Hymn

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Lloyd, please!’ Celia begged him.

  But Kathleen slapped Helmwige’s shoulder and shouted, ‘Let him go! You’re all crazy! You’re vicious and you’re crazy! Let him go!’

  Otto gave her a fleeting, dismissive glance, ‘Very spirited, Mrs Kerwin. But it won’t help at all.’

  Lloyd kept his fist closed for as long as he could, but the burning of Helmwige’s fingers was more than he could take. Gasping, sweating, shaking with pain, he slowly opened his fingers and exposed the charm. Without a word, Helmwige picked it fastidiously out of his palm, and pressed it to her lips. Metal sizzled against saliva.

  ‘Thank you for your somewhat reluctant co-operation, Mr Denman,’ said Otto. He suddenly stooped forward, and caught a hopping cicada by the leg. It struggled and danced, but he pushed it into his mouth until only its head was showing between his lips, its black beady eyes staring. Then he crunched it up between his teeth, and swallowed it. ‘I like to give them one last look at the world they are leaving,’ he remarked.

  Shuddering with emotion and pain, his burned hand pressed against his chest, Lloyd could do nothing else but watch Celia climb back into the car, followed by Helmwige and Otto. Otto raised one gloved hand in dismissal, and then they drove off into the darkness. Their brake lights glared momentarily as they rejoined the main road, and then they were gone.

  Kathleen came up to Lloyd with tears in her eyes, and put her arms around him. ‘Oh God, are you all right? That must have hurt so much.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Lloyd. ‘I’ll get over it. A college friend of mine lost both his legs in Viet Nam, and he got over it.’

  ‘Was that really Celia?’ Kathleen asked.

  Lloyd nodded. ‘It looked like her. It sounded like her. I don’t know how it could be, though. I think I’m just about ready for the Yoyo Hotel.’

  ‘But Lloyd,’ Kathleen insisted, ‘I saw her too, so she must be real. Just different, like that awful Otto said. God, he’s disgusting! She’s in a different state, that’s what he said, didn’t he? Volatile.’

  Lloyd said, ‘Let’s see if we can get the car back to the house.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Kathleen asked him. ‘Are you going to call the police?’

  ‘Not yet . . . not till I know what’s going on. If there’s a chance that Celia could be saved, then the last thing I want to do is blow it.’

  Kathleen said nothing. There was nothing to be said. They had both been confronted with the evidence that the dead could really walk, that the grave and the crematorium might not be the end at all, but a new and mysterious beginning.

  Fifteen

  He was deeply asleep when the door chimes rang. He opened his eyes and for a long moment he couldn’t think where he was, or what had happened to him, or even who he was.

  He was lying on a chestnut-brown couch in a large rustic-style living-room. An empty red-wine bottle stood on the glass-topped table close by, with three wine-flecked glasses. On the brick-effect wall above the cabin-style fireplace hung a huge oil painting of Red Indians riding through a blizzard. It was entitled Winter in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

  The doorbells chimed again. He sat up, and tried to rub his eyes, but found that his hands were thickly bound in clean bandages, like a boxer. He was wearing nothing but his boxer shorts. He looked around him, and saw his shirt neatly folded over the back of the chestnut-brown armchair opposite. It was only when he heard Kathleen calling from upstairs, ‘Lloyd! Could you get the door please?’ that he remembered exactly where he was.

  He tugged on his pants and held them together with one hand because he couldn’t fasten the button with his bandaged fingers. The dark wobbly shape of a man in a blue suit was visible through the hammered glass door. Using his hand like a big white lobster-claw, Lloyd opened the door on the chain and said, ‘Who is it?’

  The man turned around. It was Sergeant Houk. A little further away stood Detective Gable, with his hands in his pockets, whistling to himself. In the driveway, parked alongside Lloyd’s burned and scraped BMW, stood Sergeant’s Houk’s Buick, and behind it, a blue-and-white squad car from the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, with a pale-faced young deputy sitting in it.

  ‘Do you mind if we come in, or are we interrupting something?’ asked Sergeant Houk.

  Lloyd released the chain. ‘Surprised you knew where to find me.’

