The Fire (10 page)

It was the can the Shevvingtons had left in her bedroom, the one she had tried to hide behind the geraniums. The one which had her fingerprints.

My fingerprints are on everything in this house, thought Christina. And that smell — it’s gasoline. This house is ready to burn.

From the depths of memory she heard Anya’s voice. (Anya last fall, when the Shevvingtons began eating at her sanity.) “No, Chrissie,” Anya had said, her hair a cloud of spun black glass. “The Shevvingtons will not destroy you.
You will destroy yourself.
”

Christina did not dare blow the flame out. There were enough gas fumes to light the kitchen. She wet her fingertips and squashed the flame. Racing back into the living room, she kicked the shutter open. The bottom hinge broke. It was no secret now; anybody could tell the storm cottage had been broken into.

And she knew, grimly, who would do the telling. The Shevvingtons.

And she knew who would produce the fingerprints for comparison. The Shevvingtons.

And she knew who would say,
But didn’t we tell you she was nothing but a wharf rat?

How had they known? How had they found out? Christina had told nobody!

She went out the window. The world was invisible. The fog was as thick as the inside of an envelope. The ocean she could not see chewed on the rocks she could not locate.

It was Anya’s ocean; Anya had always said that at times like this, the sea sounded like a coffin being dragged over broken glass.

Whose coffin? thought Christina.

Mine?

Val’s?

She ran, and the fog ran with her, engulfing her feet, swallowing the tips of her own fingers. She stumbled, but fog was no cushion. Rocks and barnacles ripped her skin. She cut between summer people’s houses. The wet soggy branches of forsythia whipped her cheeks, and the heavy perfume of lilacs slapped her face. She slid on the grass and stained her clothes. At last she came out on the road, among headlights of cars, like dim yellow baskets.

Val, where are you? thought Christina. Are you safe? Did you go home? What happened?

She came into the village again and here the fog had come in soft and gray and cozy. Summer people were laughing at being lost only a few feet from each other. Natives were irritated and hoping it would sweep away soon.

Jonah was right, she thought. I got cocky. I was so sure of myself, so proud. He kept saying,
Pay attention, they’re after you.
But would I listen to Jonah? No, because he’s just in seventh grade and seventh-graders bore me.

A queer, horrible worry made her stop and look in her bookbag. She sat on a bench for tourists. Red geraniums nodded at her from out of the fog. She took out the sandwich. She took out the yogurt. She took out the apple. She took out her arithmetic book and her history book.

And yes.

There, beneath everything, caught in a seam, a lump so small only police fingers would have found it, was a box of matches.

Her hair was wet from the fog. No separate colors sprang from her head: no silver and gold, no rich chocolate-brown. Her hair was just a soggy mass, no different from anybody else’s in the rain.

Nothing will save me, thought Christina Romney.

There will be a fire. The town will say that I set it. There will be fingerprints. The town will say I put them there. There will be a matchbox. The town will say I took it with me. They have forgotten the past. The memory of the village has been sealed up also.

They will catch me.

Mr. Shevvington’s eyes will be soft and gray, like spring rain.

Mrs. Shevvington will nod her head like a guillotine in slow motion.

And the town will whisper,
We always knew she was just a wharf rat.

T
HE FOG BEGAN WHISPERING
. The whisper was thick and snuffly and damp. “
The alone,
” it breathed. “
The alone.
”

It was the voice of Christina’s fears: that one day she would be alone… all alone… the world would end … while she wandered … her breathing the only breathing on earth … her footsteps the only footsteps on earth.
The alone.

Mattresses of fog disappeared when she walked through them.

The alone,
repeated the world.

Fear struck Christina’s lungs, and she breathed in the fog itself, lungs heaving as if she were in a track race. The fog sat in her lungs like a wet towel, suffocating her.

And now the fog murmured
Chhhrrrissssteeennnaaaaaaaahhhh,
and she knew it had come for her; it was going to wrap its wet arms around her; it would take her —

“I was afraid of
the alone,
” said Val clearly, and now Christina could see her: slim and damply pretty, blending with the tourists. “The storm cottage,” said Val, clinging to Christina, her fingers like tree toads plastered to Christina’s arms. “It was so full of
alone.
I was alone, it was alone, the sea was alone, the sheets on the chairs were alone. Christina, I couldn’t bear it.”

