The Auctioneer (31 page)

Once he was inside, the press of people dissolved, and John was free. He paused. Everything gleamed. The deep color of oriental rugs over polished oak floors had replaced Amelia’s linoleum, and a delicate crystal chandelier hung where her pink glass fixture had been. Everywhere there was light and the glow of well-oiled wood.

John started up the broad staircase three stairs at a time, his feet silenced by the deep blue carpet, his fingers touching the dark banister at the curves.

Upstairs, he ran until he was stopped by a door at the end of the hall. He pulled it open and found himself in a bedroom. A row of lights near the floor made the white walls glow. John turned slowly, examining the bed with its green velvet spread, the oak chiffonier, the small painted table and chair. Quietly, he moved to the closet door and jerked it open. Inside, a row of dark suits hung on hangers. John jabbed at them with a stiff arm, and they began to swing back and forth without a sound. Despite the fact that the three pairs of shoes on the floor were clearly empty, John kept staring, expecting Perly to materialize before him.

From the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of something that made him whirl around—a dark green figure gliding smoothly by the door. He ran for the hall and shouted. But the man who turned, his face white with alarm, was Walter French.

John moved to the next door down the hall and yanked. Behind it was a bathroom, everything blinding white—the tub on claw feet, the flat walls, the four fluorescent lights. John turned to leave and bumped into a running figure. It was Tom Pulver. The two drew away and looked at each other, almost without recognition, then backed off and, carefully skirting one another, continued in opposite directions.

John started running again, gathering momentum, rushing from door to door down the hallway. Finally, in a bedroom, he paused. His eyes were stinging and he was gulping for air.

Dan Rouse was tearing the curtains off the windows, grunting with satisfaction as the silky stuff ripped. A traverse rod fell with a clatter.

John kicked at the fallen curtains and watched. It was only after Rouse had moved to the next room that he saw the dressing table—its walnut polished to a dark richness, its elegance more in keeping here than in the plain bedroom at home. John turned away and leaned in the doorway, pressing his hands against the doorposts in an effort to hang on to his anger.

Cogswell lurched out of the bedroom opposite. “He’s gone!” John cried. “Mickey, is he gone?”

Mickey’s face was red with temper. “I’ll find him,” he promised.

“God damn...” He stopped, and he and John found themselves looking at one another, their faces gone slack with bewilderment.

Without sound or warning, all the lights went out. A stunned stillness fell over the house, as if life had been snuffed out with the light.

A woman’s voice rang out, “He’s here!”

There was a soft impact near John and a man shouted in surprise.

Slowly, John backed away from the darkness, returning to the bedroom he had just left, where the pale oblongs of two windows revealed at least the contours of the room. He backed up against one of the windows and waited.

As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he thought he detected a dark figure standing perfectly still against the wall opposite him. He opened his mouth to make some casual remark, and remembered that he had just been through that room and left it empty. His mouth went dry.

When the figure didn’t move, John began to slide slowly along the wall toward the door. Almost imperceptibly, the figure also inched closer to the door. John stopped. The figure stopped. John started again. And again the figure moved.

John made a furious dive for the figure. He was caught in a muscular embrace, and fell to the floor with his face pressed to the other man’s neck. The two rolled over, kicking and grunting. Then the other man took John firmly by the shoulders. “Let go of me,” he commanded in a detached and unfamiliar voice. “What on earth are you thinking of?”

Reflexively, John loosened his grip.

Then, without knowing how he got there, he found himself lying on his back making his way through layers of sleep, trying to reach and stop the hard pain at the back of his neck. Somehow, he got his feet beneath him and stumbled toward the black shape of the door to the hall. But the man was lost. John tripped over the threshold and fell against the banister. “I had him. I had him,” he moaned.

“You had him!” repeated a man. “You mean he’s here?”

John grasped the banister for support and, in an effort to collect himself, peered down over it into the murky pit of the downstairs front hall. “I don’t know,” he said. “How the hell should I know?”

The other man moved off, his footsteps sounding on the uncarpeted stairs to the third floor.

