Someone screamed. Everyone ducked as the thick gray cloud filled the theater, collecting on the ceiling and gathering itself up to fill more and more and more of the space. It was collapsing toward us, sending all the breathable air somewhere else—devouring it, maybe, I don’t know how these things work—and so we fell to our hands and knees.
Francine was praying in a language that didn’t sound like Latin, but what would I know about that, either?
“This way!” I heard someone say, but I didn’t see what way he meant.
Above us, the projection booth exploded—sending a rain of broken glass and molten celluloid down on our heads. I screamed, jerking away from my companion and covering my head with my hands. Something landed on my arm, dripping there onto my skin. It burned like lava must burn, if anyone ever lives to tell of it.
I screamed again, and this time it soared into a high-pitched howl when I looked at my fresh, bubbling injury. Something thick and goopy had seared itself into my skin, and there it smoldered. I was so shocked I couldn’t do anything but stare at it, smelling my skin cooking like a Sunday roast.
Francine slapped me, hard, right across the face. “Come on, girl! Move, or stay here and die!”
I nodded hard and wiped at the simmering goo—burning my hand while I was at it. It must have been celluloid from the melted reels above. It hardened as it cooled, but it hurt like hell and I scraped into it with my fingers, digging it away. I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving it there.
The sticky muck tugged on the fine hairs on my arm and I squealed some more, but I got it out—most of it—even as I struggled to crouch, hunker, and keep up with Francine. It stuck to my fingerprints and wedged under my nails. It was warm, but it couldn’t hurt me now. It’d done all the damage it could.
Now it was the smoke’s turn.
The hunch of Francine’s folded back lumbered before me, stumbling onward, ducking lower as the poisonous black air sank lower. It was dark, and she was wearing a navy dress. She was hardly more than a rounded shape before me, and I thought I was going to lose her—but she grasped my hand again and pulled me forward.
A sliver of light opened up. I could see it, but I couldn’t tell where it was. Were we still in the auditorium? Had we passed the doors and gone into the lobby? Were we somewhere else?
Glass was breaking everywhere, from the heat or from falling objects that had been shattered and consumed, clattering down from the ceiling. A narrow piece of wood toppled to the ground before me, along with the curling poster for next week’s matinee. I kicked it aside and stumbled over myself, but Francine wouldn’t let me stay down.
“Almost there, almost out,” she wheezed.
How could she stand to speak? My throat was full of fire, coated in smoke, and even my screams were so hoarse that now they sounded like groans. How could she see where she was going? There was a sliver of light, yes, but between us and that sliver there were tumbling arms and legs of people crawling over one another to escape, and there was the ever-sinking ceiling of roiling smoke. My eyes were burning so hard I could scarcely keep them open. I gave up on keeping them open. I squinched them shut and trusted the nun and her prayers. I had to. The world was burning down and I couldn’t move without her.
I trudged forward and then tripped forward—and felt fresh air on my face like the blast from a powerful fan. It wasn’t particularly cool air, and it still smelled like the Second Coming, but it was enough to make me open my eyes and gasp. I sucked it in; I’d been drowning and hadn’t known it.
Someone new took me by the arm. I let go of Francine. I didn’t see where she went.
I gulped air like a guppy thrown free from its bowl. I panted like a dog on a summer day. I drank down the fresh atmosphere as I let this new person lead me away from the inferno that used to be called a calliope.
A towel was thrust into my hands. It was damp, and that was useful. I used it to wipe down my face and rub my eyes clean, and then I sat down on a bench on the far side of the tracks, beside the gate pillars and adjacent to the hotel. From there, I watched the grand little building come down.
The roof went first. It belly flopped into the middle, sending up a tower of smoke, cinders, and sparks. The walls went down one by one after that, and when there was only a single wall standing—teetering, wobbling on borrowed time—a fire truck finally showed up from Lake Helen. It arrived just in time to watch the whole thing come down in one final burp of coals and smoke.
