How long I remained in my terror-induced swoon I am unable to say. I can only recall a period of utter oblivion, followed by a long—unsettling—and uncannily vivid dream which gradually took shape within the depths of my mind. I was alone on a desolate tropical isle, where the scorching sun beat down with merciless intensity. All at once, I became aware of a strange noise: a low, ominous rumble that grew steadily louder, building to a thunderous crescendo. Glancing around in wonderment and fright, I perceived—in the near distance—the cone of a mountainous volcano, out of whose flattened apex there suddenly erupted a thick column of glowing sparks, followed by a fountain of seething red lava. The ground beneath my feet began to tremble, then shake with all the violence of a cataclysmic earthquake. My whole body began to vibrate in tune with this explosive display of natures fury. Suddenly, from out of the subterranean depths of the volcano, a great booming voice—like that of a pagan deity—began to issue stern and occult commandments.
It was only then that I became aware that I was partially awake. My dream was not a dream at all! The sweltering heat was real So, too, was the violent shaking of my frame. And the voice—whose timbre and inflection I now recognized as peculiarly familiar—was addressing me in loud and insistent words:
“Poe! Wake up! The goldamned house is afire!”
My eyes shot open. A few feet away, I could perceive the face of Colonel Crockett. His skin was slick with perspiration—his dark locks matted and dishevelled—his features wrought into an expression of grim urgency. My senses were still sufficiently bedazed that a few moments elapsed before I became fully conscious of several anomalous circumstances—the lurid, flickering illumination by which I was able to discern Crockett’s face in the darkness of the room—the acrid smoke which stung my eyes and assaulted my nostrils—the crackling sound emanating from just outside the room. Only then did the full—the fearful—the blood-chilling—truth smite my awareness like a thunderbolt.
We were in the midst of a roaring conflagration!
I bolted upright and leapt from the bed. Waving for me to follow, Crockett raced to the doorway of the bedchamber, calling over his shoulder: “Hump it, Poe, or we’ll be fried to a cinder!”
Eyes tearing, throat burning, I dashed from the room on Crockett’s heels and followed him down the long, smoke-filled corridor—only to find, as we approached the landing, that our escape was obstructed by a wavering column of flame that was marching inexorably up the stairwell. Quickly glancing about him, Crockett spotted the closed door of what appeared to be another bedchamber a few feet from where we stood. Leaping to the door, he twisted the knob—then ejaculated a curse.
“Locked!” he cried. Taking one step backwards, he raised his right boot to the door, and—with a single, mighty kick—sent it crashing inward on its hinges. Disappearing inside, he re-emerged a moment later with a bedsheet in his hands.
“It’s shinny down or die, Poe,” said he, looking at me with a savage grin as he tied one corner of the bedsheet to the carved, wooden balustrade and tossed the rest over the side. Clambering over the railing, he gathered the sheet between his hands—forming it into a kind of rope or cable—then slid down this makeshift liƒe-line until he reached its bottommost extent, whereupon he dropped the remaining distance to the floor and landed nimbly on his feet.
“C’mon, Poe!” he called to me from below, cupping his hands to his mouth so as to be heard above the roar of the inferno. “There ain’t nothin to it!”
Fear driving the blood in torrents upon my heart, I repeated the exact procedure I had seen Crockett perform so successfully. Bestraddling the railing, I clutched the sheet with sweat-soaked hands, then half climbed, half slid down the length of the linen. For a moment, I dangled in mid-air, my feet waving wildly. Then—closing my eyes and muttering a silent prayer—I released my hold on the linen and plummeted downward. My feet hit the floor with a thud—I bounced once—and ended up prostrate on my stomach, slightly stunned though otherwise unhurt. Almost instantly, a powerful hand reached down, clutched me by one arm, and yanked me to my feet.
“No time for dilly-dallyin’, Poe. This way!”
