Hymn (17 page)

‘Lloyd, wait.'

Lloyd thought: it can't be. But he knew with a terrible certainty that it was. You don't have to see somebody's face in close-up to know for certain who they are. A shape, a suggestion, that's all you need. And this figure standing in the flames was the same figure that he had seen running away from him on the Star of India, the same figure that he had seen sitting opposite him at Tom Ham's Lighthouse.

Celia, no question about it. Celia, self-cremated but immortal.

For a second, she emerged from the flames. They ran up her grey naked body, ran up her face, and her hair stood on end in torrential fire. She stared at Lloyd with black, impenetrable eyes.

‘Lloyd, I need that charm. If I don't have that charm, Lloyd, I'll die.'

He stared at her in horror. Flames licked at her breasts, but didn't consume them. Flames licked at her face. What fascinated and frightened Lloyd more than anything else was the way in which flames licked into her eye-sockets.

‘I have to have that charm, Lloyd. Please, give it to me.'

Lloyd hesitated for one more second, mesmerized by Celia's appearance, but then he heard the whooping of fire sirens approaching the house, and the moment of hesitation was broken. He ducked out of the living-room, along the hallway, and out into the night.

Kathleen was waiting for him on the sidewalk, just as a shining firetruck came around the corner with its lights flashing and its horn bellowing.

‘Lloyd, are you okay?' she asked him. She was trembling.

‘Sure, yes, sure. I tried to put it out, but it had too much of a hold.'

‘I moved your car back, just in case.'

‘Thanks.'

A firefighter came stalking up to Lloyd, adjusting the straps of his helmet. ‘This your property, sir?'

Lloyd nodded.

‘Is there anybody in there?'

Lloyd thought of Celia, standing in the doorway, empty-eyed, alight.

‘No, officer. There's nobody in there.'

‘No domestic animals?'

‘No, none.'

‘How did the fire start?' the firefighter asked him. Already the first hose was connected to the hydrant across the street, and two more firefighters were approaching the house behind a wide high-pressure spray.

‘I have no idea. We just came back from having dinner. It looked as if it started in the bedroom, but God knows how.'

‘Chief!' called one of the firefighters. ‘The back roof is coming down!'

‘Okay,' the officer called back. Then, to Lloyd, ‘I'll talk to you later, sir. Let's get this little bonfire under control first.'

Lloyd and Kathleen stood and watched as the firefighters axed their way into the back of the house and sprayed gallons of water into the kitchen. Lloyd felt shocked and detached. It was hard for him to believe that what he was witnessing was real. First of all he had lost Celia to fire, now his house. He felt like packing up and leaving everything behind him. Maybe travelling north to Eureka, the way that Kathleen's late husband had done.

Most of the neighbours had come out of their houses to watch the fire. Rog Kazowski from next door came across and asked Lloyd if he wanted to come in for a drink.

‘It's okay, Rog, I think I'll just stand here and watch it burn.'

‘I sure hope you got good insurance,' said Rog, the firelight dancing on his shiny bald head. ‘If you have any problems, let me know.'

Lloyd looked around, and as he did so, he saw two unfamiliar figures standing among the main knot of neighbours. It was difficult to make them out clearly in the swivelling light from the fire and the flashing lights from the firetrucks, but the more intently he peered at them, the more convinced he became that he had found the man and woman he was hunting for. With a cold tingle of excitement and alarm, he recognized Otto and his tall German fraülein. Helmet, or Earwig, or whatever.

He couldn't be certain, but it looked very much as if they were watching him, too.

‘Kathleen,' he suggested, ‘I think it would be a good idea if we got away from here.'

‘I'm sorry?'

‘I'm not really too keen on watching my house burn to the ground, you know?'

Kathleen took hold of his hand. ‘Well, of course, sure. Do you want to come to my place?'

‘That'd be great.'

