One Door Away From Heaven (65 page)

TWO OF PRESTON’S three university degrees were in philosophy; consequently, he had taken numerous logic courses. He remembered one class that, in part, had dealt with the logic of mazes. When these three-dimensional puzzles were designed by educated mathematicians or logicians, who drew upon all their learned cunning to deceive, the result was usually a labyrinth that few could find their way through in a timely manner, and from which a certain percentage of frustrated challengers had to be rescued by guides. On the other hand, when the maze was designed by anyone other than a mathematician or a logician—by ordinary folk, that is—these more mundane mazemakers followed a startlingly predictable pattern, because the design flowed from instinct rather than from intelligent planning; evidently, embedded in every human psyche was an affinity for a basic pattern that rarely failed to be asserted in the designing of a maze. Perhaps this was the pattern of the network of caves and tunnels in which the first extended family of mankind had dwelled; perhaps the map of that earliest of all human homes had been imprinted in our genes, and represented comfort and security when we recreated it. The mystery intrigued psychologists as well as philosophers, though Preston had never spent much time brooding on the subject.

The Toad of Teelroy Farm might not have been ordinary by the standard definition of the word, but when his thought processes were compared to those of a Harvard-educated mathematician, he must be judged ordinary beyond argument. Having followed the Toad through this labyrinth once, without giving a thought to whether it conformed to the classic design, Preston suspected in retrospect that it did.

Following the scheme as he remembered it from that long-ago class, he repeatedly set fire to the stacks behind him, essentially barring his retreat. In this fashion, as the first thin gray smoke settled into the tunnels of the warren, with a heavier black soot soon to press after it, and as waves of heat began to wring noxious sweat from him, he arrived at the dead end in which the Hand and the Slut Queen had trapped themselves.

He would not have turned into that passageway, but he did hurry
past
it, catching sight of them peripherally. When he reversed course and blocked their retreat, the woman and the girl cowered together in their blind alley, coughing, squinting at him through the descending veil of smoke, clearly fearful of what he would do next.

What he did next was step into the passage, forcing them to retreat further to the end of it. Then from the midpoint, he backed out, setting fire to the walls at several places on both sides.

This seemed like old times. Bugs in a jar.

WHEN FIRE SUDDENLY APPEARS and grows with explosive speed, Polly wants to plunge at once deeper into the maze, perhaps having bought her own image too completely, seeing herself as a superhero without cape.

Curtis restrains her.

“The girl’s in there,” she reminds him, as if he’s such a Gump that he’s forgotten why they are here. “And Cass, Noah—they might have gone too far in from the other end to reverse out.”

“You head back the way we came before the smoke gets too thick to see the signs we left.” At every turn, he had marked the walls with Polly’s lipstick:
STRAWBERRY FROST
said the label on the tube. “I’ll find the others.”

“You,”
Polly says, disbelieving, because though she knows that he is an ET, she also knows that he’s a boy, and in spite of all he’s told her, she can think of a boy as having but one basic form, and a vulnerable form at that. “Sweetie, you’re not going in there alone. Hey, you’re not going in there
at all.
”

“I can’t imagine a Spelkenfelter turning spooky on me,” Curtis assures her, “but promise you won’t.”

“What’re you talking about,” she demands, shifting her attention between him and the fire ahead.

He shows her what he’s talking about by ceasing to be Curtis Hammond, reverting not to any of the many forms in his repertoire, but to the shape in which he was born, an incarnation that allows him to move faster than he can move as Curtis, and with senses more acute. This is quite a performance, even if he does say so himself.

He would not be surprised if Polly fainted. But after all, she is a Spelkenfelter, and though she sways, she does not fall. Indeed, flashing back on part of the story that he told them after their Chinese dinner in Twin Falls, she says,
“Holy howlin’saints alive!”

MICKY, AT THE BACK of the dead end, didn’t want to confront Preston Maddoc in part because of his greater strength and in part because of his lighter. He would probably use it to set their clothes afire.

Flames seethed over the walls along the forward half of the passageway. In a minute, the hungrily feeding fires would join from side to side, creating an impassable wall of death.

The haze of smoke thickened second by second. She and Leilani were coughing. Already, a rawness burned in her throat. Soon they wouldn’t be able to breathe unless they dropped to the floor. The moment they were forced to the floor in search of clean air, however, they were as good as dead.