So sharp, so suffocatingly dense was the smoke—so fierce and searing the heat—that it was all I could do to keep pace with the frontiersman as he swiftly made his way through the blazing passageways of the house. Choking, coughing, half-blinded by the rivulets of perspiration that streamed from my forehead and into my eyes, I stumbled along at his heels, while, all around us, the conflagration raged in unmitigated fury.
Following my companion through an arched doorway, I found myself back in the great cavernous drawing room, which was now a scene of blinding—of blazing—destruction. The heavy, ancient draperies had been turned into fiery sheets. The art works constituting Asher’s prized collection of paintings were ablaze in their gilded frames. The antique furnishings, including the chairs that Crockett and I had occupied earlier in the evening, had become little more than kindling to feed the insatiable appetite of the fire. Even the carved oaken ceiling had been transformed into a dome of roaring flame.
For the first time, Crockett seemed at a loss. With eyes that blazed as intensely as the surrounding conflagration, he peered through the main doorway of the drawing room, which opened into the corridor that led to the front of the house. Following his gaze, I perceived that the entire corridor was now completely obstructed by what appeared to be a solid mass of flame.
“Trapped!” he cried. “Like a pair o’ coons inside a holler stump!” Frantically, he looked about for another point of egress, while—seeking some relief for my heat-seared lungs—I turned my face upward like a drowning man in desperate search of oxygen.
At that instant, through a swirling cloud of smoke, I perceived a sight which—despite the intensity of the heat—immediately caused my blood to turn cold. Directly above my head hung an enormous wheel-shaped chandelier which depended from a massive braided cord, as thick—under normal circumstances—as the anchor-rope of a whaling vessel. By this point, however, the rope had been so eaten away by the fire that it had been reduced to the apparent thickness of a boot-lace! As I stared upward, as though transfixed by this petrifying sight, the remaining strands of the rope sizzled—snapped—and the great, circular chandelier came crashing downward towards my person!
Frozen with terror, I would certainly have been utterly obliterated—crushed like a beetle of the genus scarabæus under the bootheel of a heedless pedestrian. But in the next instant, I was struck, not from above, but from the side—by a large hurtling object that knocked me off my feet just as the falling chandelier plunged to the floor with a thunderous crash!
It was the frontiersman, who—having spotted my perilous situation—had thrown himself at my immobilized form and saved me from certain destruction!
“Dad fetch it, Poe,” he gasped, raising himself to his knees, “but you are a tolerable sight o’ trou—”
Before he could complete this remark, his attention appeared to be riveted by something several yards away from where I lay. Raising myself to one elbow, I followed his glance and saw at once the ghastly sight that had captured his notice.
It was the lifeless body of our host, suspended directly in front of the more warlike of the two armored figures, the one brandishing an outthrust pike. Asher had been impaled on this fearsome weapon, whose long, spear-like tip had penetrated his breast and emerged, blood-caked, from between his shoulder blades. He hung there like a discarded marionette, arms adroop, knees buckled, head lolling forward.
“Stuck like a worm on a fishhook,” said Crockett. “He’s a goner, Poe—an’ you ’n’ me will be, too, unless we can figger out some way outta—” Gazing hurriedly about him, he suddenly exclaimed, “By God—that’ll do!”
Looking to see what had elicited this reaction, I perceived that Crockett was staring at the wooden display case containing the priceless anatomical model from the studio of the legendary Abbot Fontana. This article of furniture had thus far escaped the flames—though the intensity of the ambient heat had cracked its front panel of glass, behind which the flayed and partially dissected wax torso had begun to melt like a grotesque, anthropomorphic candle.
Springing to his feet, Crockett dashed to the cabinet; then stooped, threw his arms about its sides, and—with a grunt so loud that it could be heard above the crackling of the flames—raised it to the height of his chest. The muscular cords of his neck bulged with exertion as he carried the cabinet several yards away to the tall, Gothic window (whose voluminous curtains were now little more than twin sheets of flame) and heaved it through the crimson panes, which shattered outward with a splintering crash.
