Shortly before dawn, Craig shifted himself closer to her and slid his hand up her thigh, underneath her nightshirt. He gently stroked her with his fingertip, and then slipped his finger inside her. She felt herself becoming slippery, and a warm sensation began to rise between her legs.
‘Craig,’ she whispered, and kissed his eyelids and his lips and his ears.
He tugged her nightshirt up around her waist, and she lifted her hips to help him. Then he climbed on top of her, kissing her in that hungry way he used to kiss her when they first went out together.
‘You’re so beautiful,’ he breathed. ‘I love you so much.’
When he tried to put himself inside her, however, he was still too soft. She reached down and took hold of him and stroked his penis up and down, harder and harder, but it still refused to stiffen.
After a few moments he rolled off her and fell back on to his pillow. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Guess I’m not such a love god after all.’
She snuggled up close to him and gave him an intimate squeeze. ‘You need to stop worrying, that’s all. It’s the stress. We can try again later.’
‘I’m no damn good at anything, am I?’ he told her. ‘Can’t keep my business going. Can’t pay the mortgage. Can’t even make love to my wife.’
Ruth stroked his chest. ‘You’re the best man that any woman could wish for. You’re the best husband. You’re the best father. You’re the best lover, too.’
‘Oh, really? I can’t make any money, I give you one daughter with a chromosome disorder, and a son who thinks he’s a latter-day Fonzie. I can’t even get my dick up.’
‘Shh,’ said Ruth. ‘You’re beginning to depress me.’
Craig had been very close to tears, but now he let out a burst of laughter. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It is pretty depressing, isn’t it? Thank God I’m an optimist.’
NINE
The next morning, it was still so dark at eight a.m. that it looked like the end of the world, and as though they would never see the sun again. A furious gale was blowing from the south-west, and rain was sweeping across the road and flooding the gutters. The basswood tree was thrashing its branches as if it had gone berserk and was trying to uproot itself.
Ruth had arranged to take two hours off so that she could take Amelia to see Doctor Feldstein. Before she left the house, however, she called Jack to find out how his tests on Tilda Frieburg’s bathtub were progressing.
‘Pretty good,’ he told her. ‘I’ve started to analyze the sludge we found at the bottom of the bath, and I should know what its principal constituents are in a couple of hours. And by the way, the shower curtains are telling me a very contradictory story. If that fire was intense enough to boil away that bathwater and cremate that unfortunate young lady, it should have melted the curtains completely.’
‘I thought that, too. Do you have any theories about that?’
‘I can only guess that the seat of the fire was highly concentrated, and that there was very little radiant heat outside of the bathtub itself. How that could have occurred, I have no idea whatsoever, apart from my original thought that maybe it was an exochemical reaction, set off by magnesium or sodium. But my tests on the sludge will probably tell us.’
‘OK, Jack. I should be into the lab by lunchtime.’
‘You take your time. Amelia always comes first. Oh – and by the way, I had a call from Detective Magruder. The ME has confirmed the vic’s identity. It was Tilda Frieburg. The cops are round at her place of work now, interviewing her colleagues.’
‘Thanks, Jack. I’ll see you later. I have some strawberry shortcake left over from dinner last night. Do you want me to bring you a slice?’
‘When you die, boss, they’re going to make you an honorary angel.’
Ruth helped Amelia to button up her bright yellow waterproof, and then she put on her own black raincoat and pulled up the hood. The two of them ran hand-in-hand across the front yard through the clattering rain, with Tyson bounding after them. Just as they climbed into Ruth’s car, there was a devastating cannonade of thunder, which almost seemed to split the air apart. Amelia screamed and clung on to Ruth’s arm, and even Tyson started to bark.
‘They’re coming closer!’ Amelia panted. ‘I know they are! They’re coming closer!’
‘Hush, Ammy. It’s only an old electric storm. It’ll pass over in a while.’
‘But something bad is going to happen. Something worse.’
‘Ammy, sweetheart, you mustn’t allow yourself to get hysterical. Just remember that everything sounds much louder to you than it does to everybody else. It’s part of your condition.’
