Authors: Orson Scott Card
So he waited while she spooned the oversweet stuff into his mouth. He remembered that when he was little he liked it, but now it was way too sweet. It made him want to brush his teeth.
Up to his room he went, feeling just a little lightheaded by the time he got to the top of the stairs. And when he flopped down on his bed, the sudden move made his hand throb so hard that he almost fainted from the pain. He lay there wincing and panting for what seemed forever, refusing to cry. He finally worked up the gumption to get up and get a comic book to read, but the light coming into the room wasn’t bright enough to read well, and he didn’t want the overhead light on because it would be too bright, and in the end he fell asleep with the comic book on his chest.
When he woke up he was lying on the comic book and his hand hurt even worse, but differently, with the pain of deep healing rather than the pain of harsh injury. There was still light in the window, but it was the dim light of a winter evening and he could hear the sounds of dinner being eaten downstairs. He must have slept for hours and he was hungry.
Pain or no pain, he had missed lunch and he wasn’t going to miss dinner, too. He swung his feet over the edge of the bed and stood up and then sat right back down, his head swimming. He had apparently lost a lot
of blood outside in the snow. But after a few more minutes sitting on the edge of the bed, he was able to stand up and walk rather feebly toward the door, leaning on things as he went.
In the doorway, though, he heard gales of laughter from downstairs and suddenly he wasn’t hungry after all, or at least not so hungry that he wanted to go walking into the bright crowded kitchen with all the kids gathered around the table. Granny would make a fuss over him but the other kids would mock him and tease him and it just made him tired. He wanted to be alone, like an injured animal that crawls off into the deepest thicket in the woods in order to either bleed to death or heal.
He might have turned back in to his own room, but that wasn’t where he wanted to go. Without naming his goal, he walked along the narrow hall to the back of the house and then slowly climbed the stairs to the warm place.
He hadn’t spent much time there this year. Perhaps none. Perhaps he hadn’t sat in this place since sixth grade. Or fifth. He didn’t remember. He only knew that this was the sheltered place where he needed to go when he felt like he felt right now.
He sat down on the step where he had always sat, but now he was bigger and his body didn’t fit into the place as it used to. It really
had
been a long time, and he was going through a growth spurt, Granny said, and his legs were so long they stuck out of the bottoms of his pants like popsicle sticks.
He did not close his eyes because he never closed his eyes here.
Instead he let his gaze rest idly and unfocused on the wallpaper near the backstairs window and let the warmth of the place seep into him.
It came into him as it always did, in gentle increments with each throb of the heartbeat of the place. This time, though, the throbbing of the pain in his hand had its own rhythm that conflicted with the slower beat of the warm place, and it made him feel agitated at first, jumpy, restless. But then the warmth went to his hand and for a moment it actually burned, as if he had thrust his whole hand into a blazing fire, and he cried out with the sharpness of it.
And then he was caught up into a dream. Not of flying this time. No, he felt himself sliding and slithering through a dark passage through cold stone, downward mostly, but he couldn’t really see anything except shadows
against a dull red glow that seemed to increase with each of his breaths and quickly fade. He would brush against the sides or roof of the passage and feel the chill against his crusty skin, but the chill could never get very deep because he had so much warmth inside him.
Then the cold rock opened up and he was in a large open cavern with stalactites and stalagmites and a different sort of glow, a deeper red. The air was very hot here, as hot as the pain in Michael’s palm, so there was a sort of balance, and it didn’t bother him so much, it was just part of the place. He slipped among the stalagmites, feeling his body trail among them, bending easily around them, scraping on both sides but never injured. He had never realized how
long
his body was when he was in the dreams of this place, or how tightly and smoothly his arms could press up against his sides.
The underground chamber grew larger and brighter the farther in he went, and the stalagmites soon ceased. Instead the floor under his feet, under his belly, was as bumpy and yet smooth as the surface of boiling water, if you could harden boiling water into stone.
He came at last to a shore of an underground sea, only the sea was made of molten stone, seething and bubbling, smelling of sulphur. The blast of heat from the sea was worse than standing in front of Granny’s oven when she had it really hotted up to broil something. And yet instead of making him want to back away, to retreat to some cool place, it seemed to waken a fire inside him and he wanted to be inside it the way he wanted to plunge into a swimming pool on a hot August day. Not that the sea of molten stone would be cool, but rather that the intense heat of it would bring this body the same kind of relief.
This body. What am I, when I dream like this. Not this boy, this weak walking boy clad in soft, easily sliced skin, not this cowering creature who slinks through the world creeping up backstairs and hiding from the laughter of his enemies.
Enemies? I have no enemies.
None who dare to show themselves, huddling little human.
Who are you?
I am the fire.
And with that thought, the body Michael wore in his dreams leapt up and spread its arms, its thin strong wings, and rose circling high above the
sea of magma until he could sense, with senses he did not know he had, the roof of the great cavern, the crown of this bubble of air deep within the earth, and having reached the zenith of this dark sky, he plunged down, straight down into the hot red sea and his mind turned white inside and Michael sprawled unconscious upon the stair.
He became aware of himself again, stretched out across the steps, long and sinuous, his sleek feathery scales unperturbed by the wooden edges. His wings were folded up under him and his great jaws began to yawn.
No, that would be the other body, not this one. He stretched, and it was the arms of a boy that stretched. The hands of a boy that flexed, the eyes of a boy that opened.
It was dark, but it had been nearly dark when he had first crept to this place so that did not tell him how long he had been asleep. It couldn’t have been long, because Granny would have checked on him when the other boys finished dinner and, not finding him in his room, would have looked first in this place.
