Jerome, whose corrected vision was good, recognized the box at once by its distinctive coloration. The scene seemed to flow outwards from the fleck of violet as though his eyes were performing a high-powered zoom, then he was out of the house and striding across the short expanse of patio.
“Sammy,” he said breathlessly, abandoning all notions about propriety, “what kind of pill did you just take?”
“Pill?” Birkett gaped at him for a moment and began to smile. “Hell, this ain’t no pill.” He bared his teeth further, precariously gripping in them a small peach-coloured confection. There was the scent of cinnamon on his breath.
Jerome, abruptly restored to the world of rationality, was both deflated and embarrassed. “I…I’m sorry.”
“What for?” Birkett said, unconscious of anything odd in Jerome’s behaviour, and handed him the box. “These is good. Help yourself.”
“Thank you.” Jerome examined the box and saw that in spite of its unusual shape it was a mass-produced item. The lid bore the words Regency Cachous, and in smaller print: T. J. Grant & Co., Chipping Norton, Oxford. He opened the box and tried one of the cachous. Its spiciness brought a feeling of warmth to his tongue, but it was highly unlikely, he told himself—now bitterly self-critical—that sucking it would cause him to burst into flames. He had built a ridiculous edifice of fantasy on a small-town doctor’s avuncular habit of distributing confections to his patients.
“Doctor Bob gets ’em all the way from the Old Country,” Birkett said, taking the box and replacing it in his pocket. “Full carton at a time. He says they’s good for the stomach.”
“I’m sure he’s absolutely right.” Jerome glanced at his watch and quailed as he saw it was only five minutes before 11.00. He had behaved like an idiot, but had been fortunate that he had learned the truth without having spoken to Pitman or having identified himself to the gardener. If he got to the office quickly and gave a plausible excuse for being late the whole ludicrous episode might be safely buried, and with any luck it would be years before he experienced a similar mental aberration.
“Sammy, I’ve decided not to wait for the doctor,” he said. “I’ll contact him another time.”
Birkett looked concerned. “He’ll be back any minute. It don’t take him long to pick out shirts.”
“It’s all right—it was nothing urgent.”
“You should make goddamn sure about that.” Birkett moved forward unexpectedly and gripped Jerome’s arm. “You gotta look out for your health.”
“I’ll do that,” Jerome said, made acutely uncomfortable by the physical contact with a stranger who was beginning to seem more than a little disturbed.
“Doctor Bob will fix you up good.” Birkett tightened his grip and when he spoke again it was with an expression of ingenuous pride. “I’ve got cancer.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jerome said unhappily, realizing it had been made even more difficult for him to depart quickly. There was a strange protocol to such things.
“I’m gonna be fine, though. Just fine. Doctor Bob is fixin’ me up good, even though I got no money for the treatment. That’s why I tend his garden. I got no money, but I got a green thumb and I’m a good worker. I keep the garden lookin’ good.”
“You certainly do.” Jerome eased the young man’s fingers off his arm, but decided to risk staying an extra few minutes. Birkett seemed hungry for conversation and, in spite of his protestations, was possibly afraid for his life. If Pitman arrived in the meantime it should be possible to concoct a cover story for his visit. Jerome led off by asking Birkett’s advice on the cultivation of roses and walked further into the garden with him to examine prime specimens. Finally, deciding he had met his obligations, Jerome made a show of consulting his watch.
“I’ve enjoyed talking to you, Sammy,” he said, “but now I really must go.”
Birkett did not reply. He was standing in the attitude in which Jerome had seen him earlier, his sparsely-covered head raised and tilted as if in response to a distant call. His eyes were unfocused, and it was obvious he had not heard Jerome’s words. Jerome began to feel trapped. He debated simply turning and hurrying out to his car, but in an indefinable way he had accepted responsibility for the gardener’s welfare and he had an uneasy conviction that a crisis was on hand. He looked all about him, desperate for inspiration, and saw that they were close to a small, open-fronted summerhouse.
“Sammy, I think you ought to sit down,” he said. “Then I’ll get you a glass of water.”
He grasped Birkett’s arm and urged him towards the white-painted structure. Birkett offered no resistance. Still without speaking, he stumbled alongside Jerome to the summerhouse and sat down on a wooden bench, his back to the inner wall. His eyes stared straight ahead, unseeingly, and his posture was that of an outsized doll propped in a corner.
“I’ll be back in a few seconds.” Jerome took several paces towards the main house, then turned back as he heard Birkett give a deep retching moan. “Are you going to be all right?”
Gazing strickenly into Jerome’s eyes, Birkett opened his mouth and emitted a writhing, roaring tongue of blue flame.
Jerome sank to his knees, both hands pressed to his heart, unable to avert his gaze, groaning an instinctive animal protest at a spectacle which was an affront to reason and the whole of creation. A human being was burning like an oil-soaked torch. Mercifully the enclosed space of the summerhouse filled with dense blue smoke which obscured detail, but Jerome saw enough to germinate a thousand bad dreams. He saw bright fire spread radially from the gaping mouth to annihilate the face. He saw the torso swell, collapse and swell up again as it was consumed by a terrible heat which, miraculously, was slow to ignite the constraining clothes. He saw the nastic twitching of the limbs as they were consumed, turning the body into an obscenely dancing puppet…
Jerome had entered a timeless dimension of horror, but a tiny cowering fragment of his mind was aware that the reduction of Sammy Birkett to crackling cinder was taking place at an incredible speed. A minute went by…perhaps two…then the visitation was over.
The fire had done its work and had departed.
Still in the kneeling position, Jerome waited for the painful jolting of his heart to subside. When it seemed certain that he too was not going to die he stood up. A shrieking silence had descended over the garden and was cupped in the high perimeter hedges. He moved forward timidly. The blue smoke was dispersing with rapidity, billowing out on a light breeze which brought the sweet stench of it to Jerome’s nostrils. He tried to turn himself into a visual recording machine, a dispassionate observer.
The scene in the summerhouse was one of his SHC reference photographs translated into sickening three-dimensional reality. Of Birkett’s head and torso there remained only a fine ash heaped in a depression which had been charred into the thick wood of the bench. An incredible degree of heat would have been needed to achieve the degree of destruction in so short a time, and yet the typical SHC anomalies were present. The timber of the summerhouse was dry, but it had not caught alight—and there were large unburnt scraps of the dead man’s blue checkered shirt mingled with the ashes.
The legs of Birkett’s jeans had also survived as two tubes of material crumpled on the floor, although the flesh and bone inside them had all but vanished, wasted to a powdery residue. Jerome could almost have surmised that the victim had been a mannikin woven from straw or some other equally flammable material had it not been for the other classical feature of the scene. Birkett’s hands—all too human—were lying on the bench, one on either side of the mound of ash. Fire had severed them at the wrists and had cauterized the blood vessels in the process, but one of the black cross-sections had cracked and was oozing crimson.