Fire in the Wall

by S G Dunster

  The door swung open.

  Mom’s face is as easy to read as any simple magnetic compass, the eyes and mouth and the lines of her cheeks all pointing to her feelings.

  I dropped the jeans I was holding onto my dresser top. “What happened?”

  “Lil’s gone.”

  My stomach clenched. It wasn’t real, I told myself. Lil did not walk into a crack in the basement wall last night. “She probably went to school. She doesn’t usually wait for me.”

  “It’s two p.m.”

  “What?!”

  “I let you sleep in. I thought, after yesterday . . . I thought she left early. I just went to her room. She’s not there. I know she didn’t show up at school, either. They called when I forgot to excuse the two of you. If she’s run away—If she . . . . Logan. Seriously. Where could she be?”

  My breaths were slowing down now. Mom is a worrier. There had to be some simple explanation. “There’s nowhere. She’d never . . . I mean, in the snow?”

  “I know.” Mom sat on my bed. “Lil doesn’t go anywhere. I . . . I think I’d better phone up Officer Bell.”

  “Hold off for a bit. Let’s see if she comes home at her usual time. Okay?”

  Mom nodded, touched her cheek, and stood. “Come eat something.”

  I waited until she left, then put on my jeans and the faded green sweatshirt I wore sometimes. It was Dad’s.

  I came down the hall and stopped in the doorway to the kitchen.

  There at the kitchen table, circling an empty potting slab, were five candles, and the overpowering scents lingered in the air.

  A cold chill spread over me. It was a dream, I told myself. I had to have dreamed it.

  But maybe I really did come into the kitchen. Maybe Lil really did sculpt something. Did I . . . did we really have a conversation in the middle of the night at that table?

  Slowly, I walked down to the studio. I took a moment to breathe before I opened the basement door and walked down the steps.

  It looked normal down here. No mini-volcano in the wall. No bright, animated lizard sculpture. Gecko, her voice mentally scolded me. “Right, gecko,” I said aloud, then froze.

  There, on the floor by the kiln, was a spill of ash. And emerging from the ash-pile was a line of tracks. They were tiny, two-toed, and almost birdlike. Gecko tracks.

  I reached down and touched one—smeared it across the floor, a faint ribbon of ash.

  They snaked around the kiln in a sinuous curve. And they came to a dead end at the wall behind it.

  Mom called the police department.

  They began to look right away. On cop shows, they don’t start looking for someone until they’ve been missing for twenty-four hours, but St. Anthony is a small town, and everybody knew about Lil’s oddities. They searched all the blocks, went door to door, and searched all the schools—elementary, junior high, and the high school from roof to basement.

  They searched the town’s parks. They searched the greenway. They sent people into the bushes at Boys Town Park by the river. They searched the riverbanks.

  The sun began to sink and the bite of nighttime spread. They went out in force then—all twelve officers in their six patrol cars, plus the sheriff searching the single square mile of blocks in our town, wending their way out into the neighboring communities of Parker and Chester. Word spread and soon the churches got involved, drumming up volunteers to scour the underbrush by Clyde Keefer Park again, and all along the Henry’s Fork River.

  It was bitter that night. The kind of cold that flash-freezes your nose hairs and makes it difficult to take an entire breath. Some ladies from the church gathered at our studio there on Bridge Street and put together a coffee and hot chocolate assembly line; vats of the stuff lined up just inside the studio, and a steady stream of volunteers came to sit in the warmth and sip on a hot beverage until their fingers had feeling again.

  The sheriff finally came by the studio himself. He had an officer with him, and they spoke in low tones, sitting at the back counter away from the others, gloved fingers gripping mugs of chocolate. The sheriff’s was a green gargoyle and the officer had a blue troll, both sculpted by my mother.

  The church ladies were cleaning out the dishes with the spray nozzle on my mom’s stainless-steel sink and gathering up trash. I was busy wiping down the tables and work stations, so I heard a little bit of what they were saying.

  “No use in dragging the river,” Sherriff Winter said. “Half of its frozen over. We’d just give people hypothermia trying to look.”

