With a fatherly care that brought Lloyd closer to the brink of tears than the pain itself, the pharmacist at Del Mar 24HR Drugs covered his hands with antiseptic cream and then bandaged them up.
‘You’re pretty lucky, these are only very superficial,’ he said, taking off his heavy tortoiseshell eyeglasses, and massaging the deep indentations in the side of his nose. ‘Trouble is, it’s always the superficial burns that give you the most pain. My mother always used to put on chicken fat. It healed the burns okay, but I used to have half the cats in the neighbourhood following me around for days. Take two Tylenol now, and another two before you go to bed tonight, and don’t drive.’
They were about to go to the checkout desk when the drugstore door opened, and a thin elderly man in a wide hat and a grey business suit stepped in, followed by a tall girl with tight blonde braids and a floor-length black leather coat. The coat was unbuttoned, and underneath she was wearing what looked like a skintight black leather swimsuit. The two of them waited by the magazine rack, leafing through copies of Sunset and Barbecue Recipes until Lloyd and Kathleen began to make their way toward the door. Then the girl stepped forward to bar their way.
‘Mr Denman,’ the girl said, in a strong German accent. ‘You have something that belongs to me.’
Lloyd hesitated, his heart beating fast.
‘I don’t see how that can be,’ he replied. ‘I don’t even know you.’
The man slipped his magazine back into the rack, and stepped forward with a grin that looked like a pig’s caul stretched across a wire coathanger. ‘Allow me to introduce myself. Otto Mander, my dear sir. And this is Helmwige von Koettlitz.’
Helmet, or Earwig, something like that. Helmwige.
‘Well, good to have met you,’ said Lloyd. ‘But if this is some kind of touch, then you’re out of luck.’
Otto gave a dry, restricted cough. ‘This is no touch, Mr Denman, as well you know. You have been looking for me as intently as I have been looking for you. Now, you have something that belongs to us, not to you, and I would appreciate your returning it without the necessity for any unpleasant confrontation.’
Lloyd said, ‘Is Celia in the car?’
‘I don’t understand, Mr Denman. I was under the impression that your wife was dead.’
‘The hell you say. I saw her tonight.’
Kathleen said, ‘Lloyd . . . I think I want to go.’
‘All right,’ Lloyd agreed. ‘If this gentleman will agree to answer some questions.’
‘Of course.’ Otto nodded. His eyes roamed independently around the drugstore, as if he were constantly scanning the air, constantly searching for something. ‘I am not a secretive man, Mr Denman, and I have done nothing of which I need to feel ashamed. I will answer any question that you care to put to me, as fully and as openly as I can. First, however, I want the charm.’
Lloyd shook his head. ‘Questions first, charm later.’
‘I must insist that you give me the charm, Mr Denman, and that you give it me now.’
‘Even supposing I’ve got it, what’s so darned important about it?’
Helmwige stepped forward and stood so close to Lloyd that her breast pressed against his arm and he could feel her breath on his cheek. ‘Mr Denman, that charm is of no earthly use to you; yet it is critical to us.’
‘You mean critical to Celia?’
‘Your fiancée, regrettably, is dead. You identified her body yourself.’
Kathleen, anxious, begged, ‘Please, Lloyd, let’s just leave ‘
But Lloyd said, ‘I saw her tonight. You can’t convince me that I didn’t. She’s alive, in some way. She’s been following me.’
Otto pursed his lips. ‘An hallucination, my good sir. The living are living and the dead are very dead. There is no conceivable state of in-between.’
‘That’s not what you teach at your study groups.’
Otto’s eyes momentarily concentrated on Lloyd’s face as if he could have quite happily set fire to his forehead. But his eyes said one thing and his mouth said another. ‘You are a gentleman, Mr Denman. A man of honour. You must understand that the charm does not belong to you. It is very important that we have it.’
‘Is Celia alive?’ Lloyd asked him.
Otto didn’t answer, but continued to stare at him with that same incendiary stare. Helmwige said, ‘You have the wrong ideas, Mr Denman. We are students and worshippers, not witchcraft workers.’
‘I saw her with my own eyes, Miss von . . .’
‘Koettlitz,’ said Helmwige. ‘But of course this was impossible. Your fiancée, we are afraid, is quite gone.’
