Scene 7 - December 19th

Interior Higgins Museum, Continuous

Michael Vimes

“Look, Terry,” I said to my partner, “that security office is underground and clear on the other side of the building to boot! It’s not that weird that you didn’t hear the thunder!”

“I’m telling you, it’s weird,” she insisted. “I have good hearing, I would have heard something if it was really as loud as you said. Besides, it’s not storming - just raining. I mean, have you even heard any other thunder?”

“No,” I had to admit. “But even so -”

“And it’s not like the sensors go off for thunder normally. This shit is high tech, Mike, it can tell the difference between thunder outside and a sound from inside. I’m telling you, something’s up.”

“You think someone snuck in here to set off the alarms with a fake thunder noise?” I skeptically asked.

“I think someone used a fake thunder noise to cover up a more suspicious sound,” she said. “And they did it right in front of you so that you would have me mark it as a false alarm.”

I sighed. “Alright, alright. I’ll go back and double check the dinosaur exhibit. Lemme just look in on the Camelot thing first - it’s right here, I might as well.”

“Fine. Just make it quick.”

I stepped into the central room of the museum to see the current rotating exhibit - a bunch of shit from the early middle ages, plus a rock that was supposed to be from Camelot. I didn’t know the details, just what it was supposed to look like under the light of my flashlight.

It didn’t look like it should.

The hunk of rock that was the exhibit’s centerpiece was glowing,the upper face of it rippling like water and emitting an eerie light that illuminated the figure of a man in red leaning over it, his hands extended in the air above the freaky thing.

“Hey!” I shouted, grabbing for my walkie talkie to tell Terry. I missed in my surprise - in all the years I had worked as night guard, I had never bumped into anyone stealing on my watch. Or... doing whatever the hell this guy was going. “Hey, step away from the... the thing!”

He glanced up at me and sighed. A click of his fingers and my walkie talkie was in his hand, not on my belt. “I don’t suppose,” he asked in a remarkably smooth voice, “that I could convince you to forget you saw this?”

“Um...” I stared at him, confused.

“I can give you money,” he added, apparently trying to clarify the bribery attempt. “I promise, I’m not stealing anything the museum knows about.”

“...what the hell does that mean?”

He gestured to the stone, and its surface wavered. “This stone is a magical container of a sort. It contains a number of artifacts thought lost forever.”

“The hell you mean by artifacts?” I demanded.

“Allow me to demonstrate,” he said, flashing me a grin. He plunged his arm - not the one holding my walkie talkie - into the surface of the stone like it was a pool of water, and began rooting around within it. The smile on his face quickly faded into a frown. “...the hell?”

“Is it empty, or some shit?” I couldn’t help but ask.

“No,” the red-suited man said, sounding irritated, “but the book I was expecting to find isn’t here. Neither is anything else I thought was in there. All there is, is...”

He pulled, and a gleaming sword came out of the stone.

It was a ornate longsword, a golden crossguard protecting the hand from a long silver blade. It didn’t stay that way long, though - the shape of the blade began to morph and shift, shrinking to only two feet long or so and the crossguard changing shape as well, until it was something almost like a long wand.

The intruder’s eyes flashed as he stared at the sword, and the hairs on the back of my neck rose. A moment later flame began to lick around him, sprouting from nothingness in a ghostly aura that didn’t seem to harm him at all, only give him an eerie, backlit aura.

A smile spread across his face, and while he was undeniably handsome, that smile in that light made him ugly. The man had done barely anything, and I was more terrified of him than I had ever been in my life.

I was almost grateful when he flicked the wand towards me, and everything went dark.