Mystery

Jeanine Thielman in a dripping white dress rose up from the lake—her face dead and heavy—walking toward him through feathers of smoke—her mouth gaping open like a trap and her white tongue flapping as she struggled to speak. In his sleep Tom heard her scream, and his eyes swam open to an oily blackness. Jeanine Thielman’s drowned body lay across his, and pain muffled his head. His chest was filled with oily rags, and something foul churned in his stomach. A scream? He tried to see his bedroom. The hairs in his nose crisped with heat. All he could see through the blackness was a fuzzy red rectangle—that was a window. A rushing, roaring sound came to him at last. He shook his head, and nearly threw up. He moaned, and slid out from under the body atop his own. The movement brought his hips over the side of the narrow bed, and he tumbled to the floor. He stared at a hand dripping off the bed before his eyes, and realized that the hand belonged to Sarah Spence. The floor warmed his knees.

Tom inhaled, and felt as though he had drawn fire into his nose. “Sarah,” he said, “wake up! Wake up!” He yanked on her arm, and pulled her body toward him. Her eyes were slits. She said, “Whuzza?”

“The lodge is on fire,” he said, uttering something he had not known until it was spoken.

Her eyes rolled back into her head. Tom leaned over the bed and put his hands under her arms and pulled her toward him. She fell on top of him, and flailed out with one hand, hitting the side of his head. Tom fell back. The air was cooler and clearer on the floor. He noticed that he was wearing a shirt. Hadn’t he taken his shirt off? He reached up and pulled a sheet off the bed. Then he slapped Sarah’s face, hard.

“Shit,” she said, distinctly. Her eyes opened again, and she coughed as if she were trying to push her stomach out through her throat. “My head hurts. My chest hurts.”

Tom roughly put the sheet around her, then snatched off the blanket and put it over her like a hood. The bottom sheet lay loose and tangled on the bed, and he reached up and snapped it toward him and tugged it up over his body and began crawling toward the door. He heard Sarah crawling after him, coughing, through the furnace noise of the fire.

He bumped into the door and reached up. The brass knob felt warm, not hot, and he turned it. Voices and screams and the roaring noise came in on a rush of hot air. He flattened himself on the hot floor and snaked forward to look into the hallway.

A wall of boiling black smoke rolled toward him from the back end of the house. The door of the big bedroom and half of the staircase were invisible behind or within it. Dry wood snapped, sending streamers of glowing sparks through the blackness.

“Breathe through the sheet,” he yelled, and looked backward at Sarah. Her face peered out into the smoke from beneath the blanket, dazed and puffy, like that of a suddenly awakened child. She crawled forward another inch, tried to move the sheet up over her mouth, and collapsed under the blanket.

Tom wound his own sheet around his neck and went back and got his arms under Sarah. The blanket slithered off when he lifted her body, and he went back down on his knees and grabbed for it and pulled it over her. The blanket seemed important, essential. He got his right arm behind her shoulders, his left under her knees, and staggered upright. His eyes burned. He carried her out of the bedroom into the hall.

The force of the heat nearly knocked him down, and Sarah struggled in his arms, awkward in the blanket. His own sheet trailed like a shroud. Tom ran straight into the blast of heat—like a hand trying to hold him back. Burning air moved into his mouth and singed his throat and lungs, and he nearly fell again. Something banged into his hip, supporting him, and he realized it was the top of the banister. With sudden strength, he slung Sarah’s body over his shoulder. A loose flap of the blanket curled against his face. He was already moving down the stairs. Voices drifted toward him through the noise of the fire, but they were not real voices.

Halfway down the stairs, he saw sparks and red lines of fire jumping across the sitting room. A beam thundered down from the back of the house, and a shower of sparks and individual flames flew out from the study, encased in dense smoke. Curls of smoke rose from the sofa and chairs. The rugs had begun to burn inward from the edges, and ovals of flame from the rugs were just now touching the legs of the chairs and tables and running up the walls. The curtains snapped into flame.

He ran off the stairs and turned in a circle, unable to see any way out. He had not taken a breath in minutes, and his chest fought for air that would kill him. The front door was locked, and flames coursed across its top. A runner of fire sped across the floor, and an old chair went up like a candle with an audible poof! A heavy piece of wood came crashing down into the study. Flames ran across the ceiling. He went across the floor, jumping over a low distinct line of flames, sobbing with frustration. Sarah was a limp heavy weight over his shoulder. His eyebrows and eyelashes sizzled away in the heat.

