Authors: Elizabeth Bear
I should of shut the door at the top. Ninety-Mississippi. But I weren’t going back up there to correct the oversight now. Maybe Crispin would remember I’d asked him to. My elbows were bruised up something awful, but I was running on so much fear and excitement that they only hurt when I whacked one of ’em on something. In sorrow I report, I whacked ’em on a lot.
One hundred. Twenty seconds until Crispin opened the window. I must be almost there by now, but I couldn’t count stairs and seconds both at once. One-hundred-five …
The door was kitty-corner to the stairs, and I kicked out as I slid down what I thought was the last few steps. So I felt it was open space. I kind of swapped ends and fell out into the hall, then scrambled forward and kicked the door shut, nearly losing one of Crispin’s giant boots. I jammed it back on by stomping my foot against the doorframe.
Then I lay there on my belly for what felt like enough time for the whole damned house to have burned down around me but was probably only ten seconds or so. My breath heaved in and out like a bellows, and thank Christ there was less smoke down here or I would of choked on it. I pressed my face to the carpet and breathed through the wool fibers and the wet sheet, and it was almost like breathing air.
But the fire wanted that air, too, and when it was done there wouldn’t be none left for me. Even if I didn’t manage to roast alive before then. I pushed myself to my knees—damn, my knees—and tried to crawl. But Crispin’s overcoat got tangled in my legs and his boots was too big, and I didn’t have rags to stuff them with, so instead I laid back down and I kind of shuffle-kicked my way forward. Like a frog.
Smoked frog.
I laughed, which I shouldn’t of done, because even with the wet wrap I got a stinging lungful. But I couldn’t see anyway, so coughing myself blind didn’t really matter, except it slowed me down.
I couldn’t afford to get lost. It was dark as pitch down here, like swimming in muddy water at night. I figured that was a good sign, because if I got in sight of the fire I’d sure be able to see that, no matter how dark it was otherwise. So I was feeling my way around and hoping I could remember where all the furniture was in the dark. Furniture we’d recently rearranged, of course, due to the riot in the parlor previous.
Down here, though I couldn’t see the fire, I could
hear
it. There was a hollow, grumbling roar, like a splintercat raging in an empty barn behind a stark oak door. It came from the kitchen, and that made my stomach churn, because Connie’s room was in the hall right outside. Every so often that was punctuated with crackling pings of hot metal and the thud of falling beams. I could hear something else, too—the clarion peals of Signor’s loud, monotonous, evenly spaced meows, that rang all the way back from the parlor to where I huddled at the base of the servants’ stair.
Maybe I should of tried to come down the grand staircase to the front, but I was thinking about Connie and—
Well, it was too late to change my mind now.
Groping, I felt a doorjamb and found the door to the back hall, where Connie’s room was. Priya saved my life, because before I jerked it open I touched it.
I yanked my hand back with a real ladylike swear: my finest. Hot; sharp hot. Blistering. Then I realized I could
see
my hand, dull red through the clouds of smoke. And something like flakes of black snow was falling through that smoke, stirring eddies.
I looked up. The ceiling was on fire, flames licking from behind the door, and what was flaking down on me now was bits of blackened lath and plaster. And I could see the glare of red through the keyhole, too.
If Connie was back there … there weren’t nothing I could do for her. All I could hope was she’d made it out the kitchen door.
I wanted to curl up and sob. I wanted to yank open that door and go running into the fire looking for her, but I couldn’t even touch the cut-glass doorknob, it was so hot. And Signor was still yelling. Maybe I could get to him. And anyway, that was my only way out now.
I got up on my hands and knees and crawled.
At first, it seemed like the air was getting cooler around me, the smoke less thick. But then it started getting worse again—hotter, smokier. And when I came around the corner to the parlor, there was that awful orange flicker again.
The parlor wasn’t on fire.
Just those poor much-abused front doors.
I was trapped.
* * *
God bless Signor. I think I would of frozen there in horror until the roof fell on me if he hadn’t picked that moment to yell, with all the power of his deaf little lungs, right in my left ear. It shocked me into moving. And squeaking like a mouse. Like a stepped-on mouse.
