Chapter 14
Maria looked down at her naked body. Jim was naked, too, and in that roaring torrent of flame, they looked like chunks of pink plaster. She stared at Jim and tried to imagine him carrying the whole thing through. With his lack of guts, it didn't seem possible.
But he had done the other. He had satisfied her. He had been true. Their lovemaking had been complete, and there had been in that darkness nothing raw, nothing violent. Totally, completely, his tenderness had possessed her, and with Jim's coming she had known heaven.
She stood up. Jim moved his face around an inch at a time, just enough to see her out of the corner of his eyes, and he spoke again, but this time his voice was soft. "Go ahead, Maria. Take your time."
He seemed to weigh his words, as if in that short precious act, he were pitting them against all the vicious, slashing violence of Arlene. He used them like a sword against Arlene with her revolver, against the crackling, snapping inferno of the old Circus Room.
She felt some confidence. She stepped to the round hole in the disk. "Okay, Jim," she said softly, "I'll go."
It was strange to her. When he had first spoken to her, commanding her, she had thought maybe he had snapped completely. She could only think of him wanting them to burn rather than be destroyed by Arlene, but then, in the acrid blast of furnace air, in the quick snap of time, she remembered, too. If they were very, very lucky, they might stand a chance.
She hesitated on the edge of the circular hole. The long ladder swung beneath her like a faint wisp of spider's silk. She looked around. Arlene stood there, a mere few feet away. She held the gun frozen in her right hand, and her beautiful lesbian body looked more striking than ever in its tight black slacks, its green shirt. Each lick of reflected flame revealed Arlene into a red-lipped sorceress.
She had at last found her real realm. Maria saw her standing in it. After years of rigging traps, Arlene had finally come to her true home. She seemed to dominate the flames. She seemed to dominate and control the whole vast throbbing pulse of fire.
Maria took one final quick glance at Jim. His nakedness seemed weak. He looked like fragile white clay, likely to shatter into dust at any second. But his eyes held hard determination, and except for a tight flicking motion, which he made when his left hand kept opening and closing, he made no other movement. Maria wondered, as she started to descend, if he would have the power, the guts, the strength to follow her down.
"I'm going, Jim," she said, and her head moved down from the disk to the space underneath. She left Arlene and Jim above her. In the awful space under the disk, she didn't dare look down. Even the air trembled with red violence, and she was lowering herself into a heaving, tossing current of red light. The fierce roar of the flames spun in her ears. The distinct smell of gasoline, of smoke, clawed through her nose and throat. She felt a quick ripping into her lungs and started to cough and choke.
She held on, descended. When she looked up, she couldn't see either Jim, or Arlene. She stopped, caught her breath and yelled, "Jim, please come on! We've got to get down now!"
She passed the grim, crucial section where Ken had lost his life. She had no more time for tears, and she got within a few feet of the bottom. She thought that Jim would never try, that he had been captured and held by Arlene's power. Then she felt a tight movement of the ladder. It swung even more uneasily, and when she looked up this time, she saw Jim dropping down over the edge. He swung onto the ladder. Standing right above him, Arlene was there looking straight down.
Maria felt the firm podium under her naked feet. She held the ladder, hoping that would help him, but it seemed to her Jim would never get down. It was taking him forever. Time was running out, and he couldn't move fast enough. His white naked body passed in and out of exploding bursts of angry red light. The black gun in Arlene's hand looked more and more threatening. It seemed to her then, and she realized it clearly, that Arlene would shoot. Jim's dead body would tumble like a rag doll into space.
Maria pressed her hands to her throat. She shoved back hard against her own adam's apple. She had to cut off any sound. If she yelled, just by accident, it might increase the percentage of Arlene's pulling the trigger. She had to force herself into stupid silence, and in the vast area of the Circus Room she couldn't even stop the sound of her heart. It jumped out at her, racing like a motor pushed to the limit and about to leap off a high mountain curve into space. Frantic flames flooded the room, and her head filled with just one thought... "Oh, please, Jim, please hurry up!"
But Jim hesitated. He looked up, too, and seemed to study Arlene. The thought became clear in his mind also that Arlene was ready to shoot. He knew it, he knew perfectly well there was not a single thing he or she, or anybody in the world, could do about it.
She felt the quick, taut whisper leave her lips. She swung her hand up, and shoved it back with all her strength. "Jim, please...!"
After hesitating several more seconds, Jim began to lower himself again, descending slowly, his eyes still fastened on the black creature above him. It was a black creature with long strands of black hair curling around its face, and it had the savage smile and deep penetrating gaze of a killer insect.
Into the fire-rimmed vacuum, the insect spoke. "When do you want it, Jim? Now, or when you get to the bottom?"
Jim didn't answer. He continued to descend, and his body swung like a ridiculous, white, swinging toy.
