Fire in the Wall

by S G Dunster

  Some of the mist was clearing. I could see tall tree trunks, green branches. I could feel the rough bark of the tree I leaned against and smell pine in the air.

  A figure was coming toward me, hard to make out in the falling snow.

  “Mr. Bender?”

  What kind of trip was my mind going to give me?

  My scoutmaster had moved to Boise three years before. It wasn’t possible. In fact, it wasn’t possible I was here, five years in my past. Or was it? Maybe my life was the delusion. Maybe that was the trouble. Everything beyond this moment—being in the snowstorm with my scout troop—was a long, crazy hallucination: five years of life encapsulated in one hypothermic delusion of school, church, track meets, stories, delusions, and hundreds of pieces of buttered, jammy toast. Maybe I was dying. They say your life flashes in front of you. Did they mean your future life?

  “Mr. Bender?” I tried again. I stood, using the tree-trunk behind me to help.

  “Hey.”

  The voice wasn’t Mr. Bender’s. It was higher, more feminine.

  And familiar.

  “Lil,” I said. “No. Wait—Lil?”

  It was her. Walking toward me. It was. That pale, perfectly-sculpted face. Those wide, almond-shaped, tropical-blue eyes.

  Her mouth was hidden in a swath of orange knitted scarf. She was wearing a bright yellow quilted snowsuit. She had on slim leather boots and a long stocking-cap striped yellow, white, and orange.

  “Lil,” I said again. I dropped the flashlight.

  She stopped about a foot away from me, her eyes narrowing as she looked me up and down. “You sure do like snow.”

  I frowned at her. “Where’ve you been? Where are we?”

  “You always did. Stupid. Idaho. Winters.” She grabbed up handfuls and tossed them at me with each word. The ice stung my cheek and made my breath come quicker. “Why would you bring snow and ice and gloomy forests with you? Make them go away, Logan.”

  It sure seemed like her. Standing there, hands on her hips, bristling, indignant, and completely orange and yellow. That snowsuit she was wearing was not something I ever remembered seeing. I’d never have chosen that color, but . . .

  She would have.

  “Lil,” I said. “I’m cold. What are we doing here?”

  “Of course you are. It’s snowing. You made it snow. Stop it.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Or at least bring something to warm us up. Hot chocolate? A fire? Something.” She threw another handful of snow at me. I ducked this time, and it sailed over my head.

  She gifted me with a rare grin. “There you go. I’d worried you’d gone all catatonic like your Dad. Let’s get moving. I think you’re suffering the first stage of hypothermia, and I don’t think either of us would enjoy engaging in the protocols for treating that. Also, I have plenty to show you.”

  Chapter 5

  It took me a moment to answer. “Where have you been? Where are we?”

  “I’ve been here.” Lil shrugged a shoulder. “Waiting for you, sort of. I’ve been doing things in the meantime, of course. Productive things.” Again she looked around, her nose wrinkled slightly. “Come on. I’ll show you. You’ll like it.”

  I shook my head. My behind was going numb. “We . . . we can’t go anywhere here. Lil, I need to take you back.”

  She gave me a bland smile. “Back where?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. “Back where we came from.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “Lil,” I growled.

  She cocked her head, eyes wide. “We’re here now, and there’s no real way to get back until we figure it out. In the meantime, we might as well be comfortable.” She stretched out her mittened hand.

  I glared at her. “Fine. I’m cold and hungry. But we need to focus on getting back as soon as . . . soon.”

  “Of course. Soon.” She grabbed my hand when I wouldn’t give it to her and led me through the blowing whiteness of the snow.

  It was a little strange and unexpected, holding hands with her. Lil’s not big on touch. I felt the slender, fragile bones of her fingers through the mitten.

  We’d actually never held hands. So how come I was imagining it? Why would I make myself uncomfortable with snow and holding the hand of someone I didn’t really care to hold hands with?

  These are the confusing, tumbling sorts of thoughts I had as we climbed over a drift, and, suddenly, the world changed.

  The snow was gone. The sky was Kool-Aid blue. There were enormous trees reaching up like pillars; thick, smooth, clean trunks, and poofs of foliage at the top like massive, monolithic umbrellas.

