Dreamquake

by Elizabeth Knox

  Suddenly Laura was standing beside her. Grace put her arms around her niece, and together they walked away from the Palace, the pounding engines, the torrents of cold and warm water. They stopped at the edge of the crowd and stood, clinging to each other. Grace was drenched and shivering, but her feet smarted, as though they’d been sunburned.

  When Rose returned to the others, she found the head attendant had finished passing out wet towels. “There’s no more water in the taps,” Rose said.

  “There’s no time,” the other woman replied, and passed Rose a towel. Then she walked out of the only illumination—smoke-bruised firelight—and fumbled her way across the room. Her workmates began to bleat at her. “Come back!”

  She returned carrying scissors. She squatted and began to hack at the train of Rose’s gown. She made a sizable hole, then wrapped the cloth around her hands and ripped the train away from the skirt. Then she picked up her own towel, went to the cloakroom door, and opened it.

  For a moment all they could see was smoke—they’d made way for it, and it came toward them, twisting and black, as solid and supple as kelp in a fast-moving tide. The women and girls instinctively ducked, cowered on the carpet in the hallway, where they found that the air was clearer.

  The head attendant choked out, “Hold on to one another’s skirts.” She began to crawl toward the staircase. The others followed her. Rose came last and reached back to pull the cloakroom door closed behind her. She wasn’t sure why she did it, but she had the sense that the fire was behind the smoke, pushing it, hungry for drafts, like those coming through the high windows in the bathroom.

  The women crawled quickly along the hallway to the head of the secondary staircase. The smoke there was like black mud, obscuring everything. The women stopped, coughing through their muffling towels. Then there was a flurry among them, a galvanizing panic as the head attendant rolled away into the muck, without a word or sign. The girls behind swayed with indecision, then followed, one after another. Rose hesitated a little longer. She hadn’t seen the head attendant go—she’d been too far back. If she had, she might have thought—wrongly—that the woman had fainted and fallen. As it was, she followed the others into the smoke-filled stairway. She followed them because it simply seemed better than being alone.

  Rose tumbled down; she knocked against the walls and against something soft. She kept her eyes closed but felt sparks touch her face when she reached the bottom.

  She found herself on a flat surface. She’d gotten turned around and wasn’t quite sure where she was. The head attendant seemed to know, though, because she was gathering them together, crawling in a circle around the entire group. Rose was relieved to be able to see again. Here the smoke poured blackly only along the top half of the hallway and was transparent below that. The clearest air was near the floor. It was as though the smoke was sediment and had settled on the ceiling because the ceiling had its own gravity.

  Rose felt the head attendant pulling at her, driving the decorative seed pearls on her gown into the flesh of her arm. It hurt, but when Rose turned back to detach the hand, she saw she was being hauled away from a drop.

  The lower flights of the secondary staircase were entirely gone. The women were on a landing that ended in hanging strips of smoldering carpet and charred floorboards. Below that was a shaft full of fumes and sparks and rags of floating fire.

  Now that she’d shown them what to avoid—and where they couldn’t go to escape—the head attendant continued to crawl the other way, along the corridor that, Rose recalled, should join the main staircase.

  Rose paused to fold her skirt up and stuff its hem under the boning of her waistband. She bared her knees, then picked up her wet towel and followed the others. She’d gone only a little way when a sensation brought her up short. A memory of a sensation she’d felt just a few moments before and hadn’t fully registered. On her tumble down the stairs, she had struck something soft. Now she knew that it was a body in a dress and petticoats—a girl like her.

  Rose dropped her towel, turned around, steadied herself, and plunged past the open shaft and back up the stairs. She ran up five, eight, ten steps, her arms out wide, touching the top of each step. She held her breath. Then she felt silky cloth, and a solid body under it. She followed the shape of the limb and closed both her hands on one of the girl’s ankles. She threw her weight backward and dragged the girl down the stairs.

