“Jan! Stop. Please.”
The Sister had stopped moving.
Jan seemed to see him then. Her mouth went open in surprise, and she pushed the Sister’s body from her. “Did I—?”
He touched the Sister’s face. “She’s alive,” Harrison said, though in fact he had no idea. He stared at Jan for a long moment, then held out his unbandaged hand. She took it and pulled herself up. Her strength was alarming.
In that moment several questions in his mind were answered, or rather became one answer, like notes resolving into a chord. He knew who she was—and who she used to be.
Perhaps she saw the understanding dawn on his face. “Not now,” she said. “Greta.”
They dragged the unconscious Sister into the lobby—Harrison thought it best to get her off the street—and then started up the stairs.
Their way was lit by fire. Every half-dozen steps sat a glass bowl filled with oil and a floating wick, but the inconstant light was almost worse than pure darkness; the stairs seemed to shift beneath Harrison’s feet. Stabbing pain in his knee twice made him catch himself against the grimy walls.
Jan seemed to be having no trouble, though. She pushed past him, and he had to lunge after her to keep up. He felt like he was making a tremendous amount of noise, clumping up the stairs, huffing in the thick atmosphere of scented candles and stale urine.
At any moment he expected another Sister to appear, walking down to check on Pink Lips. He wasn’t sure what Jan would do, or what he would do. He didn’t know if he could cope with another gun aimed at his forehead.
On the second landing they heard the women’s voices chanting above them. Jan threw herself up the remaining stairs. “Wait,” he said, trying to keep his voice down, but she didn’t seem to hear him.
He reached the third-floor exit. Jan was halfway down the corridor. At the end of the hall an open doorway quavered with candlelight. The singing was loud now, a chorus that made his skin itch.
Jan reached the doorway and stopped. Harrison caught up to her a moment later.
Everyone in the room had turned to look at them.
Inside were a dozen women, sitting or standing around an open space in the center of the room. The tall, Indian-looking woman who’d come for Greta stood there between two wooden chairs that faced each other. Greta sat in one, and in the other sat a young girl, perhaps eight or nine years old. Greta had stripped down to her wife-beater and boy shorts, and the girl was dressed similarly, in a white T-shirt and shorts. Her skin, too, was an echo of Greta’s, their twin scars glowing and dancing in the flickering light.
Greta held the girl’s hands in her own, and had been leaning toward her. Now they’d turned, like the rest of the women, to see who was interrupting them.
Greta looked at Harrison as if he was a stranger. No: an enemy.
“Don’t do it,” Harrison said. “Don’t do it to her.”
He’d had it wrong. He thought Greta was going back to the Sisters to be their queen. Instead she was going to pass her mate to the next bride in the list.
“Out,” Greta said.
Jan said, “Greta, please . . .”
“Both of you,” Greta said. “Out.” One of the women on the floor nearest them began to get up.
“OUT!” Greta shouted.
Then it was in the room with them: the Hidden One revealing itself, shuddering into the world. Someone screamed. Harrison threw up his hands to shield his eyes, but that was an animal gesture, useless against the non-light that burst from it. It was not a “fire creature.” This was what fire aspired to. The heat that frightened the flames.
The thing churned toward them like a whirlwind. Harrison yanked Jan backward, into the hallway. The creature halted there on the other side of the doorway.
The door slammed shut. And then the women on the other side began to scream in earnest.
Jan shouted Greta’s name. Harrison hauled her back. The door shook in the frame; glowing holes popped through the surface like tiny meteor strikes.
“We have to get out!” Harrison shouted at Jan. “It’s—”
The door exploded outward. Shards of blazing wood bit into his skin. He grabbed Jan’s arm and yanked her toward the stairwell. Flames raced along the walls ahead of them. A roar filled his head, and he didn’t know whether it was the sound of the fire or the voice of the creature.
The stairwell was clear. They threw themselves down the stairs, Harrison barely staying on his feet, tripping over the oil candles and sending tiny flames bouncing ahead of them into the dark. At each turning of the stairs they caromed off walls, slamming shoulders.
Then the fire found them. Flames rippled across the peeling paint, and in an instant the stairwell became a furnace. They ducked their heads and ran, Harrison keeping one hand on Jan’s back, pushing her forward. Smoke jetted ahead of them. He could see nothing. He’d lost track of the number of floors. Somewhere above him, Greta’s mate was burning down the house.
I’ve got one play. He’d misunderstood everything. First he thought she was going to be their queen, their Aunty Greta. Then he thought she was going to push the Hidden One into the new bride. But thatwasn’t something Greta could do. Not to another little girl. So she had to finish what she’d started years ago—and make sure the Sisters never did this to anyone else again.
Jan dropped to her knees, then reached back and yanked him down. “Stay low!” she shouted.
Jan crawled forward—but “crawled” was the wrong word. She scuttled forward, moving on palms and toes. And so fast. He’d never seen anything human move like that.
They were on a flat surface now. He kept falling behind and she would stop, reach back for him. Her hand would touch his face or shoulder, then she’d lurch forward again.
The smoke enfolded them. He could not see his hands, much less Jan. He was coughing, and his eyes were watering furiously. The heat was like a weight pressing him to the ground.
