“That’s Shakespeare, ain’t it?” Ben asked.
“Macbeth,” Deckert offered. “Act four, scene one.”
Ben looked over at him and raised an eyebrow.
“Gimme a break, Mona’s a high school English teacher.” Deckert shrugged as he referred to his wife. “I’ve seen the play a few hundred times.”
Ben turned back to me. “So is this some kinda Twilight Zone thing, Row?”
“Yeah,” I said as I nodded. “You could say that.”
“Okay.” He gave me a questioning gaze to match his tone. “What’s it mean?”
“How many times do I have to tell you…” I began.
“Hold on,” Deckert interrupted and motioned for us both to be quiet. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Ben asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “It sounded like it was coming from upstairs.”
Ben shook his head. “I didn’t hear anything.”
We stood in relative silence, gazing up at the drop ceiling over our heads and listening intently. Detective Deckert still held his hand up, frozen in place as we waited.
“Listen.” His eyes grew wide as the noise filtered down to us. “There it is again.”
To me, it sounded akin to a screaming hiss, coupled with a dull roar, and occasionally punctuated by a popping sizzle. It was muffled by the walls and ceiling above us, but it was definitely growing louder by the second. There was something frighteningly familiar about the sound, and I was searching my memories as fast as I could, trying to place a cause with the effect.
Before I managed to make the connection, my friend spoke up. “Hear something hell, I can smell it.”
He wasn’t the only one. The acrid bite of burning wood and synthetic materials now mixed with the earlier odors in the basement and wafted through on a thin layer of smokiness.
“Seems a bit strong to be someone’s fireplace,” I observed.
Suddenly, the piercing wail of a smoke detector lanced its way through the basement from the direction of the stairs.
“Holy Jesus, Mary Mother of God,” Deckert muttered.
Ben skipped past any semblance of muttering and went directly to exclamations. “Sonofabitch!”
He was already moving when he bellowed the expletive, hooking around me and heading for the stairs. Deckert and I followed close on his heels.
This particular staircase was positioned such that it formed a steep angle diagonally against the far wall. Due to the structural design of the foundation, in order to keep that angle from being far too oblique, it reached a small landing near the bottom, then made a ninety-degree turn, and continued down for another short flight of steps. The stairwell, in and of itself, had been a part of the remodeling project and was now enclosed by thin sheets of paneling applied directly to the wooden studs.
Ben was several steps ahead of us and hit the bottom stair at full speed, launching himself past the other two and onto the landing. By the time we reached the opening, we could hear him bounding upward and coughing violently.
Deckert urged me ahead, and I stumbled for a moment, raking my shin against the edge of the stair. I groped for a handrail and found none, so I pushed off and started upward again, ignoring the pain in my lower leg. As I hit the landing with the older detective puffing hard behind me, I made the turn and was immediately enveloped in a thick haze of smoke.
The detector in the stairwell was still screaming at full volume, echoing from the paneled walls and drilling an intense pain deep in my ears.
The cloud of smoke was increasing at an alarming rate, and it easily began to overtake the narrow space as it billowed in from beneath the door. I came to a sudden halt as my eyes began to water and burn. Partially blinded, I held my arms outstretched, trying to feel my way up the staircase, and lurched forward.
My heart was racing, and I involuntarily sucked in a deep breath of the polluted atmosphere then immediately hacked it outward, sputtering and choking as I fell once again on the stairs. I could hear Ben up ahead of me barking out his shallow breaths and then the heavy sound of a body against solid wood as he threw his weight against the door. The thud was followed by my friend’s choking voice. “Owwww! Shit! Jeezus! Goddammit!”
I pulled the neck of my shirt up over my nose and mouth and dragged myself upward. Deckert was immediately to my rear, and he grabbed my arm in an attempt to help me up, but he was already breathing so hard when we hit the landing that the sudden rush of smoke was taking a far quicker toll on him.
The din of the fire was echoing from the walls, and dangerous sounding creaks and groans were now beginning to insinuate themselves into the fray.
I squinted hard in the darkness of the thickening atmosphere and saw a pinpoint of reddish-orange appear above me. It started to grow, and I realized that I was standing directly beneath it. I threw myself backwards, barreling into Deckert, and propelling us both into the wall at the bottom of the landing. The slab of paneling that angled up over the stairs suddenly erupted as flames ate through, fed by the noxious gases the treated laminate was expelling. The smoke detector began to warble sickly as the blaze lapped at it with an arcing fan of orange. A moment later, there was a loud snap followed by a crash as the sheet of paneling broke apart and fell across the stairs.
Bright orange light illuminated the cloud of smoke in the stairwell as the roar of the conflagration announced its arrival. I thought I could see the silhouette of my friend moving at the top of the stairs. I started upward amid the rush of heat and began kicking the flaming pieces of pressboard off to the sides in order to make a path.
