The Moonlit Mind: A Tale of Suspense

13

December 3, the last night of Crispin’s thirteenth year, his fourteenth ahead of him if he can survive it …

Boy, girl, and dog take the elevator down from the fourth to the second floor where, among other temptations to the wallet, waits the toy department.

Unable to be price-competitive with discounters like Toys R Us, Broderick’s stocks exotic and expensive items not found elsewhere but still moves the more ordinary items at Christmas by making of the toy department a wonderland of highly decorated trees, animated figures, snow scenes, and ten thousand twinkling lights. The space given to this department triples with the season, and many people in the city consider it a tradition to visit the display after their children have moved away from home and even if they don’t have grandchildren to spoil.

Even seen by flashlight, with the leaping reindeer stilled and the capering elves frozen in place in the fake snow, this world of toys is nevertheless impressive. This year, the marvel at the center of the department, the thing that Amity has brought him here to see, is a scale model of the department store.

Broderick’s has commissioned nothing so ambitious as a quarter-scale rendition. Instead, it is forty-eighth-scale, one quarter of an inch to one foot in the real structure. Nevertheless, the model proves to be sufficiently immense to delight children and adults as well. Crispin is a child, Amity an adolescent, both of them adults by virtue of their suffering, and they are charmed. Even Harley rises up with his forepaws on the support table and pants with apparent admiration. The detailing is not as impressive as the obsessive workmanship in the miniature room at Theron Hall, though it is so well done that it’s magical in its own right.

This approximately eight-foot-square reduction of Broderick’s is not the sum of the display. Instead of a glass globe, it stands within a thick Plexiglas case that is filled with a mixture of water and something else, Amity knows not what. She does know where to find the switch that operates it, however, and when the tank lights, it also fills with falling snow that settles slowly through the fluid before being recycled to the top by a pump.

As the night now casts snow down upon the true Broderick’s, so snow falls upon the model, and the real and the fantastical are one. They are always one, of course, but seldom so obviously as here and now, when the modelmakers’ creation and the Creation of which the modelmakers are themselves a part are synchronized to suggest, inescapably and powerfully, that the world is potentially a place of harmony if only harmony is wanted and sought.

They stand in silence awhile, and then Amity says, “Seems to be a sign, don’t you think?”

Crispin doesn’t reply.

“The store has never done this before.”

He keeps his silence.

“The three cats you saw in that other miniature may still be there.”

“Two cats. It was my brother who said he saw three, but in the real house, not in the model. Anyway, they fled from the window seat as I looked in at them. I never saw those cats again.”

“That was your last day in Theron Hall. You never had a chance to see them again.”

“I didn’t understand what they were. I probably never will.”

“They’re unfinished business,” Amity says.

Snow falls and snow falls.

“The store has never done this before,” she reminds him.

Broderick’s stands here within Broderick’s, and both turn with the turning world.

“We’ll have a birthday dinner tomorrow,” Amity says. “And then we’ll consult your cards.”

“I don’t know.”

“You do know. You could have left this city long ago, gone far, someplace they’d never look for you.”

“I think their kind is everywhere. No place to hide.”

“Whether that’s true or not, you’ve stayed in this city because something calls you back to that house.”

“Something that wants me dead.”

“Maybe so. But something else, too.”

“What would that be?” he wonders.

“I don’t know. But you do. Deep down, you know. Your heart knows what your mind can’t quite comprehend.”

Snow falls and snow falls.