Beyond the Pale by Mark Anthony Read Free Book Online

into nothing.
    The moment shattered. Travis reeled away from his friend. The blazing fire had vanished, and now chill sweat trickled down his sides. Although he dreaded what he would see—crisped flesh and blackened bones—he looked down at his throbbing hand. The skin was smooth and undamaged. However, all that was left of the hair on the backs of his knuckles was a fine gray ash.
    He looked up at Jack with a mixture of fear and wonder.
    “Go, my friend,” Jack said. “May the gods walk with you.”
    Travis shook his head in dull incomprehension. Anotherimpact shook the cellar door. The thick wooden bar cracked with a sound like breaking bones.
    “Go, Travis!” Gone now was the kind and slightly absent-minded old man Travis had known for seven years. In his place was an imposing stranger: face sharp, voice commanding, eyes vivid as lightning.
    This time Travis did as he was told.
    He dived into the cramped tunnel. Cobwebs clung to his hands and face. With a cry he tore them to shreds. From behind came a crash as the cellar door shattered. A high-pitched sound crackled on the air, like dry ice on metal. Travis ran hunched through the tunnel, propelled by terror. Seconds later the passage dead-ended. For a panicked moment he thought he was trapped, then his groping fingers found the wooden rungs in the blackness. He clambered up the ladder, threw open a trapdoor, and found himself in the cluttered garden shed. He stumbled out the shed’s door and into the frigid night.
    The antique shop loomed thirty feet away. Light—hot and brilliant as a burning strip of magnesium—flickered behind the windows. Travis took a staggering step toward the antique shop. At that moment every one of the shop’s windows exploded outward in a spray of glittering glass. The shock wave struck Travis like a clap of thunder, threw him to the ground, and knocked the breath from his lungs in a grunt of pain.
    He gritted his teeth and struggled to his feet. Now the flames that poured out of the antique shop’s windows were red and orange. Fire, real fire. The place was going to burn.
    Travis whispered a single word. “Jack.…”
    Then he turned and ran into the night.

6.
    Just north of town, the billboard faced blindly into the moonlight.
    The highway was empty, a silent river of blacktop cutting across the high-country plain. The night was still. Stars glittered in the purple-black sky, and added their glow to that ofthe crescent moon. Somewhere a coyote warbled a mournful sōng that would have spoken of cold rushing water, of old splintered bones, of lonely mountains stretching to the end of the world, had anyone been there to listen to it.
    The moon brushed the sharp horizon. That was when it began. Like a drop of water on a hot iron skillet, a spark of blue light skittered across the face of the old billboard. The spark burned itself into a cinder of darkness and was gone. Another pinprick danced across the billboard. Before this one dimmed another spark joined it, and another, and another. In moments the entire face of the billboard sparkled with blue incandescence.
    A faint hum buzzed on the air. As the sound grew louder, a strip of the faded cigarette advertisement peeled itself off the surface of the billboard and fell to the ground. Sparks clustered like blue fireflies around the edges of the hole left by the chunk of old paper. Bathed in their sapphire glow, a patch of the picture beneath showed through—a jewellike fragment of a wild landscape.
    Winking like tiny eyes, the sparks spread outward. More strips of paper curled themselves into tight coils and dropped to the ground, then still more, to reveal the long-hidden image beneath.

7.
    People in the Emergency Department always told Grace Beckett she had a good grip on reality.
    If they meant she could pull hot chunks of car shrapnel from the chest of a screaming motorcyclist without blinking … if they meant she could perform a caesarean on a seventeen-year-old mother killed