Suspenseful Tales Part 12

I'm home. No matter how far away I move, this will always be home.

A fuzzy sense of unreality held sway over me. I remembered the time that I had been playing football with some kids in the neighborhood: I had been running through the gra.s.s with the ball, and practically the whole team tackled me and piled on top of me. Mashed the breath out of me, cut off the oxygen flow to my brain for a bit. Mr. Jackson, who lived next door to Grandma, came and untangled us, and I had walked around in a daze for at least an hour, my body on autopilot.

I felt like that right now. My body was on cruise control. I was simply along for the ride.

I climbed out of the car.

Night had fallen over the city. Porch lights shone outside most of the surrounding houses, and warm, golden light suffused their windows.

This time, the storm door that led to the breezeway was unlocked. I pulled it open.

The breezeway was dimly lit. A short flight of wooden stairs led to the house. Another door led to the back yard; that door yawned open, barred only with a screen door. I looked through it and saw our dog, Cleo, a Doberman, watching me. Her nubby tail wagged, her sable eyes glimmering in the darkness.

"Hey, girl, how're you doing?" I said.

She leaped and placed her forepaws on the screen. She pressed her nose to the gla.s.s.

I waved at her. I climbed the steps to the inner door.

This door would be locked. Grandma always kept this lock engaged.

I found the familiar, shiny gold key in my pocket.

I turned the key in the lock. I pushed open the door.

When I stepped through the doorway and into the kitchen, smoke engulfed me.

Acrid, black smoke seared my nostrils and eyes, snapping me out of my nostalgic daze and into alertness. Coughing, I dropped to the floor and covered my mouth.

The stove stood in front of me, barely visible in the twisting haze. I glimpsed a cast-iron skillet sitting on a sputtering burner, a skillet that Grandma had used for thirty years. Flames and smoke poured from the pan as if it were the opening to h.e.l.l.

The fire. This is the fire that killed Grandma. And I'm in it. Oh, s.h.i.t.

I didn't think about running out of the house. Grandma was in here. This was my chance to save her. To redeem myself.

Finally, everything made sense.

The blaze had started in the skillet, but I didn't know how to fight it. You couldn't throw water on a grease fire; it would only feed the flames, and even if it could work, the fire had grown too powerful for that approach to be effective.

My only choice was to get Grandma out of the house. I had time. The fire had not yet advanced past the kitchen.

On all fours, keeping close to the floor, I scrambled out of the kitchen and into the carpeted hallway. Thick waves of smoke rolled into the hall and into the living room ahead of me, but nothing in there had caught fire.

Heart hammering, I dashed down the hall to Grandma's bedroom. The door was closed. I rammed it open with my elbow and exploded into the room.

In the warm darkness, I saw Grandma, nestled under bed sheets. Pungent fumes laced the air.

"Grandma, wake up!" I ran to the bed. "Wake up! There's a fire!"

"Huh?" Her voice was groggy; the bedsprings creaked as she rolled over. "What you say, boy?"

"The house is on fire!" I clutched her arm. "We've gotta get out of here!"

She cougheda"a sharp, body-wracking cough that I could feel in my own bones. For perhaps the past five years, Grandma had been plagued by coughs that seemed to flare up as soon as the sun went down. I had grown so accustomed to hearing them as I dozed off to sleep that they had become as commonplace as a cricket's nocturnal whine.

But these coughs were spurred by the quickly spreading smoke. My own lungs had begun to burn. I dropped to my knees. Grandma and I were face-to-face.

"Oh, Lord," she said. "Fire. The smoke. Oh, Lord, help us."

"We're going to make it out of here." The smoke had brought tears to my eyes; I wiped my eyes with my shirt. "Come on. We're running out of time."

She coughed. "Can't breathe ... can't walk." Hacking coughs punished her body.

I grabbed her arm and slung it over my shoulder. She slid out of the bed, much of her weight upon me. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances, my knees would have buckled, but adrenaline had endowed me with inhuman strength.

With my free hand, I s.n.a.t.c.hed the bed sheet off the mattress and covered our heads with it, hoping it would give us some protection from the deadly fumes.

Like a sober friend carrying a drunken buddy home from a party, we shambled toward the bedroom door. In spite of the sheet, smoke scoured my eyes, nose, and throat. I began to feel light-headed. As if from a distance, I heard Grandma coughing.

