FURNACE

by Muriel Gray

  A wide hardwood staircase swept in spiral splendour around one portion of the hall, culminating in two upright balustrades supporting gilded metal orbs representing the sun and the moon.

  But the hall was not the lair of a witch. Rather it had the feel of the foyer of some huge and expensive corporate office building. He had underestimated the wealth of these houses. This was not middle-class comfort. This was the realm of the seriously rich. Nelly moved in front of him, turned and held a finger to her lips again.

  “We must be quiet. Grandchildren. They sleep so lightly.”

  Josh looked at her face filled with affection and with no difficulty conjured up the face that had been standing behind the stroller on the morning of May first. And having given mental consent to the memory of that image, it was impossible to block out the tiny, crushed body blackened with sticky blood in its terry-cloth suit.

  Josh closed his eyes for a second and held the bridge of his nose. If there were indeed any children in the house, he wondered not that they slept lightly, but that they could ever sleep at all. His presence here had taken on a dreamlike quality, and as he opened his eyes again the brevity of his time, the urgency of his mission, however doomed, nearly took his breath away.

  Nelly seemed oblivious to his faltering and walked across the hall as elegantly as her backless slippers would allow to stand in front of double doors of oak, each one beautifully concaved to allow for the curve of the wall. She looked across at him without sympathy, and indicated the doors.

  “It’s not a dungeon, Mr. Spiller. It’s merely a tribute to my family. I thought it might help you understand.”

  He hated her at that moment, more than he had hated anyone in his life.

  Had it not been for the events of the last few days, things he had seen with his own eyes, experiences he could not tidy away as anything but the horrible truth, then he would happily have labelled this woman mad.

  But if she was mad, then he was also.

  He drew himself up and crossed the floor, his Caterpillar boots making the polished wood squeak in protest as though the floor had never before encountered anything so vulgar in contact with its surface.

  The room he entered was small and without windows, but lined to picture-rail height in tongue-and-groove wood panelling. Running down its centre was a long and rugged table, crudely formed as if from some poor farmhouse kitchen. It had a variety of objects placed on it, in a regimented fashion, each one facing out to the edge of the table, inviting inspection. The walls of the room were tightly packed with photographs and etchings, pieces of cloth and old candleholders, but there was nothing remotely sinister about the room. It was simply a museum, and as dull as any modern, parochial, child-friendly museum, where the exhibits are of no greater value than their part in social history. Josh almost expected to see a cheesey sign imploring visitors to touch.

  Instead, Nelly McFarlane did.

  “Please. Look around. Feel free to touch anything.”

  Josh didn’t want to look around. He wanted to run from here, try to find John Pace. But this woman terrified him almost as much as the thing that followed him here.

  He cast her a glance and then awkwardly began a circuit of the room. She stood by the door watching like a curator. “They came here from Scotland in the eighteen seventies. Not persecuted in the way perhaps that the Jews were, but feared and despised. And why? Because of faith.”

  Josh looked at the etchings of glum, craggy faces, a few small oil paintings of cottages by a long grey lake, some obscure old astrological charts. The whole collection looked like some mock-nineteenth-century display in one of those sad yuppie stores in Pittsburgh’s Shady Side that Elizabeth sometimes dragged him to screaming, to look at perfumed candles and lace pillowcases. They held absolutely no interest for Josh whatsoever. He turned to the objects on the table: a set of crude metal instruments that looked like a child’s geometry set, a wooden mortar and pestle balancing on top of a worn leather book. A small jar filled with some silvery powder sat imperiously beside ordinary kitchen implements. If he had expected something wonderful, something that would have explained the mystery of this hellish quagmire, then his hopes had foundered on this table of junk. Josh breathed hard, trying to fight his panic at wasting time. The emotion overtook him, and he turned to McFarlane, his hands hanging at his sides.

  “This is it? The bargain-hour bonanza from a Virginia yard sale?” His tone was vicious, and whether it was that alone, or the sacrilege of its presence in a shrine to her family, the thunder gathered around Nelly McFarlane. Josh stared at her, and his stomach lurched as he saw her face contort with a mixture of rage and power being held, but only just, under control.

  He took a step back from the table but neither withdrew his comment nor attempted to pacify her. He felt sure, witnessing the strange machinations behind her eyes, that she could strike him down with no more effort than swatting a fly. But he knew too that she would not. What was more, he hated the bitch so much that to hurt her at all was a triple cherry on the fruit machine.

  “Do you have a family, Mr. Spiller?”

  Her voice was the voice of sinister authority.

  He tried and failed to make his sound equally forceful. “Who doesn’t?”

  Elizabeth. Oh God. Elizabeth and his child.

  “Then you’ll know how important they are in your life. Past, present and future.”

  I don’t have much future left, he thought. Nor much family, come to that. What the fuck do I care?

  She walked to the other side of the table and stood opposite him. “You think me a murderer because you saw,” she paused, a coquettish grin being born at the corner of her mouth, “or thought you saw, me push a child to its death.”

  “You are a fuckin’ murderer. You want me to make up another name for it?”

  “People always make up names for things they don’t understand.”

