Lightning

  watching the store, but he was not there.

  The man in dark clothing was not there, either, but she had not expected to see him. She had half convinced herself that the other stranger was unrelated to her guardian, that he had been in the cemetery for some other reason. He had known her name... but perhaps he had heard Cora calling her earlier, from the top of the graveyard hill. She was able to put him out of her mind because she did not want him to be part of her life, not as she so desperately wanted to have a special guardian.

  She read the message again.

  Although she did not understand who the blond man was or why he had taken an interest in her, Laura was reassured by the note he had left. Understanding wasn’t always necessary, as long as you believed.

  5

  The following night, after he had planted explosives in the attic of the institute, Stefan returned with the same suitcase, claiming he had insomnia again. Anticipating the post-midnight visit, Viktor had brought half of one of his wife’s cakes as a gift.

  Stefan nibbled at the cake while he shaped and placed the plastic explosives. The enormous basement was divided into two rooms, and unlike the attic it was used daily by employees. He would have to conceal the charges and wires with considerable care.

  The first chamber contained research files and a pair of long, oak worktables. The file cabinets were six feet tall and stood in banks along two of the walls. He was able to place the explosives atop the cabinets, tucking them toward the back, against the walls, where not even the tallest man on the staff could see them.

  He strung the wires behind the cabinets, though he was forced to drill a small hole in the partition between halves of the cellar in order to continue that detonation line into the next chamber. He managed to put the hole in an inconspicuous place, and the wires were visible only for a couple of inches on either side of the partition.

  The second room was used for storage of office and lab supplies and to cage the score of animals—several hamsters, a few white rats, two dogs, one energetic monkey in a big cage with three bars to swing on—that had participated in (and survived) the institute’s early experiments. Though the animals were of no more use, they were kept in order to learn if over the long term they developed unforeseen medical problems that could be related to their singular adventures.

  Stefan molded powerful charges of plastique into hollow spaces toward the back of the stacked supplies and brought all of the wires to the screened ventilation chase down which he had dropped the attic wires the previous night, and as he worked, he felt the animals watching with unusual intensity, as if they knew they had less than twenty-four hours to live. His cheeks flushed with guilt, which strangely he had failed to feel when contemplating the deaths of the men who worked in the institute, perhaps because the animals were innocent and the men were not.

  By four o’clock in the morning, Stefan had finished both the job in the basement and the work he had to do in his office on the third floor. Before leaving the institute, he went to the main lab on the ground floor and for a minute stared at the gate.

  The gate.

  The scores of dials and gauges and graphs in the gate’s support machinery all glowed softly orange, yellow, or green, for the power to it was never turned off. The thing was cylindrical, twelve feet long and eight feet in diameter, barely visible in the dim light; its stainless-steel outer skin gleamed with faint reflections of the spots of light in the machinery that lined three of the room’s walls.

  He had used the gate scores of times, but he was still in awe of it—not so much because it was an astonishing scientific breakthrough but because its potential for evil was unlimited. It was not a gate to hell, but in the hands of the wrong men, it might as well have been just that. And it was indeed in the hands of the wrong men.

  After thanking Viktor for the cake and claiming to have eaten all that he had been given—though in fact he fed the larger part of it to the animals—Stefan drove back to his apartment.

  For the second night in a row, a storm raged. Rain slashed out of the northwest. Water foamed out of downspouts into nearby drains, drizzled off roofs, puddled in the streets, and overflowed gutters, and because the city was almost entirely dark, the pools and streams looked more like oil than water. Only a few military personnel were out, and they all wore dark slickers that made them look as if they were creatures from an old Gothic novel by Bram Stoker.

  Stefan took a direct route home, making no effort to skirt the known police inspection stations. His papers were in order; his exemption from curfew was current; and he was no longer transporting illegally obtained explosives.

  In his apartment he set the alarm on the large bedside clock and fell almost immediately to sleep. He desperately needed his rest because, in the afternoon to come, there would be two arduous journeys and much killing. If he was not fully alert, he might find himself on the wrong end of a bullet.

  His dreams were of Laura, which he interpreted as a good omen.

  Two

  THE ENDURING FLAME

  1

  Laura Shane was swept from her twelfth through her seventeenth years as if she were a tumbleweed blown across the California deserts, coming to rest briefly here and there in becalmed moments, torn loose and sent rolling again as soon as the wind gusted.

  She had no relatives, and she could not stay with her father’s best friends, the Lances. Tom was sixty-two, and Cora was fifty-seven, and though married thirty-five years, they had no children. The prospect of raising a young girl daunted them.

  Laura understood and bore no grudge against them. On the day in August when she left the Lance house in the company of a woman from the Orange County Child Welfare Agency, Laura kissed both Cora and Tom and assured them that she would be fine. Riding away in the social worker’s car, she waved gaily, hoping they felt absolved.

