Fire in the Wall

by S G Dunster

  We hadn’t worked on it in a while, not since the takeoff of the graphic novels and our online comic.

  “He needs his story told,” Lil repeated, looking over her shoulder at the sculpture on the table. “It’s an emergency. You can see it even now. See his face? Logan, we have to go down there. To the Caldera. Things won’t go back to normal until we do.”

  “Normal?” I laughed. “Normal how? What is normal, Lil? I don’t know anymore! I don’t think you’re exactly the authority on normal.”

  “Dummy,” she retorted. “I mean the changes, of course. They’re happening because He wants us to come down to Him. Don’t you want to stop seeing things, Logan? I know it scares you. We’ll keep seeing things until we fix it.”

  I stared at her, hard. Hope was rising in my chest. Was there some reason I was seeing things? Did Lil know what was going on? Lil’s stories sometimes had a basis in real-world logic, though she got at them in the strangest, most roundabout way possible. “You don’t make any sense at all,” I said finally. “But I guess that’s nothing new. That’s normal. What’s the Caldera?

  “Just shut up. Look.” She gestured to the statue. “Look at him.”

  Reluctantly, I glanced again at the features of the unattractive, hunched little statue in front of me. She was right. He looked hollower than her usual depictions. More emaciated, more tired, like something was hurting him.

  “We’ll go tonight,” she repeated. “We’ll go in. We’ll fix this, Logan. You won’t have to go on the poison.”

  “No,” Mom interrupted, rising from the floor. She crossed the room and in one, dispassionate movement, took the sculpture from the table and crushed it between her hands until it squeezed out between her fingers in rivulets and snakes. “It can’t continue. It’s time, Logan.” She sighed, and turned to face me. “It’s time to call the doctor. And Lil, it’s time to call your mom.”

  Lil’s face went blank. She turned mechanically, and without another word, walked down the hall to her room. The door didn’t slam. Lil never slams doors.

  “Mom,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “You can’t call Adrian. She’ll put her in residential treatment or something. She won’t— “

  “Are you only worried about her, Logan? After what happened at the school today?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You’ve managed this well. You’ve done your best. But now you’ve hurt someone.” She sighed, tucked her fingers in the strings of her clay and paint-spattered apron. “I’m sorry. And I’m very sad about this.” Her voice thickened. “I’m sad, Logan. They want to suspend you. I’m getting your counselor to speak for you. I’m going to fight them. The world’s not going to fail you.”

  “Like it did with Dad.”

  “But you need the medicine,” she continued. “You really can’t say you don’t now, can you?”

  Again, the picture of my Dad frozen in his chair swam into my mind. My mouth went dry.

  At least frozen, I wouldn’t hurt anyone.

  She’s right. And we’ve always worried this would come. We always kind of knew.

  So why am I fighting it so hard right now?

  “Yeah,” I said hoarsely.

  She clung to me, arms circling my neck, and then shoved me gently away. “Go rest. I’ll make the calls.”

  Partway across the kitchen I turned. “Lil. She shouldn’t have to be . . . have to suffer because of my problems.”

  Mom shook her head, her eyes going flat, mouth taut. “Lil can’t be here. She makes you worse. She does it on purpose. That book of yours? It’s not . . . it won’t . . . she enjoys it. She doesn’t realize what she—no,” Mom corrected herself. “She doesn’t care. She treats you like some tool. Treats your hallucinations as a tunnel into her voracious creative process.” Mom was, like Mrs. Sanders, mostly talking to herself now. “Adrian needs to shoulder her responsibility,” she muttered. “She needs to step up. I’ll call her. I can do it. I’ll put my foot down.”

  “She’ll send her someplace where people won’t know her. Aren’t you the one who always goes on about her gift and her out-of-the-box perspective and how—” I paused, trying to remember exactly how Mom put it so many times—“how she needs to be sheltered from the world that sees creativity as disorder and quirkiness as mental illness?”

  Mom passed her hand over her mouth, covering it. “There’s nothing else to do, Logan. I refuse to lose you. I won’t let her take you from me.” She turned away and grabbed her cell phone from her pocket. “I’ll have dinner ready in a little while, okay? Go give that brain of yours a rest.”

