Lashed by the wind, the fire spread like a flood. A blast of smoke engulfed the glass obscuring their view with its swirling whiteness. Then bits of flaming ashes dotted the smoke as the flames found new fuel in the rotted trees. Standing there, holding Dorothy in his arms, Norman saw the glass around them slowly darken. Quickly, as the wind brought the increasing heat upon them, the glass turned black and all he could see was the wild smoke rolling across the hole at the top of their stifling cage. He felt Dorothy coughing. Heat swam in the blackness about them. Then almost as suddenly as it had begun, the wind swept the smoke away and Norman tore himself away from Dorothy and sprang to the glass wall. Without waiting till the glass lightened, he ran his hand across its blistering surface. When the thermal quality of the glass permitted the passage of light and the sight of the smoldering forest across the field, Norman was half way up the slick side, climbing like a ladder the bulging ridges that encircled the glass at its invisible seams. As Dorothy stared at him, unbelieving, he vaulted over the rim and jolted with stinging feet to the hot gravel outside. The metal ladder was like a live coal in his hands but he barely felt it as he threw it against the wall and ran up it like a squirrel. Sitting on the cooling rim, he drew the ladder up after him and dropped it inside for Dorothy. Soon they were streaking across the steaming gravel toward the house, Dorothy's hair streaming in the smoky wind. Norman burst into the big front room with Dorothy behind him. Their running feet were loud in the silent house as they sped down the corridor, Norman dreading what he would find tied to the cylinder where they had left Keren. "You don't want to see this," he said, halting at the closed door. "Try these other doors and find a gun. Sade may be back any moment!" Dorothy obediently turned away as he went in and the sight that met his eyes was to figure in many a future nightmare. Half way between the door and the cylinder, Keren lay on the floor, more like some hideous reptile than a human being, staring up at him, her eyes two black holes, hate alive in them, the only life in what was left of her face. Norman stepped over and picked her up, his fingers recoiling from the touch of leathern skin and bone. Her luxurious hair had vanished leaving a skull, cracked skin tight across her cheek bones. The rope that had held her to the cylinder had slipped from her shrunken wrists and how she had crawled this far, Norman couldn't tell.