  “Baobab trees,” I said. “Really?”

  “My world. My stuff.”

  Colors and shapes fuzzed around her. I blinked, thinking my vision had gone blurry, and then she was no longer bundled in a snowsuit. She wore vivid blue trunks and a tank-top.

  “Stop looking at my hot body,” Lil said. “And get out of that junk. You’re going to get heatstroke.”

  My face heated up. But she was right; I was sweating in my pillow-fat coveralls and jacket.

  “Take ‘em off.”

  I let go of her hand and drew down the zipper, turning my body away from her. I had on stuff under. Pants, a shirt. I hoped.

  “No,” she snapped. “Think of something new in their place. Don’t be an idiot.”

  “Think of something new?” I echoed. “What do you mean? Think of something new.”

  “What do you want to be wearing right now?”

  The landscape was lush and green, and there was a wide, clear lake. The baobabs reflected perfectly in the lake, upside down pillars pointing straight at me and Lil where we stood at the lake’s edge in tall, marshy grass.

  The lake looked cool. Calm. A brilliant jade blue, contrasting with the deeper blue of the sky. I longed, suddenly, to dip my toes in it, to swim, with that cool water against my skin like silk. To be wearing trunks like Lil. A particular image popped into my head: the blue trunks I’d seen in Sportsman’s Warehouse last summer, which Mom hadn’t bought because they cost sixty bucks.

  Suddenly the wind touched my skin. My naked chest, naked arms and legs, bright blue swim trunks fluttering around my thighs.

  What. The. Hell.

  I stared down at myself, suddenly garbed the way I’d thought of being garbed. My thoughts made real, manifested by my skin pricking in the wind and sun.

  Real.

  What was this place? What was happening?

  “Ah.” Lil ran her fingers through her long hair, now free of braids. “Good. I worried you wouldn’t be able to do it. Come on.” She jerked her head in the direction of the water. “We can swim to my house from here.”

  “Your house?”

  “Come on. I told you, you’ll like it.”

  Again, she took my hand, and tugged me along with her as she walked to the water’s edge.

  She dove in, scattering cold droplets all over me. I eyed her slender, barely-womanly shape through the water—lean like a shark, her movements sharp and determined, her gold hair streaming behind her, billowing up as she slowed between strokes.

  Should I follow?

  I had to bring her back. But none of this made sense. Brain, I thought. Thanks for bringing me to her, but I could use a little context.

  What if it wasn’t Lil at all? What if I was negotiating with a giant, grand mal hallucination? What if everything was, even back before the first problem?

  Maybe I was sitting in a room somewhere, like my Dad. Maybe I was already trapped.

  Then this is infinitely better than being there, isn’t it? And if it were real, parts of it, I still needed to bring Lil back. And I shouldn’t expect anything to make sense. And what other direction did I have to go, anyway?

  I stepped in, and walked until the surface touched my thighs. The water was exactly like I’d imagined: warm silk on my skin.

  I sat, the line of water enveloping me and closing over the crown of my head.
I opened my eyes underwater. The sand glittered like glass on the bottom, undulating in pale waves, catching deeper water in pools of jade. Bright fish darted under and over me, eyeing me sideways.

  I swam. Tentative strokes, then explorative, and the bottom fell away, became dim, then dusky, then dark. I was swimming now; I’d left solid earth behind.

  I broke the surface, looking for the opposite shore. I could see Lil, small as an ant, waiting for me. I corrected my direction and swam for her.

  I was getting tired. Swimming takes more muscles than running, I knew. I kept going because there was no other option. Wide blue spread around me, over and under. No other option.

  I took a rest, turned over on my back and floated, then turned face-down, opening my eyes again, looking for a hint of the sand under me.

  And stared directly into a face—pale, surrounded by a halo of dark strands, followed by a skin-and-bones body. There was a dark spot by the tip of her left eyebrow, marking her temple. She paused as our faces aligned, and she gazed up at me, staring in a way that was both imploring and hungry.

  What?

