But it came out.
The cop lifted the barrel of the pistol and put it under his chin. His eyes were squeezed shut.
Crow raised his fist, and the harder he squeezed the stone the more power he had in his arm.
“I’m sorry…” Crow said, mumbling the two words through lips bubbling with spit.
The cop’s finger slipped inside the curled trigger guard.
“I’m so sorry…”
Crow threw the stone at the same moment the cop pulled the trigger.
The stone struck the mirror a microsecond before the firing pin punched a hole in the world.
There was a sound. It wasn’t the smash of mirror glass and it wasn’t the bang of a pistol. It was something vast and black and impossible and it was the loudest sound Crow would ever hear. It was so monstrously loud that it broke the world.
Shards of mirror glass razored through the air around Crow, slashing him, digging deep into his flesh, gouging burning wounds in his mind. As each one cut him, the world shifted around Crow, buffeting him into different places, into different lives.
He saw Terry. The adult Terry, but now he was even older than the one who had been laughing with Val. It was crazy weird, but somehow Crow knew that this was as real as anything in his world.
Terry’s face was lined with pain, his body crisscrossed with tiny cuts. Pieces of a broken mirror lay scattered around him. Each separate piece reflected Terry, but none of them were the Terry who stood in the midst of the debris. Each reflection was a distortion, a funhouse twist of Terry’s face. Some were laughing — harsh and loud and fractured. Some were weeping. Some were glazed and catatonic. And one, a single large piece, showed a face that was more monster than man. Lupine and snarling and so completely wrong. The Terry who stood above the broken pieces screamed and if there was any sanity left in his mind it did not shine out through his blue eyes. Crow saw a version of his best friend who was completely and irretrievably lost.
Terry screamed and screamed, and then he spun around, ran straight across the room and threw himself headfirst out of the window. Crow fell with him. Together they screamed all the way down to the garden flagstones.
The impact shoved Crow into another place.
He was there with Val. They were in the cornfields behind Val’s house. A black rain hammered down, the sky veined with red lightning. Val was older… maybe forty years old. She ran through the corn, skidding, slipping in the mud. Running toward a figure that lay sprawled on the ground.
“Dad!” screamed Val.
Mr. Guthrie lay on his stomach, his face pressed into the muck. In the brightness of the lightning, Crow could see a neat round bullet hole between his shoulder blades, the cloth washed clean of blood by the downpour.
“No!” shrieked Val. She dropped to her knees and clawed her father into her arms. His big old body resisted her, fighting her with limpness and weight and sopping clothes, but eventually Val found the strength to turn him onto his back.
“Daddy… Daddy…?”
His face was totally slack, streaked with mud that clumped on his mustache and caught in his bushy eyebrows.
Val wiped the mud off his face and shook him very gently.
“Daddy… please …”
The lightning never stopped, and the thunder bellowed insanely. A freak eddy of wind brought sounds from the highway. The high, lonely wail of a police siren, but Crow knew that the cops would be too late. They were already too late.
Crow spun out of that moment and into another. There were police sirens here, too, and the flashing red and blue lights, but no rain. This was a different place, a different moment. A different horror.
He was there.
He was a cop.
He was sober. Was he younger or older? He prayed that this was him as an older man, just as Val and Terry had been older.
Older. Sober.
Alive.
But the moment was not offering any mercies.
Stick was there. He was on his knees and Crow was bent over him, forcing handcuffs onto his friend’s wrists. They were both speaking, saying the same things over and over again.
“What did you do? Christ, Stick, what did you do?”
“I’m sorry,” Stick said. “I’m sorry.”
On the porch of the house a female cop and an EMT were supporting a ten year old girl toward a waiting ambulance. The girl looked a lot like Janie and Kim, Stick’s sisters, but Crow knew that she wasn’t. He knew that this girl was Stick’s daughter. Her face was bruised. Her clothes were torn. There was blood on her thighs.
“What did you do, Stick, what did you do?”
“I’m sorry,” wept Stick. His mouth bled from where Crow had punched him. “I’m sorry.”
Crow saw other images.
People he did not know. Some dressed in clothes from long ago, some dressed like everyone else. He stepped into sick rooms and cells, he crawled through the shattered windows of wrecked cars and staggered coughing through the smoke of burning houses.
Crow squeezed his eyes shut and clapped his hands over his ears. He screamed and screamed.
The house exhaled its liquor stink of breath at him.
-8-
Crow heard Val yell. Not the woman, but the girl.
He opened his eyes and saw the Morgan silver dollar leave her outstretched hand. It flew past him and he turned to see it strike the mirror. The same mirror he’d shattered with his lucky stone.
For just a moment he caught that same image of her kneeling in the rain, but then the glass detonated.
Then he was running.
He wasn’t conscious of when he was able to run. When he was allowed to run.
But he was running.
They were all running.
As Crow scrambled for the door he cast a single desperate look back to see that the mirror was undamaged by either stone or coin. All of the restraints that had earlier held his limbs were gone, as if the house, glutted on his pain, ejected the table scraps.
And so they ran.
Terry shoved Stick so hard that it knocked his ball-cap off of his head. No one stooped to pick it up. They crowded into the vestibule and burst out onto the porch and ran for their bikes. They were all screaming.
They screamed as they ran and they screamed as they got on their bikes.
Their screams dwindled as the house faded behind its screen of withered trees.
The four of them tore down the dirt road and burst onto the access road, and turned toward town, pumping as hard as they could. They raced as hard and as fast as they could.
Only when they reached the edge of the pumpkin patch on the far side of the Guthrie farm did they slow and finally stop.
Panting, bathed in sweat, trembling, they huddled over their bikes, looking down at the frames, at their sneakered feet, at the dirt.
Not at each other.
Crow did not know if the others had seen the same things he’d seen. Or perhaps their own horrors.
Beside him, Terry seemed to be the first to recover. He reached into his pocket for his comb, but it wasn’t there. He took a deep breath and let it out, then dragged trembling fingers through his hair.
“It must be dinner time,” he said, and he turned his bike toward town and pedaled off. Terry did not look back.
Stick dragged his forearm across his face and looked at the smear, just as he had done before. Was he looking for tears? Or for the blood that had leaked from the corners of his mouth when the older Crow had punched him? A single sob broke in his chest, and he shook his head. Crow thought he saw Stick mouth those same two terrible words. I’m sorry.