It happens. Not often, but it happens. Everyone who’d come out to look . . . every man and woman with hands on mouths in disbelief . . . every child, gazing wide-eyed in astonishment . . . every single person in Cassadaga, was clinging to that very slim hope.
I did not search the scene for a qualified fireman. If one had been present, I would’ve heard the trucks. More bells would’ve been ringing over the sound of the house coming down. The trucks would’ve been rumbling.
I was the nearest thing to a fireman for at least a mile. My credentials were slim, but they were better than no credentials at all.
A woman standing on the other side of Alice had wrapped herself in a blanket, for modesty or warmth. “Pardon me, ma’am?” I said to her. I did not wait for an answer. I swept the blanket off her shoulders and threw it over my head. It was rude, but it was necessary. It might allow me to save their beloved minister. Or it might not, but what could I do except try?
Now protected, however slightly . . . into the house I ran.
The front door was already open. It might have blasted open from the heat, or some more timid soul might have tried it and found the path too perilous to proceed.
I was not timid. I was a soldier. I was not afraid of fire.
Alice screamed. I know it was Alice. She has a powerful voice that carries easily and cuts through a crowd like a sword. She was screaming at me, or for me. She was calling my name again and again, furious and fearful—but she would not follow me. She could not follow me; two women had seized her and were holding her restrained while she struggled against them and still screamed, still called.
That’s all I gleaned from a single backward glance. After a moment, I could not hear her.
In another moment more, I was inside the house, inside the fire.
It crawled along the walls and pooled on the ceiling, so the house was not long for the world and no number of ready and loaded fire trucks could save it now, even if they arrived in the blink of an eye. The heat was intense, but I had felt such heat before. The air was thick, but I kept myself low. The darkness was profound, but I have spent much time in darkness, and I could work past it.
“Doctor?” I cried out, and heard nothing in reply. I said it again, as loud as I could—for all that the crackling flames and the groaning, failing structure were as noisy as hell around me. I could hardly hear myself. I tried again anyway, a third time.
The third time is always the charm—isn’t that what they say?
I got a response, but not the one I expected. I’d expected a cough or a plea for help, something living but dying, calling out with dwindling breath. I was wrong on all possible counts.
Este camino.
Two words. A woman’s voice, but not the voice of the minister. I knew, because I knew the voice. I recognized the woman from two words, breathed so sweetly through the flames.
“Evelyn, ayúdame . . .”
Por aquí.
There was a corridor, a dining room—a very long table filled most of it. Beyond, a library. The shelves were an inferno; the books were burning and dead. On the floor was a body, a woman. Burned and not quite dead. Her foot twitched when I touched her. Her eyes fluttered when I rolled her over. Her lips moved when I picked her up and slung the blanket over both of us, and in a crouch I dragged us both back through the dining room while the cinders fell and burned holes in the blanket, holes in my shirt. An ember burned through the back of one pant leg, and it surprised me—I teetered and nearly dropped the woman, but I recovered and I held her firmly.
Back down the corridor and to the parlor I carried her in a crouch; I held her as low as I was able, so that one of us might breathe, at least. If she was still breathing at all. If she was even alive.
We missed a collapsing corner of the ceiling by the breadth of a hair. A fresh blast of heat bloomed up in its wake, searing my shoulder and the back of my neck. I felt the skin of my right ear boiling against my scalp. I smelled the ash of my own hair.
The door was just ahead.
It was a black hole with glimmering lights on the other side—the light of the rising sun, and the light of lanterns, and lights coming on in nearby windows. It all swirled as my vision swam from the heat and exhaustion, from the thick and poisoned air. It was a universe of constellations spinning, framed in that narrow rectangle.
I reached it, hauling the woman in a graceless, staggering hold. I was hurting her. I hoped I was hurting her—it would mean she was still alive, even now, and I was not bringing her out a corpse.
