Hymn

by Graham Masterton

  After he had returned to the kitchen, Lloyd shook his head and smiled. ‘Did you hear that? It is how it should be. That man is so uncompromising. I’ve seen him throw away lobsters because he didn’t like the colour of their shells.’

  Kathleen said, ‘You surprise me, you know. You don’t seem like the kind of guy who would want to open a restaurant.’

  Lloyd shrugged. ‘I fell into it, I guess. I was tired of insurance, I wanted to be free. I thought of starting my own outboard motor company . . . in fact, I was better qualified to start an outboard motor company than anything else. I can strip an Evinrude blindfold. But I thought to myself, where’s the class, where’s the image? Where’s the fun?’

  ‘But a restaurant must be such hard work.’

  ‘Are you kidding? This isn’t work. This is complete and utter self-imposed slavery, from morning till night. And still the customers complain.’

  Their mutual bereavement sustained them through the hors d’oeuvres. But when they got into the crabbed halibut they began to realize that they had very much more in common than the sudden death of somebody that they had loved. They both liked theatre, they both liked music, they both liked water sports. They both liked Maria Callas and Robbie Robertson and Woody Allen.

  ‘You’ve been marvellous,’ Kathleen told him, as they left the Original Fish Depot and walked out into the warm night air. ‘It’s pretty hard to have fun after something like this, but I’ve had fun.’

  ‘I guess the world keeps on turning, no matter what,’ Lloyd told her. ‘Now, how about a ride home? You could leave your car in the parking-lot here, and I could have one of the waiters bring it out to you tomorrow.’

  ‘All the way to Escondido? Come on, Lloyd, you’re tired. I could take a cab.’

  ‘Well . . . if it doesn’t sound too forward, maybe you could come back to my place for a nightcap, and then make up your mind what you want to do.’

  She took hold of his arm. ‘That doesn’t seem too forward at all. In fact it sounds very inviting.’ He was breathing the smell of her perfume, Ombre Rose, and her hair was very fine-filamented and shiny in the streetlight. Somehow her plain black dress made her even more alluring. It was no good pretending: he liked her a lot.

  They climbed into his BMW and Lloyd backed out of his parking-space.

  ‘I just love your licence plate,’ Kathleen told him.

  ‘What, FISHEE? I don’t know. The joke’s kind of worn off.’

  They drove down the long swooping curves of the road that would take them to North Torrey. It was slightly foggy, a late-night ocean fog, and the lights all around them were blurred and star-whiskered.

  Kathleen said, ‘Do you know what Mike always used to tell me?’

  Lloyd glanced at her quickly. ‘Go on. What did Mike always tell you?’

  ‘Mike always used to tell me that when his grandfather died, he took off north, all the way to Eureka, even further. He said it was the greatest spiritual experience of his life. He stood on the seashore way up north, in winter, and he heard his grandfather speak to him clear as a bell. He said his grandfather told him that nobody dies until they’re completely forgotten, until everybody that ever knew them dies, too.’

  ‘I guess that’s right,’ Lloyd told her. ‘I guess it makes it a little easier.’

  ‘Well, maybe,’ Kathleen replied. ‘But I think I’d feel better if I thought that Mike had gone for good. Vanished, you know? Just like he never existed. My God, Lloyd, he was alive a week ago. He held me in his arms. Now there’s nothing. Nothing! I find that pretty damned hard to accept.’

  Lloyd said, ‘Did Mike belong to any kind of religious study group?’

  Kathleen stared at him. ‘Mike? You’re kidding! He wasn’t into religion at all! What made you ask me something like that?’

  ‘I don’t know, just fishing,’ Lloyd said guardedly. He didn’t want to tell her too much about Otto, not yet.

  ‘He used to go bowling a couple of nights a week,’ Kathleen volunteered.

  ‘Do you know where?’

  She stared at him. ‘No, I don’t know where. He went with a gang from the office. You’re making it sound like it’s something really important.’

  ‘It could be, yes.’

  ‘Then what are you trying to say? Was he doing something wrong? Was he mixed up in something illegal or something? Come on, Lloyd, you can’t just let it go.’

