Hymn (18 page)

Lloyd glanced across at her. He knew what she was thinking, and what she was going to say. She had listened patiently to his stories about seeing Celia on the Star of India and at Tom Ham's Lighthouse, and about the breakins, and the Wagner libretto inside the piano. But he wasn't surprised that he was stretching her credulity by insisting that Celia was somehow still alive.

All the same, he shook his head. ‘No, I don't think I'm cracking up. I'm not superstitious, I don't even believe in star signs. I don't believe in the supernatural, either. But I saw Celia and she wasn't a mirage or an hallucination or a trick of the light. There's an explanation for all of this. I don't know what it is, but I'm sure as hell going to find out.'

He held up the charm. ‘First of all I'm going to find out what this is all about. Then I'm going to take that Wagner libretto to somebody who knows something about music.'

‘All right, then,' Kathleen agreed. ‘And I'll phone Doctor Kranz, and ask about Mike's medical. But if none of this adds up to anything—well, I don't enjoy being chased around by people like this Otto of yours. It scares me.'

Lloyd raised one bandaged hand, and pledged, ‘If we can't come up with anything that makes any sense, then you're out of it. I promise.'

She leaned across the car and unexpectedly kissed his cheek. ‘You were good, back there in the drugstore. Like Lethal Weapon.'

‘Flattery will get you anywhere.'

‘Well, home would be a good start.'

Lloyd cautiously steered the BMW out of the trees and back on to the road. There was no sign of the Mercedes anywhere. He turned right, and rejoined the winding road that would take them through Rancho Sante Fe and eventually out past Lake Hodges to Escondido. The night was exceptionally black, a strange liquid black, as if the world had been silently drowned by a seamless oil-spill.

Rancho Santa Fe was lit up, neat as toytown, its streets unnaturally deserted, as if all of its elderly residents had been taken away by friendly aliens. But once they had driven out into the hills, the blackness covered them yet again. Lake Hodges lay black between its black forested banks, betraying its presence only by an occasional secretive sparkle.

Kathleen tried to tune into KOGO on the radio to hear if there were any bulletins about Lloyd's house burning, but all they could pick up were six or seven country-rock stations and a long tedious interview about the Navy Hospital. She switched the radio off again.

Kathleen said, ‘What are you going to do if Celia is still alive?'

‘I've been trying not to think about it,' Lloyd replied. ‘It gives me the shudders.'

‘You still love her, though, don't you? The way that I still love Mike?'

Lloyd drove in silence for a short while. Then he said, ‘I loved her the way she was. But the way I saw her tonight—well, she wasn't at all the same. She looked really strange. Her skin was kind of—I don't know—greyish, and she didn't seem to have any eyes. She was alive, for sure. At least she was walking and talking, and she recognized me. But she looked like she was dead.'

He cleared his throat. ‘I keep trying not to think about the word “zombie”. It sounds like some dumb teenage video with dead people shuffling through shopping malls.'

Kathleen didn't answer, but she gave a small shiver, as if somebody had stepped on her grave.

They turned toward Escondido. Kathleen's house was on the south-western outskirts, on a secluded road opposite the vineyards of the Altmann Brothers Winery. She touched Lloyd's shoulder as they approached it, and said, ‘It's best to go dead slow. It's a real sharp turn into the drive.'

The BMW's headlights picked out the San Diego Tribune mailbox with the name M. KERWIN painted in silver reflective letters on it. The late M. Kerwin. Lloyd slowed the car down to a crawl, and steered carefully around the tightly curving driveway.

‘Lucy and Tom are probably still over at Rancho Bernardo,' said Kathleen. ‘They were visiting my parents this evening. Mom's been so good about everything.'

Lloyd saw bushes, flowers, a two-storey brick-and-wooden house. Then, to his horror, he saw a silver Mercedes sedan, parked facing him. Beside it stood the unmistakable and menacing figures of Otto and Helmwige. Somebody else, too, standing well back in the shadows behind them. Somebody with a black coat and a yellow scarf and blacked-out sunglasses.

‘Oh God, it's them!' Kathleen breathed, her voice high-pitched with fright.

