Death in Cold Type

by C. C. Benison

  He had found sanctuary at the end of a row of shelves containing more of the industrial drums witnessed in the corridor, their blunt shapes in the dim light at once sheltering and ominous. Almost immediately, Mellish had moved from view and Leo, barely thinking, had darted into the aisle determined to charge forward and pull Liz from the vault. But as quickly, Mellish had returned, dragging an empty barrel with him, arresting Leo in mid-motion, stifling a gasp, quelling the crash of his heart against his chest. He had not been seen. But he had beheld Mellish’s face in profile and been jolted by the transformation, by the blotchy skin, the stubborn set of the jaw, and the singular frenzy in his eyes.

  And now the moment had arrived. This fire, this reckless dangerous fire, blazed higher, clouding the room with smoke. Liz, whose voice told him she had been fighting back the panic, broke down in entreaty, anguishing to hear. He pressed forward, his senses sharpened as he closed in on his quarry.

  And then, unexpectedly, Mellish bent down and Liz’s eyes were locked on his. He tried to caution her with a silent gesture. But her face crumpled and broke, the tears speaking not of horror, but of deliverance. And then there was no choice. With a howl of rage, Mellish thrust Liz backward from the edge of the vault with his left hand, grasping the lip of the door with his right. Leo was upon him in an instant, pressing against his back, as revolted by the man’s heated, sweating bulk as he was surprised at his strength as he tried to choke him with the crook of one arm and pry loose his hand from the door with the other. He heard rather than saw Liz fall to the floor of the vault and a shiver ran through him at the vicious crack as her head met the stone. But Mellish was determined. Grunting furiously, he flailed with his free arm, first trying to drive his elbow into Leo’s side, then reaching over to smash his fist on the hand trying without success to wrench his fingers from the door. Then Leo gasped in agony as something cold and sharp pierced the skin of his forearm. Instinctively, blinded by pain, he let go his adversary only to hear in the next instant the awful forbidding slam of the vault door.

  Hardly aware what he was doing, he ran at Mellish with his shoulder, knocking him away from the door before his scrabbling fingers would find the combination lock, sending him crashing against the drum, knocking it over and scattering in a blaze of ash and spark and flame the still burning contents, saturating the air with smoke. Coughing, nearly gagging, he lunged again toward his opponent. But Mellish was on the ground groping amid the debris, muttering and cursing. And then Leo saw it—the source of his pain, his throbbing arm, the warm blood bubbling from his wound—saw it gleaming in the new flames dancing over the straw and paper. He kicked Mellish’s hand from the knife with sudden fury, and then kicked the knife, sending it scuttling toward a stand of shelves all too quickly swathed in fire. Screaming, Mellish hurled his weight against Leo’s legs, knocking him to the floor, then tore toward the shelf, half crawling, half swimming through the billowing smoke. But Leo twisted himself around, sending pain tearing through his ancient back injury, and grasped a retreating ankle with his left hand, holding doggedly while Mellish thrashed at him with his free leg, dragging him by increments along the blackened, ash-strewn floor. With his other hand, Leo tried to hoist himself onto his adversary, thwart him in his desperate pursuit of the knife, but he was frustrated by his awkward berth along the floor, by the feet beating about his head and by the numbness overtaking his right arm. He could feel his strength ebbing and then he heard a grunt of satisfaction. Mellish had found it. And then his shoulder seemed to erupt with pain as Mellish, coiled about, thrust blindly again and again through the smothering haze into his flesh. With a groan Leo released his hold and tried to rise to meet his opponent who was heaving himself, coughing and choking, from the floor. But his own progress seemed agonizingly prolonged, like the movements in a slow motion film. He looked up and saw Mellish over him, wild-eyed, saw him lift his leg, saw the advancing shoe, felt the impact along his temple, the shock as his skull seemed to split in two.

