Ruffly Speaking

returned her attention to her dog. “Ruffly, I’ll take it from here! What on earth is wrong with him! He’s supposed to let me...” Her voice broke.
    “Move back! Stephanie, move back!” Against the smoggy city sky, the slate roof of the carriage house showed only its usual sag; no sparks, no visible signs of a blaze, not yet. A few yards ahead of us, the espaliered tree I’d noticed from the street still shinnied its way benignly upward, its leaves blurred and blackened only by nightfall. Nothing but the burning chemical stench betrayed the shabby building’s transformation to a gigantic smudge pot set to metamorphose to a blast furnace when the vapors trapped within found air and flame, and the fire reached its flashpoint.
    “Stephanie, we’re too close. Move back!” I touched her arm. She flinched as if my hand had seared her flesh. I waved toward Alice Savery’s house and Highland Street. As I did, Steve came sprinting down the drive, and Rita finally showed up. Matthew and Leah were at her heels.
    “I can’t rouse anyone there.” Steve jabbed a thumb toward the big house. Catching sight of Stephanie, he yelled at her as uselessly as I’d done, “Get back! Hey, get away from there!” Veterinarians are trained to act in emergencies, and they’re used to shoving around large creatures. Steve gripped Stephanie’s forearms and began dragging her away from the danger zone around the carriage house. The fumes became nauseating, medical, and weirdly sick now, as if within the old wood and under the slate, an evil surgeon were merrily cauterizing the raw stump of a leg he’d just had fun amputating. The stench had a pesticide taint: I imagined the sadist medico basting the severed limb in bug killer and roasting it for his own consumption.
    Matthew and Leah arrived bearing flashlights. The beam of Matthew’s brought me the welcome light of reality. When he ran it over the carriage house, I saw through the grimy haze a pair of wide double doors that looked as if they’d open outward. I stared at them. Smoke oozed through, I thought, but the doors remained closed-No one opened them to hurl out charred remains. No half-dead, legless creature shrieked from within.
    Ruffly’s leaps became ferocious, his barks menacing-
    Stephanie battled to shake Steve’s grip. “It’s a sound!” she insisted. “He hears something. It’s not like the phone. He’s not playing.” Unable to hear her own desperate voice, she clamored wildly.
    “Steve, it couldn’t—” I began. A hideous phrase ran through my head, a fear-twisted snatch from a song, “the crown of creation,” but grossly distorted, like words of melted wax: the crown of cremation. “Where is Miss Savery?” I demanded. “Matthew, Leah, run and see if you can find her. Bang on her doors. Yell. Do anything!”
    As they took off, Doug appeared. “Morris’s raccoons! This is awful! They’re in there, and—”
    The stench?Chemicals. Petroleum. Kerosene. Gas. And fat, maybe? Melting fat, the rendering of fat-streaked flesh. The nausea started in my throat and spread down until my stomach gagged.
    Steve was calm. “At this time of night, raccoons are checking out garbage cans.”
    “Doug,” I shouted over Ruffly’s unremitting noise, “what if Miss Savery’s in there! Where the hell are the fire trucks? Doug, would she be in there? Does she keep anything—?”
    Doug answered. “Hideous junk and the world’s oldest Volvo station wagon. You must’ve seen her in it, sitting bolt upright going directly against the traffic the wrong way up—”
    Rejoining us, Leah interrupted him. “Matthew’s looking for a hose. Why isn’t anyone else doing anything?” Leah had found a garden fork. She plunged it into the grass.
    “Leah,” I told her, “you were supposed to be looking for Miss Savery and not—” Leah extracted the garden fork from the ground. “Put that thing down!” I ordered her. “If you want to do something useful—”
    Ruffly was still dashing to Stephanie, wheeling around, almost flinging himself against the harmless-looking doors of what now felt and stank like a giant crematorium about to blow open and shoot out half-incinerated remains, the singed bodies of small, furry animals, monstrous human limbs with flame-eaten flesh. Stephanie kept trying to assure Ruffly that his work was done. “He can’t be made to feel that his efforts are ignored,” she told Steve, “but when I tell him I’ll take over, he’s