Timothy Hallinan - Incinerator

“I thought it all hurt,” I said.

“He’s got third-degree burns,” the doctor said. “That means total loss of skin. The nerves go with the skin. Where he hurts most are the boundaries between the third- and second-degree bums. Where he’s got some skin left.”

Annabelle Winston started crying. This was nothing controlled, nothing like the averted face in the suite at the Bel Air. This was tears and snot and screwed-up eyelids and a sound like someone exhaling golf balls.

“Now, now,” the young doctor said ineffectually, out of his depth again. The mustache made him look like a kid fancied-up for Halloween. He put a hand on her arm, but she shrugged it off and grabbed my wrist. Her fingers felt like bridge cables. “Come in here,” she said fiercely. “Get your ass in here.” She dragged me through the open door with a strength that almost dislocated my shoulder. Bobby Grant followed us, hovering like a bad conscience. The doctor, abashed at the reaction he’d provoked, came in and closed the door behind us.

“Take a look,” Annabelle Winston said shakily. “The brotherhood of the pumpkin.”

Abraham Winston-what had once been Abraham Winston-lay in a bed that looked like one of the roasting racks at the Escorial, the Spanish palace of Philip II where heretics had been barbecued for the enlightenment of the Saved. The bed was a metal frame hitched up to a complicated series of levers and pulleys. Winston was swathed from feet to nipples in white bandages, and the skin that was exposed was covered with a ghastly, greasy white ointment.

His head was enormous. It was swollen and blistered, all the features concentrated into an area in its center. His hair was gone. His face looked like the crimped end of one of Hammond’s cigars, eyes, nose, and mouth pinched into the middle. The eyes, mercifully, were closed.

“Um, pumpkin,” the young doctor said. “All serious burn victims look like this.” I was looking at what Annabelle had hoped I’d never see, the reason it took her an hour to recognize her father.

“Why not a real bed?” I asked. I just needed to make sure that I could talk.

“We have to be able to turn him,” the doctor said. He’d used the time to recover his equilibrium. “You can’t change his bandages, you can’t put the ointment on him, without turning him.”

“Why is his head swollen?”

“Blistering.” The doctor made a small motion that took in Annabelle, asking me not to force him to discuss it further. His tongue snaked out and touched the bottom of the ridiculous mustache.

“The head’s only part of it,” Annabelle said mercilessly, recovering her power of speech. She drew a gray silk arm across her face. So much for that suit. “Tell him about his lungs.”

The doctor looked down at his feet. One shoe went back and forth, grinding out the cigarette he probably wanted. I wanted one, too.

“He inhaled fire,” the doctor said. “He got up before the old woman threw the blanket over him. Perfectly natural reflex, of course. Anybody who’d been set on fire would get up. Try to run away from the fire. Try to find water, maybe. I’d do it, too. Even though it’s the worst possible thing to do.” He exhaled a quart of pent-up air. “But there wasn’t any water around. So he breathed fire.”

“So he can’t talk?” I asked.

“Nothing anybody could understand,” said the doctor.

Bobby Grant put an arm around Annabelle’s shoulders, and she shrugged it off like an unwanted fall of snow. Her eyes were on her father.

“Isn’t there someplace else you can take him?” I asked. “And what old woman?”

“The old woman who kept him from burning to death there and then, may her soul rot in hell,” Annabelle Winston said. She was finished with crying; she’d put it behind her as though it had been a social gaffe. “At least then it would have been over quickly. Instead of this. And, no, you can’t move him. Even if there were anywhere better, which there isn’t. We already moved him once, from County USC to here. They didn’t even want us to do that.”

“Burn victims just get worse,” the doctor said apologetically. “Infection. Every burn is infected. The skin, the hair follicles, are teeming with bacteria. Move them and they die. Excuse me, Miss Winston.”

“I’ve heard it before,” Annabelle Winston said. “Take a look at Santa Claus, Simeon. Take a good look, and then tell me you’re quitting.”

Bobby Grant put in his two hundred dollars’ worth. “I don’t know how you could,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “you’re not me.” I turned to go.

There was a sound behind me, like the rasping of a file over iron, and I turned back. The human parody on the metal bed lifted a greasy, ointment-covered arm.

“He should be out,” the doctor said worriedly. “A normal human being would be out cold.”

“He’s not a normal human being,” Annabelle said, crossing to the bed. “He’s Abraham Winston.”

“Schossshuaaa?” said the thing on the metal frame.

“Yes, Daddy,” Annabelle Winston said. “I’m here. It’s Joshua.”

“Surrammatagga,” said the thing on the metal frame, its open eyes locked on Annabelle’s. “Dhooo shomeshing.” With supernatural force, it lifted its shoulders and turned its head. “Dhooo shomeshing,” it repeated.

“We’re going to do something,” Annabelle said in a businesslike tone. She turned and pointed a gray silk arm at me. “We’re going to get him. This is the man who’s going to do it.”

The pumpkin head turned to me. Its red, tiny, swollen eyes bore in on mine and found me lacking. Then, with a clogged cough, Abraham Winston passed out.

“Everybody,” the doctor said in a stricken voice. “Everybody out of the room. Now.” We all went. Even Bobby Grant had nothing to say.

In the corridor, Annabelle Winston clutched my hand in hers. All the control was gone, washed away by tears and terror. “Say you’ll stay with it,” she pleaded. She’d gotten a case of hiccups. They made her sound twelve years old.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.” Bobby Grant was smart enough to shut up and stay shut up.

“You have to,” she said. “You’ve seen him.”

“Maybe,” I said again. I shook the two of them loose and headed for the parking lot. Alice started with ironic ease, and I drove home, full of righteous determination to quit once and for all the next morning. When I got home, I opened a Singha beer and congratulated myself on a narrow escape. Resolving myself that I’d quit for good over the phone in the morning, I drank until dark. Then I went to bed and tried not to dream. I almost succeeded. I only had to get up twice for water.

While I slept, Abraham Winston died, and the Crisper set fire to another bum. When I woke up and went down the driveway on my way to Eleanor, there was a new letter in my mailbox.

This is what it said: You didn’t answer my letter. Is that polite? I want very much to be polite. Etiquette is one of the few things left to us in these times. I’m joking, of course. You couldn’t have answered my letter no matter how polite you are.

The people I burn, they have no notion of what it is to be polite.

Who are they, anyway? Biological misfires. Good for fuel but for nothing else.

All right, perhaps the next-to-the-last one, the Winston man, was a mistake. Even if he was past it when we met. Past knowing, past doing. Can’t I make the occasional mistake? God knows, whichever god we mean, everyone else makes mistakes. Ahriman has his way more often than we would like to admit. Last night’s fire, however, was no mistake.