‘She’s alive,’ Lloyd repeated.
Otto gave that stretched-caul grin. ‘Perhaps you are then a fan of Goethe? Und so lang daß du nicht hast dieses: Stirb und werde! Bist du nur ein trübe Gast auf der dunkeln Erde.’
He kept on grinning, and said, ‘It means “So long as you fail to understand the notion that death transforms you, you will only be a miserable guest on this gloomy planet.’”
‘I believe that Celia is still alive,’ Lloyd repeated. ‘I don’t know how, I don’t know why. Maybe I’ve totally flipped. But I believe that she’s still alive, and I also believe that you know how, and why.’
‘Well! Well! We are all entitled to our fantasies and our aberrations!’ Otto replied. His laugh could have desiccated a coconut. ‘But I insist on the charm.’
‘Or what?’ Lloyd challenged him.
Kathleen said, ‘Lloyd, please let’s go. I don’t like any of this.’
‘Or what?’ Otto demanded. ‘You want to know “or what?” Well, let me tell you this: if you refuse to give me the charm, if you absolutely refuse to give me the charm, then you must burn and burn until I can pick the charm from out of your ashes.’
Lloyd was shaking with pain and anger. He never would have counted himself as brave, but with his hands bandaged and his house burned down, with Celia dead or not dead, with Sylvia burned and Marianna burned and Kathleen’s husband burned, he had passed that imaginary limit that his lawyer Dan Tabares called the GAS Line. After you’ve passed the GAS Line, whatever happens, you simply don’t Give A Shit.
‘Get out of my way, old man,’ he told Otto.
‘Hey! You don’t speak to Mr Mander with such disrespect!’ Helmwige interjected, jostling her shoulder forward.
Lloyd tried to be calm, but it was difficult. ‘Get out of my way, all right?’ he insisted. ‘Because if you don’t get out of my way, believe me, I’m not going to call the manager. I’m not going to call a cop. All I’m going to do is beat the living shit out of you, octogenarian or not, and then I’m going to do the same to Miss Cut-Price Leather Couch here.’
Otto lifted his chin in controlled fury. His neck rose out of his withered cream shirt-collar like a turtle. ‘Mr Denman, you are not a wise man, my dear sir. All of your difficulties would be solved by simply returning the charm, please. In any event, it is not your property. You have no claim to it. I am sure the police will understand that.’
‘Get out of my way,’ Lloyd insisted.
There was a long moment in which none of them spoke: in which all of them were trying to outguess each other’s reactions. Then, without warning, Lloyd shoved Helmwige back against the nail-varnish display, and there was a sudden brittle scattering of pink and red bottles. Then he jabbed his elbow deep into Otto’s concave ribs. Otto gave a barking cough, and clutched himself tight.
Lloyd snatched Kathleen’s hand and pushed open the drugstore door. They ran together across the pavement, colliding with a young skateboarder, tangling themselves with a couple in bermuda shorts and baseball caps, then climbed into Lloyd’s BMW and skittered away from the curb with tyres howling and rubber ‘Ss’ snaking all across the street.
Otto threw open the drugstore door, and immediately pressed both hands to his forehead. Helmwige said, ‘Otto! Vorsicht! Er hat den Talisman!’ But Otto’s fury was locked together jigsaw-tight, and nothing could have broken it, not then. A sharp arrow of fire chased across the blacktop after Lloyd’s BMW, flaring against the car’s rear bumper for an instant. But Lloyd was too quick, and the BMW had roared out of sight before the fire could take hold.
‘Scheiβ!’ Otto cursed. He whirled around and walked stiffly back to his parked Mercedes, wrenching open the passenger door as if he wanted to tear it off its hinges. Helmwige walked around the car and opened the driver’s door.
‘What now?’ she asked him.
‘Go after them, of course!’ Otto instructed her. ‘Come on, quick, quick! Why do you stand there, staring at me like an idiot? Follow them!’
‘They could have turned off anywhere,’ Helmwige retorted.
Otto screeched at her. ‘Do what I tell you! Follow them!’
The Mercedes bucked and heaved away from the curb. From the back seat, a grey-faced figure bent forward and said, ‘If you catch him, you won’t hurt him, will you?’
‘What, you think I’m verrückt?’ Otto snarled back. ‘But where will you be, without your talisman? A Salamander, for ever! A living fire!’
