Mystery

Tom wheeled wide around the corner, and a block away saw the continuous stream of vehicles that filled Calle Burleigh. The haze of dust had vanished into the purple dark, and headlights, bicycle lamps, and shining lanterns moved along with the traffic like a swarm of attendant fireflies. An unhappy horse whinnied and stamped a foot.

One of the boys pounded around the corner, and, far sooner than Tom had expected, the other followed. Another glance over his shoulder showed him that the skeletal teenager had managed to run past the fat one and was now only some fifteen yards behind. He was lifting his arms and legs high in a natural runner’s lope, the fish knife back in his hand, and he was still gaining on Tom. He had been so sure of being able to outrun Tom that he had pretended to get winded and drop out. The arrogance of this charade terrified Tom nearly as much as the knife: it was as if the boy could never be defeated. In a moment or two he would close in on Tom, and by then it would be so dark that the people leaning out of their windows, curious about all this running, would not be able to see what would happen next.

A stitch like a hot sword entered Tom’s side.

At the corner of Auer and Calle Burleigh he could have turned right or left and tried to escape by running up or down Calle Burleigh. Either way, he thought, the skinny boy would get him. The clattering footsteps were so close to him now that he was afraid to look back. When he reached the corner, he simply kept running straight ahead.

Tom flew off the curb and held out his arms as he plunged into the traffic. Horns instantly blew all about him, and a man yelled something incomprehensible. Tom thought that his pursuer, already almost at the curb, shouted too. He dodged around the rear tire of a high black bicycle, and was aware of a horse rearing somewhere off to his left. Another bicycle, virtually at his elbow, tilted over to one side like a trick in the circus, but did not right itself and continued tilting until, with unnatural slowness, its rider was two feet from the ground, then a foot. The rider’s grey hair flew back from his forehead, and his face expressed only the deep concentration of a man trying to think his way out of a particularly interesting puzzle, as his shoulder struck the ground. Then his bicycle slid straight out from beneath him. A horse the size of a mountain made of lather and hair appeared directly in front of Tom. He ducked to the left. The panicked horse bounded forward, and the wheels of its cab passed over the grey-haired man’s body. Tom heard the thump of collisions and the screech of metal all around him; then an empty illuminated space magically opened before him, and he sprang forward into this empty space. A horn blatted twice. Tom looked sideways and saw a pair of headlights coming toward him with the same dreamy slowness as the falling bicycle. He was entirely incapable of moving. Between the headlights he could see the mesh of a tall metal grille, and beneath the grille was a wide steel band that looked burnished. Above the bumper and the grille a face, indistinct behind the windshield, pointed toward him as intently as the muzzle of a bird dog.

Tom knew that the car was going to hit him, but he could not move. He could not even breathe. The headlights grew larger, the distance between himself and the car halved and the headlights again doubled in size. An electrical coldness of which he was only barely conscious spread over and through Tom’s body. He could do nothing but watch the car come closer and closer until it hit him.

Then at last it did hit him, and a series of irrevocable events began happening to Tom Pasmore. Searing pain enfolded and enveloped him as the impact snapped his right leg and crushed his pelvis and hip socket. His skull fractured against the grille, and blood began pouring from his eyes and nose. Almost instantly unconscious, Tom’s body hugged the grille for a moment, then began to slide down the front of the car. A black rubber ornament shaped like a football held him up for the following two or three minutes as the car swerved through the confusion of felled bicycles and rearing horses. His right shoulder snapped, and the broken femur of his right leg sliced through muscle and skin like a jagged knife. Fifty feet down the road the car finally jerked to a stop as the nearest horses either settled down or galloped away. Tom flipped off the bumper ornament and slammed down on the roadbed.

His bladder and his bowels emptied into his clothing.

The driver of the car opened his door and jumped out. At some point during the next few moments, while the driver moved reluctantly toward the front of his car, another event, even more irrevocable than everything else that had occurred in the past sixty seconds, happened to Tom Pasmore. The accumulation of shock and pain stopped his heart, and he died.