fish, that’s right. Keep coming. I’ve got your back. He won’t hurt you—just bring him along. I’ve got my net. ”
“He isn’t coming. ”
“He’ll come. ”
But he didn’t. Not at first.
He camped outside the jailhouse and—as its occupants soon realized, with no small degree of nervousness—he peeked in the windows and ran away. Then again. And a third time. A fourth. He lingered, skulked, and mulled the whole thing over. The fish. The jail. The four small things inside.
Zeke watched for a bit, but as the sasquatch contemplated his next move, the younger boy left the team and wandered back into the gloom. The bland, uniform, brown-black shadows were cut only by slats of weak sunlight, filtered too many times to be stronger than a candle in the overwhelming darkness. Zeke slowly chased them anyway, following the little rays as far as they’d take him.
While Angeline and Houjin watched the entrance and waited for company, Rector watched Zeke, then joined him.
“What are you doing?” he asked, whispering without knowing why. The place felt like a graveyard, but that wasn’t right, was it? No one had died here. Even Maynard hadn’t died until he got back to town, or that’s how the story went.
“Just looking,” Zeke murmured. “Never been here before, but I heard so much about it. ”
His hands trailed along cabinets and cubbyholes for mail; they dragged furrows in the dust along a solid plank desk covered with brittle scraps of curling paper. A metal stamp was on the floor. Rector found it by accident, kicking it with the edge of his boot. He retrieved it and examined it.
Zeke asked, “What’s that?”
And Rector said, “Looks like something for making dates, over and over again. ” He placed it beside a long-dried-out ink pad. “The kind of thing you use on official papers. Like birth certificates. Or court papers,” he added, thinking that it was more likely the prison processed felons than babies.
“Oh. ”
But Zeke’s attention was already elsewhere.
He puttered over to a board on the wall, about the size of the blackboard back at the orphan’s home. It was covered in rows of hooks, and each hook held an iron ring set with a single key. A small plaque beneath each key indicated which cell door it fit. Each of the keys was too corroded for anything but looking at, so Zeke didn’t molest them.
And at the board’s far left, a single hook was empty.
Beneath it was a grimy plaque that read, “Master set. ”
He touched the empty hook with one gloved finger, then tugged it as if it would grant him a wish. “This is the one,” he said. “The master set. Maynard took the keys, and he went…” Zeke turned on his heel and disappeared down the corridor that ran between the two rows of cells. He continued. “Down here. He went down here. And one by one, he opened the cells. ”
It was true, the doors were open. Some of them hung sadly on their tracks, ready to fall over if anyone so much as breathed on them. But back in the past, they had indeed been unlocked—and thrown aside so the occupants could escape.
Zeke left the only footprints.