  I fell asleep and woke to Mom’s soft knock on the door, summoning me to dinner. We ate pretty much in silence. Lil had nothing to say, which is not unusual. But she didn’t seem upset, only thoughtful, like she was planning something, which worried me a lot more than even one of her rare, famous fits would have.

  I could hardly eat, and it was my favorite that night: tortellini soup. But each bite tasted like too much on my tongue. I couldn’t handle taste, or touch, or sounds, or sights. I wanted a dark, blank room for my thoughts to unwind.

  Mom was going to bring back Adrian because of me. Because I couldn’t hold it together. This was the second half of our junior year. Only a year and a half and things would be different—we’d be adults. Why couldn’t I have held on until then? This would set Lil on a very bad path. Back to her mom, who basically treated her like an unwanted cat to be dumped on others’ doorsteps. Before she came to us, Lil’s life was just that. Travel from one place to the next until she wore out her welcome. And eventually, she always wore out her welcome.

  Except with us.

  Well, unless now counted.

  Watching her take her neat spoonfuls of soup, studying the delicate angles of her face, the gold feather of her blond eyebrows and eyelashes, waist-length hair slicked back into braids that, although they were normal braids this time, hung at an odd angle—she was so much more than her differences, and Mom and I were really the only ones who knew it. Did she understand what was going to happen to her?

  I lay in my bed that night and thought through what I might say to change Mom’s mind, to reassure her, to argue with her. Maybe Lil wasn’t making me worse. I was just getting worse. Like Dad, I couldn’t help it. Even before Lil came to us we knew what might happen. Now that it was happening, why was Lil’s fate being tangled up in my mental problems? It was all me. Mom had it wrong. She just didn’t want to face it. My brain had a bad piece, a dark seed, planted by my father. I belonged where he did, locked away. But the thought brought the hairs up on my arms. Trapped in a chair, chained in bright knitted afghans, frozen solid. His eyes blank and terrified.

  Did he feel it? Did he know?

  The curtains hid my tiny attic window, and the room was black. Nothing to see. Nothing to notice except the howl of the wind. But I lay there, and again, the air thickened and changed. The musty old-paper smell of my room suddenly sharpened and tasted like snow. My headboard grew and roughed up with tree bark.

  A lonely, wild howl punctuated the silence. It was either coyotes, which often came in winter, or it was my brain. It made me angry that I couldn’t be sure of the difference.

  Help me, the howl seemed to say.

  “Shut up,” I hissed. “I need to sleep.”

  Help me. It was only a whisper this time, and more human, but a wheeze of sound. It could almost be just wind. I sat up abruptly, swung my feet over the side, and walked across the room, ignoring the plush feel of moss under my feet, which I knew was really worn pine floorboards. I found the door handle and pulled it open.

  The hall light was off, but there was a dim illumination coming from under the kitchen door. I walked quickly, then ran to the end of the hall, pulled that door open, and the warmth of the kitchen folded around me.

  The light was dim and flickering—candlelight. Lil was sitting there at the table with her sculpting board, and she’d lit all five of my mother’s Sc
entsy candles, acquired over years of neighborhood parties.

  I took a step inside and choked on the overpowering scents—fake lavender, pine, pumpkin pie, sugar cookie, and apple blossom. “Lil,” I muttered, pulling out the stool and sitting across from her. “What are you doing?” I avoided eye contact. I couldn’t manage meeting those clear blue eyes, knowing what was about to happen to her.

  I turned my attention to the thing she was shaping. It wasn’t familiar to me this time, or at least not easily recognizable. It was an animal. A lizard maybe. A curved thing with slender legs and knobby, clawed feet, and a face kind of like a cartoon dragon’s, with a wide brow running to a pointed nose in a spade-like shape. It would almost be cute if it weren’t for the evil, bulging, slit-pupiled eyes slanted under the peak of its bony eyebrows.

  Lil scooted her chair back and looked it over.

