Fire: Fog, Snow, and Fire

by Caroline B. Cooney

  She held up her hands, flat, like a barricade. “Don’t touch me.”

  “Chrissie,” said Benj blankly, “what’s going on? Nobody’s going to touch you. What are you afraid of? Mr. Gardner’s an old friend of your parents’.”

  The air was humid, and the world hummed.

  “All we need is a little talk, Chrissie,” said Mr. Gardner in a slow, soothing voice. An attendant’s voice. A white-uniformed guard’s voice. It oiled its way across the truck, even as his shoes slid across the truck, getting closer and closer. His hands were out, too, ready to grab her wrists. He had his car parked like that to block her escape. Probably his car had no handles on the inside. Probably once she was in that car, she was in it forever.

  Like Val.

  At seventeen, her own mother agreeing to shut her up forever. Forever. Forever. Christina backed into the far corner. It was not a large truck. There was not much corner. “Leave me alone.”

  “I have to talk to you, Christina,” he said. His voice was silky, like all enclosures, like all traps.

  Christina. Child of wind and sand, tides and isles. “No, don’t lock me up!” she screamed. “I can’t stand it!” She jumped over the edge of the truck, landing lightly on her sandals. Benj circled the truck to grab her. Mr. Gardner jumped off after her.

  “I’m your parents’ friend!” shouted Mr. Gardner, coming after her. “Don’t be afraid of me.”

  She had never run so fast. She had not known she was capable of running so fast. She reached the sidewalk and saw the Shevvingtons’ van at the other end of the street. They had blocked her off. They were on all sides.

  The only sounds on earth were the smacking of Christina’s sandals on pavement and the heaving of her lungs. In silence the Shevvingtons lunged for her, in silence Mr. Gardner chased her, in silence Benjamin tried to cut her off.

  In the west, the sun chose an angle that was piercing and harsh. Christina’s hair was on fire with it, melting. She felt the heat, felt her separate colors, and then — no color at all. They’ve come for me and taken my color, thought Christina. I’ll be white, like the sheets in the storm cottage and the uniforms at the Institute.

  Her feet slapped the pavement. Wharf, rat, wharf, rat, wharf, rat, wharf, said the rhythm of her running.

  Up Breakneck Hill she ran; through the thick green doors of Schooner Inne; into the cold silent house where Evil lived. She bolted the doors behind her, so nobody could get in: nobody, no matter how many keys they carried and how well they called the fog.

  She took the stairs two at a time. She flung open the door to her bedroom: the guest room of fire and isles. It was empty. She flung open the door to guest room number 7: the room of Val, of crimson and violet. It was empty. Empty in the closet, empty under the bed, empty in the blanket chest, empty behind the curtains. “Val!” screamed Christina. “Val, where are you? We have to go!”

  She ran up to the third floor to her old room, with its peeling paint and its single dark window. It was empty. The mattress was stripped. The posters were gone. The lamp had no bulb. “Val! Val!” shrieked Christina. “They’re coming! We have to go!”

  She looked in the boys’ room. She looked in the room that Dolly and Anya had once shared. She looked in the cupola.

  Empty. Empty. Empty.

  Like our souls, thought Christina. Like all the girls before us.

  She ran down the stairs, ran down and down and down among the forest of white banisters, while the house whispered, Chhhhhrrrrisssssstina! Chhhhrrrrisssssstina! The tide slammed against the foundations and the house rocked. Her heart and soul rocked with it, shaken inside her ribs, thrown against her hope. She ran through the hall, she tore through the kitchen, she ripped open the cellar door. “Val, where are you?”

  Brown hair emerged from the floor. Insane brown eyes stared out of pale, scared skin.

  “Val?” whispered Christina.

  But it was not Val. It had fingers like Val, and bones like Val, and skin like Val, but there was no person inside it. Its eyes flew around like small birds.

  “It’s me,” whispered Christina.

  Val slithered out like an animal and crawled up to Christina, making little whimpery noises. Her touch was clammy and damp, like frogs.

  “The alone,” said Val. “The alone got me.”

  Christina could feel the alone. It was under the house, hot and panting. It was up the stairs, crouching and sucking. It was in the air, ghostly and sightless.