  And then, as he tried again to rise, to thwart a second blow, there came an explosive roar from the back of the storeroom and suddenly the film regained momentum. Heat rolled over him like a blanket. Everything was bathed in flame. He looked up to see Mellish staggering forward from the impact, his lips moving in a soundless scream. He seemed to forget Leo then. He careened toward the vault and Leo, turning his head to watch, unable to get up, groaned in despair. If he turned the combination, Liz was lost. But, instead, Mellish snatched at the remains of the file unconsigned to fire and with a final half-crazed stare fled the room. As Leo sank into semi-consciousness, lulled by the sweet chill of the stone floor beneath his aching body, one detail floated by like a bright scarf—the white label affixed to the side of the blue drum in whose shelter he had earlier stood. Written on it was the word trichloroethylene. It was the liquid used to clean the presses and it was highly flammable.

  The thought pulled him from his stupor. There were other drums in the storeroom and more in the corridor. Battling nausea, gasping in the smoke, he willed himself onto his knees and began to crawl toward the vault, keeping low where the air was least contaminated. His right arm, torn and bleeding, had weakened terribly; blood streamed down his face from the wound to his head. With effort he stood up, thrusting his nose under the collar of his shirt to filter the smoke, aware of the mounting heat at his back, the crackling as the flames consumed the wooden shelving. There was no time. Fearing the worst, that the vault had somehow locked, he pulled on the handle, gasping as the pain coursed down his arm. At first, it would not yield but then there was an almost imperceptible click and, slowly, agonizingly, he pushed the door back on its hinge to reveal Liz, immobile, her limbs twisted in a parody of sleep. And then there was another explosion and a blast of smoke and flame ripped into the vault itself. The storeroom behind him was now a pool of fire.

  Desperately, nearly retching in the suffocating air, he pulled Liz to a sitting position with his one good arm. Crouching down, he hoisted her over his shoulder, then, bowed under the vault’s low ceiling, stumbled forward into the searing heat. He heard Liz groan, felt her first tentative struggle back to life. Stepping from the vault to the floor of the storeroom his legs nearly buckled under a combination of weight and fatigue. The distance to the corridor seemed to spread out before him, the air between charged with roaring flames like great orange tongues licking and curling, whipping at his clothes and hair. For a moment he doubted his ability to travel the few feet to safety. The flesh on his hands and face scalded. The blasted air seemed to suck the very breath from his aching lungs. How easy it would be to surrender to this inferno, he thought, as his lids dropped over his burning eyes and a vision of cool green gardens and running water bloomed in his brain.

  The hallucination was momentary but its power to confound terrified him and that in itself was sufficient to propel him forward. He pressed against the wall, twisting his head away from the bulging curtain of fire, blindly pushing away with his feet fallen bits of flaming wood. And then he felt a sudden convulsion. Liz had wakened to consciousness. Her body tensed along his own. He heard above the fire’s roar a terrible retching cough and then her arms began to flail weakly down the back of his legs as though she believed herself still in Mellish’s grip. It was then Leo realized his clothes were burning. Liz was not disoriented. She was beating the flames from his trousers. Through the acrid smoke came the sickening stench of burning hair and flesh—his own—and the pain, unacknowledged in the single-minded pursuit of escape, now ripped through him like a barrage of deadly arrows. He plunged forward in a final effort.

  And then, miraculously, he was in the corridor. He felt his knees give under him and he dropped to the floor in a heap, half-falling onto Liz. With waning strength, he made himself roll away from her to extinguish the flames still fed by his clothes, each turn along the hard stone a torment to his burnt flesh. A few seconds later, the right side of his shirt and trousers reduced to charred rags, he lost consciousness. The last thi
ng he saw as his mind ushered the awful pain to merciful oblivion was Liz struggling toward him through the gathering smoke, her face a web of black streaks.

  But it was pain that awakened him a moment later. At first, his mind, dream-thickened, told him incisor teeth were slashing his shoulder and for the first time a cry forced its way from his throat. Then he realized there were hands tugging urgently under his arms, trying to pull him along the corridor that in the brief time he had been unconscious had surrendered to the fire, the wooden flats forming a blazing gauntlet. He looked up to see Liz, her face contorted with effort, and Stevie, fierce and pale, leaning over him, mouthing words unintelligible above the crackling spluttering flames. Pushing his heels against the floor, he tried to scramble to his feet, but his socks slipped along the slick surface and he fell back, tumbling from his rescuers’ grasp, his arm a tattered ribbon of pain.

