by James Smythe
The man who ran off comes back. He’s got a container of gas with him. Jessie watches him haul it to the front of the crowd and Henderson shouts at him to stop, but he doesn’t listen. He pulls the cap off and hurls it up at the house; over the porch, over the decking. It collides with the house and almost explodes, sending a shower of fuel all over the side of it. Henderson shouts at him, but he’s passionate. He yells, and everybody hears it, that Robards was his friend, that he wants to get that asshole Walker out of the house now. Henderson says something about putting the children in danger. The man doesn’t care. He pushes Henderson back. The other man – Templeton, somebody says his name, a Deputy – runs around to the side of the house, close to Robards’ body, and he grabs Robards by the armpits, and leads his friend back towards the crowd. When he’s done he picks up Trent Henderson’s smoldering torch from the ground, and he doesn’t say a word. He hurls it in the same arc as he threw the canister.
The flames seem to catch before the torch even hits the wood, as if the fumes might be enough. They rip around the house, swallowing the old gray wood. They cover all that can be seen in seconds, as if this house was always meant to be burned.
Inside the house, Deanna hears the water; it sounds like a gentle wave, a tide, lapping against the house. It cannot be that, because she knows that there is no tide. Then comes the heat from the flames and she realizes what has happened. The house starts succumbing almost immediately. She hears the crackle of the wood, and the creaking of it as it begins to buckle.
‘No,’ Laurence says. ‘No!’ The flames start to come inside. The gaps between the planks themselves, and the spaces underneath the doors, and the windows, and the small round bullet holes. The flames lick their way inside and Laurence crouches in the middle of the floor. ‘Oh, no,’ he says. ‘No!’ He rams the floor with the gun, over and over, as if he could just fire into the wood, and then he stands up. ‘We go upstairs,’ he says.
‘The house will collapse,’ Deanna tells him. ‘We’ll all die.’ He nods, as if that’s an acceptable outcome, and then it hits him, like inspiration.
‘Down, then. The cellar. That’s stone. We can survive the fire there.’
‘And what happens—’
‘Just fucking listen to me!’ he screams. ‘Just fucking listen! I am trying to save you, don’t you see that? I am trying to save us all!’ He crosses to the cellar door and opens it. He looks into the darkness; there is no bulb in the fitting down there and he’ll want to close the door, but it’s cold old stone walls and a stone ceiling and stone floors, and it will be safe. Even if it’s only for a short while. ‘Get downstairs,’ he says, ‘in the cellar.’ He holds the door open for them.
The TV in Amit’s dash tells him about the fire and he struggles to not watch it, to keep his eyes on the road. The house burns, a red and orange and yellow thing against the backdrop of the lake, and the sun in the distance, coming over the hills at the far side. It’s almost the same color. On the small screen it looks like they’re bleeding into each other. The whole house is somehow engulfed.
The GPS tells him that he’s twenty minutes away. He wants to be able to see the town in the distance and he looks, to find a glow of gold, because if he can see it burning he will know that he is getting closer.
It’s pitch black and they can’t see anything. There is no adjusting to the light, because there’s nothing to adjust to, nothing coming in from anywhere. The cellar is like a bunker, like somewhere you would drag your family to escape the terrors of nuclear war. Built like a safe room, only without a lead-lined door; and with no way of looking out, of seeing if the world outside is safe or not. Deanna can’t see Laurence, but she can hear him pacing around, his legs swirling the water around his ankles. She can feel her daughters, because they’re all clinging to each other, and she puts her hand out to feel the back wall. It’s cold, maybe even damp, and she feels her way along it, trying to get as far away from Laurence as possible. He murmurs, standing by the water main. She doesn’t care what he’s trying to say now.
‘Why have you done this?’ she asks.
‘I. Have. Done. Nothing,’ he replies. He pauses between his words as if he cannot catch his breath; as if he has been running and he’s come back and she has tried to have a normal conversation. He struggles.
‘We could die down here.’
‘You could die up there! Didn’t you see? They wanted to burn us down, Deanna.’
