Mortal Fire

by Elizabeth Knox

  There was a rope attached to the jeep’s back bumper, but it seemed to have been thrown forward downhill. Lealand pulled on the rope, hauling in what was tied to its end. As he hauled he could already see what had happened. The marine had been using the jeep to pull something free, some stuck object. One end of the rope had been tied to the jeep’s back bumper, and the other to the thing he’d wanted to move. The thing had come free suddenly and unexpectedly, causing the jeep to leave the road and crash into the forest. Lealand could see the snapped branches on one of the overgrown pear trees on the first terrace. The stuck object had catapulted through the branches and broken them off. There was a reek of rye whiskey all around the vehicle. Lealand spotted a twelve-slot crate in the back of the jeep. Moonshine made on the Peninsula always came in unlabeled jars. The crate held one remaining jar. Lealand retrieved it and put it in his pocket, then went back to hauling on the rope.

  He reeled in a horror. As soon as he saw what was on the other end of the rope, he ran up the hill to find his brother.

  Ghislain’s body was hanging over the rock wall between the cultivated terrace and the wild one. From the way the blood was wiped about the rocks, as well as soaking the ground at the foot of the wall, Lealand could see that Ghislain had tried to help himself, tried to at least raise his body and lift his face from the stones. He’d perhaps even been thinking. Lealand deduced that from the gouge marks behind his brother’s bare feet. Ghislain had dug his toes into the soil of the garden. He had been trying to pull himself back and turn himself over. But there isn’t much a man hanging head down over a wall can do to right himself if he has no arms.

  Now, seventeen years after that morning, Lealand looked at the beautiful young man standing on the porch, flushed with triumph, and tried to remember that moment—the moment when he’d finally had the power to properly punish Ghislain for Bull Mine and those kneeling, stifled miners. Because the house couldn’t reach all the way down the hill into the untamed, unspelled tangles of forest and retrieve the missing fifth of its human chattel—Ghislain Zarene’s arms. If Lealand hadn’t carried the grisly objects up the hill, then carried Ghislain too, and put both Ghislain’s body and his arms down indoors, then the Midnight Mending wouldn’t have been able to put his brother back together. The house had been full of those whiskey jars—all empty. Everything else was cleared away, because everything else belonged to the house.

  So that was that—a jeep crashed in the forest, a dead marine at the wheel, Ghislain in three pieces, blood in the garden, empty whiskey jars, a forage cap belonging to a Private First Class, USMC, Division II. And the house itself, full of wounded silence.

  Lealand had a good look around but there was nothing to be learned, since the house always tidied up after its occupant. There were a few new things—Ghislain had been whittling, making human and animal figures from wood: a boy in overalls, a girl in a ballet dress, a horse, a train engine, and a rowboat. The carvings were dry, splitting, so the work was old. Possibly Ghislain had made the figurines sometime in his first ten years alone, before he went mad. Or he’d made them to stop himself from going mad—whittling, whiling away the time.

  Lealand had left at eleven thirty p.m., before the Midnight Mending. But not before he’d carried the dead marine up the hill too and put his body and the bloodied rope into the window seat of a downstairs room. Midnight might mend Ghislain, but sooner or later he would smell the body and—if he was still even a little mad—he’d think he was responsible for yet another death. And then perhaps he’d think again about why he deserved to be where his family had put him.

  * * *

  IRIS SAID, “This is a new low for you, Ghislain—getting your hooks into a young girl.”

  “Do you imagine I care what you think?”

  Lealand said, “It’s better not to speak to him, Iris. We must concentrate on helping Mr. Mochrie extract his sister.”

  “I don’t see my sister,” said Sholto. He started forward. The Zarenes each grabbed an arm.

  “Not a good idea,” Lealand said. “He can be very dangerous.”

  * * *

  GHISLAIN TOOK A STEP BACK across the bright brass lintel. He held out his hand to Canny. She came to him reluctantly. She whispered, “Sholto looks so upset.”

  “Don’t show him you’re sorry,” Ghislain said. “It never makes any difference. Thirty years ago I sat for a whole week where I’m standing now and watched them come and go, winding their spell around me. I kept saying sorry, which they only took to mean that I accepted responsibility for everything. I sat still and let them have their feelings. I waited to be forgiven.”

