“Not in the chair. Not underfoot.
“The door’s open. Sophie’s dazed, she lets out a little cry—Ah!—and looks at me. See, I was its daddy. I was supposed to do something. That’s why she’d come and all. God. Just the thought of this thing running around loose in my house gave me the willies. I went out in the hall. Nobody. Then I saw it climbing up the stairs. Stair by stair. It looked—what’s the word—purposefuclass="underline" like it knew where it was going. So I said, ‘Hey, wait a second, buster—’ I couldn’t think of it as a girl—and I reached for its arm. It felt weird, cold and dry, like leather. It looked back at me with this look of hate—who the fuck are you—and it gave a pull away, and I pulled back, and—” George sat again, overcome. “It tore. I tore a hole in the god damn thing. Rrrrip. A hole opened up near its shoulder, and you could look in, like into a doll—empty. I let go fast. It didn’t seem to be hurt, it just flapped the arm, like damn now it’s busted, and crawled on; and its blanket was coming off, and I could see there were some other cracks and splits here and there—at the knees, you know, and the ankles. This kid was falling apart.
“Okay. Okay. What could I think then? I came back in here. Sophie’s bundled up, with these big eyes. ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘It ain’t Lilac. And it ain’t mine, either.’
“She broke down. Like dissolved. That was the last straw. She just melted, man it was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen—‘You’ve got to help me, you’ve got to’—you know. Okay, Okay, I’ll help; but what in hell am I supposed to do? She didn’t know. Up to me. ‘Where is she?’ Sophie asked me.
“ ‘Went upstairs,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s cold. There’s a fire up there.’ And she suddenly gave me this look—horrified, but just too tired to do anything or even really feel anything—I can’t describe it. She grabbed my hand and said, ‘Don’t let her go near the fire, please, please!’
“Now what’s that about? I said, ‘Look, you just sit here and get warm and I’ll see.’ What the hell I was going to see I didn’t know. I picked up the baseball bat—be prepared, you know—and I went out, and she was still pleading: ‘Don’t let her get near the fire.’
George mimed creeping up the stairs, and entering the second-floor drawing-room. “I go in, and there it was. By the fire. Sitting on the whatchacallit, the hearth there. And I can not believe my eyes: because as it sits there it’s reaching into the fire—yes!— reaching into the fire and picking out, you know, glowing embers: picking them out, and popping them into its mouth.”
He came close to Auberon, this could not be believed unless he gripped Auberon’s wrist in pledge of his truthfulness. “And crunching them.” George made the gesture: like eating a walnut. “Ca-runch. Ca-runch. And smiling at me—smiling. You could see the coals glowing inside its head. Like a jack o’lantern. Then they’d go out, and it’d pick out another. And boy, it was getting a lot livelier behind this, Chipper, you know, a little refreshment; it jumps up, does a little dance. Naked now, too, Like a little broken evil plaster cherub. I swear-to-god nothing: nothing has ever scared me like that. I was so scared I couldn’t think, I just moved. You know? Too scared to be scared.
“I went over to the fire. I picked up the shovel. I dug up a whole lotta hot stuff from deep inside the fire. I showed it: mmm mmm good. Follow me, follow me. Okay, it wants to play this game, hot chestnuts, very hot chestnuts, come on, come on, we went out and up the stairs, it keeps reaching for the shovel; uh-uh, no no, I keep leading it on.
“Now listen, man. I don’t know if I was crazy or what. All I knew was that this thing was evil: I mean not evil evil, because I don’t think it was anything, I mean it was like a doll or a puppet or a machine, but moving on its own, like awful things in dreams that you know aren’t alive, piles of old clothes or mounds of grease that suddenly get up and start threatening you, okay? Dead, but moving. Animated. But evil, I mean an awful evil thing to have in the world. All I could think of was: get rid of it. Lilac or no Lilac. Just. Get. Rid of it.
“So anyway it’s following me. And up on the third floor across from the library is my, you know, my studio. Okay? Get the picture? The door is closed, of course; I closed it when I came down, always did, can’t be too careful. So I’m fumbling with it, and the thing is looking at me with these eyes that weren’t eyes, and oh shit any minute now it’s going to figure out the scam. I shove the shovel under it’s nose. The damn door won’t open, won’t open, then it does—and—”
With a mighty imaginary gesture, George heaved the shovelful of live coals into the studio filled with charged fireworks. Auberon held his breath.
“And then for the kid—”
With a swift, careful kick, side of the foot, George propelled the false Lilac into the studio also.
“And then the door!” He flung shut the door, staring at Auberon with the same wild horror and hurry that must have been in his eyes that night. “So done! Done! I flew down the stairs. ‘Sophie! Sophie! Run!’ She’s still sitting in that chair—right there—paralyzed. So I picked her up—not exactly carried her, but like a bum’s rush, because I can already hear the noises upstairs—and get her out into the hall. Bang! Blooey! Out the front door.
“And we stood out there in the rain, man, just looking up. Or anyway I looked up, she just sort of hid her head. And out the studio windows comes my whole show. Stars. Rockets. Magnesium, phosphorus, sulfur. Light for days. Noise. Stuff is falling all around us, hissing in the puddles. Then blowey! Some big cache goes up, and puts a hole right through the roof. Smoke and stars, boy we lit up the neighborhood. But the rain had got a lot worse; and pretty soon it was out, about the time the cops and the fire-trucks got there.
“Well, I had the studio pretty well reinforced, you know, steel door and asbestos and stuff, so the building didn’t go. But by God if there was anything left of that kid, or whatever it was…” .
“And Sophie?” Auberon said.
“Sophie,” George said. “I told her: ‘Listen, it’s all right. I got it.’
“ ‘What?’ she says. ‘What?’
“ ‘I got it,’ I said. ‘I blew it up,’ I said. ‘Nothing left of it.’
“And hey: do you know what she said to me?”
Auberon could not say.
“She looked up at me—and man I don’t think anything I saw that night was as bad as her face just then—and she said: ‘You killed her.’
“That’s what she said. ‘You killed her.’ That’s all.”
George sat down, weary, depleted, at the kitchen table. “Killed her,” he said. “That’s what Sophie thought, that I’d killed her only child. Maybe that’s what she still thinks, I don’t know. That old George killed her only child, and his too. Blew her up, in stars and stripes forever.” He looked down. “Man, I don’t want to see somebody look at me the way she did that night, not ever again.”