Demon's Door (18 page)

‘Oh, Jimmy-wimmy,' she breathed, one hand gripping his bare shoulder. ‘You can teach me now, if you feel like it.'

He licked her again, and again, and at the same time she took hold of his bone-hard penis in her hand and slowly stroked it.

There was silence between them for a while. Jim continued to lick her until her back began to arch and she began to breathe faster and deeper. He could feel every muscle in her body begin to clench. He could almost feel what it was like to be her, with that clockspring tightening inside her. She was so juicy now that he was almost drinking her. His penis was dripping, too, so that her fingers were slippery.

He was happy. There was no other word for it. He was so excited that he was practically delirious, but most of all he was happy. He was Jimmy Rook, making love to a beautiful young blonde, and she was huge-breasted and long-legged and silky-haired and she was funny, too, and that was all he cared about.

But then for no accountable reason Jim Rook made one of his cutting observations inside his mind and immediately spoiled it all, just the way he had spoiled almost every other relationship he had ever had with a woman. Jim Rook thought,
Look at me, dipping my head up and down, lapping up Summer like Tibbles lapping up his milk
.

The thought totally threw him. He lifted up his head, breathing hard, but his penis started to soften. Summer kept rubbing at him, but the more forcefully she rubbed the softer he became. He stayed where he was for a moment, with his eyes closed and his head tilted back, but then he dropped sideways on to the pillow next to her, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘What's wrong, Jimmy?' she said, frowning at him through a fine curtain of blonde hair. ‘Don't tell me you've suddenly gone all guilty on me. I
am
old enough, you know. I'm even old enough to drink.'

He took hold of her fingers and squeezed them together, and then kissed her fingertips. ‘I'm sorry, Summer. It's not you. You're beautiful and you're bright and you don't even know how wonderful you've been tonight, you really don't.'

‘Then what is it? You've suddenly remembered that you're a faggot?'

Jim shook his head. ‘I'm not a faggot and I know you're old enough. It's
me
. It's me and my ghosts – me and my goddamned demons. There's always a little nasty niggling imp in the back of my mind who won't trust anybody or anything, and won't take anything at face value. Like, is this really real, or are you dreaming it?' He didn't tell her what he had thought about Tibbles.

‘You do like me, then?' Summer asked him.

He brushed the hair away from her face and kissed her. ‘Hey – a little more than
like
.'

‘Then where do we go from here? Do you want us to go back to bumping into each other on the landing, every now and then, and saying “hi, how's it hanging?” and nothing else?'

Jim looked into her eyes. He had always known they were blue, but he had never realized before what a complicated collection of blues they were, like broken fragments of cornflowers and sapphires and sky, all jumbled up together in a kaleidoscope. She was right: he always spoke to people as they were sitting behind a row of desks, and even though he cared about them, he never looked at them closely enough. Not as close as this.

‘No,' he said, clearing his throat. ‘I don't want to go back to that.'

She put her arm around him. ‘In that case, Jimmy-wimmy, maybe we should try again. Tell your nasty little imp to stay in his box for an hour or two, and we'll see what we can do with Mr McFloppy.'

‘OK. I'll try.'

She kissed his arm. ‘You're real
skinny
, you know. You need to build up your upper body. Maybe I should take you to the gym. But we can start by exercising your love muscle, can't we?'

She took hold of his penis again, and stretched it out like saltwater taffy.

Jim said, ‘Careful . . . it does have a breaking-point!' Summer giggled and yanked it even harder. Just as she did so, however, they heard a loud crack, like breaking glass, followed by a high, despairing scream. Then there was another scream, and another, and each scream was so different from the last that they sounded like a chorus.

‘Jesus, what's that?' said Jim. He scrabbled for his shorts, bunny-hopped into them, and hobbled toward the bedroom door, still pulling them up. Summer reached for her T-shirt but she couldn't find her thong in the tangled bedclothes so she went across to her closet and pulled out a short denim skirt.