  Absolved. That word was a recent acquisition. Absolved: freed from the consequences of one’s actions; to set free or release from some duty, obligation, or responsibility. She wished that she could grant herself absolution from the obligation to make her way in the world without the guidance of a loving father, absolution from the responsibility to live and carry on his memory.

  From the Lances’ house she was conveyed to a child sheiter—the McIlroy Home—an old, rambling, twenty-seven-room Victorian mansion built by a produce magnate in the days of Orange County’s agricultural glory. Later it had been converted to a dormitory where children in public custody were housed temporarily between foster homes.

  That institution was unlike any she had read about in fiction. For one thing, it lacked kindly nuns in flowing black habits.

  And there was Willy Sheener.

  Laura first noticed him shortly after arriving at the home, while a social worker, Mrs. Bowmaine, was showing her to the room she would share with—she had been told—the Ackerson twins and a girl named Tammy. Sheener was sweeping a tile-floored hallway with a pushbroom.

  He was strong, wiry, pale, freckled, about thirty, with hair the color of a new copper penny and green eyes. He smiled and whistled softly while he worked. “How’re you this morning, Mrs. Bowmaine?”

  “Right as rain, Willy.” She clearly liked Sheener. “This is Laura Shane, a new girl. Laura, this is Mr. Sheener.”

  Sheener stared at Laura with a creepy intensity. When he managed to speak, the words were thick, “Uhhh ... welcome to McIlroy.”

  Following the social worker, Laura glanced back at Sheener. With no one but Laura to see, he lowered one hand to his crotch and lazily massaged himself.

  Laura did not look at him again.

  Later, as she was unpacking her meager belongings, trying to make her quarter of the third-floor bedroom more like home, she turned and saw Sheener in the doorway. She was alone, for the other kids were at play in the backyard or the game room. His smile was different from the one with which he’d favored Mrs. Bowmaine: predatory, cold. Light from one of the two small windows fell across the doorway and met his eyes
at such an angle as to make them appear silver instead of green, like the cataract-filmed eyes of a dead man.

  Laura tried to speak but could not. She edged backward until she came up against the wall beside her bed.

  He stood with his arms at his sides, motionless, hands fisted.

  The McIlroy Home was not air conditioned. The bedroom windows were open, but the place was tropically hot. Yet Laura had not been sweating until she turned and saw Sheener. Now her T-shirt was damp.

  Outside, children at play shouted and laughed. They were nearby, but they sounded far away.

  The hard, rhythmic rasp of Sheener’s breathing seemed to grow louder, gradually drowning out the voices of the children.

  For a long time neither of them moved or spoke. Then abruptly he turned and walked away.

  Weak-kneed, sweat-soaked, Laura moved to her bed and sat on the edge of it. The mushy mattress sagged, and the springs creaked.

  As her thudding heartbeat deaccelerated, she surveyed the gray-walled room and despaired of her circumstances. In the four corners were narrow, iron-framed beds with tattered chenille spreads and lumpy pillows. Each bed had a battered, Formica-topped nightstand, and on each was a metal reading lamp. The scarred dresser had eight drawers, two of which were hers. There were two closets, and she was allotted half of one. The ancient curtains were faded, stained; they hung limp and greasy from rust-spotted rods. The entire house was moldering and haunted; the air had a vaguely unpleasant odor; and Willy Sheener roamed the rooms and halls as if he were a malevolent spirit waiting for the full moon and the blood games attendant thereon.

  That night after dinner the Ackerson twins closed the door to the room and encouraged Laura to join them on the threadbare maroon carpet where they could sit in a circle and share secrets.

  Their other roomie—a strange, quiet, frail blonde named Tammy—had no interest in joining them. Propped up by pillows, she sat in bed and read a book, nibbling her nails continuously, mouselike.

  Laura liked Thelma and Ruth Ackerson immediately. Having just turned twelve, they were only months younger than Laura and were wise for their age. They had been orphaned when they were nine and had lived at the shelter for almost three years. Finding adoptive parents for children their age was difficult, especially for twins who were determined not to be split up.

  Not pretty girls, they were astonishingly identical in their plainness: lusterless brown hair, myopic brown eyes, broad faces, blunt chins, wide mouths. Although lacking in good looks, they were abundantly intelligent, energetic, and good-natured.

  Ruth was wearing blue pajamas with dark green piping on the cuffs and collar, blue slippers; her hair was tied in a ponytail. Thelma wore raspberry-red pajamas and furry yellow slippers, each with two buttons painted to represent eyes, and her hair was unfettered.

