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Prologue

LAURA was in the cellar, doing so every minute of it She didn’t dislike the work itself; she was by nature an industrious girl as happiest when she had chores to do But she was afraid of the cellar

For one thing, the place was glooh in the walls, were hardly larger than elass perhtened by a pair of la roo to be coht fro, coal-fired furnace that was cold and unused on this fine, war shelves, row upon row of quart jars reflected splinters of light, but their contents--hoetables that had been stored here for the past nine months--remained unilluminated The corners of thewith shadows like long banners of funeral crepe

The cellar always had a mildly unpleasant odor, too It wasand suus sorowth, fringed with hundreds of tiny white spores that reserotesquery added its own thin but nonetheless displeasing fragrance to the cellar air

However, neither the glooave rise to Laura’s fears; it was the spiders that frightened her Spiders ruled the cellar Some of theray, a bit bigger than the brown ones, but just as fast- as their siants as large as Laura’s thumb

As she wiped dust and a feebs fro ry with her mother Mama could have let her clean some of the upstairs rooms instead of the cellar Aunt Rachael or Mama herself could have cleaned down here because neither of them worried about spiders But Mama knew that Laura was afraid of the cellar, and Mama was in the mood to punish her It was a terrible mood, black as thunderclouds Laura had seen it before Too often It descended over Ma year, and when she was in its thrall, she was a different person fro woh Laura loved her mother, she did not love the short-tempered, mean-spirited woman that her mother sometimes became She did not love the hateful woman who had sent her down into the cellar with the spiders

Dusting the jars of peaches, pears, to the inevitable appearance of a spider, wishing she were grown up and married and on her own, Laura was startled by a sudden, sharp sound that pierced the dank basement air At first it was like the distant, forlorn wail of an exotic bird, but it quickly beca, looked up at the dark ceiling, and listened closely to the eerie ululation that came from overhead After a moment she realized that it was her Aunt Rachael’s voice and that it was a cry of alar fell over with a crash It sounded like shattering porcelain It must have been Mama’s peacock vase, If it was the vase, Mama would be in an extremely foul mood for the rest of the week

Laura stepped away frooods and started toward the cellar stairs, but she stopped abruptly when she heard Mae over the loss of the vase; there was a note of terror in it

Footsteps thu room floor, toward the front door of the house The screen door opened with the faed shut Rachael was outside now, shouting, her words unintelligible but still conveying her fear

Laura smelled sues of fire at the top The smoke wasn’t heavy, but it had an acrid stench

Heart pounding, Laura climbed to the uppermost step Waves of heat forced her to squint, but she could see into the kitchen The wall of fire wasn’t solid There was a narrow route of escape, a corridor of cool safety; the door to the back porch was at the far end

She lifted her long skirt and pulled it tight across her hps and thighs, bunching it in both hands to prevent it froerly onto the fire-ringed landing, which creaked under her, but before she reached the open door, the kitchen exploded in yellow-blue flae Fro, the rooh the blaze Crazily, the fire-choked doorway brought to Laura’seye in a jack-o’-lantern

In the kitchen, s exploded, and the fire eddied in the sudden change of drafts, pushing through the cellar door, lashing at Laura Startled, she sturabbed at the railing,her head against the stone floor at the bottom

She held on to consciousness as if it were a raft and she a drowning swiot to her feet Pain coruscated across the top of her head She raised one hand to her brow and found a trickle of blood, a s the minute or less that she had been incapacitated, fire had spread across the entire landing at the head of the stairs It wasdown onto the first step

She couldn’t keep her eyes focused The rising stairs and the descending fire repeatedly blurred together in an orange haze

Ghosts of s, insubstantial arms, as if to embrace Laura

She cupped her hands around her mouth "Help!"

No one answered

"Somebody help me! I’m in the cellar!"

Silence

"Aunt Rachael! Mama! For God’s sake, somebody help me!"

The only response was the steadily increasing roar of the fire

Laura had never felt so alone before In spite of the tides of heat washing over her, she felt cold inside She shivered

Although her head throbbed worse than ever, and although the abrasion above her right eye continued to weep blood, at least she was having less trouble keeping her eyes focused The problem was that she didn’t like what she saw

She stood statue-still, transfixed by the deadly spectacle of the flames Fire crawled lizardlike down the steps, one by one, and it slithered up the rail posts, then crept down the rail with a crisp, chuckling sound

The smoke reached the botto aggravated the pain in her head, ainst the wall to steady herself

Everything was happening too fast The house was going up like a pile of well-seasoned tinder

I’ht jolted her out of her trance She wasn’t ready to die She was far too young There was so s to do, things she had long drea It wasn’t fair She refused to die

She gagged on the s stairs, she put a hand over her nose and mouth, but that didn’t help much

She saw flaht she was already encircled and that all hope of rescue was gone She cried out in despair, but then she realized the blaze hadn’t found its way into the other end of the roo were only the twin oil laht The flalass chiain, and the pain in her head settled down behind her eyes She found it difficult to concentrate Her thoughts were like droplets of quicksilver, sliding over one another and changing shape so often and so fast that she couldn’t make sense of some of them