  Lloyd turned toward North Torrey. His face was lit up by the passing streetlights—lit, then shadowed, then lit, then shadowed. ‘It seems like Celia and Marianna were both attending regular religious study groups run by a character called Otto. Otto, apparently, was offering them everlasting life.’

  Kathleen frowned at him. ‘Everlasting life? Are you serious?’

  ‘My feelings exactly,’ Lloyd told her. ‘But it seems like a whole lot of people believed it. Enough people to make up a coachload, anyway.’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’ Kathleen demanded. ‘Mike was always so positive. He couldn’t have been interested in everlasting life, or anything like that. He wasn’t even superstitious. He didn’t mind spilling salt or breaking mirrors from time to time, or black cats crossing his path.’

  ‘He wasn’t into drugs?’

  Kathleen shook her head very firmly. ‘He hated drugs. He didn’t smoke and he didn’t drink. He had a physique like Sylvester Stallone. He ran three miles every morning before breakfast and he voted Democrat.’

  Lloyd turned into the drive of his house, and killed the BMW’s engine. ‘I’m sorry, Kathleen, I guess I shouldn’t try to play detective. All I manage to do is upset people.’

  Kathleen laid her hand on his arm. ‘You’ve been great. Really. That’s not just flattery. I was beginning to wonder if there was any kind of future after Mike, whether life was worth living. I admire what you’re trying to do, you know that? Even if you find that Celia took her own life because of depression, or PMT, or who knows what . . . at least you’re not giving in. You’re looking for answers. You’re fighting back. That makes life worth living, doesn’t it? That alone.’

  They got out of the car, and Lloyd ushered Kathleen toward the house.

  Kathleen said, ‘Do you smell burning? Do you smell smoke?’

  Lloyd sniffed. The sourness of burning was unmistakable, and as they approached the house he saw a blueish curtain of smoke hanging over the back yard. Dear God, he thought, they’ve burned my house down. He unlocked the front door and, turning round to Kathleen, said, ‘Stay back!’

  ‘It’s still alight!’ called Kathleen, frantically pointing toward the bedroom windows at the back. Reflected flames danced in the window of the house next door. Lloyd hesitated for a moment. If he opened up the front door, he might feed the fire with a huge surge of oxygen. On the other hand, he had to get inside to put it out. No matter how fast the Fire Department made it to North Torrey, his precious house would be ashes before they could connect up their first hose.

  ‘Call the Fire Department!’ he yelled at Kathleen.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Call the Fire Department! Call them now! Use the car phone!’

  Kathleen shouted at him, ‘You’re not going inside? You can’t!’

  ‘Just call the Fire Department, will you?’

  He hesitated for only a second. Then he unlocked the front door, shouldered it open, and rolled head-over-heels across the hallway. He heard the fire bellow like a wild animal, and felt the side of his face scorched. Crouched by the foot of the stairs, his hands clasped protectively over his head, he waited until the flames had subsided, then he stood up and quickly looked around him.

  The living-room had been ransacked. All the drawers were hanging open, and all of the display-cabinets had been smashed. The air was thick with smoke, and Lloyd coughed and spat to clear it out of his lungs. Then he ducked toward the kitchen.

 
In the kitchen, the story was the same. There was so much cutlery on the floor that it looked as if a fisherman had emptied his baskets of sardines on to it. Every jar was broken open. Coffee, rice, cookies, salt. Even the burners had been prized out of the hob.

  They were looking for their lizard charm, thought Lloyd. They wanted it so much so that they lost sight of the fact that it doesn’t mean anything to me. Not yet, anyway. But it will.

  He hop-jumped across the living-room. The bedroom door was wide open, and the bedroom itself was a mass of fire. He could see his bedside table burning, and the photograph of Celia twisting and curling up. He could see flames licking out from under his bed. It was so hot that he couldn’t approach closer than six or seven feet, holding his hand up to protect his eyes. He didn’t have a fire-extingusher in the house, but he guessed that a few bowlfuls of water might douse it down. He hurried back to the kitchen, flicked on the tap, and waited impatiently while the red plastic washbowl noisily filled up with water.

