Wildfire

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  “No, I’m not. I’m completely normal.” Small, shy and plain, perhaps, but definitely normal. Or I was until a giant cat attacked me and made me look like I’d picked a fight with a garden rake. “I’m no weirder than you!”

  “Come on,” was all he said. “I want to see that mouse.”

  We went to the old toilets in the school playground, which hardly anyone ever used because they stank and were built in the days when children wore short trousers and got caned regularly. Carefully, I pulled up my sleeve so that we could both see the mouse.

  It was an ordinary house mouse with grey fur and a long nose, white whiskers and shiny black eyes. Its front paws were pink and looked like tiny hands. It didn’t run away, no, it sat up on its hind legs and wrinkled its nose.

  “It’s very sweet,” Oscar said. “But it has to be someone’s pet, it’s completely tame.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Why not? A wild mouse would have run away ages ago.”

  “Something’s wrong with it,” I said. “Look at its nose.”

  Oscar bent down to get a better look. “Yes,” he said. “It’s hurt itself.”

  I gently raised my arm until I held the mouse at eye-level. It went down on all fours to get a slightly better grip with its pink paws, but otherwise it stayed where it was.

  Oscar was right. On one side of its nose there was a clot of dried blood and pus, and something black was sticking out from the centre of it. A thorn. A thin thorn from a bush had pierced the mouse’s upper lip and got stuck so the mouse couldn’t close its mouth properly.

  “Oh, you poor mouse,” I whispered. “That’s why you’re so thin. You can’t eat.” And without even thinking about it, I pinched the thorn with my thumb and index fingernails, and pulled it out.

  The mouse emitted a small, shrill squeak and rubbed its nose with its front paws ten or twelve times. Then it darted along my arm, across my stomach and down my trouser leg until it could jump safely onto the old, red floor tiles. There it squatted on its hind legs for a brief second and rubbed its nose again. It looked almost as if it were waving.

  “Goodbye,” I said. “Take care!”

  A quick movement, little more than a grey flash, and it was gone. It disappeared with familiar ease into the crack between the threshold and the floor. Oscar stared after it. Then he looked hard at me.

  “OK,” he said. “So you still think you’re normal? You can forget about that.”

  CHAPTER 6

  An Angel in the Mist

  We cycled home from school together, Oscar and I. We both live in Jupiter Crescent, only he lives in the block that faces Jupiter Avenue, whereas Mum and I live in the one overlooking Mercury Street. They’re old buildings with high ceilings and tiny bathrooms. There’s a green area inside the courtyard with trees and bushes like chestnuts and lilacs, and it’s so overgrown that it’s like a wonderful jungle. According to Mum, my friendship with Oscar began when we were sat at opposite ends of the sandpit in the courtyard, took one look at each other and then crawled towards the other as fast as we could, spraying sand and knocking over plastic buckets and other kids in the process. Oscar’s mum is a single parent, too. Her name is Marlena and she is a lawyer in an office somewhere in the city.

  We were able to ride our bikes next to each other on the cycle path for most of the journey. The weather was grey and foggy, and water splashed everywhere when we rode our bikes through the puddles. The cycle path ended when we reached Station Road, so I had to pull in behind Oscar and cycle single-file. Cars rushed past us and sprayed our legs.

  “Very foggy, isn’t it?” Oscar called over his shoulder, slowing down.

  And it was. The tarmac was shiny and wet. A clammy, grey mist lingered between the houses. It was so dense that the street lamps had come on though it was only two in the afternoon.

  “We’d better get off and push,” I said. “It’s really hard to see where we’re going.”

  We jumped off our bikes and pushed them on the pavement down the last stretch of Station Road.

  “I can barely make out the traffic lights,” Oscar said.

  And he was right. We had to squint to see whether the man at the pedestrian crossing was red; all we could make out was a faint red glow in the fog. When it changed to green, we started crossing. And then something really weird happened.

  The pavement disappeared.

