They stumbled onto the porch and down the steps. A gust from the house caught the front door and slammed it behind them.
At the base of the steps, they stopped.
Lights bathed Greensward. Red lights and blue lights and white lights, stationary lights and lights that spun wildly into the night. The first of the lights pulled up in front of the house and dark forms disengaged themselves from trucks and cars.
For an instant, both men were blinded. They threw their arms in front of their eyes and felt the warmth of blood as it flowed across their foreheads and into their eyes.
“Cathy!” Payne cried.
He stumbled forward, almost falling, but reaching her at the same moment the first of the paramedics knelt at her side. Another caught Payne as he fell. Someone else—a fireman, maybe—grabbed Nick under the arm and propelled him away from the house just as the front windows blew out and showered the porch with glitters of pulverized glass.
Flames licked along the wooden rafters, and the leaves of the vines that had almost recovered the wildness that The Greer had fostered withered beneath the heat. The blast struck Nick full in the back and, in spite of the arm that tried to support him, knocked him to the ground. He struck his head against something hard.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Nick woke to sensations of heat and a cacophony of sound.
Even before he struggled to lift the iron weights that hung over his eyes, he felt the heat on his face, on his arms and neck.
He heard voices as well, but could not distinguish any words.
He opened his eyes.
At first, he could not understand what he was seeing. There was only an indeterminate glare of red-orange framed in the middle of universal blackness. The glare seemed both immediate and distant. Since there was nothing else visible, he didn’t know whether it was close or miles away.
He could feel its heat on his skin. It must be close.
A shadow blocked part of the glare and where the shadow fell on his skin, Nick felt a delicious coolness.
“He’s okay. Not too bad,” a voice said. Something touched Nick’s wrist. A finger and a thumb. Someone checking his pulse.
With that perception, events pulled together and Nick tried to sit up.
“Take it easy,” the voice said. “You got no breaks or deep cuts, mostly scratches and bruises, but don’t try to move too fast.”
Nick nodded numbly but continued moving until he was standing—a bit wobbly to be sure, but standing. His back rested against the side of the paramedics’ truck. A man in a dark uniform hovered beside him, as if afraid that Nick would suddenly topple over and damage himself further.
Nick waved his hand, meaning the gesture to say hey, I’m okay now, no problem.
The man in the uniform shrugged and moved away.
Nick closed his eyes for a moment. He felt all right. Stings from cuts, sure, and places where he felt like his ribs and arms and back had been hit with sledge hammers. His leg burned. There was an awkward bulkiness there. He looked down and saw the bandages that swathed him from ankle to knee. But other than that he was fundamentally okay.
He raised his eyes and looked around. Payne’s house was engulfed in flames. The roof had fallen in and flames hurtled skyward through the emptiness where the attic had been. The cyclopean eye was gone; that part of the front wall must have toppled inward because the porch was burning but unlittered by debris.
Dark silhouettes flitted in the night between Nick and the fire, and he knew from their frantic attempts to fight the fire that he could not have been unconscious for very long.
He stood away from the truck and took a few steps. He was a little dizzy. Nothing that time and a long rest wouldn’t cure.
At the edge of the street, a clot of dark figures huddled around something. They parted long enough for Nick to see two men standing on each side of a slim form sitting in the open doors of the ambulance. Someone else was standing in front of her, his back to Nick and his attention riveted on the woman being cared for my one of the paramedics. Nick recognized the woman.
Cathy!
He stumbled toward the ambulance.
“Cathy!” he yelled, oblivious to the fact that he barely knew the woman, that he had spoken to her only once.
At the sound of his voice, she looked up and started to call to him. He tripped on a fire hose and pitched forward. Someone grabbed him by the arm—careful to avoid the bandages plastered here and there on his skin like military badges of valor—and propelled him around one of the trucks into the relative calmness and quiet of the street. When his eyes got used to the dark, Nick looked around.
The street was clogged with fire trucks and police vehicles and news crews in—and in two cases on—vans. Beyond a fragile barrier of wooden barricades connected by yellow plastic ribbon, neighbors and strangers stared, some at Nick, others at the fire raging beyond him.
“Hey, man, you okay?” the man holding onto Nick’s arm asked.
“Where’s Payne? Mr. Gunnison?”
The man looked blankly and shrugged.
“The owner. It’s his house that’s burning.”
Comprehension dawned and the man pointed back toward the knot of people standing where the ambulance had been only seconds before.
Nick studied the group. Yes, there was Payne standing next to Cathy. From this distance, and from what little Nick could see of him, he looked unharmed, other than a bandage across his forehead. Nick started across to him, then slowed and stopped. Payne looked well.
Too well.
Nick remembered seeing Payne in agony in the living room, remembered the flashes of current scouring Payne’s body and whipping him around. Nick remembered the thing inside as it reached out to touch....
“Payne!” he yelled. Payne jerked his head up as if startled and stared for a moment.
Nick felt a chill begin at the base of his neck and ripple down his spine.
