One Door From Heaven

back the way we came before the smoke gets too thick to see the signs we left." At every turn, he had marked the walls with Polly's lipstick: STRAWBERRY FROST said the label on the tube. "I'll find the others."
        "You, " Polly says, disbelieving, because though she knows that he is an ET, she also knows that he's a boy, and in spite of all he's told her, she can think of a boy as having but one basic form, and a vulnerable form at that. "Sweetie, you're not going in there alone. Hey, you're not going in there at all."
        "I can't imagine a Spelkenfelter turning spooky on me," Curtis assures her, "but promise you won't."
        "What're you talking about," she demands, shifting her attention between him and the fire ahead.
        He shows her what he's talking about by ceasing to be Curtis Hammond, reverting not to any of the many forms in his repertoire, but to the shape in which he was born, an incarnation that allows him to move faster than he can move as Curtis, and with senses more acute. This is quite a performance, even if he does say so himself.
        He would not be surprised if Polly fainted. But after all, she is a Spelkenfelter, and though she sways, she does not fall. Indeed, flashing back on part of the story that he told them after their Chinese dinner in Twin Falls, she says, "Holy howlin' saints alive!"
        MICKY, AT THE BACK of the dead end, didn't want to confront Preston Maddoc in part because of his greater strength and in part because of his lighter. He would probably use it to set their clothes afire.
        Flames seethed over the walls along the forward half of the passageway. In a minute, the hungrily feeding fires would join from side to side, creating an impassable wall of death.
        The haze of smoke thickened second by second. She and Leilani were coughing. Already, a rawness burned in her throat. Soon they wouldn't be able to breathe unless they dropped to the Hour. The moment they were forced to the floor in search of clean air, however, they were as good as dead.
        She turned to the back wall of this blind alley and tried to claw newspapers and magazines out of the construction, hoping to burrow through to another passageway where the flames had not yet reached. The bundled publications were so tightly packed that she couldn't pry them loose.
        Okay. All right. Topple the damn thing. All this crap was just piled here, wasn't it? No one had cemented it in place. No one had reinforced it with rebar.
        When she pushed against the palisade, however, it felt every bit as solid as anything the pharaohs had built. At the end caps of some passages, she'd been able to see that the maze walls were always at least two and sometimes three stacks thick, with sheets of Masonite and plyboard between layers. Perhaps more support structure existed than met the eye. She put everything she had into a shove, without effect, and then tried to rock the wall, attacked it with rhythm, pressing and relenting and pressing again, hoping to start the trash swaying, but it wouldn't sway.
        Turning to face Maddoc beyond the flames, she pulled Leilani to her side and gathered her courage. She saw no option now but to rush the entrance, get out before the flames closed the way, and try to take Maddoc down before he could harm them. Bowl him over, try to kick his head if he fell-because if she fell, he would be trying to kick hers.
        PAPER WHISPERED when it burned in great volume, crackled and popped and hissed, as well, but whispered, as if divulging secrets printed on it, naming names, citing sources.
        Preston realized that he had lingered too long in the smoke and heat when the burning paper began to whisper the names of those whom he had killed.
        The foul air remained breathable. Yet even before the smoke grew dense enough to clog the lungs, the air assailed with lethal toxins spewed out by burning materials, gases that were invisible compared to the roiling soot, but no less dangerous. The manufacture of paper required numerous chemicals, which fire liberated and transformed into even more effective poisons.
        If he were hearing the names of those he killed, he had inhaled enough toxins to half unscrew his mind. He'd better get out of here before he became disoriented.
        He hesitated, however, because the sight of the Hand and the Slut Queen, trapped in the blind alley, thrilled him. He hoped they would run the fiery