Simeon Grist Mystery - 04 - Incinerator

by Timothy Hallinan

  My knees began to buckle long before I made it. I was even more fatigued than I’d realized, worn down to nub ends and scraped nerves by Wilton Hoxley. I did the last third of the incline at a sorry trot, which was just as well because I ran right into a chest wound.

  At the moment of impact, I thought I’d been shot. I bounced back, flung like a slingshot, and a bright spot of pain in my chest announced itself in crimson through my T-shirt. Both the red and the pain spread as I stood there stupidly, staring down and waiting for my lungs to collapse. When they didn’t, when the sound of the shot didn’t follow, when a second bullet failed to tear into me, I looked up and saw a barbed-wire fence.

  A fence, by implication, has something on the other side of it. The thought formed altogether too slowly in my brain as I pressed at the torn skin on my chest and tried to stanch the bleeding. The hill crested some twenty feet beyond the fence. I left a piece of my shirt waving gaily on one of the barbs, but except for that and a scratched knee, I got through intact. I was almost to the top of the hill when I heard the music.

  Polyphonal, rhythmic, anachronistic, something with drums and tambours and sackbuts, it floated on the breeze that blew hot on my face as I topped the hill and looked down on a miniature out of an illuminated manuscript brought to life, a fifteenth-century fairyland set down mistakenly in some obscure corner of the Gobi Desert.

  Turrets rose gracefully against the nicotine-colored sky. Pennons snapped in the wind, arches arched, flying buttresses flew. I counted three crenellated pasteboard castles, stone-solid from here, several smaller structures, and a warlord’s moated fortress. On a patch of green sward too healthy-looking at this time of year to be anything but Astroturf, mounted knights with lances gave each other the evil eye through upraised visors when their horses pawed the plastic. This had to be the place.

  Revelers in costume pushed and shoved their way festively through the streets of a medieval town that huddled at the knees of the taller structures. People crowded against stages where jugglers made patterns of oranges in the air and mountebanks performed tumbling tricks and magicians did complicated things with geese and conical Merlin’s hats. A sudden burst of flame, seen out of the corner of my eye, popped my goose bumps to attention in defiance of the heat. I focused to see a burly man on one of the stages, stripped to a pair of uncomfortable-looking leather bloomers, lift a torch to his mouth and spew an arc of fire five feet long.

  The fire reminded me that I was underdressed. I clambered back through the fence and scuffed my way back down the hill to fetch my suit of armor.

  The flat little automatic that I’d reclaimed from the cops was in the glove compartment, and I took it out and put it, plus two spare clips, on top of the car. The clip in place was full, and the bullets were illegal hollow-points that made an entrance wound the size of a tenpenny nail and an exit wound the size of a cantaloupe.

  The bucket full of water and towels had been wedged on the floor between the backseat and the backrest of the front seat. I drew out one of the sopping towels and wrung it out over my head, soaking my shirt and shorts, and then twisted the excess water out of the others and went to work.

  First, two wet towels, one on top of the other, wrapped tightly around my torso from armpits to crotch and fastened to each other and to the T-shirt with the heaviest of the safety pins. Then one towel, wound diagonally, around each of my arms and legs and pinned to my shirt and shorts. I had to leave open areas over my knees and elbows to give me bending room, and it took a little time to get it right. By that time I was as wrapped in white as Claude Rains in the middle reels of The Invisible Man.

  I dipped the extra-large sweatpants into the bucket, gave them a squeeze, and climbed in. The towels didn’t look all that bulky, given the size of the pants. The zippered sweatshirt, dripping wet, followed. Finally, I took one of the three plastic slickers from its little package, shook it out, and slipped into it. It had a sash instead of buttons, making it easier to get out of, and it reached almost all the way to my feet. If he sprayed me and threw a match, the fumes just above the surface of the plastic would ignite first, followed almost immediately by the plastic. I figured it would burn through in a couple of seconds, but at least it gave me one skin I could shed, and it would keep the gasoline from saturating cloth. I tucked the two spare slickers into the front of the wet sweatpants, tugged the drawstring on the pants tight to keep the spares in place, tied a simple one-tug bow in the sash on the coat I was wearing, slipped the flat automatic under the right wristband of the sweatshirt, and started up the hill. The two extra clips were in the shirt’s single pocket, hard to get to through the coat. I hoped that would be my biggest problem.

