He is only an outline in the smoke at first, unmoving and featureless. But with a single step forward he is more real than he has ever appeared to me. Oblivious to the fire, the lick of hair caught in his eyelashes and jumping with every blink. Coming to stand so close that even through the sulphurous air I can smel the rank, burnt-sugar sweetness of him.
The boy holds my hand. On his face an expression of mock relief, a mimicry of Carl's features when we held hands in the Thurman kitchen the first night we left the coach alone in the celar. But unlike Carl's, the boy's hand is cold, and his grip is meant not to comfort but to hold me in place. To keep me in the fire forever.
I fight him. Or I tel myself I must try to fight him, to wrench myself free. To
And I wil. Perhaps I never had a choice. If home is the place you spend most of your grown-up life working to forget, then this is mine.
Overhead, the sound of timber giving way. I look up in time to see a sheet of plaster breaking free of the ceiling before it crashes onto me, pinning me flat to the floor.
I had felt the heat before this—had been thickly swimming in it, drowning in it—yet only now do I lend it my ful attention. It's because I'm burning. Trapped beneath what might be half a ton of century-old debris, the original nails and mouldings and support beams of the Thurman house. Stil conscious, stil within the reach of pain, but al of it to disappear soon.
The fire breaks a window. The high tinkle of glass atop the low growl of flames.
Then the boy is tugging at my arms. Apparently it's not enough for me to slowly burn to death. He wants to dislocate both of my shoulders too. When I don't move, he tugs again, and again.
Some part of me shifts. Yet other parts feel as though they are being left behind. Limbs torn from their sockets.
I open my eyes and work to turn my head to an angle where I might see who has put his hands on me, but the smoke has left me blind. If I am expecting to see any living thing it is Randy, horrificaly burned. Randy, who seeks to pul me against him so that the two of us might be fused by fire.
The hands lift me up, throwing me onto narrow but strong shoulders that carry me through the haze before tossing me into the air. There is a new pain to go along with the previous ones. Sharp teeth biting my skin in too many places to count, like being attacked by a swarm of yelowjackets.
And then the ground. Sudden and cool, and me roling through the grass, clothes smoking and, if I'm not hearing things, some part of me sizzling. I keep tumbling in order to extinguish any live flames I've lost the ability to feel.
Now when I open my eyes there is the sky, the stars distinct, hovering close. Licks of flame reach out from the upper floor, as though the house is claiming the night for itself. It draws my sight to the shattered living-room window. The same window where
What felt like stings in fact the cuts of glass teeth.
Then, through smoke so dense it is like another part of the wal, the boy leaps out. Landing on the ground with a thud, his body crumpling. His clothes, his hair, his skin blackened by smoke. His eyes the only colour—worn denim blue—that he lets me see.
'Trevor?' the boy says, but not in the boy's voice.
Carl grabs me by the ankles and, leaning back, drags me through the grass and away from the house. Al of it ablaze now, the fire elbowing windows and bringing the ceilings down with oddly gentle crashes, as though the floors and wals have been cushioned by the heat.
When we make it to the sidewalk Carl lets go and sits next to me, the two of us able to do nothing more than watch the Thurman house flare and spit. I have a dim awareness of others around us—a clutch of bathrobed neighbours, a dog barking with the excitement of being outside, leashless, in the night.
No firetrucks or police yet, though their sirens join the undercurrents of sound. The murmuring witnesses, the yielding wood frame, the hissing voices rising up out of the smoke.
An ambulance arrives first. Stopping in front of the McAuliffe house, where we watch as the paramedics tend to someone lying under blankets on the front porch.
Tracey Flanagan, who is able to sit up and tel them who she is.
Then Carl is puling me close to him. His face appears freshly washed, streaks of white cut into the ash down to his jaw. But as he kneels with me I see that they are tears. Abundant, unstoppable.
There is nothing to do but what we have done al our lives, whether in our dreams or in our Grimshaw days. We watch the Thurman house and wait for it to show us how it is unlike other houses, how it is alive. The fire towering over its roof like a crown. The headless rooster stil, as though, after decades of indecision, northeast was its final determination.
I suppose it's possible that someone else sees him other than us, though I hear no shriek from the onlookers behind us. So maybe it is only Carl and me who see Randy in the upstairs window. The bedroom where the coach died. Where Roy DeLisle stood over Elizabeth Worth's body, excited and proud, wanting to show someone the remarkable thing he'd done.
Randy is staring down at us with the false calm of someone trying to hide his fear. A soldier doing his best not to worry his family as the train puls away, taking him off to war.
He takes a half step closer to the window frame and he isn't Randy anymore. He is the boy. Roy DeLisle as we have had to imagine him—a kid like us, looking like us. A kid expert at playing the same normal act we have played al our lives.
For a moment, Randy's face and the boy's face switch like traded masks, so that, behind the curtain of smoke,
