Fire in the Wall

by S G Dunster

  “Go,” I told him.

  “Haaaaar!” his war cry echoed weirdly off the metal of his mask. They ran for the door, roaring and clanking, and then poured out into the woods, setting it on fire, blasting holes in the ground, roaring like jet engines. With the howls outside, it was a noise-hell. I was tempted to cover my ears like my little cousin Eben did when things got too loud at family reunions.

  They pushed open the door of the keep and ran out onto the lawn. I followed them. “Stand around!” I shouted, running out the door after them.

  The Saxons circled the keep until every foot of wall was guarded. Aelfur stood out in front, his fire-stick raised, facing the shadow that crept in on the keep. It was starred with icy-yellow eyes, hung all over with rows of curved teeth, seeping around the hill like a black tide—fur, and the stink of blood and dog.

  “No!” Lil shouted, shoving me. “Don’t look at them! Don’t see them! Look at Aelfur. Keep hold of the keep! And come inside.” She grabbed my hand and dragged me inside. “Up!” She hissed, pulling me toward the stairs. She leapt up them so fast she flew.

  I followed, too full of adrenaline to worry about the gum-soles, and we came out on the top floor.

  A ladder formed in midair, leading up to a hatch—something I hadn’t imagined. Lil was making it.

  But now that I saw, it became clear in my mind, the edges hardening: a door in the ceiling, leading up to the roof.

  Lil swung up the ladder and reached for the roof hatch that suddenly appeared—a square of wood and iron hinges in the stone. “Come on,” she screamed at me, climbing through. “You’ll have to make them fight. You’ll need to be able to see them.”

  I followed her up onto the roof.

  It was so high. For a moment the dark swells of forested land around the keep were waves, and the rock roof of the keep rose and fell over them. Recognizing my vertigo, I breathed in sharply and shut my eyes tight and let my breath out, steadying myself against one of the battlements.

  There, far below, was my gleaming ring of soldiers. And there, creeping in on them: wolves.

  Wolves? Or just dark, ragged shapes? Eerie yellow light glanced off the sharp angles of their hunched backs as they slithered up toward the keep, a great mass of them, long shadows creeping from the trees.

  My Saxons were standing strong and brave, blowing fire fifty yards into the darkness. The pack retreated from the flames, then circled back.

  “Ut! Ut!” Aelfur roared. He reached into the quiver at his back and tossed two of the crater bombs. A split second after they landed, earth rocking noise and twin pillars of fire burned twenty feet tall.

  There was a heartrending, hair-raising howl, a smattering of yelps, and the shadow parted around the fires.

  “Ut!”

  The men circling the keep repeated Aelfur’s cry, and then there were dozens of rocking-explosions, flares of fire all over.

  “Olicrosse!” Aelfur roared, and charged right into the shadows.

  “No!” Lil shrieked. She grabbed me. “Bring him back!”

  But Aelfur had already disappeared into the pack.

  Literally disappeared. He was there, and then the black mass of wolves poured over him in a tide of ragged fur, and then he was gone.

  Something else was happening. The wolves. They were stretching. Growing. Their legs spread up from the ground tall as small tree trunks, their necks and backs arced, and they their thin, tooth-filled muzzles rose up toward us.

  Toward me and Lil. Yellow gazes fixed on us, growing closer and closer as they stretched up toward us like shadows being cast by a setting sun.

  The mouths opened, and the howl they let off—three of them, necks dark ribbons of shadow now three stories tall and growing—sent a terrible thrill through my body. And over it all, something hissed: a voice.

  It said something. Both howl and words, I couldn’t quite catch what it was. But I thought I heard my name.

  “Get inside,” Lil whispered as the heads of a dozen wolves swooped up over the tower, yellow eyes fixed on us. “Don’t let them touch you. Inside, Logan. Now!” She pulled open the hatch and grabbed my arm. I snapped out of my terrified paralysis and stumbled down the ladder with her.

  She shut the hatch with a bang. “Down the stairs. Not all the way down. They’re outside. Not up, either. They’re trying to . . . Logan.” She grabbed at her braids and closed her eyes for a second. “Logan, we need to make something. A space. Small. Where we can keep the walls strong.”