  FfffffFFFFFFFFFFFF, said the house.

  FffffFFFFFFFFFFFF, said the sea.

  I am granite of the Isle, she reminded herself. I am Christina Romney and I am afraid of nothing. “I’m here now. You’re not alone.” I’m lying, she thought. When I first came here, Mr. Shevvington wanted me to make a list of all the things I am afraid of. For his Fear Files. I remember Anya filled it out. But I wouldn’t do it. I didn’t want him to know what I’m afraid of. But he knew anyway. He knew before I ever got to Schooner Inne.

  Val’s eyes widened.

  “I am not afraid,” said Christina. But she was afraid. She was afraid of being alone, and unloved, and unwanted. She was afraid of falling backward, of the Shevvingtons’ plans.

  Val’s eyes grew wider still: holes for Christina to fall in. “I will always be alone,” she said. Her voice was dead and lost.

  “No,” said Christina loudly. She felt that the louder they talked, the more she could scare off the alone. “Come back, Val. You’re not alone. I’m here.” She dragged Val into the kitchen but she could go no further. She felt as if she had dragged Val a hundred miles.

  They fell into chairs at the table. The room had the thick, dull heat of closed-up rooms in summer. The only cheerful spot in the entire dreary kitchen was a bowl of oranges in the center of the table. Christina lifted one as if it were a leaden weight. “Here. Let’s have an orange.” She knew they should be running. The Shevvingtons, Mr. Gardner, and Benj were on their way, closing in. But she could not move. She was sapped of energy. Is this what a maple tree feels like when they tap its juices? she thought. Is the tree tired and its leaves droopy and then rooted forever to one place and can never move on?

  Val stared at the round, bright fruits as if they were unknown to her; as if they grew on other planets, in other eons. “No, thank you,” she said.

  Trees can’t move on anyway, thought Christina. I’m definitely going insane. But I have to get Val out of the alone first.

  Christina felt it: The alone came up from the cellar on the sea wind, full of damp and decay. It touched her bare ankles and crept up her bare legs. She tried to brush it off, like insects, and it swarmed around her jackhammering head, like wasps.

  I’m half here, she thought. Like being half in the water. My tide is rising. Or is it ebbing? Where is the rest of me? Drowning?

  “I’ll peel one for you,” Christina offered. She dug her fingernails into the orange peel, and the air suddenly smelled of citrus: It was a sharp, tangy, good smell. It killed off the alone that was lingering by their shoulders, touching their hair. “Doesn’t it smell wonderful?” said Christina, holding it up, wafting it around like incense.

  A smile touched Val’s lips. “It smells like Christmas.” She touched the orange skin lightly with one finger, exploring memories. “And all the things I don’t have anymore,” she said sadly.

  “But they’ll come back now, Val,” said Christina. “You’ll be well and everything good will be yours.”

  Val laughed. Her laugh was bright and brittle. It had a crack in it, like an old piece of pottery. She looked at Christina as an ancient crone looks at innocence. “No,” said Val. “I think when you’ve lost childhood, you’ve lost it forever.”

  Chapter 16

  “CHRISSIE,” SAID VAL. HER lovely eyes were half hidden by falling lids almost transparent: The tiny veins were maps of blue.

  You can see right through her, thought Christina. “What, Val?” She felt like taking a nap. Or two naps. She had never been so tired in
her life. She wondered if her eyes looked like Val’s. How did sleep restore eyelids?

  Val leaned forward, so limp and exhausted she folded down over the table and the orange peels. “They know I’m here.”

  “Who knows?”

  “The Shevvingtons.”

  “They do not! If they knew, they’d turn you in.”

  Val shook her head. “Cats don’t always kill the mouse, you know. Sometimes they catch it in their teeth and shake it around, and drop it, and let it run a few feet, and then catch it again.”

  Christina’s big, old house and barn on the island had a dozen cats, and perhaps a thousand mice. She knew cats and mice. She said, “Did the Shevvingtons see you in here, Val?”

  “No. But they laughed. The way they did each time they visited me at the Shoreline Institute. Gloating. Knowing.”

  In the hot, still, musty house Christina began shivering.

  “Mrs. Shevvington purrs,” said Val.

