Niceville

Featherlight,” said the man. “What are you doing here? Who are you? Why did you come here? What did you want here?”
    “My name is Merle Zane,” Merle said, “and I came to see a friend.” He hit the button for the first floor.
    The doors started to close, but Featherlight caught the slider and blocked it.
    “Who sent you?”
    “Glynis Ruelle sent me, Mr. Featherlight,” said Merle, on a whim, just to raise the devil with the guy. “You have a nice day.”
    He reached out and jerked the slider free, and he was still grinning at his joke as the doors closed. The man was staring back, his eyes wide and full of strong emotion. Thinking about it later, as he made his way back to the station to wait for the Blue Bird, Merle decided that he had damn near scared the guy to death, which was just fine with him. It was about time he started making things happen in Niceville, because up until now Niceville had pretty much kicked his ass.

Nick and Beau Open a Door
    “What the hell am I looking at, boss? Is it like a home theater or something?”
    Nick said nothing for a time, standing beside Beau Norlett in the pitch-black basement of Delia Cotton’s mansion, at the bottom of the rickety staircase that led down from the kitchen.
    Both men were watching a wall of moving light on the far side of the basement, a field of flickering, dancing images in bright greens and deep yellows, pure blues and vivid browns, almost like a movie of an Impressionist painting being shown on a screen, a shimmering field of motion and light that covered the entire wall, a stretch of thirty, maybe forty feet, and about seven feet high.
    Both men stared at it in stunned silence, each man feeling a cold crawling ripple on the back of his neck, and a kind of pagan dread.
    “I … don’t know,” said Nick, stepping off the last stair and walking out into the dark room. “It sure as hell isn’t like any home theater I’ve ever seen.”
    The glow from the field of light was strong enough, once his eyes adjusted, for Nick to make out a gigantic old furnace, like a huge squid squatting at the far end of the basement, and a row of storage boxes piled along the wall opposite the field of dancing light. Heavy rough-cut beams ran overhead and the floor was concrete, very clean, no dust, a dry well-kept space, as carefully tended as the rest of the house.
    Behind him he heard Beau fumbling around, muttering to himself.
    “What are you doing?” said Nick, speaking in a whisper, as ifhe were afraid to attract the attention of whatever this light-thing really was.
    “I’m looking for a light switch,” said Beau, also in a whisper.
    “No. Don’t touch anything. Stay where you are.”
    “What are you going to do?”
    “I don’t know,” said Nick, moving farther out into the room, staring at the flickering on the basement wall. Bright green bands across the top, swatches and blobs of vivid color here and there, a band of cool sky blue along the bottom … cool sky blue?
    “Beau, have you got a camera on your cell phone?”
    “Yeah,” said Beau. “You want me to take a picture of … it?”
    “Yes. No flash. Can you do that?”
    “Just a minute … yeah … okay.”
    Nick heard the phony metallic snap sound that cell phone cameras had to make now because of all the locker room perverts who bought cell phones with cameras, and then a rapid series of them
—snickety-snickety-snickety-snick
.
    “I can take a video too, you want?”
    “Yes. Start now.”
    “Okay … but, boss, please, don’t go near it.”
    “I’m not. I’m just—there’s something weird.”
    “No shit,” said Beau, watching through his LCD screen as Nick stepped into the middle of the room, facing the wall of light, his body lit up by the glow, Nick staring at it, fixed and frozen.
    He was trying make sense of it when something tripped in his brain, a visual gestalt, and the puzzle got solved. The color field was
upside down
.
    He bent sideways, trying to see it that way, and suddenly he was looking at a tree line, blurry but clear enough, a broad canopy of oaks and chestnuts and a few dark spear points that could be pines or cedars, and, below the tree line, a large tilled field, with people working in it, a brown tractor pulling a flat sled loaded high with what looked like white stones, round as balls.
    More dark figures of men, some digging in the black earth, others lifting what looked like long black boxes out of the ground, still others in