Jan stopped short, shouted something back to him. It took her several tries for him to understand that the way ahead was blocked. He crawled up beside her and touched hot metal: the building’s rear door. The padlocked door. But how had they gotten back here? The lobby should have been right in front of them. Somehow they’d missed it, turned one too many times.
Jan started banging on the door. He joined her, hitting it with the side of his fist, but his blows were feeble. Then he started coughing, and suddenly he couldn’t lift his arms. He dropped flat against the floor, trying to find oxygen.
So strange. All his life, he was sure he’d die in water. He’d nearly drowned when he was a toddler and had not gone back into open water until a very bad night in Dunnsmouth. Even after surviving that night, he’d never lost his certainty that the sea would eventually suck him into the dark. Death by fire had never occurred to him.
Jan still banged away. Or else someone else was banging to get in. Sorry, he thought. Come back later.
A rush of wind and heat blew past him. Then he felt hands on his arms, and he was dragged out of the building, into the parking lot.
“Hey, Martin,” he said. Or tried to say. One breath and he was racked with coughing. Martin stood over him, still holding the tire jack, as Harrison rolled onto his side and attempted to hack his internal organs onto the gravel.
The building was in full torch. Every window blazed, opera boxes bursting with madly clapping flames.
“I could see Jan,” Martin said. “Behind the door.”
“Thanks,” Harrison said. He raised himself to his elbows, coughed some more.
“But Greta . . .” Martin asked. “I think she’s still in there.”
Jan was sitting up a few feet away, looking at the building. Her eyes were shining. “Oh God,” she said.
Harrison twisted to follow her gaze. The door they’d been trapped behind was wide open, the interior rippling with orange and yellow. A pair of figures walked down the corridor through the flames. No, not through. The flames parted around them.
/> Greta and the new bride stepped out of the doorway, holding hands. They were untouched. Radiant.
A few feet from the door, Greta stumbled, then righted herself. The girl looked up at her, concerned.
Greta turned. The building seemed to swell with new heat like a great beast inhaling. And it was a beast. The creature proudly shook the walls, bellowing from every open window. So large! So mighty!
Then: An explosion knocked Harrison onto his side, shook the ground. Debris rained down. When he looked up again, the building was shuddering. Then, thunderclaps. Internal structures gave way as floors collapsed.
Greta and the girl were still standing, facing the building. Greta opened her arms.
Fire burst from every window. Rivers of flame bent through the air toward her and in an instant engulfed her.
He tried to shout, but his lungs had no air.
She blazed. She blazed, lost inside the fire. And then the fire was inside her.
Greta opened her mouth, and the flame glowed there. Her eyes were alight. The girl beside her cried out. Greta raised an arm as if to say, Just give me a second. Then she closed her mouth, and then her eyes. Sealing the bottle.
Greta fell over onto her side. Jan was beside her a moment later, kneeling on the gravel. “She’s breathing,” Jan called to him. He assumed that was the truth. Jan wasn’t as much a liar as he was.
Behind him a voice said, “God damn.” Stan was sitting on the hood of the silver Pontiac. With his shortened legs he looked like a little kid who’d been propped up there to watch the fireworks.
Harrison got to his feet. “God damn” pretty much covered it.
The little girl, the former bride, looked down at Greta, then back at the building. The fire still burned, but it was an ordinary fire now, feeding only on oxygen and fuel. Cremating the dead. How many of them had been this girl’s family? One of them was likely to be her mother. And Greta—by releasing the thing inside her—had killed them.
The girl’s expression was stony. Another sole survivor, he thought. Another victim. And another candidate for long-term therapy.
Sirens sounded in the distance. Harrison turned to Martin and said, “You know how to drive?” His voice was a croak.
“Uh . . .”
“Start the car at least. The keys are in the ignition. And get Stan back in.”
Harrison went to Jan and crouched down. “We have to get Greta and the girl out of here,” he said. “I’ll help Greta. Why don’t you. . . ?” He nodded toward the girl.
Jan stood. “Tell me your name, child.”
“Alia,” she said.
“We have to go, Alia. Do you understand?”
She nodded. Jan held out a hand, but the girl declined to take it. They walked side by side toward Harrison’s car.
Greta stared up at him. “Did I get them all?”
He looked at the building. “Pretty sure.”
She took a breath. “Good.”
He reached for her, hesitated, then touched her elbow. Her skin felt almost cool. She allowed him to help her up.
“You should go,” Greta said. “Take care of Alia.”
“There’s room in the car for all of us.”
“I’m a murderer,” she said. “Again.”
“Everybody falls off the wagon.”
“Do not quip.”
“Sorry,” he said sincerely.
Martin was at the Pontiac, leaning over so Stan could climb onto his back. Jan was leading Alia to Harrison’s coupe. They had just reached the car when the door window shattered beside Alia’s head. The girl screamed.
Another voice shouted. Harrison turned. A woman shuffled toward them. One leg dragged behind her, and what clothing remained seemed to be glued to her body. Most of her hair had been burned away, but he recognized her. She screamed again and raised her arm a second time. She was pointing straight at Alia.