  Then he hurried back again, balancing the bowl, slopping water, but as he approached the fiery entrance to the bedroom, he realized that what he was attempting was completely futile. The bed was alight, with huge flames roaring up to the ceiling, and fabric burning in a blackened blizzard. The heat was huge; it dried the moisture on his eyeballs as soon as he approached; and when he tossed the bowlful of water, it did nothing more than sizzle momentarily, and vanish into the smallest puff of steam. He might just as well have tried spitting.

  He threw the plastic bowl aside, and hurried across to his desk, where he kept his accounts, and his diaries, and the photograph albums that his mother had given him. If he could save nothing else, he could save those.

  He fumbled for his keys, slotted them into the keyhole, and it was only then that he realized that the desk wasn’t locked. Somebody had been here before him. Somebody with a key. He opened the desk and saw that everything had been searched and shuffled aside: diaries, photographs, files, papers, passports, cheque books.

  Still, he didn’t have time to worry about that. He stuffed the most important papers into two large envelopes, and hunched his way across the living-room with his arms full. The bedroom was burning so ferociously now that long tongues of fire were roaring out of it, and the bureau beside the door was already sprouting flames. It would be only a matter of minutes before the whole house was ablaze.

  Lloyd had almost reached the hallway when he heard somebody calling him.

  ‘Lloyd! Wait! Lloyd!’

  At first he thought it was Kathleen, and he yelled out, ‘Kathleen! I’m okay! I’m coming out!’

  But then he suddenly realized that the voice was coming from his left. He stopped, disoriented, and dropped some of his photograph albums.

  ‘Lloyd! Wait! Please, Lloyd, wait!’

  He shielded his eyes against the heat. The living-room was filling up with smoke and he could scarcely breathe. He coughed, and coughed, and coughed again. At first, he couldn’t see anything. But then he began to distinguish a shadowy figure in the bedroom doorway. He smeared his eyes with his fingers, trying to focus. The figure wavered in the flames, but didn’t attempt to move; as if the flames meant nothing, as if the flames were no more than confetti, or flowers, or bright running water.

  ‘Lloyd, wait.’

  Lloyd thought: it can’t be. But he knew with a terrible certainty that it was. You don’t have to see somebody’s face in close-up to know for certain who they are. A shape, a suggestion, that’s all you need. And this figure standing in the flames was the same figure that he had seen running away from him on the Star of India, the same figure that he had seen sitting opposite him at Tom Ham’s Lighthouse.

  Celia, no question about it. Celia, self-cremated but immortal.

  For a second, she emerged from the flames. They ran up her grey naked body, ran up her face, and her hair stood on end in torrential fire. She stared at Lloyd with black, impenetrable eyes.

  ‘Lloyd, I need that charm. If I don’t have that charm, Lloyd, I’ll die.’

  He stared at her in horror. Flames licked at her breasts, but didn’t consume them. Flames licked at her face. What fascinated and frightened Lloyd more than anything else was the way in which flames licked into her eye-sockets.

  ‘I have to have that charm, Lloyd. Please, give it to me.’

  Lloyd hesitated for one more second, mesmerized by Celia’s appearance, but then he heard the whooping of fire sirens approaching the house, and the moment of hesitation was broken. He ducked out of the living-room, along the hallway, and out into the night.

  Kathleen was waiting for him on the sidewalk, just as a shining firetruck came around the corner with its lights flashing and its horn bellowing.

  ‘Lloyd, are you okay?’ she asked him. She was trembling.

  ‘Sure, yes, sure. I tried to put it out, but it had too much of a hold.’

  ‘I moved your car back, just in case.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  A firefighter came stalking up to Lloyd, adjusting the straps of his helmet. ‘This your property, sir?’

  Lloyd nodded.

  ‘Is there anybody in there?’

  Lloyd thought of Celia, standing in the doorway, empty-eyed, alight.

  ‘No, officer. There’s nobody in there.’

  ‘No domestic animals?’

  ‘No, none.’

  ‘How did the fire start?’ the firefighter asked him. Already the first hose was connected to the hydrant across the street, and two more firefighters were approaching the house behind a wide high-pressure spray.