Lloyd slammed the BMW into reverse, and twisted around in his seat. The car's tyres shrieked in protest as it backed up the drive at full speed, swaying violently from side to side as Lloyd attempted to steer it straight. With a hideous thumping noise, they collided with a low retaining wall close to the entrance, and Lloyd had to shift back into ‘Drive' and rev the car forward to unhook his bumper from the bricks.

In the glare of his halogen headlights, Lloyd saw Otto step forward and lift his hands to his forehead. Otto's face was unnaturally white and his eyes were pinpricks of flashing yellow, as dead and as bright as a snake's eyes. Grunting with pain, Lloyd pushed the gearshift into reverse again, and began to steer his way backwards round the curve in the drive, scraping the wall all the way.

They almost reached the mailbox when the BMW's tyres exploded into flame, all four of them. Kathleen screamed. Lloyd shouted, ‘Hold on! It's okay! We're almost there!' The car's rear bumper hit the mailbox and knocked it flat. Then Lloyd slewed the car around and they sped off into the darkness, their tyres blazing like Catherine-wheels, or the red-hot wheels of Union Pacific locomotives careening down the High Sierras on nothing but their brakes.

‘How did they know where I lived?' Kathleen screamed, almost hysterical, as they roared along the highway with flames flickering all around them. ‘How did they know where I lived?'

Lloyd was tempted to say, ‘Maybe Mike's still alive, too. Maybe Mike told them', but he decided that Kathleen had been through enough horrors for one night. Besides, his most urgent concern now was to extinguish their tyres.

They flashed past an irrigation hydrant by the side of the road. Lloyd skidded the BMW to a halt, and backed up until they were parked right beside it. ‘Out!' he told Kathleen. ‘Careful! Don't stand too close! And keep an eye open for Otto!'

He climbed out of the car, and wrestled with the hydrant. He cried out, ‘Shit, shit, shit!' in agony as the knurled knob dug into his bandaged hands, but at last the faucet juddered and shook, and splattered blood-rusty water on to the ground. Lloyd found a discarded cardboard fruit-box only a few feet away, and filled it up to the top. The box gushed noisily from all its crevices, but it held enough for Lloyd to be able to heave water over the burning tyres, one by one, and to douse them in a sizzle of rubbery-smelling steam.

‘Okay, let's get out of here!' he called. But as he tossed away the box and opened his door, he heard the rushing noise of a fast-approaching vehicle, and out of the darkness beside the Altmann winery sped the silver Mercedes with the blacked-out windows.

Kathleen ran back to the car, and Lloyd dropped into the driver's seat and twisted the key in the ignition. But before Kathleen could reach the passenger door, the Mercedes cut in front of them, and slid to a crunching, emphatic halt. The Mercedes' doors flew open at once, and Otto and Helmwige climbed out. Helmwige circled the BMW towards Kathleen, while Otto remained where he was, desiccated and thin, his hands clasped in front of him, his face darkly shadowed by the brim of his hat.

‘No!' cried Kathleen, as Helmwige approached her. Lloyd came around the back of the car and stepped in between them, but Helmwige simply grinned at him.

‘Now, with no more nonsense, you're going to give us the charm?' she demanded.

‘Not a chance,' Lloyd told her, shakily. ‘Now get the hell out of here and leave us alone. This time I'm going to call the cops.'

‘Oh, yes? And what are you going to tell them, these cops?'

‘I'm going to suggest that they search your little hideout on Paseo Delicias, for starters. Kidnapping and imprisonment are pretty serious offences, wouldn't you say?'

‘Oh, you've been prying around our house, too?' asked Helmwige, still grinning. ‘Well, I agree with you. Kidnapping and imprisonment are very serious offences. But there is no law against a man who wants to be chained up, now is there? That man would not be at all happy to be free. He is guilty, you see, that he has not lived up to his promise. He is only content when he is being punished.'

‘You can tell that to the sheriff. I'm sure,' Lloyd challenged her.

‘By all means. I will also tell him that you have an item of valuable property which belongs to us, and that you refuse to return it.'

Lloyd help up the charm between his gauze-wrapped fingers. ‘You show me who else you've got in that car, and tell me why you want this charm so badly, and then maybe I will.'

Otto called out dryly, ‘What is he saying?'

Helmwige without relaxing her grin, turned back to him. ‘He wants to see our passenger.'

‘Then let him. Perhaps then he'll come to his senses.'

