mass of foul-smelling smoke poured into the stairwell from below,
invisible but palpable, enveloping me as some giant sea anemone might
envelop a diver. Coughing, choking, struggling to breathe, I reversed
directions, hoping to escape through a second floor window, although
not through the master bathroom where Angela waited.
I returned to the landing and clambered up three or four steps of the
second flight before halting. Through smoke-stung eyes flooded with
tears-and through the pall of smoke itself-I saw a throbbing light
above.
Fire.
Two fires had been set, one above and one below. Those unseen
psychotic children were busy in their mad play, and there seemed to be
so many of them. I was reminded of the veritable platoon of searchers
that appeared to spring from the ground outside the mortuary, as though
Sandy Kirk possessed the power to summon the dead from their graves.
Downward, once more and quickly, I plunged toward the only hope of
nourishing air. I would find it, if anywhere, at the lowest point of
the structure, because smoke and fumes rise while the blaze sucks in
cooler air at its base in order to feed itself.
Each inhalation caused a spasm of coughing, increased my feeling of
suffocation, and fed my panic, so I held my breath until I reached the
foyer. There, I dropped to my knees, stretched out on the floor, and
discovered that I could breathe. The air was hot and smelled sour, but
all things being relative, I was more thrilled by it than I had ever
been by the crisp air coming off the washboard of the Pacific.
I didn’t lie there and surrender to an orgy of respiration. I
hesitated just long enough to draw several deep breaths to clear my
soiled lungs, and to work up enough saliva to spit some of the soot out
of my mouth.
Then I raised my head to test the air and to learn how deep the
precious safe zone might be. Not deep. Four to six inches.
Nevertheless, this shallow pool ought to be enough to sustain me while
I found my way out of the house.
Wherever the carpet was afire, of course, there would be no safe-air
zone whatsoever.
The lights were still out, the smoke was blindingly thick, and I
squirmed on my stomach, frantically heading toward where I believed I
would find the front door, the nearest exit. The first thing I
encountered in the murk was a sofa, judging by the feel of it, which
meant that I had passed through the archway and into the living room,
at least ninety degrees off the course I imagined I’d been following.
Now luminous orange pulses passed through the comparatively clear air
near the floor, underlighting the curdled masses of smoke as if they
were thunderheads looming over a plain. From my eyeto-the-carpet
perspective, the beige nylon fibers stretched away like a vast flat
field of dry grass, fitfully brightened by an electrical storm. This
narrow, life-sustaining realm under the smoke seemed to be an alternate
world into which I had fallen after stepping through a door between
dimensions.
The ominous throbs of light were reflections of fire elsewhere in the
room, but they didn’t relieve the gloom enough to help me find the way
out. The stroboscopic flickering only contributed to my confusion and
scared the hell out of me.
As long as I couldn’t see the blaze, I could pretend that it was in a
distant corner of the house. Now I no longer had the refuge of
pretense. Yet there was no advantage to glimpsing the reflected fire,
because I wasn’t able to tell if the flames were inches or feet from
me, whether they were burning toward or away from me, so the light
increased my anxiety without providing guidance.
Either I was suffering worse effects of smoke inhalation than I
realized, including a distorted perception of time, or the fire was
spreading with unusual swiftness. The arsonists had probably used an
accelerant, maybe gasoline.
Determined to get back into the foyer and then to the front door, I
sucked desperately at the increasingly acrid air near the floor and
squirmed across the room, digging my elbows into the carpet to pull