  I know it sounds crazy. But when we reached the other side of the street, there was no pavement. Instead of paving stones and cobbles there was grass. Dense grass, ankle-high, like a lawn that hasn’t been cut for weeks.

  I stopped.

  “Oscar…”

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Where has the pavement gone?”

  He didn’t say anything for a while. We both stood there and I couldn’t see anyone but him and me, our bikes – and then the grass, which shouldn’t have been there at all.

  “Perhaps we wandered into someone’s garden by accident,” Oscar suggested.

  “In Station Road? There aren’t any gardens.”

  “Then we must be lost, I guess…”

  The fog moved around us in slow, grey spirals. We couldn’t even see the house wall, though we must be standing right next to it. The traffic noise had faded away. And we could no longer see people, cars or bikes moving in the fog. I felt a strange, wet prickling at the back of my neck – as if a ghost were standing behind me, tapping my shoulder. I spun around. There was only more fog.

  Suddenly a gust of wind swept the fog away. Or, at least, some of it. A kind of tunnel was created down the middle, a grass tunnel whose ceiling and walls were made of fog. And down this path something was coming towards me.

  It wasn’t a human being. I’ve certainly never seen a human being with wings reaching a couple of metres above their head. It made her look enormous even though without the wings she was only slightly taller than me. And she hadn’t even unfurled them. They were closed and they weren’t white as I thought they would be, but brown and grey like the wings of a bird of prey.

  Her face was also narrow and birdlike, with a pointy chin and a sharp nose that stuck out almost like a beak. And her eyes flashed yellow. I know this because she was looking straight at me.

  “Witch child,” she said in a hissing, lisping voice. “Blood of Viridian. Come with me.”

  I took a step forward without giving it a second thought. When an angel calls you, you come. And she had to be an angel, didn’t she? She had wings.

  Then two things happened in quick succession.

  Something struck the side of my thigh and I stumbled. Then a black shadow charged at the angel with a wild and piercing war cry, and I recognized the distinctive wet seaweed smell of the giant cat. The angel retreated a few steps and raised her hands – except they looked more like claws because her nails were twice as long as her fingers. The cat pounced on her. They both screamed, each as high-pitched as the other, and a thin fountain of blood spurted up into the air and turned into a spray of tiny, red droplets.

  At the same time Oscar grabbed me and pulled me aside so we both fell over and landed in a jumble of bike wheels, arms and legs.

  “Look out!” he shouted.

  A lorry appeared out of the fog. Headlights, squealing brakes, the roar of a diesel engine and a radiator grille, everything came thundering right at us and I yelped, a feeble, terrified squeak, and rolled out of the way as fast as I could.

  There was a crunching sound and a strong smell of burnt rubber.

  I lay on the pavement with my back pressed up against a wall with Oscar sprawled across my legs. The radiator grille of the lorry loomed large a very short distance from us and both our bikes lay crushed under its massive front wheels.

  The door to the driver’s cabin was opened and the driver jumped out. His face was deathly pale under the shade of his trucker’s cap.

  “What happened?” he said. “Are you OK? I didn’t see you because of the fog, not until the last minute.
Please tell me that you’re all right.”

  The angel had gone. The cat had gone. There was no longer a tunnel through the fog, and the fog itself was lifting.

  I shifted, mostly to make sure that I still had my arms and legs and could move them. I could. But Oscar lay still.

  “Oscar?” I whispered. And then much louder: “Oscar!”

  “All right, all right,” he grunted irritably, as if I’d told him to wake up and go to school. “Ouch. Ouch, my head hurts.”

  He half sat up and I saw a thin line of blood trickle from a cut to his forehead. He must have bashed his head against either the wall or the pavement. But at least he was able to sit up, look at me and speak.

  By now several onlookers had gathered. One of them, an elderly lady in a shaggy green winter coat, had already got her mobile out and was making a call.

