The seat of the stool smashed into the back of my head, and I went down like a tree. There was no way to catch myself with my arms immobilized, and my forehead cracked the floor. For a moment I may have gone out, because it seemed to me that Mrs. Lewis stopped crying.
Then a high wail split my ears, and I was back, lying on the truck’s dirty floor with blood in my eyes. The corrupt smell of the propane invaded my nostrils as I fought to my feet again. Okay, change of plan.
Don’t hit something high enough to drive the seat into your head, stupid. Hit something lower.
This time I pushed off from the wall and hurtled back into the edge of the stove. I collapsed immediately to my knees, my head ringing and the hand I’d slammed on the counter firing off high-voltage pain signals, maybe something broken there, but I’d heard one of the stool’s legs crack.
I tried to breathe shallowly as I waited to gain the strength to rise again, and Mrs. Lewis suddenly said, “What are you doing?”
“Tell you later,” I said. My voice was thinner than Kleenex. “Can you get out of that thing?”
“Of course not,” she said, sounding like her old self. “If I could, do you think I’d be in it?”
“Right. Well, hang tight. Here we go again.”
When I stood this time, I seemed to feel the trailer heaving beneath my feet. For a moment, I thought my knees would give way, and I narrowed my focus against panoramic death until I was seeing and feeling one thing only, the stool crumbling like matchwood the next time I hit the counter. When I’d reached the far wall, I wiped the blood from my forehead onto the cool glass of the window and watched the fire. It had advanced a foot or so, and the flames were higher, feeding frantically on the weeds.
“This is going to hurt me more than it does you,” I said to Mrs. Lewis, and this time I threw myself back with such force that I stumbled even before I hit the counter, the leg of the stool striking the counter’s edge above my hands this time, and even as I smashed onto the floor, watching bright points of light bounce around inside my skull, I felt the stool go to pieces behind me.
Well, not quite to pieces. The seat, as I saw when I could open my eyes, was next to me on the floor, but I still had at least two of the legs trapped between my back and my arms, and of course there was the one good old Wilton had taped directly to my wrists. But the important thing was that I could get them over toward one side now; the important thing was that I might be able to sit down.
First, though, I had to stand up. I counted to ten and tried, but I couldn’t make my muscles work. I could tell them to do anything from the neck up, but below the Mason-Dixon Line they weren’t listening. I flexed everything I could locate, including a hand that felt bigger than a boxing glove. The pain had shut down, shock coming to the rescue, and I was happily and comfortably congratulating shock on having the sense to intervene when I realized I had to get away from the hissing stove.
Like a sidewinder, I wiggled across the floor to the door and tried to breathe through the crack at its bottom. The air coming through it was hot.
“Are you all right?” Mrs. Lewis said.
“Practicing my polka,” I said. “We’ll be dancing in no time.”
“Where’s Eddie?” she asked. It shut me up. “He took Eddie,” she said.
I managed to get to my knees without blacking out. I was wringing wet, and I’d left an oval pool of blood on the floor. I got one foot under me and then the other, and, leaning against the wall, pushed myself upright. My ears were ringing, and my eyes refused to focus. The truck’s interior looked as it might have if I’d been seeing it through moving water.
Taking one slow step after another, I crossed to the counter. I had to sit on the counter.
It had been so easy the first time, the time Wilton had told me to do it. Put the hands on the counter behind me, give a little jump, and allez-oop. But now I couldn’t use my hands, and I didn’t have a little jump in me, not even a very little jump. Not a single decorous Easter-bunny hop. The counter was almost as high as the small of my back. It might as well have been as high as the walls of Troy.
“I can’t get up there,” I said to myself.
“Up where?” Mrs. Lewis said. Then she began to cry again. “Where’s Eddie?”
I was getting sleepy. I thought about resting. I’d closed my eyes and let my head slump forward when I heard screams. They were outside, far from the truck, but they cut through the aluminum and through Mrs. Lewis’s sobs, and they galvanized me. Wilton had gone to work.