  It was 7:09, and I was late.

  Halfway up the dirt track, I realized I had added at least twenty pounds to my weight and invented the world’s first portable steam room. The slicker held the moisture in— which was one of the things it was supposed to do, prevent evaporation—and by the time I reached the fence, I was pouring sweat. The sun, which was finally on the verge of dropping behind the ridge of hills to the west, seated through the transparent plastic like a microwave through freezer wrap. When I’d thought this through, if my mental processes at the time could be so charitably described, I’d known I would be hot. I hadn’t known I’d be exhausted.

  The fence poked a few holes in my armor and tested the limits of my flexibility, but I barely noticed. It was 7:11, and the Incinerator was nothing if not punctual.

  There must have been five thousand people enjoying themselves in the hollow below me. As I worked my way down the dry brush of the hill at an angle, I saw that most of them were in contemporary clothing; the medieval motley was apparently reserved for employees and nostalgic party animals. An edge of shadow was moving across the bottom of the large bowl that held the Chivalry Faire, and historically incorrect colored lights were blinking on here and there. With the night would come the Master of the Revels, in his cap and bells and black rubber trench coat.

  But where was he? It was almost quarter after, and nothing seemed to be amiss. I didn’t want to blunder into the crowd without having any idea where to find him, so I sat down next to a large, desiccated clump of sage and surveyed the scene.

  The parking lot beyond the Faire, on the other side of the hollow, was already plunged into shadow. Between it and me were the main gates, through which people were still arriving, and the tall castles and ye quainte village. Studded here and there among the medieval set pieces, like walnuts in the crown jewels, were artifacts of the twentieth century: trailers that served as dressing rooms for the costumed help, Porta potties, ticket booth, a large catering truck, electrical generators. At the near periphery of the village was an area reserved for food booths, and on the far side was a concentration of carnival rides that had been gussied up with Arthurian trappings for the occasion. People squealed as they rode a small roller coaster painted to look like a dragon or whirled in cups that, for the moment, were supposed to be wine barrels. The largest of the rides was a haunted house bristling with cardboard turrets to turn it into a haunted castle, and the smallest was a six-foot pyramid made of rubber sheeting stretched over a padded metal frame, up which eight or ten very small children were trying to climb. As they bounced back down, their shrill squeals of laughter cut through the deeper noise of the crowd. Looking around, I suddenly saw children everywhere.

  Above the Faire, the sloping hillsides that formed the hollow were packed with dry, explosive brush, the perfect fuel. My best guess was that Hoxley intended to crisp all five thousand revelers, children included.

  A sharp smell overrode the acrid scent of the sage, and I recognized it as me. I tried to tell myself that it was just sweat, but any pack of dogs, smelling the fear on me, would have torn me to pieces, plastic and all.

  Seven-eighteen.

  Where was he!

  Something was nagging at me, some detail I’d seen and had filed away in a part of my brain that had either shut down or gone to t
he end of the oxygen line so the areas needed to keep me alive could function without interference. I felt as I had when I’d seen Hoxley’s face in my mind’s eye on Caputo’s show, and now, as then, I couldn’t get whatever it was back again. The only thing to do was disregard it and trust some obscure little glop of gray matter to deal it faceup when it was needed.

  I stood and stretched, yawning from sheer nerves. Originally, I’d planned to go in through the main entrance, figuring that Hoxley would be watching it from wherever he was, but when I’d blundered up against the fence I’d decided to improvise and see if I could see him before he saw me. Well, I couldn’t see him, and the time had probably come to go back to Plan A. For all I knew, he was delaying the show, waiting for me.