  We’d descended the stairs and were now on one of the keep’s half stories with a view all the way down to the first floor. “Something that’ll surround us,” she muttered.

  “Why don’t you do something?” I said. “Get us out of here, Lil! Come on! Put us back in the studio. In St. Anthony. Now’s the time for us to be gone.”

  “I can’t,” Lil growled. “We’re here, now. We’re here. We can’t. We need the Grey Man. Oh.” She sat on the wooden floor and put her hands on her head. “Fine. Logan, sit here with me. Think of metal. Think . . . indestructible. Something that won’t break. Something simple, something small. Something that blocks out the noise of the blyks.”

  It was the word Jenny had used. I stared at her. “What did you say?”

  “The siren-blyks. The wolves. The noise is half their punch. Block it out. A soundproof room, a . . .”

  A fiery tide of anger rose up through me. Why did everyone around me seem to have more information than I did?

  I took a deep breath, and shoved it aside. “Safe room,” I said. Lil’s words had reminded me of a movie my mother and I had seen together once. “Soundproof. Bulletproof. A cube of impenetrableness.” As I talked, it formed around us—a room of thick, impenetrable glass, just large enough for Lil and me to sit.

  As the ceiling came in over her, as the walls closed in around us, Lil moved in close to me, grabbing my arm with her two hands. Her nails dug in. It hurt.

  “Glass,” she murmured, glaring around us. “Why not something we can’t see through?” The walls hazed over, then gleamed solid metal.

  “There have to be air holes— “

  “Shut it, Logan,” Lil hissed. “Quiet. We need to be quiet, and we need to sit here, and we need to watch these walls and ceiling and not . . . not let them go. Not let anything get through. We can do that together, the two of us. We might not be what they are, but we’re strong enough to hold our own like this. Until they leave.”

  “Lil— “

  “Quiet. Focus on the walls. The ceiling, the floor. Don’t let them go.”

  I looked at the ceiling. It was just bare metal. Not hard to see or imagine: simple, solid, shiny. “Okay.” My voice boomed and echoed against the hard walls. “But we— “

  “Focus. Hard. Keep telling it, Logan. Keep telling it. Pay attention to what we’ve made, and don’t listen to or see anything that wants to come through.”

  I forced myself to watch the walls, the floor, the ceiling in turn. They didn’t seem to waver at all.

  I don’t know how much time passed. My eyes ached. My head ached. “Lil, can we— “

  Something rumbled underneath us, vibrating the floor.

  “Shush,” Lil hissed. She was sitting, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, her fingers pressed to her temples. “Don’t talk. Concentrate.”

  Another rumbling, and the floor shook again, worse this time.

  “What’s— “

  “It’s not real,” Lil snapped. “Not if you decide it’s not. Metal, Logan. Metal.”

  The rumbling grew louder. The floor shook, tilted. Lil and I slid along the slick metal surface, crashing into the side of our cube. It tilted the other way, and then, whatever was holding us up—above the ground of the keep, below the ceiling, in an indeterminate space supported only by tellings—it was suddenly gone.

  The floor dropped out from under us. We fell.

  It was like being on an elevator.

  No. A roller-coaster—one of those rides at a theme park where the
y just drop you. That split-second feeling of suspension and the terrible inside-thrill of a long, fatal fall.

  “Stop us!” Lil screamed. “Logan— “

  We kept falling. It went on far longer than it should have, based on how tall our keep was, how close the ground. We were pinned up against the ceiling, the force of the fall freezing us there, and Lil scrabbling against the smooth metal ceiling for something to grab.

  “We’re dead,” she screamed. “We’re dead, Logan. We’re dead!”

  Chapter 10

  Her voice tapered to a moan, then a murmur. “We’re dead, we’re dead, we’re dead.” Her body went slack, limp. She closed her eyes.

  But we weren’t. We weren’t dead. At least, I didn’t think so. Would I know if I was?

  I could still breathe. I could still . . . feel myself. My nerves. My skin. And the metal walls were still there, reflecting us, pressed up against the ceiling with the force of our fall.