He rose to his feet and was surprised at how small and light he was. An hour ago, he had thought himself rather tall and big—his man-height was coming on him these days, and he was taller than Granny, wasn’t he, and almost as tall as Gramps?
He looked down at hands that were not wings, and again he flexed his fingers and realized that the bandaged hand did not hurt at all. Not so much as a twinge. The only discomfort was the awkwardness of the thick bandage.
He brought the bandage up to his mouth to bite at the tape, but then remembered that he had another hand, and used those fingers to prise up the end of the tape and peel it away. Granny’s thorough packaging was unwrapped in only a few moments, and underneath it there was no wound at all, not even a scar. Only a few loops of black thread lying in his palm. He blew them away and there was then no way to tell which hand had been sliced.
Was this what happened when he plunged into the sea of fire? It made him whole?
You healed me?
But there was no answering thought as there had been in the dream. Just a faint buzzing, whirring, rushing sound.
Which, Michael now knew with absolute certainty, was not the sound of wind rushing past the drainpipes and playing them like an organ. It came from inside the locked windowless room where a bright light shone though no one ever entered to change the bulb. It sounded like razors, like can openers, and he had to know, he had to see.
He was up the stairs in a moment, his eye trying to peer through the keyhole. The tiny slit he had made years ago was still there, and as before, it showed only dazzling light.
In moments he had the bed back from the crawlspace door and was through it. It was dark, but he felt his way along the rafters, taking care to find the next one before taking his weight from the ones before. If there were spiderwebs or beetles he did not care; he was barely aware of the thick dust that rose from the rafters with each movement of a hand or foot. For one moment he thought he would sneeze, but he held it in by holding his breath, for he did not want to set the house on fire.
Fire? I make no fire when I sneeze.
Who are you, who healed me? Whose body is it that I dwell in, who was it took me diving into fire?
There was faint light up ahead. Far ahead, the length of the house. It was a couple of lines of dim light, and when at last he got there, he found that it was another crawlspace door, which was closed only by the same simple kind of latch as the door in his old attic room. He lifted the block of wood and the door opened easily at his push.
He was in the front room of the attic, the one that had the window and balcony overlooking the street. The only light in the room came from the streetlights outside—that had been enough to make the faint glow around the edges of the crawlspace door.
But he could still hear the noise from the locked room, and there, opposite the window, was another door. This keyhole had not been blocked up—a bright glow shone plainly through it. And when Michael turned the handle and pulled, the door opened easily.
Four bright naked bulbs in ceiling fixtures made the dazzling light, and the razor sounds had come from five electric trains making their rounds along tracks that stretched completely around the room. The table surrounding the room even crossed in front of the doors, so the only way into the room was to duck down under the table and come up the other
side, in the midst of a miniature world of villages, train stations, trestles and tunnels, hills and farms and rivers and a distant sea.
Who had built this? Why didn’t anyone ever see it? Why did they leave the trains running, with no one here to play with them?
In one corner of the room, a mist seemed to gather. Michael watched it, fascinated. It was a cloud, he saw that now, emanating from the smokestacks of a tiny factory. No sooner had it formed than electricity began to spark from it. Michael felt his own hair standing up the way it did when you rubbed a balloon and held it near. The sparks crackled. A tiny bolt of lightning snapped from the cloud to a train track. There was a sharp cracking sound—miniature thunder. He could smell the ozone.
How was it done? He had never heard of a train layout with weather. A storm, of all things! No rain, but maybe that was coming.
The cloud kept jetting out of the smokestacks and now the whole ceiling was masked by it, so the light of the bulbs was dimmed. Lightning cracked here and there all around the room now, snapping down to the tracks. Each time, the trains hesitated for a moment but then went on.
Michael caught a whir of motion out of the corner of his eye. He spun to look. A train? But the only train in that part of the room was nowhere near the motion he had seen.
He looked intently at the painted, lichened landscape and again saw movement as a dragonfly suddenly leapt upward from the ground near the mouth of a tunnel. It flew rapidly around the room, so Michael could hardly get a look at it. There was something wrong, though. It did not move like a dragonfly, really. It had the long tail, but the wings were not a dragonfly’s blur of translucence, they flapped like a bird’s wings. Yet the skin of the tiny creature was as iridescent as a dragonfly’s body, sparkling in the light, glimmering with each thread of lightning.
The creature did not shy away from the lightning, either. In fact it seemed drawn to it, darting toward each bolt as if it were drinking in the ozone that was left behind in the burnt air.
I know you, thought Michael.
“I know you,” he whispered.
You don’t know me, came the answer in his mind. You will never know me. You are incapable of knowing me, you poor worm.
You healed my hand. You took me flying with you and plunged me
with you into the magma deep within the earth. “Thank you,” Michael whispered.
In reply the tiny dragon lunged in the air just as a spark of lightning began to crackle downward and even though it happened in a mere instant, Michael thought he saw the dragon sparkle all over as if the lightning were inside it and it was the dragon that snapped downward to the electric track, leaving a trail of lightning behind it.
And it was gone.
The lights went out. The trains fell silent. Michael was in total darkness, surrounded by silence and the smell of ozone and another faint burnt smell.
You couldn’t have died, thought Michael. After all these years that the trains have run in this room, and the lightning flashed, you couldn’t have died on this very day when I first came here and saw you. It must be this way every time. You were reaching for the lightning. You must have reached for it, caught it like a surfer catching a wave, and ridden it down to earth. You must still be here . . . somewhere . . .