He edged his way back through the onlookers, making sure that the fire chief didn't see them leaving. A police car had just arrived, too, and the last thing he wanted was to have to answer a lot of routine police-type questions. He glanced back across the street at Otto and his companion, and as he did so he saw a figure in dark glasses and a black turban skirting around the back of the crowd. Celia, no question about it. Or the grey-skinned empty-eye-socketed creature who had taken Celia's shape.

He gripped Kathleen's hand more tightly, and hurried her over to his car.

Kathleen said, ‘Hold on! You're hurting me!'

‘Quick, get in,' he told her. ‘They've seen us.'

‘Who's seen us? What are you talking about?'

Otto had detached himself from the main crowd and was walking toward them, straight and purposeful. The tall German woman followed him, although Celia remained where she was.

Kathleen said, ‘I wish you'd tell me what's going on.'

‘No time,' Lloyd told her, slamming the car door and starting the engine. As he did so, Otto abruptly stopped where he was, fifty or sixty feet away, and raised his hands to his forehead. He looked as if he were protecting his eyes from the glare. Lloyd released the parking-brake and swerved the BMW across the road in reverse.

‘Lloyd!' Katheleen exclaimed.

Lloyd slammed the T-shift into 2, and the car skidded forward again. As they approached Otto, however, Lloyd felt the leather-covered steering-wheel heating up in the palms of his hands. Otto made no attempt to move aside as they slewed past him, and as they did so, the steering-wheel burst into flames.

‘Aaahhh!' Lloyd yelled, trying to keep control of the swaying car with his fingertips. The leather steering-wheel cover was blazing furiously, and strips of fiery black hide kept dropping on to his unprotected thighs. His palms were branded, his fingers blistered, but in spite of the pain and the panic he managed to keep his hands dancing around the wheel, and to keep the car under some sort of control.

‘Here!' said Kathleen, and dragged off her knitted shawl so that Lloyd could use it to smother the flames. He wound it around the top of the steering-wheel, and managed to damp down the worse of them.

They skidded on to the main highway next to the university entrance. Lloyd's teeth were clenched with pain, and his eyes were filled with tears.

‘Under my seat,' he managed to tell her. ‘Fire extinguisher.'

‘For God's sake, can't you stop?'

Lloyd glanced in his rearview mirror. Already a large silver Mercedes sedan was swerving out of North Torrey, in obvious pursuit. It pulled right in front of a van, and Lloyd heard a horn blaring in indignation.

Kathleen unclipped the fire-extinguisher and blew five or six squirts of foam on to the last guttering flames on the steering-wheel.

‘That's fine,' Lloyd told her, ‘that's fine.'

‘Why can't you stop?' Kathleen demanded, frantically. ‘Who was that man? How on earth did our steering-wheel catch fire? Would you please mind telling me now what's going on?'

Lloyd checked his mirror again. ‘You see that Mercedes? It's following us.'

Kathleen turned around in her seat. ‘Are you sure? Why?'

‘It's that man you saw in the road back there. As far as I can make out, that's Otto. The leader of that religious study group I was telling you about.'

‘But what does he want?'

‘This, I think,' said Lloyd, and reached into his coat pocket and took out the lizard charm. ‘I don't know, it's some kind of symbol. He has the same symbol on the wall in his house.'

Kathleen turned the charm one way, and then the other. ‘Why does he want it so badly?'

‘I wish I knew. But it was found in the car park where Celia burned herself. If you look at the newspaper photographs, Otto was there, too, standing in the background. And Otto was also standing in the background in the newspaper photographs of that bus burning.

‘What's more, anybody who has shown even the slightest interest in Otto and these burnings seems to have gotten themselves burned to death.'

Kathleen looked around again. ‘They're gaining on us. Your poor hands. Are you going to be okay?'

Lloyd grimaced, and nodded. The sharp burning in his fingers had become a silently-roaring fire, and he was doing his best not to think about it. Pain? What pain? That pain doesn't belong to me.

Kathleen said, ‘I don't understand it. How did your steering-wheel catch fire like that?'

