Free The Glittering World by Robert Levy

K-9 unit searched the area where Beaton and Whitley were last seen.
    The ground search also turned up no clues. A door-to-door canvass is under way.
    Michael’s heartbroken mother, Yvonne Whitley, along with Gavina’s mother, Tessa Beaton, remained at the Portland Road home on Thursday night surrounded by friends and family members and hoping for good news. Both families are residents of the Starling Cove Friendship Outpost and Artists Colony, a communal living collective.
    “I’m devastated,” Ms. Whitley said. “This is a feeling no one would ever want to have. It’s not like these kids to wander off, so we’re just really scared for them. We’ll keep hoping and praying every minute they’re gone.”
    “You’ll know her if you see her,” Ms. Beaton said of her sociable daughter, and added that she has a distinctive birthmark on her right shoulder in the shape of a star (see photo at right).
    Mrs. MacKenzie was too distraught to comment.
    Blue flipped forward and found another headline: ONE WEEK LATER, STILL HOPE FOR MISSING CHILDREN.
    The sound of creaking footsteps on the porch shocked him to attention, and he quickly shoved the binder into the crook of his arm. He looked up at the discolored ceiling, the crumbling plaster, anywhere but at the album.
    “So, that’s about everything,” the agent said from the other side of the screen door. “Still want to sell it?”
    Blue nodded and stood, not really listening; he was in another place now. The unwanted knowledge seeped into his pores, traveled his veins, coiled around his stomach, where it contracted and clenched like a fist. A flood of awful scenarios washed over him: he and the other child must have been abducted, or otherwise had some sort of ordeal, the slate of his memory erased by whatever horrors he’d endured. He felt a sudden and overwhelming sadness, not for himself exactly but rather for the boy he’d been, the boy who had to forget. Also for the little girl, Gavina; who knew what had become of her? Maybe he would learn from the clippings. And now that he began imagining what might have happened, he could never unconjure the images of violation.
    I don’t have time for this shit. It was just too much. Not when his business was falling apart, when there was so much else to push through. Not now. Not now.
    “You want to take a minute?” Stanley said, studying him through the screen door. “I can wait outside if you’d like . . .”
    “No. No, that’s okay. I’m ready.” The agent disappeared down the porch, and Blue went to follow him. But then he stopped, and turned.
    Directly facing him was a four-paneled door, paint peeling and padlocked, with three two-by-fours nailed across the frame. The basement , he thought, the space a distant half memory. Something inside him—his rib cage? his heart?—reached out for the tarnished brass knob, like metal filings to a magnet.
    “Excuse me,” Blue said through the porch screen. “Do you happen to have the key to this door?”

    It was only after prying the boards off with a crowbar Stanley had fetched from his Suburban that they found the padlock key on the agent’s keychain. As soon as the door opened, the smell hit Blue at once: an earthy, fetid stench, mixed with another scent, a heavy musk that was not altogether unpleasant. The pungent blend of rotten vegetation and heady perfume was jarring, and was touched with a tangy iron flavor, like blood. It was oddly familiar. The agent pleaded a bad knee and headed back outside, while Blue lingered at the top of the steps and stared for a long while down the open throat of the stairway.
    “Hello?” he called into the dark void, almost expecting a response. His footsteps echoed as he started down the stairs, feeling his way with one hand on the splintered plank railing while the other searched in vain for a light switch, the black album of photos and clippings clasped beneath his elbow. As he descended it struck him that he was in a waking