Fire in the Wall

by S G Dunster

  Magma gun. It was the first weapon for my quiver, in case things went . . . unfortunately, as Eap had put it.

  After a lot of musing, rehashing and rethinking, I sat up again.

  A notebook and pen—just like mine at home, only not tattered and full of scrawls and sketches. Fresh. Clean.

  I opened it, and began to sketch and write.

  I fell asleep on my book, but didn’t realize it until Lil shook me awake. “We’re here,” she hissed, “hovering right over the plateau.”

  I sat up slowly. She was right. Everything was very quiet. No rumble of engines, no sway from the whir of fans competing with the balloon that held us aloft.

  “Come on. We’re going down right away. It’s going to take a lot of work, exploring this thing.” She pointed out the window.

  It was getting lighter. The sky—everything. There was a bloom of sunrise colors in the east. “They’re trying to find us again,” I said.

  “They’ll still take some time. They’ve got a lot of territory to keep track of. They will find us, but we have some time. I hope.”

  “Me too,” I said, gazing down on the giant, table-like mountain that reared up underneath us. After all the distant land, the tiny trees, it was startling to see the wide expanse of rock up so close. “Are we landing on it?”

  “Us, not the Whippoorwill. We need to be able to take off fast, in case. We’re keeping the ship in the sky.”

  “Has Eap already given the orders?”

  Lil shrugged, gave me a narrow stare. “You were asleep. Captain.”

  I narrowed my eyes in return.

  “You can tell them to let down the ladders.” She shrugged. “If you need something to make you feel all command-y.”

  I gave Lil a look. “How about parachutes?” I suggested. “Ladders didn’t work too well last time.”

  “Oh.” Her face scrunched adorably. I couldn’t suppress a smile, seeing it. “Right, they didn’t.”

  We ran out onto the deck. Eap was there already, standing at the rail. I closed my eyes and pictured a parachute bag on my back, the straps tight around my shoulders and chest, cinched over my thighs. The cord. What would happen when I pulled it? A puff of super-lightweight nylon, big as a house, the exact color of the sky.

  There was a whirl of wind, and the balloon shook, the ship swinging wildly on its anchor-ropes.

  “I’m worried,” Eap said. His coat flapped behind him like he might take off. He pointed above us. I looked up at the strange swirl of clouds and sky . . . and river.

  It was the Henry’s Fork River, which ran through our town. There were the dark silhouettes of fish. I could see the bridge. The bridge over the river, and the spray of water off the rock in the middle of the falls that always reminded me of a Comanche Feathered Headdress.

  “It’s there,” I murmured, clutching the rail, my parachute pack weighing on my back.

  “The meeting of the firmaments,” Eap nodded. “We’re not going to be able to land here. The turbulence is too harsh.” He shoved off the rail, and ran to the engine room, shouting. “Turn around! Turn around!”

  In the swirl of cloud pillaring over the plateau, there were images from my town. I saw a hint of my school, the elementary school with its glass arch. The one stoplight in town. The grocery store. The river, sparkling and bright, the green of spring creeping up the rocks on shore.

  “Spring,” I muttered to myself. “Really?”

  Had we been gone that long? No, it was just that time of year. The breaking of spring.

  “We can go home,” I murmured. The boundary was hazy, but thin. “If Hans sent something through there,” I leaned up, staring, “we could go through, too.”

  “Logan?” Lil grabbed my shoulder and shook me. “Come on, we’ve circled away. We’ve got to get to the— “

  “We can go home. We just have to fly up through that. Hans went through, right?”

  Lil shook her head. “He sent his imprint through. The Nightingale. She came through and brought his thoughts . . . him, with her.”

  “We have to try. We can go home, Lil. This would just be . . .” I shrugged. “Done. We’d be back.”

  “Lo, it’s not a good idea,” Lil’s fingers were talons digging into my flesh. “Eap said it was dangerous. He lost it, knowing Hans had even sent his imprint through. And the Grimms know about it now. They—”

  “Whatever.” I shook her off. “You just want to meet your Grey Man.”

  She blinked, and took a step back.

