from sheer relief. I couldn’t help it. Somebody moved, nearer to the center of the store. Somebody squeaked.
Do all the aisles anyway, I told myself. Every damn one of them. As I spread my arms and started up the second aisle, my ankle snagged something, and it broke. Another thread. I had a sudden image of myself in a web. I loathe spiders above almost anything else.
I was a third of the way up the aisle when the pillar of fire bloomed in front of me. It towered six, then eight, feet tall, too bright to look at, and I scuttled backward as fast as I could until I slammed against the wall at the end of the aisle, the end farthest away from the door I’d come in through. As the fire fell, I saw, or thought I saw, someone standing well behind it. He was tall and wrapped in black. The fire died, and I heard the squeaking sound again.
Then I was aware of a wild flapping sound that seemed to come from all over, and in my peripheral vision, which was all that I had left after the brilliance of the pillar of fire, black pieces of paper tore themselves to shreds above me and scattered through the darkness in all directions. Something knocked against the side of my head, and I screamed higher than the girl in a horror movie, and pressed back against the wall as the flapping died away. Something cooed.
The place was full of birds.
It was a bunch of birds and a firework, that’s all. One of those stupid cones that look so nice on the Fourth of July.
“Very pretty,” I said, wishing I hadn’t screamed, wishing I could keep the quaver out of my voice. “Have we got any more of those?” My direct vision was completely gone, the imprinted image of the fire pillar working my retina overtime, a green and red ghost vision that totally blocked out the tiny amount of real light in the room. I put my arms out again and swept the second aisle in a blind run, moving by touch until I was at the other end and I knew it was empty. I turned with my back to the south wall and panted, waiting for my eyesight to return and bring my courage with it.
Had he been standing at this end when the firework went off? My memory said yes, but I couldn’t be completely sure. “Okay,” I said out loud, partly for his ears and partly for the wire. “Okay, then.” Something squeaked, definitely to my left this time.
My feet didn’t want to take the three sideways steps to the left, but I still had control of my feet. I sought reassurance in the fact. “Ready or not,” I said, “I’m coming.”
I could see almost the entire length of the third aisle. The lantern’s light created an edge about three feet down the shelves to my right. It looked empty, but he might be crouched down against the left-hand shelving. I was certain he was to my left, but I knew now that I could hear him move, and I had decided to sweep every aisle. It might not have been much of a plan, but it was the only one I had, and I wasn’t going to abandon it. Hands out again. Test for a thread with the foot. Nothing there, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be one part of the way down.
There was, and this time the fire erupted behind me. It cast brilliant light all the way to the wall, and I pulled in my hands and ran for it while the glare lasted. The birds went crazy again, and I looked up and saw them diving and swooping for refuge among the open rafters, and then the glare died down and we were all back in the almost-dark.
“I liked that,” I said, turning to press my back against the wall. “Keep them behind me. Will you work on that?” I wondered what Hammond and Finch were making of this monologue. Probably asking Schultz to analyze it. The smell of the firework was sharp and pungent and familiar from the summers when I was a boy, and it tickled my nose. I might even have enjoyed it, except that the air was getting smoky, and that canceled out the increased visibility from the lantern. It was only one aisle over, but the air in the aisle in front of me was milky and hard to see through.
“Well, shoot,” I said. “Here we go again.” I touched the shelves and moved down the aisle, more slowly this time, putting out a tentative foot to test for threads before committing myself to a step. Nothing. The aisle was clear, and I got to the end, put my back against the wall again, and sidestepped to find myself staring down the next one, the aisle that had the lantern standing in its center. The air was too smoky to see the black pole on which it stood, but the lantern shone seven or eight feet up, in the center of a soft halo. The door through which I had entered was behind me, and it was closed.
I had left it ajar.
“Nobody there?” I called, before I noticed the thread. It was pinned to the shelf to my left and looped through a bent nail on the shelf to my right, and it disappeared down the aisle into the skim milk of the air. He’d taken a lot of time with this.
“Would you like me to break this one, too?” I asked. “Or can we just talk?” There was no answer, so I leaned down and yanked at the thread with my hands.
Music shattered the air, music so loud that it seemed to gather the smoke into balls and roll them at me. Handel. The Royal Fireworks Music. I covered my ears, knowing that now I couldn’t hear him squeak anyway, and took a step forward.
A cone of fire licked its way toward the roof at the far end of the aisle, and he was standing behind it, tall, wrapped in black, fuzzy, and indistinct though the smoke. Then the cone died.
“Wait,” I said, half-blind again, taking another step. The music boomed out again, and another flare erupted, closer to me this time, and he was there again, just behind it, moving in time to the music, and he was taller than I had imagined he could be, and stick-thin in his black coat. He had one hand out.
As the flame guttered and died, I backed up and tried the door behind me. It wasn’t locked. That was something.
The air was full of smoke now, the lantern only a firefly floating in front of me, and I had just let go of the door when the next cone blossomed, and he was only eight or ten feet from me, impossibly thin, with scraggly straight blond hair that was wrong somehow, on crooked, and a broad grin with very few teeth behind it. He leaned forward, extending the hand toward me. It had something in it. The smile was as crooked as his hair, and the birds cut through the smoke like lunatic confetti in a murderer’s parade.
“Stop,” I said for some reason, and stepped forward.
The cone went off almost at my feet, and I leapt back, and he was right behind it, four feet away this time, baring red puffy gums in a meaningless smile and showing me ravaged skin and empty blue eyes that were paler than ice. He stepped around the cone, so close that I could hear the rubber coat squeaking over the music, and looked down at me and pressed whatever it was into my hand.
A stalk of fennel.
He leaned down until his mouth was against my ear, and I was scrabbling for the gun in my pocket.
“Ten dollars,” he said. He smelled like a dead cow at the side of the road.
The cone died down, and the store and my mind went black simultaneously. “What? ” I said.
But he was past me then, shaking his head and heading for the door, and I heard him squeaking through the smoke and I turned to watch and then threw up a hand to protect my eyes as he pulled the door open into an impossible blaze of light and squeaked through it and birds exploded through the doorway and into the light, and over the music someone shouted, “Stop or I’ll shoot,” but he didn’t stop, and two loud booms shook the smoke like water in a jar, and he went down.
And I ran through the door into the glare from the headlights of six LAPD black-and-whites and saw him on the broken asphalt, twisted like a scout’s knot gone wrong in the center of what seemed to be a pool of black ice, and I looked around and, with an effort that began at my toes, I did my level best to break Al Hammond’s jaw.
11
“… A transient,” Captain Finch was saying. “Acid burnout name of Dennis Thorpe. Thirty-four. From Indiana.”
“But not the Incinerator,” Annabelle Winston said in a voice that was, at once, soft and awful.
Finch was already red, but he got redder. “Not,” he said. He looked around. Nobody came to his
