The Divide (24 page)

It was a cue. He recognized it. Time had resumed its forward march. His heart began to batter against his ribs.

He picked up a fifteen-inch copper pipe segment he had set aside in rehearsal for this moment. A weapon in one hand, the Eveready flashlight in the other. Be prepared. The Boy Scout’s Motto, ha-ha. A smile formed on his lips.

Passing into the shadow of the building, John felt its presence as a physical chill.

He didn’t know this building, but Amelie had told him about it. (Told him, told Benjamin: in memory the merger was already complete.) It was a huge, cold, black-brick nautilus shell and she hated it. He understood why.

But that was pathology, John thought, his sense of the building’s soullessness. Because buildings don’t have souls, ever. He had read extensively in abnormal psychology, not psychoanalytic case histories but the infinitely subtler literature of brain dysfunction. And it struck him that what he felt now was like the “heightened significance” in the intrarictal consciousness of temporal lobe epileptics. The limbic system bleeding into perception… animal foreboding injected into the loom and bulk of this stony Victorian structure. But then, he knew what might be inside.

He took a step up onto the ancient loading bay. The wooden platform creaked ominously. He could smell the damp interior now. Animals had died in there. Hard to imagine even a homeless person sheltering here, even in summer. But Amelie had said nobody went inside much. Just lingered here out of the rain. Brief shelter. Still.

He remembered Amelie telling him about a TV show she’d seen, about dream interpretation. If you dream about a house or a building, Amelie said, you’re really dreaming about yourself—your mind. “And the attic or the basement is sort of your unconscious self. Maybe you don’t like what you find there, or maybe it’s something great you forgot about. But either way, it’s part of you. It’s your secret self.” Maybe, he thought, I dreamed this building. It would be appropriate. Down into his jerrybuilt and crumbling soul, echoes of his own voice rumbling through these ruined corridors.

Moving into the darkness, he thumbed the switch on his flashlight. The beam lanced out ahead.

Soon he was aware of another human presence—of the distant, stealthy tread of feet, faint echoes at the threshold of perception: a whisper in this frigid air, but revealing. He didn’t doubt that the presence was Roch. Too many signs had pointed this way; the truth was too obvious. He tried to track the distant footfalls as he moved, to range on them… this was his uniqueness after all, his secret weapon.…

But he was sidetracked by his thoughts. It was as if the sound of his own thinking had grown intolerably loud, a din that drowned out the external world. He recognized this as akin to the feverishness that had overtaken him last night, or maybe the same feverishness, a dementia that had never entirely retreated. He was dying, after all. Or, if not dying, then retreating into some utterly new form, a dim shape just emerging from the darkness. Which was, when you came right down to it, a kind of dying.

He stumbled against a damp concrete wall. Vertigo. This wouldn’t do at all. He had entered the world of Greek and Latin nouns: vertigo, dementia, kinaesthesia, aphasia.…
Too soon,
he thought.

He thought about Roch.

There was a skittering from a dark room beyond the reach of his flashlight beam. Not Roch: some animal, maybe a rat; he hurried past.

He remembered Roch from their confrontation in Amelie’s apartment. A big man, muscular, no real threat—not then—but John recalled also his deeper sense of the man as a fierce kettle of hostility, at explosive pressure. But “hostility,” what an inadequate word! It was an anger as purified and symmetrical as a laser beam, far more potent than any physical threat and more difficult to overcome. John was, at this moment, more than a little frightened of it.

He had counted on his old abilities here, the superhuman edge, but since last night that surety had blurred. The edges of things ran together, events happened too quickly, some internal clock had slowed down. His impression of the corridor now, in the sway of his flashlight beam over concrete and blackened ceiling beams, was more vivid than it ought to be but less informative: he was hard-pressed to extract the implications of a footprint or an echo. Where was Roch? Where was Amelie?