In the hall below, the glimmer of pocket flashlights began to move cautiously back and forth. Someone cried, “Candles!” and soon people were moving up the stairs, each one cupping a fragile flame.

John started slowly down the stairs. At the bottom, he found himself looking into the living room. In the shimmering orange light from newspapers burning in the fireplace, Frank Lovelace was stamping methodically on a spindly pine rocker and feeding the broken pieces to the fire. “There’s a hundred people in this house,” he said in his slow heavy voice.

“Perly’s too sly to hide in his own hole,” said Dan Rouse.

“Then what are we doin’ here?” cried Arthur Stinson. “Damn!” He swept an arm across the mantel, sending a clutter of candlesticks and knickknacks crashing to the tile hearth.

Lovelace threw the solid seat of the rocker on top of the fire, damping it momentarily. “Good question,” he said soberly.

John turned away. Seven candles lit the dining room on the other side of the hall. Fanny Linden and Janice Pulver were fishing in the drawers of the buffet. John moved toward them and saw that they were filling a shopping bag with silverware.

“Fanny...” he said.

She turned her moon face to him. “It’s stolen goods, ain’t it?” she said flatly.

Janice Pulver examined a fork in her hand and did not look at him. “He left the lights on and the door open, didn’t he? You go right ahead and hunt for his big self, if you think he’s that much of a fool.” She threw the fork into the bag. “Myself, I’ll settle.”

Them too, said Fanny, jerking her head in the direction of the front hall.

Walter French had an easy chair jammed in the front door, and people were piling up in the hall behind him, complaining. Jane Collins was at the top of the staircase, feeling gingerly for the steps with her feet, unable to see over her armload of ornate mirrors and paintings. Agnes Cogswell and Jerry were carrying a harvest table, and old Adeline Fayette was waiting by the door with her usual frail dignity, weighed down by a pair of silver candelabra.

Suddenly Jimmy Carroll shoved his way down the stairs. “What are you doin’?” he shouted. He grabbed Jerry by the collar. “Where’s Perly?” he asked the boy. “Don’t you care?”

The people paused and looked up at him in the uncertain light. Sam Parry was leaning on the wall at the foot of the staircase.

“He’s here,” insisted Carroll.

“Says who?” said Parry.

“He’s got to be,” Carroll said, but he let go of Jerry. He looked around at the dubious faces and shook his head. Near the hall fireplace he spotted a metal wastebasket filled with mail and old magazines. He took a lighted candle from the mantelpiece, and dropped it in. With a sound like a gust of wind, the trash flared up. Hovering behind it, his features insubstantial and mobile in the dancing flames, Carroll gave the wastebasket a kick that sent it skidding across the polished floor into the center of the crowd. “Smoke him out!” he shouted as people backed away. “We’ll smoke him out!”

John stood watching the flaming wastebasket. In minutes the hall was filled with smoke. There were cries of “Fire!” and people began running for the door, hollering at the people ahead of them to move. They coughed and jockeyed for position, but they did not abandon the chairs and tables or the armloads of appliances, china, linen, and clothes that were making the exodus so slow.

John looked up at the crystal lobes of the chandelier, their bright faces twinkling with gold light caught from the flaming wastebasket. Every night the auctioneer had walked under its great luminous symmetry into this house. John swung up his arm, grabbed a handful of crystal pieces and yanked them free. As he pushed into the crowd waiting to get out the door, the chandelier jittered and rang out in sour dissonance.

In the living room, Arthur Stinson was pouring from a five-gallon can of kerosene, wetting down the sofa and cushions. Rouse and Lovelace were looking on, frowning, their arms hanging loosely at their sides.

“Smoke him out!” shouted a voice and someone elbowed John aside and burst into the living room. Stinson straightened up with his can of kerosene. “See how you like it, Perly!” shouted the newcomer, and John recognized Sonny Pike by his sling.

Outside, the townspeople who had not gone into the house— mostly mothers and their children—were strung out in a long thin line across the road from the house. Near one end, Mim knelt on the ground with Hildie asleep in her arms. Ma leaned on her canes nearby.

“Johnny,” Mim called in relief as he approached. Then, as he came close, she shifted Hildie and asked, “John, what on earth...?”