Arlene's voice stopped him. "I can't miss, Jim. That's one thing you never knew, did you? You never knew the hours I spend practicing in the shooting gallery back home. You never knew that, did you? Nor did you know what Kelly Green and I did afterwards? Did you, Jim?"
For Maria, everything in the huge room had built into one intense violent inferno. Her heart raced with it, her breath escaped in savage gasps through her hands, and she tasted the hot acrid smell which made her choke and cough. Flames snapped out in long, leaping explosions, to shatter up and down the walls. The ladder swung sickly, made weird gyrations, as Jim swung slowly down it.
Maria looked up at him. She pleaded silently, and she could see that Arlene was about to shoot. She would shoot. Maria knew it then, and she could do nothing. She couldn't even take the bullet for Jim. She knew it as a cold, stated fact. Jim descended, a step at a time, and that was all. He waited for Arlene to shoot. That was all, and he was within a few short feet of her head.
Above them, Arlene loomed centrally in the hole in the middle of the disk, and Arlene started to kneel. The sound, when Maria tried to recall it, was like that made by billions of agonized wasps driven to savage frenzy at once. At first, the sound came as a soft whisper, so high-pitched it seemed nobody could even hear.
But then it changed. The sound became a thing. It was there. It had begun, whisper-like, high, beyond hearing. Suddenly it filled the universe with one supreme stupendous keening cry. Maria looked up quickly, trying to see what it was. The Circus Room filled with the noise, throbbed with it. She heard the lashing, whipping, snapping, more than she could see it, but for one second, and that second was enough.
Dozens of wires... wires everywhere. They had been melted or burned loose from their anchors around the walls of the room, and they snapped back violently toward the disk that was their center. Incredibly, they lashed back at once. They had been strained tight, stretched for years. When they let go, they acted like sudden springs, whipping back toward the center of their steel web.
Arlene, for one second, must have had the time to understand it, too.
She had remained poised above them ready to shower them with venom, but the full force of those rapidly striking wires rose against her. They caught her. They wrapped her up. For a split second, she stood clean, black, central. She took half a step. She said something indistinct, something strange, something beyond knowing, and then she was finally and forever caught.
Arlene metamorphosized into a twisting, turning, savagely cocooned object. That spider's web of steel had swiftly recoiled upon itself, and Arlene was the victim... Arlene turned into a ball of black dead tissue.
Her body disappeared suddenly from their vision, only one thing remained. Her violent, animal shriek screamed out into the Circus Room. It cluttered the room. It almost quenched the flames with its frantic intensity.
Maria listened to it savagely. It refreshed her, but she wanted to close her ears to it. Arlene's death-sound would never leave her hearing again. She stood there hypnotized, transfixed, as if her wound had been cut by an arrow, and that arrow had penetrated through into her intestines and spine.
She didn't breathe. She looked up, and the scream had stopped, but in her ears it went on. She listened, listened... And she would have stood there waiting for the flames to devour her if Jim had not grabbed her arm. He dragged her down after him through the trapdoor in the podium. He guided her feet down, and that was all.
Once at the bottom, he hesitated. He listened to the sounds above. They both could hear the mounting fury of the fire. Wood, plaster, glass, metal exploded in the Circus Room above, and their present darkness held only the rotten smell of cabbages. He didn't have his flashlight. They had to feel their way along, and they were naked.
"Watch out," he would say, "there's some stuff on the floor."
She said nothing. She couldn't. She couldn't open her mouth or make her throat work. She felt her way until they were in the back room, which now looked milky, strange, untouched by flames. She turned to him. She looked at him. "Jim," she said suddenly, "You've got to kiss me."
She waited for him, and he did. They turned then and looked for some old rags. There were strips of old flour sacks or something, and then she followed him out of the hotel. The first people they ran into were Jerry Williams and another policeman.
Jerry smiled at her, and turned away to tell the police officer to get her a coat or something. "It's okay, Sue," he said, and his voice was fatherly, kind. "We found out that Mrs. White did it. We had a man posted at the Motel, and after she left, we searched her room." He turned and looked apologetically for a second at Jim. "There was evidence. For one thing, she had Ken's cab key."
Maria didn't have the strength to speak. Jerry turned away from them, and they all looked back at the hotel. The fire had now broken through the roof, and the efforts of the fire truck and the several firemen were futile and useless. Maria watched smoke burst through the roof, until it made a gigantic black column.
The black pillar towered over the hotel, over the town of Hollyhock, and Maria shivered as she felt the power of it standing and pushing up so immensely over her.
She started shivering, uncontrollably, and she knew she couldn't stop. Luckily, Jim came over and halted the agony of her body by pressing her close to his side. He didn't shiver, and he looked strong in the golden sun of the July day under a completely blue sky. His words told her all she wanted to hear, for then, and for always.
"Maria," he said, "it's okay. We don't have to worry... ever again!"