Surrender (8 page)

And Finnigan was not one to rush himself. Maybe half a year passed without incident — certainly winter did. I read and reread the worn word on the fence, swept away leaves that fell on it, dried raindrops with my sleeve. I was twelve, and I knew now that Finnigan was not a tiger in the dark. He was real, and he was hibernating somewhere. Yet when Jeremie Tool’s outhouse caught fire, I didn’t automatically blame him; there had been lightning above the town that night, and this seemed the likely culprit. It wasn’t until I found, on my windowsill, a small, dented, flame-blacked doorknob that my blood went cool. I remembered running a stick along Tool’s wooden fence, inciting his dogs into strangled rage. Tool had burst from the house, shrieking at me; I had scuttled home scarlet-faced. I had told Finnigan. Now something had burned. I buried the scalded doorknob as deep as I could go.

Everything happened just as I imagined.

Soon after Tool’s outhouse went up in smoke, the clothes on Bushell’s clothesline were reduced to charred tatters. Jammy Bushell, the youngest son, was a bully and a pincher, and insufferably vain.

Mrs. Henry Nightingale woke to see her azalea hedge in flames.

The front fence of the Wells house could be seen for miles when it burned, and the grimy stink of kerosene palled the town for days. Limerick Wells was a boy of no significance but he had nominated me for the role of princess in the annual school play.

It was only after this that Constable Eli McIllwraith, our newly appointed law enforcer who was, in the minds of his elders, insultingly raw and underaged, conceded that Mulyan was being stalked by an arsonist. The evidence seemed to point to a resident of the town or its surrounds. We were told to be on the lookout for anything suspicious; property owners were advised to leave their dogs unchained. Finnigan smiled at this: he liked dogs.

Those early blazes were to prove a gentle introduction to his work. Finnigan did not grow out of, but rather into, his pastime. Committed to his undertaking, well fitted to the work, he would create for Mulyan a legend, for the burnings would continue sporadically year after year. Months would go by unsmoked, but people soon realized that was a lull. The firefly was victim to an unquenchable itch. Night would quilt the valley, the world would be at peace — then the bell would jangle at the town hall, the siren would whir into life, the roosters, confused, would crow at the moon, and flames would be leaping like jaguars for the stars.

The barn that had stood for ninety years on the hill behind Torquil’s farm, the subject of innumerable watercolors and the site of many a fumbled first kiss.

The clubroom on the edge of the sporting oval, together with the scoreboard on which generations of bored timekeepers had scratched their beloved’s name.

The racecourse stables, which were already falling down.

Raffe Lowe’s notorious car, for the purchase price of which he’d sacrificed three fingers laboring at the lumberyard.

The clubroom that was built to replace the original one, which had burned.

The citizens of Mulyan could hardly contain their outrage. None but small-minded adolescents found amusement in the arsonist’s escapades. A string of names was cast up as suspects, their owners interrogated by McIllwraith. Soon it became evident that unscrupulous souls were volunteering as suspects the names of those who’d done them wrong. Anger flourished, and division. It was around this time that Finnigan began to shadow McIllwraith, and learned much by studying the Constable’s habits and technique. The smudged hyena was cultivating a mind as sleek and slippery as an eel.

One balmy afternoon in spring I sat with the criminal on the shoulder of Cotton’s Pinch, looking down on farms small enough to sit in a palm, on cattle the size of square sluggish ants. I asked. “Are you ever going to stop?”

Finnigan’s hair was long, ragged as a yard-dog’s scruff. He lay on the rocky earth, picking his teeth with a twig. At thirteen he slept in creek beds and trees; he never spoke of his parents or of the place in the mountains where he’d been raised. His eyes were jet and unnerving. It pleased me to think that he was a member of an undiscovered species, half-human half-beast half-storybook-goblin, which roamed the world wildly, wreaking chaos. He replied, “When there’s none left who deserve it.”

“But what had Raffe Lowe done? He loved that car.”

Finnigan sneered. “That car stunk. He drove too fast. Anyway, a car is a stupid thing to love.”

“What about the flower shop?”

