Hymn

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Well, be seeing you,’ said Otto, with a smile as thin as the edge of a sheet of paper.

  ‘Not if I see you first, Bob replied.

  He stepped around Helmwige and carried on walking toward his car. Jesus Christ, he thought to himself, wackos wasn’t the word for those two. Those two came from the Planet Bananas.

  He was halfway to his car when he suddenly began to realize that the soles of his feet felt hot. Not just tired-and-sweaty-from-cooking-all-afternoon hot, but really hot, like walking barefoot across the beach on a midsummer day.

  He half hopped, and walked more quickly. It had been warm today, for sure, but not warm enough to heat the car-park up to this kind of temperature. His feet almost felt as if they were burning.

  He glanced behind him. Otto and Helmwige were still standing where he had left them, except that Otto was shading his eyes with his bony hands.

  Suddenly Bob’s feet hurt so much that he shouted out loud, and danced from one foot to the other. ‘Jesus! I’m on fire!’ he yelled. ‘Jesus! What have you done to me?’

  He dropped to the ground, and yanked at the laces of his worn-out Keds. Smoke was dribbling out of the laceholes, and out of the ventilation holes at the sides. His feet were actually on fire!

  Panting with effort and pain, he dragged off his sneakers and tossed them smoking across the car-park. God almighty, that Helmwige woman must have given him a double hotfoot! Even his socks were scorched! But he was just about to stand up when both feet actually burst into flame, flaring and spitting like candle wax.

  He screamed, and tried to beat at the flames with his hands. But then his hands caught alight, too, and started to blaze just as fiercely.

  ‘Help me!’ Bob screamed. ‘I’m burning! Help me!’

  But neither Otto nor Helmwige moved a muscle. Otto remained with his hands shading his eyes, as if he were thinking very intently about something inconsequential, like his nephew’s birthday present, or what he was going to have for lunch. Helmwige simply watched, with her arms folded under her breasts—not pitiless, but not particularly interested, as if she saw men burning every day.

  Bob struggled to his knees, his hands melting in front of his eyes. At first, the pain in his blazing fingers and blazing toes had been excruciating, but then they became numb, and the pain encircled his wrists and his ankles instead. He didn’t realize that the fire had burned away his nerve-endings, and that his hands and feet were approaching sixth-degree burns, which meant their complete destruction.

  They’re not going to help me, he thought, with an overwhelming dullness. They’re just going to stand there and watch me burn.

  He shuffled forward on his knees. The flames from his feet licked up his back, and abruptly his trousers and the back of his tan leather jacket caught fire. My ass, for God’s sake, my ass is on fire!

  He could see his Pontiac parked only twenty feet away. The dull handpainted fenders, the shredded vinyl roof. There was a fire-extinguisher under the passenger seat, if only he could . . .

  Blazing, he stumbled on his knees toward his car. A fiery penitent, a man lurching in flames toward his God. He suddenly thought that he had been doomed to die this way, ever since he had first seen that monk burning himself in Saigon. It was one of those bizarre twists of destiny in which he had become inextricably entangled, the moment he had stepped out of his car on the Cholon Road and tried to prevent that monk from doing what he believed he had to do.

  Cars and buses whished past, this way and that, on Rosecrans Avenue, only thirty or forty feet away from him. What their occupants thought when they caught sight of a man burning in the car-park, he couldn’t even guess, but none of them stopped.

  ‘Oh, look, Morton, there’s somebody on fire.’

  ‘That’s all right, dear, it’s nobody we know.’

  Bob’s back was burning furiously now, and tongues of flame licked up between his legs. He staggered forward on his knees. It didn’t seem to hurt any more, he couldn’t think why. It was like kneeling in a very hot wind, that was all. It was almost funny.

  He reached his car, and managed to heave himself up with his elbow beside the passenger door. Extinguisher, extinguisher . . . then I can put it out, and everything’s going to be fine. He grasped the doorhandle with his blackened hand. Thank God the locks are broken, I could never turn a key. He pulled, and the door opened, but with a crackling, agonizing wrench, his hand broke off, too, as if his fingers were sticks of charcoal.

