Leydecker lunged out from behind the police-car, and as his fingers disappeared into the black membrane surrounding Chris Nell, Ralph heard Old Dor say, I wouldn’t touch him anymore if I were you, Ralph-I can’t see your hands.
Lois: [“Don’t.” Don’t, he’s dead, he’s already dead!”] The gun poking out of the window had started to move to the right. Now it swivelled unhurriedly back toward Leydecker, the man behind it undeterred-and apparently unhurt-by the hail of bullets directed at him from the other police. Ralph raised his right hand and brought it down in the karate-chop gesture again, but this time instead of a wedge of light, his fingertips produced something that looked like a large blue teardrop. It spread across Leydecker’s lemon-colored aura just as the rifle sticking out of the window opened fire. Ralph saw two slugs strike the tree just to Leydecker’s right, sending chips of bark flying into the air and making black holes in the fir’s yellowish-white undersurface. A third struck the blue covering which had coated Leydecker’s aura-Ralph saw a momentary flicker of dark red just to the left of the detective’s temple and heard a low whine as the bullet either ricocheted or skipped, the way a flat stone will skip across the surface of a pond.
Leydecker pulled Nell back behind the car, looked at him, then’ tore open the driver’s-side door and threw himself into the front seat.
Ralph could no longer see him, but could hear him screaming at someone over the radio, asking where the fuck the rescue vehicles were.
More shattering glass, and Lois was grabbing frantically at Ralph’s arm, pointing at something-at a brick tumbling end over end into the dooryard. It had come through one of the low, narrow windows at the base of the north wing. These windows were almost obscured by the flowerbeds which edged the house.
“Help us!” a voice screamed through the broken window, even as the man with the assault-rifle fired reflexively at the tumbling brick, sending up puffs of reddish dust and then breaking it into three jagged chunks. Neither Ralph nor Lois had ever heard that voice raised in a scream, but both recognized it at once, nevertheless; it was Helen Deepneau’s voice. “Help us, Please.” We’re in the cellar.” We have children.” Please don’t let us burn to death, WE HAVE CHILDREN!”
Ralph and Lois exchanged a single wide-eyed glance, then ran for the house.
Two uniformed figures, looking more like pro-football linemen than cops in their bulky Kevlar vests, charged from behind one of the cruisers, running flat-out for the porch with their riot guns held at port arms. As they crossed the dooryard on a diagonal, Charlie Pickering leaned out of his window, still laughing wildly, his gray hair zanier than ever. The volume of fire directed at him was enormous, showering him with splinters from the sides of the window and actually knocking down the rusty gutter above his head-it struck the porch with a hollow honk-but not a single bullet touched him.
How can they not be hitting him? Ralph thought as he and Lois mounted the porch toward the lime-colored flames which were now billowing through the open front door.
Christ Jesus, it’s almost pointblank range, how can they possibly not be hitting him?
But he knew how… and why. Clotho had told them that both Atropos and Ed Deepneau had been surrounded by forces which were malignant yet protective. Was it not likely that those same forces were now taking care of Charlie Pickering, much as Ralph himself had taken care of Leydecker when he’d left the protection of the police-car to drag his dying colleague back to cover?
Pickering opened up on the charging State Troopers, his weapon switched to rapid-fire. He aimed low to negate the value of the vests they were wearing and swept their legs out from under them. One of them fell in a silent heap; the other crawled back the way he had come, shrieking that he was hit, he was hit, oh fuck, he was hit bad.
“Barbecue!” Pickering cried out the window in his screaming, laughing voice. “Barbecue! Barbecue. Holy cookout. Burn the bitches God’s fire.” God’s holy fire!”
There were more screams now, seemingly from right under Ralph’s feet, and when he looked down he saw a terrible thing: a medley of auras was seeping up from between the porch boards like steam, the variety of their colors muted by the scarlet blood-glow which was rising with them… and surrounding them. This blood red shape wasn’t quite the same as the thunderhead which had formed above the fight between Green Boy and Orange Boy outside the Red Apple, but Ralph thought it was closely related; the only difference was that this one had been born of fear instead of anger and aggression.
“Barbecue!” Charlie Pickering was screaming, and then something about killing the devil-cunts. Suddenly Ralph hated him more than he had ever hated anyone in his life.
[“Come on, Lois-let’s go get that asshole.”
He took her by the hand and pulled her into the burning house.
CHAPTER 22
The porch door opened on a central hallway that ran from the front of the house to the back, and the whole length of it was now engulfed in flames. To Ralph’s eyes they were a bright green, and when he and Lois passed through them, they were cool-it was like passing through gauzy membranes which had been infused with Mentholatum. The crackle of the burning house was muffled; the gunfire had become as faint and unimportant as the sound of thunder to someone who is swimming underwater… and that was what this felt like more than anything, Ralph decided-being underwater. He and Lois were unseen beings swimming through a river of fire.
He pointed to a doorway on the right and looked questioningly at Lois. She nodded. He reached for the knob and grimaced with disgust as his fingers passed right through it. just as well, of course; if he had actually been able to grab the damned thing, he would have left the top two layers of his fingers hanging off the brass knob in charbroiled strips.
[“We have to go through it, Ralph."’] He looked at her assessingly, saw a great deal of fear and worry in her eyes but no panic, and nodded. They went through the door together just as the chandelier half-\way down the hall fell to the floor with an unmusical crash of glass pendants and iron chain.
There was a parlor on the other side, and what they saw there made Ralph’s stomach clench in horror. Two women were propped against the wall below a large poster of Susan Day in jeans and a Western-style shirt (DON’T LET HIM CALL YOU BABY UNLESS YOU WANT HIM TO TREAT YOU LIKE ONE, the poster advised). Both had been shot in the head at point-blank range; brains, ragged flaps of scalp, and bits of bone were splattered across the flowered wallpaper and Susan Day’s fancy-stitched cowgirl boots. One of the women had been pregnant. The other had been Gretchen Tillbury.
Ralph remembered the day she had come to his home with Helen to warn him and to give him a can of something called Bodyguard; on that day he had thought her beautiful… but of course on that day her finely made head had still been intact and half of her pretty blonde hair hadn’t been roasted off by a close-range rifle-blast. Fifteen years after she had narrowly escaped being killed by her abusive husband, another man had put a gun to Gretchen Tillbury’s head and blown her right out of the world. She would never tell another woman about how she had gotten the scar on her left thigh.
For one horrible moment Ralph thought he was going to faint.
He concentrated and pulled himself back by thinking of Lois. Her aura had gone a dark, shocked red. jagged black lines raced across it and through it. They looked like the E.K.G readout of someone suffering a fatal heart-attack.
[“Oh Ralph Oh Ralph, dear God."’] Something exploded at the south end of the house with force enough to blow open the door they had just walked through. Ralph guessed it might have been a propane tank or tanks.