‘It’s not just the noise. I can feel them.’
‘Come on, sweetheart. Let’s get you to Doctor Feldstein. I’m sure he’ll be able to tell you that everything’s fine.’
Amelia stared at her, her green eyes wide. ‘They never knew that they could come back. They thought they had to stay downstairs. But now they’ve found out that they don’t have to.’
Ruth leaned across and held Amelia close. She was shaking, as if she were suffering from hypothermia. Ruth didn’t know what to say to her. It was obviously no use trying to convince her that ‘they’ were only a delusion. All she could do was try to reassure Amelia that she wasn’t in any real danger.
After a while Ruth gave her a kiss on the forehead, and said, ‘OK? You ready to go now?’
Amelia nodded. But as Ruth backed out of the driveway and into the street, there was another deafening barrage of thunder, and Amelia cowered down in her seat with her hands clamped over her ears.
At the same time, over on North Jay Street, opposite Bon Air Park, Neville Ferris was pushing Mrs Ida Mae Lutz along the pathway from her house to the white Spirit of Kokomo bus that was waiting at the curb.
Mrs Lutz could walk unaided, but the morning was so wet and windy that Neville was using the wheelchair to pick up all of his passengers. He had collected seven of them so far. Three of them were headed for St Joseph’s Hospital, two for the Fewell Eye Clinic, one for the Grace United Methodist Church, and one for lunch at the Senior Citizens’ Center.
‘One hell of a day, isn’t it?’ shouted Mrs Lutz. She was one of the feistiest of Neville’s regular pick-ups – a handsome seventy-seven-year-old who had once been a minor TV actress. She was always smartly dressed, although today she was wearing a bright red vinyl raincoat and a matching sou’wester.
‘Wasn’t forecast, this storm,’ said Neville. ‘Don’t think those weather people got the first idea.’
He parked the wheelchair beside the bus and opened up the door. Then he helped Mrs Lutz to climb the steps and find her usual seat right behind his.
‘Morning, everybody!’ said Mrs Lutz, taking off her sou’wester and shaking her white bouffant hair. ‘One hell of a day today, isn’t it?’
‘Morning, Ida!’ the rest of the passengers chorused, all except for Mr Thorson, who had throat cancer, and could only croak.
Neville folded up the wheelchair and locked it in place in the wheel-well. Then he started up the bus and called out, ‘Hold tight, everybody! First stop, Fewell Eye Clinic!’
He pulled away from the curb, but the rain was lashing so hard against his windshield that he didn’t see the Buick Riviera until it overtook him and slewed across in front of him, at an angle. He stamped on his brake pedal and the bus jolted to a halt. Mrs Betty Petersen, who was eighty-four years old, was thrown on to the floor, and Mr Carradine knocked his teeth against the seat in front of him.
Neville said, ‘What in the name of—?’ Then he twisted around in his seat and said, ‘Everybody OK? Anybody hurt? Mrs Petersen – are you all right?’
He made his way to the back of the bus and helped Mrs Petersen back up on to her seat. He found her eyeglasses on the floor and carefully placed them back on her nose.
‘I’m fine,’ she told him. ‘I just hit my knee.’
‘Mr Carradine? Your lip’s bleeding.’
‘Don’t you
worry, Neville. I bit myself, that’s all. If I need any fixing, they can fix me up at St Joseph’s.’
Neville went back to the front of the bus, opened the door and stepped down on to the road. The rain was hammering down now, so hard that he had to shield his face with his hand. The Buick remained in front of the bus, its engine running. It was an old car, 1969 or 1970, with a boat-tail trunk, and its steeply-angled rear window made it impossible for Neville to see who was inside it.
He approached the driver’s door and knocked on the window. ‘What do you think you’re doing, man? I got seniors here, two of them got hurt! Get this piece of junk out of my way before I call for the cops!’
At first there was no response. Raindrops continued to course down the Buick’s window, and even when Neville wiped them away with his hand, he still couldn’t clearly see the driver.
‘Did you hear what I said? Get out my way, man! If you don’t, I’m going to call for the cops right now!’