Out the door we tumbled together as the whole house creaked and strained, and finally I quit stealing air from the space near the floor—where it was only as hot as an oven, but not ruined with the smoke of burning wood and books and flesh. The air on the other side reeked of smoke, and my own seared skin, and the ends of my hair that were burned away, but it was clean enough to make me gasp and suck it down.
I was saved from drowning.
I was tiring from the heat and aching from the burden.
I stumbled down the short porch steps, and a man caught me—while another man caught the doctor as she fell from my grasp. Another blanket was tossed over my head, and I felt a dozen pairs of hands patting away, snuffing out all the little sparks I’d brought along with me.
The woman was pulled in one direction and I was pulled in another, but when I extricated myself from the blankets I saw her laid out in the middle of the sandy street—away from the house, which would surely come down at any moment. The bucket brigade had surrendered to the inevitable, and now those townspeople who were not attending the doctor were watching her home go up in smoke.
Alice was at her side. (I did not know the woman’s name. I only knew her titles.) I joined my friend, staggering and breathing too hard, clutching my chest, still catching up on all the air I’d lost when I’d gone inside.
“Tomás!” she said to me. She did not look at me. She could not take her eyes off the woman on the ground, with her hair burned mostly away, and her hands cooked down to the stringy red and black sinews and bone. “Tomás, you went inside!”
“I am not afraid of fire.” I wheezed. I coughed. I bent over and let my head hang while I caught my breath. I would catch my breath. I would throw these clothes away and wear new ones. My hair would grow back and my ear would heal.
This was all the silver lining that I could muster in my exhaustion and pain—for it had been for nothing. I am not afraid of fire, but I know what it can do. I know what it does. I had not rescued a corpse, only by moments. Well, she could pass in peace, in the cool sand of the street where the sun hadn’t baked it yet. She could die among friends instead of among flames.
She was not gone yet, but she would leave us soon. Her eyelashes were lost, and her clothes were scorched tatters, but she lived long enough to gaze right at me, and right past me. Her chapped, blistered lips moved, and Alice leaned close. “Dr. Floyd, you hold on. You rest up, and the ambulance is on the way.”
The woman spoke, a cracked, jagged sound like wind over coals.
“It isn’t her . . . ,” she said, and she said it to me. Her head rolled to the side, so she could see Alice. “It’s him. He’s here. He’s free.”
Her eyes did not close. They only went blank.
She stopped breathing, and no one dared to push on her chest like they did for David. No one imagined for a moment that it would help. Her skin would slide off in their hands. Her ribs would snap like sticks. She was gone.
Alice exploded into tears. I tried to comfort her but she pulled away from me—she pulled away from everyone and stumbled off toward the hotel. Then she changed her mind and went off in another direction, crying into the sleeve of her housecoat all the way. I watched her stumble, tripping over shoes that weren’t meant to see the outside. She caught herself, found the sidewalk to the hotel, and disappeared around the corner. I assumed she w
ent inside.
She was safe. Then all was not lost.
I looked to the burning house and watched as the roof fell inward, sending up a great shower of sparks and ash. People on the sidewalk gasped. The flames were very bright against the dim sky, going from navy blue to something lighter. The fire made everything gold and black, all blinding light and absolute shadow. The southern wall toppled to the ground and flames went shooting out from that side, too. The front porch awning dropped and fell to burning pieces.
The fire bell across the way had stopped ringing, but it began again as the truck arrived, both of them present in time to do nothing of any real value. No other houses were close enough to be threatened, and there was nothing left inside to be saved—human or otherwise.
I looked back at the woman I’d pulled from the house. One of the ash-stained blankets had been draped lovingly across her face and torso. A weeping woman tugged the hem down to cover the victim’s gruesome hands, which had curled up toward her chest like fists anticipating a fight. I knew that stance. I’d seen it happen before, on soldiers who’d been doused in fire—or those who had simply come too close to it. They call that petrified pose a “pugilist’s stance,” after the way a boxer holds himself in the ring.