  He lifted the blazing stump of his wrist in pain and amazement. He understood then that he was dead, that he was beyond healing, beyond any kind of help. In a way, it came as a huge relief, because it took away the burdensome lifelong responsibility for having to take care of his body, for having to survive. No more worries about driving safely and drinking sensibly and giving up smoking.

  Bob Tuggey tried to yell, a sort of a rebel yell, to show Otto and Helmwige that he didn’t give a damn, that he was going out defiant. But he breathed in nothing but flame, he choked on a throatful of fire, and fell forward into the passenger seat of his Grand Prix without another sound. His body shuddered wildly as it burned, but the movements were probably caused by shriveling muscles.

  The vinyl seats caught alight almost at once. Fanned by the warm ocean wind, the interior of the car was soon blazing furiously. All that anybody could have seen of Bob Tuggey were his legs, protruding from the open passenger door.

  Now that a vehicle was burning, somebody called the fire department, and sirens began to honk and wail and warble in the distance. Just as the first fire-engine turned into the car-park, Bob’s coveted Grand Prix exploded, sending up a huge rolling ball of dazzling white flame that was far brighter and far fiercer than nine gallons of petrol could have produced.

  Burning chunks of car tumbled across the car-park. Even the engine-block rolled over and over, like a monstrous blazing die. Fragments of blazing fabric were caught in what felt like a sudden strong gust, and whirled around and around.

  In the eye of this fiery storm stood Otto, slowly lowering his hands from his eyes, and Helmwige, who was looking the other way now, obviously bored.

  ‘Are we going to La Jolla tonight?’ Helmwige asked, nonchalantly.

  ‘Oh . . . the morning will do,’ Otto replied. ‘If Celia’s liebling believes that the amulet is hers, he will keep it quite safe.’

  ‘Bist du müde, meine keine Taube?’ Helmwige cooed, her pink lips shining in the light of Bob Tuggey’s burning car. ‘Are you tired, my little dove?’

  Otto didn’t answer, but remained where he was, staring at the glittering embers of steel and rubber and upholstery, his face intermittently lit crimson by the flashing lights of the fire-engines. A moth flickered past in the darkness, attracted by the brightness of the fire. Without hesitation, Otto snatched it out of the air, and pressed it with two fingers flat on his protruding tongue. Then he slowly sucked it against the roof of his mouth.

  Helmwige sighed restlessly, and began to pace up and down. Unlike Otto, she found death completely uninteresting. How could anybody be interested in death, when they knew that they were going to live for ever?

  Ten

  After his shower, Lloyd wrapped himself in a thick white Turkish bathrobe, and sat down in the living-room with a large glass of Wild Turkey and all the San Diego newspapers for the past three days. He hadn’t looked at them until now. He had known that some of them had carried photographs of Celia on fire, and he hadn’t been able to face the idea of seeing her last seconds alive, when there was no possible way that he could turn back the clock and save her.

  He was afraid, too, that he would see how much she had suffered.

  However, his fear had at last been overcome by his curiosity about the charm that Bob Tuggey had found. He wanted to see if Celia had been wearing her bracelet when she set herself on fire; and if this particular charm were visible in the newspaper p
ictures.

  He turned it over and over, frowning at it. It was discoloured by fire, so it must have been near her, at least. And its link was broken, as if it had accidentally been twisted and snapped off. But why had she been wearing it at all, on a bracelet that was supposed to symbolize all the important things that had happened in her life?

  Maybe it was important, but Lloyd certainly didn’t know why. A lizard, in a circle? What had happened recently that had anything remotely to do with lizards?

  His CD was playing Bellini’s La Sonnambula. He remembered Celia singing along with it once, waving a glass of champagne from side to side as she sang, so that champagne flew all over the carpet.

  ‘Celia . . .’ he said, although he knew that she could never answer him now. God damn it, why hadn’t she told him what was wrong? Why hadn’t she even left him a letter?