  With darkfall the insufferable heat of the day had passed. They were less than ten miles from the Pacific, so the night breezes made comfortable sleep possible. Now, with the windows open, currents of mild air stirred the aged curtains and circulated through the room.

  “Summer’s a bore here,” Ruth told Laura as they sat in a circle on the floor. “We’re not allowed off the property, and it’s just not big enough. And in the summer all the do-gooders are busy with their own vacations, their own trips to the beach, so they forget about us.”

  “Christmas is great, though,” Thelma said.

  “All of November and December are great,” Ruth said.

  “Yeah,” Thelma said. “Holidays are fine because the do-gooders start feeling guilty about having so much when we poor, drab, homeless waifs have to wear newspaper coats, cardboard shoes, and eat last year’s gruel. So they send us baskets of goodies, take us on shopping sprees and to the movies, though never the good movies.”

  “Oh, I like some of them,” Ruth said.

  “The kind of movies where no one ever, ever gets blown up. And never any feelies. They’ll never take us to a movie in which some guy puts his hand on a girl’s boob. Family films. Dull, dull, dull.”

  “You’ll have to forgive my sister,” Ruth told Laura. “She thinks she’s on the trembling edge of puberty—”

  “I am on the trembling edge of puberty! I feel my sap rising!” Thelma said, thrusting one thin arm into the air above her head.

  Ruth said, “The lack of parental guidance has taken a toll on her, I’m afraid. She hasn’t adapted well to being an orphan.”

  “You’ll have to forgive my sister,” Thelma said. “She’s decided to skip puberty and go directly from childhood to senility.”

  Laura said, “What about Willy Sheener?”

  The Ackerson twins glanced knowingly at each other and spoke with such synchronization that not a fraction of a second was lost between their statements: “Oh, a disturbed man,” Ruth said, and Thelma said, “He’s scum,” and Ruth said, “He needs therapy,” and Thelma said, “No, what he needs is a hit over the head with a baseball bat maybe a dozen times, maybe two dozen, then locked away for the rest of his life.”

  Laura told them about encountering Sheener in her doorway.

  “He didn’t say anything?” Ruth asked. “That’s creepy. Usually he says ‘You’re a very pretty little girl’ or—”

  “—he offers you candy.” Thelma grimaced. “Can you imagine? Candy? How trite! It’s as if he learned to be a scumbag by reading those booklets the police hand out to warn kids about perverts. ”

  “No candy,” Laura said, shivering as she remembered Sheener’s sun-silvered eyes and heavy, rhythmic breathing.

  Thelma leaned forward, lowering her voice to a stage whisper. “Sounds like the White Eel was tongue-tied, too hot even to think of his usual lines. Maybe he has a special lech for you, Laura.”

  “White Eel?”

  “That’s Sheener,” Ruth said. “Or just the Eel for short.”

  “Pale and slick as he is,” Thelma said, “the name fits. I’ll bet the Eel has a special lech for you. I mean, kid, you are a knockout.”

  “Not me,” Laura said.

  “Are you kidding?” Ruth said. “That dark hair, those big eyes.”

  Laura blushed and started to protest, and Thelma said, “Listen, Shane, the Dazzling Ackerson Duo—Ruth and moi—cannot abide false modesty any more than we can tolerate bragging. We’re straight-from-the-shoulder types. We know what our strengths are, and we’re proud of them. God knows, neither of us will win the Miss America contest, but we’re intelligent, very intelligent, and we’re not reluctant to admit to brains. And you are gorgeous, so stop being coy.”

  “My sister is sometimes too blunt and too colorful in the way she expresses herself,” Ruth said apologetically.

  “And my sister,” Thelma told Laura, “is trying out for the part of Melanie in Gone With the Wind.” She put on a thick Southern accent and spoke with exaggerated sympathy: “Oh, Scarlett doesn’t mean any harm. Scarlett’s a lovely girl, really she is. Rhett is so lovely at heart, too, and even the Yankees are lovely, even those who sacked Tara, burned our crops, and made boots out of the skin of our babies.”

  Laura began to giggle halfway through Thelma’s performance.

  “So drop the modest maiden act, Shane! You’re gorgeous.”

  “Okay, okay. I know I’m ... pretty.”

  “Kiddo, when the White Eel saw you, a fuse blew in his brain.”

  “Yes,” Ruth agreed, “you stunned him. That’s why he couldn’t even think to reach in his pocket for the candy he always carries.”

  “Candy!” Thelma said. “Little bags of M&Ms, Tootsie Rolls!”

  “Laura, be real careful,” Ruth warned. “He’s a sick man—”

  “He’s a geek!” Thelma said. “A sewer rat!”

  From the far corner of the room, Tammy said softly, “He’s not as bad as you say.”

