Cruel Pink by Tanith Lee (uplifting book club books TXT) 📕

out. Then something was shoved through. A half-flattened can of petrol, presumably. With some material wadded in the neck—a towel—something. And the end of it had been lit. It went off inside the hall, a sort of much larger Molotov Cocktail.

Yes, the door was on fire, and the peacocks were consumed, and now the main room carpet was burning in here. Mindless with instinct I found myself retreating through the room backward, into the short interim space, where the bathroom and loo are, and the door to the cellar, and so into the kitchen.

Smoke was building already, as floor boards and carpets, general furnishings, household debris and dust, ignited and joined in the festival of light.

I could think of nothing to do to stop all this. There was nothing I had to put out the flames. It was like a piece of music on a CD; long ago; the music began and had to run its course. No off-switch.

Once in, I shut the kitchen door.

The air was misted now, even in here, and loud with cracklings and sighing shifts of air and smoke. The whole house had become a smoker, filling its wooden lungs with the glorious fix. Oh, you never stop missing it, do you, a fag?

Even through the closed door, through all its little splits and holes and thinnesses, the red glow eagerly beamed at me… The insistent lover.

I’d thought of fire in the park, the fire the young moron made, and how I could stun and thrust him and yank him into it, so he would begin to burn. And I would beat him there, and kick him, keep him pinned just long enough, until he was well-alight and so no chance, even should he manage to propel himself finally from the flames. The burning man.

But it would have been on a much smaller scale to this.

I would have to get out. Leave everything and run, as I’d previously told myself I had to when Bruvva and Uniform first appeared.

Quickly I got into the utility room and undid the back door. I shot the bolts and worked the locks. I was cool enough, in a brain-dead way. There had been no space for panic.

But then, the door refused to open. Naturally. Would they have overlooked this adjunctive back-up? Even if never seen by them, (and though they had never seen Micki, let alone detected the stench of her rot), still Bruvva and his side-kick infallibly guessed I must have killed her. Maybe Bruvva came back, and found the grave outside, at which I hadn’t looked for several days, not liking to, as if… shy. And that way, finding the grave he had located the back door, too.

Men love to burn women, they always have. For witchcraft, or heresy, or adultery. I cite Joan of Arc, Mistress Pently, Queen Guinevere—so burn this fucking heretic witch-queen called Emenie. And block her every exit from the pyre.

I tried the kitchen windows next. Outside the thick zipped curtains I could see at a glance every pane of glass now had external bars of heavy wood nailed across. When had they done this? How had I never heard them? Oh, it was like the burial—Christ had they even done that? Broken in, taken and buried her, then stormed back pretending still to be looking for her, to judge my reaction?

No—all insanity. Stop thinking, you cretinous bitch. I need to get out!

Already I had dismissed any idea of the front bedroom windows, or the side window in the main room. I myself had fully or partly boarded them up. And besides that area would be—was—fiercely ablaze by now.

The kitchen too was beginning to creak and sing with heat.

Smoke curled like a filmic Dickensian river fog, bleak, mutual and expectant. Oh for a real fucking river to put out this fire—my eyes were running, trying to help. My skin was tight. I could just make out how the plaster on the walls seemed to be blistering. I thought of the basement. Should I try to get back into the space beyond the kitchen, even though the fire would already be fingering, probing it—get down into the cellar—maybe the cellar would be fire-proof? (Down among the bones and stink, the accusatory remains—would they shelter me, their un-creator?) But where was the key? I’d hidden it, hadn’t I? Where had I hidden it? I turned round full circle, staring through water and smoke and heat, a whirl of drawers, cupboards… No. No use.

It did not matter.

Only the fire mattered. The red lover. The Hunter.

I found a frying pan—out of the—into the—in the very instant I heard the second explosion of the electric fire from the main room.

Raising the pan high, I smashed it with all the force I had against the kitchen window. Glass disintegrated, and with it one small section of the nailed-over wood.

I heard a louder crack behind me. It was the kitchen door. Took no notice.

I was swinging again with the heavy pan when ice cold hands clutched against my back and into my hair. A hundred hands, two hundred, and all bright red, hunter’s red. Not ice but fire. Liberated by the breaking door frame, enticed and fed by the inward gush of oxygen from the window.

The roar of the inferno swallowed me as the freezing scald of the flame-sea covered me up. As in a million meltings I was amber, I was crimson, I was molten gold. Far, far away I heard my shriek before the flames ate up my throat. Drowning in hunting pink. I was sunrise. I was dead.

Rod:

97

Ghostly as twilight, a paramedic bent over me. “I’m just going to put this oxygen mask on for you, Rod—it is Rod?”

Max must have told him. Unless George was out there somewhere.

Pain is an excruciating and striated envelope, but I float inside it, indifferently.

Ah, now the oxygen flows.

“Thank you,” I said. Or I didn’t.

They still have to cut me out of the cab, but the gang,