  “If she’s not inside somewhere, she’s likely already . . .” the officer paused and glanced at me.

  The sheriff nodded at me and rose. He passed by, clapping one of his large hands on my shoulder, and went back outside, the officer following.

  The search was called off thirty minutes later. The crowds dispersed, and I heard people talking about an Amber alert. It was almost midnight before our studio was cleared.

  Guilt had been warming me all afternoon, all night, because I knew something. I didn’t know what, but I knew it was possible Lil wasn’t in the river. I knew it was possible she wasn’t anywhere outside, or in town, out of town, or hunkered down in the dump north of town.

  What happened last night? The thought had cycloned in my head for the last fourteen hours nonstop.

  Did I do something to her like I did to Mrs. Sanders?

  My hands shook as I tossed the dirty rags in the laundry hamper.

  I needed to tell them. But what could I say? Should I tell them what I’d seen? What I’d hallucinated? What else did I have to tell?

  But you can’t tell a sheriff or his deputy that you saw someone disappear into a basement wall. I could, however, tell someone. And she’d know exactly what it could mean.

  I was frightened to tell my Mom. As we were alone, moving things back into place in the studio, I was terrified, but I knew I had to.

  I took a handful of paper cups—left along the counter interspersed with the pottery projects—and tossed them in the large trash can that had been brought over from the church.

  My hands were shaking again. I spread them out on the counter, tracing the grout with my fingers. “Mom, I saw Lil leave.”

  She had her back to me at the sink, rinsing out mugs. Her hands paused. She reached up to press the faucet handle down, stopping the flow of water. She turned to face me. “What?”

  “I thought it was a dream,” I said. “I didn’t know. Last night, I found Lil in the kitchen. We talked for a few minutes. She was sculpting this gecko thing, and it just . . . it came alive, and crawled up on her shoulder.”

  She drooped. Her face collapsed. “Logan.”

  “No. Sorry. I know it’s not real, only listen, okay? I did see something. I just don’t know what it means, what was real.”

  There was a long tense pause. The cobalt blue bottles standing on the window seemed to resonate with the vibrations of the current in the air.

  “All right,” she relented. “What did you see?”

  “The lizard changed. Gecko, I mean. I don’t know, it crawled on her shoulder, and she said something about us having to fix some problem. And she was, like, really upset at the idea of me being put on meds.”

  “Logan,” she said sharply. “What happened?”

  My whole body was shaking now. I stepped away from the counter and folded my arms around myself. I knew it looked bad. Sounded bad. Even now I was like him, hugging myself, rocking slightly. “She said we had to go somewhere. She went down to the studio, and I followed her. She went to the basement. I went down with her because, I don’t know, because she was acting weird, and the whole thing was weird, and . . . I don’t know. Anyway, down in the basement, it looked like there was this giant crack in the wall behind the kiln. The lizard—the gecko—it jumped off her shoulder and went through the crack. She wanted me to go through it. I said no, I wouldn’t, that I wasn’t going to give in and . . . be a part of whatever it was, the story she was telling. So s
he was mad at me, and she went through by herself.”

  “She went into a crack in the basement wall?” Mom’s expression was weary. And something more—frightened. “You were there with her. You were hallucinating.”

  I met her eyes. “That’s what I saw. Yeah, I was there, when it happened. And I went up to bed and thought, it must have been a dream. But Mom, I went down again this morning and the . . . there’s . . . tracks. I can show you.”

  Mom shook her head. Kept shaking it. She bent over the counter and leaned her elbows on it, supporting her forehead with the heels of her hands. “We have to tell the sheriff.” She squeezed her eyes shut, and her mouth trembled. Finally, she looked up at me again, her eyes sad and tired and full of something dark—something I couldn’t quite place. Pain, I guess it was, though not a pain I’d ever felt myself. Pain from the past, from losing my father, from times of danger and uncertainty and watching the one she loved slip away into a world of his own.

  “I’m sorry, Logan.”

  My heart sank. “Do we have to tell them?” I asked. “Tell them everything, you mean? Sherriff Winters and the others?”