“Time to git up ’n’ git, Poe!” Crockett called to me—then turned and disappeared through the gaping hole he had created in the glass.
Scrambling to my feet, I hurried across the floor, climbed through the jagged opening in the shattered window and—after pausing for a moment on the exterior ledge—leapt down several yards and landed in the copious bushes that fringed the rear of the house.
Shaking in every limb, I hurriedly extricated myself from the entangling undergrowth, then staggered towards an open field that lay at some distance from the house. I sank to my knees, rolled onto my back, and lay spread-eagled in the grass, staring upwards at the blackness of the heavens, where shimmering stars commingled with the fiery embers that floated skyward from the blazing house.
Several moments elapsed before I was able to draw myself up into a sitting position. Employing my loose-hanging shirttail as a kind of towel, I wiped the moisture from my stinging eyes and looked about for Crockett. At first, I could see him nowhere. Gradually, however, I became cognizant of a sound drifting above the roar and crackle of the inferno. It was a hoarse male voice, emanating from a point somewhere off to my left. As I strained my ears to listen, I perceived that the voice was repeatedly shouting, “Miz Asher! Miz Asher!”
Rising with a groan to my feet, I made my way in the direction of the sound until, in the unholy crimson glow of the fire, I spotted the frontiersman. Moving as dose to the house as the scorching heat would allow, he was circumambulating the premises, hands cupped to his mouth, calling out the name of Asher’s sister in the evident hope of finding her still alive. Even at a glance, however, I could determine that his efforts were futile. By now, the once-stately manse was little more than an enormous furnace. Billowing clouds of smoke poured through every ruptured window; tall flames shot upward from the roof and danced along the ramparts. It was inconceivable that anyone trapped within those blistering walls could yet be alive.
Hurrying up beside the frontiersman, I laid one hand upon his shoulder. “It is no use, Colonel Crockett,” said I in a voice loud enough to be heard above the noise of the conflagration. “Unless, like ourselves, the mistress of the house has somehow managed to escape, we must forgo the hope of saving her.”
Crockett turned to me with a look of weary resignation. “I reckon you are right, Poe,” he sighed, dropping his hands to his sides. “C’mon!”
With the frontiersman in the lead, we bent our steps to the front of the house, where we discovered—not entirely to our surprise—that our horses, in their instinctive terror of the flames, had managed to tear their reins free of the hitching post and were nowhere in sight. By that point, the extreme, the unprecedented strains of that seemingly endless night of misery and peril had begun to exact their inevitable toll. Overcome with both physical and mental exhaustion, I sank to the ground beneath a towering tree, resting my back upon the gnarled trunk. Crockett—whose exertions had, at the very least, equalled my own—lowered himself beside me. For several moments we sat side by side in utter silence, transfixed by the scene of cataclysmic destruction taking place before our eyes.
At length, I turned my head toward my companion and asked: “In heaven’s name, what happened, Colonel Crockett?”
He opened his mouth to reply but was seized by a paroxysm of coughing. Finally, he shook his head and replied: “Blamed if I know. After you went to roost, me ’n’ Asher headed back to the kitchen and commenced to palaverin’ some more. We was hittin’ his jug at a tolerable pace, too. After a spell, ol’ Asher said he’d best go see how his sister was farin’. I was feelin’ a mite drowsy by then, so I put my head down on my arms and figgered I’d get me a little shut-eye ’til Asher came back. Next thing I know, I’m wide awake and the whole damn house is burnin’ like a canebrake afire.”
At that instant, a thunderous noise—like the roar of a thousand demons—smote upon our ears. Swivelling our heads in the direction of the fearsome sound, we saw the blazing roof collapse inward with an earsplitting crash. An enormous geyser of smoke and flame and fiery cinders erupted into the sky—a fierce blast of scorching air blew the massive front door from its hinges—the ramparts toppled—the very earth beneath our bodies trembled—and the stately and venerable house of Asher was no more!