  “You’ve been trying to keep me here all along in this . . . whatever it is. Dream. Delusion. You’ve been forcing me along this ridiculous . . .” I shook my head. “I’m done playing, Lil. No more airships, no more castles, no more freaking treehouses. I’m ready to be done. Stay here if you want. I’m leaving.” I pointed up. “My mind is giving me an out. I’m taking it.” I climbed up onto the rail.

  “No.” Lil grabbed at my legs. “You aren’t. Dumb-butt.”

  I kicked, and unluckily, or luckily, got her in the center of the chest. She went sprawling, choking on her breath.

  Standing there, shivering a little as the broad wall of wind hit me full force, balanced on the polished wood of the rail, I closed my eyes and pictured a frame of metal—aluminum— and great, triangular wings of stretched canvas, broad above me. A glider.

  I opened my eyes. There they were: bright nylon wings, stretched a dozen feet on either side of me. They lifted and ballooned with the wind.

  I took a breath and threw myself off the rail.

  The air caught under my wings, leveling me.

  I tilted, turning toward the whirling current of air.

  As soon as I hit it, it swept me up, tearing at me, tumbling me, sending me screaming high like I was a leaf in an enormous dust devil. There were chunks of twisted black branches with grasping twigs, chunks of plateau rock . . . and cardboard, plastic bags, loose papers.

  Debris from two worlds. A rotting, dead fish from the river spun by me, circling back up. I clenched my jaw and followed it. If it can come down and go up, so can I.

  Sky, Grimwoods, and St. Anthony, swirling all around me. A jagged branch clocked me in the face. I shouted, hung onto my wings and tilted crazily. The ground twisted underneath me, wildly askew, tilting one way, then another.

  St. Anthony, I thought, there are pieces of you all around me. All I need is to go a bit higher . . . a bit higher. I’ll burst through to you. I’ll emerge from the river, wet and dripping. I’ll swim. I’ll fly. Just a bit higher.

  As I rose, the wind grew stronger, stronger. I went from barely managing the strong gusts of wind to losing all control. I was being thrown. Tossed, torn. With a crack, one of the metal wing frames snapped off. The wind whisked me up in the air and tossed me crazily, dangling wildly from the wrecked frame.

  “Drop!” A tinny noise hit my ear. “Drop, Logan!”

  I closed my eyes, trying to take deep breaths. The world flashed up and down.

  Don’t let go, I told myself. Keep moving. It’s just a threshold. If you keep going… if you don’t die… if you aren’t crushed, you live. Like being born.

  “Logan!” It was Lil’s voice, screeching. That odd, tinny quality couldn’t mask her distinctive way of talking. Like she was addressing a world full of morons who couldn’t understand unless she pronounced every consonant. “You’re not going to make it! We need you!! I need you!

  I clung tightly to the crossbar that held my wings—now a tattered mass of trash. I was shivering, hating and yet knowing it wasn’t going to work.

  The monster tossed me up. Threw me down. Tossed up, down.

  I couldn’t physically climb through the calm eye of a tornado. I was at the mercy of this wind.

  What if I thought of a current . . . a strong, broad current that would take me up and out?

  Jaw clenching hard, I told a story of winds braiding together. Picturing it intensely, I saw gusts lifting up my one good wing, tumbling me higher and higher until I brea
ched water and sky.

  I opened my eyes.

  I was plummeting toward the ground. My wing was a rainbow of nylon ribbons. Why hadn’t it worked? I tried to think of whole, smooth wings, but I was falling. I couldn’t think of anything but that I was falling. The earth raced up to meet me, a pit of dread in my stomach.

  “Drop!” A voice commanded. Brassy, again, like it came through a horn. Not Lil this time. Eap’s terse, sarcastic tones. “Let go of the wings!”

  I clung for a moment, and finally let go of the metal frame.

  I was falling more slowly, but still falling. I could see them now—Lil and Eap, dark dots on the red surface of flat rock that expanded to fill my view.

  “Pull the cord!” The tinny voice shouted again. “Idiot boy. Pull the cord!”