  Feeling broader than a billboard, I walked straight down the hillside, making no attempt to conceal myself. I was frantically fishing my memory, a dangerous diversion for someone walking downhill wrapped in twenty pounds of wet towels. What had I seen, and when had I seen it? From the top of the hill or sitting next to the sage? The thought nagged at me and distracted me, and I hoped that whatever Hoxley did to announce himself wouldn’t be too subtle.

  By now I was at the edge of the crowd, and folks were glancing at me in a way that informed me that I looked very odd indeed. In fact, people parted to let me through. Children pointed at me. I smiled reassuringly at a five-year-old girl, and she broke into tears. Weary, sweating, scared half out of my wits, I envied her the luxury.

  The smell of food slapped me in the face. A guy in a leather apron was flipping unrecognizable pieces of mud that a sign identified as Joustburgers. Next to him, a fat man in a leather apron was carving thick slices off Ye Kinge’s Jointe, which I thought was pretty rude. All around me people stopped chewing and making change to gawk at me. I waved harmlessly, like some ogre on a parade float, and grinned at everyone. I’d never smelled so much food in my life.

  Food. I stopped dead. A man behind me bumped up against me and, as I turned around, gave me a startled glance, apologized profusely, and melted into the crowd. I barely saw him. I knew how Wilton had gotten Mommy and Daddy out.

  I’d seen it from my first vantage point. It sat over to the right, behind the crooked turrets of the haunted castle, and I looked above the plywood roofs of the medieval town to find the right turret. One turret looks pretty much like another to me, but the haunted castle had a distinctively striking tackiness that made it easy to spot. The turrets seemed to be made out of papier-mache and spray-painted, and one had a pronounced leftward tilt. Even by the relaxed standards of the Faire, it was an amateurish job.

  A steeplechase, in the nineteenth century, was precisely that: a bunch of beefy so-called gentlemen on horseback, racing cross-country toward a church steeple several miles away, jumping, fording, or riding over anything in their path. I headed for that crooked turret with the same single-mindedness, bulling my way through people patiently waiting in line and shouldering through archways, and the crowd obediently let the lunatic in the wet jogging clothes and transparent plastic raincoat get by. Once past the turret, it would only be twenty or thirty yards to the catering truck, maybe the same catering truck that had been ministering to the workmen at the Lewises’ house, the truck he’d taken them out in, and—I was willing to bet—the truck he’d been living in for the past few days.

  But I didn’t make it to the catering truck.

  I’d barely hit the stretch of open ground between the medieval town and the rides when a burst of fireworks erupted from the turret of the haunted castle. Balls of fire hurtled into the darkening sky to explode into magnesium chrysanthemums, spiral whistlers shrilly corkscrewed themselves into space, and rockets sailed high above us and burst with a flat whump, like a slapstick hitting a wooden leg. The crowd around me erupted into applause and cheers.

  A line waited in front of the haunted castle, but no one protested as I elbowed my way through it. My costume appeared to set urban-survival mechanisms on red alert. At the head of the line was a closed gate set into a rectangular metal frame, with a waist-high fence running from either side of the frame to the castle. On the other side of the fence was a narrow-gauge railroad track that connected the door on the left with the fake iron gate on the right.

  “Anybody in there?” I asked the man in Bermuda shorts at the front of the line, a triumph of will over gravity, his potbelly and four chins somehow held erect on legs that were thinner than his arms.

  “Got me,” he said, taking me in and stepping protectively in front of a woman who was probably his wife.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Fifteen, twenty minutes.”

  “No one’s gone in or out?”

  His answer was drowned out by blare of trumpets, and the gates at the left of the castle opened. A rickety little chain of four cars rattled out on the tracks and stopped in front of the gate.

  “About time,” Spindle Legs said to his putative wife.

  At the moment I smelled it, Wifey screamed. The second car wasn’t empty. Its occupant was lying on his side, wrapped tightly in a heavy net. He was naked, but the woman wasn’t screaming out of prudery.