Signor was standing right at the base of the grand stair, glaring at me with his one blue eye and one yellow exactly as if the whole thing were my fault. I scooped him to my chest, and the ungrateful little bastard left a bloody long trail of scratches down my forearm with his hind foot. But I hung on to him. And about squeezed him into pudding, I was so glad to see him alive.
I say “little,” but Signor was twenty pounds if he was an ounce. I crouched, hugging him, and he hid his face in my wet sheet wrap. Flakes of burning something was sizzling out on Crispin’s overcoat, the wool adding a scorched stench to every other awful smell in the room. I needed a way out. Anything. I had to pick a direction, and I was terrified that whatever direction I picked would be wrong. I didn’t think I was gonna get a chance to change my mind and try something different if I happened to get it wrong.
Maybe I could go back up the stairs? Go out a window? Crispin would be out there to catch me now, or Miss Francina. Or there might be a firefighter with a ladder by now—
And then my eye lit on the sewing machine to the left of the parlor doors. That big, industrial, ridiculous, totally overengineered, souped-up-to-Jesus Singer sewing machine. The one that Priya and Lizzie had been hot-rodding for weeks, with the ornamental metal plates all over the armature, and Miss Lizzie’s diesel engine welded in beside the hydraulics.
It hurt me to stand up. Knees, spine, everything. My lungs, from the heat of the air, even through the wrap. The wrap was nearly dry now anyway, all the water sizzled off into the fire.
Head spinning, breath rasping, I staggered to the sewing machine. It weren’t easy getting into it while holding on to an unhappy cat, wearing boots four sizes bigger than my feet. The sewing machine was hot as a bitch, but I managed somehow, and the coat and boots were a lifesaver. It burned my legs through my socks and where my night shift didn’t quite meet up with ’em at the knee. I burned my hands some, too, in the process but didn’t drop Signor and I got about half the straps catched.
That were probably enough. I just leaved the machine’s left arm hanging, because I was using that hand to hang on to Signor anyway. He quieted down a bit when I swaddled him up in the sheet and bound him against my chest. At least it was easier than getting a horse out of a burning barn—a job I only knowed in theory, though Da’d made sure I was good and drilled in it. Stable fires had been the worst dread of my childhood.
Turned out there was something worse.
I had the coat, and I had the big machine. And I had the cat, who had quit yowling and twisting and scratching and now just huddled against me, face shoved into my chest. The heat was rising as I sparked the boiler, hoping whoever’d used it last had left some water in the damned thing. It ran on kerosene, not coal—thank God—because kerosene was cleaner indoors.
I never would of gotten a coal engine fired up fast enough to save our lives. It took me thirty seconds that felt like six hours just to get the diesel engine cranked up so it would spark, and then and turning over—me praying the whole time that I remembered right that diesel didn’t explode, then remembering the kerosene.
And it turned out to be a horrible kind of blessing that the thing was hot, because the water in the boilers might already have been near simmering. Anyway, it came up to pressure right quick, with hissing and creaking and a whole mess of noise. While I waited, I managed to force the thing into a crouch by main strength and with the torque from the auxiliary engine, so I could get me and Signor closer to the floor where there was still some air lasting.
I don’t recommend any of it.
The parlor, as I said, wasn’t burning, though now flames licked out from the doors into the paneling on either side. I imagined those flames inside the walls, creeping up to the ceiling—and the fire behind me, from the kitchen, chasing down the hall. I knowed rooms could get engulfed in flames in an instant when they got hot enough. But I also knowed—I
knew
—that somebody had set this fire on purpose to trap us inside. There weren’t no other reason for just the door to be burning, excepting if somebody had set it on purpose to shut us in. And I knowed the longer I let it burn, the weaker the wood would be.
And the more pressure there’d be in the sewing machine, in order to break it down.
I don’t mind saying I ain’t never been so scared in my life.
Finally—it seemed like hours, but it were only two minutes or so—the gauges read 70 percent pressure and climbing. When I rose up, it was a hell of a lot easier than squatting down had been. As soon as my head came up into the smoke layer, though, everything went dizzy and rough edged. I would of swayed, but the sewing machine has gyroscopes, so it shifted around me and caught my stagger. This is a good thing, because the sewing machine weighs half a ton and if you fell inside it you might never get up unless the hydraulics kept working.
