Page 118 of The Man Made of Smoke

And somehow I moved.

It was as much a stumble as anything else—a desperate half fall across the short distance between us—but I managed to loop my left arm under Aspinall’s, and my right behind his back, joining my hands at the far side of his head, and the momentum took him off my father and sent us both sprawling into the dust on our sides. With my chest against Aspinall’s back, I kept my hands gripped tightly together as best I could, then tried to hook my foot over to pin him at the ankles. As we wrestled, the shattered lights of the compound whirled around us. The ground was at my back, and then against my elbows with Aspinall underneath me, but then the two of us were rolling, his weight on top of me again. I lost track of where the knife was, or if he even still had it.

You do not let go, I imagined my father saying.

You do not give up.

But Aspinall was much stronger than I had expected, fueled by that burning rage inside him, and my own body seemed watery and weak in comparison. I caught a flash of light on the knife, and slackened my grip and reached out to grab his wrist. But he moved as I did, squirming out of the loosened hold and catching me hard in the face with an elbow. The world filled with stars again. And then Aspinall was on top of me, lifting the knife up into the night air.

There was no time to avoid the blow.

But then there was a sickening thud as my father swung the woodenpost into Aspinall’s head. The strength of the blow knocked Aspinall off me and into the shadows to my side. I rolled over, my father stepping across me, and I watched as he raised the post again before bringing it down in an overhead strike that landed where Aspinall’s face must have been.

The force of the collision took my father off-balance. He stumbled back toward me. I thought he was going to trip, but somehow he gathered himself, corrected the half fall, and ended up kneeling down in the dust next to me.

We looked at each other.

Silence for a moment.

And then I realized that, from off to the side, I could hear Aspinall attempting to breathe through the remains of his face. It was a horrible, sickening noise.

And it sounded for all the world like someone was whistling.

James

August 2001

James stands up.

The man is walking toward him across the compound, approaching him slowly and steadily. There’s no need for him to rush, because he knows there’s nowhere for James to escape to. There never has been.

Perhaps it’s strange, but James realizes he’s not afraid anymore. Until this moment, the man has been a monolith, a demon, a monster. But as he walks toward James now, the lights of the compound are bringing him into sharp relief, and it’s clear that he’s only ever been a man. Average height and build. His face is finally visible now, and the features that James can see there are unremarkable. While he’s still whistling his tune, it sounds small and silly now.

He might even look pathetic if he wasn’t holding the knife.

James glances down. All he has are the keys he took from the cellar. They won’t save him, but he clenches them between his knuckles anyway.

Just give a good account of yourself, he thinks.

He’s not sure where the voice comes from, but it’s right. That’s all he can do. Because heisgoing to die—he understands that clearly. It should have been obvious from the very first moment he was taken on the beachthat there wasn’t going to be a happy ending. And perhaps a part of him had recognized that all along, and that’s why he held on to that little flame inside him.

He was always going to lose.

But that doesn’t mean the man has to win.

He is only a few meters away now, but he has his back to the house, which means James can see something that he can’t.

You know what you have to do.

He remembers the old kerosene lamp on the shelf in the cellar.

The crumpled box of matches beside it.

The man has left the front door open and, over his shoulder, James can see a faint glow coming from inside the house. The first few tendrils of smoke from the fire he started in the basement are already beginning to emerge out into the air above the porch. The man doesn’t know it yet, but his storeroom full of dark magic is burning: all his power turning to ash and smoke. And by the time he does realize, it will be too late to rescue any of it.

James glances down at the boy beside him.

I’m sorry I didn’t manage to save us, he thinks.

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