'GIVE IT UP, PICKERING!' Nell shouted, unaware that he was a dead man breathing.
The wire stock of an assault-rifle smashed through the glass of a window on the lower floor of the north wing, then disappeared back inside. At the same instant the fanlight over the front door exploded, showering the porch with glass. Flames roared out through the hole. A second later the door itself shuddered open, as if nudged by an invisible hand. Nell leaned out farther, perhaps believing the shooter had finally seen reason and intended to give himself up.
Ralph, screaming: ['Pull him back, Johnny! PULL HIM BACK!']
The rifle emerged again, barrel-first this time.
Leydecker reached for Nell's collar, but he was too slow. The automatic rifle hacked its series of rapid dry coughs, and Ralph heard the metallic pank! pank! pank! of bullets poking holes in the thin steel of the police car. Chris Nell's aura was totally black now - it had become a deathbag. He jerked sideways as a bullet caught him in the neck, breaking Leydecker's grip on his collar and sprawling into the dooryard with one foot kicking spasmodically. The bullhorn spilled from his hand with a brief squawk of feedback. A policeman behind one of the other cars cried out in surprise and horror. Lois's shriek was much louder.
More bullets stitched across the ground toward Nell and then slapped small black holes into the thighs of his blue uniform. Ralph could dimly see the man inside the deathbag which was suffocating him; he was making blind efforts to roll over and get up. There was something singularly horrible about his struggles - to Ralph it was like watching a creature caught in a net drown in shallow, filthy water.
Leydecker lunged out from behind the police car, and as his fingers disappeared into the black membrane surrounding Chris Nell, Ralph heard Old Dor say, I wouldn't touch him anymore if I were you, Ralph - I can't see your hands.
Lois: ['Don't! Don't, he's dead, he's already dead!']
The gun poking out of the window had started to move to the right. Now it swivelled unhurriedly back toward Leydecker, the man behind it undeterred - and apparently unhurt - by the hail of bullets directed at him from the other police. Ralph raised his right hand and brought it down in the karate-chop gesture again, but this time instead of a wedge of light, his fingertips produced something that looked like a large blue teardrop. It spread across Leydecker's lemon-colored aura just as the rifle sticking out of the window opened fire. Ralph saw two slugs strike the tree just to Leydecker's right, sending chips of bark flying into the air and making black holes in the fir's yellowish-white undersurface. A third struck the blue covering which had coated Leydecker's aura - Ralph saw a momentary flicker of dark red just to the left of the detective's temple and heard a low whine as the bullet either richocheted or skipped, the way a flat stone will skip across the surface of a pond.
Leydecker pulled Nell back behind the car, looked at him, then tore open the driver's-side door and threw himself into the front seat. Ralph could no longer see him, but could hear him screaming at someone over the radio, asking where the fuck the rescue vehicles were.
More shattering glass, and Lois was grabbing frantically at Ralph's arm, pointing at something - at a brick tumbling end over end into the dooryard. It had come through one of the low, narrow windows at the base of the north wing. These windows were almost obscured by the flower-beds which edged the house.
'Help us!' a voice screamed through the broken window, even as the man with the assault-rifle fired reflexively at the tumbling brick, sending up puffs of reddish dust and then breaking it into three jagged chunks. Neither Ralph nor Lois had ever heard that voice raised in a scream, but both recognized it at once, nevertheless; it was Helen Deepneau's voice. 'Help us, please! We're in the cellar! We have children! Please don't let us burn to death, WE HAVE CHILDREN!'
Ralph and Lois exchanged a single wide-eyed glance, then ran for the house.
6
Two uniformed figures, looking more like pro football linemen than cops in their bulky Kevlar vests, charged from behind one of the cruisers, running flat-out for the porch with their riot guns held at port arms. As they crossed the dooryard on a diagonal, Charlie Pickering leaned out of his window, still laughing wildly, his gray hair zanier than ever. The volume of fire directed at him was enormous, showering him with splinters from the sides of the window and actually knocking down the rusty gutter above his head - it struck the porch with a hollow bonk - but not a single bullet touched him.