The clump of forms parted. Payne said something to Cathy and touched her on the shoulder and then turned away and walked toward Nick. He walked slowly, painfully, as if he hurt in every joint. But he didn’t limp. He didn’t shuffle or drag one leg behind him. His shoulders slumped, but it was the slump of utter, bone-breaking fatigue not of age or disease, and when Payne grabbed Nick’s shoulders both hands were strong and steady, with fingers that were young and slender and strong.
“You all right?” Payne asked.
“Yeah. How’s Cathy?”
Payne grinned suddenly—it was so unexpected that for a moment Nick’s exhausted brain interpreted the movement as a grimace, a threat.
“She’s going to be fine. Burns are mostly superficial. No concussion, they think. They’re bandaging her hands now.”
Nick wanted to say something but suddenly his well of words failed. So did Payne’s, apparently, because they both turned as if with one motion and watched the firemen scurrying around the house.
Sometime during the fire, sparks had landed on the roof of the garage because it was burning strongly now as well. A line of hoses protected Nick’s place on one side and the Harrisons’ on the other.
Payne’s house would be a total loss. That much was obvious to everyone. The sense of frantic effort diminished. The best the fire companies could hope for would be containment to only the two structures.
The two men crossed through the darkness and stood near where Cathy sat on a chair that neither of them recognized. One of the neighbors must have brought it out for her. It was a white aluminum chair with white webbing touched with blue. In the reflected glare from the fire, Cathy seemed sitting on cold flames.
Nick shivered and turned away. The three of them watched the fire for a long time. None spoke.
Gradually the flames died down. Gusts of sparks exploded as interior walls fell or rafters gave way, but the worst was over. Some of the spectators filtered away, enervated by the dying fire or exhausted by the late hour. One by one the camera crews departed, and several of the fire trucks.
Officials stood by Payne for long moments at a time asking questions in low voices. Payne answered curtly, with one- or two-word responses, often only shaking his head or nodding.
Several times, firemen or paramedics tried to persuade Cathy to go to the hospital and have the burns on her hand treated further. She held up her hand. The gauze wrappings glowed redly against the firelight. She shook her head resolutely. She refused to leave the yard on Greensward. Her eyes never left Payne, except when she allowed them to stray to the fire for a few seconds at a time.
Through it all, Payne watched the house as it died. Nick watched it, too. Neither Payne nor Nick nor Cathy grieved at the loss.
CHAPTER FIFTY
By dawn, the fire was dead. The first streaks of daybreak burning through the spiky fronds of palms further down Greensward revealed only charred remnants of the house and the garage. The lawn had burned for several feet from the house, and the rest of the yard was a mass of trampled grass mixed with ashes and water into a filthy quagmire. Deep tire marks scarred the ground.
Payne and Nick and Cathy had not moved all night.
With the coming of the dawn and the final last burst from the fire, there was time for more questions about how the conflagration might have started.
“Probably electrical,” Payne said quietly to one of the questioners. “I’d been having some trouble with...with the wiring.”
Then later, sometime around nine or ten, came a moment when Nick saw Payne grow tense. The three of them had moved over to Nick’s porch. They had picked at a quick breakfast Nick threw together, sitting where they could see most of the house next door.
Payne stiffened when several official-looking people entered the rubble and began prodding at the water-soaked ruin. Payne got up from the porch and walked around the shattered walls, keeping the investigators in sight. Nick could tell that Payne expected them to find something at any moment.
The prospect obviously frightened Payne. He stood for more than an hour more, waiting and watching.
By that time, Payne was pale and trembling, on the verge of collapse. The stress of the night, of whatever had happened to him inside that house, had finally caught up with him.
“Be right back,” Nick said to Cathy. She nodded. She too was pale. Her hand hurt but she still refused to leave until Payne could come with her.
Nick went across the devastated yard and put his hand on Payne’s shoulder; Payne jumped at the touch. Nick left his hand there and for a long time afterward, he felt a trembling that seemed to come from deep inside Payne.
“Hey,” Nick said finally, “come on back to my place.”
Payne didn’t answer. He watched the investigators intently, waiting.
“Come on,” Nick said again. “How about a cup of coffee or something.”
Payne started to answer, but at that moment several figures emerged from the rubble. Their clothing was sodden with ash-blackened water. They conferred with other official-looking types on the ruin of Payne’s lawn, then disappeared into vans and cars. One of the official-types separated himself from the others and came over to Payne.
“Sorry that we couldn’t save anything, Mr. Gunnison,” he said. He shook his head slowly. “The fire was too hot. There’s nothing inside, nothing salvageable. Sorry.”
Payne nodded. “We’ll need to contact you later today...,” the man began.
“He’ll be next door. At my place,” Nick said.
“Okay,” the man said. And again, “Sorry.”
He left.
“Let’s go,” Nick said, walking toward his place. Payne looked up, as if he were coming out of a trance, and stared at the ruin.
“He must have gotten out,” he said softly.
“What?” Nick asked. “Who?”
“Uh, nothing,” Payne said, turning away from the rubble.
He sat down on the wooden planks of Nick’s porch and leaned his head against Cathy’s legs. She ran the fingers of her uninjured hand through his hair. To Nick, it looked like a heartbreakingly tender moment for both of them. Neither spoke. Neither needed to.