‘I don't understand it, either. But I think Otto did it. Maybe he can make things catch fire just by thinking about it. Did you ever see that movie about a little girl who could make things catch fire just by thinking about them? Maybe it's the same kind of thing. It's like using your mind as a magnifying-glass—concentrating all your energy on just one spot. The spot heats up, then whoof! it catches fire.'

The Mercedes was driving on full headlights, less than three car lengths behind, and Lloyd had to deflect his mirror so that he wouldn't be dazzled. ‘There's something else,' he told Kathleen, as they negotiated the long lefthand downhill curve toward the ocean. ‘I saw Celia in the house tonight.'

‘You did what?'

‘Believe me, Kathleen, I know it sounds crazy, but she was there. Or her ghost was there. Or some kind of apparition. She was standing in the bedroom and the bedroom was blazing and she wasn't even touched, wasn't even singed.'

‘Lloyd . . .' said Kathleen, gently. ‘You don't think maybe that Celia's death has upset you more than you realize?'

Lloyd shook his head. ‘It wasn't my imagination, Kathleen, I swear to God. And if I'm really going screwy, how come this steering-wheel caught fire? It's all part of the same damn thing. Celia's death, the bus burning, Mike's death.'

‘But I told you . . . Mike didn't belong to any religious groups.'

‘You mean that he didn't tell you that he did. But Celia didn't tell me, either. Celia, the love of my life, the girl who was going to share everything with me. She didn't even tell me that her best friend had cancer.'

‘Her best friend had cancer?'

‘That's right. Marianna, the one who was burned on the bus, along with Mike.'

They sped northward on the coast road. In the darkness, the Pacific foamed lonely and cold, and even the seagulls had found shelter for the night, the souls of the dead, the spirits of the lost.

‘You know something,' said Kathleen. ‘Mike went for a medical about three months ago, and when he got the results he was really quiet for a couple of weeks.'

‘Did he tell you what was wrong?'

‘Unh-hunh. He kept insisting that everything was fine. But I could tell that he was worried. In the end he said that he had problems at work, that was all. But he never did show me that medical.'

Lloyd quickly looked around. The Mercedes was still close behind, but it was keeping its distance. It seemed to be intent on following them, more than trying to overtake them. On the other hand, they were driving through Del Mar now, a well-lit, built-up stretch of the road, with rows of beach houses and bars and hotels and Chinese restaurants and bookstores, and if Otto tried anything too catastrophic, there would be scores of witnesses.

Kathleen said, ‘Look . . . there's a late-night drugstore. Let's get you something for your hands.'

Lloyd gave another quick glance behind. ‘Okay . . . they'll probably keep away from us here.'

He drew into the kerb beside Del Mar 24HR Drugs. It was a calculated risk, with Otto so close behind them, especially since Otto seemed to be capable of setting things on fire from such a long way off. If he could burn Lloyd's steering-wheel, there was no reason why he couldn't burn Lloyd, too. But Lloyd's hands were raging with pain, and both he and Kathleen needed a few moments to get their breath back.

They went into the drugstore just as the Mercedes drew up about sixty feet behind them, and remained at the kerb with its windows darkened and its motor running. Lloyd paused at the brightly lit drugstore door and gave the Mercedes a long, intent stare, but there was no way of telling what effect he was having on the Mercedes' occupants. The car was as blind-looking as Celia had been, if that burning figure in the bedroom door had truly been Celia.

He was beginning to realize that he no longer knew the difference between the living and the dead.

With a fatherly care that brought Lloyd closer to the brink of tears than the pain itself, the pharmacist at Del Mar 24HR Drugs covered his hands with antiseptic cream and then bandaged them up.

‘You're pretty lucky, these are only very superficial,' he said, taking off his heavy tortoiseshell eyeglasses, and massaging the deep indentations in the side of his nose. ‘Trouble is, it's always the superficial burns that give you the most pain. My mother always used to put on chicken fat. It healed the burns okay, but I used to have half the cats in the neighbourhood following me around for days. Take two Tylenol now, and another two before you go to bed tonight, and don't drive.'