  Canny peered out the door. “They’re afraid of you,” she said.

  “They should be.” Ghislain drew her into his arms. He turned her so that her back was to the open door. He put his chin on the top of her head and looked over her at Iris, Lealand, and Sholto.

  “Canny!” Sholto called.

  She clung tight to Ghislain.

  “Dear?” Sholto said.

  Ghislain raised his voice to say, “Go on, Mr. Mochrie; put your case.”

  “I’m speaking to her, not you,” Sholto said. Again he tried to move forward and again was caught. Iris began whispering fiercely in his ear.

  Ghislain said to Sholto, “You’re going to let Iris caution you, are you? After the bees, how can you listen to anything she has to say?”

  “We know the bees were a mistake,” Lealand said.

  “Oh—so people do make mistakes?” Ghislain said.

  Sholto shook Iris off, but Lealand still held him. The young man was clearly not sure enough of his safety just to take a chance on approaching Ghislain.

  “Dear,” Sholto said again. “You know as well as I do that you shouldn’t be out all night with a boy. You don’t need me to tell you that. Which isn’t to say you can’t see—this person. You just have to take things more slowly.”

  Ghislain laughed. “He’s pretending this is a normal situation.” He smiled at Sholto, mocking and amused.

  Sholto’s chin jutted, and his brows came together. “No matter what you think—mate—there’s normal in it. You’re a bloke. She’s my sister. The normal rules apply.”

  Ghislain pointed at Lealand. “And that’s my brother. Do you think I have much faith in family feeling?”

  “Canny,” Sholto said, dismissing Ghislain. “Look at me.”

  Canny turned, wiped her eyes, and looked at him.

  Sholto slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out Marli’s letter. “You have a letter,” he said.

  Canny said softly, too softly for anyone but Ghislain to hear, “Marli can’t tell me much because, to write a letter, she has to get someone else to take dictation.” Then she began to cry. “I can’t,” she sobbed. “I can’t go on with it. It’s always the same. I hurry in because I have things to tell her, but I hate the place. I hate the smells.”

  * * *

  CARBOLIC FLOOR CLEANER, boiled food, vomit, and the fruity-smelling white polish the nurses used on their shoes. The hair smell of Marli’s hair, which was only washed once a week.

  Ghislain always smelled of the outdoors, even indoors he smelled of rain, and rosemary, and the perfume of the forest.

  “Girl,” said Iris Zarene. “Has he told you he’s a murderer?”

  Sholto waved the letter, as if he hoped to fan away Iris’s words before they reached her. “Canny. Look.”

  “I want to come and go as I please, Sholto,” Canny said. “I know I shouldn’t have lied to you. But I only want my freedom.”

  “You’ve been free at school, and free with Marli too,” Sholto said. “When classes are done, or visiting time is over, you walk out and hop on a bus and come home. Freedom is being able to come home when you want to. Everything doesn’t have to be a pledge. You don’t have to man the barricades and die at your post.”

  Canny only heard: Come home. “No,” she said, and then couldn’t talk for a bit. She was too busy fighting tears. Ghislain sa
id something about going in and closing the door, and how that would show them—but he sounded exultant, not sympathetic. Her eyes were swimming. She could scarcely see Sholto. In the dusk, the white square of the envelope in his hand seemed to have a light in it. It looked like a glass of milk used to when she was smaller, and Sholto would pour it out for her. That was back when Sisema and the Professor were first married, and Sholto and she were shy of one another, and when he came in from high school, an hour after she was home, he’d pour himself a glass of milk and get her another too. He’d sit down with her and, every day, say the same thing. It always made her laugh. “Can you help me with my homework?” he’d say. And it was funny because she was seven and he was fourteen. And even funnier because she would help him with his math.

  Finally Canny managed to choke out, “I kept it secret because I wanted to steal some—” then, with an effort, “magic.”

  Iris Zarene said, “Girl, just because you got up the hill to this house, that doesn’t mean the magic has chosen you.”