  She indicated the pictures on the wall. “My ancestors had to live with plenty.” She grinned horrible. “Still, sticks and stones.”

  Nelly McFarlane stopped grinning and adopted an insane look of solemnity, like a child asking a parent a favour. “Are you a believer in a woman’s right to choose?”

  Josh opened his mouth slightly.

  “What?”

  “I mean, Mr. Spiller, are you in favour of abortion on demand?”

  Josh’s head spun. What was this? It was as though she were casually starting a bar-room discussion, and one that he’d had often. Yes, of course, he would have said, a bottle of Bud in his fist, the woman should choose. It’s her body, her life. Yes. Yes. Yes. You guys are fuckin’ Neanderthals if you think different. But now. After everything. Did he still think that? Would his argument still hold water in the motel bar? Did he think he was a bystander, or should he have a say in the fate of the life that he prayed still slept soundly in the safety of Elizabeth’s womb? He bowed his head and let his hands rest on the table, taking his weight.

  “I guess.”

  McFarlane nodded. “Then what if I told you that the child you saw was not a wanted child? That what you saw was nothing more than a rather late abortion?”

  Josh saw the face of Amy Nevin’s mother, that ugly shape she made with her mouth. Flic horror and terror on her face as the wheels crushed the life out of that tiny shell of flesh, and he knew McFarlane was lying. But as quickly, he saw Alice Nevin slumped at the side of the road mouthing, “I’m sorry,” to the man who had brought about this catastrophe. He raised his head, his eyes moist.

  “What do you mean?”

  Nelly looked deep into his welling eyes, then averaged her gaze and walked a little farther around the table. “No. Let me ask you what you mean if you use the word ‘sacrifice.’”

  He stared back numbly.

  She answered for him. “I’ll guess you would mean the giving up of something precious. Something so unbelievably dear to your heart that it would be inconceivable to part with it were it not for the love of the something greater to
which you offered this prize. Am I right?”

  He stared back, still stunned into silence by his own torment.

  “Abraham knew that. You remember? God asked him to sacrifice his son. The son he loved more than anything in the world.”

  Josh continued to say nothing. There was a dread in his heart that was deeper than the dread of his own death, which he had been facing now in some certainty for nearly a day. He could not contain it or comprehend it, but it overwhelmed him.

  “And what did Abraham do?” she continued. She smiled as though she were picking out drapes in a store, continuing in a sunny voice, “The only thing he could do, Mr. Spiller. Obey the will of God.”

  He looked up at her from his broken face and his voice was weak and pathetic. “God stopped him before he killed his son.”

  She laughed. “Yes. Yes, he did. So you have read your Bible. I apologize.”

  Her laughter stopped and she leaned across the jumble of artifacts towards him. “But if God hadn’t. What then? Would Abraham have been wrong in carrying out that deed? God, after all, created Abraham’s son. Did He not have the right to call back that ephemeral gift?”

  Josh bowed his head again, unable rather than unwilling to answer. There was silence for a few moments and then she said carefully, “Look at this.”

  He looked up. She held a wooden stick in the air, shaped at the top in the crude representation of a thistle, and was looking at it as if seeing it for the first time.

  “A spurtle. They stirred porridge with it.”

  She shot a mad smile across at Josh, and if any part of him had secretly hoped that returning to Furnace would restore him to the land of the sane, would reassure him that the threat of his imminent death was mere fancy, it ended there and then like a child’s sandcastle being washed over by the tide.

  It took him about two or three minutes to get himself out of bed, get to the door and open it. Elizabeth, dressed in a long T-shirt with a sweater pulled over it, looked frantic when he pushed the door open two inches.

  “Sim? Are you okay? I’ve been knocking forever.”

  He nodded once.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  He opened the door properly, aware he’d been keeping her out. “What’s the time?”

  Elizabeth looked at her feet. “Twelve-thirty.” She looked back up at him. “I’m really sorry I woke you.”

  “I not sleeping. You okay?”

  “Can I come in?”

  He stood aside.

  Sim looked awful, but Elizabeth felt worse. Both because of the dream she’d just had, and from the guilt of disturbing this poor, sick man. But she needed company. She was scared.

  Sim shuffled back into the house, and Elizabeth was at least relieved to see he was dressed. His crumpled clothes suggested he’d been lying down, but she believed him when he said he hadn’t been asleep. They went into the kitchen, which like the rest of the house already had its lights on, and sat at the table. Elizabeth wondered if Sim was scared too. It wasn’t like him to waste electricity.

  “Sim?”

  He blinked at her.

  “I had a dream, the craziest, sickest dream I ever had. And I know I sound like a ten-year-old. But I’m scared.”

  He looked down at the table. “I scared too.”

  She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “The phone?”

  He nodded.

  She nodded too. “That’s what I dreamt about.” She swallowed, looking very serious. “Sim. I thought you’d gone a little nuts back there. Now you’re going to think I have too. But I have to ask you something.”

  “Sure.”

  He sounded so weary, Elizabeth felt embarrassed to be there. She picked at her fingernail.

  “This dream. I guess I was just thinking about you, and Josh and everything, you know?”

  He stared at her, unmoving.