The smoke's gonna kill us, I thought. I dropped to the floor, pulling her down with me. We crawled out the bedroom and into the hallway. I lifted the sheet higher to see what was ahead of us.

The flames had spread to the living room and the end of the hall. Furniture that I had grown up witha"sofas, chairs, end tables, lamps-blackened like roasted marshmallows in the all- consuming fire. A rancid stench filled the air, and the heat squeezed every ounce of sweat out of me.

We could not go any farther down the hallway without risking our lives. We had to find another way.

Beside me, Grandma whispered. I glanced at her. Her face was tortured, and her lips moved ceaselessly. I realized that she was praying.

"We're going to make it out alive," I said to her, perhaps attempting to convince myself. "We're not gonna die in here, we'll find another way out."

She continued her prayers, whispering with such intensity that I doubted she had heard me.

A dancing wall of flames slowly advanced toward us. Behind the fiery blockade, objects crashed, sputtered, exploded.

"Let's go back to the bedroom!" I said. "We can climb out through the window!"

Grandma shook her head.

I tried to pull her backward, toward the bedroom. She would not move.

"Let's go!" I said. "To the bedroom! Come on!"

"You go, Rick," she said. She gasped, coughed. "Leave me here."

"What? No!"

"You can't save me, baby," she said, her voice paper-thin. "You've been good to me, a fine man, like a son. But you've got to go on now. My time has come. Please, leave me here."

I shook my head fervently. "But I'm supposed to save you."

"No, no, sugar," she said. "You're supposed to leave me here and go on with your life."

Like a swift bird, the meaning of the words that she had spoken flitted through my thoughts, but, distracted by my growing fear of a fiery doom, I could not focus upon her message.

"No way," I said. "You're coming with me if I have to carry you." I reached to get a better hold on her.

As if by spontaneous combustion, Grandma burst into flames. Her face split open like some kind of bizarre, fiery flower, skin charring, lips peeling back to reveal disintegrating teeth, eyes sinking into her blackening skull. Her arm that I had clutched ignited like a piece of dry wood, fingers curling up, shriveling, bones popping.

I screamed. Let her go. Then reached for her. But there was nothing left of her to grab. Hungry flames devoured her body as if she had been made of straw.

I howled. I had been given a second chance to save her. And I had failed.

The bed sheet on top of us had caught fire, too. Frantic, I cast it off into the flames that had consumed Grandma.

Those flames that attacked Grandma had erupted from nowhere, I thought vaguely. As if she were destined to die here. As if I were meant to learn that nothing I could have done would have saved her.

The meaning of everything that I had witnessed hit me like a jackhammer. Anguished by the hard truth, I felt a sudden urge to throw myself into the inferno, to give up and perish with Grandma and this house that held so many memories. But I couldn't. An invisible force seemed to hold me back and drive me to save myself.

I scrambled into the nearest room. My old bedroom. A double-bed, a dresser, a nightstand, not much else. I didn't stop to examine anything. I flung open the only window in the room and stuck my head out through the gap.

It was about a twenty-foot plunge to the gra.s.s below. The height of the drop mattered little. I would have taken my chances with a fifty-foot fall rather than accept dying in the blaze.

I climbed onto the window sill, focused my gaze on a soft-looking spot on the lawn, and drew a deep breath.

Then, I jumped.

I wasn't sure how long I was unconscious. When I awoke, I was lying on gra.s.s. Night still reigned.

I looked around. I saw that I was on the front lawn of the residence at 2118 Common Avenue; my car was parked in the driveway. But something was different.

It was not Grandma's house.

The address above the mailbox read 2118, but it was a completely different house. It was a beige, two-story, contemporary-style home that fit in well with the rest of the neighborhood. A wooden "For Sale" sign stood in the yard, creaking softly in the night breeze.

Staring, I got to my feet.

The house was dark, silent... and, obviously, vacant.

I took note of my clothes. They should have reeked of smoke. But they smelled as if they had been laundered yesterday, which, in fact, they had. I did not find any stains, or rips in the fabric.

Countless questions spun through my thoughts. But it was futile to ponder them, because few of the questions had answers. I knew only one thing for sure: I could not change the past. I could only accept it and move on. A tough and unsparing but, ultimatelya"liberating truth.

Sighing, I walked to my car. I slid my hand into my pocket.