  She nodded, straightened and sighed, running her fingers through her wavy brown hair, disarranging her already unkempt ponytail. “We need to let Sheriff Winters know what has been going on with you. And you need to tell him what you saw. If . . . if something happened,” her voice grew suddenly fierce,” it wasn’t your fault.” She narrowed her eyes, holding my gaze as if I were Sheriff Winters and she were daring me to argue. “But we need to let them know, and pray to God they can understand the . . . situation.”

  My hands were cold. My heart had lodged in my throat.

  Memories of my father—his terrible frights, his strange, sudden, impulsive aggressions. The time he grabbed a 12-gauge rifle and nearly blew the mailman’s head off. The time he was certain red ants had invaded our kitchen, purchased a bug bomb, and nearly killed us all.

  The time he’d held my head underwater, certain I was something I was not.

  I still don’t know what he thought I was—what he was trying to clean me of, what he was trying to exorcise that day. Looking back on it now, though . . .

  Maybe he was right.

  I looked down at my hands. They were still shaking. I was holding the troll mug. That surprised me. Had it been on the counter? It had to have been. And I’d picked it up. The whimsy of its ugly face had always given me a warm trickle of pleasure, but right now it was something evil. Something that might bite off the edge of my thumb.

  I felt it again—the stirring of change. The mug was about to do it—shift, turn into something alive. It was about to bite me.

  And then it was like I skipped a scene in a movie. Suddenly there were blue fragments of ceramic mug all over the floor, and Mom was rushing over like this was the emergency, the shattered mug, not the disappearing girl, not her dangerously delusional son.

  She swept it up in silence. “Well.” Her voice was a little unsteady. “That’s a shame.”

  “Yeah,” I managed. “I really liked that one.”

  “I made it the year after you were born.” She tried to smile.

  I took a deep breath and bent to pick up a shard that had skittered under one of the tables.

  “I’ll wait until tomorrow morning to call.”

  “But what about Lil? She might be—“

  “The searchers have finished. What else can they do tonight? Maybe, though . . . maybe we should go down and . . . look around the basement.” She put a hand on my shoulder, just where Sheriff Winters had patted me earlier. “It’s better to look in corners for ghosts than refuse to look,” she said, “and worry what might be lurking everywhere.”

  I violently disagreed. But I kept my mouth shut, and we walked together down those old wooden stairs.

  We scoured the basement. Every corner, every set of shelves. I felt sicker and sicker as we looked, certain that at any moment we’d find what we were looking for, but there was nothing. No sign of Lil. Mom walked to the wall behind the kiln. She reached up and knocked on it. “Could there be something here?” she murmured. “A sort of . . . hidden door? Something your mind interpreted as a crack in the wall? There’s supposed to be tunnels all under Bridge Street. During prohibition, the place was riddled with secret underground ways to the speakeasies and brothels.”

  She tapped a few more times. Knelt on the floor.

  She stared at the ashy tracks. They were still there. Relief gusted through me and whistled through my lips. There, two-toed, tiny, leading right into the wall. She looked up at me, frowning.

  “I didn’t put them there,” I told her. “Or at least, not that I can remember.”

  She straightened, nodding, her face remote, her forehead lined, thinking hard. Worried, upset. “All right, Logan. Time for bed.”

  I couldn’t sleep at all. I was still in that place of searching—searching for Lil, for something terrible I might have done. That was the real monster in the shadows. What I might have done.

  No wolves howled. It was a very quiet and ordinary night in a quiet, ordinary bedroom. I almost wished for wolves to distract me.

  The sheriff was at our house before breakfast. I heard him and mom talking quietly in the kitchen. I lay in bed and listened to the unintelligible murmur of voices. Her raspy, feminine tones, sometimes high and fast in agitation, his rumbling bass.

  The frost on the window was almost intentional: spears spreading down from the top pane like rays of the sun. A sheaf of icicles, fat around as my arm, hung from the roof just three feet away. If I stretched, I could probably break one off and bring it in and suck on it, as I’d always wished I could do when I was younger.