  He’d been roasted. The skin on his back was black and charred and creviced and fissured, like crackling on an overcooked suckling pig. His head was contorted backward against the pain, against the prison of the net, and on his fat, unburned throat, the tendons stretched taut as guitar strings. The fingers of his left hand splayed through the net, spread wide, as though he’d tried to grab coolness and wet and safety, and splash himself with it. The back of the hand was singed, its black hairs turned to ash above the porky crackling.

  A brilliant rocket blossomed above us, bringing the obscene mess into bright, hard relief. There was something protruding from the center of Eddie Lewis’s back, something that went straight through him. It was metallic and thin, and the end that came out through his spine was pointed. He’d been skewered on a sword or rapier of some kind, like a shish kebab.

  Stuck onto the metal point that had insinuated its way between his charred vertebrae was a piece of cardboard. On it, in carefully squared letters that betrayed no hint of urgency, were the words IT’S ABOUT TIME.

  People were in motion now, milling dangerously, the people up front trying to get back, the people behind jockeying for a better look. I let the automatic slip into my right hand, jumped the little fence, and moved, fast and bent low, to the right gate of the haunted castle.

  It opened with a gentle push. It opened inward, and it opened almost soundlessly: no creaking Inner Sanctum hinges, no response of gibbering laughter. It was, altogether, too much to hope for.

  Wilton Hoxley was not standing behind it.

  The gate closed behind me, and I stopped counting my blessings. The haunted castle was darker inside than Charlemagne’s tomb. I was standing on a track that moved upward at a gentle angle, and I could feel no walls on either side of me, even at full arm’s length. As my fingers grasped for what wasn’t there, I thought I heard someone sigh contentedly.

  The sigh had been in front of me, not to the side. The railway was only about two feet wide, and I found that I could spread my feet until the inner edges of the rails touched the outside of my shoes, and that I could move relatively easily in that stance. And noisily. My wet sneakers squealed against the rails, and the plastic slicker hissed and crackled with every step.

  I’ d gone forward maybe six or eight feet when the whole place started to glow. At first I thought my eyes were getting used to the darkness, but the glow grew stronger until I found myself in a twisting corridor with walls of painted stone and electrical sconces set here and there to resemble torches. Their little pink filaments flickered faintly.

  There were three open doorways ahead of me. The track went past two of them, and then turned left into the third, and the corridor I was in faded off beyond the turn to the left in a trick of painted perspective.

  I had one comfort: Now that I could see, I didn’t need the fe
el of the tracks to guide me. The first of the openings was to my right, and I put my back against the wall on that side of the corridor and edged slowly toward the doorway. When I reached the corner of the doorway, I counted three, pivoted on my right ankle, and whirled into the doorway, the gun extended in both hands. Ghosts attacked me.

  When they flew at me, I shot both of them. They rushed me from the end of the tunnel, coming fast, weightless and fluttering, the ragged tatters of their robes barely brushing the ground. The bullets didn’t even slow them. In less time than it took me to inhale they were brushing my face, and I listened to the echoing spang of the gunshots and smelled dusty muslin and felt wire stiffeners, and then the ghosts slid away from me as quickly as they’d come, back up into their waiting post at the end of the little tunnel.

  I’d wasted two bullets. By firing, I’d told Hoxley I was armed, although I didn’t figure that counted for much. On the other hand, I’d been made a fool of, which counted with me.

  “That was pretty good,” I said out loud. “What’s next?”

  What was next was the second opening, to the left this time. I approached it from the center of the tracks, not particularly eager to catch another face full of anything, and as I positioned myself in front of it, a light came on, and the medieval figure of Death, the image that has come down to us in the twentieth century as the Grim Reaper, black-hooded, with a scythe over its shoulder, and with a skull for a face, began to move toward me on some sort of rollers. It lifted its scythe.

  “Too Ingmar Bergman for me,” I said, and then about twelve things happened at once. The tracks shook, the doors behind me burst open, music erupted, cold air struck my neck, I tried to dodge, and the little train hit me on the back of the thighs. I tumbled backward into it, and the last thing I saw before it trundled me away was Death winking at me.