Beyond the Pale Read Online Free PDF Page B

to cull the saloon’s storeroom for any “artifacts of historical interest.” Andy Connell had been out of town, but one of Travis’s assignments while Andy was away had been to clear a century’s worth of junk out of the back storeroom. Travis had been more than happy to let Jack do some of the work for him.
    Yet before long—and afterward he was never quite certain just how it happened—Travis found himself on the storeroom floor, covered with grime and cobwebs, sorting through tangled piles of hundred-year-old clutter, while Jack, neatly ensconced on a barstool, politely offered direction. In the end, the saloon’s storeroom got cleaned, Travis hauled a pickup truck full of copper lanterns, bent-willow chairs, and thick-glassed purple bottles to the Magician’s Attic, and somewhere along the way Jack had apparently decided he and Travis were the best of friends. Travis had never bothered to disagree.
    Still, nothing in their long friendship had prepared Travis for Jack’s behavior tonight. With Travis following on his heels, Jack wended his way to the back of the shop, his tin lantern casting off shards of gold light. He stepped over a heap of broken Grecian urns and edged past a wooden sarcophagus that leaned against the wall and stared with knowing eyes of lapis lazuli. They started up a narrow staircase that Travis, in all his visits to the Magician’s Attic, had somehow never noticed before.
    Old photographs in antique gilt frames lined either wall of the stairwell. One caught Travis’s eye. He paused and peered more closely at the photo. It showed a group of grim-faced men and women clad in somber attire. Some gripped shovels or pickaxes, and a hole had been torn open in the earth before them. A caption was written at the bottom of the photo in spidery ink. Travis strained to make it out:
The Beckett-Strange Home for Children, 1933
. It was the groundbreaking ceremony for the old orphanage. However, it wassomething else that had caught Travis’s attention. A rectangular shape floated in the picture’s background, blurry and half-obscured by a woman’s hat, but he recognized it all the same. The old billboard by the highway—only in this photo it was not covered by the cigarette advertisement. Although dim and murky, he could just discern the wild landscape. So the painting had been there back in 1933. Yet what was it advertising? There seemed to be flowing words written at the bottom of the billboard, but Travis could not read them.
    A perturbed voice broke his concentration. “Travis, do stop dawdling. There simply isn’t time.”
    Travis tore his eyes away from the old photo and hurried up the steps after Jack. The odd staircase ended in a blank wall. Jack pressed against a mahogany panel to his right, and an opening appeared. Travis ducked his head and followed his friend through the small door. Bronze light flared to life as Jack used the candle from his hurricane lantern to light an oil lamp atop a wrought-iron stand. Travis adjusted his gun-slinger’s spectacles in amazement.
    “Jack, what is this place?”
    “Minerva’s Thread! You can’t stifle your questions for five seconds, can you, Travis?”
    Travis hardly heard him. The windowless room was circular, and by that he knew it to be somewhere within the house’s tower. He was familiar with the rooms above and below. Why had he never considered what might lie between? Now he stared in wonder.
    The walls were covered with artifacts. Flat-bladed swords gleamed in the light of the oil lamp, their blades etched with flowing designs and incomprehensible symbols. Beside them hung half-moon axes hafted with bone and leather, and massive hammers that obviously had been designed for pounding in skulls, not nails. There were wooden shields inlaid with silver, and neck-rings of fiery copper, and helmets crowned with goat horns and yellow horsehair. It was like a collection from a museum, but not quite. For what startled Travis most of all was the