Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 6. Whole No. 766, June 2005

I hear the tinny clank of his light meter knocking against his second camera. “Smile, sweetheart,” he taunts. The tunnel explodes in white light. His camera whirrs.

I spin on my foot and dash out into the gray-yellow light, through the piles of dead leaves, my ankles twisting on horse chestnuts underfoot.

I glance behind and see him laboring, his brow beaded with sweat. On he comes.

Is today the day I succumb? I can’t run forever. One day my legs will give out.

I dash across the Great Lawn, through the wild Rambles, down to the lake, my feet slipping where the grass has worn to mud. I pause on Hernshead Rock under the London plane trees and look out. Fall colors edge the lake in yellow and brown like a cuff of leopard fur. The sun breaks from behind a cloud and makes an amoeba-shaped patch on the still water. A single rowboat in the middle drifts as a man and a woman look at one another from opposite ends of the boat.

The Cyclops runs out of the woods; when he sees me he stops and raises his camera.

As soon as you are born, you begin to die. HE is there, every moment of your life, stalking, waiting... ready. No one escapes.

I could run west toward Columbus Circle, or east into the zoo. But I have come as far as I want. I will run no more.

I turn and face him.

What’s she doing? She’s walking toward me. Well, make my day, honey.

I finish a roll of film and she’s still headed toward me. Like taking candy from a baby! Defiant, head-on shots. Sultry and furious. God, she’s gorgeous.

It’s like she wants me to take pictures. Hot dog! That’s it, honey, look hard. Make me sweat.

She puts her hand into her purse, fumbling around without looking, walking slowly. She pulls out something silver. What the hell?

I turn fast, bolting back toward the woods. I look over my shoulder. She’s coming at me, jogging fast. I gotta make it back to Fifth Avenue.

I aim for the tunnel ahead. My left arm is getting numb and my chest feels like someone is kicking me with boots. Damn! I’m not in shape for this. I pause in the tunnel, just for a second. I lean my right hand against the wall. It’s wet and cool, but my chest! Stop kicking! I can’t get my breath.

I hear her footsteps enter the tunnel. She wouldn’t shoot a guy who’s having a heart attack, would she? I turn and lift my arm, trying to tell her that I need help, but the words don’t come out. I take two steps toward her.

Something crashes, like a truck smashing into an overpass. My chest explodes and I think it’s my heart. My knees buckle and I’m on my back on the cold wet pavement, but I feel warm all over. I taste blood in my mouth. I see her beautiful face above me, like an angel, warm and relaxed, her hair falling around her shoulders, smiling.

What a fabulous shot.

I reach for my camera. “I’ll take that for you,” she says, her voice like music playing. She points it at me, and all I see is the black lens like a big black tunnel, and I’m falling down into it, and I hear the flash, and a bright white light blasts at the end of the tunnel, pulling me away.

Copyright © 2005 by Ruth Francisco.

Born in Liverpool, England, Eileen Dewhurst read English at Oxford University. After graduation, she worked as a journalist, and in 1975 her first mystery novel was published. She has continued to produce highly regarded books in the genre ever since. Readers interested in her novels will want to look for the latest, Naked Witness (Severn House/2004).

I’d been thinking for some time anyway about going back to Bangor, cathedral city of North Wales with its maelstrom of wartime memories, and when I read about the female skeleton that had tumbled into view at the feet of some city-council ditch diggers, I set off as soon as I could find a few days’ space.

I’d spent my school holidays in Bangor during the war while there was the likelihood of air raids on Liverpool, in the flat above my uncle’s jeweller’s shop in the High Street, only a flight of stone steps and a road-crossing from Bangor Mountain, where the skeleton had been found.

The High Street! In 1942 it was my Champs Elysées. All human life was there, its apotheosis the BBc’s Light Entertainment Department, which when the Blitz began had moved lock, stock, and barrel from London. The glamour of it washed over us round the clock. Summer evening after summer evening, my cousin Bea and I would stand with our autograph books outside the old County Cinema round the corner, waiting for the likes of Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, the cast of Happidrome, and many other celebrities of the day to emerge and give us their signatures and a bit of chat. Neither of these blessings, if I remember rightly, was ever denied the two little girls, and I can still recall the number of Arthur Askey’s modest car.

Day after day we would stand at our first-floor sitting-room window, watching for stars on the High Street pavements below and seldom having long to wait. What our grandmother was waiting for was one of us to spell out aloud the shaky white letters chalked on the grey stone wall of the bank building opposite. Eventually it was my ten-year-old cousin Bea (I was a majestic — but no less innocent — twelve) who obliged. “S-H-I-T... That’s a funny word. Grandma, what does it mean?”

“Just something not very nice, chick. It’s a silly word, no one with any sense would use it.”

Something else not very nice, according to Grandma, had invaded Bangor Mountain that summer of my keenest memory.

No one had ever monitored our frequent disappearances up the flight of steps at the end of the narrow alley separating our shop from the next one up the High Street, content to think of us on our way to our lofty playground. Until the day Grandma told us, with uncharacteristic hesitancy, that she didn’t want us to go up Bangor Mountain anymore because... well, because some dangerous snakes and lizards had been found there, beasts with poisonous bites. This behest followed the arrival in the city of a small contingent of American soldiers — GIs — but girls of my cousin’s and my age at that time were far too innocent to interpret our grandmother’s metaphor and understand that the beast she was afraid would soon be infesting Bangor Mountain was the beast with two backs.

Now, on my latter-day return, I discovered that my great highway is so narrow it’s unable to accommodate two-way modern traffic. And that I couldn’t stay at the Castle Hotel, that fondly recalled pinnacle of ‘forties sophistication near the cathedral precinct, because it had closed down. This wasn’t the shock the other changes were, because I’d heard the news, of course, when I’d been unable to reach the hotel by phone and booked into a place in the nearby countryside.

The biggest shock of my return was the overall erosion of the close-knit grey stone city, holes blasted first by the numerous extensions of the university, and then, offered the precedent, by the iconoclastic jerry-builders of the 1960s. Builders of roads as well as buildings: the High Street isn’t just narrow, it’s become irrelevant. Oh, sic transit!

I drove to Bangor the morning after I’d checked into my hotel, and when I’d managed to find a parking space I went on foot round my old haunts, and the places that had figured in the final drama. Not yet up the mountain — partly because my climbing days are just about over, but also because I was pretty anxious to get to the police station and try to learn more about the unearthed bones. But I did pause in front of my uncle’s old shop and remember, as I looked sentimentally at its unchanged facade and the small recessed space where the two windows stand proud of the door, that the manager had once locked Bea and me into that space when the outside gate had gone up at closing time and we were being especially obstreperous, and left us there for a corrective ten minutes, to our chagrin and the amusement of passersby.