The frog’s legs twitched on the electrified plate again, only they were my legs this time, and I was sitting on the counter, my arms twisted impossibly to one side, the legs of the stool bisecting my back at an angle like misaligned bicycle spokes. The wooden block with the carving knives wedged into it was directly behind me, and I pushed my hands against it, feeling blades slicing through tape and into skin, feeling hot new wetness behind me, but sawing up and down anyway until the stool leg taped between my hands fell free with a clatter onto the countertop, and I could open my slick, wet fingers. Willing myself to be careful, I pushed the tape between my wrists against the black at the edge of the block, angling veins and arteries away from the other one. I cut myself, deeply, and yanked upward involuntarily, and my wrists were loose.
They were a mess. They looked as though I’d loaned them to someone for suicide practice, but the cuts were clean, and the blood, while plentiful and disconcertingly red, wasn’t alarming. I held my hands above my head for a moment, willing the blood to stop, and then realized I didn’t have the time.
“We’re going,” I said to Mrs. Lewis. “Can you walk?”
No answer, just a kind of steady keening that put me in mind of an Irish wake. “Well,” I said, sliding down from the counter, “you’re going to have to.” I pulled both of the knives from the block and glanced outside the windows. The fire was washing against the walls of the truck. “In fact,” I said, “you’re going to have to run.”
First I snapped off the knobs on the gas stove. Then I went to her and sliced through the first spiral of fiber tape. “You’re going to do what I say,” I said, pausing. “Because if you don’t, you’re going to die. Do you understand me?”
She stopped crying.
“That’s better,” I said, sawing away. “Here’s the plot. Wilton turned the gas on in the big stove and then set fire to the weeds outside.” I’d started at her feet, and the plastic had parted to reveal slippers and a pale blue terry-cloth robe. She probably dressed for national holidays. “The second problem is how to run across the fire, but even in those slippers you can probably manage it. The first problem is how to open the door without blowing ourselves over the rainbow.” I cut through the last length of tape, and she glared up at me, face shiny with sweat, blond hair matted against her face. Her eyes were puffy, but whatever despair had seized her, it had had the sense to retreat. “Can you stand up?” I asked.
“You look terrible,” she said. It wasn’t a particularly compassionate tone.
“I’m not going to look any better, either,” I said, using a bloody sleeve to smear more blood across my face. “Not unless we work out a way to step outside while remaining physically intact.” I heard my voice enunciate the fussily correct words from a distance, like listening to a practiced orator talking to me from the bottom of a well. I put out a hand to keep myself upright.
“Gas,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
“Are you listening to me? I told you, Wilton—”
“Wilton,” said the Ice Princess dismissively. “We need something to put over the door.”
I looked at her for eight or nine of my remaining heartbeats. “Right,” I said. “Something to put over the door.”
With both knives in my right hand, moving more carefully than may or may not have been strictly necessary, I got myself to the door. It didn’t seem to take more than a week. Wilton’s rubber coat was heavier than I’d thought it would be, or maybe I was weaker than I’d re
alized, but I lifted it up, stretched it open, and drove a knife through its shoulder at the upper left-hand corner of the door. Then I repeated the action with the other shoulder, and there it hung, a more or less impermeable air curtain.
“Suppose it’s locked?” she said at my side. I hadn’t heard her move.
“Why would catering trucks lock from the inside?” I asked. “To keep the food from escaping?”
“Try it,” she said.
I lifted the right edge of the coat and tried the handle. Locked.
“Smart guy,” she said. “I always get smart guys.”
I leaned against the counter. It was either that or fall down. “Well, lady,” I said, “I’m the last one you’re going to get.”
“I doubt it,” she said. “Excuse me.” And she shouldered past me and slipped beneath the rubber coat. I stood there, watching the bulge of her back, and then I heard a sharp snap, and the coat flapped as the door banged open against the side of the truck, and she was gone.
