the street in front to the garage behind the house. There was no ledge, no tree, not even a drainpipe to hang on to. If she jumped, surely she would break her legs.
She shrank back from the window and turned to the door once more. She had started across the smoke-filled room when her foot touched something soft.
The bedspread, lying in a heap at the foot of the bed. She snatched it up, wrapping it around her body, then, like Tom a few minutes earlier, used one of its corners to protect her fingers from the searing heat of the door. Drawing her breath in slowly, filtering the smoke through the thick padding of the spread, she filled her lungs with air.
At last, battling with the fear that threatened to overwhelm her, she pulled the door open.
The fire in the hall, instantly sucking in the fresh air from the open window, rose up in front of her, its crackle building into a vicious roar.
Time seemed to slow down, each second dragging itself out for an eternity.
Flames reached out to her, and Polly was helpless to pull herself away as panic clasped her in its paralyzing grip. She felt the burning heat against her face, even felt the blisters begin to form wherever her skin was exposed.
She heard a strange, soft sound, like the sizzling of oil in a hot skillet, and instinctively reached up to touch her hair.
Her hair was gone, devoured by the hungry fire, and she stared blankly for a moment at the ashy residue on her fingertips. What had been a thick mass of dark blond hair only a moment ago was now only an oddly greasy smudge on the blistered skin of her hand.
Her mind began closing down, rejecting what she saw, denying the searing heat that all but overwhelmed her.
She staggered backward, the bedspread tangling around her feet as if it had joined forces with the fire to destroy her.
Faintly, as if in the distance somewhere impossibly far beyond the confines of the house, she heard Tom’s voice, calling out to Teri.
She heard vague thumpings, as if he might be pounding on a door somewhere.
Then nothing.
Nothing but the hiss and chatter of the flames, dancing before her, hypnotizing her.
Backing away, stumbling and tripping, she retreated from the fury of the fire.
She bumped into something, something hard and ungiving, and though her eyes remained fixed on the inferno that was already invading the bedroom, her hand groped behind her.
And felt nothing.
Panic seized her again, for suddenly the familiar space of the bedroom seemed to vanish, leaving her alone with the consuming flames.
Slowly, her mind assembling information piece by piece, she realized that she had reached the open window.
Whimpering, she sat down on the ledge and began to swing her legs through the gap between the sill and the open casement; her right leg first, then her left.
At last she was able to turn her back on the fire. Gripping the window frame, she stared out into the faintly graying dawn for a moment, then let her gaze shift downward toward the concrete below.
She steeled herself, and clinging to the bedspread, let herself slip over the ledge.
Just as she began to drop away from the window, the corner of the bedspread still inside the room caught on something. Polly felt the pull, found herself unreasonably speculating on what might have snagged it.
The handle of the radiator?
A stray nail that had worked loose from the floor molding?
Falling! Suddenly she was upside down, slipping out of the shroud of the bedspread.
Her fingers grasped at the material; it slipped away as if coated with oil.
She dropped toward the concrete headfirst, only beginning to raise her arms to break her fall as her skull crashed against the driveway.
She felt nothing; no pain at all.
There was only a momentary sense of surprise, and a small cracking sound from within her neck as her vertebrae shattered and crushed her spinal cord.
It had been no more than three minutes since she had awakened, laughing quietly, from her dream.
Now the quiet laughter was over, and Polly MacIver was dead.
Teri MacIver stood rooted on the lawn in front of the house, her right hand clutching at the lapels of her thin terry-cloth bathrobe with all the modesty of her nearly fifteen years. Her eyes were fixed on the blaze that now engulfed the small two-story house which had been her home for the last ten years. It was an old house, built fifty years earlier, when