I pulled out the car keysa"and found a shiny gold key that was unattached to the key ring. I recognized the key. For years, I had used it to unlock the door to Grandma's house. Before I had moved away, I had given it back to her.

Now, it had been given back to me.

"Thank you," I said. I pressed the key against my lips, softly. I dropped it into my pocket.

I would keep the key with me for the rest of my life, just as I would keep all my memories of Grandmaa"with no more guilt to plague my dreams. I got in the car and drove away.

GHOSTWRITER.

"How's the new book coming along, honey?"

Andrew was reaching for the bowl of tortilla chips when she asked him the question. He'd been antic.i.p.ating dipping a fresh chip in the dish of spicy salsa; his mouth had literally been watering in expectation. But Danita's question made his mouth go dry.

"The book?" He drummed the table. "It's coming along okay, I guess."

Danita's brow creased disapprovingly--the same look he imagined that she gave her clients at the law firm when they tossed a lie her way. Frowning, she folded her arms on the table, leaned forward.

"What page are you on?" she said.

He cleared his throat. "Well, lately, I've been doing some outlining, working out some of the fuzzy story elements. You know how I write. I need to have a clear sense of direction before I move forward."

"You've been outlining for months. Your deadline is only three months away, Andrew." "I know my deadline. You don't have to remind me."

"Right, but like you said, I know how you write. You always do several drafts before you're finished, and you haven't completed a first draft yet. I'm worried about you." Her big brown eyes reflected genuine concern.

Andrew idly stirred the straw in his tea. Her pointed questions and insightful comments touched him--and annoyed him, too. For many years, he'd longed for a relationship with a woman like her: she was smart, ambitious, loving, pretty. She admired his talent for spinning tales and supported his writing career not for the money and fame it brought him, but because she understood that writing was his labor of love. She wanted him to do well, and he loved her for it.

But sometimes, he wanted her to back off and let him be a neurotic writer--with all the loopy work habits, unpredictable creative impulses, and paralyzing bouts of angst that came with the role.

"It's fine," he said. "The book is coming to me slowly. It works that way sometimes."

Her lips curled. She didn't believe him; worse was that he didn't believe himself.

The book was not merely coming to him slowly. It was not coming to him at all. This book, his second novel, was like an headstrong dog that refused to be cajoled or punished into obedience. The more he pressed and teased, the more it resisted. It was maddening.

It hadn't been that way with his first novel, "Ghostwriter." He had written "Ghostwriter" in a searing creative heat, burning through five hundred pages in only seven months. And it was good. The first agent he queried wanted it; the first publisher they sent it to bought it, plunking down a six-figure advance that enabled him to quit his day job as a programmer. Books by black authors were hot, and industry people were calling him "The African-American Stephen King," a derivative label that he despised but tolerated because it gave the marketing people an effective handle. Film rights were sold for a hundred grand; lucrative foreign rights sales to eight countries followed soon afterward. The book had been flying off the shelves since it had hit stores five months ago. Readers were asking for the next book. His editor was ready for the next book. So was his agent. Add his girlfriend to the list, too.

But no one was as ready for the next book as he was--and he couldn't write it. Writer's block, which he had long believed was a myth made up by wanna-be authors who'd never finish anything anyway, had fallen like a crushing brick onto his hands, rendering them numb and useless. Each morning, he sat at his brand-new Dell computer, a bright and painfully blank screen staring back at him, and after an hour of fitful typing and story outlining that led nowhere, he'd log onto the Internet and spend the rest of the day surfing the web under an alias so none of his online writer-buddies could ask him what he was doing, shouldn't he be working on the next book-- "Did you hear me, Drew?"

He blinked. "Sorry, I s.p.a.ced out. What did you say?"

"I said, you need inspiration. Something to get your creative juices flowing."

"Maybe I could start drinking. It's worked for some writers." He chuckled.

She didn't laugh. In the past, she would've found humor in such a joke. He wondered if she didn't laugh then because she worried that he just might take up the bottle to loosen up his creative muscles.

"I was thinking about you immersing yourself in a place that fits the stuff you write about," she said. "Somewhere scary."

"Like your parents' house?"

That time, she did laugh. "Oh, you've got jokes now, don't you? No, silly, I mean, you write about ghosts, haunted houses, stuff like that. Why not go somewhere creepy?"