  Canny ignored Iris and gazed intently at the blur that was her brother, and the envelope, that white bull’s-eye. She took a hitching breath and said, “I wanted to steal some magic to make Marli better.”

  * * *

  SHOLTO’S HAND SANK TO HIS SIDE. Tears came into his eyes. The only thing he understood, of everything that evening in the valley, was his sister. The man and woman beside him were wolves. The man Canny was clinging to was probably a mad wolf. But Canny was faithful. And because she was a kid she was waiting for her faith and patience to be rewarded. She was like that bloody elephant in the book she’d used to love so much, though, at seven, she was already too old for it. She used to get him to read her that book, though she could read herself and it took her courage to ask him for anything. She got him to read it to her because, for some reason, she wanted to share with him—her new brother—what was essential to her. Her faith. And it should be, it should be, it should be like that—

  —but it wasn’t. Yet how was she supposed to understand that there were things that were impossible, when she was brought up hearing over and over how you could set out in a canoe, with a compass and green coconuts, and save people?

  Sholto turned to Lealand Zarene and said, “Bugger this. I’m going up there to talk to them. He won’t hurt me if he cares for her.” He wrenched his arm free of Lealand’s grip.

  “Wait,” Lealand said softly, then followed Sholto a step to murmur in his ear. “Tell her to look in the window seat. He keeps it locked. But the key will be on the board in the kitchen with all the rest of the keys.”

  Sholto eyed Lealand distrustfully, then gave him a curt little nod.

  As he walked away Iris said, “You’re a fool.” Then she raised her voice to address Canny. “Girl. If the house didn’t mend Ghislain, what is inside him would show on the outside too, and he wouldn’t just be old, like me, he’d be ugly.”

  “No,” Canny said. “He bakes bread and keeps busy like a—like a busy grownup,” she finished. She ground her fists into her eyes to wipe away tears. “What do you know anyway? You haven’t spoken to him for years.”

  “We’ve all changed,” Ghislain said to Iris and Lealand. “Only I stayed young. And I didn’t get my sentence reduced because there wasn’t a sentence. The term of my natural life wouldn’t work for me, would it? I look like the kid who made mistakes, so you can have the pleasure of punishing that kid forever.”

  “Come off it, Ghis,” Lealand said, sounding like an older brother telling off an irritating younger one. “You’ve threatened to kill us countless times. We’d be stupid to let you go.”

  “And besides, we couldn’t undo the spell even if we wanted to,” Iris said. “And that’s your fault. You were always going to eat up everyone else’s magic. You pulled it all in, and it has set hard around you. You were always a greedy, greedy boy.”

  “You’re your own prisoner,” Lealand added.

  Then Iris again. “And now you want to feed on young Agnes. You can’t bear to think of all her ability out of your hands.”

  Sholto climbed the steps. He kept his eye on Ghislain, watching him react to this. Sholto was sure that what they were saying was true, even if it seemed heartless. Ghislain was drawing Canny away toward the door and seemed prepared to let Sholto follow them inside. But then Canny put her mouth to Ghislain’s ear and whispered something, and Ghislain pulled the door shut instead. As it closed, air puffed out of the house’s dark interior—it smelled of molten metal, a sour scientific smell.

  Sholto put his arms around his sister. He said, “We’ll figure this out.”

  Ghislain moved away from them.

  “Come,” Canny said. “Let’s sit for a bit.” She led Sholto around the veranda to the kitchen door, where there was a bench. She sat him down and settled beside him. Ghislain leaned on a veranda post and regarded them. Sholto looked at the rabbits in the hutch. The hutch had been moved to a fresh patch of grass and the rabbits were busy, clipping it close with their sharp incisors.

  “I want to apologize properly,” Canny said.

  Sholto took his sister’s hands. “There’s no need. You just have to let me get you out of here.” He was whispering.

  Canny wiped her eyes again and gave a little gleeful laugh.

  Sholto’s gaze wandered. Everything looked brand-new. The timber was freshly dressed and painted. “This place,” Sholto said. He heard himself sounding disgusted and bitter. Then because it seemed he’d promised, he handed Canny Marli’s letter.

