“This is her doing.”

“Don’t be mad, Alice. A little séance never hurt anyone.”

“Stop your idiocy, Sandra, please. For once in your death.”

“Testy, testy.”

“Please. Both of you. Stop it.”

They came from all sides, from everywhere and nowhere. Little points of pain exploded in Trenton’s head, as though each word were an arrow fired into his brain. He dropped Katie’s hands and, without realizing it, cried out. It was worse than a migraine. It was worse than anything.

“Trenton,” Katie’s voice seemed distant now, muffled behind layers of cloth. “What is it? Are you okay?”

The other voices were real, sharp, finely tuned, louder and clearer than he’d ever heard them.

“Look at him. Just look at him. And you still claim he doesn’t hear?”

“Calm down, Alice, don’t get your panties in a bunch.”

“Everything will be ruined . . . ”

There were fists pummeling Trenton’s brain, and colored lights blooming behind his eyes. He had to get out. He had to get away. He started to stagger to his feet, on legs that no longer moved the way he wanted, a puppet trying to move its wooden limbs. Katie was still shouting from behind her layers of cloth, but he could no longer hear what she was saying. He managed to stand, finally, and cracked his head on the ceiling.

“Leave us alone. Can you hear me, Trenton? Leave us alone.”

Trenton opened his mouth to reply, no longer caring if Katie thought he was crazy. He didn’t care about anything but making the pain stop.

But before he could speak, or shout, he felt a motion in the air—as though a dozen windows had been opened at once. At the same time, lightly—just lightly—the pressure of a hand on his back.

He stumbled. And then the candles turned over. Not singly, but all at once, so that in one split second, in a time too quick to register, the blanket was on fire and there was smoke unfurling like ribbons from the ground and Katie was screaming.

“Trenton!” Katie’s terror cut through the muffling, through the fog in Trenton’s brain, through the other voice, receding now but still distinct, repeating the same words, over and over.

“What have you done, Alice? What the hell did you do?”

AMY

It was fun to hide, even though she had to sit in a little ball on the floor, and it was cold in the attic and also smelled weird. She had to be very careful to be quiet because that was how people found you, if you moved a lot or made sounds. That was how Amy always found her mom when they played hide-and-seek because Mommy didn’t know how to sit still and also she always hid in the same spot, under the bed.

Mommy wasn’t a good hider but Amy was. She could hide for hours without moving hardly and stay quiet as a mouse or even quieter. It was fun to watch people when they couldn’t see you, like being God or the Eye of Judgment in The Raven Heliotrope, which was invisible but there in the curve of the sky and everywhere at once, so the whole world was mapped on the inside of its eyeball.

Back home, Amy had found a little hole that went from her closet through to her mother’s closet and sometimes she hid there when Mommy thought she was doing something else, like napping or watching TV, and then she liked to watch her mom being her mom when she thought she was all alone and Amy wasn’t there to be the daughter.

Except one time there was a stranger there with her mom, a man, and Mommy was naked, and he was na**d and ugly and Amy didn’t like looking at him. But Mommy had kissed him and made little noises like Brewster, the neighbor’s dog, when he was about to pee on the floor. Amy didn’t like that and she was glad the man went away and never came back, but now she didn’t like to watch her mom so much anymore.

Amy didn’t understand what Trenton and the dead girl were doing, but she thought maybe Trenton was trying to make Grandpa come back to life like the dead girl did. It was fun to watch even if she couldn’t see that good because she was hiding behind a stack of big cardboard boxes and could see only through a little crack between them.

But then Trenton got mad and was holding his head like her nana did in the mornings if you woke her up by talking too loud, and the dead girl was calling out, and Amy started to get scared but she didn’t want to move because if Trenton saw her he’d be even madder.

And then there was fire and she knew it was fire because Trenton kept saying it and also because she’d seen it before, in Nana’s house in wintertime and also this one time Mommy tried to cook dinner and something happened and then there was fire on the stove. And Mommy screamed stay back, Amy, stay back, and pressed Amy back far against the wall while she sprinkled white stuff on the fire to make it go away.

So Amy stayed back and didn’t make a sound because that was what Mommy told her to do and because she didn’t want Trenton to be mad. She pressed her knees to her chest and stayed small, and quiet.

ALICE

In The Raven Heliotrope, I wrote a scene about a fire: the palace of the Innocents burns down after it’s raided by marauding Nihilis. The Innocents outsmart them and flee through a hidden tunnel to safety. They use magic to lock the palace doors, entrapping the Nihilis, and Penelope asks her pet dragon to burn the whole place down, so the Nihilis can’t desecrate it. The fire was like white ribbons, reaching into the sky. I was very pleased with that sentence, and especially pleased with that image, of the white ribbons.

These flames aren’t like ribbons at all. They’re like mouths, like greedy fingers, like something alive: leaping, running up the walls, swallowing boxes and broken furniture.

“Are you proud of yourself?” Sandra’s voice is like the hiss and pop of the flames. “You’ll kill them all.”

I can’t answer. I can’t speak at all. I’m breaking apart on billows of smoke: memories are floating up from distant, buried places. Throwing up, day after day, in the toilet, clutching the porcelain for support; sheets stained with blood and water; the willow tree running its long thin fingers along the ground, as though searching, searching for something.

“What’s going to happen?” The new ghost sounds like she’s about to cry. “Are they going to burn? Are we going to burn?”

Trenton has managed to extinguish the blanket. But the fire has already spread too far. It jumps from surface to surface, skates across the old wooden bureau, hooks onto the low-beamed ceiling, and starts its climb.

Katie is on her hands and knees, looking for something. Trenton tries to pull her backward, toward the stairs. She wrenches away from him.