Hymn (21 page)

Detective Gable appeared on the other side of the house, fighting aside the last of the weeds. He stopped and stared at the deputy in open-mouthed horror.

‘Your coat, Gable, for Christ's sake!' yelled Sergeant Houk. ‘Use your coat!'

He looked desperately around. How the hell do you extinguish a burning man? There was a swimming-pool in the yard, but it had obviously long been empty, and was peeling and cracked and silted up with dry eucalyptus leaves. The rest of the yard was mainly concrete, with a few sorry yuccas, a tangled flower border, and a glass vegetable frame hidden amongst the overgrown crabgrass.

The garden hose!

The deputy was still flapping, still dancing. Detective Gable had twisted himself out of his coat and was waving it at him like a matador, trying to get near enough the blazing deputy to smother the flames. Sergeant Houk ran back to the garden hose. The tap was stiff, but he hit it twice with the butt of his revolver, and it loosened.

Hurry, Christ, hurry, the man's on fire!

But all the time he knew that he was far too late, that it was no goddamned use, and that it would probably be kinder to let the deputy die. But he had been trained not to respond to thoughts like that. It was his duty to do what he could to save the deputy's life, human sympathy notwithstanding.

The hose was faded and inflexible from years of lying in the sun, and hideously knotted, but he managed to yank enough of it across the yard to reach the burning man. Water clattered on the dry ground all around him.

The deputy had fallen on to his side now, amongst the grass and the broken glass, and was shuddering and quaking in agony. Detective Gable was on his knees beside him, trying desperately to cover him up with his coat, but every time he moved the coat to suppress the flames that danced around his face, more flames would spring up around his thighs and his groin.

‘Oh God!' whimpered Detective Gable, his own hands reddened and blistered. ‘He's like one of those fucking candles you can't blow out!'

‘Roger!' Sergeant Houk shouted. ‘Roger, you hear me? It's okay! Get ready for a shock! This water's real cold!'

He couldn't tell whether the deputy had understood him or not. The boy's face was blackened like burned beef, his eyes had been poached into blindness, his hair was nothing but crisp black tufts. But somehow he was still alive, still hurting, still burning, still trembling in the very last moments of his life.

Sergeant Houk swung the hose around and drenched him.

Detective Gable heaved himself up, offering his own burned hands to the hosepipe jet, and saying, ‘Here, Sergeant, for Christ's sake, just one splash.'

The second he said that, however, Sergeant Houk saw with horror that the hose hadn't extinguished the deputy at all. In fact, the flames were roaring up even more furiously, as if the water itself were flammable. He was about to say, ‘Gable, no . . .!' when the arc of water pouring out of the hose-nozzle burst into flame, and Detective Gable was drenched in fire.

Detective Gable screeched, and tried to wave away the fire with his arms, but his arms instantly caught alight. The hose almost immediately became too hot for Sergeant Houk to hold, and he dropped it. It snaked backwards and forwards under the wild pressure of the fluid, spraying Detective Gable again and again with liquid fire.

He fell to the ground, rolled over, thrashed, but he was burning even more fiercely than the deputy.

‘Daddy!' he screamed. ‘Daddy! For Christ's sake, Daddy!'

This time Sergeant Houk knew that the time for the rulebook had passed. He dodged the cascade of fire from the hose, and stepped up to Detective Gable quick and intent, his muscles tense as springs. He was holding his service revolver in both hands.

‘God forgive me,' he said, and shot Detective Gable once in the head. Blood and brains sprayed outwards, and sizzled sharply in the heat.

Then Sergeant Houk turned around, his gun raised, and saw Otto standing at the kitchen window, his face white white white, his dry hands raised over his eyes as if he were staring at something very far in the distance. Helmwige stood a little further back in the shadows, but she wasn't even looking at the burning men in her back yard, she was admiring her fingernails.

Sergeant Houk pointed his gun stiffly at Otto and screamed, ‘Freeze! Freeze, you bastard! You're under arrest!'

But instantly he felt a wave of heat roar over him, as if a huge furnace door had been opened right in front of his face. His hands blistered, his sleeve caught fire, his gun fired on its own, smashing the kitchen window. Instinctively, he threw the gun away, a split-second before the rest of its rounds exploded in the chamber, blasting fragments of shrapnel in all directions. One of them caught Sergeant Houk deep in his left-calf muscle.