In all seriousness, the firemen could not be blamed. They were miles away, on the other side of sandy roads that might or might not have been paved. They got there as quickly as they could. One of them, a strapping fellow with a mask of soot around his eyes, offered me some water. I took it and tried to thank him, but no words came out at all. He walked away, back to the truck. The hoses were unspooled and the pump was cranking right along, and soon the ashes were soaked—and steam rose from the ruins in wispy, warm waves.
Mabel was standing beside me, watching the steam rise across the street. “I’m glad you’re all right,” she said, not taking her eyes off the trucks and the water and the men with their hoses and boots and suspenders. “But what were you doing in there?”
My voice was sandpaper and soot. “Watching The Mark of Zorro.”
“Wasn’t there a—”
“Yes,” I cut her off. “There was a seminar I should’ve been attending instead. I needed to . . . I wanted to . . . I was tired of studying. Just for a little while, I wanted to do something else.”
“So you went to Candy’s and went to a movie.”
“I wanted a sandwich.”
“I just bet you did.”
I couldn’t tell if she was teasing me about being fat or signaling that she knew I’d had a drink. I was too tired and frightened and short of breath to care. “Where’s Francine?”
“I don’t know. I saw her, though. She got out just fine. Then she left.”
“She led me out. I would’ve died in there.” Something awful dawned on me. “Did anyone not get out? Was anyone left inside?”
She shook her head and said, “We don’t know for sure. Mr. Alders couldn’t recall how many tickets were sold. He took in an awful lot of smoke.”
“Will he be—”
“One of the firemen is taking him to the hospital in DeLand.”
“Are there any ambulances?”
“None that would get him there any faster than Stuart Kipper.”
“That’s the fireman?” I asked.
“He lives a few blocks away. He knows Mr. Alders.” She offered to take my towel, so I handed it over—wet and filthy. She folded it up and held it anyway. Then she changed her mind, sat down by me on the bench, and put the towel beside her legs.
“Mabel, I—”
“I know. Or . . . to put it another way, I don’t care. You didn’t do anything wrong. You passed on one opportunity in favor of another, and it could have cost you dearly—but it didn’t. I’m not going to feed you some morality fable. It could’ve just as easily been the Brigham house that went up in flames, with you in it. People die by meaningless happenstance every day, whether they’re having a drink or sitting in church.”
“Thank you. I think. I still feel like I’ve been caught at something, and I’ve been righteously punished for it.”
“Nonsense. That isn’t how the world works.”
“You’re not mad at me?”
She turned to look at me with astonishment written all over her face. “Alice, people may have died today. A building burned. A business was lost. People were hurt and badly sickened.” She waved toward the hotel porch, where several folks were being addressed by Sidney Holligoss, who was a doctor, that’s right. (I only remembered it when I saw him with his bag and stethoscope. I also saw Francine, sitting beside a woman lying on a cot, holding her hand and speaking gently.)
&nbs
p; I swallowed. It didn’t do anything at all. “But it could’ve been much worse.”
“That’s a miserable and lazy way to look at it,” she admonished, but her heart wasn’t really in it. “Things can always be worse; that’s a universal truth. All I’m trying to say is that in the scheme of things, your sip of . . . whatever you sipped . . . and your decision to miss the rest of the afternoon’s meetings . . . were choices you made of your own free will, and I’m in no position to judge you for them. Like all decisions, yours had repercussions. Like some decisions, those repercussions were unforeseen and cataclysmic when they should’ve been negligible. Your entire consequence of the afternoon should’ve been a two-hour headache and a missed opportunity for knowledge. Now you’ve got a cough, red eyes, and a badly burned arm.”
“My arm?” Oh God, in all the excitement, I’d almost forgotten it. How on earth do you forget something like that? The moment she mentioned it, I felt the wound so keenly that I wanted to explode into sniffles and tears, but I only sucked in my breath and squeezed my hand over it, instead.