  “The tail still needs work.” I said, pointing to the broad, misshapen appendage curled away from the sinuous lines of the body.

  “It’s supposed to have a tail like that. You need to start really noticing things, or we’re both going to be in trouble.”

  “What trouble?”

  She flicked me a glance, sharp as a blade.

  I remembered. The tail, the body, the head. She’d shown me so many pictures from that dang Madagascar book, and all of the animals had been so improbable. I remembered this one, though. The strange, adorable, and sinister look to the thing, with a tail that was exactly like a dead leaf. “Gecko.”

  “It’s a satanic leaf-tailed gecko,” Lil corrected. “We need dark forces on our side, Logan. Should we call her Satie?”

  “Sadie’s a girl’s name. Not very scary.”

  “Satie,” Lil repeated, emphasizing the t. “Short for Satan, of course.”

  I sighed, resting my head in my hands. “We can’t ignore what’s happening, Lil.”

  When I forced myself to look up at her, she was gazing back at me calmly. “No, we can’t. You need to believe it, Logan. You’re seeing real things.”

  “Don’t, Lil.”

  She leaned across the table and her eyes narrowed, almost as evil as the eyes of the thing she was sculpting. “Just because nobody else can see them, doesn’t mean they aren’t real.” Lil’s voice was suddenly hissing and fierce. “You stop it. Why are you believing them? Mrs. Sanders and your mom? You are the one that can see. They are the ones who can’t.”

  My veins were pulsing with the warmth of the candle flame all around us. It was like some ritual—the lizard, a circle of lit wicks. Lil was a very convincing witch.

  “See?” She whispered.

  I felt it again. Things were changing. The sculpture on the table between us—it was changing. I didn’t want to look. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help it. I gazed at its curved, gleaming back, its upraised face. The flickering light created an illusion of movement: a blink of those slitted, frog’s egg eyes. At least that’s what I told myself until it turned and started scampering toward Lil.

  As I watched, mouth dry, heart like a running rabbit, it climbed up onto her shoulder and stared at me. They both stared at me: twin cold calculating gazes, one set yellow and one blue.

  Yellow. Its eyes were yellow, no longer the grey-brown of sculpting clay. The body was yellow, too; the dry-corn yellow of Lil’s hair.

  I stood and almost tipped over the stool again. Hands shaking, I steadied it. I did not want Mom to come to the kitchen right then. “Good night, Lil,” I muttered, and made for the door.

  “You can’t un-see things, Logan. Stop believing sightless people.”

  “And believe you? Believe the hallucinations?” I took a step back toward her, braced my hands on the table, and leaned over it. “You know what happened to my Dad, Lil. It’ll happen to me. It’ll happen to you. We have to keep a hold on what’s real. We have to stop trying to see things. And you need to stop asking me to . . . to get involved in your things. Your fancies. My mind isn’t strong like yours. I can’t just dip in and out of fantasy and reality like you can. Mom will send you away. She’s already said she will. She doesn’t feel like you’re safe for me to be around anymore.”

  Lil stood, carefully moving her chair and rounding the table so there was only a foot of space between us. I straightened, and looked down at her. She is a full foot shorter than me, but somehow that makes no difference with Lil. She isn’t a short person, standing there, eyes cutting into mine.

  “Your mother is the dangerous one. She and your teachers and everyone else who thinks you need to un-see things, that you need to take a pill to make your eyes blind to what’s real. Logan, there’s a problem we need to fix. A real one. If we don’t help the grey man . . .”

  “What?” I said, when a moment had passed in silence.

  The creature on her shoulder shifted, nestling into a more comfortable position as she walked across the room to the door that led down to the studio. “Come on.”

  “What are you doing? We can’t go outside on a night like this.”

  “We’re not.” She held the door for me, and when I didn’t pass through, she descended the stairs herself.

  “Stop it,” I hissed, following her. “What are you—”

  I froze halfway down the stairs because the room we were descending toward wasn’t my mother’s studio. It wasn’t a room at all. It was forest: massive trees, shadows, moss, rocks. A thin sliver of moonlight slanted across, pointing at the door that led down to the basement where we kept the kiln and heavier equipment.

