The smoke was so thick in there that each breath I took seared my lungs, made me dizzy and nauseous. I pushed away from the desk, staggered toward the front entrance; tripped over something and fell skidding on hands and knees, scraping skin off my palms. Flames licked along the front wall, raced over the floor. As old and decayed as it was, the place was a tinderbox. It would be only a matter of minutes before the entire building went up.
In the hellish, pulsing glow I could see the boarded-up door and windows in the front wall. I scrambled to my feet again and ran to the window on the left; a gap was visible between two of the boards nailed across it. I got my fingers in the gap and wrenched one of the boards loose, flung it down, and went after another one. The fire was so close that I could feel the hair on my head starting to singe.
Sparks were falling around me; two of them landed on my shirt, on the back and on one shoulder, but I was only half-conscious of the burns as I tore the second board loose, hammered at a third with my fist where it was already splintered in the middle.
When I broke the two pieces outward, the opening was almost wide enough for me to get through. But not quite-Christ, not quite. I clawed frantically at another board, twisting my head and shoulders through the window and out of the choking billows of smoke. More sparks fell on the legs of my trousers, brought stinging pain in four or five places as if someone was jabbing me with needles. I sucked in heaving lungsful of the night air; I could hear myself making noises that were half gasps and half broken sobs.
The oxygen gave me the strength I needed to yank one end of the board loose, and when I wrenched it out of the way I was able to wiggle my hips up onto the sill and through the opening. In the next second I was toppling over backwards, then jarring into hard earth on my shoulders and upper back-outside, free.
I rolled over twice in the grass, away from the burning building; got up somehow and staggered ten or twelve steps into the middle of the road before I fell down again. Now that I was clear of the fire, I could smell my singed hair, the smoldering cloth of my pants and shirt. The smells made me gag, vomit up the beer I'd drunk earlier in Weaverville.
But I was all right then. My head had cleared, the fear and the wildness were gone; inside me was a thin, sharp rage. I got to my feet again, shakily. Pawed at my smoke-stung eyes and squinted over at the hotel.
My car was gone.
The rage got thinner and sharper. He took it away somewhere, I thought. Took my keys after he slugged me and drove it away and hid it somewhere.
But there was no time now to think about either him or the car. The hotel was coated with flame, like a massive torch, and the fire had spread to the adjacent buildings, was beginning to race across their roofs to the ones beyond. Part of the starlit sky was obscured by dense coagulations of smoke. Soon enough, that whole creekside row would be ablaze.
I ran along the far edge of the road, back toward the fork. Most of my attention was on the fire behind me, so I did not become aware of the cluster of people until I was abreast of the last of the south-side buildings, where the road jogged in that direction.
They were standing in the meadow up there-more than a dozen of them, the whole damned town. Just standing there, watching me run toward them, watching the ghosts of Ragged-Ass Gulch burn as though in some final rite of exorcism.
No one moved even when I stopped within a few feet of them and stood swaying a little, panting. All they did was stare at me. Paul Thatcher, holding a shovel in one hand. Jack Coleclaw, with his arms folded across his fat paunch. Ella Bloom, her mouth twisted into a witch's grimace. Hugh Penrose, shaking his ugly head and making odd little sounds as though he was trying to control a spasm of laughter. Their faces, and those of the others, had an unnatural look in the fireglow, like mummers' masks stained red-orange and sooty black.
"What's the matter with you people?" I yelled at them.
"What're you standing around here for? You can see the whole town's going to go up!"
Jack Coleclaw was the first of them to speak. "Let it burn," he said.
"Ashes to ashes," Penrose said.
"For Christ's sake, it's liable to spread to some of your homes-"
"That won't happen," Ella Bloom said. "There's no wind tonight."
Somebody else said, "Besides, we dug firebreaks."
"You dug firebreaks-that's terrific. Goddamn it, look at me! Can't you see I was in one of those burning buildings? Didn't any of you think of that possibility?"
"We didn't see your car anywhere," Thatcher said. "We thought you'd left town."
"Yeah, sure."
"What were you doing in one of the ghosts? You start the fire, maybe?"
"No, I didn't start it. But somebody sure as hell did."
"Is that so?"
"He was trying to kill me, the same way he killed Allan Randall in Redding. He damned near broke my head with a board and then he locked me in a room he used in the hotel and took my car and hid it somewhere. When he came back he torched the building."
Coleclaw said in a flat, hard voice, "Who you talking about, mister?"
"The only person who isn't here right now, Mr. Coleclaw, that's who I'm talking about. Your son Gary."
The words seemed to have no impact on him. Or on any of the others. They all kept right on staring at me through their mummers' masks. And none of them made a sound until Coleclaw said, "Gary didn't do any of those things. He didn't."
"He did them, all right."
"Why? Why would he?"
"You know the answer to that. You all hate the Munroe Corporation, so he hates them too. And he decided to do something about it."
"Gary's slow, mister. You understand that?"
"I understand it. But being retarded doesn't excuse him setting fires and committing murder and attempted murder. Where is he? Why isn't he here with the rest of you?"
He didn't answer me.
"All right," I said, "have it your way. But I'm going to the county sheriff as soon as I find my car. You'll have to turn Gary over to him."
"No," Coleclaw said.
"You don't have a choice-"
"The law won't take him away from me," a thin, harried-looking woman said shrilly. Coleclaw's wife. "I won't let them. None of us will, you hear?"
And that was when I understood the rest of it, the whole truth-the source of the bad vibes I had gotten earlier, the source of all the hostility. It was not any sudden insight, or even what Mrs. Coleclaw had just said; it was something in her face, and in her husband's, and in each of the other faces. Something I had been too distraught to see until now.
"You knew all along," I said to the pack of them. "All of you. You knew Gary set those fires; you knew he killed Randall. A cover-up, a conspiracy of silence-that's why none of you would talk to me."
"It was an accident," Mrs. Coleclaw said. "Gary didn't mean to hurt anybody-"
"Hush up, Clara," her husband told her in a sharp voice. Thatcher said, "No matter what happened to Randall, he had it coming. That's the way we look at it. The bastard had it coming."
"How about me?" I said. The rage was thick in my throat; I had to struggle to keep from shouting the words. "Did I have it coming too? You don't know me, you don't know anything about me. But you were going to let him kill me the way he killed Randall."
"That's not true," Coleclaw said. "We didn't know you were still here. I told you, we thought you'd left town."
"Even if you didn't know, you could have guessed it. You could have come looking to make sure."
Silence.
"Why?" I asked them. "I can understand the Coleclaws doing it, but why the rest of you?"
"Outsiders like you don't care about us," Ella Bloom said. "But we care about each other; we watch out for our own."
"More than neighbors, more than friends," Penrose said. "Family. No one here lies to me. No one here thinks I'm ugly."