CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness Read Online Free

mouth . . . to complain? . . . to ask questions? . . . to disagree? He never found out. There was an urgency to the way that the Girl’s hand tightly held on to his, an urgency that refused to be questioned. He shut his mouth and closed his eyes. And he counted, abandoning himself entirely to the string of numbers. One. Two. Three . . .
    . . . Two hundred! Slowly, like the Girl had instructed him to, he opened his eyes—and found that he could see; not clearly, but he could make out the shape of some nearby buildings and details of their close surroundings, even though there were no lampposts in sight or any other visible light source to pierce the dense smog. His eyes had adjusted to the slight amount of sunlight that diffused through the grey atmosphere.
    They were in a dead-end alley, some three buildings deep and one wide. Across from the wall on which the Boy and the Girl were leaning, cylinders pumped out grey smog: some in quick currents, others in slow streams, others still in irregular explosions like old diesel engines struggling to get started, and still others in steady bursts, as if they were obeying the beat of a military march. The cylinders were of all sizes, some as small as household plumbing, others as big as a patio door. The Boy couldn’t see as far as the roof of the middle building. It was so high it seemed to meld with the smog. The surface of its wall was spotted with all sizes of cylinders, sometimes in thick clumps, sometimes spread out haphazardly. The building to the left, the one closest to the dead end, was only two storeys high, and a huge cylinder, spewing a thick slow stream of smog, sprouted out from the centre of its wall. The building to the right, where the alley opened out, was three or four times as high as the short one and only had one small cylinder out of which smoke leaked out slowly. The Boy could just barely make out the jutting stone that bordered its roof.
    The Girl pulled him up, and they left the alley.
    Again, the Boy was struck by the definite purpose in the Girl’s steps. She seemed to know where she was going. But how could she? And where did she think she was leading them? Back where they’d come from? To the Kid? How could she know where the Kid was in this place? Was all of this a plan the Girl and the Kid had concocted earlier, before the Boy had met them at the Girl’s house? Was this a prank to scare him, to make fun of him? He wished he could voice these questions, but both his potential stutter and the Girl’s stern command of silence stayed his voice.
    They hadn’t walked far when a loud, familiar voice boomed from behind them, “There you are!” And there was Cop Carla, as always, right on their heels. The Boy had never been so grateful for her unshakeable presence. Cop Carla would get them all out of this horrible place that smelled like an old, unventilated garage.

    The Girl screamed, “No!” Her grip on the Boy’s hand was so tight that he thought his bones would break. She started to run away from the police officer. The Boy was taken by surprise by the Girl’s abrupt movements, and they both stumbled to the ground, scraping their hands on the asphalt.
    Again, the Girl screamed, “No!” She reached for the Boy. “Don’t ever let go of me, or they’ll see you!”
    The Boy had no idea what the Girl was talking about.
    Cop Carla knelt down. “Are you kids alright?” She furrowed her brow. “What were you thinking? Coming in here! This is the most dangerous stunt you’ve pulled all summer!” She squinted quizzically at the children and asked, looking the Boy right in the eye, “Isn’t the Kid with you? I saw all three of you brats run in here.”
    “I-I-I ha-he d-d-did we—” The Boy erupted in tears, overwhelmed by the shame of his impediment, the intimidating presence of the adult, and the fear his surroundings inspired.
    In a menacing tone, the Girl answered, “We got separated. Okay? We don’t know where the Kid is.