They were about to go to the checkout desk when the drugstore door opened, and a thin elderly man in a wide hat and a grey business suit stepped in, followed by a tall girl with tight blonde braids and a floor-length black leather coat. The coat was unbuttoned, and underneath she was wearing what looked like a skintight black leather swimsuit. The two of them waited by the magazine rack, leafing through copies of Sunset and Barbecue Recipes until Lloyd and Kathleen began to make their way toward the door. Then the girl stepped forward to bar their way.

‘Mr Denman,' the girl said, in a strong German accent. ‘You have something that belongs to me.'

Lloyd hesitated, his heart beating fast.

‘I don't see how that can be,' he replied. ‘I don't even know you.'

The man slipped his magazine back into the rack, and stepped forward with a grin that looked like a pig's caul stretched across a wire coathanger. ‘Allow me to introduce myself. Otto Mander, my dear sir. And this is Helmwige von Koettlitz.'

Helmet, or Earwig, something like that. Helmwige.

‘Well, good to have met you,' said Lloyd. ‘But if this is some kind of touch, then you're out of luck.'

Otto gave a dry, restricted cough. ‘This is no touch, Mr Denman, as well you know. You have been looking for me as intently as I have been looking for you. Now, you have something that belongs to us, not to you, and I would appreciate your returning it without the necessity for any unpleasant confrontation.'

Lloyd said, ‘Is Celia in the car?'

‘I don't understand, Mr Denman. I was under the impression that your wife was dead.'

‘The hell you say. I saw her tonight.'

Kathleen said, ‘Lloyd . . . I think I want to go.'

‘All right,' Lloyd agreed. ‘If this gentleman will agree to answer some questions.'

‘Of course.' Otto nodded. His eyes roamed independently around the drugstore, as if he were constantly scanning the air, constantly searching for something. ‘I am not a secretive man, Mr Denman, and I have done nothing of which I need to feel ashamed. I will answer any question that you care to put to me, as fully and as openly as I can. First, however, I want the charm.'

Lloyd shook his head. ‘Questions first, charm later.'

‘I must insist that you give me the charm, Mr Denman, and that you give it me now.'

‘Even supposing I've got it, what's so darned important about it?'

Helmwige stepped forward and stood so close to Lloyd that her breast pressed against his arm and he could feel her breath on his cheek. ‘Mr Denman, that charm is of no earthly use to you; yet it is critical to us.'

‘You mean critical to Celia?'

‘Your fiancée, regrettably, is dead. You identified her body yourself.'

Kathleen, anxious, begged, ‘Please, Lloyd, let's just leave ‘

But Lloyd said, ‘I saw her tonight. You can't convince me that I didn't. She's alive, in some way. She's been following me.'

Otto pursed his lips. ‘An hallucination, my good sir. The living are living and the dead are very dead. There is no conceivable state of in-between.'

‘That's not what you teach at your study groups.'

Otto's eyes momentarily concentrated on Lloyd's face as if he could have quite happily set fire to his forehead. But his eyes said one thing and his mouth said another. ‘You are a gentleman, Mr Denman. A man of honour. You must understand that the charm does not belong to you. It is very important that we have it.'

‘Is Celia alive?' Lloyd asked him.

Otto didn't answer, but continued to stare at him with that same incendiary stare. Helmwige said, ‘You have the wrong ideas, Mr Denman. We are students and worshippers, not witchcraft workers.'

‘I saw her with my own eyes, Miss von . . .'

‘Koettlitz,' said Helmwige. ‘But of course this was impossible. Your fiancée, we are afraid, is quite gone.'

‘She's alive,' Lloyd repeated.

Otto gave that stretched-caul grin. ‘Perhaps you are then a fan of Goethe? Und so lang daß du nicht hast dieses: Stirb und werde! Bist du nur ein trübe Gast auf der dunkeln Erde.'

He kept on grinning, and said, ‘It means “So long as you fail to understand the notion that death transforms you, you will only be a miserable guest on this gloomy planet.'”

