The crowd began to move, with more speed and elbows than had been suggested. The murmur of questions became a rising buzz of alarm, then someone yelled, “There’s a fire!”
Laura and her partner had come together when the music stopped. They went along together, turning slowly in an eddy of pressing bodies. “My mother is in the supper room,” he said. He began to push his way against the current, aiming at the high door of the supper room, visible over all the flower-decked and brilliantined heads.
People were shouting the names of relatives and receiving answering shouts. The hall was ringing with calls and throbbing with a clamor of fright. But everyone stayed on their feet, and the room was clearing. Laura went with the flow. She wanted to locate her uncle and aunt, and was sure the quickest way to do that was to get out of the building and into the plaza. She was simply too short to see over the heads of the crowd.
Laura was in Founders Hall when she smelled smoke. Somewhere in the building someone had opened an external door and let in a breeze, the air pressure changed, then the scent of smoke swept across the crowd. The people started and shuddered and, as one, shied away from the smell.
An elbow collided with Laura’s head. She saw stars. When she managed to get her bearings again, she found she was facing backward. Her feet weren’t touching the ground. She was being carried along by the crowd. It was terrifying, and she began to cry out for help.
She caught a glimpse of a bunch of bodies in black formal wear on a dais at one end of the hall. Men, who had fought their way free from the crowd and were now scanning it, looking for their own people. She saw her uncle among them, taller than most. His head was swiveling back and forth—he had heard her screaming but wasn’t able to find her. She lifted an arm and waved to him, and he launched himself off the dais and into the thick of the people. He shoved and swam his way toward her. He picked her up and lifted her over his head, then let the crowd carry him onto the sweeping curves of the wide staircase and down into the street.
Chorley put Laura down. He hurried her clear of the main doors. Once free from danger, the crowd seemed to collect itself and begin to cooperate—for the most part. People hovered, waiting to see who came out, while the police tried to get them to move out of the path of the clanging fire trucks and horse-drawn water tenders.
“Rose was still up in the powder room,” Laura said to her uncle.
He said, “Can you see your aunt?”
They kept hold of each other and turned this way and that searching for the little figure in the gray silk dress. Then Chorley snapped upright and cried out. He pointed. Laura followed his finger and saw that her aunt was on the terrace outside the ballroom, with dozens of other people, all clustered at the stone balustrade and calling down to the crowd. None of them seemed terribly worried, and, as far as Laura was able to tell, they were asking for news, not help.
Chorley gripped Laura’s arms and fixed her with his sternest look. “You stay right there,” he said. “Grace should be fine. It’ll be possible to reach all those people with ladders. I’m going back in to get Rose.”
Laura hung on to him.
“Laura!” he yelled in exasperation, broke out of her grip, and ran back to the still choked exit, dodging firemen unraveling hoses and opening fire nets. He found his way up the steps and through the main doors and vanished from Laura’s sight.
Laura looked up at the People’s Palace. Streetlight caught on the woolly underside of a pall of smoke that didn’t seem to have come from any exterior part of the building. Perhaps it was oozing through the roof, or up an internal air shaft. The smoke hung, quite still and colored only by the lights from the plaza. It looked so innocent, so anticlimactic after the crush of escape. The sounds of human frenzy were dying down. People still called out to loved ones, and there were orders, from police and firemen, and the pounding of pumps and rattle of hose reels and extension ladders.
Then came a deep, bright smash from the building, and flames burst out of an exploded window on the second floor. The crowd shrieked, then moaned. Arms went up, pointing. The innocent fleece of smoke above the building now had the light of fire at its heart.
It was one of the attendants in the dressing room who first noticed the smoke. She supposed it was the smell of scorching and went to check that the two irons had been returned to the stove top. The irons were where they should be, the kettle was still half full, its base in no danger of burning through. For a few moments the woman stood frowning at the stove and sniffing.
Somewhere in the large building a door opened to the outer air, and the faint whiff shifted and became a strong odor. Then, in the cloakroom—the room nearest the hallway—an attendant shrieked as a wisp of smoke coiled in and spread thinly across the ceiling. She ran into the powder room, screaming, “Fire! Fire!”
“Be quiet, child!” her superior commanded.
Rose was before one of the full-length mirrors giving herself a final check. Her face was still too pink, and she was very uncomfortable. She heard the shouting, and, at the same time, the lights wavered as a film of smoke covered them.
Rose picked up her train and hurried out toward the hallway. Everyone else followed her.
They found the hallway filled with a haze of gray-white smoke. But halfway down its length, pouring along the ceiling, as though gravity had reversed itself, was a brown pall, oily and thick.
It was Rose’s instinct to move away from the sight. But she didn’t know what lay the other way. There were no signs pointing to exits—as in the Rainbow Opera. This was a much older building. It still had gaslight on its upper floors, and Rose couldn’t remember ever having noticed fire escapes bolted to the heavy carving of its stone exterior. She pulled her train up, pressed it against her mouth, and, with a quick glance at the woman beside her, set off into the smoke.
After she’d gone a short way, she realized that only three other young women had come with her. Her eyes were streaming. She began to cough through the cloth muffling her mouth. She, and the women who had followed her, turned around and retreated.
