Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor

He turned toward Lisa to hold her, to comfort her, to move her away from the sight of her dead friend, but her back was now toward him.

Glass shattered, and Joe flinched. He thought wildly that some murderous adversary was breaking into the kitchen through the windows.

The breaking was not windows but glass oil lamps, which Lisa had grasped like bottles, by their tall chimneys. She had smashed the bulbous bases together, and a viscous spray of oil had burst from them.

Bright points of flame irised wider on the tabletop, became glaring pools of fire.

Joe grabbed her and tried to pull her away from the spreading blaze, but without a word, she wrenched loose of him and seized the third lamp.

‘Lisa!’

Granite and bronze ignited in the Polaroid of Angela Delmann’s grave, image and medium curling like a black burnt leaf.

Lisa tipped the third lamp, pouring the oil and the floating wick across the front of her dress.

For an instant Joe was immobilized by shock.

The oil washed Lisa, but somehow the slithering spot of flame slipped along the bodice and waist of her dress and was extinguished in the skirt.

On the table, the blazing pools overlapped, and molten streams flowed to all edges. Incandescent drizzle sizzled to the floor.

Joe reached for her again, but as if dipping into a wash basin, she scooped handfuls of flames off the table, splashing them against her breast. As Lisa’s oil-soaked clothes exploded with fire, Joe snatched his hand back from her and cried, ‘No!’

Without a scream, which at least she had managed in reaction to Georgine’s suicide, without a groan or even as much as a whimper, she raised her hands, in which balls of flame roiled. She stood briefly like the ancient goddess Diana with fiery moons balanced on her palms, and she brought her hands to her face, to her hair.

Joe reeled backward from the burning woman, from the sight that scorched his heart, from the hideous stench that withered him, from an insoluble mystery that left him empty of hope. He collided with cabinetry.

Remaining miraculously on her feet, as calm as though standing only in a cool rain, reflected in every angle of the big bay window, Lisa turned as if to look at Joe through her fuming veil. Mercifully, he could see nothing of her face.

Paralyzed by horror, he realized he was going to die next, not from the flames that licked the maple flooring around his shoes but by his own hand, in some fashion as monstrous as a self-inflicted shotgun wound, self-evisceration, self-immolation. The plague of suicide had not yet infected him, but it would claim him the moment that Lisa, entirely dead, crumpled in a heap on the floor — and yet he could not move.

Wrapped in a whirlwind of tempestuous flames, she flung off phantoms of light and ghosts of shadow, which crawled up the walls and swarmed across the ceiling, and some shadows were shadows but some were unspooling ribbons of soot.

The bone-piercing shriek of the kitchen smoke alarm cracked the ice in Joe’s marrow. He was jarred out of his trance.

He ran with the phantoms and the ghosts, out of that hell, past suspended copper pots like bright blank faces in a forge light, past three glasses of Chardonnay sparkling with images of flames and now the colour of claret.

Through the swinging door, along the hallway, across the foyer, Joe felt closely pursued by something more than the blatting of the smoke alarm, as though a killer had been in the kitchen, after all, standing so still in a darkish corner that he had watched unnoticed. At the front door, as Joe grasped the knob, he expected a hand to drop upon his shoulder, expected to be spun around and confronted by a smiling assassin.

From behind him came not a hand and not, as he might have expected, a blast of heat, but a hissing cold that first prickled the nape of his neck and then seemed to drill into the summit of his spine, through the base of his skull. He was so panicked that he did not remember opening the door or leaving the house, but found himself crossing the porch, casting off the chill.

He hurried along the brick walk between the perfect box hedges. When he reached the pair of matched magnolias, where large flowers like the white faces of monkeys peered from among the glossy leaves, he glanced back. He was not, after all, being pursued by anyone.

The residential street was quiet but for the muffled blaring of the smoke alarms in the Delmann house: no traffic at the moment, no one out for a walk in the warm August night. On nearby porches and lawns, no one had yet been drawn outside by the commotion. Here the properties were so large and the stately houses so solidly built, with thick walls, that the screams might not have penetrated to the attention of the neighbours, and even the single gunshot might have been apprehended only as a car door slamming or a truck backfiring.

He considered waiting for the firemen and police, but he could not imagine how he would convincingly describe what had transpired in that house in a mere three or four hellish minutes. As he had lived those feverish events, they had seemed hallucinatory, from the sound of the shotgun to the moment when Lisa swathed herself in flames; and now they were like fragments of a deeper dream in the ongoing nightmare of his life.

The fire would destroy much of the evidence of suicide, and the police would detain him for questioning — then possibly on suspicion of murder. They would see a deeply troubled man who had lost his way after losing his family, who held no job, who lived in one room above a garage, who was gaunt from weight loss, whose eyes were haunted, who kept twenty thousand dollars in cash in the spare-tyre well in the trunk of his car. His circumstances and his psychological profile would not dispose them to believe him even if his story had not been so far beyond the bounds of reason.

Before Joe could win his freedom, Teknologik and its associates would find him. They had tried to shoot him down merely because Rose might have told him something they didn’t want known

— and now he knew more than he’d known then, even if he didn’t have any idea what the hell to make of it. Considering Teknologik’s suspected connections to political and military power grids, Joe more likely than not would be killed in jail during a meticulously planned altercation with other prisoners well paid to waste him. If he survived jail, he would be followed on his release and eliminated at the first opportunity.

Trying not to break into a run and thereby draw attention to himself, he walked to the Honda across the street.

At the Delmann house, kitchen windows exploded. Following the brief ringing of falling glass, the shriek of the smoke alarm was considerably more audible than previously.

Joe glanced back and saw fire writhing out of the back of the house. The lamp oil served as an accelerant: Just inside the front door, which he had left standing open, tongues of fire already licked the walls of the downstairs hallway.

He got in the car. Pulled the door shut.

He had blood on his right hand. Not his own blood.

Shuddering, he popped open the console between the seats and tore a handful of tissues from a box of Kleenex. He scrubbed at his hand.

He stuffed the wadded tissues into the bag that had contained the burgers from McDonald’s.

Evidence, he thought, although he was guilty of no crime.

The world had turned upside down. Lies were truth, truth was a lie, facts were fiction, the impossible was possible, and innocence was guilt.

He dug in his pockets for keys. Started the engine.

Through the broken-out window in the backseat, he heard not only the smoke alarms, several of them now, but neighbours shouting at one another, cries of fright in the summer night.