“What’s the harm? So he has a vivid imagination — so what? I think it’s a good sign — even your developmental jerks say so. Right now he wants to be a doctor — last week it was Batman, next week it’ll be one of these cops walking the grounds.”
She was shaking her head. “I don’t agree that his imagination is a good thing. You let him watch too much unsupervised TV. Do you want him to jump off the roof in his Superman pajamas? And it’s cruel of you.”
“What is?”
“Putting it in his head he could be grow up to be a doctor.”
Roy rolled his eyes. “Oh, for Pete’s sake. Suppose he does develop an actual interest in medicine — he’s so much brighter than your ‘experts’ indicate. Can’t you see how he’s blossoming?”
“He’s more like a six-year-old than almost eleven.”
“But a normal six-year-old. And even if he’s not a genius, he could be a male nurse or maybe an orderly. I mean, his vocabulary — ‘quarantine’? How about stethoscope’? How many kids his age with their high IQs know that one?”
She sighed. “It’s just dangerous, getting his hopes up. You’re his hero, Roy. He sees you and wants to be a doctor. It’s cruel.”
Glass shattered and an object came flying through the picture window to the left of the fireplace, knocking a lamp off a table, sailing in like a terrible bird that had caught fire. Helen gasped and Roy, momentarily stunned, realized what he was looking at, as it spun on the wood floor like a deadly top spitting flames — a bottle of fluid, its cloth wick already lit.
“Get away and down!” he yelled at his wife, and bolted to the bottle and grabbed it and thrust it back out through the jagged-toothed aperture in the window. The burning bottle hit the lawn and exploded in a burst of flame that illuminated something scurrying away, something...
...human?
A broad-shouldered creature in black on no discernible legs, its long simian-like arms outstretched, was moving quickly, though the motion was more side to side than forward, and yet in a few eyeblinks he was at the fieldstone wall, climbing it as quickly as a squirrel up the side of a brick building and...
Gone.
Roy yanked off his sports coat and smothered the flames the burning bottle had deposited on the wooden floor. Outside, the fire was ebbing but still vivid in the night and three cops were rushing to where the Molotov cocktail had landed after Roy lobbed it, the trio apparently not having seen the fleeing... man?... who had obviously hurled the makeshift bomb in the first place. A fourth cop joined them, having availed himself of a fire extinguisher and got to work putting out the flames.
Roy went back to Helen and said to her, “It’s all right. Check on Richie,” and got a long-stemmed flashlight from a drawer before going out to join the four officers.
Leon Jackson, a big trimly bearded African-American officer who the chief had left in charge, approached as Roy exited the house and ran down the steps off the porch.
“Did you see it?” Roy asked, almost yelling, though the only sounds were the steamy noise of the fire extinguisher and the snap of the dying flames. “Did any of your men see it?”
“It?”
Roy nodded several times, fast. “If it was a man, it was the damnedest man I ever saw. I think he was in a black sweater, maybe a cap — he went over the wall... there.”
Roy pointed.
Jackson trotted over and sent two of his men out to check the other side of the wall, where a strip of grass bordered trees, then returned to the doctor.
“It was more like... half a man,” Roy said. “But he had legs... or anyway feet, or...”
Jackson put a hand on Roy’s shoulder. “It’s okay, doctor. Just tell me what you saw.”
Roy did, but could add nothing to what he’d already shared, other than, “He scrambled up that wall like a damn monkey. So fast. So goddamn fast...”
Gently, hand still on Roy’s shoulder, Jackson said, “Now, come on, doctor. You can do better than that. What did he look like?”
“I only got a glimpse.”
“Try. You’re a medical man, now. Amputee? Dwarf? Try.”
Roy shook his head. “You’d need Dr. Frankenstein for the right medical opinion on this one. Get Chief Cutter out here, would you?”
“You bet.”
“Sergeant Jackson!”
The cry came from one of the other cops stepping just inside the gate, which they’d opened to check out the perimeter. Jackson jogged over to the officer and Roy followed.
The cop, a skinny guy in his forties who wore an alarmed expression, had a flashlight, too. “You need to see this, Sergeant.”
Roy followed Jackson taking the other officer’s lead, flashlight beams cutting the night. Another cop with a flashlight was already illuminating footprints in soft ground — it had rained a few days ago — trailing into the nearby trees.
The footprints were those of a large man — a barefoot man.
“What the hell,” Jackson said to nobody in particular, “are we looking at?”
“He doesn’t have much of a stride,” the skinny officer said.
Roy said, “Why would he? He’s only about three feet tall.”
All the cops looked at him like he was crazy. Which was exactly how Roy felt.
Before long Roy was back inside, where the fire on the floor was out, the charred sports coat cast aside, an officer taking Polaroid pictures of the blackened, glass-scattered area. Helen was over on the couch sitting next to Richie, who was snuggled against her in his pjs. A lot of lights had been turned on. The boy straightened and smiled as his father approached, then the child’s expression tightened like a fist.
“What the hell was that, Dad?”
“Language,” his mother said, without much conviction.
“Dad says that all the time,” the boy said defensively, then words came tumbling from him: “I saw the fire from my window, Dad. And those cops standing around it like a marshmallow roast. What the... heck’s going on?”
“Is that all you saw?” Roy said, and sat next to them.
“That’s all.”
“Probably some kids. Halloween.”
“Dad, Halloween’s two weeks from now.”
Roy smiled, shrugged. “Sometimes big kids get an early start.”
Richie shook his head. “Kids shouldn’t play with fire, even if they are big.”
“No, they shouldn’t. You better scoot upstairs, son.”
The boy turned to his mother. “Tuck me in again?”
She smiled, took his hand. “You bet.”
“See you in the morning, Dad!”
The officer with the camera had just left when Helen came down. Wind was whistling tunelessly through the open window. Roy stood looking at the scorched floor.
She slipped her arm in her husband’s, looking toward the jagged remains of the picture window. “We’ll need to board that up tomorrow.”
“I’ll take care of it tonight.” He kicked at the shards on the floor. “Guess you believe me now. Unless you think I really know how to put on a show.”
“I believe you.” Her eyes were on the broken window. “You saw something out there. What did you see?”
He didn’t answer at first. Instead he led her back to the couch and they sat again. No cushion between them now. He told her as best he could.
She shivered, held onto his arm again. “Sounds like something out of King Kong.”
“More like Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
They just sat there for a while, the fire dwindling, at once comforting and yet a reminder of the more unpleasant flames that had come sailing through the window not long ago.