“No, don’t do that.”
“But it hurts.”
“I know it does. But that won’t help—you’ll only get it dirty. Come on, let’s go to see Dr. Holligoss. Your throat will clear and your eyes will sting until they stop, and that’s all . . . but this burn needs attention.”
So I joined the handful of ragged, smoke-stained men and women from the theater, most of whom had been brought to the hotel porch. I recognized some of them from the audience or from the ticket line. By and large, they looked like they’d be all right; they were sooty and coughing, and some were lying reclined on the lounge furniture, catching their breath and moaning softly. But they were alive, and they were breathing, and no one looked too much worse for wear.
“Doctor?” Mabel called.
Francine looked up and gave me a nod that said she saw me and she knew I was more or less fine. Dr. Holligoss himself seemed not to have heard.
“Doctor, please . . . ,” she tried again to get his attention.
This time he paused and came to join us. “Mabel, Miss Dartle. Oh good heavens—what have you done to your arm?”
Before I could answer, Mabel scanned the scene and asked, “Is anyone else in need of more . . . critical attention?”
“Only Alders, and he’s on his way to the hospital. He kept going back inside, trying to pull people out. If he hadn’t opened that second door, more might have been trapped.”
“But everyone did escape?”
“It appears so. God, I hope so,” he added under his breath. “Is anybody missing? Has anyone said, one way or another?”
“Not to my knowledge, but . . .” Mabel’s voice trailed off as she stared back across the street and the train tracks to the crackling rubble of the Calliope. People still stood around fretting, like that did any good—and asking questions, which didn’t help, either. Only the efficient, burly firemen were really doing anything useful over there. They kept people away, soaked down the cinders, and poked around at the ashes.
One of the trucks started up, kicked into gear, and turned down Stevens Street.
“Where’s it going?” I asked.
“Spirit Lake,” said the doctor. He ushered me to a seat and took my arm in his hands. “The trucks are empty. They may as well refill them here.”
• • •
IT was my private and carefully not-spoken-aloud opinion that Spirit Lake would be half drained by such an operation, but no one else seemed worried about it, and someone had told me it was filled by a spring . . . so perhaps it would naturally regain anything that was taken from it. Or perhaps it would dry up, and so would Colby Lake or Lake Colby or whatever the other one was, connected by that little channel. Those two big puddles, full of grass. How many tanks would it take to empty them forever?
• • •
I held very still and watched the truck recede; I couldn’t see the lake from where I was sitting, and I wasn’t meaning to watch it fill up again—but it was a cheap enough trick to keep myself from looking at my arm, which smarted something awful. When I did give in to temptation and sneak a peek, I saw the skin curled up pink around the edges of the burned-away flesh. The wound followed the track of the dripping celluloid, running from the back of my wrist almost to my elbow in a long, curly drizzle. Where it had landed, my skin was gone—simply removed, because I had smeared the molten celluloid off and away. Had it been the right thing to do or not? I do not know. But at the time, it was the only thing to do.
“This is a very bad burn, Miss Dartle.”
“I know,” I whispered, looking away again. The truck was out of sight, but I could still watch the bookstore, the rest of the hotel porch, and one wing of Harmony Hall from where I was sitting. There were a million things to look at that weren’t the pale white underlayer of skin with tiny red lines, as if someone had taken a heated scalpel and scrawled a signature. I felt like I’d been branded, claimed by someone having stamped their initials upon me.
Maybe that was a silly thing to think, but the long, dragged-out injury did have a style to it. Rationally I knew that the style could be summed up as “random splashes of melted goop,” but it almost . . . at a squint . . .
Well, it really did look like a scrawled capital “H” followed by a drawn-out “K.”
I don’t know why that thought flung itself forward. It wasn’t a useful thought. It wasn’t a sane or reasonable thought, so I kept it to myself. I might as well have nattered on about somebody else’s dream. It would’ve been equally stupid and meaningless.
