Dean Koontz: One Door Away From Heaven

Bundled newspapers and magazines offered the best fuel. The kiss of the butane lighter ignited an immediate passionate response. The publications were so tightly compacted in the lower portions of the walls that, almost as dense as bricks, they would burn fiercely and for hours.

He circled the cramped space, bringing flame to paper in half a dozen places. He had never killed with fire before, except when as a boy he tortured bugs by dropping matches on them in a jar. Licking flames, lavishing bright tongues upon the walls, thrilled him.

When he first found the armchair empty, Preston had noticed the runt's damp footprints made patterns with his own. Now he followed them, pausing briefly every few steps to apply the lighter to the tinder-dry walls.

NEITHER OF THEM had time to be weepy, but they wept anyway, even though tough babes like Micky B and dangerous young mutants were both averse to giving anyone the satisfaction of their tears.

Crying didn't slow Leilani as she used the fragment of yellow glass to cut the loops of lamp cord that shackled Micky's wrists. She needed perhaps a half minute to do the job, less than a half minute to clamp the brace around her leg.

When they were ready to move again, flames bloomed elsewhere in the maze. Leilani couldn't yet see the fire itself, but its reflected light crawled the ceiling, like swarms of bright chameleons whipping lizardy tails across the plaster.

Fear nothing. That's what the surfers said. Yeah, sure, but how long since the last time that any of those dudes had to worry about being burned to death while they were catching a honking big wave?

They started back the way they had come, but simultaneously they noticed the damp footprints, and without discussing the matter, they reached the same conclusion: Preston would follow the spoor as surely as Micky had followed it.

In truth, finding their way out was no harder if they went one direction instead of another. No easier, either.

Already, on the ceiling, slithering salamanders of firelight faded behind rising masses of smoke that were first carried on the updraft but that would soon pour down through the labyrinth in thick, choking clouds.

Micky put one arm around Leilani, lending support, and together they hurried as fast as the cyborg leg would allow. At intersection after intersection, they turned left or right, or continued straight ahead if that option existed, basing every choice on instinct — which brought them eventually to a dead end.

TWO OF PRESTON'S three university degrees were in philosophy; consequently, he had taken numerous logic courses. He remembered one class that, in part, had dealt with the logic of mazes. When these three-dimensional puzzles were designed by educated mathematicians or logicians, who drew upon all their learned cunning to deceive, the result was usually a labyrinth that few could find their way through in a timely manner, and from which a certain percentage of frustrated challengers had to be rescued by guides. On the other hand, when the maze was designed by anyone other than a mathematician or a logician — by ordinary folk, that is — these more mundane mazemakers followed a startlingly predictable pattern, because the design flowed from instinct rather than from intelligent planning; evidently, embedded in every human psyche was an affinity for a basic pattern that rarely failed to be asserted in the designing of a maze. Perhaps this was the pattern of the network of caves and tunnels in which the first extended family of mankind had dwelled; perhaps the map of that earliest of all human homes had been imprinted in our genes, and represented comfort and security when we re-created it. The mystery intrigued psychologists as well as philosophers, though Preston had never spent much time brooding on the subject.

The Toad of Teelroy Farm might not have been ordinary by the standard definition of the word, but when his thought processes were compared to those of a Harvard-educated mathematician, he must be judged ordinary beyond argument. Having followed the Toad through this labyrinth once, without giving a thought to whether it conformed to the classic design, Preston suspected in retrospect that it did.

Following the scheme as he remembered it from that long-ago class, he repeatedly set fire to the stacks behind him, essentially barring his retreat. In this fashion, as the first thin gray smoke settled into the tunnels of the warren, with a heavier black soot soon to press after it, and as waves of heat began to wring noxious sweat from him, he arrived at the dead end in which the Hand and the Slut Queen had trapped themselves.

He would not have turned into that passageway, but he did hurry past it, catching sight of them peripherally. When he reversed course and blocked their retreat, the woman and the girl cowered together in their blind alley, coughing, squinting at him through the descending veil of smoke, clearly fearful of what he would do next.

What he did next was step into the passage, forcing them to retreat further to the end of it. Then from the midpoint, he backed out, setting fire to the walls at several places on both sides.

This seemed like old times. Bugs in a jar.

WHEN FIRE SUDDENLY APPEARS and grows with explosive speed, Polly wants to plunge at once deeper into the maze, perhaps having bought her own image too completely, seeing herself as a superhero without cape.

Curtis restrains her.

"The girl's in there," she reminds him, as if he's such a Gump that he's forgotten why they are here. "And Cass, Noah — they might have gone too far in from the other end to reverse out."

"You head back the way we came before the smoke gets too thick to see the signs we left." At every turn, he had marked the walls with Polly's lipstick: STRAWBERRY FROST said the label on the tube. "I'll find the others."

"You, " Polly says, disbelieving, because though she knows that he is an ET, she also knows that he's a boy, and in spite of all he's told her, she can think of a boy as having but one basic form, and a vulnerable form at that. "Sweetie, you're not going in there alone. Hey, you're not going in there at all."

"I can't imagine a Spelkenfelter turning spooky on me," Curtis assures her, "but promise you won't."

"What're you talking about," she demands, shifting her attention between him and the fire ahead.

He shows her what he's talking about by ceasing to be Curtis Hammond, reverting not to any of the many forms in his repertoire, but to the shape in which he was born, an incarnation that allows him to move faster than he can move as Curtis, and with senses more acute. This is quite a performance, even if he does say so himself.

He would not be surprised if Polly fainted. But after all, she is a Spelkenfelter, and though she sways, she does not fall. Indeed, flashing back on part of the story that he told them after their Chinese dinner in Twin Falls, she says, "Holy howlin' saints alive!"

MICKY, AT THE BACK of the dead end, didn't want to confront Preston Maddoc in part because of his greater strength and in part because of his lighter. He would probably use it to set their clothes afire.

Flames seethed over the walls along the forward half of the passageway. In a minute, the hungrily feeding fires would join from side to side, creating an impassable wall of death.

The haze of smoke thickened second by second. She and Leilani were coughing. Already, a rawness burned in her throat. Soon they wouldn't be able to breathe unless they dropped to the Hour. The moment they were forced to the floor in search of clean air, however, they were as good as dead.

She turned to the back wall of this blind alley and tried to claw newspapers and magazines out of the construction, hoping to burrow through to another passageway where the flames had not yet reached. The bundled publications were so tightly packed that she couldn't pry them loose.