It was coming from up the block. Footsteps on the gravelly walk. The thunk of a car door. And an engine, growling to life. Straining her eyes to peer through the watery moonlight, she saw the glint of metal as a car ghosted around the corner of the alley and disappeared.
“D’you hear something?”
She turned like a dervish, startled to see Duran standing in the doorway to her bedroom. He was barefoot and looked sleepy, although she noticed that he was dressed.
“There was someone here,” she said.
“In the house?”
“In the basement,” she told him. “And then in the house. I think he was after the computer.”
Duran nodded.
“Well?”
“What?”
“Did he get it?” What was the matter with him?
“I don’t know. I’ll take a look.”
Then he gave her a sort of loopy grin—Oh for chrissake, she thought, I’m in my underwear—and went into the living room. She pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater, as Duran called out, “It’s right where it was—on the table!”
Coming into the living room, she saw that the house was as she’d left it when she went to bed. Nothing had been moved, or touched, as far as she could tell. Going to the window, she saw that the car was in its parking place, just as it had been. “Maybe I was mistaken,” she said.
“I don’t think so,” he told her. “I heard something, too.”
“I thought it was in the basement, but… now, I’m not sure.”
They looked in all the rooms again, but nothing seemed to be disturbed—or even touched. Finally, Duran slipped into his shoes and grabbed a coat. Together, they went outside and around the house to the metal doors that gave access to the basement. “We might as well take a look,” he said, and lifted one of the doors.
“That was the noise!” she whispered, as the doors opened with a distinct creak. “That’s what woke me up.”
“Hnnnh,” he said.
She followed him down the steps into the darkness. At the bottom of the stairs, he began walking forward, waving his arms in search of the light cord that hung from the ceiling. Finding it, he snapped on the lights, and glanced around.
It was more of a cellar than a basement, with a spooky-looking crawl space angling off under the front porch. Aluminum-tube deck chairs with webbed seats were folded and stacked against one wall. Ropes, and a few garden tools hung from another, along with a selection of mildewed life jackets and beach toys.
“I don’t see anything,” she said.
“Me either.” They walked past the furnace, then the water heater. The ceiling was so low that Duran had to duck, swags of cobwebs catching his hair. Peering into the crawl space, Duran cocked his head, and reached out to put a hand on her arm.
“What?” she asked.
“Do you smell gas?”
“I’m kind of stuffed up,” she told him. “All the dust at Nikki’s.”
Duran grunted. “I think it’s gas,” he said. And a few seconds later. “It is gas.”
“Let’s call the real estate agent,” she suggested, turning toward the door. “Gas scares me. They should fix it.”.
Irritated, she pulled sharply on the light cord and started up the steps.
“Hey!” Duran called out. “Wait up! I can’t see a thing.”
She apologized with a giggle. “I thought you were right behind me.” Turning, she swung her arm through the air, hoping to hit the light cord. It was amazing how elusive the damn things were. Then she found it, and yanked.
He was standing there with a thoughtful squint, as if he were about to sneeze. “Wait a second,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “Turn it off.”
“What?”
“Just turn it off!”
She did, this time taking care to keep the cord in her grasp.
“That’s weird,” Duran said, his voice loud in the darkness. “There’s like a… glow… coming from the crawl space. Turn the light back on.”
She did and crossed the cellar to the corner where he was standing. He was in a crouch, leaning on a concrete abutment, looking into the crawl space. Her eyes followed his gaze.
And then she saw what he saw: a votive candle, flickering in the darkness.
Neither of them knew what to say. So they stared, and watched as the candle’s flame seemed to change and grow brighter, lengthening into an elongated blue pillar, the orange wick glowing within. And then the flame evaporated and it was just the glowing wick. Duran grabbed her by the arm and, straightening, yanked her toward the basement doors. The ferocity of his grip scared her and, for a moment, she remembered the night before, when he’d seized her wrist and wrestled the plastic overlay out of her hand. Only now, he was even more violent, pulling her toward the door.
“Hey,” she said, “wait a minute!”
Her feet were scrabbling for purchase, more or less bouncing up the cement steps, her ankles and shins barking painfully on the edges. Then they were out in the air, and he was hustling her down the alley toward the ocean, moving so fast that she was barely in contact with the ground.
That’s when the sound came—a rolling growl that exploded into a concussive whummmmp, followed by a pressure drop that made her ears pop. Then the air behind them dissolved into a cloud of fiery foam, ballooning outwards. Now, she was running on her own, the heat surging at her back. Not till they reached the beach did it seem safe to stop. Turning, they saw a column of fire roaring through the roof of the house.
“But… how did you know?” she asked.
“You saw the light… the candle… get brighter—right?”
She nodded.
“Propane’s heavier than air, so it lays on the floor, and it just sorta… builds up. They had the candle up in the elevated crawl space, so when the gas reached the flame, a lot of it had accumulated. You saw how the flame went out; that’s because there was no oxygen left. It was all gas. We were lucky.”
Duran’s attention was reclaimed by the house. There were new sounds now, sharp cracks as the windows exploded, the shriek of metal coming apart in the heat. Every once in a while, a fresh roar told them that the fire had discovered new territory, new fuel. Then they heard an enormous siren wail, summoning the volunteer firefighters.
Adrienne started to shiver, from cold or shock, she couldn’t be sure. They tried to kill us both, she thought. They turned on the gas, and shut off the pilot light. Or something. A column of sparks blasted into the air. Then they lighted a candle, as if it were a mass. That’s what I heard, she thought, the noise in the cellar. And then they checked—they checked to make sure I was there.
“They tried to kill us,” she said, her voice dull, her face flushed from the fire.
Duran nodded.
He put his arm around her and, together, they walked back toward the house. There were sirens all over town now, wailing closer. Suddenly, Duran tensed, stopped, and slapped his hips. Then he smiled with relief. “Car keys,” he said.
It was getting hotter now. In the intervals between the houses, they could see the first fire truck roaring down the street, siren screaming, lights whirling. The sky fluttered with the wheeling lights—yellow, red, yellow, red. They walked past a man whose pajama bottoms were visible below the puffy parka he wore. He stood with his arm around a woman in a bathrobe and furry slippers. They were staring at the house as Adrienne and Duran walked by. “Like a torch,” the man said, his voice hushed. Then a part of the roof collapsed, falling into the house with a soft thud that sent up geysers of fire and sparks.
Duran unlocked the door to the car, and flicked the button inside. Adrienne heard the snap of the locks as she stood there, staring at what was now an architectural skeleton, with flames dancing along its blackened ribs. The temperature must have been 130 degrees on one side of the street, and 35 on the other.