  The blond girl was so quiet, so thin and colorless, so adept at fading into the background that Laura had forgotten her. Now she saw that Tammy had put her book aside and was sitting up in bed; she had
drawn her bony knees against her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs. She was ten, two years younger than her roommates, small for her age. In a white nightgown and socks Tammy looked more like an apparition than like a real person.

  “He wouldn’t hurt anyone,” Tammy said hesitantly, tremulously, as though stating her opinion about Sheener—about anything, anyone—was like walking on a tightrope without a net.

  “He would hurt someone if he could get away with it,” Ruth said.

  “He’s just...” Tammy bit her lip. “He’s... lonely.”

  “No, honey,” Thelma said, “he’s not lonely. He’s so much in love with himself that he’ll never be lonely.”

  Tammy looked away from them. She got up, slipped her feet into floppy slippers, and mumbled, “Almost bedtime.” She took her toiletry kit from her nightstand and shuffled out of the room, closing the door behind her, heading for one of the baths at the end of the hall.

  “She takes the candy,” Ruth explained.

  An icy wave of revulsion washed through Laura. “Ah, no.”

  “Yes,” Thelma said. “Not because she wants the candy. She’s... messed up. She needs the kind of approval she gets from the Eel.”

  “But why?” Laura asked.

  Ruth and Thelma exchanged another of their looks, through which they seemed to debate an issue and reach a decision in a second or two, without words. Sighing, Ruth said, “Well, see, Tammy needs that kind of approval because... her father taught her to need it.”

  Laura was jolted. “Her own father?”

  “Not all the kids at McIlroy are orphans,” Thelma said. “Some are here because their parents committed crimes and went to jail. And others were abused by their folks physically or ... sexually.”

  The freshening air coming through the open windows was probably only a degree or two colder than when they had sat down in a circle on the floor, but it seemed to Laura like a chilly late-autumn wind that had mysteriously leaped the months and infiltrated the August night.

  Laura said, “But Tammy doesn’t really like it?”

  “No, I don’t think she does,” Ruth said. “But she’s—”

  “—compelled,” Thelma said, “can’t help herself. Twisted.”

  They were all silent, thinking the unthinkable, and finally Laura said, “Strange and... so sad. Can’t we stop it? Can’t we tell Mrs. Bowmaine or one of the other social workers about Sheener?”

  “It wouldn’t do any good,” Thelma said. “The Eel would deny it, and Tammy would deny it, too, and we don’t have any proof.”

  “But if she’s not the only kid he’s abused, one of the others—”

  Ruth shook her head. “Most have gone to foster homes, adoptive parents, or back to their own families. Those two or three still here... well, they’re either like Tammy, or they’re just scared to death of the Eel, too scared ever to rat on him.”

  “Besides,” Thelma said, “the adults don’t want to know, don’t want to deal with it. Bad publicity for the home. And it makes them look stupid to have this going on under their noses. Besides, who can believe children?” Thelma imitated Mrs. Bowmaine, catching the note of phoniness so perfectly that Laura recognized it at once: “Oh, my dear, they’re horrible, lying little creatures. Noisy, rambunctious, bothersome little beasts, capable of destroying Mr. Sheener’s fine reputation for the fun of it. If only they could be drugged, hung on wall hooks, and fed intravenously, how much more efficient that system would be, my dear—and really so much better for them, too.”

  “Then the Eel would be cleared,” Ruth said, “and he’d come back to work, and he’d find ways to make us pay for speaking against him. It happened that way before with another perv who used to work here, a guy we called Ferret Fogel. Poor Denny Jenkins...”

  “Denny ratted on Ferret Fogel; he told Bowmaine the Ferret molested him and two other boys. Fogel was suspended. But the two other boys wouldn’t support Denny’s story. They were afraid of the Ferret... but they also had this sick need for his approval. When Bowmaine and her staff interrogated Denny—”

  “They hammered at him,” Ruth said angrily, “with trick questions, trying to trip him up. He got confused, contradicted himself, so they said he was making it all up.”

  “And Fogel came back to work,” Thelma said.

  “He bided his time,” Ruth said, “and then he found ways to make Denny miserable. He tormented the boy relentlessly until one day... Denny just started screaming and couldn’t stop. The doctor had to give him a shot, and then they took him away. Emotionally disturbed, they said.” She was on the brink of tears. “We never saw him again.”

  Thelma put one hand on her sister’s shoulder. To Laura, she said, “Ruth was fond of Denny. He was a nice boy. Small, shy, sweet... he never had a chance. That’s why you’ve got to be tough with the White Eel. You can’t let him see that you’re afraid of him. If he tries anything, scream. And kick him in the crotch.”

  Tammy returned from the bathroom. She did not look at them but stepped out of her slippers and got under the covers.