  He picked up the San Diego Tribune, and slowly unfolded it. Girl’s Fiery Death In Rosecrans Ave. Parking Lot. Horrorstruck McDonald’s Diners Witness Apparent Suicide. He stared at the photographs with a feeling of growing numbness. The Times picture was quite blurred, but Lloyd could still recognize Celia’s face through the flames. Her hands were resting in her lap, and it was difficult to make out any detail, but there was a thin white line around her right wrist that was almost certainly her charm bracelet. Unfortunately none of the charms was visible.

  He examined the picture on the front of the San Diego County Post. This must have been taken a few seconds later, because Celia’s head had almost vanished into the flames, but it did show more distinctly that she was wearing her bracelet. Reaching across for his magnifying glass, Lloyd scrutinized the photograph intently. He thought he could distinguish the gold treble-clef that he had given her, but there was no obvious sign of the lizard charm.

  He went through all the photographs again and again, but none of them were clear enough for him to be able to tell whether she had been wearing that particular charm or not. Maybe somebody at her religious study group had given it to her, and that’s why she had kept it a secret from him. He decided to visit Civic Theater tomorrow to see what he could find out about this mysterious Otto and his curious get-togethers.

  On the front page of yesterday’s Tribune there was a photograph of the burned-out bus in the Anza Borrego, too, but there was nothing in the report next to it that told him anything he didn’t already know.

  La sonnambula came to a finish and, dropping the newspapers on the table, Lloyd stood up to put on another disc. He hated the house being completely silent. He kept imagining that he could hear Celia in the kitchen, or in the bathroom, and at night he didn’t dare to look into her dressing-table mirror, in case he should glimpse her sitting there, making up her eyes, alight.

  He put on La Traviata and returned to the sofa. Standing up, he could see the newspaper photographs side by side; and it was then that something odd struck him. He frowned first at one newspaper and then at another. He took out his magnifying glass. It was crazy, but the evidence was indisputable. And it was far too much of a coincidence to have happened by chance.

  In the background of the photograph of Celia stood twenty or thirty people, most of them children. But two tall figures stood out. A man in what appeared to be a business suit and a soft wide-brimmed hat, and a blondehaired woman, who had her hand clamped over her mouth.

  Then, in the photograph of the burned-out bus, the same two people appeared. They were standing quite a long way from the bus, next to a car that looked like a large Mercedes saloon. There were several other bystanders there. Three men who were probably truckers, and a woman holding a dog on a leash. But there was no question about those two. The man with the soft widebrimmed hat and the woman with the bright blonde hair.

  As far as Lloyd was concerned, that was indisputable proof that Celia’s death had been connected with the bus burning—and indisputable proof that these two people knew what the connection was. Damn it, they probably even knew why Celia had committed suicide.

  He picked up the telephone and dialled Sylvia’s number. He had already rung her two or three times during the evening because of two peculiar calls—one from a woman who had sounded a little like Sylvia, but who had refused to do anything but whisper, and the other made to somebody at her apartment who had made only kissing noises. Each time he had called since then, however, he had heard the drone of an out-of-service signal. He knew that she must be all right—after all, he had seen her go into her apartment building—but he would have liked to have been able to tell her about these extraordinary bystanders, whose fascination with death by burning seemed to go way beyond even the worst excesses of human prurience.

  Again, Sylvia’s number was out of service. He replaced the receiver, and punched out Sergeant Houk’s number instead.

  ‘Sergeant Houk?’

  ‘Houk’s out on a call right now. This is Detective Gable. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Oh . . . this is Lloyd Denman. From Denman’s Original Fish Depot, remember? My fiancée was the one who . . .’

  ‘Sure, Mr Denman. I remember you. Is there anything that I can do?’

  ‘Will Sergeant Houk be very long?’

  ‘Naw . . . shouldn’t think so. Thirty minutes tops. Do you want he should call you?’

  ‘Please . . . yes, I’d appreciate it.’

  He put down the phone and sat back with his fingers laced behind his head. Sergeant Houk had been assigned to assist the State police in their investigation of the burned-bus fatalities, and so it was possible that he already had information which could help Lloyd find these two bystanders. Perhaps they’d been there when the bus was actually burning—in which case, the police would have taken their names and addresses.

  He wondered what he ought to do if he found who they were.

