The sun hung red on the horizon as O came round to the back of the house. As she was climbing the porch stairs, she caught sight of a figure huddled by the door. She jumped back, and then realized it was just a pile of debris. Stepping past it, she pounded on the door. The sound died into the deep hush of the house.
Suddenly she smelled fire. She looked down and saw smoke drifting out lazily under the door. Cupping her hand to the window, she looked in. The dim room inside opened onto a long hall. The far end of the hall was lit by flames. For a moment she thought she saw two figures standing in their midst. But then there was only one.
“Emily!” she screamed as the figure slumped to the floor.
She plucked a loose brick from the pile of debris and smashed the glass in the door. Smoke streamed out into the night. She reached her arm through the ragged hole and groped for the handle. Her hand closed over what felt like a small chill hand, balled into a fist. She gave it a twist, and the door opened.
Dashing into the house, she ran for the hall. The smoke ran to meet her. It wrapped its arms around her, filling her lungs with its searing breath and blinding her eyes. She yanked her shirt up over her mouth and groped her way along the hall.
She hadn’t gone far before dizziness and nausea overwhelmed her. She couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. She no longer knew the way forward or the way back. In some impossibly calm corner of her, she thought, This is the part where you die. A dark hole seemed to open under her, and she tumbled in.
She found herself back at the Green Man, standing high on the shaky ladder outside the shop, staring into that ageless, knowing face. But the cracks had vanished, the flaking paint had fallen away, and life pulsed within the pale green flesh.
He swayed in the wind, and she swayed with him. She looked into his eyes, and he looked back. Instead of creaks, words came. He called her by name. And the vines that were his arms reached out and wrapped themselves around her. She was enfolded in them, lifted lightly up and carried.
Fresh air filled her burning lungs. She breathed in the rich dark smell of soil and leaf mold, felt the cool green dampness of the ravine against her skin as she was gently laid down.
And then there was nothing.…
When she woke, she was lying in the long grass in the backyard of the Linton house. A sickle moon shone down from a sky strewn with stars. Emily lay on the grass beside her, her face streaked with soot, her eyes shut. She looked ghostly pale in the moonlight, and for one terrifying moment, O thought she was dead. But then she saw the faint rise and fall of her chest.
How on earth did we get out of the house? she wondered dully, as she tried to piece together what had happened. The wail of sirens sounded in the distance.
The sirens grew steadily louder. Soon there were lights flashing and firefighters running about, smashing windows, training hoses on the burning house. A pair of ambulance attendants came hurrying into the yard with a stretcher. They lifted Emily onto it and wheeled her off to a waiting ambulance.
O turned and saw Rimbaud, striding from the shadows where the yard fell away into the ravine. He knelt beside her and took her hand in his. She tried to speak, but the effort brought on a fit of coughing.
“Shhh. Don’t try to talk now,” he said as he knelt by her side and assured her everything would be all right. She closed her eyes.
The attendants returned for her. As they were lifting her onto the stretcher, she asked, “Can he ride with me?” A strange look passed between them. When she turned to where Rimbaud had been, she found that he had vanished silently back into the shadows.
The firefighters were still training their hoses on the smoking building, when the attendants wheeled her around to the front of the house and lifted her into the back of the ambulance. One of them slipped an oxygen mask onto her face.
As she felt herself drifting off, she glanced out the ambulance window and imagined she saw Rimbaud standing there, as she had first seen him standing at the window of the Green Man.