  Once Rose had the girl out in clearer air, she saw it was another debutante, a girl from the class a year ahead of hers at the Academy. Rose found her towel and slapped the girl’s face with it. She shouted her name. The girl didn’t stir; her face was a terrible color, waxy, her lips tinged black, as though the smoke had been kissing her. Rose shook the girl, who flopped, her head banging on the carpet.

  Then, through her own hoarse shouting, Rose heard her name, “Rose!”

  Rose dropped the girl—the dead girl—and retreated. She scuttled along the hallway in the direction she’d seen the others go. The smoke seemed to be thinning, streaming away faster behind her and sucked into something ahead of her. It was as if where she was—perhaps halfway along the hallway that joined the two staircases—was at a tipping point, a summit with solid avalanches of smoke breaking loose on either side of her.

  “Rose!” The call came again. It was a deep voice, like an echo out of a dark cave. It wasn’t the voice of the head attendant.

  Suddenly Rose saw the others. They were a distance away, their faces and figures brightly lit and stripped of their individuality by the color of fire. The head attendant was signaling to her, Rose was sure. Then, the next moment, she was equally sure the woman was trying to call another one of their number back to her. Rose recognized the mother of the girl who had been left behind on the stairs. She recognized her by her finery—all the other women were attendants, not guests at the ball. And Rose recognized her too by the expression on her face—one of horror and despair.

  Rose lurched up and ran toward the woman. She didn’t want the mother to see her daughter. She knew that if the woman went back, she wouldn’t stir again, she wouldn’t make any further efforts to escape. Rose saw all this at once, her mind making calculations full of people instead of figures. The face and name of this woman’s younger daughter, a cheeky junior at the Academy, came instantly to Rose. Her memory of the existence of this girl seemed to jump right into her body and drive her forward so that she collided with the woman and sent her hurtling back across the landing and into the others, who were crammed in the doorway of a room—a room that was dark, though only with night, not smoke.

  Rose struck so hard that she rebounded. Her weight shifted. And then the whole landing moved too, under her. It tilted and tipped her toward—

  —heat. Rose flung out a hand and caught hold of the edge of a decorative shield, part of the high-relief carvings on the wall panels of every one of the Palace’s main chambers. The shield was only gilded plaster; it crumbled under her touch but helped her regain her balance.

  Rose saw that, below her, the whole main staircase was on fire. Fire had climbed its sweeping curves, consuming every atom of carpet and curtaining. Flame flowed over all the carvings, a film of fire like some spirituous liquid. All the shapes of shields and crossed swords, wheat sheaves, grape bunches, lions, griffins, cherubs, ribbons and bows—everything retained its shape beneath its fiery double. It was as if the fire meant to make a mold of all the baroque glories of the Palace so that it could be formed afresh again one day.

  Rose saw all this in flashes, her eyes squeezed down to their narrowest and pouring tears.

  The other women were shouting at her. She couldn’t make out their words. The fire was too loud, as loud as the engine of an express train blasting through a country station, but a roar without rhythm.

  Rose heard her name once more. The sound came from below her. Shielding her face with her hand, she looked first at the women—they were signaling her to come to them, to dare to run across the tilting landing
. And then she squinted down into the maelstrom of fire.

  Laura’s sandman was below her, pressed against the wall on the curve of the staircase. He hadn’t been there a moment ago. The fire was licking the panels, and the timber runners of the great stairs, but it shunned his body, finding nothing of interest to it. Laura’s monster had always appeared to Rose as a shadow, a shapely, shadowy body; now he shimmered in the light of the flames, as though his skin was covered in frost. He moved another two steps up, in one bound.

  The landing jolted and tilted further. Rose fell to her knees and dug her fingers into the crumbling plaster. Her cousin’s sandman stopped and stood still. Rose imagined that his eyes were directed not at her but at the underside of the landing visible to him. He dared another step, but it was his weight disturbing the fragile equilibrium of the staircase. He stepped, and it shuddered and gave more.

