Fire in the Wall

by S G Dunster

  Fire in the Wall

  The Caldera Series

  Book 1

  S. G. Dunster

  Blackhart Productions

  Pulblished by Amazon KDP

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination.

  Text Copyright © 2019 Sarah Dunster

  Cover and internal art © L.K. Blackham

  ISBN 9781795853422

  For my children, my friends, my writing buddies, the writers of tales read to me when I was young, my parents who read those tales to me and, especially, my spouse—all partners in this crime.

  --S.G. Dunster

  Chapter 1

  My father tried to protect me. But when the shadows left and it was me, small, trembling, standing there in front of him, he was the one who asked for meds. He was the one who went to all the specialists and therapists.

  And he was the one who eventually locked himself away.

  They took him on a gleaming metal thing—soft mattresses, tight straps, whirling wheels that made me dizzy. They stuffed him full of medications to keep him and the staff who served him safe. The unfortunate side effect was that they took his mind as well, leaving him a dribbling husk. For a while we went to visit. He’d rock there in the chair that came from my great-grandma, wrapped in the afghan my mom knitted as her wedding present to him. He’d apologize, cry. If he ever got dangerous—and it happened even with all the drugs swimming in his system—there was a button we pushed. People came before he tried to throttle us.

  I knew it wasn’t his fault. And I knew it killed him, what he saw, and what it made him do. I hated him because I loved him and I couldn’t be safe with him. He couldn’t be what I needed him to be for me.

  And there’s also this: ever since I can remember, I’ve also felt what isn’t there.

  Colors always have sounds. Sounds have colors. Numbers have flavors. The scribble on the wall of my mother’s art studio has a particular voice, and it speaks to me at night.

  As I got older, my mind told me increasingly elaborate stories. My childhood was full of stories and magic. At first my Mom thought I was just a very creative boy. But after . . . as the medications wore my Dad down over time, etching away at his consciousness and personality like acid at a motherboard, and he went from raving, to pleading, to mumbling, to silent, to frozen, trapped in that chair.

  Just about third grade. That’s when my father stopped speaking. That’s when my mom gave up on him and turned her worried attention to me. She began to realize that my stories weren’t just stories. I was actually seeing things differently. I was actually seeing things, just like Dad. She was the first who got that it wasn’t just a matter of imagination; it was . . .

  Delusion.

  For a while I brushed off her concern and went on telling myself stories, watching as the sidewalks warped into a giant cocoon of concrete, cooling me from the hot sun above. Closing my eyes, I willed colors to blossom—red haired, rosy skinned, peach-breasted . . . or dark-shadowed, yellow-eyed, wickedly curved and studded with sharp teeth. My stories made me alive. They made me feel. They made me taste and hear and smell. I wanted them, and I was sure I wasn’t anything like my dad. I’d never hurt anyone. I wasn’t like him.

  And then Lil came.

  Lil. You don’t meet many like her. We were in fifth grade when her mom dropped her off at our house for a week and didn’t come back for a month.

  By the time she did come back my mom had taken steps, and, sadly or fortunately, Lil’s mom had no objections. She became a foster parent, and Lil joined our tiny household of two.

  My mom liked Lil at once. She is likeable in spite of her strangeness. Most people who are worth anything like Lil. She’s fresh. Twisted. Colorful, insightful, and completely rude. Also, she’s a consummate artist.

  The things Lil draws are like my stories—color you don’t expect next to color you never imagined; shapes that you can’t describe but just seem completely right, like they should have a name. Circle, square, and Lil’s andrehedron.

  Lil’s not one to get emotional, but whatever she draws or sculpts sweats and gleams and scowls and beams and muses and chortles and a million other things outside and in between.

  She and I were friends immediately. With the stories in my head, we were a perfect match. We played and imagined and she never thought I was strange. She found everything I saw or thought or told interesting and worth exploring.

  We made a world together. Me with words, her with fingers. She made something, I told it. I wrote something, she sculpted it. Our world was as real as anything outside the four walls of our house, and it wasn’t long before others noticed our mutual oddness. Sometimes in not-nice ways.