  And then suddenly we weren’t. I went from ceiling to a moment of suspension. Then gravity flooded back into our metal square. The loss of weightlessness was a peculiar sensation: a pressure on all sides, my ears hurting like they do when a plane takes off. My eyes were swollen in their sockets, my stomach and lungs squeezed against my ribs.

  We settled, ever so gently, onto the floor, Lil wildly scrabbling, still, for a handhold.

  I landed on my feet. It didn’t feel good.

  Lil was spread-eagle on the floor, panting.

  “I don’t think it’s moving anymore.” I touched my throat, feeling the vibration of my voice there.

  “We’re dead,” Lil whispered, her words slurred because her face was pressed against the floor.

  Something was happening to one of the walls. A dark outline was forming. A rectangular shadow, about as tall and wide as me. A four-sided crack seeped around it, like a stream of water. Up, across, down, then flowing across the seam where the floor joined the wall.

  A door.

  My lightheaded relief evaporated.

  Sure enough, a knob materialized—a doorknob. Strange, intricate. Brass, weathered with tarnish. It rattled and turned. The door opened.

  I couldn’t see much. The sudden burst of sunlight was a solid white glare. Strange, white mist curled into our compartment.

  A cat—dead black with yellow eyes—entered. It looked me up and down, arched its back aristocratically, turned and sat, staring down at Lil, its small nose inches from her blond head.

  A cat? A cat opened our metal cube?

  At least it wasn’t a rook or a wolf.

  Lil looked up, nearly kissing its sour little face, and screamed so loud that with the echoes off all the metal I couldn’t hear anything except ringing for several seconds. She leapt up, and the cat leapt back, showing its nice array of curved, white teeth and claws.

  “We are in some real trouble,” a bold, gentlemanly voice, lilting with a southern accent, spoke, “if a mere feline is enough to drive the two of you mad.”

  I whirled around and there he was, leaning against the makeshift doorway, ankles crossed, observing us.

  He looked almost normal, that sort of almost that has you staring for a long time, trying to figure out what was wrong, exactly.

  He was wearing all black clothes that seemed too big for him. His pants were a little ragged on the bottoms, and his coat—old fashioned, black—had tails which came nearly to his ankles, and not in a dapper way. He had a thick cravat around his throat, tied in a neat bow under his chin. On his head was a hat—round, bowl like, with not enough brim to shade his exceptionally strange features: broad forehead, small chin, pointy nose underlined by a small black-brush moustache above a small slit of a mouth. But the oddest were his eyes. Huge, hollow, black eyes with purple shadows around them, an awful mismatch to his complexion, which was like yellowed paper.

  I thought I’d seen him before. I couldn’t place it, though. And whatever it was I was remembering had slight differences. Alterations. The more I looked at him, the more I was sure I knew him somehow.

  He gave me a nod—eyes narrowing slightly—and strode inside. “Time to go.”

  Lil, backed up against the wall, gaped at him. “You . . . you . . . you . . .”

  “Me, me, me.” He grinned, exposing two rows of large, greyish teeth. The smile made his face even more horrible. Smiles didn’t belong on that face. “You, you, you.” He added, pointing at Lil. And you, too.” He gave me a sidelong glance. “This is a treat. Unexpected. Two in the place of one.”

  “You’re not eating us.” Lil pushed off from the wall and brought her hands in front of her, fingers curled like talons, and then they shifted and became talons—yellow, curved, wicked-looking nails.

  “No, don’t do that.” The stranger reached out and grabbed her wrist. “See? I’m no blyk. I won’t take you.”

  Lil shrieked again at his touch, then stopped, panting, looking at his pale fingers, still touching her skin. “How do I know you’re not a blyk?”

  “A blyk’s touch is not something the solid easily recover from. See, girl? You’re fine.” He let her wrist go. “And you mustn’t change yourself. First rule of order in the Caldera. I’m surprised that fool of a withered skeleton Hans didn’t teach you that immediately.” He leaned toward her, their foreheads nearly touching. “It leaves you too open to suggestion.”

  He turned away from her, to me. “Better be off,” he said. “Can’t stay safely in one place for long in the mists. We need to get back to firmament.”

