The Divide

The ballet of his own death.

But not yet, John decided.

It was not even a thought. It was a denial so absolute that it felt like a seizure. He took a step back, hefted the big hardware-store flashlight and threw it at Roch. The flashlight whirled as it flew, end over end, and it seemed to John that Roch was staring at it, perplexed and wholly attentive, as it impacted squarely against his forehead.

Roch teetered on his heels, lunging forward with the pipe-section for ballast. No good. He sat down hard on the concrete floor. A line of blood seeped out from the impact point on his forehead.

He looked at John with mute, angry amazement.

“Son of a bitch!” he managed.

Began climbing to his feet again, pipe in hand.

John turned and ran.

But who had thrown the flashlight?

This question occupied a brightly lit corner of his mind as he staggered down the increasingly dark and smoky corridor.

Because, he felt different.

Not John or Benjamin.

Some third thing.

It rose and shifted inside him even now. It was large and still wordless. It didn’t have a name; it had never had a name. Some new presence. Or maybe not: not new at all.

Maybe, John thought, it had been there all along.

Roch had cut him off from the ladder where he had climbed up to the second floor; John ran in the opposite direction.

The fire was large and potent now, able to leapfrog the stony breaks between oases of wood and insulation. No part of the building was safe. Already, on the floor above, two of the tiny wire-reinforced windows had been blown out of their frames by the pressure of the burning. Flame jetted from the empty spaces, a newly crowned infant king surveying his kingdom.

The fire created its own weather. Throughout the eastern half of the structure, air that had lain stagnant for years began to stir. Locked or boarded doors groaned against their restraints. Shuttered windows rattled. The sour dust of limestone and decayed animal droppings stirred and lifted. The fire drew in gusts of clean air from the winter afternoon, and for one paradoxical moment it seemed as if a kind of spring had come.

John felt the air on his face, a good sign. It meant he was moving away from the main body of the fire. He had decided there must be another way down; it was only a question of finding it. But the light had dimmed to a smoky nimbus; he had lost the flashlight and soon he would be groping on his hands and knees. And Roch was close behind him. He heard the footsteps, though he could no longer calculate direction and distance.

He understood, too, that the fire had grown large enough that it might encircle him. That if it did, he would be helpless.

Strange, he thought, to die without knowing his own name.

The darkness now was absolute, interrupted in rare moments by the flicker of Roch’s flashlight from behind. John toiled onward as quickly as he dared. But the air was warm and choking. He didn’t have much margin anymore, and he knew it.

When he saw a glimmer of light down the corridor he was afraid that it might be the fire circling around from the front. He slowed to a walk, groped ahead cautiously, then stood for a moment surrounded by this dim aurora before it registered as window-light.

The windows were tiny glass rectangles set in a wickerwork of framing. They rose from waist level to the ceiling, and they were so thickly crusted with grime that he hadn’t recognized them at first for what they were.

He pushed against one of the panes with both hands, but it didn’t yield. This was carpentry as old as the building itself, Victorian and hugely solid. He took away his hands and carried enough dirt with them that the prints let through a brighter beam of light, hand-shaped in the smoky air.

He looked around. He wanted a brick, a pipe like Roch’s, anything … but the corridor was bare.

Roch’s flashlight flickered behind him.

Sighing, John pulled off his jacket and wrapped it around his right hand. Bracing himself, he drove his fist directly into the thick glass.

It was like punching rock—bruising, even through the cloth. But the glass splintered and fell away, leaving a razor-toothed space where cool air came flooding in.

The panes of glass were maybe twelve inches square, and he knocked out ten of them so rapidly that there was no time to notice the shards that ripped through the lining of the jacket and pierced his hand and wrist. The pain was momentary and irrelevant. When the glass was gone, he kicked and ripped at the wooden latticework until there was a hole big enough to fit through.

He heard Roch almost directly behind him now, but there was time to ascertain that he himself was directly above the old loading bay; that there was a roof below him, two-by-fours covered with lathing and tarry shingles, some of this eroded by the weather … not exactly a firm footing; time enough, too, to see that the fire had reached the west end of the loading-bay roof and was spreading wildly.

He turned his head and saw Roch ru

He began inching downward. With luck, he might make it to the edge before the flames caught up with him. Then he could swing down to ground level. If there wasn’t time—he could let himself roll and tumble, take his chances on what might be down below.

In the distance—already audible, though it escaped John’s awareness—the firetrucks howled their sirens.

The smoke that had drifted up lazily only minutes before was darker, and it boiled skyward in massive gouts. The roof of the building had drifted over with snow, but that was melting—a sudden waterfall developed where the roof sagged toward the southeast corner—while the snow nearest the flames was simply vaporized by the heat. The hissing was as loud as the crackle of the fire; Susan, ru

The makeshift roof over the loading bay was just twelve feet above the ground at the lowest point of its slope. What John had contemplated doing might have been safe: to let himself tumble down and hope the snow would cushion his fall. But he was transfixed by the sight of Roch stepping up into the frame of the broken window, a mist of smoke writhing after him; clinging to the frame to keep himself from falling, shards of glass piercing his hands as John’s hands had been pierced, the copper pipe fallen and rolling away—missing John’s head by three or four inches—over the roof and out of sight.

Hanging there, Roch looked down at John in a blaze of distilled hatred—and then across at the western edge of the roof, where the flames had begun to creep forward.

He braced his feet and took his hands off the window frame.

The roof was old and weathered. It had been designed to carry a calculated weight of snow—barely. In the years since it was erected, dry rot had invaded the studs; ice and water had pried up the shingles and rusted the nails. It could not support more than a fraction of its calculated load.