  I gulped in a couple lungfuls of water and swam, fast, over and away. I thought that maybe her fingers brushed my ankle, trying to grab as I went by.

  I surfaced, panting as I trod water.

  Blue above, jade blue around me. Giant reaching trees, and Lil. I could see now that she was sitting on a rock at the water’s edge, wringing out her hair, her legs curled to the side, almost a mermaid tail. I blinked. The sun gleamed off of the pale skin of her legs. Not scales. Legs.

  I took in a deep breath, laid my body on top of the water, and crawled as hard as my arms and shoulders and battling feet would let me.

  I was gasping again by the time I got to Lil, and trying not to think of the girl—pale, like a ghost. Like something you’d see in a horror movie. And that was bringing up all sorts of horrible images. I could almost feel them again, those fingers on my ankle. Closing around it, dragging me down.

  I could feel them. I could. And I was being pulled under. Fingers on my ankle like steel bands, no matter how hard I kicked.

  “Lil,” I gasped, flailing, kicking.

  “Stop it,” she snapped, flicking her wet hair back over her shoulder. “If you freak out here, things get dangerous.”

  “Something’s got me.”

  “It’s not real. It’s in your head.” She glowered, pointed. “Don’t be a wimp. Come on.” She turned and leapt off the rock onto the shore.

  “Lil!” I fought for another second, kicked out viciously at whatever it was that had me, and connected with a smooth, hard stretch of flesh. Suddenly, I was free. I tumbled onto the sand, scrambled to stand, and ran after her.

  She didn’t even turn around. “I’ll show you around the place,” she called out, running along a white-sand path, worn through the dune grass. “But there isn’t very much time to hang out. We’ve got work to do. They’ll see us soon.”

  “They? Who?” I thought of the face that had slid under me—ghostly, heart shaped. Dark-eyed, skeletal. Pleading.

  Dragging me under like a kelpie. “Who else is here?” I asked.

  Lil turned and regarded me with solemn eyes. “The two. Wolf and Rook. And the Grey Man, of course.”

  “Uh huh,” I ran my hand through my wet hair, and flicked the drops at her. “Mother-may-I?”

  “Stop it, Logan. I’m serious. You’ve seen them now. You know. And honestly? We need to talk to someone before we can really find the way back to St. Anthony.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Her gaze shifted slightly. “We can’t climb back through the wall. I’m not sure why. It just doesn’t work from this side. We’ve got to find someone who knows another way, or how to use that way. And that means we’ve got to at least find the Grey Man.”

  Something streaked toward us. Golden yellow.

  Satie.

  I stared as the creature climbed up Lil’s foot, grabbed onto a water-soaked strand of hair, and climbed up onto the top of her head. The creature met my stare and licked her eyeball.

  “Are you saying,” I said slowly, “that you don’t know how to get back to the real world?”

  “We’ll get out,” Lil’s tone was confident.

  “We’d better.” I followed her, the powdery sand crusting over the tops of my feet. “Mom’s got half the town looking for you. For me too, now, I guess.”

  “Huh,” Lil said. “Looking for you, not me.”

  I grabbed her arm. “She had the entire police force out,” I said between my teeth. “Looking for you, Lil. You.”

  “Yeah, because she doesn’t want to be the one responsible for losing a kid.” Her eyes narrowed, a hint of anger sparking in them.

  I stepped back.

  “She’s never cared about me, Logan.”

  “Lil.”

  “She’s always been worried about what I’d do to you. What I’d make you do. I’m like the disease in your house.”

  “No.” My voice rose. “That’d be my Dad.”

  “Your Dad,” Lil said, her voice rising too, “is being poisoned.”

  A current of anger flashed through me. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I balled up my fists to keep them from shaking. “You live in this fake world, Lil. But real things happen to people. Real, awful things.”

  “No,” Lil said in measured, clipped tones. “I live in the real world. The world your mother sees, the world that she limits herself to seeing, is the one that hurts your Dad. And you.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  Eyes narrowed nearly to slits, Lil approached me. “Am I?” She said, her face inches from mine, her breath stirring the fine hairs on my cheek.