Lloyd raced northward out of Del Mar, steering choppily and erratically with his gauze-bandaged fingertips. He skidded to a stop whenever they hit traffic signals, revved impatiently, watching behind him, then ripped ahead as soon as the lights turned green.
Kathleen said, ‘Lloyd! My God! Are they following us?’
Lloyd flicked his eyes to the rearview mirror. ‘I can’t see them yet.’
‘Maybe they’ve given up.’
‘No,’ said Lloyd. ‘They need that charm too badly.’
‘But they’re terrible! They’re so threatening! Can’t we call the police?’
‘Sure we can call the police. But what do you think the police are going to do?’
‘I don’t know. But they set fire to your house, they set fire to your car! Look at your hands! Surely the police can charge them with something?’
Lloyd shook his head. ‘Kathleen, I don’t want to call the police. If I call the police, I’ll never find out what’s going on. They won’t let me. Besides, what am I going to say to them? “My dead wife set fire to my house, then this cheesy old man set fire to my steering-wheel from fifty feet away”? You think they’re going to believe me?’
‘But they threatened us, they’re chasing us.’
Lloyd said, ‘Just tell me how we get to your house. They haven’t caught up with us yet.’
‘Lloyd, I’m frightened!’
‘Me too. But calling the police isn’t going to help. In fact, it’ll probably make things worse.’
Kathleen was quiet for a moment. But then she said, ‘Do you really think that Celia is still alive?’
‘I’m beginning to believe that she is, yes.’
‘I don’t understand this at all,’ said Kathleen.
Lloyd checked his rearview mirror again. ‘I don’t understand it, either. But Otto promised everybody who came to his group that they were going to live for ever. Somehow, it looks like he’s managed it. With Celia, anyway. I saw her! She was different, but she was still Celia.’
‘People can’t die and then come alive again.’
Lloyd shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe they can, in a different way. Burning seems to have something to do with it. Maybe you live for ever, if you burn.’
Kathleen said, tightly, distractedly. ‘You can take a right here.’
They turned away from the ocean and started to drive up into the hills. But as they reached the first high crest beyond the interstate, Lloyd became aware that a single pair of headlights was following them, not too close, but close enough not to lose them.
‘Look around,’ he told Kathleen. ‘Do you think that’s them?’
She shaded her eyes. ‘I can’t be sure, but it looks like them.’
‘Hold on tight, then. This is where we shake them off for good.’
Lloyd pressed the gas-pedal down to the floor, and the BMW surged forward at more than 90mph. It took them only a few seconds to reach the next intersection, and Lloyd immediately braked hard and swung off to the right, killing his headlights as he did so. Then he swung left, completely off the road, and the car jolted and bounced as he negotiated his way down a dusty slope, through a clump of birds-of-paradise and prickly pear. The BMW’s suspension banged unnervingly as they drove over a series of rocky ruts, and the muffler grounded again and again. But then Lloyd wrestled the car around behind a high screen of bushes and brought it to a halt.
‘There’s no way they’re going to find us now,’ he told Kathleen. ‘Let’s give them ten minutes or so to get tired of looking for us, then we’ll carry on to your place.’
Only a few seconds afterwards, they saw headlights flash past them on the main highway. Then a truck went past, and a procession of much slower cars. Lloyd let out a tight, anxious breath.
‘I wonder what they want that charm for,’ said Kathleen.
‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s part of their religious ritual. Otto has the same design on the wall of his house, but much larger.’
‘They’re so weird, those people,’ Kathleen shivered. ‘I can hardly believe that Mike was mixed up with them.’
They waited in silence for five minutes longer. Then Lloyd said, ‘I’ve been thinking about your husband’s medical. Is there any way we could find out what the results were?’
‘Why?’
‘Just a guess. Marianna thought she might have had breast cancer, and if your husband had found out that he had something wrong with him—maybe that would have made them both a whole lot more receptive to the ideas of somebody like Otto. After all, he was promising everlasting life.’
‘I suppose I could call Doctor Kranz.’
Lloyd checked his watch. His hands were still burning dully, but the Tylenol was deadening the worst of the pain. ‘It’s just a shot in the dark. But I’ve been trying to follow up every possible idea.’
