Timothy Hallinan: The Fear Artist

Up , he thinks, and he slogs through the water to the nearest tree, but the trunk is smooth, the bark almost slick to the touch. He checks the branches anyway. No platform, no tree house, no fort. Squinting against the rain, he surveys the other two trees, but no straight lines, no paler shapes, reveal a structure in either of them.

He feels time passing. His anxiety level, the terror he deferred while Murphy had his gun on them, has been rising for the past minute or two, and he wills it down, breathing against the tightness in his chest and working his way back along the edge of the house. The wall here is vertical iron bars, and he can see the light from Murphy’s train room shining in the water. Impossible for Treasure to have slipped between the bars.

Water-covered lawn, three trees, hedge. No Treasure. No place for Treasure. He realizes he’s been expecting a structure of some kind, a place she can shut others out of. Someplace where she can be whatever she really is, when her father’s not nearby.

But it’s not here.

So it has to be in the hedge.

He splashes across the yard to the bushes and bends down; she’s much shorter than he is. About halfway across the yard, almost straight back from the dining-room doors, he spots it: an opening in the bushes, perhaps three feet high. In front of it, he drops to his knees in the water and sees that it’s a tunnel, neatly clipped into the foliage. It’s very dark, but it seems to go in a couple of feet and then curve right.

Putting one hand on the lawn below the water, he reaches in and waves his other hand around, hoping to avoid coming face-to-belly with one of the extravagant spiders of the tropics. He’s never lost the fear of spiders that made Frank call him a sissy thirty or so years ago, and he performs this check instinctively even though he’s certain she’s just crawled through here and there won’t be any webs. There won’t be any webs , he says to himself, and he crawls in.

Eighteen or twenty inches in, the tunnel turns sharply to the right. Following it, scraping his back and shoulders on the sheared-off twigs, he puts his hand on something hard, and his fingers turn into a bright orange, barbed-wire jolt of pain. When he yanks his hand up, it brings weight with it. It’s clamped into a mousetrap. He pries the trap off and drops it, then crawls farther in, sweeping the dirt from side to side and finding four more traps, which he pushes out of his way. Suddenly he feels the space expand and rise above him. He stops and looks straight down at the black water, willing his pupils to open wider. He hears the rain pattering on something, but he’s not being rained on.

He puts a hand up and finds smooth, heavy plastic, feeling the sticks and leaves of the hedge on the other side. He tries not to focus on anything, knowing that the peripheral vision is more sensitive, and out of the darkness a shape emerges, a bit farther in and to his right, rectangular and relatively light-colored. It’s wood, his fingers tell him, finished wood with a smooth surface, and he finds the top and immediately knocks something over, small, light, and slick to the touch, and he knows what it is.

A plastic disposable lighter.

He’s certain he’s alone in here, but he doesn’t know how far back the hollow goes. He picks up the lighter and flicks the wheel. And feels the blood leave his face.

Treasure has used pieces of plywood to create irregular walls, not so much walls as a gallery space. Color pictures from books and magazines cover every inch, overlapping here and there. There must be a hundred of them.

Ballerinas. Princesses. Girls in frilly, pale dresses. Girls holding hands with other girls, laughing with other girls. Girls at parties, giving one another presents. One wall is devoted entirely to a single large picture, twenty or thirty copies of it: a young girl in a loose white dress, her hair alive with sunlight, walking a dappled path in green, hospitable woods. The picture has been trimmed to the girl’s left side, and the forest on the right has been left uncropped and the pictures placed seamlessly beside each other so she perpetually emerges from the green of the forest to the safety of her path. Again and again and again. A girl, floating through a world of green light. On a path.

Rafferty wipes his eyes fiercely and wishes Murphy could die twice.

On top of the table are rounded stones and dried thistles and another mud-smoothed bird’s nest. A loose handful of wild grass splays gracefully from the top of what Rafferty recognizes as a cough-medicine bottle. Another medicine bottle holds a single, half-burned candle.

He takes a last look around, replaces the lighter on the table, and crawls out again, back into Treasure’s other world.

As he stands up, his eyes go to it immediately, the brightest thing in his field of sight. It’s a small window, high up, and it’s lit, and the light flickers and then intensifies, and he realizes two things simultaneously: that it’s the window in Treasure’s bathroom and that it’s on fire.

He starts to run, splashing toward the doors that lead into the dining room, but he slows at the sight of a small cabinet, about three feet high and four feet wide, built against the rear of the house. It’s rough plywood, and its door lolls open. There, stacked neatly, are six one-gallon gasoline cans.

There is room for three more.

His feet nearly slip out from under him on the wet dining-room floor, and he sees that the living room carpet is on fire, flames inching up the sides of the couches. There’s a foot of gray smoke trapped beneath the ceiling, and the smell of splashed gasoline is overpowering.

Almost thick enough, he thinks, to trigger an explosion. He goes farther in, to the stairs, to see how advanced the fire is.

The carpeting on the stairway is burning, too, but it’s been burning longer than the living room and the flames are five and six feet high, licking at the banister and being drawn upward by the ravenous inhalation of the fire that’s already raging upstairs.

He envisions it all in a second: beginning in her own bathroom and bedroom, pouring the gasoline on cloth and wood, tossing a match and running, spewing gasoline behind her, the flames following obediently along on the wet trail, the gasoline splashing from the can until the can is empty-there’s an empty can at the entrance to the hallway that leads to Neeni’s room-and grabbing another can and then another.

The L-shaped hallway is on fire, its carpet saturated. Neeni’s room is dark and cool-looking beyond the flames. It’s been spared.

He wipes his stinging eyes and coughs out a lungful of smoke, and then he knows where she is, if she’s still in the house. He wheels around and runs back over the tile of the entry area and the bare wood of the dining room and the tiled kitchen floors and into the train room.

The train table is engulfed in flame. Murphy is still on his back below the window, below the green drapes that Treasure had hoped would protect her. The carpet near the hallway that leads from Neeni’s room is blooming ripples of blue flame, not yet hot enough to turn yellow. Treasure, her back to him, backs away from the open, wet closet, drops the gasoline can, and pitches into the closet a chunk of bright metal-a heavy military-style Zippo, its little wick emitting a bright yellow light.

He shouts “NO!” and rushes at Treasure from behind, getting his arms around her waist as she turns and fights him with pure animal rage, tearing at his hair and clawing for his eyes and kicking at his chest and stomach, and he throws her over his shoulder, her head hanging down behind him, and runs for his life.

As he clears the kitchen, Ming Li runs in through the front door to meet him, and he waves her out and charges ahead, practically banging into Murphy’s car, pulled up to the front porch, not stopping until he’s halfway across the front yard, and he shouts to Ming Li to give him one of the briefcases. She pulls one out of the trunk of the Toyota, and he snatches it with his free hand, the story he will eventually tell taking shape in his mind. He tightens his hold on the kicking, screaming Treasure and runs back to Murphy’s car, pulls the driver’s door open, and tosses the briefcase into the backseat. Then he yanks the remote for the gate from the sun visor above the steering wheel. Moving away from the car, he’s almost pulled off his feet by Treasure, who’s clamped her fingers over the window of the open car door. He pries her loose, pushes the button to open the gate, and calls to Ming Li, “Start the car!”