Timothy Hallinan - Incinerator

The stool made it impossible for me to shift my weight, and I almost fell as I turned. Only by throwing one knee in front of me could I stay upright.

“Good boy,” Hoxley said as I faced him. He’d shed the black robe and stood in front of me in a white T-shirt and blossoming boxer shorts. His arms and legs were thin and white, filmed with reddish hair, and I felt my eyes being drawn down to the black shoes, the left one thick and heavy, with a brace that stretched partway up his calf.

“Ah-ah,” he said in a warning tone.

“I knew you’d wear boxer shorts,” I said. “And an undershirt. Even in this weather.”

“That’s marginally safer ground,” he said. “But only marginally. You won’t tell anybody, will you? No, you won’t.” He hobbled over to the black rubber trench coat and put it on, catching the wig in midair as it slipped from the coat’s folds. Another coat, the third one Willick said he had bought, lay crumpled at the bottom of the pile. Turning to a polished aluminum surface above the sink, he adjusted the wig until it was perfect and then intentionally knocked it askew. “Jauntier this way,” he said, studying his reflection. “I really should have thought of the makeup earlier.” Satisfied, he spread his arms and pirouetted toward me, pivoting on the heavy shoe. “So. What do you think?”

“All dressed up,” I said, “and no place to go.”

“Wrong as usual,” he said, sounding smug. “Listen, I really can’t tell you what a pleasure this has been.” He leaned over and picked up a long black cylinder that had been hidden by the coat, vaguely familiar-looking, with straps hanging down from it. “We all have to go sometime, of course,” he said, slipping the straps over his shoulder so that the cylinder was cradled against his chest. It culminated at the top in a stretch of flex cord connected to a funnel. “But what a treat to see an old friend again just before Act Five.”

The thing against his chest was a fire extinguisher.

“Cute, no?” Hoxley said. He took the funnel in his right hand and pointed it at me. “Fwoooooo,” he said. I cringed. “Opposites attract, hey? Here I am, with Mom and my friend along for the epiphany. Except, looky here.”

He backed to the far end of the catering truck and pulled out a box of wooden matches. Pulling the box open, he took one out and struck it. It broke, and he swore and struck another, holding it in front of the funnel.

“Prepare,” he said, “to meet your maker.” I was scrambling backward until the stool struck the counter and its edge cracked me on the back of the head, and Hoxley turned a sort of faucet handle at the top of the cylinder and fire spewed out. I think I screamed.

“Wasn’t that dramatic?” Hoxley asked happily, turning the faucet closed. “ ‘Prepare to meet your maker.’ Those nineteenth-century playwrights really knew their audience. Well, your maker is going to have to wait a few minutes. And why shouldn’t he? The bugger invented time, didn’t he?”

The smell of kerosene filled the truck. I felt my eyes slam shut, and I sagged against the rigidity of the stool.

“I’m sorry we won’t have a chance to discuss time,” Hoxley said, and I opened my eyes to see him turning knobs on the larger of the two stoves. “Is it a straight line or a circle? Does it only happen once. Is there some price, as Dylan said, that we can pay to get out of going through all this nonsense twice? Another quote, maybe more to your liking than the earlier ones.” He twisted the last knob and limped to the door, opened it, and stood in it, a tall black silhouette with the face of death.

“There are children out there,” I said in a voice higher than Shirley Temple’s. The stove was hissing.

He shrugged. “Can’t be helped. Everything gets boring. Well, this is new. Maybe I’ll experience a last flicker of interest before it’s over. I think I’d like that.”

“Wilton,” I said.

“Or maybe not,” he continued, oblivious. “It’s so hard to find something one truly enjoys these days.” He gave the faucet handle an experimental twirl and then turned it off again. For a moment he stood silent, head down, as though listening to something. Then he looked up and straightened his shoulders. “ ‘Bye, Simeon,” he said. “And, hey. ‘Bye, Mom.”

The door closed behind him, and a moment later, flames erupted outside the windows.

The instant the door closed behind Hoxley, Mrs. Lewis began to scream.

I found my way to my feet, the stool pinning my arms behind me, and went to the window. A ridge of flame leapt and shimmered in the weeds about ten feet from the truck. It extended from one edge of my view to the other. For all I knew, it went all the way around.

Now that I was standing, I could smell the gas from the stove. Well, at least we weren’t going to burn to death. When the flames reached the truck, we were going to be spread like peanut butter all over San Bernardino. A last favor for an old friend.

Mrs. Lewis continued to shriek as I backed to the stove and felt for the knobs. I found them, but with my fingers taped together, there was nothing I could do. I tried to brush up against the sides of the knobs and turn them that way, but they wouldn’t move. The gas was sweet and foul and heavy in my throat.

“Be quiet,” I said, and then I started to cough. I was too close to the stove to grab a safe breath, so I backed away from it until I hit the far wall of the truck. I took a lungful of air, held it, and went back to the stove, pushing against its edge, crowding against it, and then, with all my strength, shoved myself away from it and across the corridor into the wall behind me.

The seat of the stool smashed into the back of my head, and I went down like a tree. There was no way to catch myself with my arms immobilized, and my forehead cracked the floor. For a moment I may have gone out, because it seemed to me that Mrs. Lewis stopped crying.

Then a high wail split my ears, and I was back, lying on the truck’s dirty floor with blood in my eyes. The corrupt smell of the propane invaded my nostrils as I fought to my feet again. Okay, change of plan.

Don’t hit something high enough to drive the seat into your head, stupid. Hit something lower.

This time I pushed off from the wall and hurtled back into the edge of the stove. I collapsed immediately to my knees, my head ringing and the hand I’d slammed on the counter firing off high-voltage pain signals, maybe something broken there, but I’d heard one of the stool’s legs crack.

I tried to breathe shallowly as I waited to gain the strength to rise again, and Mrs. Lewis suddenly said, “What are you doing?”

“Tell you later,” I said. My voice was thinner than Kleenex. “Can you get out of that thing?”

“Of course not,” she said, sounding like her old self. “If I could, do you think I’d be in it?”

“Right. Well, hang tight. Here we go again.”

When I stood this time, I seemed to feel the trailer heaving beneath my feet. For a moment, I thought my knees would give way, and I narrowed my focus against panoramic death until I was seeing and feeling one thing only, the stool crumbling like matchwood the next time I hit the counter. When I’d reached the far wall, I wiped the blood from my forehead onto the cool glass of the window and watched the fire. It had advanced a foot or so, and the flames were higher, feeding frantically on the weeds.

“This is going to hurt me more than it does you,” I said to Mrs. Lewis, and this time I threw myself back with such force that I stumbled even before I hit the counter, the leg of the stool striking the counter’s edge above my hands this time, and even as I smashed onto the floor, watching bright points of light bounce around inside my skull, I felt the stool go to pieces behind me.