How can they not be hitting him? Ralph thought as he and Lois mounted the porch toward the lime-colored flames which were now billowing through the open front door. Christ Jesus, it's almost point-blank range, how can they possibly not be hitting him?
But he knew how . . . and why. Clotho had told them that both Atropos and Ed Deepneau had been surrounded by forces which were malignant yet protective. Was it not likely that those same forces were now taking care of Charlie Pickering, much as Ralph himself had taken care of Leydecker when he'd left the protection of the police car to drag his dying colleague back to cover?
Pickering opened up on the charging State Troopers, his weapon switched to rapid-fire. He aimed low to negate the value of the vests they were wearing and swept their legs out from under them. One of them fell in a silent heap; the other crawled back the way he had come, shrieking that he was hit, he was hit, oh fuck, he was hit bad.
'Barbecue!' Pickering cried out the window in his screaming, laughing voice. 'Barbecue! Barbecue! Holy cookout! Burn the bitches! God's fire! God's holy fire!'
There were more screams now, seemingly from right under Ralph's feet, and when he looked down he saw a terrible thing: a medley of auras was seeping up from between the porch boards like steam, the variety of their colors muted by the scarlet blood-glow which was rising with them . . . and surrounding them. This blood-red shape wasn't quite the same as the thunderhead which had formed above the fight between Green Boy and Orange Boy outside the Red Apple, but Ralph thought it was closely related; the only difference was that this one had been born of fear instead of anger and aggression.
'Barbecue!' Charlie Pickering was screaming, and then something about killing the devil-cunts. Suddenly Ralph hated him more than he had ever hated anyone in his life.
['Come on, Lois - let's go get that asshole.']
He took her by the hand and pulled her into the burning house.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
* * *
1
The porch door opened on a central hallway that ran from the front of the house to the back, and the whole length of it was now engulfed in flames. To Ralph's eyes they were a bright green, and when he and Lois passed through them, they were cool - it was like passing through gauzy membranes which had been infused with Mentholatum. The crackle of the burning house was muffled; the gunfire had become as faint and unimportant as the sound of thunder to someone who is swimming underwater . . . and that was what this felt like more than anything, Ralph decided - being underwater. He and Lois were unseen beings swimming through a river of fire.
He pointed to a doorway on the right and looked questioningly at Lois. She nodded. He reached for the knob and grimaced with disgust as his fingers passed right through it. Just as well, of course; if he had actually been able to grab the damned thing, he would have left the top two layers of his fingers hanging off the brass knob in charbroiled strips.
['We have to go through it, Ralph!']
He looked at her assessingly, saw a great deal of fear and worry in her eyes but no panic, and nodded. They went through the door together just as the chandelier halfway down the hall fell to the floor with an unmusical crash of glass pendants and iron chain.
There was a parlor on the other side, and what they saw there made Ralph's stomach clench in horror. Two women were propped against the wall below a large poster of Susan Day in jeans and a Western-style shirt (DON'T LET HIM CALL YOU BABY UNLESS YOU WANT HIM TO TREAT YOU LIKE ONE, the poster advised). Both had been shot in the head at point-blank range; brains, ragged flaps of scal
p, and bits of bone were splattered across the flowered wallpaper and Susan Day's fancy-stitched cowgirl boots. One of the women had been pregnant. The other had been Gretchen Tillbury.
Ralph remembered the day she had come to his home with Helen to warn him and to give him a can of something called Bodyguard; on that day he had thought her beautiful . . . but of course on that day her finely made head had still been intact and half of her pretty blonde hair hadn't been roasted off by a close-range rifle-blast. Fifteen years after she had narrowly escaped being killed by her abusive husband, another man had put a gun to Gretchen Tillbury's head and blown her right out of the world. She would never tell another woman about how she had gotten the scar on her left thigh.
For one horrible moment Ralph thought he was going to faint. He concentrated and pulled himself back by thinking of Lois. Her aura had gone a dark, shocked red. Jagged black lines raced across it and through it. They looked like the EKG readout of someone suffering a fatal heart attack.