  Lil was completely unruffled by the change. I didn’t know if she didn’t see it, or if she didn’t care. She swerved around a twisted, sinister-looking trunk and opened the door to the basement. And I knew she saw.

  She saw. Just like me.

  There was a moment of stunning realization. It wasn’t that I hadn’t known it before. I had sat at that table with her and had seen sculptures come to life. But it was like it suddenly computed.

  Lil sees what I see. How? If she’d been with me on the trail running, would she have seen the wolf? The fierce man in the classroom? The Grey Man in the bookstore?

  The thought brought a wave of hope, of dire longing as she glanced over her shoulder at me on her way down the rickety wooden stairs.

  Go back to bed, I told myself. Don’t get caught up with her in this.

  But the idea of going back to my dark room alone, to step on moss instead of floorboards, with the howling of wolves as my only company . . .

  I wasn’t alone.

  I shivered and followed her, keeping my gaze exactly on her back, away from the hallucinations around us.

  Down in the basement there was a noise. Like the sea, or a forge-fire—a sort of roaring. And behind the kiln, which squatted against the west wall like a particularly ugly troll, was light. Blinding, like lava. A bright crack against the dull brick.

  “Come on.” Lil grabbed my hand and pulled me toward it. “Satie, show us the way.”

  The gecko scrambled down her arm, down her leg to the floor, and flowed across the weathered old boards toward the crack like a salmon headed for the ocean. She slipped through, and was gone.

  “What is that?” I breathed.

  “It’s an opening. A door down.”

  “Down where?”

  “Come on.” Lil tugged on me. “We have to follow it.”

  “No.” I wrenched my hand away and took a shaky step backward. “No, Lil. I’m not doing this. Quit it. Leave me out of this story.”

  “We’ve got to go now, Logan. We can’t lose Satie or we won’t know the way in.”

  “So make another one.”

  Lil gave me a look like I’d just answered a simple math problem wrong.

  “No, Logan. We’re supposed to follow her.”

  I took another step back. “I’m not, this time, Lil. I’m not telling this story. I’m not,” I let out a long, gusty breath, “going in.”

  I could see all kinds of feelings working their way over Lil’s face—very unlike her.
“I have to, Logan. By myself.” She walked to the wall, took a deep breath, turned her body sideways and stepped through.

  Her body disappeared into the fire.

  I stood there for a while, gazing at the blazing crack in the wall. I shut my eyes tight. I screwed my face up, tight, tight, and when I opened my eyes . . .

  It was still there. The glow of molten-orange, slashed on the wall. I waited for a few more minutes and tried again. When it still didn’t go away, I turned my back and started up the stairs.

  All a dream, I thought, my spirits deflating like a balloon. All a dream. Lil doesn’t see what I see. My mind wants her to, but she’s just a storyteller.

  The room was changing back, like humidity passing out of the shower when you open the door for some fresh air. I could feel it when it started to dissipate just as I reached the top. I glanced down one more time and saw that the crack was, indeed, smaller—a gleaming orange-gold thread on the wall.

  I let out a burst of half-held breath and turned away again. As I came into the studio, it was as it should be again—a little ghostly in the dim blue light, but ordinary chairs and easels, counter, workspace, and four walls decorated with the pieces of art my mother had collected over the years from her students.

  Lil’s grey man is one of them. My mom photographed a particularly quirky, magnificent rendering of him and had it framed. I avoided looking at it as I went up the final set of stairs to the apartment. I walked down the hall and cautiously opened my door. The pale shape of my pillow and grey comforter, crumpled on the bed, greeted me. I climbed in, sighing again, and pulled the covers up around my ears.

  It’s not real, I reminded myself. I’ll know when I wake up in the morning. That’s the way dreams work.

  Chapter 3

  I woke to a pounding on my door and a broad stream of light through my little attic window.

  Overslept, I thought immediately and snapped to a sitting position. “Hang on,” I called. “I’ll get dressed. Sorry. I had a rough night. Go back to your morning class, Mom. I can get myself to school.”