  ‘We didn’t know where to find you, as a matter of fact. We put out a county-wide bulletin for your car last night, and that smart young deputy happened to notice it in Mrs Kerwin’s driveway first thing this morning, and called us. There can’t be too many white BMWs in Southern California with the licence FISHEE.’

  As he stepped into the house, he looked back at Lloyd’s car and commented, ‘Pretty beat up, too. Hope you’re not thinking of driving it on the highway in that condition.’

  ‘I had a slight accident,’ said Lloyd, trying to push the button of his pants through the buttonhole with the heel of his hand.

  ‘You’re not kidding. Was that how you hurt your hands?’

  ‘That’s right, burned them. It’s not too serious. More blisters than anything else.’

  Sergeant Houk walked into the living-room and looked around at the couch with its scrumpled-up cushions and its dragged-aside blanket, the empty bottle of wine, the three glasses. ‘I didn’t know that you and Mrs Kerwin were old acquaintances,’ he remarked.

  ‘We’re not. We only met yesterday.’

  ‘Impolite to ask you how?’

  ‘Of course not. I went out to the Anza Borrego Desert to look at that burned-out bus, and Mrs Kerwin was there, tying on a wreath, in memory of her husband.’

  Sergeant Houk nodded. ‘Any particular reason you went out to look at that burned-out bus?’

  ‘Celia was a member of the San Diego Opera, so was Marianna Gomes. I guess it struck me as something of a coincidence that both of them had burned to death within two days of each other.’

  ‘So you went to look at the burned-out bus?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  Sergeant Houk stood in the centre of the living-room with his arms folded, making a show of thinking. ‘Can I ask you what you thought you might find, if you went to look at the burned-out bus?’

  ‘I don’t know. Some kind of clue why Celia might have committed suicide.’

  ‘Oh! And did you?’ asked Sergeant Houk.

  ‘Did I what?’

  ‘Did you find any clues why Celia might have committed suicide?’

  Lloyd gave a small, uncommunicative shake of his head. ‘I guess I didn’t.’

  ‘But you did find Mrs Kerwin? Just by chance?’

  ‘That’s right. We got talking. In the end, I asked her to come back to La Jolla with me for dinner.’

  ‘At your own restaurant, I presume?’

  ‘That’s right. We ate pretty early, as a matter of fact. But Mrs Kerwin seemed to be tired, so I suggested that she leave her car in the parking-lot and come back to my place for a nightcap.’

  Sergeant Houk sniffed. ‘With what intention?’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘What I’m trying to get at, Mr Denman, is what you had in mind when you invited Mrs Kerwin back to your house? Was it just for a drink, or did you have something more serious in mind?’

  Lloyd stared at him indignantly. ‘Are you sick in the head, or what? Both of us had just lost people we loved in the most horrible way you can think of. And you’re trying to suggest that I asked Mrs Kerwin back to my house so that I could seduce her?’

  Sergeant Houk was unfazed. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Denman, I was simply trying to assess the degree of your intimacy with Mrs Kerwin. For all I know, you and Mrs Kerwin might have been acquaintances before these burning occurred.’

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I’
m asking you.’

  ‘You’re not suggesting that I could have burned that bus?’

  Sergeant Houk shrugged as if, well, it was possible sure, now that you came to mention it. ‘You see the difficulty we have here is why Mr Kerwin was riding that bus at all. Or why any of the passengers were riding it. It was chartered by somebody calling himself Jim Ortal, and it was supposed to be a tour by the El Cajon Astronomical Society to visit Mount Palomar Observatory. Of course there is no El Cajon Astronomical Society and there is nobody with the name Ortal at the address that was given. The deposit on the bus and one day’s rental plus full insurance was paid in advance in cash, so there’s no bank account number and no credit card billing address.’

  At that moment, Kathleen’s older sister Lucy came downstairs in her black gingham robe, closely followed by a nine-year-old boy with dark hair and dark circles under his eyes. Lloyd had met Lucy and Tom late last night, when they had returned from visiting Lucy and Kathleen’s parents in Rancho Bernardo. Kathleen had said nothing to Lucy about the unwelcome visit from Otto and Helmwige, and Lloyd had explained the devastated condition of his car by telling her that he had misjudged the turning into the drive, struck the garden wall, and that the car’s fuel hose had fractured and started a fire. Lucy seemed to have believed him, and Tom had thought that any man who could cause such spectacular damage just by turning into somebody’s drive was practically a superhero. And wreck a $65,000 BMW, too!