['Oh Ralph! Oh Ralph, dear God!']
Something exploded at the south end of the house with force enough to blow open the door they had just walked through. Ralph guessed it might have been a propane tank or tanks . . . not that it mattered much at this point. Flaming scraps of wallpaper came wafting in from the hall, and he saw both the room's curtains and the remaining hair on Gretchen Tillbury's head ripple toward the doorway as the fire sucked the air out of the room to feed itself. How long would it take for the fire to turn the women and children down cellar into crispy critters? Ralph didn't know, and suspected that didn't matter much, either; the people trapped down there would be dead of suffocation or smoke inhalation long before they began to burn.
Lois was staring at the dead women in horror. Tears slipped down her cheeks. The spectral gray light which rose from the tracks they left behind looked like vapor rising from dry ice. Ralph walked her across the parlor toward the closed double doors on the far side, paused before them long enough to take a deep breath, then put his arm around Lois's waist and stepped into the wood.
There was a moment of darkness in which not just his nose but his entire body seemed suffused with the sweet aroma of sawdust, and then they were in the room beyond, the northernmost room in the house. It had perhaps once been a study, but had since been converted into a group therapy room. In the center, a dozen or so folding chairs had been set up in a circle. The walls were hung with plaques saying things like I CANNOT EXPECT RESPECT FROM ANYONE ELSE UNTIL I RESPECT MYSELF. On a blackboard at one end of the room someone had printed WE ARE FAMILY, I'VE GOT ALL MY SISTERS WITH ME in capital letters. Crouched beside it at one of the east-facing windows that overlooked the porch, wearing his own Kevlar vest over a Snoopy sweatshirt Ralph would have recognized anywhere, was Charlie Pickering.
'Barbecue all Godless women!' he screamed. A bullet whined past his shoulder; another buried itself in the windowframe to his right and flicked a splinter against one of the lenses of his hornrimmed glasses. The idea that he was being protected returned to Ralph, this time with the force of a conviction. 'Lesbian cookout! Give em a taste of their own medicine! Teach em how it feels!'
['Stay up, Lois - right up where you are now.']
['What are you going to do?']
['Take care of him.']
['Don't kill him, Ralph! Please don't kill him!']
Why not? Ralph thought bitterly. I'd be doing the world a favor. That was undoubtedly true, but this was no time to argue.
['All right, I won't kill him! Now stay put, Lois - there's too many goddam bullets flying around for both of us to risk going down.']
Before she could reply, Ralph concentrated, summoned the blink, and dropped back to the Short-Time level. It happened so fast and hard this time that it left him feeling winded, as if he had jumped out of a second-storey window onto a hard patch of concrete. Some of the color drained out of the world and noise fell in to replace it: the crackle of fire, no longer muffled but sharp and close; the crump of a shotgun blast; the crack of pistol-shots fired in rapid succession. The air tasted of soot, and the room was sweltering. Something that sounded like an insect droned past Ralph's ear. He had an idea it was a .45-caliber bug.
Better hurry up, sweetheart, Carolyn advised. When bullets hit you on this level they kill you, remember?
He remembered.
Ralph ran bent-over toward Pickering's turned back. His feet crunched on slivers of glass and scatters of splinters, but Pickering did not turn. In addition to the automatic weapon in his hands, there was a revolver on his hip and a small green duffle-bag by his left foot. The bag was unzipped, and Ralph saw a number of wine bottles inside. Their open mouths had been stuffed with wet rags.
'Kill the bitches!' Pickering screamed, spraying the yard with another burst of fire. He popped the clip and raised his sweatshirt, exposing three or four more tucked under his belt. Ralph reached into the open duffel-bag, seized one of the gasoline-filled wine bottles by the neck, and swung it at the side of Pickering's head. As he did, he saw the reason Pickering hadn't heard his approach: the man was wearing shooter's plugs. Before Ralph had time to reflect upon the irony of a man on a suicide mission taking pains to protect his hearing, the bottle shattered against Pickering's temple, dousing him with amber liquid and green glass. He staggered backward, one hand going to his scalp, which was cut open in two places. Blood poured through his long fingers - fingers that should have belonged to a pianist or a painter, Ralph thought - and down his neck. He turned, his eyes wide and shocked behind the smeary lenses of his spectacles, his hair reaching for the sky and making him look like a cartoon of a man who has just received a huge jolt of electricity.