  He wondered what he ought to do if he found out that they were somehow responsible for Celia’s death.

  Should he report them to Sergeant Houk, or should he take the law into his own hands? At least if he took the law into his own hands, their punishment would be sure and certain and absolutely final.

  He was still drinking and thinking when the telephone rang. He scooped it up and said, ‘Denman.’

  ‘Mr Denman? Sergeant Houk. I understand you called me.’

  ‘That’s right, Sergeant, I did.’

  ‘You heard the news, then?’

  ‘News? What news?’

  ‘The news about your fiancée’s friend, Ms Cuddy.’

  ‘Sylvia? I was out with Sylvia earlier this evening. She’s all right, I hope? I was trying to call her number, but it’s out of service.’

  ‘You didn’t hear the news, then.’

  ‘Well, don’t you think you’d better tell me?’ asked Lloyd.

  There was a pause. It sounded as if Sergent Houk had put his hand over the receiver and was answering a question from somebody in his office, because he finished up by saying, ‘Sure, and take it right down to the ME.’

  Then he said, ‘Sorry, Mr Denman, we’re a little busy here this evening. I’m afraid that the news is bad. There was a serious fire at Ms Cuddy’s apartment about two hours ago, and she was very regrettably unable to escape.’

  Lloyd licked his lips. They felt as dry as insects’ wing-cases. ‘You’re trying to tell me she’s dead?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Denman. Really, truly, sorry.’

  ‘God almighty. First Celia, then all of those people on the bus. Now Sylvia.’

  ‘There’s still no suggestion that there’s any connection,’ Sergeant Houk told him, with a noise like swallowing hot coffee. ‘Since you were one of the last people to see Ms Cuddy alive, however, I’d like to come around and ask you some routine questions. You know how it is.’

  ‘Sergeant . . .’ Lloyd began, and for a moment he was tempted to tell him about the bystanders. But something told him not to, to keep it to himself, at least for a
while. He had the feeling that there was an extra double-knot in what had happened that logical detective work would never be able to unravel.

  ‘Sure, Sergeant,’ he finished. ‘I’d be glad to help.’ He took a breath, and then he asked, ‘This fire at Sylvia’s apartment . . . does anyone know how it started?’

  ‘Hard to tell. She was literally burnt to ashes. The fire department investigators were even talking about spontaneous combustion.’

  ‘I thought spontaneous combustion was a myth?’ said Lloyd. His voice shook.

  ‘You haven’t seen Ms Cuddy’s apartment yet. All that got burned was her, and her telephone. Nothing else at all. We’ve got engineers from Pacific Bell working on it, too. Somebody came up with the theory that she might have been struck by a freak bolt of lightning down the telephone cable.’

  Lloyd asked cautiously, ‘Were there any witnesses?’

  ‘None,’ said Sergeant Houk. ‘The super said he heard noises, laughing or screaming, but when they stopped, he thought she was having a bit of a private party, if you know what I mean. Nobody saw anybody enter the building, apart from Ms Cuddy, and nobody saw anybody leave the building, neither. And the door sure wasn’t forced in any way, although the security chain was off.’

  ‘Is there anything else I can do?’ said Lloyd.

  ‘Just sit tight, Mr Denman, that’s all. Sit tight and stay in touch.’

  ‘Very well, then,’ Lloyd agreed, and put down the receiver.

  Sylvia, burned to death! My God! He swallowed a mouthful of Wild Turkey and sat on the sofa, hunched up and shivering. This was like a forest fire, sweeping through his life, incinerating everybody he knew and loved. How could Sylvia have possibly burned to death? Ashes, Sergeant Houk had told him. Nothing but ashes.

  After a while, he went back to the newspapers, spreading them out yet again, and reading every story with exaggerated care. Three eye-witnesses had been interviewed for the report on Celia’s death. One was Bob Tuggey, whom Lloyd already knew. The others were a 25-year-old gas station attendant (who was unlikely to be dressed in a business suit and a trilby hat), a 32-year-old childminder called Maria Salazar (who was unlikely to be blonde), and a 66-year-old gardener with the improbable name of Dan Kan.