THE WAKING SILENCE

"What is the poison, Eleanor?!" Arthur screamed over the roar of the fire, the phone pressed tight to his ear.

Eleanor knelt on the blistering floorboards, coughing violently as the black smoke thickened, banking down from the ceiling like a heavy, suffocating blanket. She looked at Arthur, her eyes wide, entirely stripped of the polished armor she had worn for years.

"I don't know!" she choked out. "I swear! He just handed me the vial and told me it was a heavy sedative!"

"Think!" Arthur grabbed her by the shoulders, his thumbs pressing into her collarbones. "What did he have access to? Who did he buy it from? My daughter is dying on a table right now!"

On the phone, Dr. Evans's voice was a frantic buzz in the background. "Arthur, her blood pressure is tanking. We’re pushing epinephrine, but her liver is shutting down!"

Leo, crouched low to the ground with his shirt pulled over his mouth, suddenly pointed at Eleanor. "The shed!" the boy yelled, his voice muffled. "Marcus spent hours in the old gardening shed. He had boxes of chemicals in there!"

Eleanor’s eyes widened with sudden recognition. "Foxglove," she gasped, gripping Arthur’s wrists. "He grew foxglove in the greenhouse. Digitalis. He extracted it himself. He told me it was for a landscaping project, but he was boiling it down!"

"Digitalis overdose," Arthur yelled into the phone. "Treat her for a massive digitalis overdose! Digoxin immune Fab, give it to her now!"

"Understood!" Dr. Evans shouted before the line abruptly went dead.

Arthur tossed the phone aside and grabbed the iron fireplace poker. The smoke was blinding now, the heat practically singing the hair on his arms. The bottom hinge of the door was still wedged tight.

"Hit it!" Eleanor screamed, grabbing the heavy brass lamp base. She didn't hand it to Arthur; instead, she swung it herself, bringing it down with a desperate, ferocious strength against the poker.

With a loud metallic crack, the bottom pin shot out, rolling across the floor.

The door sagged, but the top hinge held. The wood of the door was beginning to blister and blacken from the hall fire.

"Get back," Arthur ordered, stepping back and throwing his entire body weight against the heavy oak. The top hinge groaned, the screws tearing through the softened, burning wood, and the door collapsed outward into the hallway.

A wall of heat and orange flame roared into the nursery.

"Stay low!" Arthur yelled, grabbing Leo by the collar of his coat and pulling him into the hallway. The stairs were engulfed, but the servant's back staircase was only a few feet away, mostly untouched by the flames.

They crawled through the smoke. Arthur shoved Leo ahead of him down the narrow wooden stairs. When he looked back, Eleanor was trapped. A burning beam from the ceiling had collapsed, blocking her path to the stairs.

"Eleanor!" Arthur shouted, moving back up the steps.

"Go!" she screamed, her robe catching the edge of a rogue ember. "Get to Lily! Save her! I'm sorry, Arthur! I'm so sorry!"

She didn't reach for him. She stepped back into the flames, pushing the burning beam with her bare hands, trying to clear a path not for herself, but to keep the fire from following them down the stairs.

Arthur hesitated for a fraction of a second, the instinct to save her warring with the desperate need to reach his daughter.

"Arthur, come on!" Leo tugged at his sleeve from the bottom of the steps.

Arthur turned and ran. They burst through the back door into the freezing, torrential rain, collapsing onto the wet grass. Arthur sucked in deep, ragged breaths of clean air, his lungs burning.

He looked up at the house. The second floor was an inferno.