• • •
TO think, I used to enjoy watching the occasional fight. Now all I can see is the curled-up wrists and balled-up hands, held close up against chests. It doesn’t matter that it’s a defensive pose one way and a death pose another.
Everything contracts away from the flames. Everything. That’s all I see anymore.
• • •
MY eyes were stinging. I had nothing clean to wipe them with, so I didn’t. I knew better. I only blinked, and only wiped my nose with the back of my dilapidated sleeve. I left behind a smudge of charcoal and snot on the Egyptian cotton, but it was ruined anyway. No laundering would save it, not in a thousand years.
“It isn’t her,” I repeated the woman’s last words. Some of them. I turned them over in my head. I knew what she meant, but she was wrong, of course. It was Evelyn’s voice I heard in the burning house, guiding me to Dr. Floyd. (That’s what Alice had called her.) It was Evelyn answering my questions in the charred books that I still needed to clean out of the hotel bathtub. It was Evelyn, bringing brimstone to Cassadaga.
• • •
NO. That wasn’t right.
Maybe that’s what the doctor meant: It isn’t her; it isn’t Evelyn setting all these fires in Florida.
Yes, that must have been what she intended. There must be someone else setting these terrible fires. Something else. But not—and never—my Evelyn.
• • •
IT was a great relief to reach this conclusion, even as I watched the last walls of the dead woman’s house tumble into the center, bringing the second story with them. Evelyn was with me, and these fires were not her doing (not that I ever honestly thought they might be). My kind, gentle, beautiful wife would never harm another soul. She would help, yes—she would guide me through the inferno, for the chance to save another. She would lend me her advice and her aid.
Beside me, a woman asked loudly, “What on earth is wrong with you?” It was Imogene, whom Alice does not much care for. I turned to face her and see what she wanted. Was she talking to me? “Yes, I’m talking to you.”
Flustered, tired, and mildly injured, I replied, “I only wished to help. I am not afraid of fire.”
“You’re an idiot, but that isn’t what I meant. You’re smiling. You’re standing there, watching the house fall down into ashes, and you’re just . . . you’re smiling.” Disgusted with me, she glared and hugged herself, rubbing her arms against the faint chill of early morning.
“I am thinking of happier times,” I said. I did not need to explain myself, but I supposed it did look strange. I wiped the smile from my face and hoped I now appeared serious enough for her satisfaction—and everyone else’s. “I was remembering my wife.”
“Did she die in a fire or something?”
“No,” I told the insufferably blunt woman. “She died of the flu, but I heard her, just now. Inside the house, she spoke to me. She told me where to find the doctor.” I could not prevent a glance at the blanketed form in the unpaved street. “She told me what to do.”
Imogene frowned, but she always frowns, I think. She narrowed her eyes and looked past me, over my shoulder.
“I’m sorry, what are you looking at?” I asked, since bluntness may call for bluntness.
“Nothing. That’s the strange part. Every time I’ve seen you,” she began. She stopped and lowered her voice. “Every time I’ve seen you, there’s been a . . . a big, dark cloud, casting a shadow from behind you.”
“Nothing is behind me, madam.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you: Whatever it is, you’ve lost it. I’m not sure which is more frightening, really—the thought that you had it in the first place, or the thought that it’s wandered off alone.” She shook her head and rubbed at her arms more vigorously, despite the radiant heat from the doctor’s house. It warmed everything, even this far away. Still she rubbed and rubbed. “I don’t like it, either way.”
“I . . . I’m not sure what I should say in response to that.”
Her frown hardened. It became a frown of fear. “It used you.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She backed away from me, still clutching herself and shaking her head. “It used you,” she said again, with emphasis. “Now it’s free.” Then she turned her back and ran—fumbling awkwardly through the sandy thoroughfare in stocking feet, as far and fast away from me as she could get.
21
ALICE DARTLE
Cassadaga, Florida
I WENT TO the hotel, but I did not go inside. I changed my mind on the front steps, before I reached the porch. I turned around, seeking some course of action apart from “run away and hide.”
