The Intruders by Michael Marshall Page B

been nervous about flying, and Dad had joked and made her feel better about it. There had been more joking in those days. A lot more.
    But today? Madison remembered early talk of a trip up to the grocery store in Cannon Beach that morning, discussion that hadn’t come to anything. Then a little time on the beach. It had been cold and windy. There had been no walk. A quiet and skimpy lunch, in the cottage. Mom stayed indoors afterward, so Madison went back out to hang on the beach by herself.
    After that…there was this gap. Like when she’d woken last night and couldn’t remember the time on the beach. It was like there was a cloud in the way.
    Mom wasn’t here at the airport with her, that was clear. Mom wouldn’t have walked off and left her by herself. Madison was wearing her new coat, too, she realized. That was also strange. She wouldn’t have gone out to the beach in her new coat. She would have worn her old coat, because it didn’t matter if that got sand on it. So she must have gone into the cottage after the beach, to change, and snuck back out.
    Then what? How had she gotten from there to Portland? Maddy knew the word her Uncle Brian would use for this: perplexing. In every other way, she felt fine. Just like normal. So what was the deal with the blank spot? And what was she supposed to do now?
    She realized that the hand in her pocket was holding something. She pulled it out. A notebook. It was small, bound in stained brown leather, and looked old. She opened it. The pages were covered in handwriting. The first line said:
    In the beginning there was Death.
    It was written in a pen that smudged occasionally, in an ink that was a kind of red-brown. There were drawings in the book, too, maps and diagrams, lists of names. One of the diagrams looked exactly like the drawing on the back of the business card she also had in her possession, the interlinked nines. Even the handwriting looked the same. Slipped in the front of the notebook was a long piece of paper. It was a United Airlines ticket.
    Wow—how had she bought that?

    These questions didn’t make her feel scared. Not quite. For the time being, there was something dreamlike about her situation. Maybe all that mattered was going where she needed to go, and she could worry about everything else later. Yes. That sounded good. Easier.
    Madison blinked, and by the time her eyelids had flipped back up, she had largely stopped worrying about trivia like how she’d traveled the fifty miles from Cannon Beach to the Portland airport, or how she’d purchased an airline ticket costing over a hundred dollars, or why she was alone.
    Instead she turned to look at the departures information, to find out where it was she needed to go.
     
    As far as Jim Morgan was concerned, there was a simple secret to life, and it was something he’d learned from his uncle Clive. His father’s cadaverous brother spent his entire working days in security at the Ready Ship dispatch warehouse over in Tigard. Checked trucks as they came in, checked them as they went out. He’d done this five days a week for over thirty years. Jim’s dad never hid the fact that as a (junior) executive in a bank, he considered himself many steps up the ladder compared with his older sibling—but the curious thing was that while his father spent his life moaning and feeling put-upon, Uncle Clive seemed utterly content with his lot.
    One evening when Jim was thirteen, his uncle had spent an entire Sunday dinner talking about his job. This was not the first time—and Jim’s father and mother weren’t subtle about rolling their eyes—but on this occasion their son listened. He listened to information about schedules and shipping targets. He listened to discussion of procedures. He came to understand that every day, between the hours of eight and four, getting in and out of the Ready Ship warehouse was like shoving a fat camel through the eye of a needle. Uncle Clive was that needle. Didn’t matter who