Pickering’s body jerked galvanically, and his legs shot out with such force that one of his shoes flew off. His buttocks rose and then thumped down. His teeth clamped shut on his lower lip, and blood squirted out of his mouth. For a moment Ralph was almost sure he saw tiny blue sparks snapping from the ends of his zany hair. Then they were gone and Pickering slumped back against the wall. He stared at Ralph and Lois with eyes from which all concern had fled.
Lois screamed. At first Ralph thought she was screaming because of what he had done to Pickering, and then he saw she was beating at the top of her head. A piece of burning wallpaper had landed there and her hair was on fire.
He swept an arm around her, beat at the flames with his own hand, then covered her body with his as a fresh gust of rifle-and shotgun-fire hit the north wing. Ralph’s free hand was splayed out against the wall, and he saw a bullet-hole appear between the third and fourth fingers like a magic trick.
“Go up, Lois.l Go up [right now."’] They went up together, turning to colored smoke before Charlie Pickering’s empty eyes… and then disappearing.
[“What did you do to him, Ralph? For a second you were go e-you were up-and then… then he what did you do?”] She was looking at Charlie Pickering with stunned horror. Pickering was sitting against the wall in almost exactly the same position as the two dead women in the next room. As Ralph watched, a large pinkish spit-bubble appeared between his slack lips, grew, then popped.
He turned to Lois, took her by the arms just above the elbows, and made a picture in his mind: the circuit-breaker box in the basement of his house on Harris Avenue. Hands opened the box, then quickly flipped all the switches from ON to OFF. He wasn’t sure that this was right-it had all happened too fast for him to be sure of anything-but he thought it was close.
Lois’s eyes widened a little, and then she nodded. She looked at Pickering, then at Ralph.
[“He brought it of himself, didn’t he? You didn’t do it on purpose. “Ralph nodded, and then fresh screams came up from below their feet, screams he was quite sure he was not hearing with his ears.
[“Lois?”] [“Yes, Ralph-right now.”] He slipped his hands down her arms and gripped her -hands, as the four of them had held hands in the hospital, only this time they went down instead of up, sliding into the plank floor as if it were a pool of water. Ralph was once again aware of a knife-edge of darkness crossing his vision, and then they were in the cellar, sinking slowly down to a dirty cement floor. He saw shadowy furnace-pipe’s, grimy with dust, a snowblower covered with a large sheet of dirty transparent plastic, gardening equipment lined up to one side of a dim cylinder that was probably the water heater, and cartons stacked against one brick wall-soup, beans, spaghetti sauce, coffee, garbage bags, toilet-tissue. All of these things looked slightly hallucinatory, not quite there, and at first Ralph thought this was a new side-effect of having gone to the next level. Then he realized it was just smoke-the cellar was filling up with it rapidly.
There were eighteen or twenty people clustered at one end of the long, shadowy room, most of them women. Ralph also saw a little boy of about four clinging to his mother’s knees (Mommy’s face showed the fading bruises of what might have been an accident but was probably on purpose), a little girl a year or two older with her face pressed against her mother’s stomach… and he saw Helen.
She was holding Natalie in her arms and blowing into the baby’s face, as if she could keep the air around her clear of smoke that way.
Nat was coughing and screaming in choked, desperate whoops.
Behind the women and children, Ralph could make out a dusty set of steps climbing up into darkness.
[“Ralph? We have to go down now, don’t we?”]
He nodded, made that blink inside his head, and suddenly he was also coughing as he pulled acrid smoke into his lungs. They materialized directly in front of the group at the foot of the stairs, but only the little boy with his arms around his mother’s knees reacted.
In that moment, Ralph was positive he had seen this kid somewhere before, but he had no idea where-the day near the end of summer when he’d seen him playing roll-toss with his mother in Strawford Park was the furthest thing from his mind at that moment.
“Look, Mama!” the boy said, pointing and coughing. “Angels!”
Inside his head Ralph heard Clotho saying We’re no angels, Ralph, and then he pushed forward toward Helen through the thickening smoke, still holding Lois’s hand. His eyes were stinging and tearing already, and he could hear Lois coughing.
Helen was looking at him with dazed unrecognition-looking at him the way she had on that day in August when Ed had beaten her so badly.
“Helen!”
“Ralph?”
“Those stairs, Helen! Where do they go?”
“What are you doing here, Ralph? How did you get h-” She broke into a coughing spasm and doubled over. Natalie almost tumbled out of her arms and Lois took the screaming child before Helen could drop her.
Ralph looked at the woman to Helen’s left, saw she seemed even less aware of what was going on, then grabbed Helen again and shook her. “Where do the stairs go?”
She glanced over her shoulder at them. “Cellar bulkhead,” she told him. “But that’s no good. It’s-” She bent over, coughing dryly.
The sound was weirdly like the chatter of Charlie Pickering’s automatic weapon. “It’s locked,” Helen finished. “The fat woman locked it. She had the lock in her ocket. I saw her put it on. Why did she p do that, Ralph? How did she know we’d come down here?”
Where else did you have to go? Ralph thought bitterly, then turned to Lois. “See what you can do, will you?”
“Okay.” She handed him the screaming, coughing baby and pushed through the little crowd of women. Susan Day was not among them, so far as Ralph could see. At the far end of the cellar, a section of the floor fell in with a gush of sparks and a wave of baking heat. The girl with her face buried against her mother’s stomach began to scream.
Lois climbed four of the stairs, then reached up with her palms held out, like a minister giving a benediction. In the light of the swirling sparks, Ralph could dimly see the slanting shadow that was the bulkhead. Lois put her hands against it. For a moment nothing happened, and then she flickered briefly out of existence in a rainbow-swirl of colors, Ralph heard a sharp explosion that sounded like an aerosol can exploding in a hot fire, and then Lois was back.
At the same moment he thought he saw a pulse of white light from just above her head.
“What was that, Mama?” asked the little boy who had called Ralph and Lois angels. “What was that?” Before she could reply, a stack of curtains on a card-table about twenty feet away whooshed into flame, painting the faces of the trapped women in stark Halloween shades of black and orange.
“Ralph!” Lois cried. “Help me!”
He pushed through the dazed women and climbed the stairs.
“What?” His throat felt as if he had been gargling with kerosene.
“Can’t you get it?”
“I got it, I felt the lock break-in my mind I felt it-but this boogery door is too heavy for me! You’ll have to do that part. Give me the baby.”
He let her take Nat again, then reached up and tested the bulkhead. It was heavy, all right, but Ralph was running on pure adrenaline and when he put his shoulders into it and shoved, it flew open.
A flood of bright light and fresh air swept down the narrow stairwell.
In one of Ralph’s beloved films, such moments were usually greeted by screams of triumph and relief, but at first none of the women who had been trapped down here made any sound at all. They only stood in silence, looking up with stunned faces at the rectangle of blue sky Ralph had conjured in the roof of the room most of them had accepted as their grave.