You bastard! he thought. You won't burn me!

With his clothes alight, with his hair smoking, he ran back around the house, leaping over the hose, thundering along the verandah, vaulting the porch, and hurdling the long guano-spattered hood of Otto's Mercedes tourer.

He didn't notice the pain at first, but when his hair suddenly flared up, he felt a searing sensation on the top of his head that made him yell out. He had to get away! He had to get away!

His trousers were blazing, his shirt was almost completely burned off his back. Nylon was fused into skin, man-made fibre into man, until it was impossible even to separate them again. His shoes fell away from his feet in burning chunks, then the soles of his feet were torn off, with two sharp ripping noises, as his skin was fused to the blacktop.

He heard his breath coming in huge, Channel-swimmer's roars. He saw the road ahead of him, juggled in his vision like the view through a hand-held camera. He saw the eucalyptus trees swaying, although he couldn't hear them rustle. He saw his Buick, parked and ready for him, ready to take him away. He smelled fire, and smoke, and some indescribable odour that was himself, burning.

‘You . . . Kraut . . . bastard . . . you . . . won't . . .'

He reached his car, tugged open the driver's door with fingers that seemed to be dripping flesh.

Won't . . . burn . . . me . . . you . . .

His coat was gone, his shirt was gone. His torso was a mass of reddened flesh, on which small well-fed flames still licked. But he still had his car keys, embedded in his skin. With fingers that were tipped with nothing but bone, he prized the keys out of the blistered layers, pulling even more skin after them. He screamed in despair more than in pain.

‘You won't burn me you bastard!' he shouted. He rammed the key into the Buick's ignition and the end of the key penetrated the palm of his hand, wedging itself right between his finger-bones. Still shouting, still blazing, he turned his hand so that the engine started, yanked the parking-brake, and skidded away from the side of the road in a blizzard of eucalyptus leaves and a cloud of dust. A Mexican gardener was raking the lawns of the house on the opposite side of Paseo Delicias. He turned around in horror as Sergeant Houk's Buick slewed past him, tyres shrieking like a chorus from Tannhäuser, with a man on fire in the driver's seat. The gardener dropped to his knees and crossed himself.

Swerving the Buick around the next bend, Sergeant Houk knew that it was over. His legs were still alight, his scalp was tightening and shrivelling like a bathing-cap. The pain was already so intense that he didn't know whether he could still feel it or not. It was like being eaten, rather than burned.

Ahead of him, up the winding hill of Paseo Delicias, he could see a huge blue-and-white truck toiling. Genuine GM Auto Parts.

Thank you, God, he thought to himself. So you have forgiven me, after all.

Behind the next embankment, he saw the top of the truck approaching. He pressed his foot as far down on the accelerator as he could, and wildly steered the Buick on to the lefthand side of the road.

He saw lemon trees passing, like trees in a dream. He saw rocks, bushes, fragments of sky, everything floating past him so gently and so normally, with the rocking motion of a carousel. He remembered the carousel at Disneyland, when he was a kid, floating up and down, up and down. But his tyres were still singing their merciless chorus, somewhere on the edge of his consciousness. Fearful and loud thy rage is! Like a storm-wind you come!

He opened his mouth to say something, but then his entire windshield was filled with the massive chrome radiator grille of the oncoming truck.

The Buick hit the truck at a closing speed of over seventy miles an hour. Its front end dived under the truck's front bumper, and the entire car vanished underneath the truck as if it had never existed. The truck driver didn't have the time to blow his horn.

Only a second afterward, however, the Buick's gas tank detonated with a sound like a huge and distant door slamming. The truck's body was blown apart in the middle, and a lethal hail of automobile parts was sprayed in all directions. A Caprice crankshaft was driven right through the back of the driver's cab, right through the back of his seat, and with a terrible and decisive crunch, right through his lower back. A spare Oldsmobile hub-cap sang through the air with the alien certainty of a flying-saucer, and sliced the head from the Mexican gardener who had witnessed Sergeant Houk's blazing ride down the hill. He stood headless with his sickle in his hand, as if, headless, he was unable to decide whether to fall over or not.

