Chapter 20 - The Furnace on the Water
The fire didn't catch slowly. It detonated.
The chemical Harold had spread wasn't gasoline—it was an industrial solvent, the same highly volatile compound he had synthesized in his cellar. A sheet of bright, blue-white flame erupted along the length of the dock, racing forward like an electric current.
The heat was instantaneous, blistering the skin of my forehead and singeing my eyebrows in a microsecond.
"Tessa!"
I threw myself through the wall of blue fire, my jacket catching immediately. I tackled Tessa just as her legs slipped over the edge of the dock, hauling her back toward my chest with a strength born of pure, animal desperation.
Behind us, Harold was screaming.
Not with pain, but with a horrifying, manic rage. The flames had engulfed his trousers, licking up the canvas of his coat, turning him into a thrashing pillar of fire. Yet he didn't jump into the lake. He crawled toward us, his blackened hands clawing at the burning planks, his eyes wide and boiling behind the wall of heat.
"You don't leave!" he howled, his voice cracking into a high, inhuman shriek. "Nobody leaves Blackwood!"
I scrambled backward on my hands and knees, clutching Tessa with one arm, beating at the flames on my coat with the other.
The dock was collapsing. The old, rot-weakened pilings beneath the center section were disintegrating in the inferno, the timbers groaning like dying beasts.
With a thunderous crash, the middle twelve feet of the dock caved in, plunging into the water in an explosion of steam, ash, and boiling spray.
The gap cut us off from the shore.
We were trapped on an eight-foot square of burning timber at the very end of the dock, twenty feet out into the deep water, with a wall of fire between us and the land, and a burning madman five feet away, dragging himself across the gap.
Harold reached out. His fingers, blackened and smoking, clamped onto the ankle of my left boot.
The smell of burning leather and flesh filled the air.
"Down with me," he whispered, his face barely recognizable through the soot and blisters. "We all go into the pond, Claire."
He pulled. The sheer, terrifying weight of the dying giant dragged me toward the edge, toward the boiling water where the flaming timbers were hissing into the dark depths.
Tessa was screaming, holding onto my collar, her small fingers digging into my neck.
I didn't have the gun. It had fallen into the flames during the tackle.
I looked down at Harold’s face. I looked at the gold signet ring on his finger—the ring that matched Brian’s.
I reached down with my free hand, grabbed the antique silver compact mirror that had fallen from Tessa’s pocket onto the boards beside me, and drove the jagged, broken glass edge directly into the soft tissue of Harold’s throat.
The old man’s eyes widened in profound, absolute shock.
A wet, gurgling sigh escaped his lips. His grip on my boot went slack.
His weight shifted backward, off the edge of the charred timber, and Harold Vance tipped silently into the black, unmoving water of Blackwood Pond.
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He didn't splash. The water simply swallowed him, closing over his burning head with a heavy, oily gulp, leaving only a circle of gray foam and a thin ribbon of black smoke rising toward the evening stars.
***