Nick had plenty of questions to ask Payne, of course. And Cathy probably did also. Most likely Payne wouldn’t be able to answer many of them. He had already suggested that there were great gaps in his memory over the past weeks, blank spaces filled only with fleeting, staticky images that he preferred not to think about.
But there would be time later on to dig deeper and discover as much of the truth as they could.
Time.
Nick glanced at his watch and noted with a mild sense of dismay that the calendar window read August 1.
What happened to the summer, he wondered to himself, shaking his own head as if he, too, were coming out of a trance. So much time had passed; he had so few memories of it.
Most of his reading lay untouched in his bedroom. But somehow he couldn’t feel disappointed. The important thing was that Payne and Cathy were sitting together on his front porch, that they touched each other in ways that made Nick feel as if any previous suffering would be fully and fairly repaid by the happiness they felt at this moment.
Payne looked over at the ruins of the house, and for a second his face took on an expression of pain and loss and fear. He looked away, and in a moment or two, Nick heard him whisper something to Cathy: “I’m back to stay. I’ll never leave you again. Ever.”
Cathy leaned over and kissed him. This time it was Nick’s time to look away.
But only for a little while.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael R. Collings is a Professor Emeritus at Seaver College, Pepperdine University, where he directed the Creative Writing Program for over two decades. He has published over 120 volumes of poetry, novels, short fiction, and scholarly studies of such contemporary writers as Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, Dean R. Koontz, and Piers Anthony. Recent works include The Art and Craft of Poetry (1996, 2009); Toward Other Worlds: Perspectives on John Milton, C. S. Lewis, Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, and Others (2010); In Endless Morn of Light: Moral Agency in Milton’s Universe (2010); In the Void: Poems of Science Fiction, Myth and Fantasy, and Horror (2009); Matrix: Growing Up West—Autobiographical Poems (2010); and a Book of Mormon epic, The Nephiad: An Epic Poem in XII Books (1996, 2010)
He has been a frequent participant at literary, science fiction, fantasy, and horror conferences and symposia over the past quarter-century, and has served as Academic Guest of Honor at the World Horror Convention (2008); Special Guest of Honor at ConDuit (2008); Guest Scholar at EnderCon (2002); Academic Guest of Honor at MythCon XXVI (1994); Author Guest of Honor at HorrorCon ’89 (1989); Poetry Guest at LosCon XXVII (1989); and Guest of Honor, Poetry Guest of Honor, Academic Guest of Honor, and Special Guest at various meetings of the Life, the Universe & Everything Marion K. “Doc” Smith Symposium on Science Fiction and Fantasy (1992-2010).
His fiction, also published through Wildside Press, includes: The House Beyond the Hill: A Novel of Fear (2007); Wordsmith, Volume One: The Thousand Eyes of Flame (2009) and Wordsmith, Volume Two: The Veil of Heaven (2009); Singer of Lies: A Science-Fantasy Novel (2009); Wer Means Man, and Other Tales of Wonder and Terror (2010); Three Tales of Omne: A Companion to Wordsmith (2010); Devil’s Plague: A Mystery Novel (2011); The Slab (2010), the story of a haunted tract house in Southern California…that consumes people; and A Pound of Chocolates on St. Valentine’s Day (2011). His fiction is available in both print and e-book editions.
With his wife Judith, he has also published Whole Wheat for Food Storage: Recipes for Unground Wheat (2011).
He is now retired and lives in his native state of Idaho.
BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY MICHAEL R. COLLINGS
All Calm, All Bright: Christmas Offerings
The Art and Craft of Poetry: Twenty Exercises Toward Mastery
BlueRose and Other Selected Chapbooks
Brian Aldiss
Dark Transformations: Deadly Visions of Change
Devil’s Pla
gue: A Mystery Novel
The Films of Stephen King
GemLore: An Introduction to Precious and Semi-Precious Gem-stones
The House Beyond the Hill: A Novel of Horror
In Endless Morn of Light: Moral Freedom in Milton’s Universe
In the Void: Poems of Science Fiction, Myth and Fantasy, & Horror
The Many Facets of Stephen King
Matrix: Echoes of Growing Up West
Milton in Context
Naked to the Sun: Dark Visions of Apocalypse
The Nephiad: An Epic Poem in XII Books
Piers Anthony
A Pound of Chocolates on St. Valentine’s Day: A Novel of Terror
Scaring Us to Death: The Impact of Stephen King on Popular Culture
Singer of Lies: A Science Fantasy Novel
The Slab: A Novel of Horror
Static! A Novel of Horror
Tales Through Time: Poems, Revised and Enlarged Edition
Three Tales of Omne: A Companion to Wordsmith
Toward Other Worlds: Perspectives on John Milton, C. S. Lewis, Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, and Others
Wer Means Man and Other Tales of Wonder and Terror
Whole Wheat for Food Storage (with Judith Collings)
Wordsmith, Part One: The Veil of Heaven
Wordsmith, Part Two: The Thousand Eyes of Flame
Static! Page 37