Chorley ran up the steps of the building at the same moment that some shift in the air inside the building—a window breaking, a door opening—gave the conflagration a breath of fresh air. He was in the entranceway, pushing through firemen toward the stairs, when the main staircase seemed to open like a dragon’s throat and vomit fire. The flames spat down the stairs and sailed free from their bases, touching curtains and carpet, the beautiful oiled-silk wallpaper, and the deadly, glistening cellophane decorations. Everything flammable caught fire. The firemen staggered back. Chorley was knocked over, and the back of his head hit the marble floor.
Grace was waiting to one side of the jostling group of people who had gathered at the balustrade of the terrace where, they judged, the first ladder would touch down. The people were craning over, watching the ladder swivel and expand as men on the back of a fire truck cranked it into place.
Grace wasn’t in any great hurry. She thought it would be safer to hang back than to join the shoving bunch. Besides, from where she was, she had a better view of People’s Plaza.
Her eyes hadn’t yet found Rose. She’d spotted Chorley and Laura as soon as they appeared. Chorley’s graying gold hair and height made him easy to find in a crowd, and Laura’s dress was highly visible. A moment ago she’d seen Chorley leave Laura and run back to the Palace, passing out of sight under her, where the main entrance was. She knew he was looking for their daughter. Rose wasn’t in the plaza.
Grace’s eyes went back and forth, back and forth.
There was Mamie, standing with her mother, grandmother, and brother. Cas Doran was on the steps of the State Library, with the President and other ministers and dozens of bodyguards and police. It made Grace furious to see all those able bodies in uniforms forming a fence around dignitaries instead of doing something.
Grace looked over her shoulder and into the ballroom, the far end of which was on fire. Only a few moments before, fire h
ad come, following the smoke. It had climbed the vines of cellophane streamers that festooned the entrance to the ballroom. The cellophane went up like a fuse and dissolved into drips of flame. The velvet hangings behind the orchestra ignited.
The fire was more than sixty yards from where Grace stood, but she could hear it. The sound it made was solid and soft, like a huge audience clapping with gloved hands.
Grace tilted her head back and looked up at the façade of the People’s Palace. She saw smoke wafting through only one window on the third floor, a few threads straining into the air above the window’s deep molding, then dissipating. It looked so innocent. It looked like smoke coming from the window of a busy workingmen’s bar.
Grace walked along to the corner of the terrace. She joined a young man who stood with his coat held up over his head as if it could protect him from anything that fell from above. He seemed to sense her approach. He turned and said, “Careful,” and pointed at the tiles beneath her. Smoke seeped between the slabs, and Grace could feel heat through the thin soles of her dancing slippers. The man turned back to the balustrade, dropped his coat, and pointed. Grace looked and saw what he’d been watching.
In the side street facing the State Library, the whole wall of the People’s Palace was ablaze. Smoke poured through every window, and fire through a good half dozen of them. A fire truck and a water tender were in the street, and the cobbles were already submerged. The stream from one hose played in spurts on the building but reached only as far as the second story. The other hose was trained into the side entrance of the Palace. As Grace and the man watched, something moved or collapsed inside the building, and a gout of fire spat out the entrance. It swallowed the men holding the hose, then retreated again, leaving them rolling on the street, their uniforms and skin smoking.
Grace put her hand over her mouth.
The man shouted to her that his mother and sister were up in the third-floor dressing room. “I’m sure of it!” he shouted.
“I think maybe my daughter is too,” Grace said, then burst into tears. She gripped the hair at her temples and held on to it as though it were her only handhold and she was hanging over an abyss. She could see the man had begun to cry too. He was saying, over and over, “That’s where they went in,” about the red maw of the side entrance. “That’s where I left them.”
Some of Grace’s hair came away in her hands. It hurt. She looked at the smoke seeping through the tiles and said, “We should move. The fire is under us.” She took his arm and led him away, back to the balustrade but not into the crowd. A window exploded over their heads and showered them with glass. The crowd on the terrace howled, and a number of people scrambled up and knelt balancing on the stone coping of the balustrade.
After her uncle left her, Laura stood for a few moments watching her aunt, a little isolated figure, head turning back and forth, back and forth. Laura knew that if Rose was anywhere to be seen, Grace would see her. Laura watched. She held her breath, let it go, held it again. But no matter how long or hard she stared, she didn’t see her aunt seeing Rose.
Laura came back to herself. She couldn’t obey her uncle—just stay put and do nothing. Not when she had someone to turn to for help. She looked around for a gap in the crowd and went through it, away from the burning Palace. When she reached the street that led to the river, she began to run. She ran alongside a hose not yet fattened by water. She burst out onto the west embankment and swerved to avoid the firemen and their big pumping truck. They had a hose in the river.
Laura set off toward Market Bridge.
None of the busy firemen noticed as the fleet little figure in coral red silk sprinted by them.
The women shut the cloakroom against the smoke. They retreated from the outside door. Rose ran into the powder room and pulled open the curtains covering one window. She threw up the sash—ignoring the sudden shrieking behind her—and thrust her head out. The window opened onto an air shaft. The air shaft had a jumble of rubbish at its bottom and was already full of smoke.