‘You don’t think . . .’ Kathleen began.
Lloyd glanced across at her. He knew what she was thinking, and what she was going to say. She had listened patiently to his stories about seeing Celia on the Star of India and at Tom Ham’s Lighthouse, and about the breakins, and the Wagner libretto inside the piano. But he wasn’t surprised that he was stretching her credulity by insisting that Celia was somehow still alive.
All the same, he shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think I’m cracking up. I’m not superstitious, I don’t even believe in star signs. I don’t believe in the supernatural, either. But I saw Celia and she wasn’t a mirage or an hallucination or a trick of the light. There’s an explanation for all of this. I don’t know what it is, but I’m sure as hell going to find out.’
He held up the charm. ‘First of all I’m going to find out what this is all about. Then I’m going to take that Wagner libretto to somebody who knows something about music.’
‘All right, then,’ Kathleen agreed. ‘And I’ll phone Doctor Kranz, and ask about Mike’s medical. But if none of this adds up to anything—well, I don’t enjoy being chased around by people like this Otto of yours. It scares me.’
Lloyd raised one bandaged hand, and pledged, ‘If we can’t come up with anything that makes any sense, then you’re out of it. I promise.’
She leaned across the car and unexpectedly kissed his cheek. ‘You were good, back there in the drugstore. Like Lethal Weapon.’
‘Flattery will get you anywhere.’
‘Well, home would be a good start.’
Lloyd cautiously steered the BMW out of the trees and back on to the road. There was no sign of the Mercedes anywhere. He turned right, and rejoined the winding road that would take them through Rancho Sante Fe and eventually out past Lake Hodges to Escondido. The night was exceptionally black, a strange liquid black, as if the world had been silently drowned by a seamless oil-spill.
Rancho Santa Fe was lit up, neat as toytown, its streets unnaturally deserted, as if all of its elderly residents had been taken away by friendly aliens. But once they had driven out into the hills, the blackness covered them yet again. Lake Hodges lay black between its black forested banks, betraying its presence only by an occasional secretive sparkle.
Kathleen tried to tune into KOGO on the radio to hear if there were any bulletins about Lloyd’s house burning, but all they could pick up were six or seven country-rock stations and a long tedious interview about the Navy Hospital. She switched the radio off again.
Kathleen said, ‘What are you going to do if Celia is still alive?’
‘I’ve been trying not to think about it,’ Lloyd replied. ‘It gives me the shudders.’
‘You still love her, though, don’t you? The way that I still love Mike?’
Lloyd drove in silence for a short while. Then he said, ‘I loved her the way she was. But the way I saw her tonight—well, she wasn’t at all the same. She looked really strange. Her skin was kind of—I don’t know—greyish, and she didn’t seem to have any eyes. She was alive, for sure. At least she was walking and talking, and she recognized me. But she looked like she was dead.’
He cleared his throat. ‘I keep trying not to think about the word “zombie”. It sounds like some dumb teenage video with dead people shuffling through shopping malls.’
Kathleen didn’t answer, but she gave a small shiver, as if somebody had stepped on her grave.
They turned toward Escondido. Kathleen’s house was on the south-western outskirts, on a secluded road opposite the vineyards of the Altmann Brothers Winery. She touched Lloyd’s shoulder as they approached it, and said, ‘It’s best to go dead slow. It’s a real sharp turn into the drive.’
The BMW’s headlights picked out the San Diego Tribune mailbox with the name M. KERWIN painted in silver reflective letters on it. The late M. Kerwin. Lloyd slowed the car down to a crawl, and steered carefully around the tightly curving driveway.
‘Lucy and Tom are probably still over at Rancho Bernardo,’ said Kathleen. ‘They were visiting my parents this evening. Mom’s been so good about everything.’
Lloyd saw bushes, flowers, a two-storey brick-and-wooden house. Then, to his horror, he saw a silver Mercedes sedan, parked facing him. Beside it stood the unmistakable and menacing figures of Otto and Helmwige. Somebody else, too, standing well back in the shadows behind them. Somebody with a black coat and a yellow scarf and blacked-out sunglasses.
‘Oh God, it’s them!’ Kathleen breathed, her voice high-pitched with fright.
