The fire would destroy much of the evidence of suicide, and the police would detain him for questioning—then possibly on suspicion of murder. They would see a deeply troubled man who had lost his way after losing his family, who held no job, who lived in one room above a garage, who was gaunt from weight loss, whose eyes were haunted, who kept twenty thousand dollars in cash in the spare-tyre well in the trunk of his car. His circumstances and his psychological profile would not dispose them to believe him even if his story had not been so far beyond the bounds of reason.
Before Joe could win his freedom, Teknologik and its associates would find him. They had tried to shoot him down merely because Rose might have told him something they didn’t want known—and now he knew more than he’d known then, even if he didn’t have any idea what the hell to make of it. Considering Teknologik’s suspected connections to political and military power grids, Joe more likely than not would be killed in jail during a meticulously planned altercation with other prisoners well paid to waste him. If he survived jail, he would be followed on his release and eliminated at the first opportunity.
Trying not to break into a run and thereby draw attention to himself, he walked to the Honda across the street.
At the Delmann house, kitchen windows exploded. Following the brief ringing of falling glass, the shriek of the smoke alarm was considerably more audible than previously.
Joe glanced back and saw fire writhing out of the back of the house. The lamp oil served as an accelerant: Just inside the front door, which he had left standing open, tongues of fire already licked the walls of the downstairs hallway.
He got in the car. Pulled the door shut.
He had blood on his right hand. Not his own blood.
Shuddering, he popped open the console between the seats and tore a handful of tissues from a box of Kleenex. He scrubbed at his hand.
He stuffed the wadded tissues into the bag that had contained the burgers from McDonald’s.
Evidence, he thought, although he was guilty of no crime.
The world had turned upside down. Lies were truth, truth was a lie, facts were fiction, the impossible was possible, and innocence was guilt.
He dug in his pockets for keys. Started the engine.
Through the broken-out window in the backseat, he heard not only the smoke alarms, several of them now, but neighbours shouting at one another, cries of fright in the summer night.
Trusting that their attention would be on the Delmann place and that they would not even notice him departing, Joe switched on the headlights. He swung the Honda into the street.
The lovely old Georgian house was now the domicile of dragons, where bright presences with incendiary breath prowled from room to room. While the dead lay in shrouds of fire, multiple sirens rose like lamentations in the distance.
Joe drove away into a night grown too strange to comprehend, into a world that no longer seemed to be the one into which he had been born.
THREE
ZERO POINT
1
This Halloween light in August, as orange as pumpkin lanterns but leaping high from pits in the sand, made even the innocent seem like debauched pagans in its glow.
On a stretch of beach where bonfires were permitted, ten blazed. Large families gathered at some, parties of teenagers and college students at others.
Joe walked among them. The beach was one he favoured on nights when he came to the ocean for therapy, although usually he kept his distance from the bonfires.
Here the decibels of chatter were off the top of the scale, and barefoot couples danced in place to old tunes by the Beach Boys. But here a dozen listeners sat enthralled as a stocky man with a mane of white hair and a reverberant voice spun a ghost story.
The day’s events had altered Joe’s perception of everything, so it seemed he was looking at the world through a pair of peculiar glasses won in a game of chance on the midway of a mysterious carnival that travelled from venue to venue in whisper-quiet black trains, spectacles with the power not to distort the world but to reveal a secret dimension that was enigmatic, cold, and fearsome.