Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(14)

“Operator, I believe there’s a fire over on Fitch Street. Please alert the fire department, won’t you?”

This is the extent of her civic obligation, but Rio is fully awake now and it’s a moderately warm night, and the streets of Gedwell Falls are safe, even for an unaccompanied girl at night. So she dons a pair of dungarees under her robe and sneaks out into the night.

She has never been out in the street this late at night—or this early in the morning—and there is something wrong and yet thrilling about it. She knows every house, but the deep, silent darkness of the time beyond midnight turns the familiar strange and even sinister. Windows become staring eyes, doors are astonished mouths, and trees seem too active and alert to be merely ruffling passively.

From ground level she cannot see the fire at first, but as she walks she begins to catch glimpses in the gaps between homes. Then, coming around the corner, there it is.

It is a very old wood-frame house, two stories behind a weed-grown garden, and Rio recognizes it immediately. It is the Stamp Man’s House.

The Stamp Man’s House—it is always referred to that way—is the most often stared at, most often shunned house in Gedwell Falls. No one has ever seen the Stamp Man, at least not that Rio has ever heard. There are rumors, and there are tall tales. There are even ghost stories told ’round campfires at church camp. But there are no firsthand sightings that Rio knows of.

The Stamp Man lives with his sister, a middle-aged woman with wild gray hair and a face etched by suffering, leading naturally to suggestions by the more imaginative children that she is some sort of witch. Rio has seen her in town, nodded in a neighborly way, but never spoken with her. Rio knows—everyone in the small town knows—that the sister makes a weekly sortie to the post office to pick up the mail that comes to the Stamp Man, mail from strange, exotic locales bearing the brightly colored stamps he is believed to collect.

It is she, the Stamp Man’s sister, who now stands barefoot in a threadbare nightgown on the sidewalk in front of the house, hand over her mouth, staring in helpless horror at a window flickering orange.

The sister notices Rio and cries, “Help him! Help him!” Her eyes glow with reflected firelight.

“What’s . . . What is . . . ,” Rio stammers, no longer enjoying this forbidden excursion.

“It’s Peter! He won’t come out!”

For a moment Rio is confused, not connecting the name Peter with the Stamp Man. “Is he awake?” she asks.

“It’s the fireplace in my room, I told him we needed to have the chimney swept, but he . . . I have to . . .” She makes a tentative move toward the porch but doesn’t get far. There is something indecisive, a conflict of some sort. “I shouldn’t have burned coal. I should have . . . but wood is so . . . and I can’t . . .” This is all accompanied by weak, fluttering hand gestures.

An upper-floor window’s glass pane cracks, and seconds later the glass bursts outward, shards clattering on the porch roof and sliding down the shingles to smash on the walkway. A tongue of fire licks upward, touching the eaves. The smell of smoke is acrid and deeply disturbing, not the comfortable smell of burning firewood or leaves, but the more complex smell of burning paint and wallpaper paste, of pillow feathers and Bakelite and tar.

“Peter!” the sister screams. “Peter!”

A sound comes from within the house. It might be human, must be human, but it is not a sound Rio has ever heard come from a human throat. It is not a scream but a cry, a warning, but with words slurred to incomprehensibility, a guttural, throat-clearing, strangled sound. Whatever the meaning of this cry, the sister seems to understand it.

“No, Peter! You must come out!”

She says it, shouts it, but again Rio detects a doubt, an ambiguity in her tone.

Rio looks around frantically, hoping for someone, anyone to come along and do . . . something. Something, she doesn’t know what, but something that will take the burden off of her own shoulders, for she sees pleading in the sister’s eyes, a mute neediness. Despair.

Rio takes tentative steps toward the porch, willing the volunteer fire department to bestir themselves and come to the rescue quickly. But if the volunteers are on their way there is no sign of them.

“Help him! Peter! Peter!”

Rio climbs the three wooden steps to the front door, which is closed but surely not locked since the sister must have come out this way. She touches the doorknob. It is not hot to the touch. She peers through the narrow vertical slits of lace-curtained windows beside the door and sees a stairwell inside, and no sign of fire on the lower level.

Taking a deep breath, she opens the door and reels back from the stench of smoke that has crept down the stairway and now billows out through the door and passes above Rio’s head to rise into the night sky.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Rio asks herself.

And just then Tam Richlin comes rushing up and asks the identical question, “What do you think you’re doing?”

Rio has never been so glad to see her father. “The Stamp Man is upstairs. He won’t come down.”

Tam Richlin hears this and nods, showing no surprise but a grim understanding. “He may not care, but this fire could spread to other homes.”

“I called the operator and told her to call the fire department.”

“Good girl. But it’ll take them a half hour this time of night,” Tam says.