Lightning (14 page)

Within a few weeks Laura realized that there were two types of survivors in life: those, like her, who found the requisite strength in having once been loved with great intensity; and those who, having not been loved, learned to thrive on hatred, suspicion, and the meager rewards of revenge. They were at once scornful of the need for human feeling and envious of the capacity for it.

She lived with great caution at Caswell but never allowed fear to diminish her. The thugs were frightening but also pathetic and, in their posturing and rituals of violence, even funny. She found no one like the Ackersons with whom to share the black humor, so she filled her notebooks with it. In those neatly written monologues, she turned inward while she waited for the Ackersons to be thirteen; that was an intensely rich time of self-discovery and increasing understanding of the slapstick, tragic world into which she had been born.

On Saturday, March 30, she was in her room at Caswell, reading, when she heard one of her roomies—a whiny girl named Fran Wickert—talking to another girl in the hall, discussing a fire in which kids had been killed. Laura was eavesdropping with only half an ear until she heard the word “McIlroy.”

A chill pierced her, freezing her heart, numbing her hands. She dropped the book and raced into the hallway, startling the girls. “When? When was this fire?”

“Yesterday,” Fran said.

“How many were k-killed?”

“Not many, two kids I think, maybe only one, but I heard if you was there you could smell burnin’ meat. Is that the grossest thing—”

Advancing on Fran, Laura said, “What were their names?”

“Hey, let me go.”

“Tell me their names!”

“I don’t know any names. Christ, what’s the matter with you?”

Laura did not remember letting go of Fran, and she did not recall leaving the grounds of the shelter, but suddenly she found herself on Katella Avenue, blocks from Caswell Hall. Katella was a commercial street in that area, and in some places there was no sidewalk, so she ran on the shoulder of the road, heading east, with traffic whizzing by on her right side. Caswell was five miles from McIlroy, and she was not sure she knew the entire route, but trusting to instinct she ran until she was exhausted, then walked until she could run again.

The rational course would have been to go straight to one of the Caswell counselors and ask for the names of those kids killed in the fire at McIlroy. But Laura had the peculiar idea that the Ackerson twins’ fate rested entirely upon her willingness to make the difficult trip to McIlroy to inquire about them, that if she asked about them by phone she would be told they were dead, that if instead she endured the physical punishment of the five-mile run, she’d find the Ackersons were safe. That was superstition, but she succumbed to it anyway.

Twilight descended. The late-March sky was filled with muddy-red and purple light, and the edges of the scattered clouds appeared to be aflame by the time Laura came within sight of the McIlroy Home. With relief she saw that the front of the old mansion was unmarked by fire.

Although she was soaked with sweat and shaking with exhaustion, though she had a throbbing headache, she did not slow when she saw the unscorched mansion but maintained her pace for the final block. She passed six kids in the ground-floor hallways and three more on the stairs, and two of them spoke to her by name. But she did not stop to ask them about the blaze. She had to see.

On the last flight of stairs she caught the scent of a fire’s aftermath: the acrid, tarry stench of burnt things; the lingering, sour smell of smoke. When she went through the door at the top of the stairwell, she saw that the windows were open at each end of the third-floor hall and that electric fans had been set up in the middle of the corridor to blow the tainted air in both directions.

The Ackersons’ room had a new, unpainted door frame and door, but the surrounding wall was scorched and smeared with black soot. A hand-printed sign warned of danger. Like all the doors in McIlroy, this one had no lock, so she ignored the sign and flung open the door and stepped across the threshold and saw what she had been so afraid of seeing: destruction.

The hall lights behind her and the purple glow of twilight at the windows did not adequately illuminate the room, but she saw that the remains of the furniture had been cleaned out; the place was empty but for the reeking ghost of the fire. The floor was blackened by soot and charred, though it looked structurally sound. The walls were smoke-damaged. The closet doors had been reduced to ashes but for a few burnt chunks of wood clinging to the hinges, which had partially melted. Both windows had blown out or been broken by those fleeing the flames; now those gaps were temporarily covered by sections of clear-plastic dropcloths stapled to the walls. Fortunately for the other kids at Mcllroy, the fire had burned upward rather than outward, eating through the ceiling. She looked overhead into the mansion’s attic where massive, blackened beams were dimly visible in the gloom. Apparently the flames had been stopped before they’d broken through to the roof, for she could not see the sky.

