The Mask

porch was at the far end.
    She lifted her long skirt and pulled it tight across her hips and thighs, bunching it in both hands to prevent it from trailing in the flames. She moved gingerly onto the fire-ringed landing, which creaked under her, but before she reached the open door, the kitchen exploded in yellow-blue flames that quickly turned orange. From wall to wall, floor to ceiling, the room was an inferno; there was no longer a path through the blaze. Crazily, the fire-choked doorway brought to Laura’s mind the image of a glittering eye in a jack-o’-lantern.
    In the kitchen, windows exploded, and the fire eddied in the sudden change of drafts, pushing through the cellar door, lashing at Laura. Startled, she stumbled backwards, off the landing. She fell. Turning, she grabbed at the railing, missed it, and stumbled down the short flight, cracking her head against the stone floor at the bottom.
    She held on to consciousness as if it were a raft and she a drowning swimmer. When she was certain she wouldn’t faint, she got to her feet. Pain coruscated across the top of her head. She raised one hand to her brow and found a trickle of blood, a small abrasion. She was dizzy and confused.
    During the minute or less that she had been incapacitated, fire had spread across the entire landing at the head of the stairs. It was moving down onto the first step.
    She couldn’t keep her eyes focused. The rising stairs and the descending fire repeatedly blurred together in an orange haze.
    Ghosts of smoke drifted down the stairwell. They reached out with long, insubstantial arms, as if to embrace Laura.
    She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Help!”
    No one answered.
    “Somebody help me! I’m in the cellar!”
    Silence.
    “Aunt Rachael! Mama! For God’s sake, somebody help me!”
    The only response was the steadily increasing roar of the fire.
    Laura had never felt so alone before. In spite of the tides of heat washing over her, she felt cold inside. She shivered.
    Although her head throbbed worse than ever, and although the abrasion above her right eye continued to weep blood, at least she was having less trouble keeping her eyes focused. The problem was that she didn’t like what she saw.
    She stood statue-still, transfixed by the deadly spectacle of the flames. Fire crawled lizardlike down the steps, one by one, and it slithered up the rail posts, then crept down the rail with a crisp, chuckling sound.
    The smoke reached the bottom of the steps and enfolded her. She coughed, and the coughing aggravated the pain in her head, making her dizzy again. She put one hand against the wall to steady herself.
    Everything was happening too fast. The house was going up like a pile of well-seasoned tinder.
    I’m going to die here.
    That thought jolted her out of her trance. She wasn’t ready to die. She was far too young. There was so much of life ahead of her, so many wonderful things to do, things she had long dreamed about doing. It wasn’t fair. She refused to die.
    She gagged on the smoke. Turning away from the burning stairs, she put a hand over her nose and mouth, but that didn’t help much.
    She saw flames at the far end of the cellar, and for an instant she thought she was already encircled and that all hope of rescue was gone. She cried out in despair, but then she realized the blaze hadn’t found its way into the other end of the room after all. The two points of fire that she was seeing were only the twin oil lamps that had provided her with light. The flames in the lamps were harmless, safely ensconced in tall glass chimneys.
    She coughed violently again, and the pain in her head settled down behind her eyes. She found it difficult to concentrate. Her thoughts were like droplets of quicksilver, sliding over one another and changing shape so often and so fast that she couldn’t make sense of some of them.
    She prayed silently and fervently.
    Directly overhead, the ceiling groaned and appeared to shift. For a few seconds she held her breath, clenched her teeth, and stood with her hands fisted at her sides, waiting to be buried in rubble. But then she saw that the ceiling wasn’t going to collapse—not yet.
    Trembling, whimpering softly, she scurried to the nearest of the four high-set windows, It was rectangular, approximately eight inches from sill to top and eighteen inches from sash to sash, much too small to provide her with a means of escape. The other three windows were identical to the first; there was no use even