  But sometimes in productive ways. As we got older, we began to post things online. Web series. Flash fiction. Web comics. During our Sophomore year, we independently published a graphic novel.

  It’s sold lots of copies now. Enough to give both of us an idea of what we’re going to do when we grow up. Or continue to do as we grow up. Why grow up, I often wondered. Life was perfect.

  But Lil grew. Into something unworldly. Her hair was that warm, sun-bleached color of dry grass. Her eyes, an unusual mix of green and blue, almond shaped, standing out in her pale, blond-haired face like bits of tropical sea. She had a perfect, firm chin. A small, sharp nose. A curved, full mouth that thought about being kissed, even if she’s never thought of it.

  She wore her hair in the weirdest ways. I didn’t notice hair much but I noticed Lil’s, especially when she chose to band it into a dozen small snakes of braid that stood out from the crown of her head like a Viking Mohawk. She begged my mom to let her dye it orange. She said and wore and did what she wanted to say, wear, and do. People either hated her or loved her.

  She was something of a fetish on the internet. She thought this was hilarious. Sometimes she teased people with pictures of her bare armpit or something. My mom didn’t like this at all.

  In fact, she was iffy about our whole online enterprise, but people were buying the books we sold through our hokey online Amazon store. And we were getting a lot of traffic on our lame, slapped-together website. The summer after our sophomore year we upgraded, hired people to make the platforms slicker, and made the series a daily web comic.

  We reached a million hits within three months. And sold tens of thousands of copies of the second volume of our graphic novel.

  That sort of quieted mom on the subject. But people in our town didn’t treat us differently. Even the ones who liked our stuff. Sometimes someone would come up to us and say how the liked the last episode or something, but in a place where football and wrestling and Forever 21 are teenage stardom, we weren’t much. Lil and I would hear some of the kids at school talking about the last strip we’d put online. We’d lift our eyebrows at each other and continue to eat our lunch, backs against the South Fremont High’s west wall, all by ourselves.

  Mom worried as much as always about my focus on “imaginary” things, and the way Lil pulled me into those worlds every spare moment we had. But with checks coming in and stacks of books shipped out every few days during launches, she stopped bugging me about my flights of imagination. Especially when the comic sold enough copies to pay for four years plus of art school for both me and Lil.

  It was the winter of my junior year when things began to get scary.

  It’s like when you look at those eye-tricking images with all the random colors, and when you cross your eyes enough, you can see a three-dimensional image. And after looking at several of those pages, you can’t quite focus on the details, the colors, the mad swirl and random pat
terns that hid those images? You’ve strained your eyes so much that they see only the hidden, three-dimensional world. You start to see the world itself in patterns of tree leaves, in carpet texture, in shadows in the grass. You can’t turn it off.

  We were plotting the next episode of our graphic novel. It’s about a vampire who is also a werewolf because he was bit by one. In this strip, we were introducing him to his next nemesis.

  “She needs to have poison breath,” I said. “Like . . . it comes out in a milky cloud

  and chokes anything it touches. Like, saturates them. Smothers them.”

  Lil tilted her head to the side, bringing her ink brush up to her cheek as she scratched at it. “Maybe. It’s visually effective, but institutionally troubling.”

  “Institutionally troubling how?”

  She shrugged, and some of the ink got on the bridge of her nose. “Poison. It’s a traditionally feminine way of killing. Self or other. It’s too derivative.” She looked up at me, those blue eyes full of fire. “How disappointing.”

  I let out my air in an exasperated gust. “Ok. Fine. Give her an assault rifle that spits chunks of sperm that’ll instantly impregnate anything they touch.”

  Lil frowned at me, the dent in her forehead meeting the curved black line over the bridge of her nose in an x. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Of course it is.”

  The line smoothed out. “Ah. Sarcasm. We don’t have time for that, Logan.” She bent over her paper again, brush busy. “I’m giving her ice-tipped tresses. Deadly, cold . . .”