  The house closed in on them like an envelope, sealing them in with the stickiness of Mrs. Shevvington.

  “I lay under the bed in my room,” said Val, “and the bedcovers draped down so low I was completely hidden. They stood in the doorway and laughed like leopards. Furry and spotted. Then they went downstairs and lit a fire in the fireplace. I got out from under the bed and I ran into your room Christina.”

  “Which of my rooms?”

  “The attic.”

  “There’s no place to hide in there.”

  “There’s a blanket chest. I got in there and shut the lid on myself.”

  “You could have suffocated!”

  “It doesn’t close that tight. I checked first. Anyway, the Shevvingtons were showing the Inne to a couple who wanted to buy it and when they got up to the second balcony, they looked in the empty room that Anya and Dolly used to have, and they looked in the room that Michael and Benj share — but they stood outside your door, Chrissie, and they laughed, and they said to the couple, ‘This is just like the other rooms, but we haven’t cleaned it out yet. There are things in it we’re going to throw away.’ ”

  The girls looked at each other.

  Things in it the Shevvingtons were going to throw away.

  “Us,” whispered Val.

  As if they had not listened to earlier, softer, warnings, the tide began slamming against the house. It pounded and pounded, like fists on wood. “When I was in the cellar,” Val whispered, “the house called your name, Chrissie. I think they’ll throw you away first.”

  Christina’s head throbbed. She could no longer tell if the noise was the tide, or the world, or her own brain. I need earplugs, she thought. Unless all the noise is really me, in which case I need an ice-cream scoop, to scoop it all out of my head.

  What a weird idea. Perhaps this was the way people went insane. They decided they didn’t want the insides of their heads anymore and scooped it out like ice cream and let it all melt.

  She was going in and out of her mind like a cartoon character caught in a revolving door. Briefly Christina swung into her mind and her mind rushed on, dumping her somewhere else.

  Chhhhhrrrrrrissssssstina, said the house.

  Come, Chhhhrrrrrissssssstina.

  Crazy, thought Christina. I’m going crazy.

  She stood up and walked away, as if crazy were a destination: a seat at the kitchen table, a place you could vacate if you just picked yourself up and walked off.

  Suddenly the pounding took on form and meaning.

  Christina rolled her eyes and heaved a sigh of disgust. It wasn’t the tide. It was Benj and Mr. Shevvington, and probably that Mr. Gardner. Pounding on the doors, yelling her name. “I forgot I bolted the doors on the inside. Val, you have to hide.”

  “There’s no point in hiding. They know I’m here.”

  “They think you’re in the bedrooms. Go back to the cellar. They’ll never look there.”

  “I can’t go back in the cellar. The alone will get me.”

  “There’s no such thing as the alone. It won’t get you. Take an orange with you.” Christina bundled Val toward the cellar door.

  “But what about that Mr. Gardner?” cried Val. “What if they take you away and I’m still in the cellar? What if I’m trapped down there forever? Chrissie, you can’t do this to me. They’re taking you, I can feel them taking you. You —”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Christina, opening the cellar door.

  Val staggered down the steps, into the seaweed-slick dark. “No,” she whimpered, clinging to the splintery wooden rail with her left hand. With her right hand, she clung to Christina. “You come down here with me,” she said, and her fingers wrapped and crawled up Christina to find a better grip.

  “I can’t. I have to save us. I have to let them in.”

  “That won’t save us! That’s how they’ll get us. Chrissie, let me back up. Into the light. Into the world. I can’t stay down here.”

  Christina peeled Val off and backed up the steps. “Ssssshhh. Don’t make any noise.”

  The cellar made its own noises. Whispering, folding, creaking noises. Noises that slunk forward and crept through their legs. In the dark, among the spiderwebs and the abandoned, moldy boxes of things nobody wanted, Val inched her way to the furnace. It heated water even in the summer. She leaned on it, soaking up its warmth like an infant trying to find a mother substitute.

  “You okay?” said Christina. “Can I shut the door now?”

  Val laughed insanely.

  Christina Romney shut the door.

  “She’s one of them,” Val told the furnace. “She’s part of it all. She wants me down here. With the alone.”

  The shadows closed in.

