Free CRYERS by Geoff North Page B

dull purple light spilled out from the tiny space within.
Lawson stepped through and the others followed.
    There was barely enough room for
the four to stand. They huddled around a single chair in the middle. Framed
pictures hung on the walls. They weren’t the hand-drawn kind that Cobe was used
to seeing. These were real scenes capturing moments of life in the briefest
amount of time. He had seen a few in the yellowed pages of his parents’ old
books. His ma said they were called foto-grafs. Cobe wondered why the pictures
here were all of the same thing—a fat orange cat. One showed it eating from a
bowl, in another it was stretched out sleeping, content to the point of
appearing dead. A third picture showed it in the arms of a little girl, its
face squeezed uncomfortably against her pink cheek. The girl was blonde, her
hair tightly bound in two knots that jutted out from either side of her head.
    Trot was on his hands and knees. “These
are pretty.” He was fiddling with a couple of furry, colored balls on the
floor. He swatted them playfully into the corner. One of them bounced off the
wall and landed inside an empty glass bowl. The same bowl from the foto-graf.
    “What’s this?” Willem picked a piece of wrinkled paper off the chair
and looked at the words printed in pink, crude letters. He raised his eyebrows
and handed it to his brother to read aloud.
    “ Dear Smudge—I
will never ever forget you. You are my very bestest frend and I’m sorry I got
so sik. Mommy and Daddy says you can come with me! Sorry you have to get so
cold. It will be so much fun when wer back together. I luv you.—Amanda”
    He placed the letter back on the chair, hoping the
lawman would elaborate further. Lawson didn’t say a word. The big man was
staring at a three-foot long gray cylinder mounted into the wall on its side. Bundles
of colored ropes ran out from either end and disappeared into the wall. Cobe
didn’t know him well, but he could read the emotion well-enough in his steely gray
eyes. The lawman was afraid .
    Willem stepped in front of the cylinder and looked through
a slit of glass window three inches wide by an inch high, set in the middle. It
fogged over from the inside and the boy saw something orange rub past. Seconds
later, a wet, black nose pressed against the thick glass and Willem saw teeth
gnashing. “Gawdamn! There’s a cat inside!” He saw one of its eyes next—solid
pink with a pinprick of black pupil. Willem made a short, high-pitched noise
that sounded more like a yelp, and thumped back into his brother. “No! It ain’t
no cat… I don’t know what that thing
is.”
    Cobe looked next, and, even after being forewarned,
had to stifle his screaming. The eye was still staring up, unblinking and pink.
It saw Cobe and winked away. Yellow teeth appeared, sharp and biting. The
animal was howling, but he could only hear the dull clicking and scraping sound
of teeth against glass. It left small streaks of frenzied saliva behind.
    “I was the one what woke it up,” Lawson said. “See
those three buttons?” Cobe looked away from the glass and saw them in a single
line under the window. The first was white, the second red, and the last one
was green. “I pressed the white button, and that voice we heard earlier told me
to wait twelve hours while the thing inside woke up. I tried the red one next
and was warned it would only take another minute or so.”
    “And the green one?”
    Lawson shook his head at the boy. “Didn’t touch it.
Figured it might pop another door open and let the damn thing out. Even armed
as I was, I didn’t want to take the risk.”
    Cobe could hardly blame him. Willem and Trot had
already stepped back out into the hallway. Lawson stood beside the door, his
hand back at his holster, ready to leave next. “You said you were the one that
woke it up…when was that?”
    “First time I was ever here; the same time as when I
shot the howler dead over at that desk.”
    “How long