‘I believe that Celia is still alive,' Lloyd repeated. ‘I don't know how, I don't know why. Maybe I've totally flipped. But I believe that she's still alive, and I also believe that you know how, and why.'

‘Well! Well! We are all entitled to our fantasies and our aberrations!' Otto replied. His laugh could have desiccated a coconut. ‘But I insist on the charm.'

‘Or what?' Lloyd challenged him.

Kathleen said, ‘Lloyd, please let's go. I don't like any of this.'

‘Or what?' Otto demanded. ‘You want to know “or what?” Well, let me tell you this: if you refuse to give me the charm, if you absolutely refuse to give me the charm, then you must burn and burn until I can pick the charm from out of your ashes.'

Lloyd was shaking with pain and anger. He never would have counted himself as brave, but with his hands bandaged and his house burned down, with Celia dead or not dead, with Sylvia burned and Marianna burned and Kathleen's husband burned, he had passed that imaginary limit that his lawyer Dan Tabares called the GAS Line. After you've passed the GAS Line, whatever happens, you simply don't Give A Shit.

‘Get out of my way, old man,' he told Otto.

‘Hey! You don't speak to Mr Mander with such disrespect!' Helmwige interjected, jostling her shoulder forward.

Lloyd tried to be calm, but it was difficult. ‘Get out of my way, all right?' he insisted. ‘Because if you don't get out of my way, believe me, I'm not going to call the manager. I'm not going to call a cop. All I'm going to do is beat the living shit out of you, octogenarian or not, and then I'm going to do the same to Miss Cut-Price Leather Couch here.'

Otto lifted his chin in controlled fury. His neck rose out of his withered cream shirt-collar like a turtle. ‘Mr Denman, you are not a wise man, my dear sir. All of your difficulties would be solved by simply returning the charm, please. In any event, it is not your property. You have no claim to it. I am sure the police will understand that.'

‘Get out of my way,' Lloyd insisted.

There was a long moment in which none of them spoke: in which all of them were trying to outguess each other's reactions. Then, without warning, Lloyd shoved Helmwige back against the nail-varnish display, and there was a sudden brittle scattering of pink and red bottles. Then he jabbed his elbow deep into Otto's concave ribs. Otto gave a barking cough, and clutched himself tight.

Lloyd snatched Kathleen's hand and pushed open the drugstore door. They ran together across the pavement, colliding with a young skateboarder, tangling themselves with a couple in bermuda shorts and baseball caps, then climbed into Lloyd's BMW and skittered away from the curb with tyres howling and rubber ‘Ss' snaking all across the street.

Otto threw open the drugstore door, and immediately pressed both hands to his forehead. Helmwige said, ‘Otto! Vorsicht! Er hat den Talisman!' But Otto's fury was locked together jigsaw-tight, and nothing could have broken it, not then. A sharp arrow of fire chased across the blacktop after Lloyd's BMW, flaring against the car's rear bumper for an instant. But Lloyd was too quick, and the BMW had roared out of sight before the fire could take hold.

‘Scheiβ!' Otto cursed. He whirled around and walked stiffly back to his parked Mercedes, wrenching open the passenger door as if he wanted to tear it off its hinges. Helmwige walked around the car and opened the driver's door.

‘What now?' she asked him.

‘Go after them, of course!' Otto instructed her. ‘Come on, quick, quick! Why do you stand there, staring at me like an idiot? Follow them!'

‘They could have turned off anywhere,' Helmwige retorted.

Otto screeched at her. ‘Do what I tell you! Follow them!'

The Mercedes bucked and heaved away from the curb. From the back seat, a grey-faced figure bent forward and said, ‘If you catch him, you won't hurt him, will you?'

‘What, you think I'm verrückt?' Otto snarled back. ‘But where will you be, without your talisman? A Salamander, for ever! A living fire!'

Lloyd raced northward out of Del Mar, steering choppily and erratically with his gauze-bandaged fingertips. He skidded to a stop whenever they hit traffic signals, revved impatiently, watching behind him, then ripped ahead as soon as the lights turned green.

