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.
"Are you between?" Jack asked, dismayed by the tremor in his voice.
"Yeah. Between."
"Is that a good idea?"
"Yeah."
"Aren't you afraid of it?"
"Yeah. That's okay."
"What're you staring at?"
"Blue light."
"I don't see any blue light."
"When I was asleep."
"You saw a blue light in your sleep?"
"In the caretaker's house."
"Blue light in a dream?"
"Might have been more than a dream."
"So that's where it is?"
"Yeah. Part of me too."
"Part of you is in the caretaker's house?"
"Yeah. Holding it under."
"We can actually burn it?"
"Maybe. But we've got to get all of it."
Harlan Moffit clumped onto the back porch, carrying two cans of gasoline.
"Lady in there give me these, told me to bring em out here. She your wife?"
Jack rose to his feet. "Yeah. Heather. Where is she?"
"Went down for two more," Harlan said, "like she doesn't know the house is on fire."
In the backyard, there were reflections of fire on the snow now, probably from the main roof or from Toby's room. Even if the blaze hadn't yet spread all the way down the front stairs, the whole house would soon be engulfed when the roof fell into second-floor rooms and second-floor rooms fell into those below them.
Jack started toward the kitchen, but Harlan Moffit put down the fuel cans and grabbed him by the arm.
"What the hell's going on here?"
Jack tried to pull away from him. The chubby, bearded man was stronger than he looked… "You tell me your family's in danger, going to die any minute, trapped somehow, but then we get here and what I see is your family is the danger, setting fire to their own house by the look of it."
From the second floor came a great creaking and a shuddering crash as something caved in, wall or ceiling.
Jack shouted, "Heather!"
He tore loose from Harlan and made it into the kitchen just as Heather climbed out of the basement with two more cans. He grabbed one of them from her and guided her toward the back door.
"Out of the house now," he ordered.
"That's it," she said. "No more down there."
Jack paused at the pegboard to get the keys to the caretaker's cottage, then followed Heather outside.
Toby had already started up the long hill, trudging through snow that was knee-high in some places, hardly up to his ankles in others. It was nowhere as deep as out on the fields, because the wind relentlessly swept the slope between the house and the higher woods, even scouring it to bare ground in a few spots.
Falstaff accompanied him, a brand-new dog but as faithful as a lifelong companion. Odd. The finest qualities of character-rare in humankind and perhaps rarer still in what other intelligent species might share the universe-were common in canines. Sometimes, Jack wondered if the species created in God's image was, in fact, not one that walked erect but one that padded on all fours with a tail behind.
Picking up one of the cans on the porch to go with the one she already had, Heather hurried into the snow.
"Come on!"
"You going to burn down the house uphill now?" Harlan Moffit asked dryly, evidently having glimpsed that other structure through the snow.
"And we need your help."
Jack carried two of the remaining four cans to the steps, knowing Moffit must think they were all mad.
The bearded man was obviously intrigued but also spooked and wary.
"Are you people plumb crazy, or don't you know there's better ways of getting rid of termites?"
There was no way to explain the situation in a reasonable and methodical fashion, especially not when every second counted, so Jack went for it, took the plunge off the deep end, and said, "Since you knew I was the new fella in these parts, maybe you also know I was a.cop in L.A. not some flaky screenwriter with wild ideas-just a cop, a working stiff like you. Now, it's going to sound nuts, but we're in a fight here against something that isn't of this world, something that came here when Ed-"
"You mean aliens?" Harlan Moffit interrupted.
He could think of no euphemism that was any less absurd. "Yeah.
Aliens. They-"
"I'll be a fucking sonofabitch!" Harlan Moffit said, and smacked one meaty fist into the palm of his other hand. A torrent of words burst from him: "I knew I'd get to see one sooner or later.
Read about them all the time in the Enquirer. And books. Some are good aliens, some bad, and some you'll never figure out in a month of Sundays-just like people. These are real bad bastards, huh? Come whirling down in their ships, did they? Holy shit on a holy shingle!
And me here for it!" He grabbed the last two cans of gasoline and charged off the porch, uphill through the bright reflections of flame that rippled like phantom flags across the snow. "Come on, come on-let's waste these fuckers!"
Jack would have laughed if his son's sanity and life had not been balanced on a thin line, a thread, a filament. Even so, he almost sat down on the snow-packed porch steps, almost let the giggles and the guffaws come. Humor and death were kin, all right.
Couldn't face the latter without the former. Any cop knew as much.
And life was absurd, down to the deepest foundations of it, so there was always something funny in the middle of whatever hell was blowing up around you at the moment. Atlas wasn't carrying the world on his shoulders, no giant muscular hulk with a sense of responsibility, the world was balanced on a pyramid of clowns, and they were always tooting horns and wobbling and goosing each other. But even though it was absurd, though life could be disastrous and funny at the same time, people still died. Toby might still die. Heather. All of them.
Luther Bryson had been making jokes, laughing, seconds before he took a swarm of bullets in the chest.
Jack hurried after Harlan Moffit. The wind was cold.
The hill was slippery.
The day was hard and gray. o Climbing the sloped backyard, Toby pictured himself in a green boat on a cold black sea. Green because it was his favorite color. No land anywhere in sight.
Just his little green boat and him in it. The sea was old, ancient, older than ancient, so old that it had come alive in a way, could.think, could want things and need to have its way. The sea wanted to rise on all sides of the little green boat, swamp it, drag it down a thousand fathoms into the inky water, and Toby with it, ten thousand fathoms, twenty thousand, down and down to a place with no light but strange music. In his boat, Toby had bags of Calming Dust, which he'd gotten from someone important, maybe from Indiana Jones, maybe from E.T maybe from Aladdin-probably from Aladdin, who got it from the Genie. He kept scattering the Calming Dust on the sea as his little green boat puttered along, and though the dust seemed light and silvery in his hands, lighter than feathers, it became hugely heavy when it hit the water, but heavy in a funny way, in a way that didn't make it sink, magical Calming Dust that crushed the water flat, made the sea as smooth and ripple-free as a mirror. The ancient sea wanted to rise up, swamp the boat, but the Calming Dust weighed it down, more than iron, more than lead, weighed it down and kept it calm, defeated it. Deep in the darkest and coldest canyons below its surface, the sea raged, furious with Toby, wanting more than ever to kill him, drown him, bash his body to pieces against shoreline rocks, wear him away with its waters until he would be just sand. But it couldn't rise, couldn't rise, all was calm on the surface, peaceful and calm, calm.