She was breathing laboriously, noisily, not only because of the exhausting trip from Caswell but because a vise of panic was squeezing her chest painfully, making it difficult to inhale. And every breath of the bitterly scented air brought the nauseating taste of carbon.

From that moment in her room at Caswell when she had heard of the fire at McIlroy, she had known the cause, though she had not wanted to admit to the knowledge. Tammy Hinsen once had been caught with a can of lighter fluid and matches with which she planned to set herself afire. On hearing of that intended self-immolation, Laura had known that Tammy had been serious about it because immolation seemed such a right form of suicide for her, an externalization of the inner fire that had been consuming her for years.

Please, God, she was alone in the room when she did it, please.

Gagging on the stink and taste of destruction, Laura turned away from the fire-blasted room and stepped into the third-floor corridor.

“Laura?”

She looked up and saw Rebecca Bogner. Laura’s breath came and went in wrenching inhalations, shuddering exhalations, but somehow she croaked their names: “Ruth... Thelma?”

Rebecca’s bleak expression denied the possibility that the twins had escaped unharmed, but Laura repeated the precious names, and in her ragged voice she heard a pathetic, beseeching note.

“Down there,” Rebecca said, pointing toward the north end of the hall. “The next to the last room on the left.”

With a sudden rush of hope, Laura ran to the indicated room. Three beds were empty, but in the fourth, revealed by the light of a reading lamp, was a girl lying on her side, facing the wall.

“Ruth? Thelma?”

The girl on the bed slowly rose—one of the Ackersons, unharmed. She wore a drab, badly wrinkled, gray dress; her hair was in disarray; her face was puffy, her eyes moist with tears. She took a step toward Laura but stopped as if the effort of walking was too great.

Laura rushed to her, hugged her.

With her head on Laura’s shoulder, face against Laura’s neck, she spoke at last in a tortured voice. “Oh, I wish it’d been me, Shane. If it had to be one of us, why couldn’t it have been me?”

Until the girl spoke, Laura had assumed that she was Ruth.

Refusing to accept that horror, Laura said, “Where’s Ruthie?”

“Gone. Ruthie’s gone. I thought you knew, my Ruthie’s dead.”

Laura felt as if something deep within her had torn. Her grief was so powerful that it precluded tears; she was stunned, numb.

For the longest time they just held each other. Twilight faded toward night. They moved to the bed and sat on the edge.

A couple of kids appeared at the door. They evidently shared the room with Thelma, but Laura waved them away.

Looking at the floor, Thelma said, “I woke up to this shrieking, such a horrible shrieking... and all this light so bright it hurt my eyes. And then I realized the room was on fire.
Tammy
was on fire. Blazing like a torch. Thrashing in her bed, blazing and shrieking...”

Laura put an arm around her and waited.

“... The fire leaped off Tammy—
whoosh
up the wall, her bed was on fire, and fire was spreading across the floor, the rug was burning...”

Laura remembered how Tammy had sung with them on Christmas and had thereafter been calmer day by day, as if gradually finding inner peace. Now it was obvious that the peace she’d found had been based on the determination to end her torment.

“Tammy’s bed was nearest the door, the door was on fire, so I broke the window over my bed. I called to Ruth, she... s-she said she was coming, there was smoke, I couldn’t see, then Heather Dorning, who was bunking in your old bed, she came to the window, so I helped her get out, and the smoke was sucked out of the window, so the room cleared a little, which was when I saw Ruth was trying to throw her own blanket over Tammy to s-smother the flames, but that blanket had caught f-fire, too, and I saw Ruth... Ruth... Ruth on fire...”

Outside, the last purple light melted into darkness.

The shadows in the corners of the room deepened.

The lingering burnt odor seemed to grow stronger.

