Fear Nothing

position.
        I couldn't risk pumping out rounds indiscriminately. Although a spray of bullets would probably waste the bastard, whoever he might be, there was a chance that I would only wound him - and a smaller but still very real chance that I would merely piss him off.
        When the pistol magazine was empty - then what?
         Then what?
        I sidled to the hallway, risking an encounter there, but it didn't happen. As I crossed the threshold, I pulled the guest-room door shut behind me, putting it between me and whoever had come out of the armoire - assuming I hadn't imagined the creaking of the piano hinges.
        The ground-floor lights were evidently on their own circuit. A glow rose through the stair-well at the end of the black hall.
        Instead of waiting to see who, if anyone, would burst out of the guest room, I ran to the stairs.
        I heard a door open behind me.
        Gasping, descending two stairs at a time, I was almost to the landing when my head in miniature sailed past. It shattered against the wall in front of me.
        Startled, I brought an arm up to shield my eyes. China shrapnel tattooed my face and chest.
        My right heel landed on the bullnose edge of a step and skidded off. I nearly fell, pitched forward, slammed into the landing wall, but kept my balance.
        On the landing, crunching shards of my glazed face underfoot, I whipped around to confront my assailant.
        The decapitated body of the doll, appropriately attired in basic black, hurtled down. I ducked, and it passed over my head, thumping against the wall behind me.
        When I looked up and covered the dark top of the stairs with the gun, there was no one to shoot-as if the doll had torn off its own head to throw at me and then had hurled itself into the stairwell.
        The downstairs lights went out.
        Through the forbidding blackness came the smell of something burning.

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    15
        
        Groping in the impenetrable gloom, I finally found the handrail. I clutched at the smooth wood with one sweaty hand and started down the lower flight of stairs toward the foyer.
        This darkness had a strange sinuosity, seemed to coil and writhe around me as I descended through it. Then I realized that it was the air, not the darkness, that I was feeling: serpentine currents of hot air swarming up the stair-well.
        An instant later, tendrils and then tentacles and then a great pulsing mass of foul-smelling smoke poured into the stairwell from below, invisible but palpable, enveloping me as some giant sea anemone might envelop a diver. Coughing, choking, struggling to breathe, I reversed directions, hoping to escape through a second floor window, although not through the master bathroom where Angela waited.
        I returned to the landing and clambered up three or four steps of the second flight before halting. Through smoke-stung eyes flooded with tears - and through the pall of smoke itself - I saw a throbbing light above.
        Fire.
        Two fires had been set, one above and one below. Those unseen psychotic children were busy in their mad play, and there seemed to be so many of them. I was reminded of the veritable platoon of searchers that appeared to spring from the ground outside the mortuary, as though Sandy Kirk possessed the power to summon the dead from their graves.
        Downward, once more and quickly, I plunged toward the only hope of nourishing air. I would find it, if anywhere, at the lowest point of the structure, because smoke and fumes rise while the blaze sucks in cooler air at its base in order to feed itself.
        Each inhalation caused a spasm of coughing, increased my feeling of suffocation, and fed my panic, so I held my breath until I reached the foyer. There, I dropped to my knees, stretched out on the floor, and discovered that I could breathe. The air was hot and smelled sour, but all things being relative, I was more thrilled by it than I had ever been by the crisp air coming off the washboard of the Pacific.
        I didn't lie there and surrender to an orgy of respiration. I hesitated just long enough to draw several deep breaths to clear my soiled lungs, and to work up enough saliva to spit some of the soot out of my mouth.
        Then I raised my head to test the air and to learn how deep the precious safe zone might be. Not deep. Four to six inches. Nevertheless, this shallow pool ought to be