  Above the roar and sharp crackling of the fire, Rose caught the thread of a call. She looked at the women again and saw that the dark room beyond them had opened up. From where she hung, Rose could see a long series of rooms, through several doors, to a window. The window was open, and one of the women—the head attendant, Rose thought—was standing before it. Beyond her was the façade of another building. Rose recognized its arched windows as those of the State Library. There was a window directly opposite the one where the woman stood. It too was open. There were men at it, leaning out and slowly feeding a ladder across from one building to the other. Rose could see that the ladder had wheels on the end pointing her way. It was a library ladder. The head attendant reached for it, pulled it toward her, then flipped it over so that the wheels locked on the edge of the windowsill. She turned Rose’s way—Rose saw her face flash orange in the firelight. The head attendant began to call and signal to the clustered women. They had been facing Rose, but they all turned away and ran toward the window and ladder—without a backward glance.

  Rose slid her hands along the wall and edged a foot along the sloping floor. It shuddered. She glanced at Laura’s sandman. He was motionless. Then he slowly raised an arm and pointed toward Rose’s avenue of escape. He was encouraging her to go, to try it.

  She edged forward. The landing quivered again as something beneath it wrenched and dropped. Then the floor suddenly bucked and pitched Rose forward. She caught herself on stiff, extended arms. The floor had turned into a flat chute pointing Rose down at the fire. The heat blasted her face. She smelled burning hair and scorching fabric and scrabbled backward. Then her hands were on her slippery skirt, and she lost her grip on the slope. She slid forward, crying out, the hot air slamming into her mouth. Her fingers found carpet and again dug in. She spun around and went up the slope, her eyes wide open. She saw handholds, whatever would give her purchase. The floor was moving, but not one of her lunges missed its mark. She seized every safe hold just an instant before it gave way, just long enough to propel herself upward.

  Finally she found herself suspended, her hips and legs hanging over a drop, her arms, head, and shoulders on the firm floor of the hall beyond the landing. She heaved herself all the way onto the landing, then beat out the fire on her skirt with her hands in the remnants of her ripped gloves. Her dancing slippers were smoking, her stockings were a web of shriveled silk through which showed utterly hairless, pink skin.

  Rose swarmed back from the drop, but the floor was firm. A series of supporting walls beneath her had held up (and, in fact, would still be standing more than a day later, when the fire had finally burned itself out).

  Rose looked across the gap at that faraway window. She could see two women waiting to cross, and another hunched shape crawling slowly along the ladder. She could see the urgent faces and beckoning hands of the librarian rescuers. Rose looked away. She turned her eyes down to Laura’s sandman, who stood, his face turned up to her. As she watched, he set his hands back against the wall behind him. He flexed his knees. He was preparing to jump—to try to join her.

  For a moment Rose went weak with hope and relief. She wasn’t going to be left alone and have to save herself.

  Nown leapt. The steps came loose from the wall and dropped away behind him, robbing his leap of any impetus. He arched out and up toward the edge of the landing, his body stretched as though each particle could provide propulsion to the one above it and force him upward. He hung in the air. Then his snatching hands fell short, and he went down. His lower body fell first, his arms and head and blank face followed. Far below, and still falling, he condensed back into a proper human shape against the fire. Then the fire swallowed him, and he was gone.

  Rose got to her feet and fled, back along the hallway to what remained of the secondary staircase. There was less smoke in the hall now—the fire below had finished burning carpets, curtains, paintwork, whatever would produce a lot of smoke. It had moved on to consuming the dry and seasoned timbers of the Palace’s interior. The heat funneled through the hall behind Rose and propelled her along. She hesitated at the sight of the black-lipped body of her schoolmate, then averted her gaze and ran up the stairs.

  The third floor was hot and full of smoke. The air wasn’t moving, the fire wasn’t being pulled that way. But as soon as Rose threw open the cloakroom door, she felt, behind her, the fire belch and take hold and vault forward, moving up toward her.

