Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

The security man placed his fingertips on the strange man’s chest. Uh, excuse us, buddy? he said, pushing him slightly.

Then, according to various accounts, the girl dropped something she held in her arms, tore control from the two men who held her, and seized from the wall one of the burning candles. She flashed it before her across the strange man’s throat as though to send his head soaring to the ballroom rafters. Of course the candle did nothing of the sort; the man touched his neck and looked at the cooling wax on his hands. The candle broke in two, its end flying behind them, where it fell at the foot of the curtains. For several moments there was only a harmless flicker.

Everyone — the security men, the girl and the man with the mustache, men in dark coats and women in vanilla gowns — watched the flicker, immobilized. And then, like a wave very far on the horizon that rushes forward faster than anyone can imagine, the curtains were a wall of fire that stretched from one end of the ballroom to the other in a bare moment. The air was gauzed in smoke before anyone thought to even scream, and then, like the fire, the reaction was roomwide. Catherine looked around her and the men were gone. Llewellyn was gone. On the other side of the room the doors flew open, and the floor was a swamp of blue flames. In less than a minute the ceiling above became shimmeringly hot, like liquid. Beams of the ceiling began to collapse.

She ran for the doors. Colliding with the other people, she could hear the fall of the ballroom behind her. She reached the lobby to see the carpets smoking and the chandeliers dripping like the colored ice of a cavern. Around her were the molten lines of people consumed and displaced by small eloquent puffs, dark glows left where the forms had existed moments before. Either there was remarkably little shrieking from those trying to get out or it was drowned by the fire’s roar, but the silence was tomblike and malignant; there was a dreadful smell. Only when Catherine reached the street did she hear the sounds of a world outside: footsteps, voices, sirens, wheels. She fell on the long grass outside the hotel with other people, and got up to run and fell again; it was impossible to get away from everyone else. The sirens came closer and closer and still seemed as if they would never arrive. The first of the fire trucks pulled up the drive by the time Catherine had crossed the lawn to the west knoll. Near the end of the hotel’s west entrance she heard the crash of a milk truck that had just arrived with the night’s delivery; the hood of the truck was burrowed into the corner of the building. Someone was caught between the building and the truck. Milk gushed out over the lawn; people ran through puddles of it and their shoes left white tracks gleaming in the firelight. Hoses were hoisted from the fire trucks and Catherine could feel the spray of the water turning to steam.

By now the upper floors of the hotel had caught fire. Flames coursed up the sides of the building like veins. People were streaming out onto the fire escapes in nightgowns and pajamas, women carrying furs and men holding briefcases. The bottom level of the hotel shone a brilliant gold. Catherine heard a terrific crash and screams from the lobby, and through the glass doors she could see the hotel’s chandeliers crashing to the floor. From around the corner came a sharp dry crack and a resounding rumble and then a gush of white light and from the crowd its first and only collective outcry. When the air cleared, half the hotel had disappeared. Those who could still run ran everywhere. Catherine jerked from the electricity in the air, and around her people began running into each other and into the sides of limousines and fire trucks. They held their hands in front of them and called for directions. The firemen began aiming their hoses wildly, showering the dark with water. More fire trucks rolled up the drive, blasting their horns at the people who were holding their hands over their eyes and howling from the flash of the explosion. More women and men poured from the hotel, wandering down to Wilshire Boulevard in white robes, black soot falling on them like snow. Many people were perched high in the windows of their rooms. They shouted down to the firemen to tell them where to jump, and the firemen stood at the base of the hotel with a canvas in their hands listening to the cries above them. Finally the people just began dropping from the windows. Everything went silent, mute firemen and people dropping quietly from the windows. High on the sixth floor a woman clung to her window, gray hair blowing and her sightless eyes glittering like ice. Catherine watched the woman spread her arms and take off like a bird.

At the bottom of the knoll on Wilshire Boulevard scores of police cars flashed red and blue lights; troops crawled up the hill as though in an invasion. In the middle of the drive Catherine saw a group of children in nightclothes screaming and crying; a tall thin woman with her hair in a bun was trying to calm them. They kept groping in front of them. Moving blindly in a group, they left one behind, a small blond girl who reminded Catherine of the Edgars’ child. Catherine picked the girl up and carried her in the direction of the group. Who is it, the girl said, where are we going? Catherine said something in her own language, and the girl reached for her eyes. You can see, the small girl said; and then, to anyone within earshot, she cried, This one can see! Catherine felt the child reach for her eyes again, as though she wanted to take them from her head. This one can see! the child kept screaming, and then someone else reached for Catherine’s face too. This one can see! yelled a man with black gnashing gums. Catherine pushed him away.

Someone else had her nails near Catherine’s eyes, and someone else pulled at her; she felt a pain shoot from her elbow to her shoulder. It didn’t matter now that Catherine was possessed of a chameleon face; the only force her face could deceive now was the blinding explosion of moments before. She can see, she can see! they were all screaming at her, running into each other in order to get her. Catherine flung the child in front of her and struck back. People tried to tear from her head the face she had despised so long. Someone had his hands around her neck, someone had his arms around her chest. Backed against something solid and cold, she turned to hoist herself up onto it while people wailed beneath her. Where is she! they were screaming back and forth. She could barely stay on her perch, her arms and legs shook so badly. She had no idea how long she could keep from being pulled down. People around her were shoved and trampled; the children among them were laughing and chattering, their fingers wet with blood. The tall thin woman with her hair in a bun stood in the distance sobbing hysterically; none of her children paid her any attention at all. Then Catherine saw that the thing onto which she had crawled for safety was a police car: she recognized it from her nights in the Hancock veldt.

The door of the car opened.

It opened with enough force to throw many of the people on the ground; in the throes of hysteria, some of them laughed. Getting out of the car was a towering black mountain of a man, who turned to look at Catherine on his roof top. “Come here, girl,” he said quietly, and took her under her arms and lowered her from the roof, and then put her in the front seat of the car and got in, locking the door. He did it as though it were a picnic at the beach. She sank into the seat, looking at the faces of those outside, most of whom didn’t know or no longer cared that she was inside the car. The black man turned on his unit radio. “Lowery here,” he said to someone. “I got myself caught in a mob on the drive.”

“We’ll come in,” came a response.