When he looked again, the pit was back, framed round with darkness and night, while tiny grey bats of ash spiralled high into the air.
'Stay there.' Words loud enough to come from God bellowed from a hand-held loudspeaker somewhere below. 'You're safe there.'
The boy shook his head. The man lied, probably not intentionally. But only because the man wasn't where he was, so didn't know any better.
He was going to die or he was going to live: the choice was his. Not their choice, his choice. He and the fox were the ones who had to walk the abyss.
On the far side of the attic, a tall ladder was sliding upwards in a fluid sweep of hydraulics, a man balanced at its top. The man wore dark blue overalls and a yellow helmet with a bump across the top like a ridge of bone. A night visor covered his eyes and nose, and on his back was an oval oxygen tank. One of the new models, doughnut-shaped with a hole in the middle. He was mouthing words the boy didn't wait to hear.
'Time to go,' said the boy.
Claws needled into the flesh of his shoulder as he tightened his grip on the scrabbling animal. Of course the cub wanted out of there, so did he, and that meant crossing the iron beam. He didn't blame the fox for not being happy, but it wasn't helping.
The iron beam was recent: put there within the last seventy years to brace internal walls of a Swiss arms dealer's mansion originally built for show rather than quality. The beam and its bracing were the only thing stopping the wing of the Swiss boarding school falling in on itself.
Flames flickered below him, held in check by fire hoses but waiting, gathering themselves to explode upwards and sweep away the last fragments of his attic. This was life.
He shook his head crossly, flipping blond hair into already stinging eyes. He didn't like the school and didn't want to be there. He couldn't see the point of useless tests or running through brambles in the rain. It wasn't even the exercise he minded. It was the other pupils. The ones who never saw what he saw.
There were tears in his eyes again, but he couldn't work out why. Maybe he was just scared. That was allowed, wasn't it?
Except it wasn't.
Boys like him weren't scared. They did the stupid, the splendid and the impossible without making a fuss. They walked out along red-hot—
'Enough already,' said the fox. 'Move it.'
The beam was sticky underfoot. But that was the soles of his slippers melting, each step leaving a black footprint on the beam behind him.
Heat rose as if from a furnace, billowing his dressing gown until it blew out like a limp balloon. It was hotter than the wall of heat he'd hit that time stepping off a Boeing onto the tarmac in Singapore.
His mother had been photographing tigers then. Not the original singha after which the island had been named, but the new ones, the re-introduced ones that kept dying because there was nothing in the wild for them to eat. The director had offered to pay for her to bring her kid along: it added human interest to the other sort.
Bubbling step followed bubbling step. The next one would take him to the middle of the scorching beam, then he would have to do what the fox said. Not that he could turn round; any more than he could stop the soles of his slippers bubbling, molten rubber blistering the bottom of his feet.
Going on was his only option. The burning pit wasn't there. The beam was just a line he'd scrawled on a floor to amuse himself, a crack along the edge of some floorboard. Reality was what he wanted it to be, what he made it.
Staring straight ahead, the boy wrapped the struggling fox tight in his arms, buried his cheek into hot fur and walked across the remaining stretch of beam onto the front page of next morning's papers.
Fox Saves Boy — only the Enquirer got it right.
Fear, shadow and tears gave his childish face the tortured beauty of an El Greco saint. No one mentioned that he owed the anguish which twisted his mouth to a terrified fox cub chewing chunks out of his shoulder.
By the time a teeshirt was being faked in sweatshops in Karachi and sold on street stalls in London and Paris, he was gone. No longer aware of the fuss, no longer watching the screens. He had more important things to talk about — his mother was coming herself to collect him.
She flew into Zurich first-class on Lufthansa and the ticket was free, like the cars and hotels. Reporters met her at Kloten and photographs of him being hugged by a thin woman in a long black coat with shades, were syndicated worldwide. There were some long-lens pap shots from a brief stay-over at the George V in Pans — all flat surfaces and squashed depth of field — but no one got real access until London.
A man Raf didn't recognize — who called his mother Sally a lot and looked at her ankles — sat on a chair in a BBC studio on the outskirts. Hot lights blazed above the boy, raising beads of sweat under his newly cut hair. The fox cub sat on his lap, pinned by his hand to the grey flannel of his school trousers.
The trousers and tweed coat were a compromise. He wore school uniform for the interview and the school in Zurich didn 't charge a term's notice for removing him as a pupil.
Everyone won except Raf.
On the studio wall was a bare blue screen. On it the people at home would see whatever the producer wanted them to see. Mostly this was a long shot of the boy balanced high on the iron beam, his face raised to heaven.
When the man had finished asking his mother how she felt about having a child who was a hero ...
She was glad he'd rescued the fox.
What was she photographing now ...
An endangered seal colony on the Falklands.
What would she and Raf be doing next ...
Spending some quality time together at a friend's apartment in New York.
When all that was over, the man who called his mother Sally turned to the boy and, pasting on a sympathetic smile, asked how he'd felt up there on the beam.
The man wasn't happy with the boy because the producer had already halted the interview once, after a sound man complained he kept unclipping the button mike fixed to his school collar.
'Well?'
What had he felt? He wasn't too sure he'd felt anything at all. Mostly he'd been busy keeping his head empty.
'Were you scared?'
Only of having nearly killed the fox. Despite himself, despite not allowing himself feelings, the boy's eyes misted and for the first time since he'd reached the top of the fire truck's ladder, his mouth trembled.
It was like punching a button. Repressed irritation segued into instant sympathy as the interviewer's face softened. The man rephrased the question, glancing only once at the camera.
The boy thought about it. He still didn't know how he felt but now everyone was waiting, his mother's pale eyes fixed on him, her face tense.
'I can't sleep,' said the boy finally. That at least was true. Always had been. Darkness unravelled in front of his eyes in minutes that ticked by so slowly it was like living inside freeze-frame.
'Dreams,' said the interviewer. 'I can understand that.' He glanced at Raf's mother, his look conveying just the right amount of compassion mixed with an unspoken question.