Christina tried to peel Val off but Val was too afraid of
the alone
to let go. Her fingers are just fingers, Christina told herself, not toads.

“The Shevvingtons called the fog in,” said Val. “I heard them. They were in the storm cottage and they called to the fog, and the fog answered and obeyed.”

Christina shuddered convulsively. She could imagine their arms, their curled fingers, their furry voices. “The fog was coming in anyway, Val,” said Christina. “They weren’t calling it. They don’t have special powers.”

“Of course they do,” said Val. “I knew once the fog came in, the alone would have me, and the Shevvingtons would have me and it would be over. They stood on the rocks outside the storm cottage and held their hands up to the ocean, laughing, and the ocean laughed with them, and all together they cried, ‘
Fog. Fog. Fog.
’ ”

I knew they were in the storm cottage, thought Christina. I knew they were the ones who spilled …

Her thoughts bumped into a terrible wall. A wall of sharp spikes and knife-edged wire. A wall of Evil.

Gasoline. Matches. Val.

“No,” said Christina, as if to stop Evil with a syllable. “The Shevvingtons are terrible people, but setting fire to the storm cottage while you were in it? Even the Shevvingtons wouldn’t —”

“Yes, they would,” said Val. “I’m starving, Christina. Did you bring me anything to eat?”

Christina handed over the sandwich. Val tore off the wrapper and ate savagely. Christina pictured the sandwich still whole lying in Val’s stomach.

I told Benj to believe in Evil, thought Christina, but here I am facing Evil, and I don’t believe. People don’t really do things like that. Not just for the fun of it. Because there’s no reason except entertainment. There’s no money, no power, no status. “But why?” whispered Christina. “Why would they plan that?”

“Because there aren’t enough days left,” said Val. “You keep outwitting them, Christina. That’s dumb. If you would just be dumb yourself, they wouldn’t care about getting you, too. They were gloating, because they could get both of us forever. They said it would be a pleasant finale to a difficult year. That was their word. Pleasant. They said it would be pleasant to wrap things up. Meaning you. Do you have anything else to eat?”

Christina gave her the apple. I bet she eats the core, too, thought Christina, and she was right.

Christina’s head throbbed hideously. So this is what a real headache is, she thought. It bites from the inside. It chews on your eyes and your brain and the hearing parts of your ears.

“We have to call the fire department before the gasoline catches,” she said dully. “Or they’ll blame me.” Christina started crying. She thought of the storm cottage, and the innocent summer people whose place would go up in flames, and all because — as Benj would have been the first to tell her — she had trespassed for the fun of it. “They’ll blame me anyway. I’ll be the one calling the fire department, and my fingerprints are all over the place.” Christina could not imagine what her mother and father and Benj and Jonah and Vicki and Gretch and everybody else on earth would have to say.

And then she could imagine.

Perfectly.

Wharf rat,
they would say, their pointing fingers jabbing into her chest. Wharf rat, wharf rat, wharf rat!

Val shook her head. “Chrissie, I didn’t have anything else to do waiting for you to come back, so I scrubbed everything you had touched. And you carried the coffee can and the candle away with you.” Val grubbed in the bookbag, hoping for more to eat, and found the yogurt. She used two bent fingers for a spoon and slurped it up. She said, “Anyhow, while they summoned the fog, I slid out the cellar window.”

“I’m impressed, Val. I thought you’d be insane.”

“I was for a while. The alone really got to me. But you’re here now. I’m leaning on you, and I’m fine. Where are you going to hide me now?”

Christina knew more or less where they were, but the fog that had hidden Val from Christina’s sight could hide listeners and enemies, too: the Shevvingtons need stand only a few yards away and they, too, would be swallowed in the thick gray fog.

The passage to the sea, thought Christina. The cliff passage where the Shevvingtons’ horrible insane son slipped back and forth unseen so he could terrorize Anya. The sea opened it up again. I heard it crash through last night.