“... and I would’ve gone to her, I would’ve gone, but just then the f-fire
exploded
, it was everywhere in the room, and the smoke was black and so thick, and I couldn’t see Ruth any more or anything... then I heard sirens, loud and close, sirens, so I tried to tell myself they’d get there in time to help Ruth, which was a I-I-lie, a lie I told myself and wanted to believe, and... I left her there, Shane. Oh, God, I went out the window and left Ruthie on f-f-fire, burning...”

“You couldn’t do anything else,” Laura assured her.

“I left Ruthie burning.”

“There was nothing you could do.”

“I left Ruthie.”

“There was no point in you dying too.”

“I left Ruthie burning.”

In May, after her thirteenth birthday, Thelma was transferred to Caswell and assigned to a room with Laura. The social workers agreed to that arrangement because Thelma was suffering from depression and was not responding to therapy. Maybe she would find the succor she needed in her friendship with Laura.

For months Laura despaired of reversing Thelma’s decline. At night Thelma was plagued by dreams, and by day she stewed in self-recrimination. Eventually, time healed her, though her wounds never entirely closed. Her sense of humor gradually returned, and her wit became as sharp as ever, but there was a new melancholy in her.

They shared a room at Caswell Hall for five years, until they left the custody of the state and embarked on lives under no one’s control but their own. They shared many laughs during those years. Life was good again but never the same as it had been before the fire.

In the main lab of the institute, the dominant object was the gate through which one could step into other ages. It was a huge, barrel-shaped device, twelve feet long and eight feet in diameter, of highly polished steel on the outside, lined with polished copper on the inside. It rested on copper blocks that held it eighteen inches off the floor. Thick electrical cables trailed from it, and within the barrel strange currents made the air shimmer as if it were water.

Kokoschka returned through time to the gate, materializing inside that enormous cylinder. He had made several trips that day, shadowing Stefan in far times and places, and at last he had learned why the traitor was obsessed with reshaping the life of Laura Shane. He hurried to the mouth of the gate and stepped down onto the lab floor, where two scientists and three of his own men were waiting for him.

“The girl has nothing to do with the bastard’s plots against the government, nothing to do with his attempts to destroy the time-travel project,” Kokoschka said. “She’s an entirely separate matter, just a personal crusade of his.”

“So now we know everything he’s done and why,” said one of the scientists, “and you can eliminate him.”

“Yes,” Kokoschka said, crossing the room to the main programming board. “Now that we’ve uncovered all the traitor’s secrets, we can kill him.”

As he sat down at the programming board, intending to reset the gate to deliver him to yet another time, where he could surprise the traitor, Kokoschka decided to kill Laura, too. It would be an easy job, something he could handle by himself, for he would have the element of surprise on his side; he preferred to work alone, anyway, whenever possible; he disliked sharing the pleasure. Laura Shane was no danger to the government or to its plans to reshape the future of the world, but he would kill her first and in front of Stefan, merely to break the traitor’s heart before putting a bullet in it. Besides, Kokoschka liked to kill.

A LIGHT IN THE DARK

On Laura Shane’s twenty-second birthday, January 12, 1977, she received a toad in the mail. The box in which it came bore no return address, and no note was enclosed. She opened it at the desk by the window in the living room of her apartment, and the clear sunlight of the unusually warm winter day glimmered pleasingly on the charming little figurine. The toad was ceramic, two inches tall, standing on a ceramic lily pad, wearing a top hat and holding a cane.

Two weeks earlier the campus literary magazine had published “Amphibian Epics,” a short story of hers about a girl whose father spun fanciful tales of an imaginary toad, Sir Tommy of England. Only she knew that the piece was as much fact as fiction, though someone apparently intuited at least something of the true importance that the story had for her, because the grinning toad in the top hat was packed with extraordinary care. It was carefully wrapped in a swatch of soft cotton cloth tied with red ribbon, then further wrapped in tissue paper, nestled in a plain white box in a bed of cotton balls, and that box was packed in a nest of shredded newspaper inside a still larger box. No one would go to such trouble to protect a five-dollar, novelty figurine unless the packing was meant to signify the sender’s perception of the depth of her emotional involvement with the events of “Amphibian Epics.”