Free Goodhouse by Peyton Marshall Page A

reach the back row, where our headmaster sat. I was shaking. I had been there. In the chapel, that dead life was still going on inside me, playing and replaying.
    â€œJesus,” Tuck said. “You’re like some kind of fucked-up bird.” And then the lights went out and I heard a clicking noise. The locks on our doors had automatically retracted. Deep silence suddenly gave way to a collective roar. Footsteps pounded through the hallway. Tuck pulled me over to the door. He opened it wider and we stood behind the slab. It was so dark I couldn’t see, but Tuck seemed to have a grasp of where everything was. He made a low shushing noise, just barely audible, and then I heard someone enter the room with shuffling steps. I tried to breathe quietly, but my heart was hammering. The blackness was like a thick, suffocating soup. I stifled the urge to lash out. Tuck’s hand gripped my arm, sensing some change, though I hadn’t moved.
    â€œIt’s clear,” a voice said. “Check next door.”
    There were sounds in the hallway, and the brief illumination of a flashlight beam cut through the crack between the door and the wall. Then we were alone. Tuck pulled me after him. “I got to find my people,” he whispered.
    It’s hard to remember exactly what happened. Down the hall somewhere a boy was howling like a wolf. Someone grabbed me from behind and tore at my shirt. I struggled and fought. The blisters on my wrists burst. I was having little effect on my opponent, or perhaps there was more than one, and then suddenly I fell into another room, just fell through an unseen opening and lay on the floor.
    I crawled a little way and stood with my back to a wall. All the ambient noise was conjuring memories of the fire. It was peeling away time, and I felt certain that the hallway was filled with the angry remains of my friends. It felt like I was in two places at once. I was seeing little bursts of orange light out of the corner of my eye. They were phantoms, just like the smell of smoke, just like the repeating chorus of the school choir, chanting:
    But he is like a refiner’s fire, like a refiner’s fire.
    And the violins were sawing away and we were all sweating in the little church and then we were on fire, choking, clawing at each other. And there was that breath on the back of my neck: the white-haired man had found me and was going to open the back of my head. He was checking his gun. What was taking him so long?
    I was swinging into full panic, my hands digging into the wall, kicking and thrashing. When I felt the touch of a human hand, I turned toward it in fury.
    *   *   *
    This is what happened. On my last night at La Pine, I awoke to the sound of the fire alarm. Our room was already filling with smoke. I shouted at my roommates to follow me, but the hallway was chaotic. All of our training—the orderly fire drills with the marching lines of boys who stood on the green line and counted off—hadn’t prepared us for the darkness, for the chaos. We had been hunched over. Walking on all fours, bellowing and pushing—terrifying each other. The flashing red light of the alarm pulsated as it shrieked. There were no adults. Smoke filled the halls, a black, undulating ceiling that sank lower and lower. I was knocked to the ground, crushed for a few panicky seconds, kicked and stepped on. The air felt acidic in my lungs. I thought of that picture of Hell in the chaplain’s illustrated Bible: men with dog bodies and donkey tails and fire consuming their hair, maggots erupting from their mouths, a chaotic tangle of maimed and damaged limbs.
    Then, somehow, I was up and running, staying close to the wall as I sprinted to the back staircase. I saw Ian. My friend Ian, the one who stole cafeteria spoons. Ian. That was his name.
    I grabbed his arm and pulled him after me as we raced for the stairs, pushing against a tangle of boys headed in the opposite