A large furry moth flickered into the beam of the Mercedes' headlights, and clung quivering for a moment to the dazzling lens. Otto reached out smoothly and cupped the mesmerized insect in his hand. Lloyd and Kathleen watched him in disgusted fascination as he licked it all over until its wings were stuck down with his saliva, then placed it into his mouth as if it were a piece of fruit. He sucked hard, and then swallowed.

‘Celia!' called Helmwige. ‘Why don't you come out, my dear?'

Although Lloyd had already guessed that it was Celia, he still felt an acid-sharp tingle of fear. He had seen her burned body in the police morgue downtown and he had seen her eyeless and terrible in their blazing bedroom. He didn't know how she could still be walking around, unless she had undergone some extraordinary kind of advanced operation, or unless she was a zombie, or a ghost, or a robot, or her own twin sister, or unless he had gone into shock when he had heard of her death, and this was nothing but a nightmare.

One slim ankle stepped out of the car. Then a long familiar leg. Then a slender girl in a black raincoat, with a scarf tied around her head like a turban, and impenetrable dark glasses. She stood close to the car, slowly buttoning first one black glove and then the other. Her face shone softly grey.

‘Hallo, Lloyd,' she called, and it was Celia's voice, no question at all.

Lloyd was swept by such a surge of emotion, such a turmoil of fear and longing and shock and disbelief, that he could hardly speak.

‘Celia,' he said. ‘Celia, what the hell is going on? Are you really alive?'

‘I'm saved, Lloyd, that's what's happened.'

‘Did you really burn yourself?'

But Otto interrupted. ‘Mr Denman . . . the less you know about this, the safer you will be. Please . . . you have seen her. You know that she is saved. Give us the charm and the whole matter can be forgotten.'

Lloyd slowly and emphatically shook his head. ‘That's where you're wrong, friend. This matter isn't going to be forgotten. No goddamned way is this matter going to be forgotten. You've been burning people to death, you've been terrorizing people, you've burned down my house, you've wrecked my car. Look at my hands, for God's sake! And now you bring Celia out, who's supposed to be dead, and tell me she's saved!'

‘Mr Denman, she is saved, believe me.'

‘I wouldn't believe you if you told me it gets dark at night. I want to know what the hell's going on.'

Celia said, ‘Lloyd, my love, please. Don't argue now. Let them have the charm. Otherwise I can't survive.'

‘I just want to know what this is all about,' Lloyd insisted.

Otto stepped nearer, brushing dust from the sleeves of his suit. ‘Mr Denman, your fiancée is in a particular state at this moment which you might call volatile. When the year reaches its fullest point, at the summer solstice, we will be able to stabilize her condition and she will become whole. She will have attained a state of perfection that will make her nothing short of immortal. But, it is essential for her to have the talisman which she lost by accident on the day of her burning. Unless you wish her to remain in her present state, you will now return it.'

‘Celia?' asked Lloyd, ignoring Otto as pointedly as he could.

‘He's telling you the truth, Lloyd,' Celia replied. Her voice sounded like the softest of brushes on silver.

‘But why?' Lloyd wanted to know. ‘Why did you try to kill yourself like that? Weren't you happy? Was something wrong? Were you depressed? You didn't have to marry me, you know, if you didn't love me!'

‘I loved you then and I love you now, and I will always love you,' Celia replied.

‘So why did you burn yourself? What was it supposed to achieve?'

‘Exactly what Otto told you. Perfection.'

‘Don't you understand that as far as I was concerned, you were perfect? I wouldn't have changed you in any way for anything!'

Lloyd took a step toward her, and held out his hand. He couldn't stop his eyes from filling up with tears. ‘Just tell me what's happened to you! Can't you do that? Tell me what's going on!'

Helmwige stepped between him and Celia, and said, firmly, ‘No nearer, Mr Denman, or you will regret it. We will all regret it. Your interference has caused us enough trouble as it is.'

‘But she's my fiancée, for Christ's sake!' Lloyd yelled at her. ‘She's the woman I want to marry! Wanted to marry! Still want to, if you'll tell me what the hell's going on!'

Otto took off his hat, and wiped around the inside with his folded handkerchief. ‘Enough of this lovemaking. We can't spare the time. Mr Denman, my lawyers will contact you regarding any damage that might have been done to your house and your car.'