Incinerator

21

A second after the toy railroad landed me outside again, I was out of the car and running through dusk as though hell had opened behind me, toward the pair of doors I’d gone through the first time. Then I stopped and reversed field.

The doors to the left opened out, as quietly as the ones to the right had opened in. All I had to do was slip my fingers into the crack between the doors and tug. Maybe, just maybe, Wilton Hoxley’s death’s-head was still facing in the other direction.

Maybe he was expecting me to come back the way I’d come before. Maybe I could feel my way through the dark until I came up behind him, aimed, and pulled the trigger four or five times. Maybe the green cheese the moon is supposed to be made of can be bought at discount at Trader Joe’s. Maybe, one of these days, it’ll finally rain up.

The ragged sound like ripping paper that followed me into the blackness inside the castle was my own breathing. I put the automatic against my cheek and felt its reassuring cool as I willed my lungs to slow down. Water, my own water, was pouring down my sides, saturating the towels.

It was as dark as it had been before the lights went on. Once again my feet told me that I was going uphill. It made sense to whatever part of my brain was still trying to make sense: The train went up through the mild, programmed horrors of the Haunted Castle, and then it went down again. Simple amusement-park physics. Let the suckers get comfortable going uphill, scare the bejeezus out of them at the top, and then throw the whole phone book at them as the train accelerates out of control-downhill. Screw with their sense of gravity, the first thing a kid learns, so primal that we take it for granted.

At this point, there wasn’t anything I was willing to take for granted.

Up and down, I thought. Very simple, dark or no dark. The rails went up, peaked, and went down again. Pseudo-ectoplasmic interruptions and living homicidal maniacs notwithstanding, I had a simple mental map.

I slid one dripping ankle uphill to find a tie. It had finally occurred to me that all sets of rails have ties between them. If I could measure the distance between the ties and hit them with every step, I could walk without the musical accompaniment of my sneakers squealing against the steel. All I had to do was walk along the right-hand edge of the ties, taking steps of exactly the right length and keeping my right hand extended, brushing the wall to follow the curves. Simple.

Except for the gun. If I wanted to follow the right-hand wall without making noise, I’d have to transfer the gun to my left hand. Skin is quieter than metal. I’d been born left-handed and trained to write with my right, and the training had stuck. I transferred the gun to my more or less useless left hand. It had fit into the right with a comfortingly familiar weight; in the left, it felt fat and cold and greasy.

Still, it was a gun. Did Hoxley have a gun? No way, I comforted myself, as I took the first steps. A gun would have been an affront against Ahura Mazda. The Fire was All. Fire was Beginning and End, and a gun would have been technological irritation.

The track and the walls began to bend to the right. I knew someone must have gone to call the police, but no sound from outside signaled the arrival of a SWAT team to quell the castle’s resident lunatic. Listening as I climbed, I caught the sawtoothed sound of my breath again, and chewed down on my lip to silence it.

Then my right hand hit nothing. My fingers extended themselves without my permission, five little soldiers hopelessly assigned to the last patrol, and felt nothing whatsoever, just cool air against a perspiring palm. Another corridor, inhabited by mechanical spooks programmed to go woo-woo at the right moment to give the suckers their last fifty-cent thrill on the way out.

Stepping over the right-hand track, I backed into the corridor and stretched out my arms to feel its width. By extending my arms fully, I could just touch both of the corridor’s walls. I couldn’t hear anything at all, if I discounted muffled music that had to be coming from outside. Somewhere ahead of me, the Grim Reaper was waiting, counting down toward ignition with his squirt bottle and his kitchen matches. Some part of him was probably shrilling gleefully, but he was keeping still. He’d had practice. He’d made it through childhood and adolescence by keeping still, by not letting anyone hear the earsplitting screaming of his soul. He’d learned to muffle it in a pale ordinariness. Wilton Hoxley was an expert at stillness.

The walls of the corridor felt reassuringly solid. I stretched my arms out for support and sagged. I’d never needed a good sag quite so badly. Relaxing into my sag, I began, for the first time in four or five minutes, to think about where I was, rather than letting my mind bathe me in soothing, irrelevant data about where I’d rather be. The Crab Nebula, for example.

But I was here and Hoxley was ahead of me, waiting to shrill and squirt. My armor, so solid-seeming when I’d imagined it all those endless subjective years ago, felt as permeable as a wind sock. Then the walls on either side of my hands trembled, I heard a sound like a ratchet wrench, and then a bang. The trembling increased, and I stepped back and bit my tongue as the sound grew louder and a ghost’s hand passed over my face. Air, just air. The little train had carried poor Eddie through his last ride again, a new and improved vision of hell: burn to death and then revisit the scenery.

The train was a probe sent to root me out, to push me noisily off the tracks. Hoxley was still in front of me, waiting. Whatever I meant to him, it was enough to keep him where he was, in the center of a web where he knew he might soon be discovered.

As the doors below me banged shut behind Eddie’s ride, I lunged out of the corridor and up the incline, hugging the wall to my back and ignoring the ties, praying for the echo to linger. It boomed back and forth between the pasteboard walls long enough to cover the sound of my movement until another opening yawned behind me and I stepped backward into it, into the realm of some other ersatz ghost.

