Through the swinging door, along the hallway, across the foyer, Joe felt closely pursued by something more than the blatting of the smoke alarm, as though a killer had been in the kitchen, after all, standing so still in a darkish corner that he had watched unnoticed. At the front door, as Joe grasped the knob, he expected a hand to drop upon his shoulder, expected to be spun around and confronted by a smiling assassin.
From behind him came not a hand and not, as he might have expected, a blast of heat, but a hissing cold that first prickled the nape of his neck and then seemed to drill into the summit of his spine, through the base of his skull. He was so panicked that he did not remember opening the door or leaving the house, but found himself crossing the porch, casting off the chill.
He hurried along the brick walk between the perfect box hedges. When he reached the pair of matched magnolias, where large flowers like the white faces of monkeys peered from among the glossy leaves, he glanced back. He was not, after all, being pursued by anyone.
The residential street was quiet but for the muffled blaring of the smoke alarms in the Delmann house: no traffic at the moment, no one out for a walk in the warm August night. On nearby porches and lawns, no one had yet been drawn outside by the commotion. Here the properties were so large and the stately houses so solidly built, with thick walls, that the screams might not have penetrated to the attention of the neighbors, and even the single gunshot might have been apprehended only as a car door slamming or a truck backfiring.
He considered waiting for the firemen and police, but he could not imagine how he would convincingly describe what had transpired in that house in a mere three or four hellish minutes. As he had lived those feverish events, they had seemed hallucinatory, from the sound of the shotgun to the moment when Lisa swathed herself in flames; and now they were like fragments of a deeper dream in the ongoing nightmare of his life.
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-tire 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 neighbors 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
9
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 favored 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 traveled 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.
The dancers in bathing suits, bare limbs molten-bronze from the firelight, shook their shoulders and rolled their hips, dipped and swayed, beat their supple arms like wings or clawed at the radiant air, and to Joe each celebrant seemed to be two entities at the same time. Each was a real person, yes, but each was also a marionette, controlled by an unseen puppet master, string-tugged into postures of jubilation, winking glass eyes and cracking wooden smiles and laughing with the thrown voices of hidden ventriloquists, for the sole purpose of deceiving Joe into believing that this was a benign world that merited delight.
He passed a group of ten or twelve young men in swimming trunks. Their discarded wetsuits glistened like piles of sealskins or flayed eels or some other harvest of the sea. Their upended surfboards cast Stonehenge shadows across the sand. Testosterone levels were so high among them that the air virtually smelled of it, so high that it made them not rowdy but slow and murmurous, almost somnambulant with primal male fantasies.
The dancers, the storyteller and his audience, the surfers, and everyone else whom Joe passed watched him warily. This was not his imagination. Though their glances were mostly surreptitious, he was aware of their attention.
He wouldn’t have been surprised if all of them worked for Teknologik or for whoever funded Teknologik.
On the other hand, although wading deep in paranoia, he was still sane enough to realize that he carried with him the unspeakable things he had seen at the Delmann house — and that these horrors were visible in him. The experience carved his face, painted a dull sheen of desolation in his eyes, and sculpted his body into angles of rage and dread. When he passed, the people on the beach saw a tormented man, and they were all city dwellers who understood the danger of tormented men.