  “Hello? Emergency services? We need an ambulance for the corner of Station Road and West Street. There’s been an accident…”

  Oscar was admitted to hospital for “observation for concussion”. Fortunately, I was allowed to go home. I had a fresh graze to my elbow, almost on top of the one I got when I tumbled down the stairwell with the cat. I wasn’t concussed, but it felt as if everything inside me had been shaken up.

  I had seen an angel. And I had come very close to dying. Were the two things connected? Had the angel come to fetch me when the cat attacked her? And what was it she’d called me? Witch child. And something to do with blood?

  To an outsider it was straightforward: a couple of kids on their way home from school stray onto the road in the fog. A lorry driver slams on the brakes just in time, luckily. The boy hits his head, the girl is unharmed. End of story.

  But that was only the half of it. The angel, the cat and the pavement that turned into grass… the police report made no mention of them because I was apparently the only one who had seen them. Not even Oscar. He had seen the grass, that was something at least. But not the angel or the cat. How could he not have seen something that was almost four metres tall? It was beyond me.

  Mum rang up Marlena, Oscar’s mum, and learned that the hospital would keep him overnight, but that he was fine and would probably be discharged in a day or two.

  “He saved my life,” I said. It sounded dramatic to say it out loud, but it was the truth. If he hadn’t pulled me aside, the lorry would have run me over. And then the angel would probably have taken my soul or whatever it was she had come for.

  “You have to look where you’re going,” Mum said, and started shouting at me again because she was so upset. “It’s not as if you don’t know how to handle yourself in traffic!”

  “Mum…”

  “Yes. Sorry, Clara Mouse. I know it was foggy. But you have to look…”

  It was the tenth time she’d said it, at least. I was so tired that I began to cry and I blinked to make the tears go away, but they refused.

  “I was looking! It wasn’t my fault!” I couldn’t bear her telling me off any longer. Not now. “Something’s wrong. There’s something wrong with me, isn’t there? She called me a witch child…”

  Mum froze. She was still holding the mobile in her hand.

  “Who did?” she said.

  “Her. The angel. But I was the only one who saw her, Oscar didn’t. And he didn’t see the cat either…”

  And it all poured out of me, the tunnel in the fog, the pavement that turned into grass, the giant wings and the hissing voice, the cat’s war cry and the smell of seaweed.

  Mum listened without interrupting. She sat down at the kitchen table next to me and took in everything I told her without saying a single word. It wasn’t until I got to the bit about the ambulance taking Oscar away and the bikes that were squashed and bent that she put her arm around me, held me close and murmured into my hair.

  “We have to do it.”

  “Do what?” I said.

  “You and I are going on a little holiday. To your Aunt Isa.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Self-defence for Wildwitches

  “It’s not all that big,” Aunt Isa said. “But if we tidy up, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

  She looked around the attic room as if she expected the trunks, boxes and piles of clothes to just get up and march out the door of their own accord.

  “I can do that,” Mum offered. “Just tell me where to put stuff.”

  “Most of it can go in the loft in the stable,” Aunt Isa said.

  “Can’t I just sleep on the sofa like I did last time?” I protested.

  “That’s where Bumble sleeps.” Aunt Isa lifted a dusty removal crate from the old iron bedstead that was standing under the sloping ceiling. “You ought to have your own room.”

  It sounded so… permanent. As if I were going to live here and not just have “a little holiday”, as Mum had called it.

  Two weeks ago I hadn’t even met my Aunt Isa. Now I was about to get my own room in her house. I’d sussed that it had something to do with these strange events – the cat, the angel and the fog. But what was it really all about?

  “Could somebody please tell me what’s going on?” I pleaded.

  Mum and Isa looked at each other. Then Mum nodded, slowly and reluctantly.

  “Please would you do it?” she asked Isa. “You’re better at it than I am.” And then she looked away as if she were ashamed. Aunt Isa knitted her brows.

