The Fire by Katherine Neville Read Free Book Online Page A

chessboard, with eight squares on each side.
    In a nutshell – that was the thing we never talked about.
    My distraught and intractable mother had refused ever to speak of the game of chess – even to permit it into her house. Since my father’s death (the other thing that we never talked about), I was forbidden to play the game – the only thing I’d ever known how to do, the only thing that helped me connect with the world around me. I might as well have been ordered, at the age of twelve, to become autistic.
    My mother was so opposed, in every way imaginable, to the idea of chess. Though I’d never been able to follow her logic – if indeed, it was logic – to my mother’s mind, chess would prove as dangerous to me as it had been to my father.
    But now it seemed that by bringing me here on her birthday,by leaving that cryptic phrase with its encrypted message, she was welcoming me back to the game.
    I timed it: It took me twenty-seven minutes and – since I’d left the engine running – a gallon of hog-guzzling gas until I had figured out how to get inside.
    By now, anyone with half a brain would have guessed that those two-digit numbers were also combinations on a tumbler. But there were no locks on the house. Except there was one in the barn. On a lockbox. The keys to the cars were kept there.
    Would I be justified in saying ‘Duh’?
    I switched off the Rover, plowed through the snow to the barn – and voilà! – a few tumblers dropped, the door to the lockbox opened, and the door key appeared on a chain. Back at the house, it took a moment to recall that the key was inserted into the eagle’s left claw. Then the ancient doors groaned open a crack.
    I scraped my boots on the rusty old fireplace grille we kept beside the entrance, shoved open the heavy front doors of the lodge, and slammed them shut behind me, causing a flurry of sparkling snowflakes to sift through the slanted morning light.
    Within the dim interior light of the mudroom – an entry not much bigger than a confessional that kept the cold winds out – I kicked off my dripping boots and pulled on a pair of the fuzzy sheepskin aprés-ski booties that always sat there atop our frozen-food locker. When I’d hung up my parka, I opened the inner doors and stepped into the vast octagon, warmed by the giant log that was burning in the central hearth.
    The octagon was a room perhaps one hundred feet across and thirty feet high. The fire pit took up the center, with a copper hood above it, hung with pots, rising to the mossrock chimney that pulled smoke upward to the sky. It was like an enormous teepee, except for the massive furniture scattered everywhere. My mother had always been averse to things one might actually sit on – but there was our ebony parlor grand piano, a sideboard, an assortment of desks, library tables, and revolving bookcases, and a billiard table that no one ever played on.
    The upper floor was an octagonal balcony that overhung the room. There were small chambers there where people could sleep and even, sometimes, bathe.
    Molten light poured through the lower windows at every side, glittering across the dust that draped the mahogany. From the ceiling skylights, rosy morning light sifted down, picking out the features of the colorfully painted heads of animal totems that were carved into the enormous beams supporting the balcony: bear, wolf, eagle, stag, buffalo, goat, cougar, ram. From their lofty perspective, nearly twenty feet high, they seemed to be floating timelessly in space. Everything seemed to be frozen in time. The only sound was the occasional cracking of fire from the log.
    I walked around the perimeter, from one window to another, looking out at the snow: except for mine, there was not one print to be seen anywhere. I went up the spiral stairs to the balcony and checked each partitioned sleeping space. Not the slightest trace.
    But how had she done it?
    It appeared that my mother, Cat Velis, had vanished into