Then he dropped to the ground and began to irrigate the marigolds with a thick and glutinous stream of blood.

It was almost ten seconds before the last echoes of the explosion came back from the distant mountain, and the last fragments of shattered automobile parts came ringing down from the sky.

Otto turned away from the living-room window, and gave Helmwige a thin smile. ‘It makes me impatient, you know, to show them who will be the masters next.'

‘You should take more care,' Helmwige replied, in a voice which was meant to show him that she was deeply unimpressed.

‘You heard what he said. Nobody knew that he was coming here, neither his superiors nor his colleagues. He came because our friend Herr Denman told him where to come. Herr Denman has an unpleasantly inquisitive turn of mind, you know, and the fact that we are keeping Celia here is obviously not enough to keep him from hounding us.'

‘So what are you going to do?' asked Helmwige, flatly. ‘You're not thinking of burning him, are you?'

‘Of course not. Our future lies with men like Herr Denman. Good stock! Good fathers! Heaven knows that we are going to need all that we can get. But . . . he is not behaving himself. I am going to be obliged to bring him here, and keep him out of harm's way until der Umgestaltung, the Transformation. Then he can burn. But not before. You remember what der Führer always said to me. “Otto,” he always said to me, “the search for purity will take the lives of many martyrs. But we must seek purity first and last. Die Reinheit zuerst, die Reinheit letzt. Die Reinheit is alles.”'

Helmwige drew her silk bathrobe even more tightly around her, and stalked across to the far side of the living-room. The young naked man was still chained there, sitting cross-legged now, his face etched extremely sharp and pale against the southern California sunlight, every hard well-exercised muscle clearly defined. Helmwige stood over him for a long time, apparently admiring him, yet obviously despising him at the same time.

‘The master race,' she said, shaking her head. ‘What a pathetic specimen.'

Otto came and stood beside her, his hands in the pockets of his shorts. ‘I suppose I have to agree. But then it was difficult for so many of those doctors to make such a leap of the mind. Mengele, what an idiot! And even the best of them, the very finest, Bloss and Hauer and von Harn, they could never understand that the master race was not just a question of genealogy, not just a question of breeding, but a question of the elements, too. The old, unquestioned power of the earth. That is what makes a master race.'

Helmwige ran her red-clawed hand through the young man's hair. ‘Still, you know, I like him.'

‘You like him!' Otto sneered. ‘He is nothing more than a failed experiment! A racial dead-end! My God, if der Führer hadn't made me promise, I would have destroyed him years ago, yes, and his father before him, and his father before him.'

‘But you did promise,' Helmwige reminded him.

Otto walked across to the curved 1930s' cocktail cabinet, found a bottle of schnapps, and poured himself a drink. ‘Yes, I did promise,' he agreed. ‘And look at the result. A creature with perfect physique. Perfect body, perfect eyesight, perfect hearing. Pity his IQ is slightly below room-temperature.'

Helmwige continued to stroke the young man's blond, flat-cropped hair. He didn't lift his eyes to her once, didn't smile, didn't scowl, didn't acknowledge her at all, except when she began to run the very edges of her fingernails down the back of his neck, through those fine tiny almost-invisible hairs. Then his penis gradually swelled and uncurled, not fully erect, but visibly enlarged and thickened.

‘Helmwige,' Otto admonished her, with a flatness in his voice which betrayed the fact that he was neither jealous nor interested. To him, the young man had less value than a laboratory chimpanzee. He was simply a nuisance, who had to be fed and exercised and accommodated. If Helmwige hadn't adored him so much, he probably would have set him alight years ago. That big fat prick would have burned like an altar candle.

Helmwige ran her fingernails all the way down the young man's knobbly spine. Then she traced the clearly developed lines of his deltoids, his teres minor and teres major, his latissimus dorsi. His chains clanked slightly as she stroked his shoulders, and his penis swelled even larger, until the foreskin gradually rolled back of its own accord, revealing the bare plum-like glans, with its high distinctive ridge, and its deeply cleft opening.

‘You should have given him a name,' said Helmwige. ‘How can anybody exist without a name?'