Earlier that week a burning bottle of petrol had shattered the window of the produce store run by the Gilligan twins. Minnie and Rose sold homemade jam, sickly sweets, useless objects, cloth and lace, and flowers which, once taken home, tended to rapidly wilt. The shop was ancient, and tinder-dry. The fire had skyrocketed sparks into the night; they sailed down gently to lie all around the twins, who sat howling on the road. The light of the flames stained the sisters orange, and reddened their long pallid faces. The fire, the dark, the howling, the twins — somebody thought the only thing missing was a cauldron, and that somebody was me.

I hadn’t, till then, known the depth of my grudge.

One day when I was six or seven I had stood beside a bucket of jonquils as Minnie, the older twin, suggested with a smile that I was concealing a candy horse in my pocket, having plucked it from a jar on the counter while Minnie’s mind was elsewhere, measuring curtain material. “You’ll have to watch that one, Beth,” she said. “He’s a crafty fellow.”

Perhaps she’d meant my mother to take this as a compliment. Mother chose to take it another way. “How dare you!” she shrilled. “How dare you! You think I’d raise a thief? Anwell, turn out your pockets! This woman wants to see what you have in them.”

Standing on the floury floor, my blood dried up, my head an empty cup, there was nothing for it but to abandon my frame to its fate. When a certain degree of horror is reached, one must go — one can’t stay. My hands fished in my coat pockets and drew out not one but two algae-green horses prancing on lollipop sticks.

My mother made a choking sound, as if she’d swallowed her tongue.

Minnie was trying uselessly to make amends. “He’s a boy!” she cried. “Boys are like that, all of them! If I had a penny for every sweetie that’s gone into the pocket of a boy!”

My mother was taking no notice of the shopkeeper: her eyes were like pickaxes buried in me. “Put those things on the counter,” she hissed. “Go outside and wait for me.”

“Let him keep them, Beth. The loss won’t break us —”

I stepped around Mother to lay the horses on the counter. They cavorted greenly, one behind the other. The first had been for me, the second one for Vernon. He wouldn’t have eaten his, of course, but that didn’t mean I shouldn’t offer. I turned, and stumblingly crossed the floor. As the door wheezed shut behind me I heard, “You can keep your material. It’s revolting, anyway.”

At home, too disgusting to be seen, I was sent to stand in a corner of the yard and stayed there until night fell, and for long after that. I was brought inside at midnight, drowsy and gray with cold.

Finnigan was watching a flock of pigeons looping the town. He said nothing — he never spoke unless he had to.

My mother soon returned to being a customer of the twins, the equivalent stores in neighboring towns having higher prices and less decency, but I could never again bring myself to push past the wheezing door. I wouldn’t see inside the flower shop again until the fire burned the frontage away.

I lay down beside my friend and looked up at the clouds. Finnigan nodded at the swooping birds, said, “Pigeons make good pie.”

I smiled. The air felt warm and fresh in me. I thought about what he’d told me, and everything that had burned. I said, “So you’re only punishing people who deserve it.”

Finnigan stayed silent, nibbling a twig.

“That’s not really a
bad
thing to do, is it? I mean, that’s what
God
does, isn’t it?”

Finnigan glanced at me and splintered the twig and I could feel his mind ticking. I could feel him understanding what I said, and not liking it. Instinct warned me to be quiet, but I continued gamely on. As a partner in the pact, I wouldn’t be censored by fear of him. I said, “Anyone would think
you
were the angel, not me.”

His hand flashed out, lashing at me; he scrambled to his feet. “Don’t you call me names!” he cried. “Don’t you ask me questions!” And in an instant he’d disappeared down the steep flank of Cotton’s Pinch, leaving me behind with a stinging wound and a sense of satisfaction. My point, I felt, had been made. I didn’t want to be associated with any devil whose doings were clouded by morality. There was no point to our pact — no point to my goodness, no point to
him
— unless his wickedness was a wholehearted, ungovernable thing. To make things right and proper, both of us had to be pure.

He had run off in a rage: when, in the months that followed, a crop was torched and the belltower destroyed and the antique sign that welcomed tourists was reduced to a pile of cinders I understood this was Finnigan’s sullen, wantonly violent, message to me. Crusader Watts spent weeks crafting a new sign, only to see it, too, turned to charcoal:
See?
said Finnigan. S
ee?
All across Mulyan, chaos ruled. Roderick Bunkle, the town’s famed equestrian, returned from a gallop to find the stable in flames, his prized horses running berserkly over the hills. Papa and Mama Marcuzzi and their seven mousy kits watched with pleasure as their garage burned, proud to be included in the town’s misery. Ms. Evelyn Pree, the school principal, lost an entire season’s homebrew when her bungalow was set alight, and for three days afterward Mulyan reeked of petrol, sugar, and beer.

