Free The Dark Door by Kate Wilhelm

right, and a good job too. Started up on the second floor, interior room, burned up and down a long time before it reached the outer walls. Funny thing, Mr. Meiklejohn, you know how things sort of lean out with an explosion, point to the center by pointing away is how I think of it.”
    “An explosion?” Charlie said. “What was in there to explode?”
    “Not an explosion,” Barlow said meditative ly. “I’d say an implosion. A vacuum formed and just sucked stuff into itself. Big beams, things like that pointed all right, leaned in toward the middle.” He looked at Charlie shrewdly. “Any explanation for something like that?”
    “No. What else? You might as well tell me all of it.”
    “Yep, there’s more.” He slouched against the wall, his back to the sea. “I stood right here when it burned. No wind, no rain, just the fog and the fire. Pretty. You know how that is.”
    Charlie nodded. Fires were the most beautiful things in the world; every fire fighter knew that.
    “Yep. Pretty in the fog. Next day, when it cooled off, me and J—me and another guy came up and went in. Found most of two skeletons. Not all, just most.”
    Charlie felt a chill that could have come from the ocean; a steady wind was now blowing in hard, it was very cold. “Go on,” he said harshly.
    “Uh huh. We talked, started to call the sheriff, talked some more, decided to call in the state police instead. Then the other guy got sick and we talked some more and finally we buried them again. They’re in there. I said a few words, and that was that. No more trouble, we decided, no more trouble. They were good and dead. For all we could tell they could’ve been dead for years. So we buried them.”
    “Males? Females? Children? Who were they?”
    “A male, six-footer. A woman, five five maybe.”
    “Could anyone have driven up here before the fire?”
    “We had to cut the chain across the access road the night of the fire. Rusted together. Well, that’s all I know, Mr. Meiklejohn. That’s the whole story now. And I’ll deny every word of it if it gets out. Thanks for listening.” He hunched down against the wind and started to walk away.
    “Barlow,” Charlie called after him, “thanks.”
    The old man waved his hand, but did not look back.
    In his motel room Charlie poured a drink, turned on the television news, and sat staring at it without seeing or hearing a thing. He had driven past the school on his way to the hotel site and had paid no attention to it; he reconstructed the trip. The school grounds and hotel grounds shared a common fence, the buildings a little over a mile apart. In the fog it probably had seemed as if the school were burning, especially to people in town who desperately wanted the school to burn. At least he understood now why the volunteers had been in no rush. He reviewed the various accounts of the “trouble.” The music teacher had vanished, and a groundskeeper. The skeletons in the hotel? Why? He drank deeply and put the empty glass down. It was nearly seven and he knew he would get very drunk if he did not eat soon. He wanted to call Constance, but decided she probably had gone to dinner by now. He missed her.
    He had left his window open a crack; the wind moaned as it entered. He got up and closed the window. The problem was, he decided, he had let them mix up his fire and their “trouble” in his mind, and he couldn’t separate them again. And that was because he was too hungry. Abruptly he left his room for the motel dining room. If Byron got there before he finished, fine; if not, that was also fine. He stopped at the desk to leave a message, and at that moment Constance and Byron Weston entered.
    His laughter was as spontaneous and unguarded as a child’s when he saw her, ran to hug and kiss her. Ten minutes later the three of them were seated in the dining room.
    “I finished by one and we were both ready to leave, so we left. This afternoon and tomorrow the feelies are in control of