کتاب 07-14

14

After she popped the lunate back into place—it went in with a meaty thwack! and a shrill cry—and retaped the wrist, she made him drink two ladles of frosty water and swallow four Advil. She forced him to lie down and then spooned against him in his cot for one, her arm around his waist.

“You asshole,” she said. “You’re lucky you didn’t smash in those ribs again.”

He put his injured hand over hers.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “About what I said.”

“Do you want to tell me about it? About what happened to her?”

“No,” he said. “Yes. Do you really want to hear?”

She thought she already knew much of it, but she squeezed his thumb between her fingers, to let him know she was ready to listen. He sighed—a weary, haggard sound.

“Now and then Sarah and I would paddle out here, you know . . . to the cottage on this little island, to be away from the others. Allie didn’t come with us—she had become almost completely nocturnal by then and slept most of the day, storing up energy for her night runs. Nick tagged along, but usually he’d nod off after a picnic out on the dunes. There were beds in the cottage, but he liked to sleep in the rowboat. He enjoyed the rock of the tide and the way the boat knocked against the pylons. There was a little dock then, out alongside the cottage. Well, that was all right. Sarah and I could have some wine and some fresh air and do what grown-ups like in the cottage.

“We had a sleepy romp in the sheets one day after a meal of cold chicken and some kind of salad with raisins in it. Just as Sarah was dozing off, she asked me if I would check on Nick. I went out in my bare feet and jeans—and saw a little gusher of flame spout up from the boat. I’m sure I would’ve screamed, only I was too scared to get any air. I staggered out onto the dock, trying to shout Nick’s name, as if he could’ve heard. All that would come out was a thin wheeze. I was sure I’d find him ablaze.

“But he wasn’t on fire, he was breathing fire. Every time the boat knocked against the pylons, he’d cough a mushroom cloud of red flame and then laugh a dozy little giggle. I don’t think he was all the way awake or really knew what he was doing. I know he wasn’t aware of me watching. After all, he couldn’t hear me, and he wasn’t looking my way, his entire drowsing attention focused on his work with the flame. By then I had dropped to my knees. My legs had gone all weak. I watched him for two or three minutes. He’d blow rings of fire and then wave his fingers and dash off a dart of flame to jump through the hoops.

“Finally I was able to get back to my feet, although my knees were still shaking. I made my unsteady way back to the cottage. My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth and I needed a drink of water before I was able to speak. I woke Sarah gently and told her I needed to show her something and not to be afraid. I said it was about Nick and that he was all right, but she needed to see what he was doing. And I led her out.

“When she saw flame spurting from the boat, she got wobbly herself and I needed to hold her arm to support her. But she didn’t shout for him, didn’t cry out. She let me lead her to him, trusting me that there was no reason to panic.

“We stood over him and watched him play with fire for most of five minutes before she was overcome and sank to her knees and reached into the boat to touch him. She stroked her hand over his hair and he snapped out of the trance he was in and for a moment was coughing black smoke and blinking blearily. He jumped up on a gunwale, looking embarrassed, as if we had found him flipping through a girlie magazine.

“She climbed into the boat, her whole body trembling, and took him into her arms. I descended after her. For a long time we sat together in silent conference. He told his mother no, he wasn’t hurt, it hadn’t caused him any pain at all. He told us he had been doing it for days and that it never hurt. He said he always did it in the boat, because something about the sway of the ocean helped him get going. He enumerated his many accomplishments. He could breathe smoke, blow streams of fire, and light one hand like a torch. He told us he had made little sparrows of flame and set them flying and that sometimes it seemed to him he was flying with them, sometimes it seemed to him he was a sparrow himself. I asked him to show us and he said he couldn’t, not right then. He said after he lit himself on fire it sometimes took him a while to recharge. He said after throwing sparrows—that was how he described it in sign language—sometimes it was hard to get warm, that he’d have the shivers and feel like he was coming down with flu.

“I wanted to know how he was doing it. He did his best to explain, but he is only a little boy, and we didn’t learn much, not that day. He said you could put the Dragonscale to sleep by rocking it gently and singing to it like you’d sing to a baby. Except of course Nick is deaf and doesn’t have any idea what singing sounds like. He told us that he thought music was like the tide or breath: something that flowed in and back out again in a kind of soothing rhythm. He said he’d get that flow going in his mind and then the Dragonscale would dream whatever he wanted it to dream. It would make rings of fire or sparrows of flame or whatever he liked. I said I didn’t understand and asked him if he could show me. He looked at his mother and Sarah nodded and said it was all right, he could try to teach me how to do it . . . but if either of us ever hurt ourselves, we had to stop, right away.

“The next morning my lessons began. After three days I could light a candle. In a week I was throwing ropes of fire like a walking flamethrower. I began to show off. I couldn’t help myself. When Allie and I went on one of our rescue missions, I would make a wall of smoke to create an impressive getaway. And once when we were chased by a Cremation Crew, I turned on them and ignited, made myself into a great burning demon with wings to scare them off. They ran wailing!

“How I loved having my own legend. Being stared at and whispered about. There is no drug in all the world as addictive as celebrity. I boasted to Sarah that getting Dragonscale was the best thing that had ever happened to me. That if someone came up with a cure, I’d refuse to take it. That the ’scale wasn’t a plague. It was evolution.

“We often discussed my ideas about Dragonscale: how it was transmitted, how it bonded with the mind, how it produced enzymes to protect Nick and me from burns. I say we discussed my ideas. What I really mean is I lectured her, and she listened. Oh, I did like having an audience for all my insights and theories. That’s what should be on her death certificate, you know. Sarah Storey—talked to death by John Rookwood. In a sense that’s what happened to her.

“I remember the day after I first turned into a devil and scared off a crowd of armed men. I took Sarah out to the island for a picnic and a celebratory screw. She was quiet, off in her own head, but I was too full of my own greatness to really notice. We made love, and after I lay in bed, feeling like a rock star. A rock star at last. She got up and found her jeans and dug a bottle out of a pocket, a bottle full of white grime. I asked her what she had there. She said it was infected ash. Then, in front of me, she dumped it on the kitchen counter and snorted it. She poisoned herself intentionally. She did it before I had time to scream. She knew all about how to infect herself, of course, because I had told her just how the spore spread.

“Three days later the first marks appeared across her back. It looked as if the devil had lashed her with a burning whip. I was right about the method of transmission, but for once there wasn’t any pleasure in saying ‘I knew it.’ She was dead less than four weeks later.”