Concerning the Hard Time of Motherless Children

    Someone was growling "Motherless Children Have a Hard Time" from the shadows of the park. They had no idea how right they were, Hoell mused. The Fog was crawling, roiling in a deliberate direction, and he was trying to make a different course even while knowing it hopeless. The fog would be here until it was time for it to move on, leaving the world changed. He tried to tuck his ears into the collar of his coat.

   A small group lingered about the gnarled guitarist, including a drunk sleeping it off by a tree and a tourist couple bored but reluctant to miss a moment. Hoell paused to see if it was anyone he knew, moved on.

   Across the green, by the old pavilion, the skies had opened to a moon bulging and lachrymose, lighting the ground cover fog into a chalky miasma. Hoell followed the winding path, waste bins and water fountains resembling an old cemetery with the tentacles of mist curling around them.

   The pavilion had once been white, salmon latticework adorned with summer lights and the sounds of brass bands. Time had befallen it now, aided by moisture and neglect. The paint had peeled away in strips, boards and railings bowed and sagging. The moonlight flicked back and forth over the landscape, calculating off seconds of the night. Hoell was past it before he felt a subtle shift in the fog. He glanced over his shoulder, saw the mere suggestion of a figure in the ghostly shadows by the railing. Feminine form, with a bowled hat. He hadn't thought that Whitechapel, while paranoid, was suspicious enough to send a tail so soon. Then he looked again and the shadow was gone. He hurried his way across the green, over a small footbridge skirting the edge of a pond. No further shadows detached themselves from the landscape by the time he reached the carcass of a wooden maintenance shed steadily being swallowed by foliage, a building forgotten in a forgotten scape of park. Hoell had the only key that fit the weathered padlock. He glanced about and shut the door behind him, rebuking the darkness with a sputtering lighter.

   The walls were shelves strewn with a miscellany of obtuse rusty things in boxes, pitted tool chest and things best left to imagination. Clearly no park maintenance man ventured into this temple. It was as though an archeological packrat with a view toward future value made a nest or tomb here.

   Hoell rustled about in the lighter's amber flickers, muttering arcane directions to himself. Eventually he found what he was seeking, uttering a muted crow, and stuffed it quickly into a pocket. He snapped the lighter closed, pushed open the door and paused for a moment. After a second's hesitation he turned about, reignited the light and opened a browbeaten steamer trunk that might have been pulled from the wreck of the Titanic. From the piles of dark woolen cloth he withdrew a moth-scarred canvas satchel, the resting place for an ungainly revolver as ancient as the trunk. Hoell stuck this in his pocket as well, and locked the shed behind him.