  The marble tiles of the bathroom were warm but not smoking. The toilet seat she’d stood on perhaps only ten minutes earlier was still down. Rose lifted it and dipped her scorched feet in the bowl, but she was still too inhibited by years of habit to cool her hands in the water. She kept her tattered gloves on, dropped the lid once more, and stepped up onto it.

  She was going to try to squeeze through the empty window frame. She thought perhaps she’d fit, but she’d done a lot of growing over the past two years, and her sense of her true size was with her only sometimes. At this moment she felt small, like a child who should be able, seeking safety, to cram itself into little spaces or escape through tiny gaps.

  She found she needed something else to stand on. She thought of the dark dressing room and cloakroom behind her. She examined her memory and rejected the footstool—its legs were set too wide, the chairs (same problem), the basins (they broke too easily; she’d broken one). Then she remembered the seamstress’s wicker sewing basket.

  Rose ran out and felt her way around the side of the room where she knew the basket must be. She touched the stove—it was still hot. As she snatched her hand back, she knocked over the poker. If only she dared to open the door to the hall, there would be more light—from the fire, the fire she mustn’t let find her.

  A moment passed when nothing happened. Rose coughed and didn’t think. The clang of the falling poker echoed in her brain. Then she bent over, felt for it, and picked it up. Holding the poker, she continued in her search for the sewing basket—round, wickerwork, sturdy enough to stand on. Then she felt the texture of braided willow beneath her tattered glove. She put her arms around the basket and hurried back to the toilets. She placed the basket on the toilet seat and stepped up onto it. It creaked and rustled but held her weight. The window was right in front of her now. She measured the empty frame with her eyes, saw how the light caught in a few jagged bits of glass sticking up out of the cracked putty like teeth from gums. Rose thought, “Laura could fit through this.” A silly thought, but Laura was the person with whom Rose had shared every moment of wriggling through places only children could wriggle through—the ventilation grille in the Academy cellars, sometime in their junior year; and the wood box at Laura’s aunt Marta’s.

  Rose pulled the empty frame down till it stopped against its catches. She shoved the poker into the gap and wrenched it back and forth. The frame let go suddenly, splintered at one corner. Rose began to work on the right angle that had remained firm. She demolished the frame till it was a disjointed mess of splintered timber hanging from its hinges.

  Rose dropped the poker and pushed her head and shoulders out through the window.

  She fo
und herself high above the graveled back lots of several small buildings. There were signs of fire there—or of people’s attempts to combat it. The back doors of all the buildings were open, and the empty yards were full of dropped buckets and big puddles near the pumps. Even from where she was, Rose could see that all the walls were drenched.

  She called out—her voice hoarse from smoke.

  No one appeared.

  She wriggled and writhed to get her hips out through the window. Her dress caught and tore as she moved. It scattered pearls. The window was too small for her to perch in it without a handhold. But it wasn’t until she was almost all the way out that Rose found one—the gutter above her.

  She stopped to catch her breath, and cough, her legs still inside, her back to the drop. Without her grip on the gutter, she would have fallen. Next, she knew, she would have to heave herself up over the lip of the gutter and onto the roof. She would need to keep her legs straight to get her knees out the window.

  Somewhere in the Palace, something caved in with a series of crashes. The whole building shook. Far away, a crowd of people screamed together.

  Rose sucked in the fresh air. She inched one hand forward, feeling for a handhold beyond the gutter. It was a big, square gutter with a high lip on its inner edge. Rose hooked her fingers over that and then began to pull herself simultaneously out of the window and onto the roof. Her shoulders and elbows popped, the muscles in her back stretched to snapping. Then her knees came out of the window and she was able to get her feet onto the sill, not to balance—there was no possibility of a pause to find her balance—but only to push up. She moved her other hand to the back lip of the gutter and, painfully scraping her breasts, forced her head and shoulders and chest onto the roof.