Someone hauled Rose back and slammed the window shut. It was the head attendant. The woman was more stern than frightened. Rose saw that there was more smoke in the room than before she’d opened the window and instantly understood that, by opening it, she had offered the smoke free passage into their sanctuary. “Sorry,” Rose said.
“The only windows on an outer wall are those above the toilets,” the attendant said. “And they only open a gap.”
Rose ran to look. She made sure she shut the two doors between the dressing rooms and bathrooms. Her caution was unnecessary. The toilet windows were already ajar. They were frosted glass, about fifteen inches high and twenty-five across. Metal catches were firmly screwed into the frames on either side of each window, allowing them to open at an angle, with a gap of perhaps seven inches at their tops.
Rose lowered a toilet seat and climbed onto it. She reached around the tank and gripped the top of the frame with both her hands. Then she lifted her feet and hung her whole weight from the frame, which creaked and buckled. The glass cracked, and most of it dropped out. A large piece scored a cut in Rose’s cheek as it fell. She released the frame and dropped back onto the toilet seat, then tumbled to the floor of the stall. She pressed the back of her gloved hand to the cut and looked up at the angled window frame—still firmly in place, though empty of glass. She picked herself up, shook glass from her gown, and left the toilets.
In the dressing room, the head attendant and the one mother were soaking hand towels in a basin and handing them around.
The head attendant passed Rose another basin and told her to fill it with water in the bathroom and, before she did that, to wet her own gown and hair thoroughly.
Rose went into the bathroom and turned on a tap. Water came in a dribble, then stopped altogether.
The gaslights in the room flared, then dimmed and were extinguished. Rose dropped the basin, and it shattered with a sound like the single stroke of a big bell.
The room in which Rose stood was now dark, except for a fluttering, sullen glow and the rectangles of faint light from the high windows over the toilets.
“Rose!” the attendant shouted. “Come back!”
Rose wasn’t surprised to be known. But it did seem strange and lonely to hear herself summoned out of the dark by a stranger’s voice.
“Nown!” Laura’s shout reverberated in the hollow of the first arch of Market Bridge. She had come only partway down the steps from the embankment. The light from the nearest streetlamp reached no farther.
A shadow appeared out of the blackness and resolved into her sandman. He mounted the steps. She held out her arms, and he picked her up. His limbs felt coarse and very cold. She realized that she was making a comparison between the feeling of being held by Nown, and by the warm and pliant Sandy. “Run,” she said, and held on tight.
Nown bounded up onto the embankment, and Laura let go one arm to point at the pall of red-lit smoke several blocks away above and beyond the buildings. “Faster,” she said. She was out of breath after her run. She wanted to say, “Why didn’t you tell me that the Place was a Nown?” and “You said you were with yourself, but you never said what you meant.” But Nown had picked up his pace so much that his running jolted her and she had to press her head against his shoulder so she wouldn’t suffer whiplash. His body began to heat up and smell like rain on hot stones.
He ran in the shadows of buildings backlit by fire. He bore down on the firemen with the hose in the river, went by them, and turned to follow their hose, turned so fast that a snap of white sparks outlined one of his flexed feet. Laura’s stomach lurched.
He slowed as the street opened out onto the People’s Plaza. He came to a stop and set Laura down.
“Rose is on the third floor,” Laura said. “North side. But you’ll have to shout for her.”
Nown looked at her, and Laura saw the black band of iron sand drain away from his eyes, like dampness seeping through him. The black settled beneath
his cheekbones and over his mouth and jaw. She didn’t know what it meant, the shadow passing down his face, but it made her think of sorrow. Then he jumped away from her and plunged through the crowd, straight at the building. He scattered people—all of whom had their backs to him and their faces toward the fire. The people left reeling in his wake were perhaps able to get a look at the missile of his body only when he was yards beyond them. He sprinted in a straight line and with inhuman speed to the main steps of the building, among the firemen, who at this distance were only strokes of black against a maw of flame. Some of the firemen took a step or two after this mad figure, but they stopped when he ran straight into the flames on the blazing staircase.
Grace saw Chorley carried out of the People’s Palace. She saw him placed on a stretcher and borne away through the crowd. She had lost sight of Laura. She could see the debutantes. Many were draped in borrowed coats, but still all their lustrous white dresses reflected the fire as faithfully as polished silver.
The air between the terrace and the plaza was distorted with heat. Grace could no longer recognize any of the faces below her. She stood, frozen in place, till someone took her arm, drew her to the balustrade, lifted her up, and lowered her onto the ladder. Her feet and hands found its rungs. She looked over her shoulder, saw others well below her making their way down. She began to follow them.
Grace was fit and nimble, and her skirt was a manageable length. She soon caught up to the person below her. Then someone pulled her off the ladder, and for a moment she stood on the vibrating back deck of a fire truck. The air smelled of steam and hot steel. A fireman took her arm and showed her where she could climb down. The cobblestones were drenched. Another fireman drew her back from the truck. She was in the way.
Dreamquake Page 26