There was, naturally, wholesale hysteria. Mulyan had never found itself blessed with so much to seethe about. A frightened, resentful fury slicked the town like dirty grease. People woke at night plagued by hideous imaginings; they became irrational, short-tempered, and quick to take offense. They became ludicrously protective of the few worthwhile things they owned. And they hated the arsonist for making them into the creatures they’d become. At the bar of the Clover and Willow elaborate punishments were devised and made ready to receive the squirming figure of the snared culprit. In the window of the liquor shop an effigy was placed, a matchbox sitting in its hand and brain-fluff leaking from its head. “Know what we should do to him?” asked Danny Collop of Lissie Skene, the pair of them standing in the shade of the incinerated town hall. “We should hang him like in the good old days, and then we should draw and quarter him.”

“What do you mean?” asked Lissie. “Draw a picture of him, you mean?”

“No, no — gut him, like he was a pig.”

“Oh,” said Lissie, and nodded; I took my timely leave.

Inside my own small family, it was my father who took the burnings hard. A man of solitude within his own four walls, preferring the privacy of his study and the company of his plants, he cultivated an outgoing and forthright persona when in public. He was Mulyan’s only lawyer, and saw himself as the town’s representative of all that was correct: as such, he took the rampage of the firebug as an attack upon himself. He would make haste to the site of each new burn, and pick through the rubble for evidence — which brought him to the attention of Constable McIllwraith, who had the gall to warn him off and thereby gained for himself a dire enemy. Helpless and frustrated, my father thrashed like a mud-mired bull. He combed great books to discover how arsonists had been cornered and dealt with in the past. His dread was that our criminal, once caught, would escape on a technicality — madness, perhaps — or would prove too young to be blasted by the full force of Justice’s wrath. He voiced this concern everywhere, railing against the cunning of the crazed and underaged. In the meantime, while the felon was nameless and faceless and free, it was necessary that
someone
should shoulder the blame. Lacking a criminal, my father turned on the one charged with solving crime.

Constable Eli McIllwraith had not been born in Mulyan — had, indeed, been born in the city, which made him unacceptably alien. He was also young and inexperienced, his uniform still creased, and thus he provided good sport for the rowdy elements of town. His posting in Mulyan loosely coincided with the beginning of the firefly’s reign, and when someone put these facts together a rumor went round that the policeman himself was lighting the flames. My father dismissed this idea as idiotic, a symptom of our desperation; nonetheless he had McIllwraith in his sights. Father despised incompetence, and the Constable, with his ongoing failure to apprehend the culprit, was clearly unfit for his task. So Father began planting little bombs of discontent — a mutter here, a chuckle there, an overheard sniff of derision — which soon scratched like sandpaper against Mulyan’s confidence in the young man. Everyone respected my father’s opinion — he was a lawyer, which meant he knew things. It wasn’t wise to challenge him intellectually. But more than this, Father was simply a frightening man: devoid of humor, razored of tongue, he considered none his equal, including his wife and sons. He thought me a wood-headed cretin; Vernon infinitely repulsed him. When Father spoke, what he said was law, and it was easiest to agree.

The bombs my father scattered made life awkward for McIllwraith. Deathly silence fell when he walked into a room; murmured words and chortling proliferated in his wake. Men bragged of patrolling their land with shotguns, daring the law to interfere. Someone started a petition asking that Mulyan be sent another, more experienced policeman to sort out the mess. And soon everywhere that McIllwraith went he was watched by doubting, ridiculing eyes; every time he stepped out of his house he felt the ground shake under him.

Finnigan was not unaffected by the bitterness engulfing the town. He followed each development with interest. And when the chance came to put a spark to the powder keg that was Mulyan, he did not hesitate. Like a cat he stepped past the dozing guard and torched the town’s library. No one except the guard was surprised — the surprise lay only in the fact that the building had gone uncooked for so long. But book burning is a volatile thing: I knew Finnigan had been saving the library, as a child leaves until last the choicest item on its plate. He’d kept the library in reserve until only a final straw was needed to break the camel’s back in two.