Jim opened the front door. At first he thought that the automobiles parked on the opposite side of the street were on fire, but then he realized that the orange flames that were dancing in their windows were reflected from Mrs LaFarge's apartment downstairs. He ran barefoot down the steps to the landing below, with Summer following close behind him.

Flames were leaping out of the window, as well as thick showers of sparks, which whirled up into the yucca trees. It looked as if the interior of Mrs LaFarge's apartment was already a furnace. Shielding his face with his upraised arm, Jim could see a couch blazing from end to end, and two blazing armchairs. The television had imploded, and flames were pouring out of the empty screen. A large framed photograph of Mr and Mrs LaFarge on their wedding day was slowly being scorched black from the bottom upward, so that the happy couple looked as if they were sinking into a tarpit.

Jim couldn't see Mrs LaFarge anywhere. He shouted at Summer, ‘Call the fire department! I'm going to see if Violette is still inside!'

‘Jimmy! You can't! It's too dangerous!'

‘Call the fire department! And tell them we'll probably need paramedics too, while you're at it!'

Summer hurried back up to her apartment. Jim stood in front of Mrs LaFarge's front door for a moment, trying to decide if it was a good idea to kick it open or not. The fire was burning with a loud hollow roaring noise, punctuated by the crackling of broken glass.

He had almost decided that it would be safer to wait for the fire department when he heard another scream, so distorted that it barely sounded human. Then another, more of an agonized wail. He didn't have any choice. He stepped back as far as the railings, and then he took two quick steps toward the front door and kicked it.

He heard the frame splinter, but the door stayed shut. He stepped back again, took a deep breath, and then rushed at it again, kicking it so hard that he was jarred by the impact all the way up to his hip.

The door burst open. Inside, the hallway was filled with fire, from floor to ceiling. Standing in the center of this fire, her arms spread wide as if she were being crucified, stood Mrs LaFarge, wearing nothing but flames.

ELEVEN

‘
V
iolette,' he said, or at least he thought he said it. But then he screamed out, ‘
Violette!
'

He edged toward the doorway, knees bent, ducking down low and keeping one arm raised up in front of his face. Even so, the heat was too fierce for him to approach within less than four feet of it, and he could still feel his cheeks scorching.

Besides, there didn't seem to be much point in trying to rescue Mrs LaFarge from the flames. Her skin was already blackened all over, and in several places it had split wide apart to expose her glistening red flesh, like the black crust of a lava flow splits apart to reveal the molten magma underneath. Deep in several of these crimson crevasses he could see her blood actually
bubbling.

But it was the look on her face that gave Jim the greatest feeling of dread. It was blackened, too, like a minstrel moneybox, and all of her hair was burned into crispy clumps. It was difficult to tell if she could still see, but she appeared to be staring at him, unblinkingly because her eyelids had shriveled up into little knots. She had no eyebrows, either, so her stare was expressionless – or it would have been, if she hadn't been smiling at him so widely. There was no question about it. Jim was pretty sure it wasn't the heat, shrinking the skin on her face like some kind of horrific face-lift and distorting her lips. She was actually
smiling
, almost as if she were enjoying her immolation.

The pain she had suffered must have been unbearable – for the first few minutes, anyhow. But by now most of her nerve endings must have burned away, so she was feeling hardly anything at all. She looked ecstatic – beatific, even – as if this was something she had always wanted.

Jim stayed where he was, watching her. The last of her blood hurriedly boiled away, with a snap and a crackle and a
pippety-pop
-
pip
. Then, as the remaining fats of her body flared up, she actually
sizzled
, with the same sound as a hamburger patty on a hotplate. The flames that were crawling all over her body gradually jumped up higher and higher until they completely engulfed her head. A strong warm draft was drawn in through the doorway and it warbled and moaned like a ghost train.

Every breath that Jim took was filled with the eye-watering smell of charred human flesh. He cupped his hand over his mouth and his nose but it made no difference, and he couldn't stop himself from retching. In the distance, he could hear patrol car sirens scribbling and wailing, and the stentorian bellowing of fire trucks, but all he could do was watch as the flames that engulfed Mrs LaFarge's remains gradually died down.