‘Not us,’ she replies. He stops moving, and she suddenly becomes aware that she’s lost him. In this darkness, he is silent. He is holding his breath. ‘They wanted you, Laurence. Not the girls.’
‘I didn’t want this,’ he says. ‘You think that I did? You think that I ever imagined that this would be the way that this would go? I was going to be president. Do you remember that? It feels like such a long time ago, doesn’t it, that once that was the dream? Better for me, and for our family, and for the whole country. I mean, what even was that? Because, apparently, I was never going to be that man. Apparently, fuck you, Laurence Walker. Fuck you, because you’re just a fucking joke. You’re a man with a gun and we’ll treat you like a fucking murderer and you will—I mean, I am not a bad man, Deanna. Girls. I am not. I have tried so hard; you know that. But what did I do? What did I do?’ He’s silent. He waits in the quiet, and he breathes.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. She doesn’t say anything more and there is no sound. The silence is broken by the sobbing of one of their daughters, but honestly, in this darkness, Deanna cannot tell which one it is.
Jessie watches as the house begins to crumble; she hears the creak of wood breaking in on itself. The townsfolk stand and watch, but they aren’t proud. They don’t want blood on their hands. Or, they don’t want the wrong blood. She knows what they would have done to Laurence – and everybody would have stood aside. This would have been in self-defense. She can hear the headlines. He was a violent man, an unstable man, a terrifying man. He wasn’t who he seemed to be. We were told that he couldn’t be trusted. He killed a police officer. He was insane.
Jessie pushes through the crowd, trying to get to the front. She thinks about shouting to Laurence what has happened, but doesn’t think he’ll hear her. If he does, he won’t listen. Deanna might. So she tries, but the townsfolk look at her and close ranks. She is held back. My name is June, one woman’s badge reads, and she puts her hands on Jessie’s shoulders and looks her square in the eyes.
‘This is ours,’ she says, as if Jessie is trying to kill Laurence herself. She pushes Jessie back, so she tries shouting out the things that Amit has told her, but they’re lost to the crowds of people and the sound of the world waking up. The sun is in the sky and the birds are wide awake. It’s morning.
‘When did this happen?’ Laurence asks.
‘What?’
‘This. My decline.’ He spits the words, stolen from whatever TV show he heard them in. They are not his own. ‘It hasn’t always been like this, has it? Have you always been afraid of me?’
‘No,’ Deanna says. ‘Not always.’
‘We were happy. Girls, your mother and I, we were always happy. This is only recent, whatever this is.’
‘Laurence,’ she says, as if she is going to plead with him to spare them again; as if maybe she has an excuse, a reason that he should let them go. But, she realizes, if the simple fact that they would be alive isn’t enough, what can she say?
‘I know,’ he says. ‘What are they so scared of? Because there are worse things than this. There are certainly worse things than me.’ Above them, there is the crash of something falling onto something else, wooden floorboards and walls beginning to tear themselves apart, no longer able to sustain the weight. Deanna can’t tell what it is, but those wrought-iron beds will outlast the floors they’re standing on; and the glass of the windows, the ceramics of the bathrooms. They’ll all fall down on top of them. There’s another crash, another shattering of something. She wonders how long they have because, one way th
is ends is with Laurence too afraid to do anything, too cowardly, if that’s what it is; and Trent Henderson will still get to him in the end, walking across the charred ashes of the house and hauling him from this pit. Maybe she just has to wait it out. Maybe. ‘I won’t let you leave,’ he says, ‘because this is the only way. I was there, in that video, Deanna. I was there with you all, and with the gun.’
‘It wasn’t always the same video. In the beginning it was different. It wasn’t as bad.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t.’ She hears his suit rubbing against itself, the shirt against the jacket collar. He is nodding, and she can picture it; agreeing when he doesn’t really agree. ‘But look at us now!’ He sounds almost amused. ‘It was always a truth, wasn’t it?’
‘Homme posed for his video. He recreated it.’
‘That is still a truth.’
