features were hideously, inescapably Demmiman's own.
'Are you all right?' 'Why?'
“It sounded like your throat tightened up. Drink some wine, that'll help.'
Had all his efforts been designed but to bring him face to face with this monstrous version of himself? Part of Demmiman's humiliation lay in the recognition that the hideous being's strength far surpassed his own. The Other stepped forward, blazing with the claim it made upon him, and he could not bear up before the demand for recognition. Godfrey Demmiman turned and ran for his life.
He thought he heard laughter behind him, but the laughter was only an echo of his shame; he thought dragging footsteps pursued him down the stairs but heard only the pounding of his heart. From half-open doors and shrouded corners, the lithe, misshapen creatures seemed to peer out, awaiting his final surrender.
He would not yield in defeat. He had been born to a great purpose, of which the encounter in the barren room was but the key that opened the lock. His destiny, Demmiman took in, held a majesty he had only begun to comprehend.
Demmiman advanced upon the door to the gallery, thrust it open, and found in his pocket the book of matches he had used to light the tapers in the crypt. The bright flame trembled as he knelt before the first of the long curtains. A small, quivering flame sprang to life and inched upward. Demmiman moved to the next and struck another match. When the second curtain was alight, he ran to the mouldering draperies across the gallery. Then, in the dancing, irregular light, he examined his handiwork.
Rows of flame from the upright columns spread across the floorboards and the ceiling. Scouts and runners had taken another of the rotting panels, and lines of red flame crept along the surface of the wall. The walls opened to the flames as if in welcome; the floor set itself alight in a dozen places. He backed into the smoky hall and let himself out into the night.
On both sides of the narrow street, the dirty brick and blank windows of abandoned buildings took no notice of the red glare visible within their neighbor. The alarm would come long afterward, when flames rose into the dark sky. Demmiman moved into the shelter of a doorway.
The ground-floor windows shattered and released plumes so dark as to obscure the blaze within. With a great rush, the fire took the second floor. Flames surged out and vanished within a massive column of smoke.
The third floor went, and the fourth followed. Above the roar of the conflagration, Demmiman fancied that he heard the high-pitched screams of the creatures trapped at the top of the house, and the thought of their panic caused asavage rejoicing in his breast.
The dark blanket swarming over the front of the building hid from view the topmost windows, and Demmiman sped across the cobblestones to secrete himself in the doorway of an adjacent building, from whence he was able to observe the final progress of the blaze. No sooner had he cast his eyes upward to glimpse the fifth- floor windows than the first signs of firelight shone behind them, then deepened from yellow to red.
A silhouette moved into the frame of the window nearest and looked out with supernal calm. The entire structure offered a groan of imminent collapse. The figure in the window cast its unseen eyes upon him. In the distance, a siren, then another, came screaming toward the blaze. The eyes hidden within the black silhouette maintained their hold.
The window frame ignited around the dark shape, illuminating the ruined visage so like and unlike his own. The Other again issued his implacable claim. His hair burst into flame. Behind him, the fire darkened from red to the deep blue once witnessed at the heart of an ancient forest. Demmiman moved from the doorway and into the cobbled street. In the Other's demand, it came to him with the weight of a majestic paradox, lay an unforeseen fate to which Demmiman's suddenly exalted spirit gave its full assent.
He sprinted from cover and plunged into the burning building. An instant later, what remained of the interior gave way, and with a yielding sigh of capitulation the great structure folded in upon itself and shuddered downward upon Godfrey Demmiman's ecstatic release.
'He had to rid the world of himself? Not to mention his family house and the little crawly things?'
'Poor old Godfrey.'
'We could manage a happier ending than that. Are you interested? Aha. What we have here is a decided show of interest, What did Edward Rinehart know about ecstatic release?'
•58
•The sight of that beautiful, tawny face so close to mine made me feel blessed. Some of the women I had known may have been more passionate than Laurie, but none were more gracefully attuned to the capacity of each individual moment to spread its wings and glide into the next. She also had the gift of what some would call a dirty mind and others inventiveness. The more we explored our bodies and celebrated their abilities, the more unified we seemed to become until at last we seemed to pour into each other and become a single, profoundly interconnected thing. When we swam apart to lie side by side, I felt as though filmy trails of my self were still drifting back into me.
'Can you even begin to guess how good you make me feel?' Laurie said.
“I think I'll build a shrine to you,' I said.
A few hours later I awakened with the old sense of having to get on my way before trouble found me. Besides that, I was falling in love with Laurie Hatch far too quickly. I had no business falling in love with her at all. In a few days I was going back to New York, and after that I would probably never see her again. What I chiefly represented to Laurie was danger, and I had to protect her from that. I moved her arm off my shoulder and slid out of bed.
While I was groping for my socks, I bumped into a lamp, and the noise woke her up. Fuzzily, she asked what I was doing. I told her that I had to get back to the boarding house.
'What time is it?'
I looked at the green numerals on the digital clock. 'One-fifteen.'
She turned on a low bedside lamp and sat up, rubbing her face. “I'd drive you, but I'm so tired I think I'd go off the road.'
“I'll call a taxi,' I said.
'Don't be silly. Take Stewart's car—his other car, the one he left in the garage. We'll figure out a way to get it back. Because you are definitely coming back here, Ned, there are no two ways about
I went to the bed and kissed her. The sheet lay rumpled across her waist, and her torso seemed dusky and golden in the dim light.
'Call me tomorrow.' She switched off the light as soon as I finished dressing.
Stewart Hatch's 'other' car was an ivory two-seater Mercedes 500SL, a fact that would have amazed me had I not been past all amazement. After I started the ignition, I looked at the controls, put the car into reverse, and nearly backed through the garage door. It took me
I drove back to central Edgerton in high style, singing along with the jazz on the Albertus radio station, and passed up a spot in front of the rooming house to park around the corner on Harry Street.
•59
•As I went up the stairs I heard the unmistakable noise of a party going on at the far end of my floor. A cluster of young people filled the hallway at the rear of the house. The girls were mostly gleaming legs, the boys wore bristling haircuts and polo shirts, and all of them were holding plastic cups, waving cigarettes, and gabbing. A black-haired girl whose bangs brushed her eyebrows flapped her cigarette at me.
'Hey, new neighbor! Come to our party!'
'Thanks, but not tonight,' I said. 'Partied out.'
