“Look at that weather. Hell’s bells!” The colonel strode forth to hone his fine hatchet nose on the cool wind. “Don’t you love autumn, boy? Fine, fine day! Bight?”
He turned to look down into the boy’s pale face.
“Why, son, you look as if your last friend left and your dog died. What’s wrong? School starts next week?”
“Yep.”
“H
alloween not coming fast enough?”
“Still six weeks off. Might as well be a year. You ever notice, colonel....” The boy heaved an even greater sigh, staring out at the autumn town. “Not much ever happens around here?”
“Why, it’s Labor Day tomorrow, big parade, seven cars, the mayor, maybe fireworks—er.” The colonel came to a dead stop, not impressed with his grocery list. “How old are you, Charlie?”
“Thirteen, almost.”
“Things do tend to run down, come thirteen.” The colonel rolled his eyes inward on the rickety data inside his skull. “Come to a dead halt when you’re fourteen. Might as well die, sixteen. End of the world, seventeen. Things only start up again, come twenty or beyond. Meanwhile, Charlie, what do we do to survive until noon this very morn before Labor Day?”
“If anyone knows, it’s you, colonel,” said Charlie.
“Charlie,” said the old man, flinching from the boy’s clear stare, “I can move politicians big as prize hogs, shake the Town Hall skeletons, make locomotives run backward uphill. But small boys on long autumn weekends, glue in their head, and a bad case of Desperate Empties? Well…”
Colonel Stonesteel eyed the clouds, gauged the future.
“Charlie,” he said, at last. “I am moved by your condition, touched by your lying there on the railroad tracks waiting for a train that will never come. How’s this? I’ll bet you six Baby Ruth candy bars against your mowing my lawn, that Green Town, upper Illinois, population five thousand sixty-two people, one thousand dogs, will be changed forever, changed for the best, by God, sometime in the next miraculous twenty-four hours. That sound good? A bet?”
“Gosh!” Charlie, riven, seized the old man’s hand and pumped it. “A bet! Colonel Stonesteel, I knew you could do it!”
“It ain’t done yet, son. But look there. The town’s the Bed Sea. I order it to part. Gangway!”
The colonel marched, Charlie ran, into the house. “Here we are, Charles, the junkyard or the grave yard. Which?” The colonel sniffed at one door leading down to raw basement earth, another leading up to dry timber attic.
“Well—”
The attic ached with a sudden flood of wind, like an old man dying in his sleep. The colonel yanked the door wide on autumn whispers, high storms trapped and shivering in the beams.
“Hear that, Charlie? What’s it say?”
“Well—”
A gust of wind blew the colonel up the dark stairs like so much flimsy chaff.
“Time, mostly, it says, and oldness and memory, lots of things. Dust, and maybe pain. Listen to those beams! Let the wind shift the timber skeleton on a fine fell day, and you truly got time-talk. Burnings and ashes, Bombay snuffs, tomb-yard flowers gone to ghost—”
“Boy, colonel,” gasped Charlie, climbing, “you oughta write for Top Notch Story Magazine!”
“Did once! Got rejected. Here we are!”
And there indeed they were, in a place with no calendar, no month, no days, no year, but only vast spider shadows and glints of tight from collapsed chandeliers lying about like great tears in the dust.
“Boy!” cried Charlie, scared, and glad of it.
“Chuck!” said the colonel. “You ready for me to birth you a real, live, half-dead sockdolager, on-the-spot mystery?”
“Ready!”
The colonel swept charts, maps, agate marbles, glass eyes, cobwebs, and sneezes of dust off a table, then rolled up his sleeves.