  I reached up to my shoulder and found nothing. I grabbed for my other shoulder and found a hard plastic ring. I jerked it, and just as I’d hoped and pictured, a giant circle of fabric erupted, then gusted with air. The world came to a full stop, the harness—bright orange—jerked my trunk hard enough that I almost threw up.

  Lil and Eap—I could see now that next to them, bent on the rocky ground, was an aircraft—a biplane. Huge, spinning rudder. A three seater. Lil was holding a brass cone-shaped thing, the horn she and Eap been yelling through to try to get through to me.

  I was a dozen yards above them and drifting down quickly. She brought it away from her mouth.

  “You. Are. Stupid.” She spit on every consonant.

  I landed on shaky legs, which collapsed under me as a tent of sky blue fell over me. I detangled myself from the ropes of the parachute, pushed through all the billows of material, and came back out into the rising sunlight.

  “There’s blood,” Eap said. He’d been about to grab me, but he snatched his hands back.

  “Stupid,” Lil repeated, and kicked me right in the face.

  I roared and grabbed at my nose, which was spurting more blood. A fountain of blood. I swore, every dirty word I’d ever heard coming out of my mouth for the first time in that moment.

  Lil’s face went from a mask of cold fury to eyebrows arched in surprise, little fluttering blinks of blond eyelashes. She stared at me. I glared back at her, hand pressed to my face, blood dripping down my chin. “If you’re such a genius,” I slurred, “how come we’re down here, Lil? Huh?”

  Her expression smoothed out into scary blankness. She folded her arms and regarded me coolly.

  “Blood,” Eap repeated.

  He was pale. He was always pale, but now he was paler than usual. Sheet-paper white. I looked up at him, at the gleam of horror in his eyes, and snorted.

  It didn’t help with the blood. Lil swished her hand, and a rag—the exact flowered dishcloth that hangs from the oven handle at home—fell in my lap. I pressed it to my face, grateful that it was icy and cold, as if soaked in river water. “You’re scared of blood?” I asked.

  Eap gave me a narrow look.

  “How did you handle my fingers, then, and your . . . eye?”

  “He passed out after that.” Lil’s voice was dangerously flat. “I mopped up after the two of you. Both flat on your backs. Wusses.” She hissed on the consonants again, and studied the plane. “We made stuff, and we’re here in the Grimwoods.”

  “Above the woods,” Eap corrected.

  “Still, we don’t have much time. Let’s start looking.”

  It was there above me still. My mind seemed to swim with it—pieces of river. Buildings oozing into visibility and then fading out, around each other. Flashes of gas station. Of park. Of street, and house, and school and store. Roads, and river. Trees. Not Grimwoods trees. St. Anthony trees.

  “It’s there,” I said quietly. “It’s right . . . there.”

  “Much harder to see what you cannot reach.” Eap knelt down next to me. “Much harder, to watch and know it’s lost to you.”

  “It’s not lost.”

  Eap shrugged. “As you say.”

  “It better not be. It won’t be.”

  “But this is not a portal you can penetrate,” Eap said. “And we are in danger of losing ourselves, much less a piece of crust, Logan.” He grabbed my shoulder, and pulled me up, fastidiously avoiding the spatter of blood down my shirt. “You’ve lost a great deal. If you want any claim on it, you’ve got to leave it behind now.” His eyes fixed on mine. “You have to live here in the present. Whether you wish to be here or not.”

  “I can’t live . . . where things aren’t real,” I replied.

  He knelt, his face inches from mine. “This is real,” he breathed. His breath was foul—liquor and un-brushed teeth. “And we may yet find a way back to crust. When the boundary is rock, tunnel, earth, where change is not so constant and overwhelming, we may find a small way through to another world. But with moving air, in a storm, any small ways change rapidly, and do not stay. This particular storm,” Eap said, pointing up at the sky, “it will rise and descend. And as you rise closer to the portal, it becomes more changeable. More unpredictable. Billows of two worlds fighting. The fighting of firmaments, told by two different planes. It will tear you, and also change you. Hans stood often at the plateau’s top, and he could see a clear way through to send his imprint. But even he knew not to attempt to send himself through it.”

  “Have you tried it?”

  “No.”