Lloyd slammed the BMW into reverse, and twisted around in his seat. The car’s tyres shrieked in protest as it backed up the drive at full speed, swaying violently from side to side as Lloyd attempted to steer it straight. With a hideous thumping noise, they collided with a low retaining wall close to the entrance, and Lloyd had to shift back into ‘Drive’ and rev the car forward to unhook his bumper from the bricks.
In the glare of his halogen headlights, Lloyd saw Otto step forward and lift his hands to his forehead. Otto’s face was unnaturally white and his eyes were pinpricks of flashing yellow, as dead and as bright as a snake’s eyes. Grunting with pain, Lloyd pushed the gearshift into reverse again, and began to steer his way backwards round the curve in the drive, scraping the wall all the way.
They almost reached the mailbox when the BMW’s tyres exploded into flame, all four of them. Kathleen screamed. Lloyd shouted, ‘Hold on! It’s okay! We’re almost there!’ The car’s rear bumper hit the mailbox and knocked it flat. Then Lloyd slewed the car around and they sped off into the darkness, their tyres blazing like Catherine-wheels, or the red-hot wheels of Union Pacific locomotives careening down the High Sierras on nothing but their brakes.
‘How did they know where I lived?’ Kathleen screamed, almost hysterical, as they roared along the highway with flames flickering all around them. ‘How did they know where I lived?’
Lloyd was tempted to say, ‘Maybe Mike’s still alive, too. Maybe Mike told them’, but he decided that Kathleen had been through enough horrors for one night. Besides, his most urgent concern now was to extinguish their tyres.
They flashed past an irrigation hydrant by the side of the road. Lloyd skidded the BMW to a halt, and backed up until they were parked right beside it. ‘Out!’ he told Kathleen. ‘Careful! Don’t stand too close! And keep an eye open for Otto!’
He climbed out of the car, and wrestled with the hydrant. He cried out, ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ in agony as the knurled knob dug into his bandaged hands, but at last the faucet juddered and shook, and splattered blood-rusty water on to the ground. Lloyd found a discarded cardboard fruit-box only a few feet away, and filled it up to the top. The box gushed noisily from all its crevices, but it held enough for Lloyd to be able to heave water over the burning tyres, one by one, and to douse them in a sizzle of rubbery-smelling steam.
‘Okay, let’s get out of here!’ he called. But as he tossed away the box and opened his door, he heard the rushing noise of a fast-approaching vehicle, and out of the darkness beside the Altmann winery sped the silver Mercedes with the blacked-out windows.
Kathleen ran back to the car, and Lloyd dropped into the driver’s seat and twisted the key in the ignition. But before Kathleen could reach the passenger door, the Mercedes cut in front of them, and slid to a crunching, emphatic halt. The Mercedes’ doors flew open at once, and Otto and Helmwige climbed out. Helmwige circled the BMW towards Kathleen, while Otto remained where he was, desiccated and thin, his hands clasped in front of him, his face darkly shadowed by the brim of his hat.
‘No!’ cried Kathleen, as Helmwige approached her. Lloyd came around the back of the car and stepped in between them, but Helmwige simply grinned at him.
‘Now, with no more nonsense, you’re going to give us the charm?’ she demanded.
‘Not a chance,’ Lloyd told her, shakily. ‘Now get the hell out of here and leave us alone. This time I’m going to call the cops.’
‘Oh, yes? And what are you going to tell them, these cops?’
‘I’m going to suggest that they search your little hideout on Paseo Delicias, for starters. Kidnapping and imprisonment are pretty serious offences, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Oh, you’ve been prying around our house, too?’ asked Helmwige, still grinning. ‘Well, I agree with you. Kidnapping and imprisonment are very serious offences. But there is no law against a man who wants to be chained up, now is there? That man would not be at all happy to be free. He is guilty, you see, that he has not lived up to his promise. He is only content when he is being punished.’
‘You can tell that to the sheriff. I’m sure,’ Lloyd challenged her.
‘By all means. I will also tell him that you have an item of valuable property which belongs to us, and that you refuse to return it.’
Lloyd help up the charm between his gauze-wrapped fingers. ‘You show me who else you’ve got in that car, and tell me why you want this charm so badly, and then maybe I will.’
Otto called out dryly, ‘What is he saying?’
Helmwige without relaxing her grin, turned back to him. ‘He wants to see our passenger.’