Moving deeper now, he discovered a wooden ladder leading up through a gap in the ceiling where a staircase might once have been. The rungs of the ladder were not dusty but seemed almost polished, and this, at least, he could interpret. He switched off the flashlight and in the darkness detected a fainter light flickering above him. It wasn’t much, but it was something to follow.

At the top of the ladder he groped his way onto a horizontal surface and flicked the flashlight back on. He was in a narrower, older corridor; the wallboard had been pried away in places and the yellow lathing peeked through. The flashlight beam paled away in an atmosphere of dust motes. He moved still deeper, approaching the heart of the building.

He was totally enclosed now—the thought inspired a new, nauseating wave of vertigo. He heard faint sounds lost in their own echoes, which might be voices, or water dripping down these old posts and columns, or the sound of whimpering. His own footsteps seemed impossibly loud, and the dust was choking.

Then, without warning, he turned a corner into a long windowless room which was
not
empty. First he saw the flickering Sterno fire, then Amelie bound at the wrists and ankles and squirming against the floor. She was wearing grimy jeans and a striped top, a soiled ski jacket; her eyes were vague but she looked at him pleadingly.

“Amelie.” He was hardly aware of saying it. Maybe it was Benjamin who spoke. Benjamin’s memories were powerfully present as he stooped to untie her. Their conversations, meals together, arguments, their lovemaking. She was tied with nylon clothesline and his fingers were too numb to manage the knots; but he had a Swiss Army knife in his pocket and he pulled it out and fumbled open the blade. Amelie watched curiously, as if she couldn’t quite decide who he was; which was reasonable, after all, because he wasn’t entirely certain himself… he had lost track of his own name. Words were suddenly elusive; he imagined them (the vision was crystalline in his mind) as a flock of birds startled into a cold blue sky.

The blade parted the cords. Her hands, faintly blue, sprang apart. But maybe Amelie had lost her words, too. She was pointing and gasping, backing away.…

Too late, John understood her wild gesturing. He turned in time to see Roch rush forward from the doorway. Roch had a length of pipe in his right hand and John focused briefly on it, on the islands of verdigris laced across the copper, green in the flickering firelight. In its own way it was beautiful. Mesmerizing.

Roch smiled.

“Get out of here,” John told Amelie.

Roch brought the pipe down. John managed to catch the first blow against the open palm of his left hand, but the shock traveled up his arm to the shoulder and seemed to unhinge something there. The arm fell limp as Amelie scurried past. Passing, she slipped and kicked the burning Sterno across the floor. It spilled against an exposed spruce stud; the light was briefly dim and then flared much brighter …but John’s attention was on Roch, who had reared back for a second blow. John tried to veer away, but something was wrong here: the weapon came down too fast, or his legs were unsteady—
everything
happened too fast—and he was aware of the miscalculation but helpless to correct it as Roch brought the pipe down in a clean trajectory that intersected precisely with John’s skull; the impact was explosive. He felt as if he were flying away in every direction at once—and then there was only the darkness.

The blow connected solidly.

Roch allowed himself a brief rush of satisfaction, then turned and ran after Amelie.

Running, he transferred the pipe to a loop in his belt and took the flashlight in his right hand. He trained the beam on her; but she was already a surprising distance down the corridor… he must have been too cautious with the narcotics, must have let the time get away from him.

He tripped over a spur of concrete and almost dropped the flashlight; he managed to recover, but it gained Amelie some critical time. He stabbed the flashlight forward and saw her disappear down the empty stairwell—a miracle she had found the ladder in this darkness, but of course it was his own light, his own trusty Eveready, that had led her there. “Bitch!” he screamed, and drew out the copper pipe and bounced it against an aluminum conduit suspended horn the ceiling. The sound rang out around him like a bell, metallic and cacophonous in this closed space. Amelie ducked her head down below the floor… but Roch didn’t follow.

He was frozen in place… paralyzed by the sudden and terrible suspicion that he had done something momentous, something irrevocable… that he had jackknifed off the high board into an empty pool. How had he arrived in this dark, cavernous hallway? Basically, what the fuck was he
doing
here?

