John lowered himself gingerly into the bow and Harper shoved the rowboat off the bank, then clambered into the stern. She settled on the thwart and took the oars.
“Row,” he said. “Take us across the River Lethe, ferryman. Ferrygirl. Ferrybabe.” He laughed. “Allons-y!”
He reached for an oil lamp, set on the floor between the seats, raised the glass chimney, and stroked the wick with his finger. It ignited: a hot lick of blue flame. He glanced at her to make sure she was watching. Even hurt as he was, he loved the attention.
The oars clanked in their locks. She had a sensation of gliding out, not across the sea, but into the sky, across an impossibly buoyant acre of cloud. The mist parted before them, curling from the bow in luminous feathers.
Harper was still peering into the pale, cool, billowing fog, looking for the island, when they struck ground, jarred to a hard stop.
“Going to be a bit sloppy when we step out, but I don’t imagine either of us will drown in the mud,” he said. “Follow me and step where I step.”
He got one leg over the side of the boat before she could get to him, and then fell sideways. He was holding the lamp and it flew from his hand, shattered somewhere in the dark, and went out. He shouted in pain, then laughed—a bad, drunken cackle that both frightened and irritated her.
She sprang from the boat and sank past her ankles into the tidal mud. It was like stepping into icy, sticky pudding. Harper lost a boot, struggling through the rank muck to his side. She lost the other boot as she helped him to higher ground. It was sucked off her foot with a wet smack of suction and she tromped on without it.
They made their unsteady way up onto damp, firm sand, through the cool wet. Harper spied the shed, a dim green wall with a white door set in it, and steered them toward it.
“You’ll have to come back and drag the boat up.” John lifted the latch and put his shoulder to the door. “The tide will come in and it will drift off if you don’t.”
Her eyes needed a moment to adjust to the gloom. She saw a cot; clothes hanging from a line; stacks of paperbacks that looked as if they had been soaked and dried many times, and were now swollen out of shape. A silvery fog-glow came through a pair of skylights, the only windows in the room.
In the back of the single-room workshop—that was the word that best described the place—was a big cast-iron barrel, turned on its side and raised off the floor on metal legs. Her father had a similar sort of thing in Florida, in his backyard; he used it to slow-roast BBQ pork shoulder. A chimney pipe was welded to one end, and bent away to disappear through the back wall.
The barrel had a sliding hatch in the side. Driftwood and heaps of sea grass were set in neat piles next to the homemade furnace. John let go of her and lurched unsteadily across the floor of narrow wooden planks, stopping before it. He peered in at a flame that burned in weird hues of green and blue.
“I’m here, darling,” he said to the coals. “I’m home.”
He found a few dry planks of driftwood and pushed them in the fire, his hands extending into the flame up to the wrists. Then he retreated, holding his sides. His eyes were glazed and blank and he never looked away from the furnace. He backed all the way to the narrow cot. When his calves struck it, he sat down.
Harper reached him, helped him lie back, and began to unbutton his shirt. He looked past her at his barrel full of fire. It seemed to hold him fascinated.
“Close the hatch,” he whispered.
She ignored him, loosened his suspenders. “I want this shirt off.”
“Please,” he said and laughed weakly. “She might see us and get the wrong idea.”
Harper put her palm to the side of his face. She didn’t much care for the feverish heat she felt in his cheek. Harper tugged his shirt up, began to work it off him. It was no trouble to free his left arm, but when she began to wiggle it down the length of his right arm, he made a quick, gasping sound, somewhere between a sob and a laugh.
His right elbow was swollen, an ugly shade of purple mottled with darker, almost black spots.
“Can you bend it?” she asked.
The Fireman cried out when she lifted the arm gently, flexing the elbow, and moved her thumbs carefully over the knobs of bone. Nothing broken, but the soft tissues had gone fat and knotty, ligaments pulled into ragged threads. The wrist was worse than the elbow, already as thick around as his calf, with a deep blue bruise under the skin.
She took his right hand in one of hers and gripped his forearm with the other hand. She rotated the wrist, this way and that, looking for subluxation. A lump of bone—the lunate—had popped free from the others, come completely out of place.
“Is it bad?” he asked.
“Nothing serious,” she said. She was going to have to realign it, the sooner the better. She crossed her thumbs over his wrist. His pale, almost colorless face was dewy with sweat.
“Say,” he said. “You aren’t about to do something awful to me, are you?”
She smiled apologetically and squeezed. The lunate squirted back into place between the other bones with a wet little sock! He shivered violently and shut his eyes.
Harper looked past his arm at his right side, discolored with a grotesque patchwork of bruises. She traced her fingers along his ribs. Fracture there. Fracture here. Another. A fourth.
“Harper,” he breathed, gently. “I think I might pass out.”
“It’s all right if you do.”
But he didn’t. Not yet. He hunched on the edge of his mattress, shivering helplessly, battered arm clutched to his abused right side.
Harper wanted a sling for him. She shoved herself to her feet, began to sort through the clutter close to the bed. She found a box of dirty Frisbees, tennis balls, croquet hoops and mallets. Everything anyone would want for an afternoon of quiet fooling around outdoors. Tucked in behind the box was a camp longbow that had seen better days and—there. A canvas quiver with a few sad-looking, largely de-feathered arrows stuck in it. She dumped them clattering onto the floor. Another minute of hunting and she was able to turn up a pair of garden shears.
She snipped the quiver open from one end to the other, making a canvas trough. Harper loosened the strap that would’ve held the quiver to an archer’s back. When she returned to the bed, John had dropped onto his left side across the mattress. He was still shivering, but in weak little pulses now. His eyelids drooped.
Harper fitted his right arm into her better-than-nothing makeshift sling, working with patient, deliberate care not to unduly jostle his wrist or elbow. He took a few short gasping breaths, but otherwise endured without a sound. When the arm was settled into place, she picked up his feet and flopped them on the mattress, then arranged a blanket over him.
She thought he had drifted off to sleep while she was tucking him in, but he whispered, “Now the hatch, please. To conserve heat. It’ll keep the fire from burning down too quickly.”
Harper pushed a curl of brown hair back from his sweaty temple and whispered, “All right, John.”
She crossed to the furnace, but hesitated before clapping the hatch shut, her gaze drawn by the weird, vibrant hues of the blaze within: she saw flashes of jade and rose. She watched in a kind of peaceful trance for almost half a minute, and was just about to close the panel . . . when she saw her.
For a moment there was a face in the fire: a woman’s face, with wide, startled eyes set far apart, and the smooth features of classical statuary, a face very like Allie’s, but fuller and older and sadder. Her lips were parted as if she were about to speak. It was not a hallucination; not imagined; not a trick of the dancing firelight. The face in the flames stared at her for a full count of five.
Harper was trying to scream, but could not find the wind. By the time she was finally able to inhale, the woman she had glimpsed in the fire was gone.
13