Chapter 23

Kettering climbed the wooden stairs up the outside of his apartment building slowly. The day was getting hot and he was tired. Tired from what? he asked himself. He hadn't accomplished fuck-all since the night he shot his front door full of holes.

Well, not quite true. He had learned a name, Zoara Sol. And he had a place where his son might be, Harmony Village, somewhere in the mountains. And he had also thrown a small scare into Enzo DuLac.

Kettering let himself in and clumped across the room to the refrigerator. He yanked open the door and peered into the barren interior. One lonely can of Coors sat on the top shelf. He popped it open and drank gratefully.

Holding the beer can, he looked around the cramped apartment. The place didn't look any better than when he'd left it a couple of hours ago. No brownies had slipped in during his absence to clean up and make the place homelike.

Frankly, the room was a mess. A pot with a little water in it sat cold on the stove. This morning's dirty coffee cup rested on the table where he left it. The open jar of instant coffee was still on the drain board with brown granules spilled over the floor. Dirty clothes lay about the room, an ashtray overflowed onto the table. Hell, he hadn't spent enough time here to create this kind of clutter.

All a man needed, he had been fond of saying, was someplace warm and dry where he could kick off his shoes and stretch out. He was wrong.

Now he could see, as uncounted men before him, all the little maintenance tasks and unnoticed jobs that are handled by the women in their lives to make the home livable. He had taken for granted things like the bed being made, the beer supply maintained, the dishes washed and out of sight. Hell, any number of things. Now he could see.

The unmade sofa bed sprawled across his floor space like something that had washed up on the beach. Kettering stuffed the sheets and blankets inside without bothering to fold them and levered the thing shut. The seat did not rest quite parallel to the floor, but it would have to do.

He dropped onto the sofa and swallowed some more beer. His whole life was beginning to look like an unmade bed. An uncomfortable condition for a man with a strong sense of order. He leaned back and tried to sort out the various elements.

Overriding everything else was the shadow of Doomstalker. From out of the past it had found him. Or had he ever really been free of it, his own personal nightmare? Maybe it had always been there, lurking just beyond the limits of his vision, waiting to strike. What did it want from him? Somehow it was tied to that dreadful long-ago day in Prescott, Indiana, when he had heard his father in deadly argument. The day he had looked in his window and seen ... and seen ... what?

If he could just remember, it might be the vital clue. He closed his eyes, but as always, the day came back in fragments. The fresh smell of the park. The slap of his tennis shoes. The strange chill. The sound of the angry voices. The pizza truck.

The pizza truck? What the hell did that have to do with anything? It must figure, because it was so often in his dreams. It was something out of place. A clue. But where did it lead?

Kettering gave up and drained the last of the beer. He was a rational man who had never accepted the reality of curses or spells and other occult playthings. Halloween stuff to scare the kiddies. And yet ... and yet ... there were the dreams. There was the thing lurking at his door that had turned into a boy, who had turned into ... nothing. There was the savage murder of Al Diaz, the attack on Mavis. There was the sudden collapse of his comfortable life.

So here he sat in a depressing one-room apartment with dirty dishes in the sink, dirty clothes lying on the floor, sheets stuffed out of sight. He had been shucked like an old coat by his family. Yanked off his job on the street.

And now his last can of beer was empty. His wife was in the hospital. His son off on some nutty trip in the mountains. Not an encouraging tally sheet.

Kettering strained to come up with something positive about his situation. He crumpled the Coors can and tossed it at the carton that served as his trash receptacle. He missed and the can clattered across the floor and hid behind the refrigerator.

"Figures," he muttered.

Abruptly he sat up straighter. There was one positive thing in his life, if he hadn't fucked that up too. Charity Moline. He picked up the phone, punched the first digit of her number, then hung up.

He had never been good on the phone for anything beyond the basics - making or breaking an appointment, placing an order, confirming information. With things the way they were with him and Charity - spiky, at best - he had to talk to her in person to patch things up.

Kettering showered, shaved, put on a fresh shirt and slacks, and headed for the Hollywood Hills.

***

As he twisted the Camaro up through the canyon roads where thick chaparral grew down close to the shoulder, he caught himself listening to the silence outside. The hills never did have the clamor of the streets below, but there was always some sound - the whir of a Weed Eater or bang of a hammer somewhere. The engine of a passing car or motorcycle. The steady traffic schuss from the San Diego Freeway through the Sepulveda Pass. This afternoon he seemed to drive along in a cocoon of unnatural silence.

