hacking away until he felt he might pass out. The wind was howling, and something thudded on the roof. A much bigger branch than the one he’d fended off, from the sound.
When the coughing passed, he unscrewed the tap on the lantern’s reservoir and went looking for a funnel. He didn’t find one, so he tore off a strip of aluminum foil and fashioned a half-assed funnel from that. The fumes wanted to start the coughing again, but he controlled it until he got the lantern’s little tank filled. When it was, he let go and bent over the counter with his burning forehead on one arm, hacking and choking and gasping for breath.
The fit eventually passed, but the fever was worse than ever. Getting soaked probably didn’t help, he thought. Once he got the Coleman lit—if he got it lit—he’d take some more aspirin. Add a shot of headache powder and a knock of Dr. King’s for good measure.
He pumped the little gadget on the side to build pressure, opened the tap, then struck a kitchen match and slipped it through the ignition hole. For a moment there was nothing, but then the mantles lit up, the light so bright and concentrated it made him wince. He took the Coleman to the cabin’s single closet, looking for a flashlight. He found clothes, orange vests for hunting season, and an old pair of ice skates (he vaguely remembered skating on the brook with his brother on the few occasions they’d been up here in the winter). He found hats and gloves and an elderly Electrolux vacuum cleaner that looked about as useful as the rusty chainsaw in the equipment shed. There was no flashlight.
The wind rose to a shriek around the eaves, making his head hurt. Rain lashed the windows. The last of the daylight continued to drain away, and he thought this was going to be a very long night. His expedition to the shed and his struggle to get the lamp lit had occupied him, but now that those chores were done, he had time to be afraid. He was stuck here because of a book that was (he could admit it now) starting to unravel like the others. He was stuck, he was sick, and he was apt to get sicker.
“I could die out here,” he said in his new hoarse voice. “I really could.”
Best not to think of that. Best to load up the woodstove and get it cranking, because the night was going to be cold as well as long. Temperatures are going to fall radically when this front comes through, wasn’t that what the scruffy weather geek had said? And the counter woman with the lip stud had said the same thing. Right down to the same metaphor (if it was a metaphor), which likened temperature to a physical object that could roll off a table.
That brought him back to Deputy Jep, who was not the smartest kid in the classroom. Really? Had he actually thought that would do? It was a shitty metaphor (if it even was a metaphor). Not just weak, dead on arrival. As he loaded the stove, his feverish mind seemed to open a secret door and he thought, A sandwich short of a picnic.
Better.
All foam and no beer.
Better still, because of the story’s western milieu.
Dumber than a bag of hammers. About as smart as a rock. Sharp as a marb—
“Stop it,” he almost begged. That was the problem. That secret door was the problem, because…
“I have no control over it,” he said in his croaky voice, and thought, Dumb as a frog with brain damage.
Drew struck the side of his head with the heel of his hand. His headache flared. He did it again. And again. When he’d had enough of that, he stuffed crumpled sheets of magazine under some kindling, scratched a match on the stovetop, and watched the flames lick up.
Still holding the lit match, he looked at the pages of Bitter River stacked beside the printer, and thought about what would happen if he touched them alight. He hadn’t quite managed to burn down the house when he’d lit up The Village on the Hill, the fire trucks had arrived before the flames could do much more than scorch the walls of his study, but there would be no fire trucks out here on Shithouse Road, and the storm wouldn’t stop the fire once it took hold, because the cabin was old and dry. Old as