‘It was manufactured.’
‘Everything is. Nothing is accidental, Deanna. I don’t know that it’s ever been.’ He shuffles. ‘All of you: can I hold you all again?’
‘No,’ Lane says. It’s abrupt, and her voice cuts through the darkness, as if it has to get used to it.
‘I understand,’ Laurence says. ‘Pumpkin? What about you?’
‘No,’ Deanna says. ‘Lane, keep a hold of your sister.’ She feels behind her; they are both there, both as safe as she can possibly keep them. ‘You can hold me, Laurence.’ If it protects them, she thinks, if it stops him getting to them. Maybe she can do something.
‘Thank you,’ he says. He steps towards her and she feels his hot breath as he does and his arms around her. She puts hers around him and she feels him – every part of him – underneath them. He feels as if he is made from paper. She could crush him, she thinks. She feels it, though; the cold shape of the gun on her back, the flat of the metal pressed against her.
‘That’s enough,’ she says. ‘Now let us go.’
‘Not until it’s done,’ he says.
Amit drives through Staunton. He hears something in the distance that he thinks could the be faint whirr of a helicopter’s blades, the police or the press. When they arrive, this will all be over, and he will have no chance at all of impacting anything – so he drives faster, pushing the engine as much as he can. He nearly misses the turning and ends up cutting the corner, the tires on the car snagging on something. He hears something buckle and the flap of the tire tearing on it. He can’t stop, he knows.
All along the dirt road down towards the woods: thwap, thwap, thwap. And then he sees the smoke rising above the trees. No light other than the sun, but the smoke is thick and black with the old wood of the house, like a cloud rising from behind the trees, from the lake itself.
The house is like origami, almost, folding inwards. What was there is now something else, a mess of angles waiting to be flattened. The flames are gone, because it burned so brightly and so quickly, and now there’s red cinder and dark, blackened wood, and that smell, and the smoke which is so dark that it can barely be seen through. Jessie wonders why they didn’t leave the house, if Walker kept them there and let it swallow them. She can barely breathe. She shouts something, but so too, it seems, does everybody else.
Amit’s phone rings. He answers.
‘Is this my fault?’ Hershel asks. ‘I’m watching on the news. Is this really actually my fault?’
‘I don’t know,’ Amit says. Through the woods he goes, the car on the dirt.
The whole thing falls around them, the wood and the fixtures and the fittings raining down. There is a crack, and a joist in the room – the one holding up the ceiling, Deanna suspects – snaps and splinters. The room groans. She backs against the far wall and she feels the ceiling, the bricks.
‘We’ll die in here,’ she says. Laurence is silent. She feels something, then, around her ankles. Ripples. ‘Stop moving,’ she says to the girls, and everybody is motionless. Still, the water ripples around her ankles. The level is rising, but the lapping is coming from somewhere.
‘I want to go,’ Alyx cries.
‘I know, Pumpkin,’ Laurence tells her. She cries more at that. Deanna bends down and feels the wall. There’s a hole, now underneath the waterline. This is where the flood damage came from. Where Sean was.
‘The water,’ Laurence says. ‘It’s rising.’
‘We’re being flooded.’ She leaves the girls where they are – everything is complicit and they don’t make noise when she does; they understand that she’s doing this for them – and she crouches into the water, feeling for the hole. She presses between the stones, her finger finding its way along the concrete, and it flakes away with the water.
‘What are you doing?’ Laurence asks.
She presses the stone and it shifts, a loose tooth in a gum. The water becomes a torrent. There is light, from the hole, pouring in: this is the lake, the part underneath the dock. This, she realizes, is the water that Sean died in. It brings light in with it, enough to see the shapes of her family.
‘What did you do?’ Laurence shouts.
Deanna pulls another block out, and another. It’s big enough to climb through, she thinks, certainly big enough for Alyx.
‘Let us go!’ she yells.