Seeing the silver-gray Mazda parked out in front of the stone cottage gave Kettering a pleasurable little jolt. He immediately clamped down on his anticipation. All it meant was that Charity was home. She might very well refuse to talk to him. He couldn't blame her. So before he got all excited, he sat for a moment to prepare himself for rejection.

Charity's cottage was bright and even more Disneylike under the afternoon sun than it had seemed at night. Flowers surrounded it in a kind of orderly confusion. Kettering inhaled their fragrance as he climbed the steps and followed the flagstone walk to her door.

He thumbed the door bell and listened to the merry chimes inside. No one opened the door. He heard no footfalls within.

He looked down at the Mazda and back at the house. Had she seen him drive up and was deliberately not answering the bell? No, that was not like Charity. She would not hide. If she had anything to say to him, even if it was Take a hike, asshole, she would do it in person. Kettering felt a warning prickle on the back of his neck. He shivered.

He rang the bell again. A bee buzzed around a patch of pansies by the door. A crow sailed down on silent wings and perched in a eucalyptus tree. The door stayed closed.

Kettering tensed. Something was wrong.

Then he smelled the smoke. Not the friendly smoke of somebody's barbecue, not the Forest Service burning slash, and not one of the deadly brushfires that periodically swept these hills. It was the smell of burning wood and cloth and plastic. Somebody's house. Charity's house.

He rattled the doorknob. Locked. The solid panel would take too long to break through. A wisp of brown smoke now curled around the side of the cottage. Kettering raced through the flowers and back along the wall to Charity's bedroom window. It was open about eight inches, and that was where the smoke came from.

He raised on tiptoe and looked in. The room was a mass of flames, now roaring and crackling. From out in front he had heard no fire sounds. Lying on the floor between the bed and the door, as yet untouched by the flames, was Charity Moline.

Kettering did not hesitate. He stripped off his windbreaker and pulled it over his head like a hood. Then he planted both hands on the windowsill and levered himself up, shoving the sliding window up into the frame. He dived forward into the blazing bedroom.

The heat blasted him like the breath of Hell. For a moment he lost his sense of place and purpose as the smoke billowed around him and the heat curled the short hairs at the back of his neck. He stumbled forward. His foot struck something yielding on the floor. Charity.

He crouched, lungs fighting against the superheated air, and slid his arms beneath the prone woman.

He straightened, cradling Charity's body against his own. The smoke he had inhaled fogged his mind. His legs rebelled, buckling and sending him stumbling toward the growing wall of flame.

He opened his mouth and roared at the fire, "No you don't! You won't take me!"

The sound of his own voice snapped him to full consciousness. He staggered around, saw the window open and beckoning to the bright, cool safety of the outside. Half falling, half running, he crossed the blazing bedroom, hit the open window at mid-thigh, and toppled out head first, carrying Charity with him.

Kettering felt the ground smash his head and shoulder. He smelled the soft fragrance of peonies and gulped the blessed cool air in through his nose and mouth. He pushed himself to a squatting position, hooked his hands under Charity's arms and dragged her step by step away from the cottage to safety. Then the world spun, blacked out, and he collapsed.

The sound of Charity coughing brought him back. He shook his head and was again fully alert.

Kneeling, he looked down at the woman who lay in front of him. Her eyelids fluttered and blinked open. He could see no sign that she had been burned, other than a singeing of hair ends.

She pulled in a deep breath, coughed again, and looked up at him. "Where did you come from?"

He almost laughed in the foolish joy of seeing that she was all right. Then he remembered the fire and her cottage. He looked back toward the bedroom window through which the two of them had tumbled to safety moments before. His jaw dropped.

Where angry flames should have been exploding from the frame, belching smoke and blackening the stone exterior of the cottage, there was only a wisp of brown.

"What the hell?"

Charity pulled herself up to a sitting position. She frowned at him. "What's the matter?"

"A minute ago we both damn near got barbecued in your bedroom. Now there's no sign of a fire."

"Fire?" Charity coughed again. "Oh, yes. I was lying on the bed, taking a nap. Something woke me up. All I remember is the heat and I couldn't breathe. I started for the door ... and then here I was with you."