  “We’re not stupid,” Lil snarled. “I know who’s real down here. I know who’s here. And you’re not one of them. Not real. So you’re one of theirs. Even if you . . . even if you don’t . . .”

  He twitched his lip like maybe his moustache itched. “Well, then,” he said emphatically, giving her a look of put-on awe, “You know, do you? It’s not likely I can help much in that case.” He turned and walked out the door. “Come or stay. As you like it.” He made a clicking noise with his tongue. “Gambol along, Monty.”

  The cat licked its shoulder, treated both me and Lil to a scorching gaze, and oozed around the door.

  Lil and I were stood there stunned in our opened metal box full of that white nothing-mist I’d encountered when I first came into the Caldera. Curls of it entered, effervescent and strange like fog blown by wind. Blown by . . . I didn’t know what. Breath?

  Thoughts? It seemed to shift with the rhythm of the words that went through my head, forming vague figures, then flattening back into cloud.

  I ran my hand through my hair and mused. We can’t stay here. Not by ourselves. And we were done for anyway. Rook, wolf, or cat.

  I made a decision.

  “Wait,” I called, leaping out the door.

  He was a little ways off—two dark blotches, him and his cat.

  “They’re trying to trick us,” Lil growled, coming out with me. “Don’t.”

  “Seems to me like your rook and wolf and blyks and whatever else have us pretty good,” I retorted. “And if there’s even a small chance this dude can help us, Lil,” I gave her a squint. “He didn’t hurt you. He probably could’ve.”

  “We . . . I . . .” She stared after them. The cat looked back at us, round eyes gleaming like sun on glass. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “I mean . . . that cat . . . sort of acts like an imprint.”

  “An imprint?”

  “It’s acting like something real.”

  “Why’s that important?”

  “Because only real people can create imprints. Only real people have that much telling power.”

  “Telling power? Lil, cut it out.”

  “Stories. Telling stories. Like how you told Aelfur. Aelfur’s not an imprint, though. He’s a figment. When he fell into the wolves, they just sucked him up like water in a sponge. They fed on him, on your telling. That’s how they got bigger. I’m saying . . . he could be real. Maybe. And he didn’t take me. When he touched
me.” She moaned and grabbed at her braids.

  I narrowed my eyes at her. “Let’s walk quicker.” I sped up to follow the retreating figures.

  Lil sighed and followed me.

  The mist was disorienting. I could see them, the two of them, walking in front of us, disappearing entirely occasionally, until I caught a movement, a dark shape in the corner of my eye. It frightened me each time.

  Finally I sped up to a run. “Hey!” I called. “Hey! Wait. We’d . . .”

  The stranger halted, looking back. I saw a vague echo of the dark hollows in his face that were his eyes, and a brief gleam of fierce yellow in the dark blob at his heels.

  “. . . like to come with you,” I finished, slowing as we approached them. “Lil and I are lost. And we need to get back to . . . where we were.”

  The stranger blinked. He regarded me for a few moments and held out a hand.

  It was small, square. A little pudgy. I took it and shook, not sure what else to do with it, suppressing a shudder. Clammy, cold. Not the strongest handshake ever.

  “Ah,” he said, taking his hand away. “It is as I thought. You’re not changing. You are solid. No bites taken out of me.” He held up his hand, palm out, and treated me to that ghastly grin again. “So you’re not one of theirs, either. You’re firm.” He lifted his wispy black brows. “A human.”

  “I’m . . . yeah, human,” I repeated. “Firm. I’m here, anyway. And Lil. Both of us. And we need to get back— “

  “To where you were,” he finished for me. “Where were you?”

  “I . . . I don’t know!” I looked over my shoulder at Lil.

  “Above,” Lil said after a beat of silence. “He wants to get back to the surface.”

  The two of them exchanged a long look. There was a conversation held in that gaze. “Luck with that,” the stranger finally said. “Nobody has gone back. Perhaps because most who come down here have no desire to go back, but,” he shrugged.

  Lil eyed him. “We came down to help. Not to stay. We were going to try to find . . . someone.”

  “I’m someone.”

  Lil twisted the end of one braid. “No, someone else. Hey, if you’re real, how come I’ve never heard of you?”