There was a huge barrage of thunder, and the trees in Bon Air Park all thrashed around in panic. Before the thunder had died away, the Buick’s driver turned and stared at Neville through the window. His face was utterly white, and to Neville’s horror he appeared to be screaming with laughter. Neville said, ‘Shee-it!’ and took two stumbling steps backward in shock.
The car’s door opened, and the driver climbed out. He was tall, and wearing a long black raincoat and black leather gloves, and now that he was standing outside the car Neville could see that his white face was a mask. The rain rattled against it, and ran down its cheeks, so that it seemed to be laughing so much that it was crying.
‘I don’t know what you want, man,’ said Neville, ‘but you’d better get the hell out of here. I got seniors here, and if anything happens to any of them, you’re going to be in real deep shit, I warn you.’
The man in the laughing mask came closer, and Neville backed away.
‘Calm down, Rastus,’ said the laughing man, in a muffled, card-boardy voice. ‘We’re not here to cause you any trouble. We’re here to perform us a little ceremony, that’s all.’
‘Ceremony? What in the hell you talking about? And who’s “we”?’
At that moment, the Buick’s passenger door opened and another two men climbed out. These two were also dressed in long black raincoats, and both wore white masks, except that one was utterly expressionless and the other was scowling in rage. They came around the back of the car and stood on either side of the laughing man, with their arms folded. Neville smeared the rain from his face with the back of his hand, but it was still raining so hard that water was running from his nose and his chin.
‘We need to perform an ex-orcism,’ said the laughing man.
‘Say what?’
‘An exorcism. You know what an exorcism is, don’t you, Rastus? You must have seen the movie. Linda Blair’s head rotating around and around, and jabbing herself in the muff with that crucifix.’
‘You’re nuts,’ said Neville. ‘Why don’t you get out of here before you do something you are seriously going to regret.’
‘Too late for regrets,’ said the laughing man. ‘Much too late for any regrets, serious or otherwise. Now, why don’t you climb back on to your bus and announce to your geriatric flock that we intend to come aboard, and whatever we ask them to do, they had better cooperate, without any argument, or else it’s going to be very much the worse for them.’
‘I can’t do that,’ Neville retorted. ‘I’m responsible for these people’s welfare, and if you think I’m going to allow you anywhere near them, then you’re a whole lot crazier than you look.’
‘Well, that’s very noble,’ said the laughing man. He turned to the expressionless man and then to the scowling man. ‘Don’t you think that’s very noble?’
The two of them nodded in agreement, and the scowling man said, ‘Very, very noble,’ and let out a high-pitched snort of amusement.
The laughing man took another step closer to Neville, and Neville took another step back, until he was standing with his back pressed against the bus.
The laughing man’s voice was barely audible above the drumming of the rain on the bus’s roof. ‘You have one chance of survival, Rastus, and that is to do what we tell you, no questions asked. You got that?’
Neville swung at him, one of the southpaw punches that had won him the Indiana Golden Gloves Junior Championship. But he had been seventeen then, and now he was fifty-four, and nearly four decades slower. The laughing man whipped up his right forearm and deflected the blow before it was even halfway to hitting him.
Without hesitation, the laughing man punched Neville in the stomach, hard, just below his breastbone, and Neville let out a ‘dah!’ of pain, colliding with the bus behind him and then dropping on one knee to the asphalt.
‘Do I have to repeat myself?’ said the laughing man. He coughed, and coughed again, and it was several seconds before he was able to continue. Neville was gasping, too, desperately trying to get his breath back.
Eventually, the laughing man said, ‘If you don’t do what I tell you, Rastus, then believe me I will make you wish on your mother’s grave that you had.’
The scowling man came forward and shoved Neville’s shoulder with the heel of his hand. ‘You need to listen up, feller,’ he put in. ‘You wouldn’t want to be wishing that wish in a falsetto voice, now, would you? Because that’s what you’d be doing.’
‘Now, up on your feet,’ the laughing man ordered him. ‘We need to get this exorcism started.’