Having let the little lady kick the door out, the smart guy had no choice but to follow. I eased the coat back an inch or two and looked out at the panorama of flame, and then she called, “Left, stupid,” and I saw that Hoxley hadn’t ringed the truck with fire; intentionally or not, he’d left a path for us, and it was still open.
But the flames were licking at the right-hand side of the door, and the coat was blowing away behind me, and it all seemed to add up to a good reason to run. I jumped off the steps and sprinted around the truck, heading back toward the Haunted Castle, and I was almost there before the truck blew behind me with a whoosh and then a sound like a train hitting a timpani, and the shock wave knocked me flat on my bleeding face into the weeds.
When I looked up, the hills in front of me were on fire.
The screaming was louder now, a kind of steady white noise, and people who, I realized, had been rushing by me, toward the truck and the parking lot, suddenly dropped to their knees or fell on their backs. Those who were still standing milled uncertainly, regarding the flames from the truck like the last chapter in their personal serial. A child let out a shrill sound like a steam whistle.
“Go on,” I shouted, getting up. I pushed a man and woman in the direction of the truck. “You can get around it. Go to the parking lot. Get out of here. Go!”
In front of me, the turrets of the castle and the roofs of the town beyond it were black silhouettes against a slanting line of flame that climbed slowly upward, circling the natural hollow in which the Faire had been set. I scrubbed blood from my eyes and followed the blazing track up the slope as though it were the trail of a prey, and at the end of it there he was, spiraling upward and around the bowl like the Flaming Man in a nightmare, leaving footprints of fire wherever he stepped. And, for another precious heartbeat, everything froze.
Fire burns up.
Except for the trailer, he hadn’t ignited anything between the people and the exit.
He was sparing them.
There were police now, pushing people in front of them, big men in blue uniforms, swearing and sweating as they shoved. One of them, like a cliché on a crude recruiting poster, held a little girl in his arms.
I pushed against the crowd, fighting my way upstream with fists and elbows, heading for the other side of the bowl. In the streets of the ersatz town, the reflections of fire danced the flame fandango on the walls. It was emptier here, and I could run. Most of the people were already behind me, sprinting for the relative safety of internal combustion, their magic carpet out of C3.
My ankles told me I was running uphill before my head knew it. I was too busy sucking air and following Wilton’s stick-thin figure with my eyes to know what my body was up to. He’d gone more than halfway around the bowl now, slanting uphill all the way and moving laterally ahead of the flames. His track, I saw, would eventually lead him to the crest. It would have to; he couldn’t double back without roasting in his own fire.
Shots.
They popped softly in the air like dud fireworks, and I saw men, just dark shapes, on top of the hill. As I labored upward, they fanned out, some ahead of Wilton and some behind him. A few of the men extended their arms and silly little spurts of flame, insignificant in the Kingdom of Conflagration, were followed by more pops.
Wilton stopped suddenly and sat down as though the hill had pushed a chair beneath his feet.
He was seventy-five yards above me now, and the men were a hundred yards above him. The funnel spouted fire over his head as he sat, a nimbus for the god of combustion, probably roasting gnats but not much else. I stumbled and fell, and he got up.
He was moving again, in the same direction as before, touching the fire to the ground at every step. Some of the police who had tried to get at him from behind found flames climbing the hill below them and retreated, either straight up or up and toward Wilton. I was running again, much closer to him now, making an impossible amount of noise, and when Wilton finally heard me, I was near enough to see the smeared death’s-head of his face and the irregular line of his teeth. They were bared as though he were trying to chew his way through the air.
I stumbled to my right, trying to get in front of him. He was only a few yards away now and watching me, the funnel pointed back over his shoulder, spewing a spire of flame. I stopped dead, and he looked at me for a long moment, and then pointed the funnel directly at me.