But I wasn’t thinking straight. I was breathless, crying so hard that I couldn’t see.
I couldn’t imagine it—I couldn’t understand it or make any sense of it! How could Dr. Floyd be dead? She was practically the heart and soul of Cassadaga! Or . . . she was one of the hearts and souls, if a place can have more than one. There’s Mr. Colby, of course, but he is elderly and infirm, and he might have founded the place but he could no longer lead it.
Dr. Floyd was a leader, the very sort that the town so desperately needs. Dr. Floyd was a leader, and so is Oscar Fine, who was probably at the hospital with his son—or he might’ve been. I didn’t see him anywhere. I just hoped and prayed he hadn’t been inside the pastor’s house, now crashing into coals and ashes on Stevens Street.
Who was left? Cassadaga was running low on figureheads. Dolores Brigham was respected, but not terribly keen on taking charge, so far as I could tell. Mabel was too quietly guarded and fragile to assume such a role. Dr. Holligoss? In a pinch, I supposed.
I stopped staggering around blindly for a moment, for in considering Dr. Holligoss, I remembered what Agatha Bloom had told me: Talk to George.
But I’d already tried, and the doctor had rebuffed me. Well, now the doctor was busy with other business, and maybe Mr. Colby was awake and ready to hear the concerns of his former secretary. I sure hoped so. I hoped, and I thought, and I prayed for anything at all to hold in my mind—anything but Dr. J. A. Floyd. Her skin seared and split, her hair burned away, and her eyes red, bulging, with no lashes or brows. Her skin pink and stretched. Below the skin, all the rest exposed. Red and wet. Her hands, held up like a fighter ready to throw a punch, or block one.
I shook my head and held my hands over my ears, not that it did anything. It hardly muffled the clanging bell or the shouts of the campground members. It did not keep the waves of heat from washing over me. I felt them all the way down the street when the walls fell in and the roof fell down,
sending sparks and outrageous warmth pulsing across the road.
The sun was coming up, and I did not give a damn. The sun couldn’t tell me anything. Dr. Floyd was dead and I was going to scream or vomit, or maybe both. But I couldn’t just stand there with my hands over my ears. I had to do something productive, something useful. I had to do something good and helpful. If I couldn’t do any good, then I didn’t deserve to be there.
I had to try one more time to warn George Colby, wherever he was. It was the only instruction I’d received, and delivering this message was the one task I clung to in the midst of this awful dawn. Maybe I didn’t really expect him to tell the town to pack it in; maybe I only wanted to see him, to hear his voice and know that he was alive.
I needed to see him. I needed to know that there was something left, someone left. Somebody in charge, standing between us and the flames.
The sun was rising and nobody cared. It was already hot and bright outside. It was already a new day and I hated it.
• • •
I doubled back toward the main road and ran into Dolores, just as I was digging my feet in and out of the floury white sand and trudging down the road. I’d lost one slipper, and I didn’t know where. I kicked the other one off. It landed on the curb. For one preposterous instant I felt like a litterbug. I almost bent down to pick it up out of some lingering sense of civic duty, but somehow I lacked the energy.
Dolores stood on the edge of the sidewalk where she’d been since the firemen arrived, her hand over her mouth like it was glued there. Her hair was unwound, and it spilled down her shoulders and back. I’d never before seen it down, and I hadn’t realized how long it was. It fell past her waist, brown and streaked with gray.
I seized her by the shoulders, like I meant to shake her awake. I barely got her to look away from the fire and meet my eyes. “Where’s Mr. Colby? Is he still upstairs in your house?”
She shuddered and lowered her hand to her chin, dragging her lower lip with it. The lip slipped back into place. She swallowed dryly and pointed loosely toward her own house, across the street. “Yes . . . yes, he’s there. He wanted to come outside to help, but I talked him out of it. I . . . I put him back into his bed. He’s—”