Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder by Jo Nesbø, mike lowery Page B

Wood taste? The creature spits the food out. And it isn’t food at all. It’s a wooden crate. The creature fumes with rage. Blast it! Doggonit! How aggravating!
    But then the creature hears something. An echofrom a squeak within the sewer system. A rat squeak?
Rattus norvegicus
. Food! And
whoosh
, the starving creature is swallowed up by the darkness of the sewer, on the hunt again. Leaving the wooden crate floating there, bobbing up and down in the sewer water. And in the strip of light from the manhole cover, one can read the following printed on the lid in red letters: CAUTION ! HIGHLY EXPLOSIVE SPECIAL GUNPOWDER FROM SHANGHAI FOR THE BIG AND ALMOST WORLD-FAMOUS ROYAL SALUTE AT AKERSHUS FORTRESS .
    THE SUN SANK even farther toward Ullern Ridge and started to slip behind it. The last rays cast long, white fingers over the landscape, as if the sun were desperately trying to hang on. And the rays reached all the way to Cannon Avenue. But it lost its hold and then the sun was gone.
    It was evening. Truls and Trym stood in one of their three garages on Cannon Avenue, watchingMr. Trane, who had pulled a black crowbar out of the toolbox in his black Hummer. He had already given each of them a ski mask, which would cover their whole heads and faces apart from their eyes and mouth, so they could see and breathe and talk a little. Nice when it’s really cold out. Or when you’re going to commit a robbery. Because even if someone sees you during the robbery, they’re guaranteed not to recognize you afterward. Unless you’re still wearing the ski mask, of course.
    â€œLike so,” Mr. Trane demonstrated, sliding the crowbar in along the edge of a door. “And so and then so.”
    â€œLike this,” Truls and Trym repeated through their ski masks. “And this and then this.”
    They repeated and repeated and practiced and practiced the break-in. But it took some time, because Truls and Trym weren’t the smartest boys in the world. And not just not the smartest boys in theworld, actually. They were not the smartest boys in Norway, not the smartest boys in Oslo, and not even the smartest boys on Cannon Avenue. Because at that very moment the smartest boy on Cannon Avenue was sitting on a cot in the Dungeon of the Dead, feeling nervous. More nervous than he’d ever been before. Yes, so nervous that he bordered on being scared. And scared was something that Nilly, prisoner number 000002, very rarely was.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” he asked Doctor Proctor, who’d taken off his professor’s coat, turned the pockets inside out, and was now carefully brushing the pocket lining over one of his scraps of paper.
    â€œI was thinking,” the professor said. “It’s going to be awfully dark when you get down there. And you don’t have a flashlight. Then I remembered that there is always residue in my pockets from some of the various powders I’ve invented. And voilà …”
    Nilly came over and looked down at the sheet ofpaper, where there was a fine layer of light green powder.
    â€œI’ve seen that before,” Nilly said. “That’s Doctor Proctor’s Light Green Powder. You had it in a mason jar in your cellar. You said it was a phosphorescent powder that makes you glow. And that it was a rather unsuccessful invention.”
    â€œMaybe it isn’t so unsuccessful after all,” the professor said, carefully folding the piece of paper in half so that all the powder slid into the fold. “Open wide!”
    With Nilly’s mouth open as wide as it would go, the professor poured the powder into the small opening.
    â€œIt’ll take a little while before it starts working,” the professor said. “And meanwhile …” He intensely brushed out the other coat pocket over the sheet of paper.
    â€œIs that what I think it is?” Nilly asked when hespotted the small, light blue grains sitting on the professor’s