‘Then let him. Perhaps then he’ll come to his senses.’
A large furry moth flickered into the beam of the Mercedes’ headlights, and clung quivering for a moment to the dazzling lens. Otto reached out smoothly and cupped the mesmerized insect in his hand. Lloyd and Kathleen watched him in disgusted fascination as he licked it all over until its wings were stuck down with his saliva, then placed it into his mouth as if it were a piece of fruit. He sucked hard, and then swallowed.
‘Celia!’ called Helmwige. ‘Why don’t you come out, my dear?’
Although Lloyd had already guessed that it was Celia, he still felt an acid-sharp tingle of fear. He had seen her burned body in the police morgue downtown and he had seen her eyeless and terrible in their blazing bedroom. He didn’t know how she could still be walking around, unless she had undergone some extraordinary kind of advanced operation, or unless she was a zombie, or a ghost, or a robot, or her own twin sister, or unless he had gone into shock when he had heard of her death, and this was nothing but a nightmare.
One slim ankle stepped out of the car. Then a long familiar leg. Then a slender girl in a black raincoat, with a scarf tied around her head like a turban, and impenetrable dark glasses. She stood close to the car, slowly buttoning first one black glove and then the other. Her face shone softly grey.
‘Hallo, Lloyd,’ she called, and it was Celia’s voice, no question at all.
Lloyd was swept by such a surge of emotion, such a turmoil of fear and longing and shock and disbelief, that he could hardly speak.
‘Celia,’ he said. ‘Celia, what the hell is going on? Are you really alive?’
‘I’m saved, Lloyd, that’s what’s happened.’
‘Did you really burn yourself?’
But Otto interrupted. ‘Mr Denman . . . the less you know about this, the safer you will be. Please . . . you have seen her. You know that she is saved. Give us the charm and the whole matter can be forgotten.’
Lloyd slowly and emphatically shook his head. ‘That’s where you’re wrong, friend. This matter isn’t going to be forgotten. No goddamned way is this matter going to be forgotten. You’ve been burning people to death, you’ve been terrorizing people, you’ve burned down my house, you’ve wrecked my car. Look at my hands, for God’s sake! And now you bring Celia out, who’s supposed to be dead, and tell me she’s saved!’
‘Mr Denman, she is saved, believe me.’
‘I wouldn’t believe you if you told me it gets dark at night. I want to know what the hell’s going on.’
Celia said, ‘Lloyd, my love, please. Don’t argue now. Let them have the charm. Otherwise I can’t survive.’
‘I just want to know what this is all about,’ Lloyd insisted.
Otto stepped nearer, brushing dust from the sleeves of his suit. ‘Mr Denman, your fiancée is in a particular state at this moment which you might call volatile. When the year reaches its fullest point, at the summer solstice, we will be able to stabilize her condition and she will become whole. She will have attained a state of perfection that will make her nothing short of immortal. But, it is essential for her to have the talisman which she lost by accident on the day of her burning. Unless you wish her to remain in her present state, you will now return it.’
‘Celia?’ asked Lloyd, ignoring Otto as pointedly as he could.
‘He’s telling you the truth, Lloyd,’ Celia replied. Her voice sounded like the softest of brushes on silver.
‘But why?’ Lloyd wanted to know. ‘Why did you try to kill yourself like that? Weren’t you happy? Was something wrong? Were you depressed? You didn’t have to marry me, you know, if you didn’t love me!’
‘I loved you then and I love you now, and I will always love you,’ Celia replied.
‘So why did you burn yourself? What was it supposed to achieve?’
‘Exactly what Otto told you. Perfection.’
‘Don’t you understand that as far as I was concerned, you were perfect? I wouldn’t have changed you in any way for anything!’
Lloyd took a step toward her, and held out his hand. He couldn’t stop his eyes from filling up with tears. ‘Just tell me what’s happened to you! Can’t you do that? Tell me what’s going on!’
Helmwige stepped between him and Celia, and said, firmly, ‘No nearer, Mr Denman, or you will regret it. We will all regret it. Your interference has caused us enough trouble as it is.’
‘But she’s my fiancée, for Christ’s sake!’ Lloyd yelled at her. ‘She’s the woman I want to marry! Wanted to marry! Still want to, if you’ll tell me what the hell’s going on!’