I was still working at the task when he started down through the maelstrom. My ears were met by the cacophony of a repetitive thump, and before I could look up, I collided with my friend.
“Down!” he croaked, grabbing me by the shoulder and twisting me around. “Back down!”
I pushed forward, taking hold of Deckert’s arm as I went and pulling him back down the stairwell with me. The three of us stumbled back into the basement hacking and gulping at the less tainted air. I looked back and could see the smoke now curling along the ceiling at the mouth of the stairs, stretching grey tendrils to undulate languidly along the acoustic tiles. The paneled wall along the stairs was starting to bow and discolor, and in the amount of time it took me to suck in another breath, yellow flame began to pry open the seams.
“It’s fuckin’ blocked or somethin!” Ben sputtered the words and then coughed hard before continuing his frenzied explanation. “I couldn’t budge it. Besides that, it’s hotter than hell.”
“There’s got to be another exit,” I appealed.
“In the back,” Deckert wheezed. He had lost his hat in the rush, and his hair was sticking out in disarray. He seemed to be having even more trouble breathing than Ben or me, and he was fingering his tie in an attempt to loosen it.
“Carl, are you okay?” I reached over and worked the knot loose for him as I stared into his face.
He managed to spit out a response. “Yeah, yeah, I’m okay.”
He was lying. His face was pale, and I could see that his left hand was clenched into a fist.
“Come on,” Ben urged, hooking a hand under one of Deckert’s arms as I took hold of the other. “We gotta get outta here before…”
The fluorescent fixtures in the ceiling buzzed loudly and immediately doused, throwing us into almost complete darkness. The smoke was now rolling into the room behind us, and it was no longer content with hanging in wispy cloudlike formations around the ceiling. It had taken on a life of its own, and it was intent on filling the room to capacity with its airborne virulence.
A wave of heat was pushing through the room, chasing away the earlier frosty atmosphere that had plagued me. We started forward across the darkened basement, aiming for the dim light of the doorway some forty feet away. We had taken three steps when from behind us there came a noise unlike any I’d ever heard.
The initial sound hammered into my ears and drove directly into my skull, jarring every bone in my body. It was followed immediately by a dull roar that swelled in pitch to a persistent ring, all underscored by my ears feeling as if they were full of water.
I remember being lifted off my feet and flying forward through the air, only to be deposited onto the plywood sub-floor a pair of yards from my original position. My face did a quick double bounce from the hard surface, and my arm twisted as it folded beneath me, driving a harpoon of pain into my already tortured shoulder.
I groaned and rolled to the side then began pushing myself upward. An out-of-control spill of orange flame rolled down the stairs and waved its angry arms upward, instantly igniting the rectangular foam ceiling tiles. Black smoke from the burning polymers joined its dingy grey sibling to push deeper into the room, at the same time adding a layer of toxic fumes to the haze.
“Ben?! Carl?!” I could hear myself inside my head, but to my ears, the words were a muffled tangle of syllables.
My friend was already dragging himself upward, but Carl was motionless between us. I struggled to my feet and stumbled for a moment. I touched my face, and it felt sticky. My nose and cheek were aching, and my shoulder felt like it had just gotten in the way of a freight train.
I don’t know that Ben could hear me any more than I could hear him. His lips were moving, and I thought I could pick out something resembling his voice. In any event, we both took hold of Deckert and pulled him to his feet. We half dragged him toward the doorway as he began to come to then he started moving with us as we rushed for the opening.
I cast a glance over my shoulder and saw that the wall along the stairwell had already begun to collapse, bringing the melting tiles and grid work of the drop ceiling with it. The flames were arcing in violent bursts, swinging monkeylike from panel to panel as they consumed anything they touched. When I returned my gaze forward, I realized that it had crowned over us in the open space above the tiles and was now burning through in our path.
Directly in front of me, a molten dollop of foam ceiling tile dripped to the floor, pulling a stream of flame with it. I shifted hard to the right, slamming once again into Carl and pushing him into Ben. We careened around the synthetic lava flow and slammed against the wall then ricocheted back onto a zigzagging course and covered the last few feet to the doorway.
The ringing in my ears had subsided to a low whistle, and I could now hear the roar of the holocaust around us. Ben shoved Deckert through the opening then clamped his hand on my shoulder and pushed me in. The plywood sub-floor had ended at the threshold and dropped a few inches to the original concrete, so I tripped as I went through. Ben followed and faltered as well.
The smoke was now hanging in the entire basement from the waist up, and we were hunched over in search of cooler, cleaner air. The only source of light in the room, other than that of the flames behind us, was a small, glass block window above us at ground level.
We began scanning the room with frantic urgency, battling the thickening smoke for visibility. The caustic fumes were beginning to overtake us, and each breath was coming at an even higher cost.
“Where’s the door?!” I heard Ben almost scream the question. “Where the fuck’s the door?!”