Alan steadied the ladder while Kurt tightened the wing nuts on the antenna mounting atop the synagogue’s roof. It had taken three meetings with the old rabbi before Alan hit on the idea of going to the temple’s youth caucus and getting them to explain it to the old cleric. The synagogue was one of the oldest buildings in the Market, a brick-and-stone beauty from 1930.
They’d worried about the fight they’d have over drilling through the roof to punch down a wire, but they needn’t have: The wood up there was soft as cottage cheese, and showed gaps wide enough to slip the power cable down. Now Kurt slathered Loctite over the nuts and washers and slipped dangerously down the ladder, toe-tips flying over the rungs.
Alan laughed as he touched down, thinking that Kurt’s heart was aburst with the feeling of having finished, at last, at last. But then he caught sight of Kurt’s face, ashen, wide-eyed.
“I saw something,” he said, talking out of the sides of his mouth. His hands were shaking.
“What?”
“Footprints,” he said. “There’s a lot of leaves that have rotted down to mud up there, and there were a pair of little footprints in the mud. Like a toddler’s footprints, maybe. Except there were two toes missing from one foot. They were stamped down all around this spot where I could see there had been a lot of pigeon nests, but there were no pigeons there, only a couple of beaks and legs—so dried up that I couldn’t figure out what they were at first.
“But I recognized the footprints. The missing toes, they left prints behind like unbent paperclips.”
Alan moved, as in a dream, to the ladder and began to climb it.
“Be careful, it’s all rotten up there,” Kurt called. Alan nodded.
“Sure, thank you,” he said, hearing himself say it as though from very far away.