Kathleen said, ‘Lloyd! My God! Are they following us?'

Lloyd flicked his eyes to the rearview mirror. ‘I can't see them yet.'

‘Maybe they've given up.'

‘No,' said Lloyd. ‘They need that charm too badly.'

‘But they're terrible! They're so threatening! Can't we call the police?'

‘Sure we can call the police. But what do you think the police are going to do?'

‘I don't know. But they set fire to your house, they set fire to your car! Look at your hands! Surely the police can charge them with something?'

Lloyd shook his head. ‘Kathleen, I don't want to call the police. If I call the police, I'll never find out what's going on. They won't let me. Besides, what am I going to say to them? “My dead wife set fire to my house, then this cheesy old man set fire to my steering-wheel from fifty feet away”? You think they're going to believe me?'

‘But they threatened us, they're chasing us.'

Lloyd said, ‘Just tell me how we get to your house. They haven't caught up with us yet.'

‘Lloyd, I'm frightened!'

‘Me too. But calling the police isn't going to help. In fact, it'll probably make things worse.'

Kathleen was quiet for a moment. But then she said, ‘Do you really think that Celia is still alive?'

‘I'm beginning to believe that she is, yes.'

‘I don't understand this at all,' said Kathleen.

Lloyd checked his rearview mirror again. ‘I don't understand it, either. But Otto promised everybody who came to his group that they were going to live for ever. Somehow, it looks like he's managed it. With Celia, anyway. I saw her! She was different, but she was still Celia.'

‘People can't die and then come alive again.'

Lloyd shook his head. ‘I don't know. Maybe they can, in a different way. Burning seems to have something to do with it. Maybe you live for ever, if you burn.'

Kathleen said, tightly, distractedly. ‘You can take a right here.'

They turned away from the ocean and started to drive up into the hills. But as they reached the first high crest beyond the interstate, Lloyd became aware that a single pair of headlights was following them, not too close, but close enough not to lose them.

‘Look around,' he told Kathleen. ‘Do you think that's them?'

She shaded her eyes. ‘I can't be sure, but it looks like them.'

‘Hold on tight, then. This is where we shake them off for good.'

Lloyd pressed the gas-pedal down to the floor, and the BMW surged forward at more than 90mph. It took them only a few seconds to reach the next intersection, and Lloyd immediately braked hard and swung off to the right, killing his headlights as he did so. Then he swung left, completely off the road, and the car jolted and bounced as he negotiated his way down a dusty slope, through a clump of birds-of-paradise and prickly pear. The BMW's suspension banged unnervingly as they drove over a series of rocky ruts, and the muffler grounded again and again. But then Lloyd wrestled the car around behind a high screen of bushes and brought it to a halt.

‘There's no way they're going to find us now,' he told Kathleen. ‘Let's give them ten minutes or so to get tired of looking for us, then we'll carry on to your place.'

Only a few seconds afterwards, they saw headlights flash past them on the main highway. Then a truck went past, and a procession of much slower cars. Lloyd let out a tight, anxious breath.

‘I wonder what they want that charm for,' said Kathleen.

‘I don't know. Maybe it's part of their religious ritual. Otto has the same design on the wall of his house, but much larger.'

‘They're so weird, those people,' Kathleen shivered. ‘I can hardly believe that Mike was mixed up with them.'

They waited in silence for five minutes longer. Then Lloyd said, ‘I've been thinking about your husband's medical. Is there any way we could find out what the results were?'

‘Why?'

‘Just a guess. Marianna thought she might have had breast cancer, and if your husband had found out that he had something wrong with him—maybe that would have made them both a whole lot more receptive to the ideas of somebody like Otto. After all, he was promising everlasting life.'

‘I suppose I could call Doctor Kranz.'

Lloyd checked his watch. His hands were still burning dully, but the Tylenol was deadening the worst of the pain. ‘It's just a shot in the dark. But I've been trying to follow up every possible idea.'

‘You don't think . . .' Kathleen began.