house, the curtained front windows hid them. I couldn't see anybody anywhere now. The whole damned town might have been a ghost, lying still and crumbling in the golden light of an approaching sunset.
When I got to the fork I took the branch that led between the abandoned mining-camp buildings. I parked in front of the hotel, got my flashlight from its clip under the dash, and locked the car. Then I went around to the rear, to where the back door still stood hanging open on one hinge. I stepped inside.
Not much light penetrated now, at this time of day, through the chinks in the outer walls. The place had a murky, eerie look to it, as if there might actually be spooks and specters lying in wait on the shadowed balconies and among the decaying rubble. I switched on the flashlight, crossed the rough whipsawed floor.
The light picked up the collapsed pigeonhole shelf, the door in the wall behind it. I swung the door open. Mica particles and iron pyrites gleamed in the flash beam when I played it across the tier of shelves and their collection of arrowheads and chunks of rock. I moved over there. Some of the rocks had fossils embedded in them, all right. Bryophyte fossils, just like the ones in the stone cup in the trunk of my car.
I picked up one that looked to be the same sort of mineral-travertine, Treacle had called it-as the stone cup, and put it into my pocket. Then I swept the rest of the room with the light, looking for something that might confirm my suspicion as to who it was who spent time here. The Coleman lantern, the stacks of National Geographic, the cot with its straw-tick mattress told me nothing. But under the cot I found a small spiral notebook, and the notebook had a name on it, and that was all I needed.
I put the notebook into the same pocket with the fossil rock. As I started out the light, probing ahead, showed me nothing but the edge of the desk and the pigeonhole shelf and dim shadow shapes beyond. I took one step through the doorway
Something moved to my right, behind the desk.
That was the only warning I had, and it wasn't enough. He came rushing toward me out of the gloom with something upraised in his hand, something that registered on my mind as a length of board. He swung it at me in a flat horizontal arc like a baseball bat. I dropped the flashlight, threw my arm up too late.
The board whacked across the left side of my face and head, and there was a flash of bright pain, and I went down and out.
7
I awoke to pain. And to heat and a whooshing, crackling noise that seemed to come from somewhere close by. And to the acrid smell of smoke.
Fire!
The word surged through my mind even before I was fully conscious. It drove me up onto one knee, a movement that sent shooting pain through my head and neck; I was aware that the whole left side of my face was half numb and felt swollen. I had my eyes open, but I couldn't see anything. It was dark wherever I was-dark and hot and filling up with thin clouds of smoke.
Panic cut away at me; I fought it instinctively, shoved onto my feet, and managed to stay upright even though my knees felt as though they were made of rubber. I still could not see anything except vague outlines in the blackness. But I could hear the thrumming beat of the fire, a frightening sound that seemed to be growing louder, coming closer.
The smoke started me coughing. That led to several seconds of dry-retching before I could get my breathing under control. I took a couple of sliding steps with my hands out in front of me like a blind man; my knee hit something, there was a faint scraping sound as the something yielded, and I almost fell. I bent at the waist, groping with my hands. The cot, the straw-tick mattress: I was still in the room behind the hotel desk.
Coughing again, fighting the panic, I slid my feet around the cot and kept moving until my fingers brushed against wood, touched rock. The shelving, the collection of junk. I went sideways along it to my left, toward where I remembered the door to be. Found it, found the latch.
Locked.
I threw my weight against the door, a little wildly. The wood was old and dry; it gave some, groaning in its frame. I got a grip on myself again and lunged at the door a second time, a third. The wood began to splinter in the middle and around the jamb. The fourth time I slammed into it, the latch gave and so did one of the hinges; the door flew outward and I stumbled through, caught myself against the edge of the hotel desk.
The whole rear wall and part of the side walls and balcony were sheeted with flame.
The smoke was so thick in there that each breath I took seared my lungs, made me dizzy and nauseous. I pushed away from the desk, staggered toward the front entrance; tripped over something and fell skidding on hands and knees, scraping skin off my palms. Flames licked along the front wall, raced over the floor. As old and decayed as it was, the place was a tinderbox. It would be only a matter of minutes before the entire building went up.
In the hellish, pulsing glow I could see the boarded-up door and windows in the front wall. I scrambled to my feet again and ran to the window on the left; a gap was visible between two of the boards nailed across it. I got my fingers in the gap and wrenched one of the boards loose, flung it down, and went after another one. The fire was so close that I could feel the hair on my head starting to singe.
Sparks were falling around me; two of them landed on my shirt, on the back and on one shoulder, but I was only half-conscious of the burns as I tore the second board loose, hammered at a third with my fist where it was already splintered in the middle.
When I broke the two pieces outward, the opening was almost wide enough for me to get through. But not quite-Christ, not quite. I clawed frantically at another board, twisting my head and shoulders through the window and out of the choking billows of smoke. More sparks fell on the legs of my trousers, brought stinging pain in four or five places as if someone was jabbing me with needles. I sucked in heaving lungsful of the night air; I could hear myself making noises that were half gasps and half broken sobs.
The oxygen gave me the strength I needed to yank one end of the board loose, and when I wrenched it out of the way I was able to wiggle my hips up onto the sill and through the opening. In the next second I was toppling over backwards, then jarring into hard earth on my shoulders and upper back-outside, free.
I rolled over twice in the grass, away from the burning building; got up somehow and staggered ten or twelve steps into the middle of the road before I fell down again. Now that I was clear of the fire, I could smell my singed hair, the smoldering cloth of my pants and shirt. The smells made me gag, vomit up the beer I'd drunk earlier in Weaverville.
But I was all right then. My head had cleared, the fear and the wildness were gone; inside me was a thin, sharp rage. I got to my feet again, shakily. Pawed at my smoke-stung eyes and squinted over at the hotel.
My car was gone.
The rage got thinner and sharper. He took it away somewhere, I thought. Took my keys after he slugged me and drove it away and hid it somewhere.
But there was no time now to think about either him or the car. The hotel was coated with flame, like a massive torch, and the fire had spread to the adjacent buildings, was beginning to race across their roofs to the ones beyond. Part of the starlit sky was obscured by dense coagulations of smoke. Soon enough, that whole creekside row would be ablaze.
I ran along the far edge of the road, back toward the fork. Most of my attention was on the fire behind me, so I did not become aware of the cluster of people until I was abreast of the last of the south-side buildings, where the road jogged in that direction.
They were standing in the meadow up there-more than a dozen of them, the whole damned town. Just standing there, watching me run toward them, watching the ghosts of Ragged-Ass Gulch burn as though in some final rite of exorcism.
No one moved even when I stopped within a few feet of them and stood swaying a little, panting. All they did was stare at me. Paul Thatcher, holding a shovel in one hand. Jack Coleclaw, with his arms folded across his fat paunch. Ella Bloom, her mouth twisted into a witch's grimace. Hugh Penrose, shaking his ugly head and making odd little sounds as though he was trying to control a spasm of laughter. Their faces, and those of the others, had an unnatural look in the fireglow, like mummers' masks stained red-orange and sooty black.
'What's the matter with you people?' I yelled at them.