  ‘I have no idea. We just came back from having dinner. It looked as if it started in the bedroom, but God knows how.’

  ‘Chief!’ called one of the firefighters. ‘The back roof is coming down!’

  ‘Okay,’ the officer called back. Then, to Lloyd, ‘I’ll talk to you later, sir. Let’s get this little bonfire under control first.’

  Lloyd and Kathleen stood and watched as the firefighters axed their way into the back of the house and sprayed gallons of water into the kitchen. Lloyd felt shocked and detached. It was hard for him to believe that what he was witnessing was real. First of all he had lost Celia to fire, now his house. He felt like packing up and leaving everything behind him. Maybe travelling north to Eureka, the way that Kathleen’s late husband had done.

  Most of the neighbours had come out of their houses to watch the fire. Rog Kazowski from next door came across and asked Lloyd if he wanted to come in for a drink.

  ‘It’s okay, Rog, I think I’ll just stand here and watch it burn.’

  ‘I sure hope you got good insurance,’ said Rog, the firelight dancing on his shiny bald head. ‘If you have any problems, let me know.’

  Lloyd looked around, and as he did so, he saw two unfamiliar figures standing among the main knot of neighbours. It was difficult to make them out clearly in the swivelling light from the fire and the flashing lights from the firetrucks, but the more intently he peered at them, the more convinced he became that he had found the man and woman he was hunting for. With a cold tingle of excitement and alarm, he recognized Otto and his tall German fraülein. Helmet, or Earwig, or whatever.

  He couldn’t be certain, but it looked very much as if they were watching him, too.

  ‘Kathleen,’ he suggested, ‘I think it would be a good idea if we got away from here.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I’m not really too keen on watching my house burn to the ground, you know?’

  Kathleen took hold of his hand. ‘Well, of course, sure. Do you want to come to my place?’

  ‘That’d be great.’

  He edged his way back through the onlookers, making sure that the fire chief didn’t see them leaving. A police car had just arrived, too, and the last thing he wanted was to have to answer a lot of routine police-type questions. He glanced
back across the street at Otto and his companion, and as he did so he saw a figure in dark glasses and a black turban skirting around the back of the crowd. Celia, no question about it. Or the grey-skinned empty-eye-socketed creature who had taken Celia’s shape.

  He gripped Kathleen’s hand more tightly, and hurried her over to his car.

  Kathleen said, ‘Hold on! You’re hurting me!’

  ‘Quick, get in,’ he told her. ‘They’ve seen us.’

  ‘Who’s seen us? What are you talking about?’

  Otto had detached himself from the main crowd and was walking toward them, straight and purposeful. The tall German woman followed him, although Celia remained where she was.

  Kathleen said, ‘I wish you’d tell me what’s going on.’

  ‘No time,’ Lloyd told her, slamming the car door and starting the engine. As he did so, Otto abruptly stopped where he was, fifty or sixty feet away, and raised his hands to his forehead. He looked as if he were protecting his eyes from the glare. Lloyd released the parking-brake and swerved the BMW across the road in reverse.

  ‘Lloyd!’ Katheleen exclaimed.

  Lloyd slammed the T-shift into 2, and the car skidded forward again. As they approached Otto, however, Lloyd felt the leather-covered steering-wheel heating up in the palms of his hands. Otto made no attempt to move aside as they slewed past him, and as they did so, the steering-wheel burst into flames.

  ‘Aaahhh!’ Lloyd yelled, trying to keep control of the swaying car with his fingertips. The leather steering-wheel cover was blazing furiously, and strips of fiery black hide kept dropping on to his unprotected thighs. His palms were branded, his fingers blistered, but in spite of the pain and the panic he managed to keep his hands dancing around the wheel, and to keep the car under some sort of control.

  ‘Here!’ said Kathleen, and dragged off her knitted shawl so that Lloyd could use it to smother the flames. He wound it around the top of the steering-wheel, and managed to damp down the worse of them.

  They skidded on to the main highway next to the university entrance. Lloyd’s teeth were clenched with pain, and his eyes were filled with tears.