Generations ago, the sea captain had built in that strange location, where the high tide coming into Candle Cove made the house shake with every thundering wave. Nobody knew why he chose that cliff edge. And then Christina had found out why: He must have been smuggling something in or out his hidden hole. You could reach it only at low tide. At high tide, it was covered by water. How well she knew that cellar. The mold that grew on the walls; the smell of the tide lodged in the cracks; the cold, watery drafts that slid around your ankles. She remembered how the horrible passage tilted into the water, and she had once been forced down it, while the
thing,
the unknowable, rubbery, inhuman thing, had laughed madly from above. The thing that was the Shevvingtons’ son.

She could imagine herself in that passage again — and the Shevvingtons cementing it up on both sides while she was trying to hide Val there.

No, the cliff passage was not a possibility.

“I can’t go back to the storm cottage,” quavered Val. She shuddered and grabbed Christina’s hand. “The alone would get me.”

Christina could not loosen Val’s grip. She had the impression that if Val did not hang onto her, Val would tip over. Val was literally, as well as mentally, unbalanced.

The full horror of it struck Christina. Val
needed
the care and the help of professionals. She needed the love and the knowledge of people who helped the mentally distraught. She probably needed her mother. It couldn’t be good for Val to be by herself, surrounded by white sheets and booming tides, wondering if
the alone
was going to get her.

The fog began to curl back away from the coast, as if the gods of the sea — of the Shevvingtons — were peeling it away. They could see twenty feet ahead of them, and then a hundred feet.

The Atlantic burbled and chuckled like a nursery school playgroup.

Far out on the horizon, a fire blazed. Gaudy strips of flame pierced the fog. Glowing embers of ship or house. Burning Fog Isle, up to its old tricks with the prism of fog and sun.

I want to go home, thought Christina. I want my mother. I want my father. I want everything the way it used to be, all safe and cozy.

She could telephone her parents. “Mommy, remember how Anya almost lost her mind, and the year before, Robbie’s sister Val did lose hers and had to be put away? Val ran away from the Institute and came to me because I went there under a false name to visit her because I needed information against the Shevvingtons. The Shevvingtons know that I know about them, and they have very little time to destroy me. They are planning to set fire to the storm cottage where I’ve been hiding Val, and they will make it look as if I did it. They’ve been putting matches and candles everywhere I go. They are going to blame me for arson, Mommy! I’ll be a wharf rat before I’m even in high school.”

And her parents would say — as they wept — “No nice, kind adult like dear Mr. Shevvington would do that. It must be something about the way we brought her up, out here on this island, without a normal twentieth-century social life; it must be our fault. Christina really did do it herself.”

And yet… if Christina did
not
tell, Val might slip into the alone, and never come out.

“
S
TAY HERE
?” CRIED VAL
. “Oh, no, Chrissie, no, I — ”

“Here,” said Christina firmly.

“Impossible,” breathed Val. “I’ll go insane.”

They giggled desperately. Room 7 swirled around them, crimson and dark violet, crystal clear and dusk-quiet.

“I’ll be in and out,” promised Christina.

“But Chrissie.” Val was gasping for breath. “Chrissie, it’s their plan.” Her voice became softer, tinier. “For me to come here. I can feel it.
The Shevvingtons know.
”

“They do not know. And you can get away with it, Val, I know you can. The first rule of hiding something is to put it right out in the open where it belongs. Like the best place to hide a car is a big parking lot, not a backyard.”

“This room isn’t big.”

“It’s yours, though, Val. It was decorated for you.”

“It’s my shell. You said so yourself.”

“You’ll find yourself in here, Val. You’ll go back to being the old Val.”

Val’s laugh was high and broken, like the top of an electric keyboard, losing its current. “My ghost lives here.
The alone
lives here.”

“The Shevvingtons’ll be at school during the day. You can eat and go to the bathroom and watch television. And if there are cookies gone or something — why, three teenagers eat here, anyway. What do they expect? Besides, they’d never think to look for you here, Val. They’d expect you to run as far from them as you could.”

The sun had moved over Schooner Inne to the west, town-facing side of the house. Room 7 looked out on an ocean not blue, nor green, but kitten-gray. Soft, fuzzy, wet gray. The sky dissolved like aspirin in a glass, and you could not tell the horizon from the ocean.