“Hey!” Duran called out. “Wait up! I can’t see a thing.”

She apologized with a giggle. “I thought you were right behind me.” Turning, she swung her arm through the air, hoping to hit the light cord. It was amazing how elusive the damn things were. Then she found it, and yanked.

He was standing there with a thoughtful squint, as if he were about to sneeze. “Wait a second,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “Turn it off.”

“What?”

“Just turn it off!”

She did, this time taking care to keep the cord in her grasp.

“That’s weird,” Duran said, his voice loud in the darkness. “There’s like a… glow… coming from the crawl space. Turn the light back on.”

She did and crossed the cellar to the corner where he was standing. He was in a crouch, leaning on a concrete abutment, looking into the crawl space. Her eyes followed his gaze.

And then she saw what he saw: a votive candle, flickering in the darkness.

Neither of them knew what to say. So they stared, and watched as the candle’s flame seemed to change and grow brighter, lengthening into an elongated blue pillar, the orange wick glowing within. And then the flame evaporated and it was just the glowing wick. Duran grabbed her by the arm and, straightening, yanked her toward the basement doors. The ferocity of his grip scared her and, for a moment, she remembered the night before, when he’d seized her wrist and wrestled the plastic overlay out of her hand. Only now, he was even more violent, pulling her toward the door.

“Hey,” she said, “wait a minute!”

Her feet were scrabbling for purchase, more or less bouncing up the cement steps, her ankles and shins barking painfully on the edges. Then they were out in the air, and he was hustling her down the alley toward the ocean, moving so fast that she was barely in contact with the ground.

That’s when the sound came—a rolling growl that exploded into a concussive whummmmp, followed by a pressure drop that made her ears pop. Then the air behind them dissolved into a cloud of fiery foam, ballooning outwards. Now, she was running on her own, the heat surging at her back. Not till they reached the beach did it seem safe to stop. Turning, they saw a column of fire roaring through the roof of the house.

“But… how did you know?” she asked.

“You saw the light… the candle… get brighter—right?”

She nodded.

“Propane’s heavier than air, so it lays on the floor, and it just sorta… builds up. They had the candle up in the elevated crawl space, so when the gas reached the flame, a lot of it had accumulated. You saw how the flame went out; that’s because there was no oxygen left. It was all gas. We were lucky.”

Duran’s attention was reclaimed by the house. There were new sounds now, sharp cracks as the windows exploded, the shriek of metal coming apart in the heat. Every once in a while, a fresh roar told them that the fire had discovered new territory, new fuel. Then they heard an enormous siren wail, summoning the volunteer firefighters.

Adrienne started to shiver, from cold or shock, she couldn’t be sure. They tried to kill us both, she thought. They turned on the gas, and shut off the pilot light. Or something. A column of sparks blasted into the air. Then they lighted a candle, as if it were a mass. That’s what I heard, she thought, the noise in the cellar. And then they checked—they checked to make sure I was there.

“They tried to kill us,” she said, her voice dull, her face flushed from the fire.

Duran nodded.

He put his arm around her and, together, they walked back toward the house. There were sirens all over town now, wailing closer. Suddenly, Duran tensed, stopped, and slapped his hips. Then he smiled with relief. “Car keys,” he said.

It was getting hotter now. In the intervals between the houses, they could see the first fire truck roaring down the street, siren screaming, lights whirling. The sky fluttered with the wheeling lights—yellow, red, yellow, red. They walked past a man whose pajama bottoms were visible below the puffy parka he wore. He stood with his arm around a woman in a bathrobe and furry slippers. They were staring at the house as Adrienne and Duran walked by. “Like a torch,” the man said, his voice hushed. Then a part of the roof collapsed, falling into the house with a soft thud that sent up geysers of fire and sparks.

Duran unlocked the door to the car, and flicked the button inside. Adrienne heard the snap of the locks as she stood there, staring at what was now an architectural skeleton, with flames dancing along its blackened ribs. The temperature must have been 130 degrees on one side of the street, and 35 on the other.

Duran got out and came around to open the door for her, his feet crunching in the gravel. As he reached for the door’s handle, he cursed and yanked his hand away. “Slide in the driver’s side,” he told her. “The door’s like an oven.”

As they drove away, she turned in the seat, and said, “I think the police station’s somewhere around the water tower.”

“We’re not going there,” he told her.

She looked at him as if he were insane (which, of course, was a theory). “We have to,” she insisted. “We can’t just keep running around—”

“It’s better we don’t go there,” he said, turning onto the highway out of town.

“Why?”

“Because we’re better off dead.”

She turned her head, and looked at his reflection in the window. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean, if they think they killed us, that’s good. We’ll live longer that way.”

“It won’t work,” she announced.

“What won’t?”

“Playing dead.”

Duran adjusted the rearview mirror, dimming the sunrise. “Why not?”

“Because the car’s gone. Which suggests we weren’t in the house. And the newspapers will say no one was killed.”

Duran shrugged. “At least it gives us a day.”

Another couple of miles rolled by, and Adrienne turned to Duran. “So let’s go to Washington,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because we have time, and because I want to go to my apartment. Get some things.”

He gave her a skeptical look.

“You said it gave us a day.”

“Yeah, but… what if I’m wrong? I mean, I don’t even know how they found us in the first place.”

“I do,” Adrienne told him.

Duran gave her a suspicious look. “You do? How?”

“You told them.”

“I what? Told who?”

“You told them where we were,” she said. “You were online… in a chat room or something.”

Duran glanced at her, to see if she was kidding. But she wasn’t. She was dead serious. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

“The night before last. You scared the hell out of me.”

“I did?”

“You were on some crazy Web site. All these images were flashing by, and then… it was like one of those instant messages on AOL.”

“What!?”

“Trust me.”

“So… what did it say?”

It was her turn to shrug. “I don’t know: good-morning, or something.”

“That’s it?”

She shook her head. “No. It said: ‘Hello Jeffrey.’ Then it asked where you were. And you typed something.”

“What did I type?”

“I don’t know. It didn’t come up on the screen. But they asked, and you answered. You could have given them the zip code and parking directions, for all I know.”

“Get out!”

“I’m serious,” she insisted.

“Why didn’t you stop me?”

“I tried! And it was like… I don’t know. It was like you were gone. Way gone. I had to call Doctor Shaw.”

“What?!”

“I was afraid of you! So he hypnotized you over the phone,” she told him. “You don’t remember this?”

Duran shook his head, thinking, It didn’t happen. Or I’d remember it. Because my short-term memory is fine. Shaw said so. Which means Adrienne’s lying or… there’s more than one me. Jekyll and Hyde. MPD. Christ—The dashboard emitted a warning beep, and his eyes went to the gas gauge. “We have to stop,” he told her.