He ran toward the shooter, trying to put his body between the weapon and the little girl. He heard the pop of the pistol, felt a sting on his left thigh that made him stumble.
He righted himself, threw open his arms, making himself as large a target as possible. His vision began to swim. The woman with the pink lips was ten feet from him. He doubted she’d miss from this distance.
When the next gunshot came, it was much louder than he expected. Then another shot, and another.
The woman leaned backward, and fell. She did not move.
Harrison pivoted, and his leg nearly gave way. “What the fuck, Stan?”
Stan was riding on Martin’s back like a little kid. One hook steadied the barrel of a pistol; the other hook was looped around the trigger.
“I told you,” Harrison said. He blinked to clear his head. “No . . .fucking . . ” He began to tilt sideways, at first slowly, then very fast. He hit the gravel with a thump. His left pants leg was a very different color from his right, he noticed. Probably from blood. Almost certainly.
Jesus Christ, he thought. She couldn’t hit the plastic leg?
He opened his mouth to complain, but words escaped him, and consciousness fled closely after.
Chapter 11
We met for the last time three weeks after the fire. One more session, though a secret one, off-site and off the books. No one wanted to get Dr. Sayer in more trouble than she was in already, and she wanted nothing more on the record for the patients. We were criminals now: murderers and kidnappers and conspirators. As a therapy group we had clinched the prize for Worst Outcome Ever.
We gathered at a breakfast restaurant a few miles from the Elms. Dr. Sayer knew the owners, and because at two in the afternoon the place was nearly empty, they gave her the run of the back dining room. Martin and Stan arrived early. Ten minutes after the hour Harrison came in on crutches, looking haggard.
“She’s not with you?” Stan asked.
“Sorry,” Harrison said. He took a seat at the table and set the crutches on the floor. “I think she’s thrown away her phone. And no response on email.”
“Nothing for me, either,” Jan said.
The last time we had seen Greta was the night of the fire. She had volunteered to help Harrison check in at the emergency room. One minute she was beside his bed. The next she was gone.
Stan said, “You don’t think she’d hurt herself?”
Jan shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“She can’t risk it,” Harrison said. “If she breaks the bottle, it’s not clear what would happen to the thing inside her. Maybe it goes into the little girl.”
“But she couldn’t even say goodbye?” Stan asked.
No one had an answer for that. Maybe we’d grown tired of processing these absences.
Harrison poured himself coffee from the thermos on the table. The silence went on. Jan, however, seemed willing to let them warm up slowly. Finally Harrison said to Martin, “New frames?”
Martin nodded and took off the thick glasses. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. I’m just surprised.”
“It’s different now,” he said. He turned the frames in his hands. “Before, I was afraid to take them off. Now I want to use them. For the boost.” He smiled shyly. “I still don’t understand what happened that night. How I tracked her. I was just guessing.”
“But you weren’t,” Jan said. “Have you ever heard of blindsight?”
He shook his head.
“The brain knows more than it thinks it knows,” Jan said. “The information you’re processing isn’t coming through your visual system. It never was.”
“So these glasses are just props.”
“What works, works,” Stan said.
After a moment Harrison asked, “What happened to the little girl? Is she okay?”
“Alia’s traumatized, but she’s getting better,” Jan said. She’d gotten the girl admitted to a short-term treatment center. After that, social services would take over. Jan was petitioning to become her supervising therapist.
“How’d you explain how you f
ound her?” Harrison asked.
“I told them the truth—that I went to that building to help a patient in crisis. Then I saw the girl come out of the building.”
“What about the other stuff?” Martin said. “What if Alia tells them everything?”
“Then she tells them,” Jan said.
“You could lose your license!”
“What matters is the girl.”
Harrison believed that was more true than she knew. If the group hadn’t shown up that night, Greta would have still carried out her plan—but Alia, and probably Greta too, would be dead. And the Hidden One would be uncontained. He didn’t know what that would look like.
“I believe Alia can come through this,” Jan was saying. “I know others who have come through just as terrible beginnings. Scars heal.” She smiled. “But at the moment I’m interested in hearing from you. When terminating a group, we’d usually have several meetings to discuss the process. I’m afraid we’ll have to make do with this. So. Who’s first?”
As if she had to ask. Stan launched into complaints about Martin. The kid was still living upstairs, for free, yet kept harassing him about the mess downstairs.
“Lately I’ve been thinking about fire safety,” Martin said. “Do you know there’s not even room for a bed in his bedroom? The frame is leaning against the wall! He has to strap himself in.”
“Old habits,” Stan said.
They went on like this for nearly ten minutes, with Harrison asking questions to keep them going. The argument meant nothing in the long run, and perhaps that was why it meant so much now. No one wanted to stop talking. No one wanted to terminate.
The waitress came by to take away the coffee thermos. It was clear they wanted the room back.
“How about you?” Jan asked Harrison. “Any thoughts about the group?”
“I did want to talk about one thing,” Harrison said. He reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and dealt out the four 5x10 photographs. “These were taken during Barbara’s autopsy,” he told Stan and Martin. “It’s the map the Scrimshander laid out on her body.”
We Are All Completely Fine Page 12