  She took it, then put it down beside her. “I’ll read it later.”

  “Once you’ve gone, Mr. Mochrie,” Ghislain said. “She can’t possibly have you and her sick friend working on her feelings at the same time.”

  Sholto tried to stay calm and focus on what he should do. It was difficult. Ghislain stayed in one place, but he kept crossing and uncrossing his ankles, fidgeting like someone who wanted a fight.

  Sholto decided to face Ghislain and deal with the only thing he did understand. “You were responsible for the second fire in the mine, in 1929?”

  “Yes.”

  “1929?” Sholto repeated. He swallowed bile.

  “Yes. I had something inside me. It wanted to protect me. It mostly knew how to mimic. It felt the explosion, thought, ‘Fire!’—thought faster than people can—and it turned itself into fire.”

  “You didn’t do anything,” Canny said, in wonder. “You’re not to blame. It wasn’t deliberate.”

  Sholto was alarmed to see the love in her expression of relief. Love was pouring out of her, aimed at that not-young, youthful man.

  “I shouldn’t have been carrying it with me,” Ghislain said. “It was too dangerous to take near people. I knew better.”

  “It was trying to protect you,” Canny said. Then, nonsensically, “The ewe running to save her lamb turned into fire. I saw that. This thing—you’re its lamb, you’re its child. It was trying to show me that.”

  Ghislain looked like he had no idea what Canny was talking about. But Sholto did—at least a little. Lealand had said in his interview, “Perhaps one of us was a foster child of fire.” That’s what Ghislain was—or had been—the foster child of something that could turn itself into a miles long, speedy dragon of a coal dust fire.

  “I was a thoughtless, egotistical kid,” Ghislain said. “If I hadn’t been down there with my secret friend then there’d have been more survivors.”

  “Where did it come from?” Canny asked.

  And Sholto looked at his sister’s expression of wonder and avid curiosity and thought, “How will I ever get her away from this place?”

  * * *

  WHAT CANNY HAD SAID TO GHISLAIN when Sholto joined them was “Don’t ask Sholto in. The house is our place.” The idea that they were together, and excluding someone, was hard to resist. So Ghislain let her lead her brother around to the kitchen door, and they sat down on the sun-warmed bench while he leaned on a post. And, after a bit, he told Ca
nny and her brother a little about the Found One he had carried into the mine.

  Then Canny asked him where it had come from, and he was about to tell her, when Cyrus came around the side of the house and climbed onto the porch. “Ghislain,” Cyrus said. Then, “Agnes. Mr. Mochrie. I found Miss Miller and took her back down to the river path. She kindly agreed to see those poor pain-racked boys back to Orchard House.”

  Canny said, “They were waiting for me in the forest. I had to use Lonnie’s pain rune on them.”

  Cyrus said, “Can your brother talk you into leaving?”

  “You sent the bees so it wouldn’t have to come to talk.”

  Cyrus said, “At this minute you and your brother are completely in Ghislain’s power—you do know that, don’t you?”

  Ghislain said, “And you, Cy, you’re completely in my power too.”

  “Not that you’re going to start showing off. Remember, the less Mr. Mochrie knows the better.”

  “What about me? I know so much now,” Canny said.

  Cyrus looked at her with sympathy. “What you know is entirely subject to what you are, Agnes. Everything you understand is like a hook in you, attached to what has to stay here. You can’t leave here and keep it. Your brother, on the other hand, will remember a bit more. He may even remember that there were two of you.”

  It took all of Ghislain’s willpower not to turn his head and stare at Canny. He heard her say, “What?” Baffled.

  Sholto muttered that he didn’t know what he’d seen. Then he said, “Canny, will you come with me now?”

  “Because you’ve seen me one last time, he’s saying,” Ghislain said. “And that has to be enough.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” Sholto said.

  “Because there’s no future in me,” Ghislain said.

  Cyrus said, “Agnes, I can’t just leave you here. Not with a clear conscience.”

  “I’m not to be trusted,” Ghislain said.

  Canny told him to “Shhhhh.”

  “I’m not moving,” Sholto said.

  “And we’re not asking you in,” Canny told him.