Otto took off his hat, and wiped around the inside with his folded handkerchief. ‘Enough of this lovemaking. We can’t spare the time. Mr Denman, my lawyers will contact you regarding any damage that might have been done to your house and your car.’
‘Your lawyers? Goddamn it, I’m going to the police! I’m going to have you locked up, you goddamned maniac!’
Otto ran his hand through his white felt-like hair, and looked away. ‘Going to the police would be a grave mistake, Mr Denman. A wicked mistake. We would have to cut short our procedures, and delay Celia’s transformation until the next solstice, in a year’s time. Who knows what might happen to her in between now and then.’
‘I don’t understand this at all,’ Lloyd told him.
Otto smiled, and replaced his hat. ‘No, I don’t suppose you do. But then it isn’t really necessary for you to understand it. In fact, you’re probably not capable of understanding it. Like most men who place foreign cars and designer clothes higher on their list of priorities than spiritual strength and absolute achievement, you have an intellect no higher than any of those cockroaches which infest your restaurant.’
‘Now, you damn well listen to me . . . ‘ Lloyd began, angrily.
But Celia called, ‘Please, Lloyd! Please! Just give Helmwige the charm.’
Lloyd hesitated, glancing from Celia to Otto and back again. But then Helmwige suddenly seized his wrist, and raised the fist in which he was holding the charm. Lloyd gasped with effort, trying to push his arm down again. But Helmwige was startlingly strong, and he couldn’t move a muscle.
At the same time, he began to feel Helmwige’s fingers growing gradually warmer and warmer. He frowned at her in effort and disbelief. But it was only a matter of seconds before her fingers were so hot that his skin started to redden, and the edge of his gauze bandages began to singe. The hairs on his wrist shrivelled, and wisps of smoke rose from between his fingers.
‘Lloyd, please!’ Celia begged him.
But Kathleen slapped Helmwige’s shoulder and shouted, ‘Let him go! You’re all crazy! You’re vicious and you’re crazy! Let him go!’
Otto gave her a fleeting, dismissive glance, ‘Very spirited, Mrs Kerwin. But it won’t help at all.’
Lloyd kept his fist closed for as long as he could, but the burning of Helmwige’s fingers was more than he could take. Gasping, sweating, shaking with pain, he slowly opened his fingers and exposed the charm. Without a word, Helmwige picked it fastidiously out of his palm, and pressed it to her lips. Metal sizzled against saliva.
‘Thank you for your somewhat reluctant co-operation, Mr Denman,’ said Otto. He suddenly stooped forward, and caught a hopping cicada by the leg. It struggled and danced, but he pushed it into his mouth until only its head was showing between his lips, its black beady eyes staring. Then he crunched it up between his teeth, and swallowed it. ‘I like to give them one last look at the world they are leaving,’ he remarked.
Shuddering with emotion and pain, his burned hand pressed against his chest, Lloyd could do nothing else but watch Celia climb back into the car, followed by Helmwige and Otto. Otto raised one gloved hand in dismissal, and then they drove off into the darkness. Their brake lights glared momentarily as they rejoined the main road, and then they were gone.
Kathleen came up to Lloyd with tears in her eyes, and put her arms around him. ‘Oh God, are you all right? That must have hurt so much.’
‘It’s okay,’ said Lloyd. ‘I’ll get over it. A college friend of mine lost both his legs in Viet Nam, and he got over it.’
‘Was that really Celia?’ Kathleen asked.
Lloyd nodded. ‘It looked like her. It sounded like her. I don’t know how it could be, though. I think I’m just about ready for the Yoyo Hotel.’
‘But Lloyd,’ Kathleen insisted, ‘I saw her too, so she must be real. Just different, like that awful Otto said. God, he’s disgusting! She’s in a different state, that’s what he said, didn’t he? Volatile.’
Lloyd said, ‘Let’s see if we can get the car back to the house.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Kathleen asked him. ‘Are you going to call the police?’
‘Not yet . . . not till I know what’s going on. If there’s a chance that Celia could be saved, then the last thing I want to do is blow it.’
Kathleen said nothing. There was nothing to be said. They had both been confronted with the evidence that the dead could really walk, that the grave and the crematorium might not be the end at all, but a new and mysterious beginning.