He’d sent the train to sound me out, or-maybe-to chase me out. Maybe he thought it had. Whatever buttons or levers controlled the train were obviously in front of me, where he was. Why go any farther? If he was ahead of me, he’d wait until he couldn’t wait anymore, and then he’d move. If he came toward me, I could kill him. If he ran away from me, out through the right door, I could either chase him or go out the way I’d come in and shoot him in the face. With my left hand free, I swapped a gun into my right, and my fingers wrapped themselves gratefully around the automatic’s handle. End of the road, I thought.

And feeling smug, I backed into the end of the road.

I had my left hand stretched protectively behind me and I dismissed the first wisp of cloth as more musty ectoplasm. It didn’t even slow me. I brushed it aside and took two more backward steps and brushed it aside again. And felt a thigh under it.

“No,” I said. And then flame bloomed behind me and I smelled gasoline and my shoulder was on fire, a yellow tongue seeking my face. My hair caught, and I lost it all, all the planning and calculation, and I swatted at my hair and dropped to my knees to get under the flame, shredding the plastic raincoat as I ripped it off me, and succeeded in tossing it a few feet, and kneeling with my spine curled tightly against the flame of death, I heard Wilton Hoxley say, above and behind me, “Simeon. What terrible clothes.”

“Don’t,” I said, convulsing into an even smaller ball. The automatic clattered from my fingers, bounced once, hitting my knee, and then landed behind me.

“Don’t what?” Hoxley said. He lit another match. “Ah, of course. Don’t burn little Simeon. Well, I’ve heard that before. And what’s this?” I heard the gun scrape the ground as he picked it up. “Well,” he said, “this is an unfair advantage, is what it is. Is this how a couple of guys talk?” His hand touched my back. “Do you know that you’re all wet?” He waited.

“I know,” I said hopelessly, just biting air and spitting it out again.

“Well, this is something new,” Wilton Hoxley said, sounding pleased. “Up until now, I’ve always felt that I was the one who was wet. All wet. The wet blanket. Wetback. To wet one’s pants. Wet behind the ears. Not a very nice word, is it?” The match guttered and died, and my lungs collapsed, releasing enough air to inflate the Goodyear blimp.

“I guess not,” I said over the torrent of air.

“And that’s interesting, isn’t it?” Hoxley said serenely. “I mean, in a purely linguistic sense. What’s life, after all, except a little pocket of wet, a little envelope of wet that’s trained itself to move around? ‘Don’t dehydrate,’ life says to itself. ‘If you dehydrate, you’ll die.’ Not fish, of course. Fish don’t worry. But the terrestrials. What are they afraid of, hmmm? All these little dirt-dwelling bags of water, what are they afraid of? That the sun will dehydrate them? Or are they afraid- hold on a moment”-a match bloomed behind me- “of this?”

“Yes,” I said instantly, cravenly. The gasoline fumes clogged my nose.

“And what’s this?” he asked dispassionately, addressing some debating team from the moon. “A spark. A drop of the sun’s sweat. Are you sweating, Simeon? I can think of only one phrase that addresses the issue.” He touched the cold end of the match to my ear, and my reflexes yanked me away from it. “ ‘No sweat,’ kids say to each other, don’t they? ‘Dry up.’ Do you think this is what they mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said, my lips so dry that they made popping sounds as they slid over my teeth.

“Did anyone ever tell you to dry up?”

“Oh, come on, Wilton.”

He poked the match against my ear again. “Not my name,” he chided. “You haven’t earned the right to call me by my name. Did they ever tell you to dry up?”

“Sure,” I said, “sure they did.”

“I doubt it,” he said. I heard him take a step back, and then a little puddling sound, and then a stream of something hit my neck, and the smell of more gasoline crowded into my skull. “Half a liter,” he said conversationally as the stream trickled down the center of my back, “not much, considering the relative abundance of fossil fuels, but it should be enough. Do you know how often people told me to dry up? How many men and women told Wilton to dry up? Well, they’d all want to be wet now, wouldn’t they?” I was waiting for the match, but even so it was impossible to miss the note of self-pity that threw his tone of triumph into a minor key, and I knew that I’d been playing the wrong card.

I forced myself back onto my knees and turned my head toward him. “They didn’t say it often enough,” I said. “Dry up, asshole.”

There was a silence. Outside I heard the remote music of the carnival, a recording giving evidence of life on another planet, as I waited for the match. When the scraping sound came, it was his voice instead.

“A new tack.” He sounded like he was being held together with baling wire.

“Oh,” I said, driving my fingernails through my palms and trying for a note of command, “just light the fucking match, you pathetic slug.”

“You don’t know who I am.” His tone was almost plaintive.

“Listen up, Wilton,” I said, counting down to my last moment, “who gives a shit?”

There was a booming sound, some bold soul hurling himself against the pair of doors that opened out.

And Hoxley laughed. “We never know, do we?” he said.

“You never know,” I said, waiting for the match. “Most of us do.”

“We never know,” he said, “how important we are to others. The slightest thing we do or say, something we forget a minute later, can take root in the other person’s soul. You clown. You never think about me?”

“About as often as I think about the United Arab Emirates.”

He jostled me with his knee. “On your feet,” he said. “Time to think about Wilton.”