A Mystery Story in Serial

"Excuse me, sir? Can I talk to you a minute?"

Joseph Sterling looked up doubtfully from his half-consumed fast-food burger. Generally, in his experience, whenever anyone called him sir it was either a clerk trying to seem polite while secretly looking down on him or someone young enough to be one of his children. In this case it was the latter, a skinny young man in a fast-food outfit not coincidentally matching that worn by the workers where he was eating.

"Is something wrong?" he asked cautiously.

"No, no, nothing like that," the young man assured him. "Well yeah, I guess it is, but not like it has anything to do with this place. I mean you paid your bill all right and everything. As far as I know, anyway. They don't let me handle the money, see. Well it's not that they don't let me, exactly. It's not like I'm a crook or anything. I work in the kitchen, here." Without any more invitation he slid into the plastic chair across from the small table at which Sterling was sitting and leaned forward earnestly.

"I kinda need your help," he half-whispered.

Sterling looked around the nearly-empty fast-food place (it would probably have been over-polite to call it a restaurant) and then back to the teenager. "Short-handed on the fryer today?" he ventured.

The young man was too wound up - or too slow - to laugh. He shook his shaggy, somewhat oversized head. "You don't remember me, do you?"

"Should I?" Sterling took a bite of burger just to hint that he had come here to eat and not to provide a shoulder to be moistened by the tears of a teenaged burger-flipper.

"Hal!" a sharp woman's voice broke in. The young man looked up guiltily at the woman glaring at him from behind the counter and then he gave Sterling an embarrassed half-grin. "I have to get back to work," he apologized. "My break's not for another hour. Can, ah, can I talk with you then?"

"Why do you want to?" Sterling prodded, trying not to grimace.

"Remember the Golden Harvesters?" the boy asked. "And - and Mariam and all that?" A brief flash of pain passed across the young man's acne-tormented face.

"Ah," Sterling nodded in sudden understanding. "You're the... ah,"

"I was the gatekeeper at the compound," the boy nodded. "Till I helped Mariam hide from her dad and you told them and got me kicked out."

Sterling had enough sensitivity to feel slightly embarrassed, though that wasn't exactly the way he remembered what had happened. "Sorry."

"Nah, it's okay." The young man shrugged. "My own fault. Mariam is nothing but a little - well anyway, they kicked me out and now I'm here. And I sort of need your help. I know I'm imposing, but... Can you hang around till my break? So we can talk?"

"I have an appointment," Sterling told him. The boy looked so crestfallen that he found himself relenting in spite of himself. "But I can come back later. What time do you get off?"

"That won't work. I have to get back to the center. I don't have any transportation. One of the guys takes me. So I have to leave when he does."

"Center...?"

The young man flushed. "Never mind. I just - I can't."

"Hal!" the manager shouted even more sharply. Sterling had the impression that the glass in the window behind him was vibrating from the shrillness of her tone.

"I have to go. Sorry." The boy slid from behind the table and disappeared into the mysterious inner workings of the fast-food kitchen.

Sterling pondered while he finished his burger. Then he went to the pay phone, made a call to cancel his appointment, and ambled out to the parking lot to sit in his battered car and listen to the radio for awhile.

He couldn't really say why he was interested. He remembered the incident the boy had been talking about, of course. Not because it had been one of the greater moments of his life or even a masterpiece of deduction. A simple runaway girl who had fooled a gullible young man into helping her in her petty attempt to spite her parents. He had figured out the scam easily enough, but it couldn't have lasted much longer anyway, really.

The only thing that had burned it in Sterling's memory was that the girl's mother had been the love of his life, more or less. Or so he had told himself for decades while their relationship had never gone anywhere and the lady involved had gone elsewhere for companionship. Several elsewheres, in fact.. So there had been some pain involved in the experience. But life goes on, and he had learned, finally, that there were other fish in the sea. So he had put the entire experience, and everyone involved in it, firmly behind him. He wasn't especially eager to rake up old coals that might have a few sparks left to burn spots on his heart all over again.

And yet something told him that the boy might actually have something interesting to tell him. His reporter's instincts, perhaps, though Sterling didn't consider himself a reporter. Officially, he was a free-lance journalist writing feature articles about the odd and unconventional and the kooks who occupied the far reaches of the metaphysical and religious spectrum of life.

