The Crane Wife(56)
Author: Patrick Ness

‘I believe you,’ Rachel said.

Amanda let her go, ran to her car and stuck her head in. ‘Everything’s going to be all right, sweetie. This lady’s going to watch you for a minute. I’m going to get grand-père.’

‘Mama–’

‘Everything’s going to be all right,’ she said again.

She leant over the seat, squeezed him ferociously for a brief second, then turned and ran into her father’s burning house.

By the time they realised how very bad it was, first smelling the smoke, then seeing it push under the door with alarming force, they were already trapped.

They’d tried to run for it anyway – George still naked, Kumiko in the barest of nightslips – but they only managed two or three stairs before the smoke beat them back.

‘I cannot,’ Kumiko had said behind him, coughing out the words with an alarming wetness.

It wasn’t just that the smoke was unbreathable, it felt like a living thing, a cloud of snakes trying to reach down your throat to not just choke you, but poison you, burn you with darkness. George understood in the worst possible instant what news stories meant when they said people died of smoke inhalation. One or two breaths of this and your lungs no longer worked, one or two more and you lost consciousness forever.

Through flashes of it, he could see flames already coating the bottom of the stairs, so there might not have been a route for them even if they could have made it down.

They retreated to the bedroom, shutting the door behind them for all the good that it did. George felt dangerously light-headed, from the smoke and from how quickly cataclysm had overtaken them.

‘We will have to go out the window,’ Kumiko said, almost calm, but he could see the beads of sweat pouring down her forehead. The temperature in the bedroom had risen with alarming speed.

‘Yes,’ George agreed, following her to it. She opened it and looked out. They were directly over the kitchen and could see smoke pouring out from the ground-floor windows below.

‘It is far,’ she said, ‘and onto concrete.’

‘I’ll go first,’ George said. ‘I’ll try and break your fall.’

‘Chivalrous,’ she said, ‘but there is no time.’

She put a foot on the windowsill to lift herself up.

An explosion rocked the house, it sounded like from somewhere in the kitchen. Kumiko lost her grip and fell back into George’s arms. They tumbled to the floor.

‘Gas main,’ he said.

‘George!’ Kumiko called out in alarm, looking behind him. The bedroom floor was starting to sag, as if it was melting into the room below, something that turned out to be almost unfeasibly frightening, because George only realised how much he counted on floors to stay flat when they suddenly stopped doing so.

‘We must move!’ Kumiko said over the roar. ‘Now!’

But before they could even rise there was a sound like an angry yawn and the far end of the bedroom completely gave way. One of the bookcases George kept there (mostly non-fiction) vanished immediately into the fire below. The bed started to slide, too, down the still-tilting floor.

Kumiko grabbed the windowsill, now the only thing to hold on to as the floor continued to slide away from them. The bed juddered to a halt for a moment, caught on something, and flames streaked up the mattress. George caught a quick, hellish glimpse of the sitting room below, consumed by fire, before smoke started pouring into the bedroom like a tidal wave.

‘Try to pull yourself up!’ he shouted. He was lying below her as the floor continued its tilt. It could only be a matter of seconds before everything went. He pushed her up towards the window, and she made it easily, one foot on the sill, her arms on the window’s sides, ready to jump. She turned back to him, fear across her face.

‘I’m right behind you!’ he coughed, trying to rise.

But with another judder the bed fell through, taking most of the floor with it. George fell, too, catching his upper arms on the sudden ledge remaining below the window. His legs swung down into the burning lower level of his house, and he screamed in pain as flames seized his bare feet.

‘George!’ Kumiko yelled.

‘Go!’ he shouted back to her. ‘Jump! Please!’

His mouth filled with smoke at every syllable, even the taste of it knocking his senses off-kilter. He tried to curl his legs away from the burning below him, could feel the soles of his feet blistering, the smoke, the pain, the fear, all of it filling his eyes with tears.

He looked back up to Kumiko.

Who wasn’t there.

Thank God, he thought, grateful she’d jumped, grateful she’d at least got away. Thank God.

He felt himself succumbing to the smoke – so fast, so fast – his thoughts slurring and slowing, the world shimmering away.

He was distantly aware of his grip slipping.

Distantly aware of falling into the raging fire below.

Distantly aware of being caught.

In his dream, he flies.

The smoke curls around him under the swoop of two great wings. He thinks at first that the wings are his own, but they are not. He is being carried, held, he is not sure how, but the grip is firm around him.

Firm but tender.

The wings swoop again, slow but with a strength so sure he has no fear, even though a fire big enough to consume the world is burning below him. They pass through a wall of smoke, and the air is suddenly cooler, fresher, easier to breathe.

He is flying through open air now, arcing up and out like the path of an arrow.

He weighs nothing. His burdens fall away like the world below him. He glances up but he cannot see exactly what it is that carries him.

But even in his dream, he knows.

A long neck, graced with a crown of scarlet and a pair of golden eyes, turns back to look at him, just once, the eyes filled with tears of their own.

Tears of sadness, he thinks. Tears of depthless sorrow.

And he grows suddenly frightened.

The arc continues its downward momentum. The ground approaches again. He touches the grass first with his feet, its coolness a sudden balm on skin that he now remembers is burnt and roiling with pain.

As he is laid gently down, he gives out a long slow moan.

He calls, he cries.

He keens.

Until long white feathers wipe away his tears, brush across his forehead and temples, and enfold him in soft, soft whiteness.

He longs for his dream to end.

He longs for it never to end.

It ends.

‘George?’

He blinked open his eyes, starting to shiver almost immediately. He was na**d against the frost-covered grass of his back garden.