Just as the first firefighter came hurrying up the steps, her blackened figure fell apart and collapsed on to the hallway rug, her skull rolling one way, with smoke pouring out of her eye sockets, her arms and legs falling across each other like pick-up-sticks. Jim leaned against the railings, his stomach clenching and unclenching, but unable to vomit anything but strings of half-digested cheese because he had eaten only those two slices of pepperoni pizza.

Three more firefighters appeared, unreeling a hose as they came. Almost immediately they started blasting away at Mrs LaFarge's apartment with a high-pressure jet of water, so that the blackened coats hanging in the hallway flapped like vampire bats in a thunderstorm, and the burning chairs in the living room tumbled over and over.

One of the firefighters laid a hand on Jim's shoulder and shouted in his face, ‘Are you all right, sir? You didn't inhale any smoke?'

‘No, no.' Jim coughed. ‘I didn't go inside. By the time I got down here, the whole apartment was burning like a goddamned crematorium. Too late to do anything.'

‘OK, sir, let's get you out of here. I think the fire marshal will want to ask you a few questions.'

‘That's fine.'
Cough
. ‘Whatever.'
Cough.

The firefighter helped Jim down to the parking space in front of the apartment block, where a bulky fire marshal with short-cropped gingery hair and a gingery yardbrush moustache was standing with three or four firefighters, looking up at the fire with an expression of professional detachment.

‘Are you hurt in any way, sir?' he shouted as Jim approached. The pumper close behind him was roaring so loudly that Jim could hardly hear him.

‘I'm OK, thanks. I didn't try to be a hero, I'm afraid. I saw Mrs LaFarge but it was too late by then. I couldn't have saved her.'

‘You live here?'

‘Top floor. My name's Rook.'

‘You live alone?'

‘Just me and my cat. Well, just me now. My cat died a couple of days ago.'

‘How about this Mrs LaFarge?'

‘Violette? She lived alone, too.'

‘When did you first become aware that Mrs LaFarge's apartment was on fire?'

‘I don't know. About twenty minutes ago, I guess. We heard glass breaking and then we heard somebody screaming.'

‘
We?
'

‘Me and the young lady from Apartment Two. We were having kind of a late-night get-together.'

The fire marshal looked down at Jim's stripy undershorts and said, ‘Sure you were.'

It was almost 10 a.m. before the firefighters finally left. They criss-crossed the front of Mrs LaFarge's burned-out apartment with yellow tapes and warned Jim and Summer not to go inside, because an arson investigation officer would bring a dog round later to sniff for accelerants.

‘You think this fire was started deliberately?' asked Jim.

The fire marshal shook his head. ‘Hard to tell. I can't see any of the typical signs that somebody used an accelerant here. All the same, it started very quick and it burned very hot, so it wasn't like your victim left a cigarette smoldering on the couch or something like that.'

‘Apart from which, she never smoked.'

They were still talking when two firefighters came down the steps, carrying a black body bag on a stretcher. Jim and the fire marshal watched as they took it over to a khaki van from the coroner's office and slid it inside.

‘You don't know anybody who might have borne a grudge against her?' asked the fire marshal.

Jim said, ‘Absolutely not. She was kind of a busybody, but she was harmless enough.'

‘Well . . . I've known people set fires for all kinds of petty reasons,' the fire marshal told him. ‘Maybe their neighbors played their music too loud, and refused to turn it down. Maybe they let their dog poop on the grass verge. A couple of months ago there was a family of five who got burned to death up in Canyon Oak Drive because the guy next door objected to the smoke from their barbecue. He didn't mind the smoke
per se
, but he was Jewish and he was angry that the smoke came from pork wieners and wasn't kosher.

‘The trouble is, even in this town, people don't understand how quick a fire can get out of control. A whole house can go up in forty seconds flat.'