A white panel van approached them, driving southward with its headlights on and its windshield wipers flapping at full speed. It slowed down as it came nearer, and the driver put down his window. Neville saw the words Eli’s Electrics stenciled in red on the side. The driver looked as if he were about to call out to them and ask them if they needed any help, but then the scowling man and the expressionless man turned around and confronted him, and he obviously thought better of it, and accelerated away. Neville tried to shout out, ‘Call the cops!’, but he was too winded to get the words out, and all he could manage was an aspirate wheeze.
The scowling man and the expressionless man came up on either side of him and took hold of his arms. They dragged him up on to his feet, and then forced him up the steps into the bus. His eight elderly passengers all stared up at him anxiously, and Mrs Lutz said, ‘What is it, Neville? Who are these men? What’s happening? Are you all right?’
Mr Kaminsky said, ‘Is this a stick-up?’
‘No, sir,’ said the laughing man. ‘This isn’t a stick-up.’
‘Oh, no? If this isn’t a stick-up, why are you wearing masks?’
‘Neville, what’s going on?’ asked Miss Elwood, peering at him through her half-glasses. She reached into her purse and held up her cellphone. ‘Do you want me to dial 911?’
‘Nobody’s going to dial nothing,’ said the laughing man. He jerked his head at the scowling man, and the scowling man made his way down the bus and tugged Miss Elwood’s cellphone out of her hand.
‘Hey!’ she protested, but the scowling man slapped her hard on the side of the head.
‘You leave her alone, you goddamned coward!’ quavered Mr Kaminsky, rising from his seat, but the scowling man slapped him, too, and he fell backward and hit his head against the window, knocking one lens out of his spectacles.
‘Give me your cells, all of them!’ the scowling man demanded.
‘I most certainly will not!’ Mrs Tiplady retorted. Mrs Tiplady had been head teacher of a private girls’ school, and although she wore a pink eyepatch on her right eye and her upper lip was whiskery, she still cut an imperious figure.
The scowling man punched her in the face, breaking the bridge of her nose with an audible crack. Blood spurted out of her nostrils and down her chin, spattering on to her raincoat. Mrs Tiplady cupped her hand over her nose, whimpering, while the scowling man wrenched open her pocketbook and tipped out the contents on to the seat next to her.
‘Give me your cells, you dried-up bunch of old coots!’ he barked. ‘And I mean now!’ The remaining passengers all fumbled in their pockets and their purses and brought out their phones. The scowling man snatched them one by one and then dropped them on to the floor of the bus with a clatter and stamped on them.
‘You pigs!’ cried Miss Elwood. ‘You total pigs!’
The scowling man went back along the bus and slapped her again, twice. Miss Elwood started to weep.
The laughing man said, ‘Anybody else have anything to say? If you have, you can say it, but it’s going to make your life expectancy a whole lot shorter than it is already. You hear?’
He turned to Neville and said, ‘Sit down, Rastus, and get this bus started. Drive us into the park.’
Neville was trembling with anger at his own impotence. He was supposed to take care of these old folks, supposed to protect them, but he couldn’t.
‘I’m not doing it, man,’ he said. ‘There is absolutely no way.’
‘Knife,’ said the laughing man. The expressionless man produced a large clasp knife from his raincoat pocket and passed it over. The laughing man pried it open, coughing as he did so. He held it up in front of Neville’s face and said, ‘If you defy me one more time, Rastus, I’m going to put out one of your eyes and I’m going to stick it on the end of this shank so that you can see it with your other eye. Then I’m going to put out that eye, too. And then I’m going to cut off your floppy black dick and I’m going to make you eat it. And if you don’t think I’m deadly serious, here’s a taster.’
With that, he turned the knife around, lifted his fist, and stabbed Neville right in the middle of his forehead. Neville shouted out, ‘Ah!’ and clamped his hand to his head, and as he did so the laughing man stabbed him through the back of his hand, too.
‘Now do you think I’m kidding?’ asked the laughing man, in his thick, asthmatic voice.
‘Go on, Neville!’ called out Mr Kaminsky. ‘Do like he says! Please! We don’t want to see you getting hurt!’
Fire Spirit Page 10