  Lucy looked very much like Kathleen, only thinner and drier-skinned and more deeply suntanned, and she had acquired a slower Western drawl from all her years in Arizona. ‘Kathleen’ll be down in a minute,’ she said. ‘Have these gentlemen come about your accident?’

  ‘That’s right, ma’am,’ grinned Sergeant Houk. ‘Sorry to disturb you so early.’

  ‘Don’t concern yourself,’ Lucy replied. ‘Would you care for some coffee?’

  ‘Black, please,’ said Detective Gable.

  ‘We won’t. Thank you,’ said Sergeant Houk. ‘We’re kind of pressed for time.’

  ‘Lloyd?’ asked Lucy.

  ‘Yes, black please, Lucy,’ Lloyd told her. Sergeant Houk was beginning to make him feel cornered, and he was glad of a momentary interruption. He didn’t want to tell Sergeant Houk anything about Otto and Helmwige, not yet, not until he understood what Otto and Helmwige were actually into, and what was going to happen when Celia was ‘transformed’. He could imagine far too vividly the police bursting into the house on Paseo Delicias and arresting everybody in sight, and condemning Celia for ever to that strange grey-faced state in which he had seen her last night.

  Lloyd’s whole night had been haunted by echoing, flaring nightmares. He had glimpsed Celia again and again, behind reflecting shop doors, on the opposite side of the street, on bridges, in the rain, masked by the windows of passing cars. He couldn’t logically believe that she was still alive, in any shape, in any form. But he had seen her with his waking eyes and all he could do was to force himself to suspend his disbelief, to open his mind to any possibility, no matter how strange, no matter how grotesque.

  It upset him that she was still in the hands of Otto and Helmwige, but in the end he supposed that there was no alternative for her. Even if they had originally been responsible for her burning herself (and by God he would kill them with his bare hands if he found out that they were), Otto and Helmwige had somehow raised her from the dead. He had to trust them to complete their ritual of ‘transformation’, whatever that was. If that was the only way in which Celia could be whole again, he couldn’t interfere.

  Sergeant Houk paced across to the fireplace and examined the oil-painting of Red Indians in the snow as closely as if it were a Van Dyck. ‘Nice picture’ he remarked.

  ‘Not exactly my taste,’ Lloyd told him.

  ‘Oh, yes. I’ve seen your restaurant. You’re more into what d’you-call-’em, Depressionists.’

  ‘Impressionists.’

  ‘Whatever. They may impress you but they depress the hell out of me.’

  Lloyd said tautly, ‘If it sets your mind at rest, I never met Mrs Kerwin before yesterday, and the only reason I went out to the desert was because I wanted to take a look at the bus. Morbid interest, I guess.’

  ‘Well, I’d say that hits the nail on the head,’ Sergeant Houk replied. ‘Morbid interest, Mr Denman, that’s what you’ve got. But a very special variety of morbid interest.’

  ‘I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You don’t think you know what I’m talking about?’ queried Sergeant Houk. He lifted one hand, and began to count items on his fingers. ‘Your fiancée burns to death in the parking lot of McDonald’s. You meet with Sylvia Cuddy of the San Diego Opera and then she burns to death in her apartment. You talk to Robert Tuggey, a short-order chef at McDonald’s, and he dies in an unexplained fire in his automobile, in the same parking lot where your fiancée died. You visit the wreck of a burned-out bus, in which an acquaintance of yours from the San Diego Opera was killed. The same night, your house is seriously damaged by fire, and you and the widow of another victim of the burned-out bus are seen driving away from the scene of the fire with the interior of your car apparently in flames. This morning I arrive to find not only the interior of your car damaged by fire, but the tyres burned, too.’

  Sergeant Houk had only a couple of fingers left to count on. ‘Mr Denman,’ he said, ‘wouldn’t you say that all of those incidents would lead a reasonable person to believe that you had a morbid interest in fire?’