And turned the little faucet handle off.
I was backing up by then, and I slammed into something heavy. Flailing, I lost my balance and turned in midair to gaze up into the clear blue eyes of Willick, who glanced down at me surprisedly as I hit the ground and then lifted his arm and pointed it at Wilton.
“Stop,” I cried, and Willick looked startled just long enough for me to grab his ankles and yank his feet out from under him. The gun went off as he fell, and he rolled down the hill and away from us like a felled log, crashing the undergrowth as he went. I managed to pull myself to my hands and knees, and found Wilton staring down at me. Above the black coat his face was gray and almost featureless except for the holes that were his eyes. There was blood gleaming on the black rubber of his coat.
He raised the funnel and pointed it at me.
“Simeon,” he said, “will you never cease to disappoint me?”
And then he backed uphill a few steps and sat heavily. Men crashed their way downhill above him as he twisted the funnel toward himself, turned the handle, and opened a box of wooden matches. He closed his eyes and struck one.
The first one lit.
24
Ashes by Now
The heat had broken. Cooler air from the sea flowed into the canyon, bringing morning fog with it. The fog would spread its marine damp over the fuel, turning it sodden and useless for the gods of fire. Zoroaster would be taking his seasonal holiday, probably in Miami with everybody else.
The house was both damper and emptier than I would have liked it to be. I had bandages on both hands, and a jagged cut on my forehead, courtesy of the floor of the catering truck, that extended perversely several inches into my hairline. They’d had to shave a shape like a very large comma into my scalp, just above my left eye. In all, I looked like someone who arched his eyebrow so often that space had been carved to make room for it.
On the stereo, Rodney Crowell was stretching country music into new shapes while remaining within the same immemorial scraggly whiskered, whiskey-soaked, heartbroken mode.
“You’re just like a wildfire,” he sang, sounding like someone whose heart was tattooed on his sleeve;
“Spreading all over town.
“As much as you burn me, baby …”
I turned over on the couch, a fat book in my hands.
“I should be ashes by now.”
Eleanor was in chilly New York with Burt, “exploring his space,” as she’d said semiapologetically from an airport pay phone. When I’d suggested that his space was the nicest present he could give her, she’d hung up. She’d snorted unpleasantly f
irst, though, and later called from New York to apologize for the snort. Small blessings are sometimes the only ones at hand.
Hoxley was dead. Burning rubber, it turned out, was the hardest fire of all to put out. Ashes by now, although he still stalked through my dreams. In my dreams, his eyes were on fire.
Eddie was moldering in the ground, or, alternatively, laying bets on the fastest seraphim in the sky. I had no idea which, and I didn’t particularly care. I’d liked Eddie, but he was as dead as Wilton. Some things you can’t fight. Schultz, almost preternaturally disconsolate, had resigned from the cops to go back into private practice.
My bank account was nearly full enough to compensate for my empty house. Annabelle Winston had been free with the zeroes. Zeroes, I soon discovered, are cold comfort, especially when you can’t think of anything you want to buy.
I could think of lots of things I wanted. Problem was, none of them happened to be for sale.
“Ashes by now.”
On the other hand, I was finally enjoying Dreiser. Billy Pinnace had whistled through Sister Carrie, stinging my vanity, and I’d taken another whack. Poor Carrie was making all the wrong choices, and I was sympathizing with her heartily, my sympathy perhaps oiled slightly by an indistinct number of Singha beers, when the phone rang.
The room was getting dark enough to make me turn on a light, so I had to get up anyway. I dropped the book to the floor, and Bravo Corrigan, still hanging around in the hope of a free lunch, thumped his tail. To him, the phone held out a vague promise of future fun.
First, I snapped on the light. Then I picked up the phone and said, “Yeah?”
“Ho,” somebody said. Rodney Crowell’s bassist whopped his strings.
Simeon Grist Mystery - 04 - Incinerator Page 28