Still not allowing himself any pause, if he paused he would never get started again (in any direction save doorward, that was), Henry took two steps to the foot of the bed. One of the hairs came sliding across the floor toward him, propelling itself with its tail like a spermatozoon under a microscope.
Henry stepped on it, thumbing the red plastic cap off the spout of the can as he did. He aimed the spout at the bed and squeezed, flicking his wrist back and forth, making sure he got plenty on the floor as well. When the lighter fluid hit the hairlike things, they made high, mewling cries like kittens which had just been born.
“Eggman… eggman… walrus!”
He stepped on another of the hairs and saw that a third was clinging to the leg of his jeans, holding on with its wisp of a tail and trying to bite through the cloth with its still soft teeth.
“Eggman,” Henry muttered, and scraped it off with the side of his other boot. When it tried to squirm away he stepped on it. He was suddenly aware that he was drenched with sweat, sopping from head to toe, if he went out into the cold like this (and he would have to; he couldn’t stay here), he’d probably catch his death.
“Can’t stay here, can’t take no rest!” Henry cried in his new hortatory voice.
He opened the matchbox, but his hands were shaking so badly he spilled half of them on the floor. More of the threadlike worms were crawling toward him. They might not know much, but they knew he was the enemy, all right; they knew that.
Henry got hold of a match, held it up, put his thumb against the tip. A trick Pete had taught him in the way back when. It was your friends who always taught you the finer things, wasn’t it? Like how to give your old pal Beaver a Viking funeral and get n’d of these noisome little snakelets at the same time.
“Eggman!”
He scratched the tip of the match and it popped fire. The smell of the burning sulfur was like the smell that had greeted him when he stepped into the cabin, like the smell of the burly woman’s farts.
“Walrus!”
He flung the match at the foot of the bed, where there was a crumpled duvet now soaked with lighter fluid. For a moment the flame guttered down blue around the little stick, and Henry
thought it would go out. Then there was a soft flump sound, and the duvet grew a modest crown of yellow flames.
“Goo-goo-joob!”
The flames crawled up the sheet, turning the blood soaked into it black. It reached the mass of jelly-coated eggs, tasted them, and found them good. There was a series of thick popping sounds as the eggs began to burst. More of those mewling cries as the worms burned. Sizzling noises as fluid ran out of the burst eggs.
Henry backed out of the room, squirting lighter fluid as he went. He got halfway across the Navajo rug before the can ran empty. He tossed it aside, scratched another match, and tossed it. This time the flump! was immediate, and the flames sprang up orange. The heat baked against his sweat-shiny face, and he felt a sudden urge-it was both strong and joyful-to cast the painters” masks aside and simply stride into the fire. Hello heat, hello summer, hello darkness, my old friend.
What stopped him was as simple as it was powerful. If he pulled the pin now, he would have suffered the unpleasant awakening of all his quiescent emotions to no purpose. He would never be clear on the details of what had happened here, but he might get at least some answers from whoever was flying the helicopters and shooting the animals. If they didn’t just shoot him, too, that was.
At the door, Henry was struck by a memory so clear that his heart cried out inside him: Beaver kneeling in front of Duddits, who is trying to put on his sneaker backwards. Let me fix that, man, Beaver says, and Duddits, looking at him with a wide-eyed perplexity that you could only love, replies. Fit neek?
Henry was crying again. “So long, Beav,” he said. “Love you, man-and that’s straight from the heart.” Then he stepped out into the cold.
6
He walked to the far end of Hole in the Wall, where the woodpile was. Beside it was another tarp, this one ancient, black fading to gray. It was frost-frozen to the ground, and Henry had to yank hard with both hands in order to pull it free. Under it was a tangle of snowshoes, skates, and skis. There was an antediluvian ice-auger, as well.
As he looked at this unprepossessing pile of long-dormant winter gear, Henry suddenly realized how tired he was… except tired was really too mild a word. He had just come ten miles on foot, much of it at a fast trot. He had also been in a car accident and discovered the body of a childhood friend. He believed both his other two childhood friends were likewise lost to him.