  Lloyd opened his mouth, then closed it again. Sergeant Houk had obviously spent all night trying to build a circumstantial case against him, but whatever he said, it would only make matters more difficult.

  ‘You’re not going to arrest me, are you?’ he asked.

  ‘No, sir, I’m not going to arrest you. I just wanted you to know how things look from our point of view.’

  ‘I think I’d better speak to my lawyer,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘All right,’ nodded Sergeant Houk. ‘That’s your privilege.’

  Lloyd said, ‘Let me tell you this, though. Whatever it looks like from your point of view, you’re wrong. You’re way off beam. I wasn’t responsible for any of those deaths or any of those fires, and by the time this is over, you’re going to find that out for yourself, and you’re going to knock on my door the same way you did this morning, and you’re going to have to say that you’re sorry.’

  ‘Be my pleasure,’ grinned Sergeant Houk. ‘Come on, detective, I think that’s enough for now.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Detective Gable, without taking his eyes off the tray of coffee that Lucy was carrying into the room.

  ‘You’re going so soon?’ Lucy asked them.

  ‘I think we have everything we need, thank you, ma’am,’ said Sergeant Houk.

  Lloyd showed them to the door, and opened it.

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ Sergeant Houk said, as if it had only just occurred to him. ‘Did you by chance visit a house yesterday morning on Paseo Delicias, at Rancho Santa Fe? When we put out the APB on your car last night, an officer from White Shield Security called in to say that he’d seen a white BMW with the licence plate FISHEE out on Paseo Delicias yesterday morning. He’d also seen a man answering your description entering the property in a manner that made him look twice.’

  Lloyd felt a tightness in his chest. The last thing he wanted was for Sergeant Houk to call at Otto’s house. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you,’ he replied.

  ‘You mean you weren’t there?’

  ‘I mean the security officer must have been mistaken. I told you where I was yesterday, out in the Anza Borrego.’

  ‘Well . . . just asking,’ Sergeant Houk smiled. ‘Have you been back to your house yet?’

  Lloyd shook his head. ‘I was planning on calling my neighbour to find out how bad it was damaged.’

&nbs
p; Sergeant Houk sniffed. ‘It wasn’t as serious as it might have been, that’s what the fire chief told me. Apparently the back roof collapsed, and the kitchen’s burned out, but the main structure is still safe. You were lucky the firefighters got there so quick.’

  He turned to leave, but then he hesitated and said, ‘You’ll stick around, won’t you? And you’ll let me know where I can get in touch?’

  ‘Is that because I’m a suspect?’ asked Lloyd.

  ‘It’s because I don’t want to have to put out a countywide APB every time I want to ask you a couple of questions, okay? Is that reasonable?’

  Lloyd nodded, and closed the door. As an afterthought, he slid the security-chain into place.

  Kathleen came down, wearing jeans and a plain white blouse. ‘What was that all about?’ she asked him.

  ‘Just questions,’ said Lloyd. ‘He seems to have got it into his head that you and I might have planned to burn that bus so that we could collect your husband’s insurance and run off to Acapulco together.’

  ‘You’re not serious!’

  Lloyd swallowed coffee. ‘Almost. But that doesn’t worry me. We didn’t do it, and he can’t produce any evidence that we did. What does worry me is that he knows where I went yesterday morning.’

  ‘You mean to Otto’s house?’ Kathleen asked.

  ‘That’s right. And he’s enough of a keen detective to try checking it out.’

  ‘Oh, God. Otto will think that you tipped him off, won’t he?’

  Lloyd said, ‘That possibility had occurred to me. And Otto isn’t exactly your genial, forgiving type, is he? With any luck, he might allow me one last look at the world, like that cicada.’

  ‘What can we do?’ asked Kathleen.

  Lloyd shrugged. ‘Nothing. Have breakfast. Hope for the best.’

  ‘Piove sul bagnato,’ said Kathleen. ‘It never rains but it pours.’ When she caught Lloyd’s quizzical look, she smiled gently and said, ‘I used to have an Italian boyfriend once. Trouble is, I didn’t fancy the idea of competing with a two-hundred-and-twenty-five-pound arm-wrestler for the rest of my life.’