WHEN I came around, the odor of my death was everywhere: scorched hair, leather and gas, hot copper, cooked flesh.
I was still strapped to the chair, now in total darkness.
So many shades of pain I couldn’t pick the worst.
I strained against the leather.
The left wrist strap must’ve been partially undone because my arm broke free.
I unbuckled my right wrist, and with both hands ripped off the singed and crumbling restraints.
I staggered to my feet, fell back into the chair, stood up again.
My burns raged as I floundered through the darkness, hobbling along as fast as I could, limbs shaking, one arm outstretched to protect my face, the other tracing the stone wall.
It occurred to me that I was dead, wandering through some outlying region of hell, and still I walked on in the dark for what seemed decades, into deadends and black rooms, through corridors that turned back into themselves, all the while the pain mounting.
I leaned over and puked.
Then came the sharpest stab of dread I’d ever known.
It whispered, Welcome to eternity.
Panic eclipsed the pain, my mind beginning to splinter, when I tripped and fell into a staircase.
My frenzy abating.
Gazing up into darkness.
Still no sign of light.
I crawled up the steps, rotten and doddering beneath me.
My head collided with a wall of wood.
I groped for a doorknob.
The door squeaked open and I tumbled into the foyer of the House of Kite, draped in the sulky gray silence of early morning.
Struggling to my feet, I moved on through the narrow hallway into the kitchen, the dead quietude of the house convincing me they’d fled, taken Violet with them.
I glanced at my forearms in the weak dawnlight that spilled through the kitchen window, the undersides blistering and striated with electrical burns. My calves and the crown of my head had been similarly ravaged, all scorched where the electricity had entered and left my body.
There wasn’t a phone in the kitchen and a search of the library and living room turned up nothing.
Through the living room’s gothic windows I saw a gray Impala parked in the front yard.
Limping back into the kitchen, wreathed in a miasma of spoiled flounder, I found the lopsided ceramic bowl on the breakfast table, filled with keys.
I grabbed them all, and disowning the pain, started for the front door, for Violet.