She turned to the back wall of this blind alley and tried to claw newspapers and magazines out of the construction, hoping to burrow through to another passageway where the flames had not yet reached. The bundled publications were so tightly packed that she couldn’t pry them loose.

Okay. All right. Topple the damn thing. All this crap was just piled here, wasn’t it? No one had cemented it in place. No one had reinforced it with rebar.

When she pushed against the palisade, however, it felt every bit as solid as anything the pharaohs had built. At the end caps of some passages, she’d been able to see that the maze walls were always at least two and sometimes three stacks thick, with sheets of Masonite and plyboard between layers. Perhaps more support structure existed than met the eye. She put everything she had into a shove, without effect, and then tried to rock the wall, attacked it with rhythm, pressing and relenting and pressing again, hoping to start the trash swaying, but it wouldn’t sway.

Turning to face Maddoc beyond the flames, she pulled Leilani to her side and gathered her courage. She saw no option now but to rush the entrance, get out before the flames closed the way, and try to take Maddoc down before he could harm them. Bowl him over, try to kick his head if he fell—because if she fell, he would be trying to kick hers.

PAPER WHISPERED when it burned in great volume, crackled and popped and hissed, as well, but
whispered,
as if divulging secrets printed on it, naming names, citing sources.

Preston realized that he had lingered too long in the smoke and heat when the burning paper began to whisper the names of those whom he had killed.

The foul air remained breathable. Yet even before the smoke grew dense enough to clog the lungs, the air assailed with lethal toxins spewed out by burning materials, gases that were invisible compared to the roiling soot, but no less dangerous. The manufacture of paper required numerous chemicals, which fire liberated and transformed into even more effective poisons.

If he were hearing the names of those he killed, he had inhaled enough toxins to half unscrew his mind. He’d better get out of here before he became disoriented.

He hesitated, however, because the sight of the Hand and the Slut Queen, trapped in the blind alley, thrilled him. He hoped they would run the fiery gauntlet before their sole escape route closed forever. Maybe they’d misjudge the moment, be caught by the shifting flames, and go up like torches—a spectacle he was loath to miss.

The vodka-sucking whore pulled the girl against her. She seemed to be trying to work out a way to use her body to shield the kid when they made their run for it, as if a few burn scars could possibly render the Hand any uglier than she already looked.

Abruptly, a section of the stacks on one side of their passage collapsed onto the floor between them and Preston, releasing clouds of sparks like fireflies and great black moths of paper ash. They could no longer exit without wading through knee-deep, furiously blazing debris.

Fate sealed, the woman and the girl retreated to the back of the cul-de-sac.

They would live another three minutes, five at most, before smoke flooded through here in smothering tides, before they became a pair of animate candles. Preston dared not wait for the final act, lest he be trapped in the house with them.

A heavy weight of disappointment lay on his heart. Their final throes, witnessed firsthand, would have given him much pleasure and thus would have added to the total amount of happiness in the world. Now their deaths would be nearly as useless as their lives.

He consoled himself with the thought that the Black Hole’s batch of lumpy cupcakes was baking in her oven.

As Preston turned away, leaving these two wads of living tallow to the mercy of the fire, the woman began to cry out for help at the top of her voice. Excited by the note of desperation in her pleas, he lingered a moment longer.

An answering shout, arising elsewhere in the maze, startled him. He had forgotten the three loud blows, likely the sounds of someone breaking down a door—further proof that the polluted air was already affecting his thinking, clouding his judgment.

Heartened, the woman cried out again, again, making a beacon of her voice.

Another answering shout rang above the rapidly rising chant of a million tongues of flame, and to Preston’s left, about ten feet away, a big man in a colorful Hawaiian shirt appeared out of the mouth of another passageway. He carried a revolver.

With a shocking disregard for ethical conduct, the sonofabitch shot Preston. They were strangers; neither of them had the informed perspective necessary to judge the other’s usefulness to the world; yet the ruthless bastard squeezed the trigger without hesitation.

When he saw the stranger raising the gun, Preston realized that he should fling himself backward and to the right, but he was more a man of thought than action, and before he could move, the impact of the slug punished his hesitation. He staggered, fell, rolled onto his stomach, and scrambled away from the shooter, away from the cul-de-sac in which the woman and the girl awaited burning, around a corner, into another run of the maze, shocked by the intensity of his pain, which was worse than anything he’d experienced before or had expected to be forced to endure.