Intensity

shocked by how quickly fire exploded high into the night behind her with a whoosh and a sudden wave of heat. Ethereally beautiful blue flames must be streaking toward her across the saturated pavement, and she steeled herself for the killing rapture of fire-but then she was out of the gasoline, rolling across dry highway.
        Gasping for air, she shoved onto her feet, backing farther from the burning pavement and from the beast in the conflagration.
        Edgler Vess was wearing boots of fire, screaming and stamping his feet as great sheets of flame were flung up from the blacktop around him.
        Chyna saw his hair ignite, and she looked away.
        Ariel was well beyond the gasoline-wet pavement and out of danger, though she seemed oblivious of the blaze. She was stopped with her back to the fire, gazing up at the stars.
        Chyna hurried to the girl and led her another twenty feet south on the highway, just to be safe.
        Vess's screaming was shrill and terrible and louder now, louder because, as Chyna discovered when she turned to look back, the freak was coming after them, a pillar of fire, totally engulfed. Yet he was on his feet, slogging through the boiling tar that bubbled out of the softening blacktop. His bright arms stretched in front of him, blue-white tongues of fire seething off his fingertips. A tornado of blood-red fire whirled in his open mouth, dragon fire spouted from his nostrils, his face vanished behind an orange mask of flames, yet he came onward, stubborn as a sunset, screaming.
        Chyna pushed the girl behind her, but then Vess abruptly veered away from them, and it became clear to her that he hadn't seen them. He was seared blind, chasing neither her nor Ariel but an undeserved mercy.
        In the middle of the highway, he fell across the yellow lines and lay there, jerking and twitching, writhing and kicking, gradually turning on his side, pulling his knees up to his chest, folding his blackened hands under his chin. His head curled down to his hands as though his neck were melting and unable to support it. Soon he was silent in his burning.

    
        On one level, Vess knew the fading scream was his own, but his suffering was so intense that bizarre thoughts flared through his mind in a blaze of delirium. On another level, he believed that this eerie cry was not his own, after all, but issued from the unborn twin of the service-station clerk, which had left its image as a raw pink birthmark on the forehead of its brother. At the end, Vess was very afraid in the strangeness of the consuming fire, and then he was not a man any more but only an enduring darkness.
        

    
        Pulling Ariel with her, Chyna backed farther from the fire, but at last she was unable to stand one moment longer. She sat on the highway, shaking uncontrollably, pain-racked, sick with relief. She began to cry, sobbing like a child, like an eight-year-old girl, loosing all of the tears never spent under beds or in mice-infested barn lofts or on lightning scorched beaches.
        In time, headlights appeared in the distance. Chyna watched as they approached, while beside her the girl mutely studied the moon.

12
        
        From her hospital bed, Chyna gave detailed statements to the police but none to the reporters who strove so arduously to reach her. From the cops, in a spirit of reciprocity, she learned a great many things about Edgler Vess and the extent of his crimes, although none of it explained him.
        Two things were of personal interest to her:
        First, Paul Templeton, Laura's father, had been visiting Oregon on a business trip, weeks before Vess's assault on his family, when he had been stopped for speeding. The officer who wrote the citation was the young sheriff himself. It must have been on this occasion that the photographs had accidentally dropped out of Paul's wallet as he had been hunting for his driver's license, giving Vess a chance to see Laura's striking face.
        Second, Ariel's complete name was Ariel Beth Delane. Until one year ago, she had lived with her parents and her nine-year-old brother in a quiet suburb of Sacramento, California. The mother and father had been shot in their beds. The boy had been tortured to death with the tools from a kit that Mrs. Delane had used in her doll-making hobby, and there was reason to believe that Ariel had been forced to watch before Vess had taken her