lower floor or out of the house altogether.
He vaulted the porch railing and kicked through the snow that had been
thrown up against the front wall by the plow. The door was standing
open in the wind.
When he crossed the threshold, he found tiny drifts beginning to form
among the pots and pans and dishes that were scattered along the front
hall.
No gun. He had no gun. He’d left it in the grader. Didn’t matter.
If they were dead, so was he.
Fire totally engulfed the stairs from the first landing upward, and it
was swiftly spreading down from tread to tread toward the hallway,
flowing almost like a radiant liquid. He could see well because drafts
were sucking nearly all the smoke up and out the roof: no flames in the
study, none beyond the living-room or dining-room archways.
“Heather! Toby!”
No answer.
“Heather!”
He pushed the study door all the way open and looked in there, just to
be sure.
“Heather!”
From the archway he could see the entire living room. Nobody. The
dining-room arch.
“Heather!”
Not in the dining-room, either.
He hurried back through the hall, into the kitchen.
The back door was shut, though it had obviously been opened at some
point, because the tower of housewares had been knocked down.
“Heather!”
“Jack!”
He spun around at the sound of her voice, unable to figure where it had
come from.
“HEATHER!”
“Down here–we need help!”
The cellar door was ajar. He pulled it open, looked down.
Heather was at the landing, a five-gallon can of gasoline in each
hand.
“We need all of it, Jack.”
“What’re you doing? The house is on fire! Get out of there!”
“We need the gasoline to do the job.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Toby’s got it.”
“Got what?” he demanded, going down the steps to her.
“It. He’s got it. Under him,” she said breathlessly.
“Under him?” he asked, taking the cans out of her hands.
“Like he was under it in the graveyard.”
Jack felt as if he’d been shot, not the same pain but the same impact
as a bullet in the chest. “He’s a boy, a little boy, he’s just a
little boy, for Christ’s sake!”
: “He paralyzed it, the thing itself and all its surrogates. You
should’ve seen! He says there isn’t much time. The goddamned thing is
strong, Jack, it’s powerful. Toby can’t keep it under him very long,
and when it gets on top, it’ll never let him go. It’ll hurt him,
Jack.
It’ll make him pay for this. So we have to get it first. We don’t
have time to question him, second-guess him, we just do what he
says.”
She turned away from him, retreated down the lower steps.
“I’ll get two more cans.”
“The house is on fire!” he protested.
“Upstairs. Not here yet.”
Madness.
“Where’s Toby?” he called as she turned out of sight below.
“The back porch!”
“Hurry and get yourself out of there,” he shouted as he lugged ten
gallons of gasoline up the basement stairs of a burning house, unable
to repress mental images of the flaming rivers of gasoline in front of
Arkadian’s station.
He went onto the porch. No fire there yet. No reflections of
second-story flames on the backyard snow, either. The blaze was still
largely at the front of the house.
Toby was standing in his red-and-black ski suit at the head of the
porch steps, his back to the door. Snow churned around him. The
little point on the hood gave him the look of a gnome.
The dog was at Toby’s side. He turned his burly head to look at Jack,
wagged his tail once.
Jack put down the gasoline cans and hunkered beside his son. If his
heart didn’t turn over in his chest when he saw the boy’s face, he felt
as if it did.
Toby looked like death.
“Skipper?”
“Hi, Dad.”
His voice had little inflection. He seemed to be in a daze, as he had
been in front of the computer that morning. He didn’t look at Jack but
stared uphill toward the caretaker’s house, which was visible only when
the dense shrouds of snow were drawn apart by the capricious wind.