  In one vicious, fierce stroke, she rammed her knee directly into my balls.

  I gasped, bent, and fell onto the ground. The world grew fuzzy. Nausea rose up inside of me, and ice-cold shock took over.

  “Damn,” I choked, clutching my knees. “Damn, damn, damnit. Damn you, Lil!”

  “Was that real enough for you, Logan?” Lil was back to her usual calm, almost bored tone. Her expression was serene. “Or do you think you made that up in your head, too?”

  She walked away, and I lay there, waves of pain receding slowly. When I could finally uncurl and sit up, she was walking into the dense thicket of bushes and wild trees that covered the hill behind us.

  Shaking, I rose to my feet and followed.

  Chapter 6

  The grass began to thicken—great tufts tall as our heads—and forest crowded the hillside we were walking up. The underbrush crawled in on either side of a narrow path—a white, windy snake in shadowed jungle.

  There were rubber trees and baobabs, like the ones on the beach, and vines covering everything. They were hung with red petals, the vines, and there were bursts of brilliant yellow flowers and thick moss dripping off of the trunks. There were birds. Lots, with many different wild, cheery sorts of voices, all pouring over us as we slipped under the canopy of trees.

  My insides were hurting. Watching Lil’s nimble form ahead of me, I wanted to pick up a rock and lob it at her head.

  I looked down, and of course there was a rock, exactly the right size for lobbing. I took a deep breath and walked past it.

  If this place could be anything, why couldn’t I get rid of this pain in my groin? I tried, but it stayed, radiating through to my periphery. You’ve been hurt. You’ve been hurt, each throb of pulse in my extremities seemed to say.

  The Baobabs were hard to believe, even walking up close. A hundred feet tall and too thick for even Lil and me together to circle if we joined hands. Too big for ten people to circle.

  “Is this the way they are in real life?” I murmured to myself.

  “Does that matter?” Lil answered sharply.

  I started. She was right in front of me. Stopped to wait for me, apparently. “Come on. You’re too slow. We need to stay close together. My place is up there.” She nodded toward the top of
the hill. The jungle was very thick there. Dark. I could see suspicious movement and dark shapes in the tree canopies.

  “Are you sure . . . ?”

  Lil gave me a scornful glance. I stopped talking.

  “I made it. I know what’s in there. It’s safe. I had to make a place where we could hide.”

  “Hide from who?”

  “The two. The—“

  “The Rook and Wolf,” I interrupted her. “Of course. Makes total sense. Sorry for asking.”

  She didn’t bother to reply. The trees closed in overhead—smaller, gracefully-curved trees with purple-red skin and flat, light-green leaves. “Manzanitas,” I said. “They don’t grow in Madagascar.”

  “They would if someone put them in Madagascar.”

  “No they wouldn’t,” I argued. “They like a Mediterranean climate.”

  “Fine,” she growled. She lifted a hand and suddenly, all the waving, purple-brown branches withered and blackened, writhing on the ground like dying octopi. They exploded, with audible pops like logs cracking in a fire, and turned into black dirt.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” I said after I’d taken a moment to absorb.

  “You didn’t believe in them, so it would have taken too much work to keep them.” She jerked her shoulder impatiently.

  I followed, more thoughtfully now.

  There was a lot in this forest that shouldn’t exist. A great, gnarled oak, bearded with Mistletoe. Things were scurrying over its branches, tiny squirrels the size of my thumb. They disappeared into a knot where the main trunk divided in two. Lil has always had a fascination with tiny things.

  As we came over the top of the hill, I slowed again to process.

  The land swooped down under us, mossy green, the sort of velvet grass that just makes you want to run and tumble and throw bright-colored Frisbees. The forest circled it like a fence, thick and dense and exotic. But from here, I could see there were mountains in the distance, and at the base of this hill a vast, silver lake with a crescent-shaped island in the middle.

  A flock of white, long-necked birds sailed through the sky. Not storks, not swans. And something else, something larger and more graceful. Something I didn’t think really existed. As I thought it, the great, white thing fuzzed slightly around the corners, and I remembered what Lil had said.