John turned and faced the house. He dug his hands into his pockets to keep himself from shivering, and his right fist closed over the icy crystal teardrops. “He ain’t in there,” he said. “There’s just a lot of junk.”

You don’t think so? Mim said. She watched the people pour from the house with their booty and move across the road to join the gathering crowd.

Tom Pulver and Arthur Stinson ran out the back door, each carrying a red can of gasoline.

In the dining-room windows, there was a faint flutter of light. It died and then sprang up again, this time with the orange taint of fire. Then a flash of flame lit up one of the living-room windows and moved in spurts around the room as the draperies caught fire.

Bob Gore ran across the green toward the firehouse. It was lit up and wide open to the night. Inside, sitting idle, were Perly’s ambulance and the two big firetrucks bought with the proceeds of a dozen annual auctions. “Come on!” shouted Gore.

No one followed him.

He stopped and looked back at the line of familiar people. There was only the wavering firelight from inside the house to mark their features, but their bunched forms were clear and utterly still. Gore stared at them for a few minutes. Then he folded his arms and moved slowly back toward them.

The living room was filled now with yellow flames, and suddenly the glass curtains in the dining room burst in a shower of sparks. In two of the upstairs windows, a tremulous gold light became visible through the dark panes.

“What if he
is
still there?” Mim whispered. She turned Hildie’s sleeping head to her shoulder and bit hard on her knuckle.

“He ain’t,” John said, choking with anger. “It’s all a waste.”

“But if he is?” insisted Mim.

The barn was on fire now, too, but people were still running in to carry out water pumps and separators and power mowers. As flames became visible in more and more windows, the stillness was broken only by the footsteps of the people and the muted panting of the fire itself. The townspeople gathered closer and closer together, leaning into each other to stare in trancelike silence as the fire rolled through the house.

“There he is!” shouted Sally Rouse. And then, her full voice rising, “He’s in there!”

But still, during a long silence, the glimmer of the fire within seemed the only life behind the sooty windows.

Then, one by one, the people saw it. In the central attic dormer, still unlit by fire, a ghostlike whiteness floated in and out of focus. And beneath it, the shadow of torso and arms moved against the black glass of the window. Pale fingers began to move against the mullions, touching the panes, trying, with ritual slowness, to open the window. It would not give. The hands struggled—distant, ineffectual, and dreamlike.

Then, with a jolt of convincing energy, the figure straightened up and smashed a foot through the bottom of the window. Glass sprayed down on the roof of the porch below and everyone had a clear vision of the scarred yellow sole of a work boot.

Smoke billowed from the break and in moments the golden glint of fire appeared in the attic room. The dark shadow sagged against the top of the window. Behind him, something caught fire. In the brief blaze, the townspeople recognized the green work clothes and the length and strength of the man they were looking for. The whiteness was a towel wrapped around his head.

“Get a ladder,” yelled Sam Parry. “Somebody get a ladder.” He himself ran a few steps toward the firehouse, then stopped and looked around for help. Bob Gore ran past him and veered around the house toward the barn. None of the other townspeople moved.

A surf of smoke washed up and down over the roof around the dormer. Here and there, a ball of flame slipped down the steep pitch and disappeared. Then, with a shudder, a pillar of fire burst free and leaped against the sky.

Now steady flames inside lit the blank white towel and enlarged and blackened the silhouette in the window. Slowly, both arms moved up, palms outward. The hands began to beat against the upper sash, shaking the panes and finally breaking one. The swaddled head leaned into the hole for air, but the smoke gathered to it also, and spun in gagging gray spirals around the head.

Only then did anybody notice Bob Gore climbing a ladder to the flat porch roof directly beneath the window. Ian James followed him up and the two pulled the wooden ladder up onto the roof and set it against the sill of the high dormer window.

Molly Tucker cried out, clearly now, “Let him burn!”

The figure groped at the window. Bob Gore started up the ladder, a hatchet in his belt. As he climbed, the townspeople disintegrated into commotion.

“Stop!” cried Jimmy Carroll. “Let him burn!”

Gore paused and turned to look down at the crowd.