The Curious Case of the Cursed Spectacles by Constance Barker

Author:Constance Barker [Barker, Constance]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Constance Barker
Published: 2017-06-20T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

I should have expected Clarence to do something. I'd noticed how he was poised, his body tensed for action. His eyes were fixed on Timothy, watching him closely. Still, when he moved, it surprised me. I suppose I just didn't think of him as a man of action, which was unfair as I barely knew him.

At any rate, as Timothy started to go all starry-eyed, when his determined look faded and he began gazing into the distance, apparently oblivious to his surroundings, Clarence rushed him. It caught Timothy off guard; he stood frozen in place and Clarence tackled him. They fell to the ground in a heap, with Timothy waking to the threat and the two men grappling, struggling. I went over to help. Somewhere after that dramatic tackle, as they scuffled on the ground, the gun went off. I felt a whizzing that went past my head. I heard a great 'whack' from behind me. I turned and saw that the bullet had hit a pipe. At a bend in a small, relatively speaking pipe, a chunk was missing and a blueish flame flickered. It ghosted around the pipe in the spooky way the yellow and blue flames of burning gas have when dancing around.

I heard the metallic sound of the gun clattering to the cement floor.

At the shot, I'd stopped. Now my reaction was immediate and somewhat frantic, with me running toward the control panel before my conscious brain even knew what happened. I was desperately looking for an emergency shut off valve. The idea of that flame spreading was terrifying. Suddenly I found it. It was right in front of me on the back of the console amid a cluster of dials and gauges. It sat there looking big, beautiful, and clearly marked 'emergency shutoff.' What could be better?

I reached for it and then froze in mid-motion, pulling myself up short. I sensed a wrongness in doing that. I started thinking it through and realized that shutting off that valve was exactly what Timothy wanted to do, what he thought had to be done to save the world from this disaster. But I knew he was being manipulated. If I shut it off for him, I'd be carrying out his wrong-headed mission and we might all die.

But what was going to cause the explosion that Timothy saw? The gunshot hadn't and it didn't seem reasonable that the glasses would miscalculate that kind of thing. And if it wasn't the gunshot, then, it dawned on me, maybe turning off the valve was exactly the wrong thing to do.

On the other hand, maybe us finding the note, knowing what Timothy wanted to do was intended to keep us from shutting it off.

When you start second-guessing intentions you open a huge and rather icky can of worms. It was making my head hurt.

The only way to get out of that dilemma was to do something else, something unexpected.

I shook myself, then made an executive decision. And it was a tough one, mostly because it meant not doing something that I thought needed doing.

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