Page 117
Story: Whistle
As he moved past the woman, he stopped and asked, “When did you get those trains for her?”
“A week ago,” the woman said. “That new shop in town.”
“He seems to be doing a bang-up business,” Harry said.
Thirty-Nine
Something was up. Edwin Nabler could always tell.
While he couldn’t accurately predict what his products would trigger when he sent them out into the world, he liked to stay on top of what they’d set in motion. It was much more than idle curiosity, or taking pleasure in one’s work. He wanted to know the trains were doing what they were designed to do, which amounted to so much more than bringing a smile to a little boy or girl’s face.
Nabler had never been a student of chemistry, but he understood the principle of an activating agent. Something that when introduced into a situation exacted a change onto whatever it came into contact with. But chemistry was rooted in science, and Nabler considered his talents as more metaphysical, something beyond the realm of human understanding, given that he operated within the sliver. He wasn’t so much an activating agent, or a change agent, to use the more popular current terminology, but an agent of chaos.
He’d hardly be the first. Such agents were the stuff of myth and folklore, like the coyote-like trickster common to the cultures of many North American indigenous tribes, or the conniving Anansi spider from the African fable of the Ashanti people of Ghana, or even the mischievous gremlin believed to be behind aircraft malfunctions. They even appeared in the pages of comic books. What was Batman’s nemesis, the Joker, if not an agent of chaos? Nabler fancied himself much like them, except he presented himself to themasses in a ridiculous engineer’s cap and a stupid vest peppered with railway logos. He liked to be as original as the circumstances allowed.
There were plenty of others like him in the sliver, some with similar methods, others more fantastical. The work ethic they all stuck to was simple: insinuate yourself into a host, which could be an individual or a group setting, and ensure that bad things happened to good people. (It was acceptable if a bad thing happened to a bad person, too, of course, and Nabler was not unhappy with how things turned out for Delbert Dorfman.)
Nabler employed an iconic, much-loved toy to work his magic. Others made use of everyday appliances from toasters to televisions, the latter being especially useful for transmitting subliminal messages. Nabler knew of one in the sliver who used automobiles. That fellow who wrote about a homicidal Plymouth Fury with a girl’s name would be astounded to learn how close he’d come to the truth. Nabler heard tell of another colleague who did amazing things with Royal Doulton figurines. How many little old ladies had choked on their Jell-O while one of those porcelain doodads looked on from a nearby shelf?
Some even used common house pets, although adapting a living organism did present challenges. Nabler’s trains couldaffectpets, but that wasn’t the same as a cat or a dog or an adorable little bunny that was chock-full of mayhem from the get-go.
As for the more fantastical, well, Nabler was willing to admit he envied those who engineered the crashing of jumbo jets, the careening of overloaded buses off cliffs, the capsizing of ferry boats, the plunging of elevators.
He had a grudging admiration for the ones who’d executed the events of September 11. Those were actualpeopleintent on chaos and disruption. Pulled it off all on their own without any help fromthe Edwin Nablers of the sliver world. You had to tip your hat to them. Enough types like that would put Nabler and his ilk out of business.
Thankfully, there were not.
That didn’t mean he didn’t have his work cut out for him these days. So many safeguards! Smoke detectors, seat belts, childproof outlet plugs, playgrounds with padded ground cover, parents who drove their moppets to school instead of letting them walk, the goddamn Food and Drug Administration, for Christ’s sake. No one worried about any of this forty or fifty or sixty years ago. It all made the work that much more important.
How did Nabler know something was up?
When a man blew himself up at a barbecue, a woman killed herself in the tub, a dog went mad, it was as though Nabler werethere. His trains were his receivers, his eyes, transmitting information back to him, and not through some sophisticated surveillance software.
On top of that, Nabler himself had special gifts. When it suited his purposes, he could make those within his sphere of influence see and hear things that were not there. Whistles in the night. Creepy-crawlies. Lost loved ones. He could present himself as he wished to be seen, and often sensed what they were feeling.
Which was how he was so confident that someone was sniffing around. It was his own fault, getting lazy with Tanner, leaving his boneless carcass to be found. He’d run into a temporary glitch with the mini-cremation machine he had tucked into a secondary room back of the shop. Worked fine for Hillman, but then Nabler briefly lost his surreptitious hookup to the local power grid.
But it was more than that. His successes in Lucknow had been, if he could say this to himself modestly, a bit splashier than he might have hoped for.
Chief Harry Cook’s interest had been piqued.
Nabler would have to exercise greater caution. What worked in his favor was that if and when the chief started putting it together, he’d doubt himself. When the evidence led him to a theory so outside the realm of the possible, he would discount it. He would think he must be wrong, that there had to be some other explanation.
Nabler certainly hoped so. He’d grown weary of moving. There was still much he could accomplish here in Lucknow and environs. He could attract customers from as far away as Bennington and Montpelier and Burlington and Middlebury, even from some towns across the border into New York State. Spread the mayhem far and wide.
But if he had to pull up stakes, so be it.
Nabler was ready.
It would be interesting to see whether Chief Cook could think beyond whatever investigative techniques he’d learned back in his police academy days.
And if he could, if he ended up at Nabler’s door, well, the man did have a decent bone structure.
Forty
Harry was thinking about a cartoon he watched as a kid.
Bugs Bunny has conned gangster Rocky into thinking his moron henchman, Mugsy, has been tormenting him. Mugsy’s tied up in a closet while Bugs cuts a hole in the floor under Rocky’s chair. Rocky plunges into the basement, and when he finds Mugsy, there’s a saw planted into his bound hands, courtesy of Bugs.
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39
- Page 40
- Page 41
- Page 42
- Page 43
- Page 44
- Page 45
- Page 46
- Page 47
- Page 48
- Page 49
- Page 50
- Page 51
- Page 52
- Page 53
- Page 54
- Page 55
- Page 56
- Page 57
- Page 58
- Page 59
- Page 60
- Page 61
- Page 62
- Page 63
- Page 64
- Page 65
- Page 66
- Page 67
- Page 68
- Page 69
- Page 70
- Page 71
- Page 72
- Page 73
- Page 74
- Page 75
- Page 76
- Page 77
- Page 78
- Page 79
- Page 80
- Page 81
- Page 82
- Page 83
- Page 84
- Page 85
- Page 86
- Page 87
- Page 88
- Page 89
- Page 90
- Page 91
- Page 92
- Page 93
- Page 94
- Page 95
- Page 96
- Page 97
- Page 98
- Page 99
- Page 100
- Page 101
- Page 102
- Page 103
- Page 104
- Page 105
- Page 106
- Page 107
- Page 108
- Page 109
- Page 110
- Page 111
- Page 112
- Page 113
- Page 114
- Page 115
- Page 116
- Page 117 (Reading here)
- Page 118
- Page 119
- Page 120
- Page 121
- Page 122
- Page 123
- Page 124
- Page 125
- Page 126
- Page 127
- Page 128
- Page 129
- Page 130
- Page 131
- Page 132
- Page 133
- Page 134
- Page 135
- Page 136
- Page 137
- Page 138
- Page 139
- Page 140
- Page 141
- Page 142
- Page 143
- Page 144
- Page 145
- Page 146
- Page 147
- Page 148
- Page 149
- Page 150
- Page 151
- Page 152
- Page 153
- Page 154