25

When Annie arrived back at quarter of three that afternoon, her normally frizzy hair flattened around her head in the shape of the helmet she had been wearing, she was in a silent mood that seemed to indicate tiredness and reflection rather than depression. When Paul asked her if everything had gone all right, she nodded.

“Yes, I think so. I had some trouble starting the bike, or I would have been back an hour ago. The plugs were dirty. How are your legs, Paul? Do you want another shot before I take you upstairs?” After almost twenty hours in the dampness, his legs felt as if someone had studded them with rusty nails. He wanted a shot very badly, but not down here. That would not do at all.

“I think I'm all right.” She turned her back to him and squatted. “All right, grab on. But remember what I said about choke-holds and things like that. I'm very tired, and I don't think I'd react very well to funny jokes.”

“I seem to be all out of jokes.”

“Good.” She lifted him with a moist grunt, and Paul had to bite back a scream of agony. She walked across the floor toward the stairs, her head turned slightly, and he realized she was - or might be - looking at the can-littered table. Her glance was short, seemingly casual, but to Paul it seemed to go on for a very long time, and he was sure she would realize the can of lighter fluid was no longer there. It was stuffed down the back of his underpants instead. Long months after his earlier depredations, he had finally summoned up the courage to steal something else… and if her hands slipped up his legs as she climbed the stairs, she was going to grab, more than a handful of his skinny ass.

Then she glanced away from the table with no change of expression, and his relief was so great that the thudding, shifting ascent up the stairs to the pantry was almost bearable. She kept up a very good poker face when she wanted to, but he thought - hoped - that he had fooled her.

That this time he had really fooled her.

26

“I guess I'd like that shot after all, Annie,” he said when she had him back in bed.

She studied his white, sweat-beaded face for a moment, then nodded and left the room.

As soon as she was gone, he slid the flat can out of his underwear and under the mattress. He had not put anything under there since the knife, and he did not intend to leave the lighter fluid there long, but it would have to stay there for the rest of the day. Tonight he intended to put it in another, safer place.

She came back and gave him an injection. Then she put a steno pad and some freshly sharpened pencils on the windowsill and rolled his wheelchair over so it was by the bed.

“There,” she said. “I'm going to get some sleep. If a car comes in, I'll hear it. If we're left alone, I'll probably sleep right through until tomorrow morning. If you want to get up and work in longhand, here's your chair. Your manuscript is over there, on the floor. I frankly don't advise it until your legs start to warm up a little, though.”

“I couldn't right now, but I guess I'll probably soldier along awhile tonight. I understand what you meant about time being short now.”

“I'm glad you do, Paul. How long do you think you need?”

“Under ordinary circumstances, I'd say a month. The way I've been working just lately, two weeks. If I really go into overdrive, five days. Or maybe a week. It'll be ragged, but it'll be there.” She sighed and looked down at her hands with dull concentration. “I know it's going to be less than two weeks.”

“I wish you'd promise me something.” She looked at him with no anger or suspicion, only faint curiosity. “What?”

“Not to read any more until I'm done… or until I have to… you know… “

“Stop?”

“Yes. Or until I have to stop. That way you'll jet the conclusion without a lot of fragmentation. It'll have a lot more punch.”

“It's going to be a good one, isn't it?”

“Yes.” Paul smiled. “It's going to be very hot stuff.”

27

That night, around eight o'clock, he hoisted himself carefully into the wheelchair. He listened and heard nothing at all from upstairs. He had been hearing the same nothing ever since the squeak of the bedsprings announced her lying down at four o'clock in the afternoon. She really must have been tired.

Paul got the lighter fluid and rolled across to the spot by the window where his informal little writer's camp was pitched: here was the typewriter with the three missing teeth in its unpleasant grin, here the wastebasket, here the pencils and pads and typing paper and piles of scrap-rewrite, some of which he would use and some of which would go into the wastebasket.

Or would have, before.

Here, all unseen, was the door to another world. Here too, he thought, was his own ghost in a series of overlays, like still pictures which, when riffled rapidly, give the illusion of movement.

He wove the chair between the piles of paper and the casually stacked pads with the ease of long practice, listened once more, then reached down and pulled out a nine-inch section of the baseboard. He had discovered it was loose about a month ago, and he could see by the thin film of dust on it (Next you'll be taping hairs across it yourself just to make sure, he had thought) that Annie hadn't known this loose piece of board was here. Behind it was a narrow space empty save for dust and a plentiful scattering of mouse-turds.

He stowed the can of Fast-Lite in the space and pushed the board back into place. He had an anxious moment when he was afraid it would no longer fit flush against its mates (and God! her eyes were so fucking sharp!), and then it slipped neatly home.

Paul regarded this a moment, then opened his pad, picked up a pencil, and found the hole in the paper.

He wrote undisturbed for the next four hours - until the points on all three of the pencils she had sharpened for him were written flat - and then he rolled himself back to the bed, got in, and went easily off to sleep.

28

Geoffrey's arms were beginning to feel like white iron. He had been standing in the deep shadows outside the hut which belonged to M'Chibi “Beautiful One” for the last five minutes, looking rather like a too-slim version of the circus strong-man with the Baronesses” trunk poised over his head.

Just as he came to believe that nothing Hezekiah could say would convince M'Chibi to leave his hut, he heard sounds of movement. Geoffrey turned even further, the muscles in his arms now twitching wildly. Chief M'Chibi “Beautiful One” was the Keeper of the Fire, and inside his hut were better than a hundred torches, the head of each coated with a thick, gummy resin. This resin oozed from the low trees of the area, and the Bourka called it Fire-Oil or Fire-Blood-Oil. Like most essentially simple languages, that of the Bourkas could at times be oddly elusive. Whatever you called the stuff, however, there were enough torches in there to get the whole village afire - it would burn like a Guy Fawkes dummy, Geoffrey thought… if, that was, M'Chibi could be gotten out of the way.

Fear not to strike, Boss Ge'ff'y Hezekiah had said. M'Chibi, he come out firs” one, “cause he the fire-man. Hezekiah, he be comin” out secon” one. So you don't be waitin” to see my gold toot” flash! You break that brat's head, damn quick!

But when he actually did hear them coming, Geoffrey felt a moment's doubt in spite of the agony in his arms. Suppose that, just this once, the one