myself along, ricocheting off furniture, until I cracked my forehead
solidly against the raised brick hearth of the fireplace. I was
farther than ever from the foyer, and yet I couldn’t picture myself
crawling into the fireplace and up the chimney like Santa Claus on his
way back to the sleigh.
I was dizzy. A headache split my skull on a diagonal from my left
eyebrow to the part in my hair on the right. My eyes stung from the
smoke and the salty sweat that poured into them. I wasn’t choking
again, but I was gagging on the pungent fumes that flavored even the
clearer air near the floor, and I was beginning to think I might not
survive.
Trying hard to remember where the fireplace was situated in
relationship to the foyer arch, I squirmed along the raised hearth and
then angled off into the room again.
It seemed absurd to me that I couldn’t find my way out of this place.
This wasn’t a mansion, for God’s sake, not a castle, merely a modest
house with seven rooms, none of them large, and 2.5 baths, and not even
the cleverest Realtor in the country could have described in such a way
as to give the that had enough rattling-around space to satisfy the
Prince of Wales and his retinue.
on the evening news, from time to time, You see stories about people
dying in house fires, and You can never quite understand why they
couldn’t make it to a door or window, when one or the other was surely
within a dozen steps. Unless they were, of course, drunk. Or wasted
on drugs. Or foolish enough to rush back into the flames to rescue
Fluffy, the kitten. Which may sound ungrateful of me after I myself
was this same night rescued, in a sense, by a cat. But now I
understood how people died in these circumstances: The smoke and the
churning darkness were more disorienting than drugs or booze, and the
longer You breathed the tainted air, the less nimble your mind became,
until your thoughts rambled and even panic couldn’t focus them.
When I had first climbed the stairs to see what had happened to An ela,
I had been amazed at how calm and collected I was in spite of the
threat of imminent violence. With a fat dollop of male pride as
cloying as a cupful of mayonnaise, I had even sensed in my heart a
disconcerting enthusiasm for danger.
What a difference ten minutes can make. Now that it was brutally
apparent to me that I was never going to acquit myself in these
situations with even half the aplomb of Batman, the romance of danger
failed to stir me.
Suddenly, creeping out of the dismal blear, something brushed against
me and nuzzled my neck, my chin: something alive. In the
three-hundred-ring circus of my mind, I pictured Angela Ferryman on her
belly, reanimated by some evil voodoo, slithering across the floor to
meet me, and planting a cold-lipped, bloody kiss on my throat. The
effects of oxygen deprivation were becoming so severe that even this
hideous image was not sufficient to shock me into a clearer state of
mind, and I reflexively squeezed off a shot.
Thank God, I fired entirely in the wrong direction, because even as the
crack of the shot echoed through the living room, I recognized the cold
nose at my throat and the warm tongue in my ear as those of my one and
only dog, my faithful companion, my Orson.
“Hey, pal,” I said, but it came out as a meaningless croak.
He licked my face. He had dog’s breath, but I couldn’t really blame
him for that.
I blinked furiously to clear my vision, and red light pulsed through
the room brighter than ever. Still, I got no better than a smeary
impression of his furry face pressed to the floor in front of mine.
Then I realized that if he could get into the house and find me, he
could show me the way out before we caught fire with a stink of burning
denim and fur.
I gathered sufficient strength to rise shakily to my feet. That