Odd Hours

true in all details.
    I doubted that every police officer in Magic Beach would prove to be corrupt. The great majority would be fine men doing good work, flawed humans of course but not monsters. Hoss Shackett would have recruited a cell of traitors as small as the job required, to ensure against discovery.
    Wyatt Porter, however, lived a long way south and east of here. He did not know any of the players in Magic Beach. He would have no way of identifying a straight arrow among the bent ones in the local police department.
    He might be able to contact the FBI and report information about a delivery of nuclear weapons through the harbor at Magic Beach, but federal agents were slow to take small-town cops seriously. And when Wyatt had to identify the source of his report as his supernaturally gifted young friend, he would forfeit all credibility.
    Besides, only a little more than two hours remained until the deed would be done, the bombs off-loaded and shipped to various points of the compass. I was entering Act 3 of the drama, and I had the feeling that God had pushed the FAST FORWARD button.
    Gradually I became aware of a continuous susurration, like the soft voice of a thin flow of water sliding over a lightly textured surface.
    I surveyed the dreary stores behind me. No source for the sound was evident.
    The mannequins had not moved in the window of the used-clothing shop. As I made that observation, I wondered why I had expected that they might have changed positions.
    The store awnings were tattered and not as taut as they ought to have been. They swagged like funeral bunting, but no water drizzled from them.
    The mysterious sound swelled into something more like numerous whispering voices echoing through a cavernous space.
    Although the fog denied me a clear view of the shops across the street, I was pretty sure this noise originated closer at hand.
    In front of me, in the gutter, light rippled from right to left, and right to left again: Halloween light here in January, like the flickering orange of a candle reflecting off the carved flesh inside a jack-o’-lantern’s hollow head.
    They said that curiosity killed the cat, and I had seen enough feline road kill to confirm that diagnosis. Nevertheless, I got up from the bench and took a step forward to the curb.
    In the pavement, a large rectangular grate covered a drain. It dated from an era when even public works had style. The parallel iron bars joined to a four-inch iron ring in the center of the rectangle. Captured within the ring, a stylized iron lightning bolt angled from right to left.
    The susurration issued from the grating. Although the source lay in the drain, the sound no longer suggested water in motion. Now I thought it was also less like people whispering than it had been, and instead like the shuffling of many feet.
    The elegance of the encircled lightning bolt appealed to me, but I wondered if it represented something other than foul weather, if it was the logo of the maker, that it should have been incorporated in a drain cover.
    Grinning-pumpkin light flickered below the patterned ironwork, through the culvert that lay under the street. For a moment, the drain cover seemed like a perforated furnace door.
    Standing, I was too far from the grating to discern the source of the quick spasms of luminosity. I stepped off the curb and knelt beside the ironwork.
    Shoe leather sliding on concrete might have made such a sound, a platoon of weary soldiers dragging their heavy feet, bound from one battle to another—if this had been a war zone and if soldiers had been in the habit of traveling underground.
    I lowered my face closer to the grating.
    A faint cool draft rose from below and with it an odor, not one that I recalled having smelled before, not offensive, but peculiar. Foreign. A curiously dry scent, considering from where it came. I took three deep breaths, trying to identify the source—then realized that the odor had raised the fine hairs on the back of my neck.
    When the orange light came a third time, I expected to see what, if anything, moved through the culvert. But each throb chased twisted shadows across the curved walls, and those leaping phantoms confused the eye, obscuring whatever cast them.
    Perhaps I unconsciously worried my split lip with my tongue or bit it. Although it had not been bleeding, a fresh drop of blood fell on the back of my right hand, which rested on the grating beside the ring that encircled the lightning