If I hadn’t been suicidal to begin with, I’d be stark-raving crazy by now, he thought, and then laughed. It felt good to laugh, but it didn’t make him feel any less tired. Still, he had to get out of here. Had to find someone in authority and tell them what had happened. They might already know-based on the sounds, they sure as shit knew something, although their methods of dealing with it made Henry feel uneasy-but they might not know about the weasels. And the eggs. He, Henry Devlin, would tell them-who better? He was the eggman, after all.
The rawhide lacings of the snowshoes had been chewed by so many mice that the shoes were little more than empty frames. After some sorting, however, he found a stubby pair of crosscountry skis that looked as if they might have been state-of-the-art around 1954 or so. The clamps were rusty, but when he pushed them with both thumbs, he was able to move them enough to take a reluctant grip on his boots.
There was a steady crackling sound coming from inside the cabin now. Henry laid one hand on the wood and felt the heat. There was a clutch of assorted ski-poles leaning under the eave, their handgrips buried in a dirty cobweb caul. Henry didn’t like to touch that stuff-the memory of the eggs and the weasel-thing’s wriggling spawn was still too fresh-but at least he had his gloves on. He brushed the cobwebs aside and sorted through the poles, moving quickly. He could now see sparks dancing inside the window beside his head.
He found a pair of poles that were only a little short for his lanky height and skied clumsily to the comer of the building. He felt like a Nazi snow-trooper in an Alistair MacLean film, with the old skis on his feet and Jonesy’s rifle slung over his shoulder. As he turned around, the window beside which he had been standing blew out with a surprisingly loud report-as if someone had dropped a large glass bowl from a second-story window. Henry hunched his shoulders and felt pieces of glass spatter against his coat. A few landed in his hair. It occurred to him that if he had spent another twenty or thirty seconds sorting through the skis and poles, that exploding glass would have erased most of his face.
He looked up at the sky, spread his hands palms-out beside his cheeks like Al Jolson, and said, “Somebody up there likes me! Hotcha!”
Flames were shooting through the window now, licking up under the eaves, and he could hear more stuff breaking inside as the heat-gradient zoomed. Lamar Clarendon’s father’s camp, originally built just after World War Two, now burning merry hell. It was a dream, surely.
Henry skied around the house, giving it a wide berth, watching as gouts of sparks rose from the chimney and swirled toward the low-bellied clouds. There was still a steady crackle of gunfire off to the east. Someone was bagging their limit, all right. Their limit and more. Then there was that explosion in the west-what in God’s name had that been? No way of telling. If he got back to other people in one piece, perhaps they would tell him.
“If they don’t just decide to bag me, too,” he said. His voice came out in a dry croak, and he realized he was all but dying of thirst. He bent down carefully (he hadn’t been on skis of any type in ten years or more), scooped up a double handful of snow, and took a big mouthful. He let it melt and trickle down his throat. The feeling was heavenly. Henry Devlin, psychiatrist and onetime author of a paper about the Hemingway Solution, a man who had once been a virgin boy and who was now a tall and geeky fellow whose glasses always slid down to the tip of his nose, whose hair was going gray, whose friends were either dead, fled, or changed, this man stood in the open gate of a place to which he would never come again, stood on skis, stood eating snow like a kid eating a Sno-Cone at the Shrine Circus, stood and watched the last really good place in his life bum. The flames came through the cedar shingles. Melting snow turned to steaming water and ran hissing down the rusting gutters. Arms of fire popped in and out of the open door like enthusiastic hosts encouraging the newly arrived guests to hurry up, hurry up, dammit, get your asses in here before the whole place bums down. The mat of red-gold fuzz growing on the granite slab had crisped, lost its color, turned gray. “Good,” Henry muttered under his breath. He was clenching his fists rhythmically on the grips of his ski-poles without being aware of it. “Good, that’s good.”