The Acolytes of Crane (Theodore Crane, #1)(22)

We were ready for trial one. After we had entered the mall, we strolled into a popular skateboarding shop. Lincoln said that he wanted me to stuff something big and blatantly noticeable under my jacket. It was decided by both of us that if the item from the rack was indeed too small, then Lincoln could fail to observe my deft move from rack to jacket.

I have to admit that all I could think about beforehand was the prospect of failure.

Lincoln and I proceeded with the skit despite the consequences.

‘Dude, you said that you would buy it for me,’ I yelped in an irritated tone, but it wasn’t loud enough to override the music in the background of the store. Lincoln motioned for me to take it up a notch with his thumb.

I yelled out once more, louder this time, so that everyone could hear me over an epic guitar solo that was playing through the speaker system. I felt the weight of all the eyes and ears in the room fixed on us.

My mouth was dry. My stomach was full of butterflies, and it was showtime. I initiated the shove, and Lincoln stumbled across the room, knocking over a skateboard rack. When everyone seemed to be looking at Lincoln, I stuck an entire pair of shoes under my jacket, and no one had a clue that I did it. I did it! The Intervention had passively stood by, despite the evil within my mind. The real test would come later—by stepping outside the boundary of the store, possessing stolen goods without paying—the true definition of shoplifting.

It happened so quickly that I became sick with nerves in reaction to what I did.

We wanted to rule out all unexplained variables. We agreed, that should I actually complete the abduction of the item while he looked on, he would have to remove the existence of ulterior motive in my mind by grabbing me and pushing me out of the store. Thus, the switch—Lincoln would take on the role of bad guy, and test himself too.

We didn’t want to fail. We were determined to discover what was causing The Intervention, so we needed draw it out. Lincoln was to take his time grabbing me and shoving me several yards away from the store perimeter, so that his ulterior motive in shoving me could draw in The Intervention long before I reached the exit.

‘Dude, I cannot believe you shoved me, dork . . . boy,’ Lincoln shouted as he clutched my shirt and escorted me out in an act of false rage. Again, nothing supernatural happened. The Intervention had ignored the evil in my mind, then it ignored Lincoln’s too. Our eyes locked in fascination as we simultaneously realized the truth, but we had a trial to finish. We were now going to finally show the risky part to the omnipresent force—the exit from the store with stolen goods.

I backpedaled achingly close to the exit from the store, the stolen goods still on me. Out of improvisation and quick thinking, Lincoln gave one final big shove, propelling himself forward in my direction. Losing my balance due to Lincoln’s onslaught, I set one foot right on the speckled marble floor of the foyer of the mall—the forbidden “no man’s land.” My other foot tenuously remained on the tiled floor of the skateboard store.

Then it happened.

Wham!

It was as if an invisible wall was placed before us. We plastered ourselves into it at full sprint. We both experienced the full feeling of The Intervention—a frontal body slam.

It felt just like the time my body smacked the plywood at the bottom end of a skateboard mini-ramp after executing a risky aerial ‘drop-in.’ Back then, I was executing my first ‘drop-in’ on a skateboard.

Luckily, Lincoln and I were not injured. Two concussed dorks, with stolen goods, would have been difficult to explain to any conservative parents. After the collision, everyone was looking at us. Lincoln turned toward the spectators and screeched.

He said, “We are working-on-our-drama-for-a-school-play.” He sounded like a chipmunk on a tape player if one held down play and fast-forward at the same time.


Everyone’s eyes flitted away from our backs. A couple of tattooed punks from behind the counter laughed and joked about us. Meanwhile, we returned the shoes to their rightful home. Lincoln and I left separately, and we met in the food court to hatch out any issues with the first test.

‘It is official. You are a freak,’ Lincoln said.

‘Okay. Dork . . . man. What in the world were you thinking with that, or was it dork-boy?’ I asked.

‘Dork-boy was the best I could do. Never mind that, we need to be careful. If we don’t respect The Intervention, we could,’ he paused to lower his voice, ‘we could get injured or worse…’ he paused yet again to scan the room and ensure no one was listening, ‘…killed.’

Right there, at the corner of a taco joint and a roast beef stand, it was our grand discovery that what we were dealing with was extremely powerful and real. The first trial was complete. The Intervention could not read minds. The Intervention could only stop us from doing something bad.

I recalled the baseball card incident of a week ago. Back then, I had attempted to exit the store with an intent to steal. This time, with the shoes, I was pushed out of the store by Lincoln, with no intent to steal. The outcome was exactly the same. The Intervention had intervened both times at the boundary between law and crime—the store exit.

Lincoln then issued what was to be known as Linc’s Commandments:

‘One, we can never, ever-ever-ever speak of this to anyone. You and I have been trusted by the power, and we have accepted it. Others will be terrified of this power, and harm us because they are afraid. Two, we can never make a joke of the power. We have to respect it. We felt the pain it dished out today, by being goofballs. We don’t want to put anyone in that pain unless we have a good reason. Three, we must never use the power for bad. We should only use it for good.’