Tom reached the front door and reached for the lock with a sheet-entangled hand. The metal burned his fingers. He fumbled, then grasped it through the sheet, and turned it over, freeing the door. The sheet came away from his hand. He put his palm on the doorknob, and felt his skin adhering to the metal. He screamed, and turned the knob. A thunderous crash and an explosion happened at his back. Fire sprang across the wood directly in front of his eyes. Tom closed his eyes, ducked his head, and pushed at the door. Cold sweet air poured over him, and the fire directly behind him roared like a thousand beasts. He staggered forward into the screen door, heard it splinter and crash, and then moved across the porch on legs made of water, gulping in air. People he could not see screamed or yelled. His stomach turned itself inside out, and he vomited down the front of his body, soaking his sheet. He tasted smoke and ashes, as if he had thrown up a full ashtray. He could hear the top of the porch roaring away above him.

Tom walked off the porch on his wobbling legs and felt the weight of Sarah magically disappear from his shoulder, as if she had flown away. He opened his eyes without seeing, stepped into empty air, and sank into someone’s arms.

Some time later he came to in the act of vomiting again. Hands held his shoulders. The air was unnaturally hot, but cooler than he expected: how could that be? He pushed himself back from the pink and brown puddle on the earth, and his feet snagged the bottom of the blanket that encased him. His vomit stank like charred wood, and so did the contradictory air. He tilted his head and saw flames jumping into the air on the other side of a row of people in robes and pajamas. A siren screamed. He remembered screams—a siren’s? Bitsy Langenheim, in a yellow Japanese kimono with flapping sleeves and chrysanthemums the color of fire, looked over her shoulder and frowned at him. Leaves burst into flame on a tall oak tree ahead of them, and everybody backed a step toward him.

“Sarah?” he said—croaked. Razor blades and knives dug into his throat.

“She’s okay. An ambulance is on the way, Tom. You saved her life.”

He fell on his haunches. He was under the trees on the near side of the Spence lodge, and the great fire all the people were watching was his lodge. Wet wool filled his brain. Now Neil Langenheim had also turned to look at him, and there was nothing in his face but distaste.

“Was anybody else in the lodge?” Lamont von Heilitz asked him.

Tom shook his head. “You caught me.”

“I was about to try to get inside when you came running out—just in time too. I think the whole back half of the lodge collapsed about a second later.”

“A second before,” Tom said, remembering the explosion he had heard behind him. “Where’s Sarah?”

“With her parents. You did the right thing by wrapping her in that blanket.”

Tom tried to sit upright, and a heavy blackness swam in his head. “The plane—and people will know you’re—”

“Our flight has been canceled, I’m afraid,” von Heilitz said. “Anyhow, Tim will have to stick around here for a day, trying to work out how the fire was started.”

“Want to see her,” Tom said with his croaking voice, and the razor blades and knives moved another inch or two into the flesh of his throat.

An oak tree on the lake side of the burning lodge began to incinerate in a rattle of leaves.

“She told—she talked about—”

Von Heilitz stroked his arm through the rough blanket.

A black-haired man wearing a brilliant red silk robe over yellow silk pajamas and sucking on a long pipe stood at the end of the row of people watching the fire. He said something to a young man wearing only a tight pair of faded jeans, and the young man, who was Marcello, swept his arm from the fire to the trees between it and the Spence lodge. Somewhere distant, a horse whinnied in terror. Tom was going to ask von Heilitz what Hugh Hefner was doing here, when the irrelevant thought came to him that the publisher of Playboy would probably have the same kind of private jet as Ralph Redwing. Then he saw that the man in the robe was Ralph Redwing, and that Ralph’s black little eye had just flicked toward him and von Heilitz before it flicked away again. On his smooth, firelit face sat an expression of worried concern as abstracted as Jerry Hasek’s.

“Everybody saw you,” he croaked to von Heilitz.

The Shadow patted his shoulder.

“No, they saw you,” he croaked again, realizing that this was terrible, it must be undone.

The fire took another oak tree.