  And then together they witnessed the final horror. As though cloven by an invisible hand, the smoke parted suddenly and raced toward them, swirling over their heads, leaving the fire clear and inviolate in its relentless destruction. At the far end, like an emergent moth at the tip of a flaming chrysalis, Mellish materialized, hugging the remains of the file to his chest. His eyes were distended and glistening, mesmerized by a world of writhing walls. He looked past them, not seeing them, his face all mad glory. Leo had only a second to remember the sub-basement offered a single exit before the explosion sundered the corridor and Mellish, his eyes acknowledging theirs at last, held out the file to the ravenous flames like an offering, shrieking triumphantly as the air burst around him. For an instant he seemed to float in the air like a fiery spirit, his arms two blazing wings, a wondrous aura playing over his hair and clothes, and then he dropped into the hellish abyss. The last thing Leo saw before the sickening smell of incinerated flesh again assailed his nostrils and returned him to the void, was the shock of white hair gleaming like a diamond before it too was consumed. Only then did he hear the sound of running feet, the shouting, the shrill ring of a fire bell somewhere off in the distance.

  Monday Edition

  43

  The Beginning

  The room held only one chair for visitors though there were two beds and the prospect of family members and friends descending in clusters on the cramped space and its Spartan furnishings was never far away. At four o’clock, however, most of the afternoon well-wishers had exhausted their supply of conversation and headed for home and the agreeable rhythms of normal life. The patients, well worn for being the objects of their clucking relatives, sought their own relief in sleep, television, or the quiet anticipation of dinner before the evening onslaught of visitors fell once more upon them. Except for the murmur of conversation among the staff at the nursing station, the ward had been mercifully quiet when Stevie passed through on her way to Leo’s room. It was what she had expected, and wanted.

  She lifted the chair gently from its position facing the unoccupied first bed and set it down beside the second. Leo didn’t awaken. Impatient to talk with him, she leaned over to tug on the arm lying outside the bedclothes but then thought better of it. In the ambulance the night before he had bobbed in and out of consciousness, his face, bloodied and streaked, contracted with pain and its suppression. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, just scream or something,” she had shouted to him at last, kneeling down, stroking his hair, sick at heart for her helplessness, his suffering, the harrowing scene in the Citizen dungeons still then crashing through her mind. He had had a moment of lucidity then. “Okay, I will.” But his grin wobbled, then a medic jabbed him with a silencing needle.

  Now, at rest, in the thin autumn light filtered by the window blinds, Leo’s features were smoothed and placid, the pain soaked up in dreams. The empurpled welt on the side of his face filled her suddenly with tenderness. There was gauze dressing along his right hand and arm, and the hair on one side of his head above a line of scarlet skin had very nearly disappeared. Her dread had been that he would be disfigured, but staff calmed her in Emergency, and her father, who had examined him in the morning had phoned to tell her the scarring would be minimal, Leo’s face would be spared.

  “Finally, a smile on your face,” Kathleen had remarked. She’d been hovering like a solicitous shop clerk since Stevie had awakened.

  The surge of relief had so very nearly overwhelmed her that Stevie let the comment pass without a retort and instead gave the old doll a big hug.

  She knew she had become lost in thought when Leo’s eyes opened suddenly, startling her. She was about to say something when the eyes, instead of focusing, rolled back in their sockets and closed again. A sigh escaped his lips. Acting on impulse, she bent over and placed a kiss on his mouth, letting her hair fall over his face. This time Leo’s cheek twitched and his eyelids flickered. His eyes opened slowly, fighting to adjust to the object in his field of vision. A smile spread slowly across his features and then recoiled along the line of bruising. He moaned.

  “Am I extra-crispy?” His voice was thick.

  “Just a little singed around the edges,” Stevie replied. “You’ll be fine. Really.”

  Leo gave her another sort of Demerol smile. “I was dreaming about you.”