But there was no answer, only the keening of the ventilator shafts down these blind, scabbed walls.

He clenched his teeth and suppressed the doubt. Maybe there was some truth to it, maybe he
had
taken the dive without looking; but when you get this far, he thought, it just doesn’t matter anymore. You’re up there in the spotlight and you tuck and spin because it’s the focal point of your entire life even if you don’t understand it, you just
know,
so
fuck
all that pain and death that’s rushing up at you; that’s
after.
Now is
now.

He hefted the copper pipe and turned back to the burning room.

Susan saw Amelie stumble away from the shadow of the building and knew at once that something had gone terribly wrong.

Amelie was sick or hurt. She took five lunging steps into the snow and then seemed to lose momentum—stopped, wobbled, and fell forward.

Susan ran out from the cover of the trees. The snow hindered every step; it was like running in a nightmare. She looked up briefly as she passed into the shadow of the warehouse. The building seemed to generate its own chill, potent even in the still winter air.

She put her arms around Amelie and lifted her up. Amelie was trembling. She was cold to the touch, and her eyes wandered aimlessly.… Susan guessed some kind of drug might be involved.

“Amelie!” Some recognition flickered in her eyes. “Amelie, is John inside? Is he all right?”

“He’s in there,” Amelie managed.

“Is he hurt?”

“He’s with Roch.”

Susan stifled a powerful urge to go in after him. She took a deep breath.
Do what you have to.
“I’ll take you to the car,” she said. “Then we can call the police.”

They crossed the railroad tracks and ducked under the link fence toward the Honda, both of them breathless and gasping by the time they reached the car. Amelie doubled over against the lid of the trunk, her cheek pressed to the cold metal. Susan turned back toward the warehouse, one edge of it still visible over a stand of snowy pine trees. She shielded her eyes and frowned at what she saw: a thick plume of white smoke had begun to waft upward from the western corner of the building.

The warehouse had been stripped bare years ago. Everything even remotely valuable had been sold or stolen. There was no furniture left to burn; the floor was pressed concrete; the exterior walls were brick. But there were ancient kiln-dried spruce studs: there were pressboard dividing walls where these lofty spaces had been partitioned into offices; there was an immense volume of sub-code insulation that had been installed by the contractor as a cost-cutting measure during a 1965 renovation. Altogether, there was plenty to burn.

John awoke to the burning.

The Sterno can had spilled flaming jelly across the floor, the bulk of it next to three exposed wooden structural studs.

The wood was porous and spectacularly dry. The flames licked at it, paused as if to gather strength, then ran upward to the ceiling beams and through an open airway to the third floor, where they encountered a five-foot-high stack of the Saturday edition of the Toronto
Sun
dated 1979 through 1981.

The flames relished it.

Awake now—dimly—John rolled away from the heat. A glowing ember flaked down from the ceiling and scorched the skin of his wrist. His lungs felt raw, sandpapered. He opened his eyes.

He saw the flames running across the ceiling in freshets, like water. Where the room had been dark, it was now bright with a sinister light. He lifted a hand to shade his vision.

His head hurt. When he moved, the pain was dizzying; nausea constricted his throat. The agony was so generalized as to seem sourceless; then he touched his head above his left ear and felt the pulpy texture of the skin there. The hair was matted and wet. His hand, when he pulled it away, glistened in the firelight. This wetness was blood.

Blood and fire all around him.

He remembered Roch.

The overheated air created by the flames was vastly lighter than the cold, stagnant air surrounding it. It shot upward almost volcanically, coursing through the abandoned building like a river cut loose from the restraints of gravity. Where stairways had fallen, it rose through the gaping spaces. It discovered flues and airways. It was merely warm by the time it reached the top of the building, but still hot enough to seek out an icy five-foot gap where the ceiling had collapsed and to rise, lazily at first, into the still afternoon air.

This was how Susan saw it from the Honda: a waft of almost pure white smoke.

It gathered strength.