  “Of course you haven’t. You said you’d die if you crossed.” My voice was hoarse. I wanted to yell. To throw something. “So how do you know?”

  “I’ve been told. By those who’ve seen others try.”

  I snorted.

  “Sometimes, Logan, it’s good to rest on the wisdom of others, rather than experience the result of poor choices.”

  “You sound like my mom.”

  “You must miss her.” His good eye was hollow, shadowed. Tired. “Mothers are no easy loss.” He held my gaze, then turned away.

  I sat there, looking up at the sky—the coil of clouds, the dark flecks of debris gathering, then spreading, then gathered again. “She probably thinks I’m dead.”

  “But you are not,” Eap said quietly. “You are here, Logan. On another plane, in another world, but very much alive.”

  Air on my skin. My heart beating in my chest. I was thirsty, my tongue dry and clinging to the roof of my mouth. I felt alive. Was Eap right? Was he real?

  “We need to hurry,” Lil’s sharp voice cut through my thoughts. I ignored her.

  Did it matter?

  Yes, it did.

  The image of Dad was coming back. Dad in his rocker. Staring, but not seeing. He was living somewhere else. And we were stuck with his empty body, the reminder of him, and the absence of him.

  It hurt so much.

  I couldn’t even feel how much it hurt. To have him, to not have him. To be real, and yet, not real. To live someplace, and to not really be living in it.

  But what choice did I have?

  I stood slowly, putting my palms to the grit of dirt, the hardness of the stone under me. I was on solid ground right now, wasn’t I?

  What if, I reminded myself, my body is an empty shell, and I’m breaking her heart right now? My mom’s? What if I was in a room right next to my Dad’s?

  She would take care of us. Love us anyway. It would hurt her.

  If I was gone, though. If she was looking for me, for Lil. That would hurt her, too. And what could I do about it?

  I was here.

  And things were, if I could admit it to myself, easier. I could control what I saw. I could do something about what I saw.

  Whether I was gone, or empty, I was not hurting my mother nearly as much as I had been. When she’d been watching me lose grip on reality. When I’d hurt someone—Mrs. Sanders that time, but maybe, eventually her.

  Like my father.

  I grabbed my face, felt the spatter of hot tears on the palms of my hands. I dug into my temples, my scalp, and the fresh bite of pain was reassuring . . . frightening.

  I was her
e.

  Where I needed to be.

  Lil . . . she’d been . . .

  Right.

  I pulled my hands away and looked at her. She sat there, staring at me, her face intense in that way she always looked when she was thinking hard . . . or waiting for something.

  I stood. “Right. So, what do we do now, Eap?”

  Eap reached into his pocket. “Here.”

  He handed me a pen. Black wood, with a rusty nib that left a bloom of ink in my palm as I took it.

  “It’s from the crust,” Eap said. “Above. It came with me. It has provided me with comfort and reference, but it is time for me to let go of that. You, however,” he gestured vaguely, and shrugged. “It’s time you wrote on the map. Eh, boy?”

  The slim, dark thing reminded me of a wand—like in Harry Potter. The wand that chooses the master. Ebony. Dragon heartstring. Onyx ink. The tip was still pricking my palm—Eap’s pen.

  Poe’s pen. Because I knew that was who he was. I knew it. Edgar Allan. The poet. The man, here with me, in the flesh.

  A flush of feeling rose inside of me—exultation, wonder—spreading and tingling to every extremity. This was a gift I’d never have on the crust. I gripped it, fingered it, and placed it in my pocket, thinking of a zipper to shut it safe against my hip.

  “It is not magic,” Eap said dryly, seeing my look. “It’s simply a pen. The words come from here.” He tapped his forehead. “Now, to strategize. How do we find an aggrandizing old fool, who is hiding from the world on, or in, thousands of feet of sandstone plateau?”

  I walked and tried to ignore the throb of bruises. This was one solid plateau. I’d fallen on it, and it was definitely firmament. It was rocky and running with water. Streams crisscrossed the top—though from what source, I wasn’t sure. It hadn’t rained, and there was no snow to melt. I guess it was just part of the telling. Streams on the plateau. No explanation needed.