  He gazed at her, seeming to drink her in, and she wanted to laugh out loud. He looked all at once so comical with his wobbly grin, bandaged, bruised, pasted against the white hospital pillowcases. And the desire to laugh was itself a balm, a return to normal. She wanted to kiss him again. But she stopped herself, confounded suddenly by the force of her feelings, constrained by the barely private, briskly efficient cell with its starched linens and chrome fixtures. There would be another, better time. Instead she asked the question unresisted by history’s legions of hospital visitors: “How are you feeling?”

  Leo struggled to concentrate. The question seemed almost abstract. How was he feeling? “Sort of blissful.” He grinned stupidly, then winced.

  “Painkillers.”

  “More, please.” He tried to fix his attention on Stevie’s face, on the dark eyes beneath a brow furrowing and unfurrowing in response to his own wavering attention. The absurd thought came to him suddenly that auras truly did exist. A liquid crown of light, blue and white, flowed in soft currents about her hair with delicate flames drifting up and fading away like a cool and kindly fire.

  “And you? Okay?”

  “I’m fine. They released me after examination but they kept Liz in overnight for observation. She was lucky. She just had a slight concussion. Leo?”

  His head fell back into his pillow as his eyelids began a lazy descent. Dismayed, Stevie wondered if he would be able to sustain a conversation. A glass of water on the adjoining night table next to a basket of cut flowers caught her eye. It looked untouched. She presented it to his lips.

  “Drink this.”

  The water was tepid and to his flannelled mouth tasted sweet. But he was thirsty, thirstier than he might have imagined, and gulped the water down gratefully. With each drop his head cleared a little, substituting the anaemic throb of fading headache at one temple. Stevie’s image clarified and with it came the sharp reminder of the Citizen basement, of her tugging at his arm, of the pain, and the horrible finale they had witnessed together.

  “Mellish!”

  “Ash,” she replied, watching liquid descend from the drip into Leo’s arm. “The fire consumed virtually everything in that lower basement.”

  “He was Richter’s…”

  “Brother, or half-brother, I mean. It’s in the paper. They were able to put an edition out—the rest of the building, the presses and stuff, weren’t damaged. That Alcock character is crazy. He had someone interviewing Liz as she was being put on a stretcher and then that woman we met outside—”

  “Julie.”

  “—tried to climb into the ambulance with us. I practically had to beat her away.”

  “Ambulance chasing.”

  “I thought only lawyers did that.”

  “Either.”

  “A
t least you were unconscious through most of it.”

  “No. I seem to remember something of it.”

  Leo smiled at her, remembering a moment or two of delicious nurse-like empathy. He winced again. Stevie returned the glass to the night table and perched on the edge of the bed.

  “Remember talking about Richter’s Bowie eyes with my father?”

  “Uh-huh,” Leo replied dreamily, barely giving a damn.

  “After I left, he told you someone else at the mall had the same thing.”

  “The same eyes?”

  “No. See, Richter’s eyes—the different coloured irises—are because of a certain genetic disorder he has. Called Waardenburg Syndrome.” She repeated the word as she had earlier in the day when her father had explained it to her on the phone, rolling it around in her mouth, drawling the “a”s.

  “It’s not dire or disabling or anything,” she continued, “at least in Richter’s case. It’s just an anomaly, something only people like my father would know about. But there’s another characteristic that people with the syndrome sometimes have.” She studied Leo’s face. “A white forelock.”

  Leo gazed at her, though she seemed at the moment to have become two. “I thought he was just greying funny.” He covered one eye with a hand. Now there was one of her. “They don’t look much alike.”

  “They do if you think about it,” Stevie insisted. “They both have jaws on the large side. They both have small mouths. And they both have widely spaced eyes. All of these are characteristic of the syndrome.”

  “But usually it’s only after you’re told of someone’s relationship that you look for resemblances.” Leo grunted as he attempted to raise himself. The pain that shot down his arm as he pressed his hand against the mattress sharpened his mind. “Mellish and Richter only share one parent, after all. And the differences in their ages, Mellish’s weight, the extra flesh on his face—” Leo broke off, watched Stevie as she stared silently through the blinds at the pale sky above the parking structure opposite.