  “An Ice-Queen? You were just mentioning something about not being derivative.”

  “There’s a difference between cheap derivation and an homage to classics,” Lil argued. “Hans Christian Andersen’s a part of the collective unconscious. It’ll evoke so much more than we can paint with words or ink. And we can put a twist on it.” She got busy with her marker, and I just watched her.

  “She’ll have to breathe ice, then. Deadly, instantly freezing ice. Ice that can choke any living thing to death.”

  Lil nodded absently, continuing to draw, dusting the table with a spray of jade-green ink as she picked up her brush-tipped marker again. I laughed to myself, because I knew she didn’t appreciate me calling her out. If Lil takes anything serious, it’s herself.

  Finally, she lifted the sketchpad, and showed me.

  It always takes me by surprise, how thoroughly she captures the picture in my mind. In both our minds. Nyerium, the nemesis, stared out at me with eyes the perfect, pale jade color of frozen rapids. Her hair bowed out from her face as if she had thrust her chin forward, and a mist shrouded half the picture, fuzzing a graceful but powerful pair of shoulders, tensed as if about ready to tear into you.

  “Yes,” I breathed. The breath came out pale, cloudy, sharp, and deadly. The bouquet of ferns and roses on the table—a gift from one of my mother’s many hopeless suitors—blackened and withered instantly.

  I could feel the cold collecting in my throat, freezing it, too.

  “Logan?” Lil said sharply, shoving the chair away and standing as I clutched my throat.

  I couldn’t feel it. It was numb. I couldn’t make my tongue form words. It was useless, a lump of frozen muscle.

  “Hhhh . . . aaaa . . .” My breath spread out into the room. Lil leapt out of the way, but it caught her hip. She glared at me, clutching at her left jean pocket. “Logan, calm down. Logan— “

  I wasn’t listening to her. I had no idea what was happening. My entire chest was freezing, numbing into a solid block of ice. “Aaaaa . . . aaaa!” I grabbed at my throat. My breath puffed out white again, crackling the tip of my nose with ice. I burned with cold. The room fuzzed around the edges.

  I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t gasp in any air.

  I don’t remember being taken to the hospital in Rexburg.

  They treated me for frostbite on my face, pneumonia, and inflamed lungs. They x-rayed me and ran a scope. My lungs had what looked like chilblains on the inside.

  Nobody could explain it. Lungs don’t get frostbite. Not if the rest of the person is alive and non-hypothermic.

  Even so, my mom refused to listen to Lil’s explanation. I spent a few days in the hospital. Mom bundled me home, cutting Lil short every time she spoke. “Don’t go hiking by the river anymore, okay, kids?” she said a few hours later, her mouth tight. “And no more crazy stories. They’re getting you in trouble. Lying to a nurse who is trying to treat you. Not smart.” She rapped me on the head with the handful of paintbrushes she was washing out, and gave Lil the dead-eye.

  Lil shrugged and continued to butter a piece of toast. “Fine. But you’ll find out soon.”

  Mom opened her mouth, then apparently deciding she really didn’t want to know, shut it again. “Just be careful. We live in a place where the weather can actually kill you. Okay?”

  She was right. February in St. Anthony, Idaho, was not to be challenged. The snow was one thing. The gusting wind was another. It brought the chill factor down forty degrees at times. But in spite of my mother’s worry, we continued to walk to school. Living in town, basically six blocks from everything, rendered the expense of a car unnecessary.

  On those walks to school, I tried to remember when it was I’d gone hiking along the river. How could I possibly have made that experience in my brain into something as strange as ice-breath? The chilblains on my lungs were real. I’d gotten them somewhere. How had it happened?

  The question puzzled my mind and turned my world upside down. I think it made me even more susceptible.

  I ran with my friend Julio every time it got above twenty degrees. We were potentially up for state in cross country the next year, if we could each shave some seconds off our mile times, so we were serious about it.

