From the Corner of His Eye

down.
        Holding the pistol, fully extending his right arm in execution style, the gunman approached the fallen minister.
        Grace White was petite, and Paul wasn't. Otherwise he might not have been able to halt her determined rush toward her husband, might not have been able to scoop her off her feet and, carrying her in his arms, spirit her to safety.
        The parsonage was a clean, respectable, and even charming house, but nothing about it might be called grand. No sweeping staircase offered a glamorous showcase adequate for Scarlett O'Hara. Instead, the stairs were enclosed, accessed by a door in one comer of the living room.
        Paul was nearest to that corner when he halted Grace in her rush toward certain death. Before he quite realized what he was doing, he found that he'd flung open the door and climbed half the single long flight of steps, as surefooted as Doc Savage or the Saint, or the Whistler, or any of the other pulp-fiction heroes whose exploits had for so long been his adventures by proxy.
        Behind them, two shots roared, and Paul knew that the reverend was no longer of this world.
        Grace knew it, too, because she went limp with misery in his arms, ceased struggling against him.
        Yet when he put her down in the upstairs hall, she cried out for her husband-"Harry!" "-and tried to plunge once more into the narrow stairwell.
        Paul pulled her back. He gently but firmly thrust her through the open door of the guest room in which he'd spent the night. "Stay here, wait."
        At the foot of the bed: a cedar chest. Four feet long, two feet wide, perhaps three high. Brass handles.
        Judging by Grace's expression when Paul plucked the chest off the floor, he figured it was heavy. He had no way of knowing for sure, because he was in a weird state, so saturated with adrenaline that his heart squirted blood through his arteries at a speed Zeus couldn't have matched with the fastest lightning bolts in his quiver. The chest felt no heavier than a pillow, which couldn't be right, even if it was empty.
        With no clear awareness of having left the guest room, Paul looked down the enclosed stairs.
        The bandaged man stormed up from the ruin of the living room, gauze fluttering around his lips as his hard exhalations seemed to prove that he wasn't a long-dead pharaoh reanimated to punish some heedless archaeologist who had ignored all warnings and violated his tomb. So this wasn't a Weird Tales moment.
        Paul pitched the chest into the stairwell.
        A gunshot. Cedar shrapnel.
        With a bark of pain, chest to chest with defeat, the killer was borne downward by the fragrant weight, in a clink and clatter of brass handles.
        Paul in the guest room again. Sweeping a bedside lamp to the floor, lifting the nightstand.
        Then once more at the head of the stairs.
        At the bottom, the killer had pushed the cedar chest aside and clambered to his feet. From out of his raveled Tutankhamen windings, he peered up at Paul and fired one shot without taking aim, almost halfheartedly, before disappearing into the living room.
        Paul set the nightstand down but waited, ready to shove the furniture into the stairwell if the swaddled gunman dared return.
        Downstairs, two shots cracked, and an instant after the second, an explosion shook the parsonage as though the long-promised Judgment were at hand. This was a real explosion, not the impact of another runaway Pontiac.
        Orange firelight bloomed in the living room below, a wave of heat washed over Paul, and immediately behind the heat came greasy masses of roiling black smoke, drawn to the stairwell as to a flue.
        The guest room. Bring Grace to the window. Disengage the latch. No good. Warped or painted shut. Small panes, sturdy mullions too difficult to break out.
        "Hold your breath and hurry," he urged, drawing her with him into the hall.
        Choking fumes, blinding soot. A licking heat told him that slithering fire had followed the smoke up the stairs and now coiled perilously close in the murk.
        Toward the front of the house, along a hallway suddenly as dark as a tunnel, toward a vague light in the seething gloom. And here a window at the end of the hall.
        This one slid easily up. Fresh cold air, welcome daylight.
        Outside, flames churned to the left and right of the opening. The front of the house was