I awoke with sputtering coughs, my lungs and throat burning. I tried to breathe, but the air tasted like ash. Something was wrong. I was hot. Too hot. Something primal in me responded, sending adrenaline thundering through my veins, and with it a single, crystal clear thought: GET OUT.

I slammed my hands clumsily against the wall, desperately searching for the panel Grandma had hidden me behind. Something gave. The panel slipped aside on silent hinges, admitting a wave of black smoke into the crawl space. I hissed as the smoke burned my eyes. It seared and rubbed at them uselessly until I began coughing again.

I had to get out of here. Had to get somewhere where the air was clear, where I could breathe. Choking, I scrambled out of the crawl space. Grandma’s closet was full of the thick, black smoke, carrying with it the smell of burning wood and ash so strong I could taste it. I choked on it, sputtering until I thought I would vomit.

Suddenly, something flashed behind my eyes. A memory. Mine and yet not mine. Fragmented like a corrupted computer file. Other crawl spaces, other hiding places. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Each of them alien and familiar all at once. I recognized none of them and yet they were mine. Each time I emerged, the room was burning. Smoke. Flames. Ashes. Décor spanning centuries, and yet each time there was a clear path. A planned escape.

Pain seared across my skull and a scream that seemed to hold a thousand voices and one erupted from me. My knees buckled and I found myself amongst a sea of sparks seeking purchase on the ground. It felt like someone had dumped a pack of Pop Rocks into my cerebrospinal fluid, sizzling across my brain.

I heard my screams long before I realized they were my own.

Whatever that was…hallucination, or dream—I didn’t have time to contemplate it. If I didn’t get out of the smoke soon, I was going to die.

On my hands and knees, I crawled toward the window. My eyes watered, fighting in vain against the smoke. Through the haze, the landscape seemed to shift. One moment, I was in my grandmother’s second story bedroom, the next I was in a single story Craftsman style home with flames licking the walls, then back again before finding myself crawling through a smoky parlor with singed Victorian furniture and peeling arsenic green wallpaper.

I pushed the images from my mind, clinging to the here and now as I felt my way across floor boards hot as coals. I stumbled into the wall and gasped, relieved, until I began coughing again. My body tried to curl in on itself, wracked with spasms as it fought to expel the smoke from my lungs. I pushed against it, forcing my muscles to obey as I reached for the window. It had to be around here somewhere… there!

The glass shattered at the slightest touch, glass exploding outward. Smoke billowed into a dusky sky as though leading the way for me. I clambered onto the windowsill and out onto the roof that overlooked the front porch. Coughing, I crawled away from the smoke and glass. I needed to stay away from the edge so I didn’t—

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The next thing I knew, I was falling. Someone screamed, but it wasn’t me this time. The ground rushed up to meet me. There was a sound like a branch breaking, and pain laced up my arm, snapping me into the present with jarring clarity.

Swirling, flashing emergency lights from two firetrucks and half again as many police cruisers and an ambulance cast dizzying voltaic light across the neighborhood, stretching and diminishing shadows so that all the world beyond them were indistinguishable from dancing black figures like something from a nightmare. The ground beneath me was wet—soaked with water from hoses mounted to the firetrucks as they sprayed water toward the flames. Oh, the flames.

They licked the first story of my home like hungry tongues, devouring the structure and all the memories within, and belching great clouds of smoke into the twilight. Wood blackened, splintered, and cracked under the lash of their heat, the whole house groaning in anguish.

All around me, there was shouting, discordant voices that wove together to create a white noise beneath the roar of the fire.

“Hey, you can’t go in there!” a voice called over the din. Another voice cut through the madness—a voice as familiar to me as my own.

“Fuck you, pig, that’s my friend!”

“Ben…” I groaned. I turned toward his voice, searching. Reaching. Ben’s form emerged from the chaos, growing more solid with each step as he sprinted to me.

“Ben!” I called again, voice on the edge of tears. I reached for him like a lifeline.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got you.”

He took hold of my outstretched hand and lifted me to my feet. I clutched my broken arm to my chest as Ben pulled my good hand over his shoulder to support me and hauled me away from the burning building.

“Mom,” I coughed, half-turning as I realized she must still be back there.

“She’s okay,” Ben assured me, holding me closer so I couldn’t do something stupid (like run back into a burning building with a broken arm). “I saw another ambulance take her away.”

“What about—” I started to ask, but a fit of coughing overtook me. Ben pulled me along, my feet weak and clumsy on the wet earth. A pair of paramedics jogged toward us. They said something to Ben that didn’t quite reach me. Everything was starting to go sideways again.

The paramedics—no, they were my cousins. My cousins. They fussed, expressions pinched with worry as they helped me to the sofa—I mean into the back of the ambulance. The overhead lights flashed. Candlelight, gas lamps, antique bulbs, lanterns, then back again.

Something covered my mouth. There was a pinch in my arm.

I struggled to stay in the here and now, but the present seemed lost amongst a torrent of names and faces. Words from strangers were a jumble with those from allies, a thousand mouths moving as one.

“Stop,” I tried to say, but my tongue felt clumsy and foreign in my mouth. My vision blurred. Everything was starting to go hazy. The color leeched out of the world. Images blurred together until nothing was indistinguishable from the next. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. Everything was happening too fast, and yet standing still.

There was an eerie kind of nostalgia to it, as though this nightmare was one I’d had before. Again, and again, and again…

And again…

And again…

And again…