'You!' he cried. 'Devil-sent Centurion! Godless baby-killer!'
Ralph thought of the two women in the other room and was once more overwhelmed with anger . . . except that anger was too mild a word, much too mild. He felt as if his nerves were burning inside his skin. And the thought that drummed at his mind was one of them was pregnant so who's the baby-killer, one of them was pregnant so who's the baby-killer, one of them was pregnant so who's the baby-killer.
Another high-caliber bug droned past his face. Ralph didn't notice. Pickering was trying to lift the rifle with which he had undoubtedly killed Gretchen Tillbury and her pregnant friend. Ralph snatched it from his hands and turned it on him. Pickering shrieked with fear. The sound of it maddened Ralph even more, and he forgot the promise he had made to Lois. He raised the rifle, fully meaning to empty it into the man who was now cringing abjectly against the wall (in the heat of the moment it occurred to neither of them that there was currently no clip in the gun), but before he could pull the trigger he was distracted by a brilliant swarm of light bleeding into the air beside him. At first it was without shape, a fabulous kaleidoscope whose colors had somehow escaped the tube which was supposed to contain them, and then it took on the form of a woman with a long, gauzy gray ribbon rising from her head.
['Don't kill him]
Ralph, please don't kill him!'
For a moment he could see the blackboard and read the quote chalked on it right through her, and then the colors became her clothes and hair and skin as she came all the way down. Pickering stared at her in cross-eyed terror. He shrieked again, and the crotch of his army fatigue pants darkened. He stuck his fingers into his mouth, as if to stifle the sound he was making. 'A ghose!' he screamed through his mouthful of fingers. 'A Hennurion anna ghose!'
Lois ignored him and grabbed the barrel of the rifle. 'Don't kill him, Ralph! Don't!'
Ralph was suddenly furious with her, too. 'Don't you understand, Lois? Don't you get it? He understood what he was doing! On some level, he did understand - I saw it in his goddam aura!'
'It doesn't matter,' she said, still holding the barrel of the rifle down so it pointed at the floor. 'It doesn't matter what he did or didn't understand. We mustn't do what they do. We mustn't be what they are.'
'But--'
'Ralph, I want to let go of this g
un-barrel. It's hot. It's burning my fingers.'
'All right,' he said, and let go at the same instant she did. The gun fell to the floor between them, and Pickering, who had been sliding slowly down the wall with his fingers still in his mouth and his shining, glazed eyes still fixed on Lois, lunged for it with the speed of a striking rattlesnake.
What Ralph did then he did without forethought and certainly without anger - he acted purely on instinct, reaching out for Pickering with both hands and grasping the sides of his face. Something flashed brightly inside his mind as he did it, something that felt like the lens of a powerful magnifying glass. He slammed back up through the levels, for a split second going higher than either of them had yet been. At the height of his ascent, he felt a terrible force flash in his head and explode down his arms. Then, as he dropped back down, he heard the bang, a hollow but emphatic sound which was entirely different from the guns still firing outside.
Pickering's body jerked galvanically, and his legs shot out with such force that one of his shoes flew off. His buttocks rose and then thumped down. His teeth clamped shut on his lower lip, and blood squirted out of his mouth. For a moment Ralph was almost sure he saw tiny blue sparks snapping from the ends of his zany hair. Then they were gone and Pickering slumped back against the wall. He stared at Ralph and Lois with eyes from which all concern had fled.
Lois screamed. At first Ralph thought she was screaming because of what he had done to Pickering, and then he saw she was beating at the top of her head. A piece of burning wallpaper had landed there and her hair was on fire.