  It wasn’t long after the ice-breath thing. We were running in the slushy snow of the Henry’s Fork Greenway, and the shadows shifted. The late afternoon was casting the trees northeast, but they were circling, and moving. As we ran past Henry Twofeathers, the bronze trapper statue that sits in the middle of the trail a half-mile in, a lump of darkness moved around its base.

  And began chasing me.

  I knew it wasn’t real. I knew it wasn’t. But I smelled the ragged animal stink of it as it got closer, and the hot breath on my neck as it leapt.

  I shoved Julio out of the way and turned to face it, but nothing was there.

  Julio growled.

  Slowly I turned back. His face was elongated. There was snow-wet fur around his teeth, which stretched, jagged and curved, from black gums. I took a deep breath, shut my eyes tight, and opened them again, just in time to see his face smooth back into its usual chiseled features. He was staring at me, perturbed. And a little angry. “What the hell, man?” He brushed the muddy snow off his sleeve. “I just put this through the wash.”

  “Sorry,” I gasped. We continued, but my knees were shaking so badly, I could only get about another half mile in. I turned around and walked back home, my neck hair standing on end every time a shadow shifted.

  In the weeks that followed, things changed every single day. It wasn’t something I could blink away. I developed a new strategy, and that was to ignore. I ignored the blood that dripped out of the mailman’s mouth. As we drove to Boutelle’s Grocery on Yellowstone Parkway for milk and bread, I ignored the smirk an osprey gave me through the passenger window as it swooped over my mom’s busted-up Outback. When I sat in bed reading or studying and my room became trees—a forest with bark digging into my back instead of the smooth cedar headboard my father had made for my fourth birthday—I shifted and pulled the blankets over my head.

  And then, in Early March, when the worst of dead-cold winter and moist, windy spring combined to freeze my nose-hairs into painful daggers, numb my chin completely, and harden my damp socks directly to my ankles, the inevitable happened.

  I was tired. I was in English class, which took place right after lunch. On a day so grey and moist and disgusti
ng, it was hard to pay attention. In fact, hard to keep my eyes open with a belly full of peanut butter and jelly and Swiss Miss hot cocoa. And even with my eyes propped open by my index fingers, face resting on the leverage of my tensed forearms, elbows on the desk, I was fading.

  Misty Alvares was usually sitting behind me. She jostled my chair, no matter how many times I asked her to stop, no matter how many times I glared over my shoulder at her. And I’d decided, in the end, that it was okay because she kept me awake.

  But she’d stayed home sick. So, no desk jostling. The room just wouldn’t stay. It became whatever it wanted. My desk turned into flesh—warm, brown, a satin horse’s flank. I jumped up. Aspen Winters turned to give me her customary rude stare, and her face spread in the wings of a butterfly, a pair of dark wing spots flashing when she blinked. Her clothes wisped away into a slinky fuchsia-colored gown that barely dusted her thighs and the curve of her breasts. Her hair, as always, was gleaming black waves down her back, impossible bait for the eye; line and liquid, curve and contrast.

  I blinked and looked away. The floor was pale, icy swells of water, and my desk an iceberg. The ceiling was hung with bright silk—the inside of a palatial tent. Desperately, I looked at the clock, but it was blank—no hands, no numbers—it was the moon, sending a benevolent beam of cold light directly into my face.

  I knew, logically, that I was in fifth-period English, and that Mrs. Sanders was handing around the essays we’d turned in a few days before. As she went down the rows, I closed my eyes, rested for a moment, and opened them. The classroom had grown into a forest, the desks thick gnarls of tree root. She stopped by an oak with glaring knots. I squeezed my eyes shut until bursts of light stabbed them, then opened them again and let out my held breath as the oak slowly dissolved into Harley Scott’s thick back, his arm reaching up to take his paper.

  The melting gladness in my middle, seeing him. Seeing the right thing. I almost peed with relief. That kind of relief when you realize you hadn’t actually left your field-trip permission slip behind as you stood in line for the bus. That you hadn’t left your lunch at home.