“Was I the hero who saved the day?”
She shook her head. “No. You were crying. You were screaming, Daddy.”
He frowned and said, “Hon—”
“You were pulling on my arm and it hurt. But I didn’t want you to stop. I didn’t want you to let go. Because then the monsters would get me.”
He kissed her forehead a second time, then said, “There’s no such thing as monsters, Ellie. You know that.”
“Yeah, I know. Come on.” She smiled, and he thought—strangely—that it was solely for his sake.
“Yeah,” he said. “Come on.”
When he stood, she said, “Good night, Dad.”
“Good night, Little Spoon. I love you.”
“Love you, too.”
For the next hour or so, he sat on the couch watching an old movie, though he really wasn’t paying much attention to it. He couldn’t relax. A few times, his gaze drifted away from the TV, settling instead on some dark corner of the room. He saw the blood in Deke’s toilet, watched those tiny bits of blackened fibers in Deke’s sink take on life and begin twisting and jerking furtively in the thick pool of blood. After a while, he found he was sweating profusely.
He got up, shut off the TV, and locked the front door. The gauzy curtains over the bay windows were drawn, but a strange, dancing light beyond them was enough to attract his attention. He went to the windows and swept aside the curtains.
Deke Carmody’s house was on fire. Pillars of flame belched from the windows, and there were black columns of smoke rising up in front of the moon. A number of neighbors stood outside on their lawns, watching. As David stared, two fire trucks turned onto Columbus, sirens wailing.
David was out of the house and running down the street a moment later, the cool night air speckled with rain freezing against his skin. But the soft rain did little to staunch the flames blooming from Deke’s house. A wall of heat struck David halfway down the block, causing his eyes to water as he approached.
“Where is he?” he asked the neighbors who had gathered on the lawns across the street. “Where’s Deke?”
“No one’s seen him,” said Lucy Cartwright, holding her silk robe closed with two hands. She couldn’t peel her eyes off the burning house across the street.
There were police officers here, too, and they waved away the more curious onlookers. David rushed over to one of them and shouted, “The owner of that house—has he been—”
“Step back,” directed the officer.
“There’s a man inside that house!”
“Sir,” said the officer, placing a hand against David’s chest. “I said to step back. Everyone’s doing their job.”
“You don’t—” David began, but was silenced as something exploded inside Deke’s house. It was a deep-bellied whump, followed by a rolling wave of thick, hot air. One whole side of Deke’s house blew out, spraying debris across the lawn and against the Bannisters’ house next door. A ball of flame roiled out, casting the faces of the nearest onlookers in a pale yellow light. Cops and firemen quickly motioned for people to get back, get back.
After a time, it began to rain harder, but it did little to douse the flames. When the roof caved in, a second fireball belched up into the night sky. A few people cried out, and many more sobbed. By morning, Deke Carmody’s house was nothing but a charred frame of struts and smoldering black boards, and it took firefighters much of the afternoon to locate Deke’s remains.
10
The stranger staring back at him in the mirror had his eyes. Beyond that, there were no other similarities. His hair was freshly cropped and dyed black, his complexion sallow and seamed with hairline creases around the eyes, mouth, and nose. It was like staring at himself wearing the mask of another.
He cleaned up the dye and the shorn bits of hair, collecting them in the plastic shopping bag where he’d previously stowed Ellie’s hair clippings. He cleaned the dye from the sink, a task that proved more monumental than he would have thought. He kept dumping wet globs of dye-blackened tissues down the toilet. He had gotten some dye on one of the bath towels, so he tucked that into the shopping bag, as well. After he finished, his fingertips looked as if he’d been printed at a police station.
When he stepped back into the room, he said, “So, what do you think of the new ’do?” He was grinning like a fool, trying to mitigate the seriousness of it all, but he stopped when he saw Ellie peeking through a part in the drapes. The smile fell from his face. “What are you doing?”
“There’s people fighting outside, I think,” she said, quickly pulling her face away from the drapes. “A lady’s out there crying.”