Being a reporter probably would have paid better, but he knew he would have withered and died writing about shady politicians and unimaginative criminals. Or so he told himself, mostly to justify a lifestyle that wasn't too many notches above that of one of the unfortunates who made a living returning refundable beer bottles and gathering random bits of scrap metal to sell at the junkyard.

When he decided enough time had passed he went back inside. After ordering a cup of coffee, he made his way to a booth in a relatively secluded corner of the fast food place's rather grandly titled dining room, away from the overexcited screaming children who had been convinced by endless commercials that eating cheap food in a cold, sterile environment was a party and their tired-looking mothers who seemed not even to notice that their progeny were in the same building as themselves. The acrid, bitter stuff that someone with a sense of humor had decided to offer as coffee had barely cooled enough to sip by the tme the young man arrived from an inner doorway.

"I didn't think you'd come back," he breathlessly as he slid into the hard plastic chair opposite him.

Sterling shrugged. "I admit, I was curious. I don't really remember your name....?"

The boy grinned. "I don't remember yours, either. I just recognized you from - well from what happened. I'm Hal Armand. Well, Halbert, but who wants to go around with a tag like that hung around his neck? It was okay for those Harvester nuts, but... Anyway, now it's Hal."

Sterling smiled and told him his name. The boy nodded and then seemed at a loss for words.

"Maybe you'd better tell me why you wanted to talk to me," Sterling suggested. "I don't suppose your break is very long in a place like this."

"It isn't." Hal's face darkened for a moment but then he shrugged. "I just- you solve mysteries, right?"

"Not exactly," Sterling corrected him. "I'm a journalist. Free-lance." Which meant that he seldom got paid for what he wrote he added to himself, but didn't say that aloud.

"But you do look into things, right?" Hal asked. "I mean like mysteries and stuff?"

"Sometimes," Sterling admitted. "Why? Do you have one?"

"I think so." He glanced around conspiratorially. "Have you ever heard of the Cult of Skulls?" he half-whispered when he had apparently determined that no one was eavesdropping.

"Like in India?" Sterling asked vaguely.

Hal shrugged. "Maybe, but I mean a rock group here in the city. You probably don't know them."

Sterling shrugged off this slur on his overall coolness in the eyes of someone half his age. "So what about them?" he prodded.

"Well one of their members is a friend of mine - he stays where I live, at the center - and he figures they're under some kind of curse."

"Literally or metaphorically?" Sterling asked, but then waved it away as Hal gave him a blank look. "Never mind. How does he know?"

"That's the problem," the boy said. "He doesn't, not really. He just thinks so because of some of the things that have been happening to them. Look, it's kind of hard to explain and you're right, I don't have a lot of time. If I lose this job too they'll throw me out of the center - they got it for me, see - and I don't really have anyplace else to go right now. Can we maybe talk about it somewhere else? When I don't have the Burger Harpy breathing down my neck?"

"Burger Harpy...

Hal nodded toward the manager behind the counter. She was clearly chewing out one of the other workers there, throwing suspicious glances in Sterling's direction as she did so. Watching her, Sterling could understand Hal's concern.

"Do you have a car?" he asked

Hal snorted. "Oh sure. But my Rolls is in the shop today, sorry. They're rotating the air in the tires."

"I don't know where you live," Sterling pointed out.

Hall flushed. "The Coms Center," he said with an embarrassed flush.

"I know the place," Sterling nodded. "I stayed there for awhile."

Hal looked at him with wide eyes. "Really?"

Sterling smiled slightly. "We all need help every now and then," he told him. He didn't add that he had done it as part of undercover research on the strange urban myths of the city's derelicts for a story that he had been writing at the time. A story he hadn't been able to get published anywhere... "I can come around sometime this evening if you want."

"Well, before ten, then," Hal said. "I start my second job at 11."

Sterling was impressed. "Two jobs. Sounds like you won't be staying in the Center long," he observed.

"Yeah, well maybe," the young man said vaguely. "If you can get there about, say, nine, that'd be cool. I'll just get up a little early."

"You sure you want to do that?" Sterling asked. "Sounds like you're on a tight schedule."

Hal shrugged. "I can do without sleep for one night I've done it before."

"With two jobs I don't doubt it."

"I have to get going," Hal said, watching warily as the Burger Harpy clicked around behind the counter on her painfully sharp high heels, clearly searching for a new victim. "I'll see you tonight, then. Be prepared for a pretty out-there story. And - thanks."

Read Chapter Two of The Cult of Skulls