And if it fell so the weight was on you, well. You’d crack a rib or three sure as if a horse fell on you. You’d be lucky to walk away without a hole in your lung, and not even Miss Lizzie can fix up that.
Now that I was decided, I had to go fast. The smoke up here was that thick. I could barely hear the roar of the Singer’s engines over the roar of the fire. I might of missed the door, honestly, if it weren’t for those flames glaring orange. They made such a beacon I couldn’t of asked for more, except maybe a fog light.
I clutched Signor against me, turning my shoulder toward the door, and started to lumber up to a run. I aimed right at the middle, at the place the panels met. And I thought,
If Peter Bantle can break it in, by God I can break it out.
I half-surprised myself when I came up on the edge of the flames, howled with all the strength in my lungs, and ran faster and more hard.
Don’t get me wrong. I knowed I had courage. But until that moment, I didn’t know I had the courage to run through a fire. We surprise ourselves all our lives, Miss Bethel would say. That is, if our lives is gonna be worth living.
The fire licked all around me, but the Singer’s big grippered feet beat the flames down, and the plates Miss Lizzie had welded to the legs shielded me a little. I hit that door screaming and I busted through so hard I didn’t stop until I fetched up on the other side of the sidewalk, against the masonry wall that held the street up. Rock dust powdered down around me. My scream turned to coughing, and all around me the sewing machine armature smoked in the cool air. Puddles hissed under its feet and its springs complained of the sudden change in temperature.
“Mother of God,” I said, turning to look back at the house.
The second story was all ablaze. I couldn’t see any higher, because smoke and flames billowed out the windows, and the narrow space of the sidewalk was near full of smoke as the inside.
I couldn’t stay here, either.
Signor wasn’t moving, but he was wrapped up close against my chest under the coat and I didn’t have time to look at him. And the ladder wouldn’t support the weight of the sewing machine.
Which left climbing.
I pulled more wrapping sheet off my head, tucked Signor into it against my chest, then strapped my left arm in with three quick jerks. If Signor was passed out—he’d better not be worse than passed out, and I didn’t have time, dammit, to think about Connie—he was probably safe enough just slung against me like a papoose. And if he started to fight, well …
My breasts would be the first to know. I’d worry about it if it happened.
The rock wall was too smooth for climbing, unless you was Merry Lee. But with the sewing machine, I could drive the fingers right into the mortar between the big stones, and the feet had grippers meant to anchor the thing when it was hauling cloth off bolts of denim heavier than it was. It weren’t easy, don’t get me wrong. And I broke three needles and blunted the scissors and awl something fierce. But length by length, I dragged me and Signor up that wall.
Effie tells me that when I hauled myself over the edge of the street and lay there suspended inside the frame, the machine scrabbling on its belly like a big turtle out of water to move forward, the first thing that happened was a cheer. I don’t remember, or maybe I just couldn’t hear it over the incredible roar of the fire. I was coughing and coughing and coughing, and all I could feel was the skin on my hands and around my eyes where the sheet didn’t wrap, tight and sunburned hot and sore.
Crispin and Effie got me up—or guided me up, anyway. The machine did all the work. They led me at a staggering run away from the blazing building, to where the rest of the girls was huddled, staring and waiting. Crispin just looked at me—he didn’t say Connie’s name. I couldn’t even make myself shake my head, but he must of read the answer in the way I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, he didn’t say nothing. He just started unbuckling the armature. Effie was petting my cheek and crying.
She started crying harder when they unwrapped the sheet and found Signor.
I looked down, not wanting to. He looked small—ridiculously small, for a white cat—gray now, smudged and sooty—with a head as big as both my fists together. And at first my heart lurched, and I moaned … but then I saw his eyes was open, his ears laid flat.
He looked me right in the face and hissed like a furious teakettle, and I hugged him as hard as I have ever hugged anything in this life or, if Priya is right about what happens when we die, I am likely to hug them in the next one.