  Val’s mind shut down.

  The furnace chuckled to itself.

  Chapter 17

  CHRISTINA WAS ON THE wharf, waiting for her mother to come in on Frankie’s boat. It was a clear day: The sea was sparkling glass. Christina felt as if she could see through the curving horizon of ocean all the way to Burning Fog Isle. She loved the wharf: the stacks of lobster traps, the lapping water, the clacking of ropes and chains against flagpoles and masts.

  Benj stood as solid as the wooden pilings on which the wharf was built. “Chrissie, what is all this about? Mr. Gardner wouldn’t tell me. The Shevvingtons wouldn’t tell me. And now you won’t tell me, either.”

  She could not tell him.

  The night had been so long. There had been storms, and every streak of lightning and every boom of thunder seemed to call her name. The ocean had raged, hurling itself against the cliff, the waves reaching for Schooner Inne like drowning sailors trying to get out of the water.

  She had not slept. She had lain in her warm bed, in her room of fire and islands, and thought of Val, alone in the darkness of the cellar.

  At two in the morning she got up. She slid out of bed, slid out of her room, slid toward the stairs — only to find Mr. Shevvington standing there, still in his suit, as if he never undressed, as if he had come that way: tailored and pinstriped and perfect, like a Ken doll you zipped back into its carrying case when you were done playing with him. “Going somewhere, Christina?” said Mr. Shevvington, and he laughed.

  “I’m getting a drink of water,” she said with dignity.

  “The bathroom is the other way,” said Mr. Shevvington, smiling, enjoying himself.

  Did the Shevvingtons know about the alone, creeping up, swarming around their ankles, trying to pull Christina and Val both underwater, to drown in the ocean of their minds? They must. Perhaps they were the alone.

  She had gotten a drink of water. And stood in the bathroom and wept, because she could not check on Val. Could not tiptoe down and cuddle her in the dark, in the endless night.

  I’m wrong, Christina had thought, lying in bed again. I shut her up for no reason. I can’t save Val from anything. I’m only making it worse.

  She tried to imagine spending an entire night down there in that cellar.

  “Talk to me, Christina!�
� said Benjamin on the way to the dock to meet Christina’s mother the next morning.

  She laughed. It was a queer, shaky laugh, because she had had no sleep to back it up. “That’s good coming from you,” she teased, “who only started talking last week.”

  Christina stared at Schooner Inne, where she had learned about Evil. The glass in the high cupola caught the morning sun and blinded her. She decided to test Benj. See if he could understand. “Think of Anya,” she said to him, picking her words carefully. “The Shevvingtons chose Anya as a victim. They attacked her in every way. Humiliating her, setting her up, terrifying her, undermining her courage. She began to lose her mind. And then her looks, her character, her grades. That’s evil, Benj. It’s the Shevvingtons’ hobby. And with me, with Val, they —”

  “Christina, stop it! Anya was trying too hard. She got too nervous to stay in school and she dropped out for a while. It happens to a lot of kids. They take a little rest and they’re fine. There is no evil, Chrissie, no plot.”

  Christina was exhausted and desperate. But Benjamin Jaye was furious. Every bone, every muscle was tight and full of anger. “The reason you’ve had problems with Mr. and Mrs. Shevvington is your bad attitude, Chrissie. You made up your mind from the beginning not to get along. The very first day in September when we got off Frankie’s boat, you were spoiling for a fight. And when spooky things happened, you blamed them on the Shevvingtons. I thought you were making everything up. When we found out about the Shevvingtons’ insane son, and that you were right, we apologized, Chrissie. But you still wanted the Shevvingtons to be evil. Evil, evil, evil! That’s all we heard from you.” Benj took a breath. His lungs filled, his T-shirt stretched, his big shoulders lifted and stayed there. “Christina, some people are dumb and some are mean and some lose their minds, but nobody is evil.”

  He wants the world to be like himself, thought Christina. Solid and secure and comprehensible. He wants a perfect match: engines that work, tides that change, people who are reliable. Once I thought the world was like that. I thought all parents were like my parents: perfect and loving. I thought all teachers were like my teacher on the Isle: good and kind. I thought all grown-ups could be trusted.