  She began, “How long were you planning to avoid—” but then she interrupted herself. “No. We can discuss that later. Come on, Clara. I’ll make us a cup of tea and then try to answer your questions.”

  So while Mum scrambled about in the attic and made it habitable, Aunt Isa and I sat at a small table with a gingham tablecloth in the corner of the kitchen and drank tea. Bumble forced himself under the table between our legs though there was barely room for him. On the windowsill by the sink a blackbird was nestled in a shoebox full of shredded newspaper. It watched us with black beady eyes while calmly preening its wing.

  “So what do you want to know?” Aunt Isa said.

  About a million things, I thought. But which one was the most important?

  “Am I going to die?” I burst out before I had decided whether I wanted to say it out loud.

  Aunt Isa’s eyebrows shot up and several lines appeared across her forehead.

  “Why do you think that?” she said.

  “Because… first there was the cat and the bacteria that can kill you… and then… yesterday… that angel came to fetch me. And Oscar and I nearly got run over by a lorry.”

  Isa put down her mug. “What did the angel look like?” she asked.

  I tried to describe her.

  “Big,” I said. “Or rather her wings were big. Enormous. And they weren’t white, sort of mottled grey and brown. She had yellow eyes. I didn’t think angels would have eyes like that.”

  Isa closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, she looked at me for a long time. For so long that I started to feel very uncomfortable.

  “That was no angel,” she said at last.

  “Then what was it?”

  “Once she was a wildwitch. What she is now… I don’t think even she can answer that.”

  The flame in the paraffin lamp didn’t flicker, nor did an icy chill pass through the room. But it felt as if the kitchen had suddenly turned darker and colder.

  “Who is she?” I asked in a voice that sounded smaller than normal.

  “She calls herself Chimera. Never speak her name anywhere but in this house, it’s already too easy for her to find you.”

  “Find me? What does she want with me?”

  Isa reached out her hand and stroked my cheek lightly. “I don’t know, Clara. But we have to make sure that she doesn’t get you.”

  Aunt Isa told me to put on my coat and boots, and we went outside. We walked down the gravel road and crossed the small field with the brook in it before we reached the gate.

  “This far,” she said, pointing at three white stones dug into
the ground so that I could only just make them out. “You must never go further than here unless I’m with you.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because I can’t protect you if you go beyond my wildward.”

  “What—?”

  “—is a wildward? An area protected by a wild-witch.”

  It was the second time she’d mentioned that word. Wildwitch. I looked at my aunt in the twilight. Hoot-Hoot had come flying the moment we stepped outside and had settled on her shoulder. Aunt Isa was wearing an ordinary raincoat and an old yellow rain hat, and she had stuffed her brown plaits inside the collar so I couldn’t see them.

  “You’re a witch,” I said. And it wasn’t a question.

  “A wildwitch,” she said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I take care of everything that lives in the wild, and in return they look after me.” Bumble wagged his tail and Hoot-Hoot rubbed his beak against the brim of her yellow hat.

  “But you said that Chimera is a wildwitch, too…”

  “No. I said that she used to be one. She broke her witch’s oath a long time ago, and now she takes whatever she wants without giving anything back.”

  I remembered the angel creature. Her yellow eyes, her sharp face. Come with me, witch child.

  “Why… does she want me?”

  Isa shook her head. “I don’t know, Clara.”

  “She called me a witch child,” I said. “But Mum… my mum is no witch.”

  “No. Your mum desperately wants everything to be ordinary and normal, to live in a world where what you see is what you get. But the world isn’t like that.” Isa tilted her head slightly and looked at me; she narrowed her eyes a little. I could feel her gaze. It was as if she had pointed a torch at my face. “Clara… would you be very upset if I told you that I think you’re a wildwitch – or that you could be one, if you wanted to?”

  Hoot-Hoot flapped his wings without making a noise. They were pale on the underside, almost silver, and I looked at him and his silver wings so that I wouldn’t have to look at my aunt.