  “In my dream it rang, and I answered, and there was all that noise again. So I did what you said, remember? Spoke with my thoughts?”

  She closed her eyes and curled her fingers.

  “Oh, Sim. This thing. This unbelievable, disgusting… thing started to come out of the phone, and it was laughing at me. Saying terrible things.”

  “What you going to ask, Elizabeth?”

  It sounded to her like he didn’t want this. Wanted her to stop talking about the whole thing and go. It was so unlike the man who would normally, any time of the day or night, do anything to delay Josh or Elizabeth just to chew the fat. She opened her eyes and swallowed. “The thing… you saw. What was it like?”

  He bent his head forward almost as if he’d fallen asleep. But with his chin on his chest he spoke quietly. “You know what it like, Elizabeth. It like a nightmare man inside an animal; it got mean red eyes that blink sideways, and claws and teeth that stink like it been inside a carcass already, and its skin that don’t look like skin, smoking like it been on fire.”

  Her hands had gone over her mouth, and her eyes were as wide as they could be without falling from her face. Elizabeth shook her head, willing it not to be so. Her voice was pleading and tiny.

  “You can’t know that. You can’t know my dream.”

  Sim let his head come back up and he looked at her. “That what stopping Josh calling.”

  She took her hands from her mouth, got up slowly and walked back and forth a few paces. “Jesus Christ. We’ve gone crazy together, Sim.”

  “Maybe.”

  “How can I ever answer the phone again?”

  “ ‘Cos if he call again, he goin’ to need you to.”

  She looked over at him and joined him at the table again. “That stuff. About talking to him with my thoughts. What made you say that?”

  He shook his head and looked down. How old he looked, she thought.

  “Dumb village talk, that’s all. Used to be if someone put spell on you, made your cattle dry, made your babies sick, worst thing was you couldn’t talk to no one you loved. Everyone run away and leave the person alone. Person go crazy with loneliness and fear. But sometimes, people who loved them could think at them and be heard. So they say.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I don’t believe spells was what caused the misery people sometimes thought it had. They just simple people. Just take against someone and think there was curses where there was only cattle colic or diphtheria. But I don’t know nothing that say it can’t maybe be true.”

  She sat back in her chair. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”

  Sim looked at her as if this was the first interesting thing she’d said all night. “Me neither. These modern days. Not jungle. I just a crazy old man who make you dream crazy stuff too. Go back to bed, Elizabeth.”

  She looked with pleading eyes, then got up reluctantly, a scared child going back to the dark bedroom. Sim did nothing to stop her. She paused on her way out the door.

  “You know what the thing in my dream said, Sim?”

  He didn’t want to know. His face said so. But she told him anyway.

  “It said, ‘He’s dead already, bitch.’”

  33

  The bad thoughts had stopped. The thoughts its carrier had entertained about killing it. It writhed again comfortably, stretched, almost able to see its own limbs as they continued to form. Sometimes it was uncomfortable. Like when its carrier was thinking hard about how to expel it, or when someone was trying to hurt its carrier. But then even if it couldn’t touch yet, couldn’t make its physical presence tangible to all, it could still make its carrier dream. And what dreams they were.

  It shared the dreams, the way it shared everything. And while they made the carrier sick with terror, they made it feel whole, contented, feeding on that fear.

  It asked itself again, for the thousandth time, had it been born before? Its time was not far. And yes. Yes, it was almost sure it had.

  “Can I know two things?”

  “That depends if the answer is within
your meagre comprehension,” she said, still examining the spurtle as though it were a work of art.

  Josh had enjoyed the look of anger on McFarlane’s face when he insulted her little display. He was going to die. He could do what he liked, and he wanted to see that flash in her eyes again. He would take his time.

  “Why did you use me for… what’d you call it? The ‘late abortion’? Why not just kill her yourself?”

  She tapped the wooden stick thoughtfully on her cheek. “You won’t understand this. But the answer is the child must be given up. That is, to take the life oneself is not enough. God knows, particularly in this part of the mountains, the creatures who inhabit these backwoods cabins are bashing their darling dull-eyed babies against the wall in a drunken stupor on such a regular basis, their power might exceed mine a hundredfold if that were the solution. No. You see, it must be taken away from you. Stolen from you. Ripped from you. Wrenched from you. In the absence of like-minded, reliable colleagues who might perform that task for me, I have been forced to find a different, shall we say more modern method of giving up.”

  She looked across at him.

  “You see? The blank stare of the blue-collar worker. The lichen on its rock.”

  The stare was not blank, but she ignored its undertow and turned from him to examine a long painting that looked to Josh like two figures bent over a flame. She tapped it with her spurtle and laughed, her back still to him.

  “They were mostly puffers in Scotland, you know. Hopeless amateur chemists who understood nothing and searched for everything. I went there, you know, a few years back. To Furnace. I shouldn’t have, really. It was heartbreakingly disappointing. Rather a nice oyster restaurant at the head of the loch, I recall. Fine fish, ruined by unforgivably poor service. And then the village itself. Dear me. A few modern little houses with their attendant suburban bushes. No trace of the laboratory the two was named after. But then, it was only the McFarlanes who reached the truth of the Philosopher’s Stone.”