  It was getting to be too much, waiting. I couldn’t keep my legs still under the warm covers, so I got up, put on my pants and threw on my dad’s ratty sweatshirt.

  I walked down the hall, struggling to decide between staying quiet so they wouldn’t hear and being intentionally loud so I wouldn’t surprise them. Finally, I pulled the door open.

  Sheriff Winters looked up from his phone. He stood. Mom stood as well. It was like they were suddenly being polite, suddenly reverting back to Victorian etiquette when standing was what you did when someone new—a visitor, a person of importance—entered the room. I sat on the tall stool, the one I’d sat on across from Lil less than two days before. “Any luck?” I asked.

  Sherriff Winters shook his head. His gaze was sharp, calculating, but there was also a softness, a pity in his face. I couldn’t quite stand it. I stared at the ceiling, avoiding eye contact.

  “Logan, your mother tells me you saw something the night Lil was . . . the night before the morning she disappeared. Will you tell me?”

  Mom’s face was pale.

  A wave of feeling came over me. Helplessness, chased by a frustration so intense I wanted to yell, to pick up something and throw it against the wall. “Yeah.” I heard anger in my own voice. “Sure. I’ll tell you what I saw. I woke up in the middle of the night because wolves were suddenly howling at me, and my headboard had turned into a tree. I didn’t want to stay in my room alone with wolves chasing me, so I went down the hall to the kitchen. Lil was there with her clay. She was making a satanic leaf-tailed gecko that she told me she had named Satie, short for Satan. She was upset because she knew my mom was going to send her away and put me on medicine so I wouldn’t hallucinate anymore, and she likes me hallucinating. She likes me crazy. She . . .” I turned my face away so he wouldn’t see the tears drip down my nose.

  “It’s all right, Logan.” His gravelly voice was grounding, like a good, steady note in the strident chaos of a band too bent on electronic distortion.

  “She wanted me to come somewhere with her,” I said when I could talk again. “She went down to the basement. We walked through the studio to get there. It had turned into a giant forest with trees and moonlight, and we went down the stairs. I forgot to tell you,” I added, meeting his eyes for the first time, “The liza
rd came alive. Satie. It crawled off the sculpting slab and climbed up onto her shoulder.”

  “You said it was a gecko.”

  “They’re basically the same thing, aren’t they?” I was surprised to see amusement in his eyes. “Okay.” I waved my hand. “Lizard, gecko, whatever. It was alive. It turned yellow and was on her shoulder. When we got down to the basement it climbed off her shoulder and went through this giant, fiery crack that was randomly in the wall behind the kiln. She wanted me to go with her to follow it. I said no, I wasn’t going to let myself get caught up in her stories anymore, because lately I’ve . . . just that day, my Mom and I had— “

  “Your mom told me about that,” Sheriff Winters said. “About Mrs. Sanders. She is all right, by the way. Just some bruises.”

  I nodded.

  “She also told me about your father, about what you have been fighting, son.” Hand on my shoulder. I wanted to shake it off this time. I closed my eyes and endured it. “What happened when you said you wouldn’t go?” He asked. “Was she angry? Were you?”

  “I was a little frustrated. Confused. I’d . . . I’ve always seen things. But never like this, like lately. Things haven’t been so . . . elaborate. They haven’t seemed so real. They were like ghosts before, disappearing almost as soon as I saw them, but lately . . .” I shrugged and managed to get the hand off. “Anyway, she walked through the wall. I didn’t go in with her. I waited, and it didn’t change. It wouldn’t go away, so I went back up the stairs. At the top of the stairs I looked back and the crack was pretty much gone. And everything was normal. I went back to my room and laid down in bed and just thought it must have been a dream.”

  “And then you woke up and Lil was gone.”

  “Yeah.”

  Sherriff Winters sighed, stood, and stretched his back. “You sure there’s not something you aren’t telling me?”

  I looked at him dead in the eye and shook my head. “I’d tell you.”

  “I think you would.”

  “But I . . . I’ve hurt people lately. Mrs. Sanders. You know about. There have been other times when I almost . . .” I was getting blubbery again, so I shut my mouth tight.