‘No,’ he says. He runs up the stairs and tries the door, but it’s stuck fast. The house is blocking them. She pulls the girls towards the hole. The room will flood, and then it will collapse. She looks at Laurence. He is where he stood and he has the gun by his side. He cocks the trigger. He doesn’t look at her. ‘But we’re together,’ he says. The water is up to her waist, and they are next to the hole, lined up and terrified. The hole is where Sean was, along with whatever’s at the bottom of the lake. She cannot wait.
‘Swim through,’ she says to the girls.
‘Don’t leave me,’ Laurence tells her. ‘Deanna, I am not that man.’
More water. A brief pause, and a look in Laurence’s eye. He—
Amit comes over the hill. He pulls the handbrake and throws the door open, runs down the track towards the smoking remnants of the house. The whole thing is gone, or will be. Fizzled out, the dying embers of a hearth. Around the shoreline the water is chopped into waves, moving back and forth; it’s murky, reflecting the smoke above it, as if it is full of mud, or ash, or ink.
He sees the crowd. Faces from the town and from the Walkers’ life, from the news companies, Jessie in the middle, searching for him as he runs. He knows he’s too late.
This is how the video ends.
From the house he hears a bang, the crack of a pistol; and then Alyx’s voice screams through the darkness.
It echoes through the trees. The sound is caught on camera and broadcast, and everybody outside the remains of the house stares. Amit runs down the path, through the people, pushing them aside. At the edges of the smoldering ashes of the house he shouts their names. The water of the lake is like a sea.
Everybody stands still, to see what happens next.
Epilogue
Laurence opens the door to the outside, to the decking, to the fledgling sun that is rising in the distance.
‘Look at that,’ he says. He points into the distance, to the far side of the lake. ‘Can you see that?’ he asks Sean, but his son isn’t listening. ‘This is what it should be like. This is what our life, when we get a chance, should be.’ He picks up Sean and he laughs, and Sean laughs, and Laurence threatens to throw him into the water, running and laughing with him. He stops, and they both collapse with giggles.
‘Go in,’ he says, ‘get used to it. Then I’ll show you.’
Sean pads down the bank and into the water, Laurence right behind him. It’s freezing, and Laurence bends away from it when it hits his waist. Sean starts swimming, this half breaststroke, half doggy-paddle thing that he picked up from his friends, and then Laurence follows, howling with the cold.
‘Holy crap!’ he yells and Sean laughs at the curse word. ‘This is so cold!’ He goes under, soaking his hair and face. ‘Now this is the best part. Come on!’
he shouts, beckoning Sean towards him. They both climb out and up onto the dock, and then Laurence explains what they are going to do. The water drips off them and onto the wood, and the dock seems to move slightly. The lake is no longer still.
He explains how this works: that you have to trust in the water and in your own body. You have to step back, take a little run up. Sean is scared, but Laurence reassures him.
‘We’ll do it from the end,’ he says. They stand with their toes at the lip of the wood, and Laurence poses for his son, to show him; arms up, outstretched to a point. And then you tip forward, and you break the water, and you’re underneath so you start kicking to back up. Take a breath before you dive, and hold it. You have to remember to hold it.
‘I’m scared,’ Sean says.
‘It’s okay,’ Laurence says. ‘You won’t be when you’ve done it once. Then you’ll want to do it over and over. Remember the rollercoaster at Disney?’ Sean nods. ‘This is like that. It’s good scary.’
‘Okay,’ Sean says. They stand there in the same pose. Sean is so thin, his skin almost translucent in this light.
‘One. Two. Three!’ Laurence says. He puts his hand gently on Sean’s back, helping the boy tip forward; and he watches him go into the water, breaking the surface and then kicking out, half in panic and half in pleasure. Laurence smiles, and then he steps back and he launches forward in turn, up and into the air; and then down, following his son underneath the waves that they themselves have made.
Acknowledgements
Thanks first and foremost to Laura Deacon. It’s often remarked that a writer is only as good as their editor, and I sincerely hope that to be true. Laura is exceptional, and I appreciate every single thing she’s done for me over the past few years. I wouldn’t have written the books I have were it not for her, and that means more to me than I can say.