The lantern glass broke and a blaze spilled out like water over a pile of blankets, and the wool smoldered and burned, flames racing straight for my papers. We faced each other in the smoldering light. As the fire roared and burned brighter, he rushed forward and picked up all the papers. His eyes widened at the sight of his score and my drawings. I reached for the book, anxious only for Speck’s letter, and he threw it into the corner for me to retrieve. When I turned around, Henry Day was gone, and his weapons—the rope, the knife, the iron bar—were on the floor. The trapdoor banged closed, and a long, thin crack opened overhead. The flames burst upward, brightening the room as if sun bore through the walls.
On the ceiling a picture began to emerge in the intense light. In the ordinary darkness, the surface lines seemed nothing more than random cracks and pockmarks in the foundation, but as the fire reached more fuel, the outlines flared and flickered. The shapes puzzled me, but once I perceived the pieces, the whole became apparent: the ragged East Coast of the United States, the fishlike contours of the Great Lakes, the broad and empty plains, the Rockies, and on to the Pacific. Directly above my head, the black brushstroke of the Mississippi divided the nation, and somewhere in Missouri, her trail crossed the river and raced west. Speck had marked her escape route and drawn a map of the trail to follow from our valley to the western ocean. She must have worked alone in the dark for months or years, arms arched to the ceiling, chipping away at the stone or painting with a rough brush, not showing a soul, hoping for the day her secret would be discovered. Around the outline of the country, she had etched and painted on that rough concrete a constellation of drawings invisible these many years. Hundreds of inscriptions, primitive and childlike, images laid over other images, each story told on top of its ancestor. Some of the drawings looked ancient, as if a prehistoric being had been here and left memories like paintings on a cave wall: a flock of crows lighting from a tree, a brace of quail, deer at a stream. She had drawn wildflowers, oxlips, violets, and thyme. There were creatures from her dreams, horned men with rifles and fierce dogs. Sprites and imps and goblins. Icarus, Vishnu, the angel Gabriel. Others as modern as cartoons: Ignatz throws the brick at Krazy Kat, Little Nemo slumbers in Wonderland, Koko jumps out of the inkwell. A mother with a child in her arms. A pod of whales arcing through the waves. Spirals roped into knots, a garland knitted from morning glory vines. The pictures unwrapped themselves in the dancing flames. The temperature rose as in an oven, but I could not save myself from her wild designs. In the darkest corner, she had painted a left hand and a right hand, thumbs overlapping. Her name and mine in a dozen fonts. Two figures raced over a hill; a boy with his hand caught in a beehive; a pair of readers sat back to back on a mountain of books. On the ceiling above the entrance to the outer world, she had carved Come with me and play. The fire sucked in the oxygen, and the rush of air caught my heart and blew it open. I had to leave.
I studied Speck’s passage west, hoping to commit it to memory. Why had I never before thought to look up? A cinder popped and flew like the devil up under my eyelid. Smoke and heat filled the room, so I gathered McInnes’s book and a few other papers and ran to the exit, but my bundle would not fit through the crack. Another pile of blankets ignited, sending a wave of heat that knocked me to my knees. I tore open the package, scattering papers to the floor. Close at hand were Speck’s letter and a few stray childhood drawings, which I pressed against my chest; then I squeezed through the opening and into the fresh night.
The stars had come out and the crickets were fiddling madly. My clothing smelled of soot, and many of the pages had been scorched at the edges. The ends of my hair had been singed off, and every inch of bare skin throbbed, red, as if sunburned. Pain shot through the soles of my bare feet with each step, but I knew enough to get away from a burning building, dropping a few more pages at the door as I ran toward the woods. The library groaned once, and then the floor collapsed upon the grotto and thousands of stories went up in flames. From a green hideaway I heard the sirens of the fire engines coming to fight the bonfire. Tucking the papers into my shirt, I started the long trip home, remembering the mad look in Henry’s eyes and all that had been lost. In the complete darkness, fireflies flashed their semaphores of longing.