"Just a minute."

Kettering got up and walked back to the bedroom window. The curtain had a ragged burn on the bottom. Inside, the fluffy white rug that covered the hardwood floor was charred. A light haze of smoke was quickly dissipating. No flames. No heat. No serious damage that he could see.

"What do you make of it?"

Charity's voice close to his ear made Kettering jump. He looked at her, then back into the bedroom.

"You're lucky. The whole house ought to be going up like a torch by now. You don't have a sprinkler system, do you?"

"No, of course not."

"Then this wasn't any natural fire."

"I don't get you."

Kettering took hold of the woman's shoulders and turned her gently to face him. "Think hard. What's the last thing you remember?"

"As I said, I lay down to take a nap. That's not my usual habit, but for some reason I got fantastically sleepy. I thought I'd just rest my eyes for a minute. I turned to look at something at the window and - " She stopped.

"What was at the window?" Kettering said.

"It was ... it was ... a silhouette. A man, maybe. Tall. Strange-looking hands. Something funny about the head. It's just a quick impression. A flash. Then I was asleep."

Kettering stared at her, then back into the bedroom. He took her hand and drew her away from the house.

"What was it?" she said. "Do you think ... ?"

"Yeah. I think so. Listen, how are you? Should you get treatment?"

"I'm fine. A little shaky on my feet, and a sore throat, is all."

"I want you to pack a few things and come to my place. You can rest up there while we try to figure out what the hell is going on."

"Brian," she said, "was it a real fire?"

"Real enough."

She pulled his head down and kissed him softly on the mouth. "It's pretty lucky for me that you happened by when you did."

"Maybe. Or maybe I was supposed to show up. Maybe this was a demonstration. Some kind of a warning." He gently disengaged her hands from behind his head. "Come on, pack some things."

"Okay." She smiled at him and started into the cottage. At the door she stopped and turned to face him. "Hey, I just remembered. I'm supposed to be mad at you."

"We can fight later," he said. "Move it."

She punched him on the arm, then vanished into the cottage.

***

Kettering sat on the convertible sofa and marveled at the transformation in his tiny bachelor apartment brought about by the arrival of one woman with one medium-sized suitcase. The dishes were washed and put away, the dirty laundry out of sight, the floor clean, the ashtray emptied.

And there was more. His clothes were shoved to one end of the pole in the small wardrobe closet, while an astonishing number of dresses, jackets, sweaters, skirts, slacks filled the rest. The limited shelf space in the bathroom had disappeared under a jumble of bottles, tubes, jars, soaps, sprayers, and tiny implements, the nature of which he could only guess.

It looks, he thought with a twinge of alarm, like she's moving in permanently.

"I'll bet," she called from the bathroom, "you think I'm moving in permanently."

He was so startled by her telepathy that he could only wave a hand feebly in reply.

"Well, don't worry. We'll make other arrangements tomorrow. No offense, but I think we'd be at each other's throats after about forty-eight hours of this kind of intimacy."

Kettering could not deny it.

Charity finished arranging her toilet articles and came out to sit beside him.

"Seriously, Brian, what are we going to do?"

"Eventually I'm going to have to face this thing, whatever it is ..."

"Your Doomstalker," she said.

"Okay. Eventually, I'm going to have to face it and destroy it."

"I said we, Kettering."

"This isn't your fight."

"Oh, no? Wasn't it I who damn near got incinerated in my own bedroom a little while ago?"

"It wouldn't have happened if you hadn't known me," he said. "It's a pattern. Jessie, Mavis, Trevor, Al. Now you. Anybody close to me is in danger."

"All the more reason I should be a part of the team."

"Well, maybe. There's something I have to do before we start making plans."

"What's that?"

"My kid is involved with some goofy outfit up in the mountains. I promised his mother I'd bring him back."

"What if he doesn't want to come back, Kettering?"

"I'll face that when it comes up. I promised I'd find him, and that's what I'm going to do."

"I understand," she said. "I wouldn't expect anything else from you. One question - can it wait until tomorrow?"

"That's what I had in mind. Why, was there something you wanted to do today?"

"Uh-huh."

"What?"

She reached over and pulled his head down to hers. The kiss did not end quickly. This time they did not wait to fold the sofa out into a bed.