His eyes were not red liquid pools any longer. Instead, fire licked out of the sockets, lapping up over his eyebrows, as though he was just the hollow figure of a man, made of wicker, burning from the inside out.
Harry was on his feet. His legs were shaky.
All he wanted was to get out of there. Burning drapes covered the window. The hobo was in the doorway. No exit.
The vagrant turned and snapped his wrist in the manner of a magician revealing a dove, and another white-hot churning sphere spun across the room, smashed into the dresser, burst like a Molotov cocktail, showering flames. The dresser mirror shattered. Wood split, drawers popped open, and the conflagration spread.
Smoke curled out of his beard, and fire spat from his nostrils. His hooked nose blistered and began to melt. His mouth was open in a shout, but the only sounds he made were the hiss, pop, and crackle of combustion. He exhaled a pyrotechnic cascade, sparks in all the colors of the rainbow, and then flames shot from his mouth. His lips curled up as crisp as deep-fried pork rinds, turned black, and peeled back from smouldering teeth.
Harry saw snakes of flame wriggle up the wall from the dresser and onto the ceiling. In places the carpet was burning.
Already the heat was tremendous. Soon the air would be full of acrid smoke.
Bright flares squirted out of the three bullet holes in the vagrant’s chest, red and gold fire instead of blood. He flicked his wrist once more, and a third bright sputtering globe erupted from his hand.
The hissing mass streaked at Harry. He dropped into a crouch. It passed over his head, so close that he protected his face with one arm and cried out when the wake of searing heat washed over him. The bedclothes erupted into flames as if they had been soaked in gasoline.
When Harry looked up, the doorway was empty. The vagrant was gone.
He scooped the revolver off the floor and rushed into the hall, with the carpet sprouting flames around his stockinged feet. He was glad his socks were sopping wet.
The hallway was deserted, which was good, because he didn’t want another confrontation with… with whatever the hell he’d just had a confrontation with, not if bullets didn’t work. The kitchen to his left. He hesitated, then stepped in front of the doorway, gun at the ready. Fire eating the cabinets, curtains flapping like the skirts of dancers in Hell, smoke rolling toward him. He kept moving. The foyer ahead, living room to the right, where the thing must have gone, thing not hobo. He was reluctant to pass the archway, afraid the thing would plunge out at him, seize him in its incandescent hands, but he had to get out fast, the place was filling with smoke, and he was coughing, unable to draw enough clean air.
Edging to the foyer with his back against the hallway wall, facing the arch, Harry kept the gun in front of him, more because of training and habit than because he had any faith in its efficacy. Anyway, only one round remained in the cylinder.
The living room was burning, too, and in the middle stood the fiery figure, fully engulfed, arms spread wide to embrace the torrid tempest, consumed by it yet obviously in no pain, perhaps even in a state of rapture. Each lambent caress of flame seemed to be a source of perverse pleasure to the thing.
Harry was sure that it was watching him from within its shrouds of fire. He was afraid it might suddenly approach, arms still in a cruciform posture, to pin him against the wall again.
He crabbed sideways past the archway into the small foyer, as a black tide of smothering, blinding smoke rolled down the hall from the bedroom and submerged him. The last thing Harry saw was his soggy shoes, and he snatched them up in the same hand with which he held the gun. The smoke was so dense that no light penetrated to the foyer even from the leaping flames behind him. Anyway, his eyes stung and flooded with tears; he was forced to squeeze them tight shut. In the tarry blackness, there was a danger of becoming disoriented, even in such a small space.
He held his breath. One inhalation would be toxic enough to bring him to his knees, choking, dizzy. But he hadn’t been getting clean air since the master bedroom, so he wasn’t going to be able to hold out long, a few seconds. Even as he scooped up the shoes, he grabbed for the doorknob, couldn’t find it in the darkness, fumbled, began to panic, but closed his left hand around it. Locked. Dead-bolt latch. His lungs were hot, as if fire had gotten into them. Chest ached. Where was the dead-bolt? Should be above the knob. He wanted to breathe, found the dead-bolt, had to breathe, couldn’t, disengaged the lock, was aware of a growing inner darkness more dangerous than the outer one, grasped the knob, tore the door open, plunged outside. The smoke was still around him, sucked out by the cool night, and he had to weave to the right to find clean air, the first breath of which was painfully icy in his lungs.
In the garden courtyard, where walkways wound among azaleas and plum-thorn hedges and lush beds of English primrose, with the U-shaped building around him, Harry blinked furiously, clearing his vision. He saw a few neighbors coming out of their apartments onto the lower promenade, and above were two people on the second-story promenade by which all of the upper apartments were accessed. They’d probably been drawn by the gunfire, because it was not a neighborhood where that sound was common. They were staring in shock at him and at the plumes of oily smoke churning out of his front door, but he didn’t think he’d heard anybody yelling “fire,” so he began to shout it, and then the others picked up the cry.
Harry sprinted to one of the two alarm boxes along the ground-floor promenade. He dropped his gun and shoes, and yanked down the lever that broke the fogged glass. Bells clanged stridently.
To his right the living-room window of his own condo, which faced the courtyard, blew out and showered glass onto the concrete deck of the promenade. Smoke followed, and whipping pennants of fire, and Harry expected to see the burning man climb out through the broken window and continue the pursuit.
Crazily, a line from a movie theme song flashed through his mind: Who you gonna call? GHOSTBUSTERS!
He was living in a Dan Aykroyd movie. He might have found it funny if he hadn’t been so scared that his thudding heart was halfway up his throat.
Sirens rose in the distance, fast approaching.
He ran from door to door, pounding with his fists on each. More soft explosions. A strange metallic screech. Ceaselessly clanging alarm bells. Sequenced bursts of shattering glass rang like hundreds of wind chimes hammered by an erratically gusting storm. Harry didn’t look back for the source of any of the sounds, kept moving from door to door.
When the sirens grew to dominate all other sounds and seemed to be only a couple of blocks away, he was finally confident that everyone in the building had been alerted and gotten out. People were scattered across the courtyard garden, staring up at the roof or watching the street for the fire engines, horrified and scared, stunned silent or weeping.
He raced back to the first alarm box and pulled on his shoes, which he’d left there. He snatched up his revolver, stepped over a border of azaleas, waded through bloom-laden primrose, and splashed through a couple of puddles on a concrete walkway.
Only then did he realize the rain had stopped falling during the few minutes he had been in his apartment. The ficus and palm trees were still dripping, as was the shrubbery. The wet fronds and leaves were bejeweled with thousands of tiny ruby reflections of the growing fire.
He turned and, like his neighbors, looked back at the building, ” startled to see how fast the blaze was spreading. The apartment above his was engulfed. At broken windows, bloody tongues of flame licked across the remaining teeth of glass that bristled from the frames. Smoke billowed, and dreadful light pulsed and sputtered against the night.