• • •
I hadn’t yet told anyone about the man who dreamed of fire. I felt almost protective of him, whoever he was. I could see him, in his mask, in my vision. He knew my name.
His mask. My vision.
While Dr. Holligoss tended to my arm, I watched the firemen finishing their job. Their masks hanging on their belts. Their glossy eyes. Their rounded filters, hanging off their faces. Their hoses. Their masks were . . . not quite the same as the one my dream man wore. But they were very, very close. Very much the same idea.
Was the man in my vision a fireman? Did they have firemen on the battlefield?
Only if the definition of “fireman” is “the man who brings the fire.”
• • •
THE doctor washed my arm and applied a weird ointment that smelled of camphor and lard, and it took the edge off the warm, itchy sting. Oh God, it itched. “You’ll have to clean it,” he warned. “It will weep, and tighten, and itch—yes, stop that. Stop picking at it. I’m going to give you some bandages and wraps. Keep it clean, and keep it covered. I won’t lie to you; burns are difficult to heal. It will take time. It will be very uncomfortable.”
“I understand,” I said, fingers twitching, trying to obey. Even through the bandage I could feel it oozing, writhing around in the ointment. It hurt, and it was disgusting, and I wanted to cut my whole arm off to get away from it.
“This is the unguent I want you to use.” He passed me a small jar with a worn label. “It’s from my own assortment and it’s half used up, so I apologize. Today has been . . .” He looked around at his charges. “Well, it’s been a bad day for burns. I’ll pick up more this afternoon, when I go to town.”
I went inside, wondering whether this was what the veterans’ shell shock felt like: numb confusion, with its undercurrent of pain. I walked through the lobby like a ghost, silent and aimless, until Mr. Rowe called my name.
I stopped to answer him out of pure reflex. “Yes?”
“This came for you with the morning’s post.” He held out an envelope.
“It must be my father,” I said, joining him at the concierge desk. “I haven’t heard from him but once since I arrived.”
He shook his head. “Postmark says it’s from here in Florida.”
I fr
owned down at the mark. “Why-bore? Is that how you say it?”
“EE-bore,” he corrected me. “It’s a Spanish name. Near Tampa and Saint Petersburg.”
“I don’t know anyone in Florida . . . not anybody who isn’t right here.” I took the envelope and saw that it’d been addressed by a “T. Cordero.” I thought about opening it on the spot but decided to take it upstairs instead. “Thank you, Mr. Rowe. If anyone needs me for anything, I’ll be in my room. I need a bath, and I need to get some rest.”
“I hope you weren’t too badly hurt, ma’am.”
“No, sir. Just a little burn on my arm. Thank you again.”
For a moment upon opening my door, I had the sickening feeling that something was aflame inside—I could smell it! I was convinced of it!—but for all my sniffing and searching, I turned up nothing except the ashes in the garbage. They didn’t smell like anything anymore, except for gray dampness.
Eventually I figured out that the smell of smoke was coming from my clothes, so I took them off and stood in my underthings and bandages. I threw everything into the laundry bag and tied it off, but I still smelled the smoke, following me around like a cloud.
Even though I needed that bath, I threw myself down on the bed first. My hair fanned out on the pillow, and that’s when I understood: The smoke was in my hair. I wouldn’t be free of the odor until I’d washed everything, even my tresses.
• • •
I hate washing my tresses. I even hate the word “tresses.” But that’s what my mother always called them when they needed washing, so there you go. I was too tired—and marginally more curious about the letter—to begin with the bath. So I sighed and slipped my finger into the seam of the envelope to open it. I pulled out the letter, unfolded it, and began to read.
14
TOMÁS CORDERO
Ybor City, Florida
I AM ON a train, somewhere to the east of Ybor City. I have packed up everything I could save, everything I could carry. I do not think I will be back. I do not think I am long for this world, and worse than that—I am a danger to everyone I know and love. (I am a danger to all of those who are left, though they number but few.)