She was dizzy and confused.
  During the minute or less that she had been incapacitated, fire had spread across the 
entire landing at the head of the stairs. It was moving down 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 smoke drifted down the stairwell. They reached out with long, 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 bottom of the steps and enfolded her. She coughed, and the 
coughing aggravated the pain in her head, making her dizzy again. She put one hand 
against the wall to steady herself.
  Everything was happening too fast. The house was going up like a pile of well-seasoned 
tinder.
  I'm going to die here.
  That thought jolted her out of her trance. She wasn't ready to die. She was far too 
young. There
  was so much of life ahead of her, so many wonderful things to do, things she had long 
dreamed about doing. It wasn't fair. She refused to die.
  She gagged on the smoke. Turning away from the burning stairs, she put a hand over her 
nose and mouth, but that didn't help much.
  She saw flames at the far end of the cellar, and for an instant she thought 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 room after 
all. The two points of fire that she was seeing were only the twin oil lamps that had 
provided her with light. The flames in the lamps were harmless, safely ensconced in tall 
glass chimneys.
  She coughed violently again, 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.
  She prayed silently and fervently.
  Directly overhead, the ceiling groaned and appeared to shift. For a few seconds she 
held her breath, clenched her teeth, and stood with her hands fisted at her sides, 
waiting to be buried in rubble. But then she saw that the ceiling wasn't going to 
collapse- not yet.
  Trembling, whimpering softly, she scurried to the nearest of the four high-set windows, 
It was rectangular, approximately eight inches from sill to top and eighteen inches from 
sash to sash, much too small to provide her with a means of escape. The other three 
windows were identical to the first; there was no use even taking a closer look at them.
  The air was becoming less breathable by the second. Laura's sinuses ached and burned. 
Her mouth was filled with the revulsive, bitter taste of the smoke.
  For too long she stood beneath the window, staring up in frustration and confusion at 
the meager, milky light that came through the dirty pane and through the haze of smoke 
that pressed tightly against the glass. She had the feeling she was overlooking an 
obvious and convenient escape hatch; in fact she was sure of it. There was a way out, and 
it had nothing to do with the windows, but she couldn't get her mind off the windows; she 
was fixated on them, just as she had been fixated on the sight of the advancing flames a 
couple of minutes ago. The pain in her head and behind her eyes throbbed more powerfully 
than ever, and with each agonizing pulsation, her thoughts became more muddled.
  I'm going to die here.
  A frightening vision flashed through her mind. She saw herself afire, her dark hair 
turned blond by the flames that consumed it and standing straight up on her head as if it 
were not hair but the wick of a candle. In the vision, she saw her face melting like wax, 
bubbling and steaming and liquefying, the features flowing together until her face no 
longer resembled that of a human being, until it was the hideously twisted countenance of 
a leering demon with empty eye sockets.
  No!
  She shook her head, dispelling the vision.
  She was dizzy and getting dizzier. She needed a draught of clean air to rinse out her 
polluted lungs, but with each breath she drew more smoke than she had drawn last time. 
Her chest ached.
  Nearby, a rhythmic pounding began; the noise was
  even louder than her heartbeat, which drummed thunderously in her ears.
  She turned in a circle, gagging and. coughing, searching for the source of the 
hammering sound, striving to regain control of herself, struggling hard to think.
  The hammering stopped.
  ''Laura . .
  Above the incessant roar of the tire, she heard someone calling her name.
  "Laura. .
  "I'm down here.. . in the cellar!" she shouted. But the shout came out as nothing more 
than a whispered croak. Her throat was constricted and already raw from the harsh smoke 
and the fiercely hot air.
  The effort required to stay on her feet became too great for her. She sank to her knees 
on the stone floor, slumped against the wall, and slid down until she was lying on her 
side.
  "Laura..." . .
  The pounding began again. A fist beating on a door.
  Laura discovered that the air at floor level was cleaner than that which she had been 
breathing. She gasped frantically, grateful for this reprieve from suffocation.
  For a few seconds the throbbing pain behind her eyes abated, and her thoughts cleared, 
and she remembered the outside entrance to the cellar, a pair of doors slant-set against 
the north wall of the house. They were locked from the inside, so that no one could get 
in to rescue her, in the panic and confusion she had forgotten about those doors. But 
now, if she kept her wits about her, she would be able to save herself.
  "Laura!" It was Aunt Rachael's voice.
  Laura crawled to the northwest corner of the room, where the doors sloped down at the 
top of a short flight of steps. She kept her head low, breathing the tainted but adequate