The Crane Wife

by Patrick Ness

  Kumiko set the tile on the bookshelves with the others. She had lit the room with candles in every corner, the tiles flickering in the warmth of the flames, like miniature suns in a temple for an ancient goddess.

  ‘It seems a strange ending,’ George said. ‘The volcano destroying itself in anger, the woman beyond his grasp.’

  ‘A happy release for both, maybe,’ Kumiko said. ‘But also perhaps a sad one, too, yes. And after all, not even an ending. All stories begin before they start and never, ever finish.’

  ‘What happens to them next?’

  In answer, she only took him by the arm and led him out of the sitting room, up the stairs, and into what was now their bed. Her intention didn’t seem exclusively carnal, but she did press herself to him after they undressed, holding him to her, stroking his hair. He looked up into her eyes, lit by moonlight.

  They reflected back to him, golden.

  ‘Do I know who you are?’ he asked.

  To which she only said, ‘Kiss me.’

  And so he did.

  Down in the sitting room, the candles still burned in their wax cylinders, flickering and dancing. One candle, though, had a flaw. Its flame licked and burned unevenly, and soon the wall of the candle melted away, molten wax spilling over the side, pooling across George’s old coffee table. Even this was only a small danger, but the collapse unbalanced the candle just enough for it to tip, lowering its flame closer to the tabletop.

  Later, after a physical intimacy so close and gentle and perfect it made George dare to think for a fleeting moment that happiness might be possible after all, he sat up in bed. Kumiko sleepily asked where he was going. ‘To blow out those candles,’ he replied.

  But it was already too late.

  The fire began like this (2).

  After Kumiko placed the last tile and George blew out the candles she’d lit, they’d retired to bed. They made love slowly, almost sadly, but with a tenderness so light George felt as if they’d finally made it through some unnameably strange and mysterious ordeal, safely reaching the other side. He looked up into her eyes, lit by moonlight.

  They reflected back to him, golden.

  ‘Do I know who you are?’ he asked.

  To which she only said, ‘Kiss me.’

  And so he did.

  Later, they slept, and still sleeping, George rose.

  He padded down the stairs with the stumbling certainty of the sleepwalker. In his darkened sitting room, he moved towards the first tile of the story (‘She is born in a breath of cloud . . .’) and took it down from the bookshelf. He tossed it carelessly on the coffee table. He did the same with the second tile, dropping it on the first. He repeated this action, unseeing, through every tile, one after the other, until he reached the last, set out this very evening. He placed it on top of the others, the pile now in great disarray, the feathers and his paper cuttings tearing and ripping under the slipshod weight.

  Still in the dark, he reached for the box of matches with which they had lit the candles. He struck one, and though his pupils recoiled at the sudden blaze of light, he didn’t wince or blink or look away.

  He held the flame to the edge of one of the tiles near the bottom of the pile. It was at first reluctant to catch, the tiles being made of a particularly heavy matte bonding, but catch it eventually did, a dark blue flame oozing over it, grabbing inexorable hold of the first batch of page cuttings, then brightening, expanding, a hungry tongue sprouting two more, which each sprouted two more in turn.

  George dropped the match and turned back towards the stairs, slowly climbing them as the fire grew and spread and flexed its muscles.

  He would remember none of this and not believe it if he had, having zero history of somnambulism. Nevertheless, he climbed back under the covers, placed his head on the pillow, Kumiko snuggling in behind him, and he closed his eyes again, as if they had never been properly open.

  The fire began like this (3).

  In the darkened sitting room, while George and Kumiko slept upstairs, the tiles looked at one another across the bookshelves. They told a story of a lady and a volcano who were both more and less than what they were called. Their story was told in feathers and paper, but it was the feathers alone that now seemed to waft and shift as if in a breeze–

  A feather detached itself from one of the tiles, flitting in the air, jumping and dashing in a fretful spiral–

  Where it was joined by a second, a bit of feather from a different tile, swirling around the first–

  And then a third and a fourth, then a flurry, then a wave of feathers, pouring from the shelves, twisting in spirals and helixes, coalescing then bursting apart, grabbing at each other like fists at the end of living ropes. They started to concentrate themselves in the centre of the room, and there seemed to be a kind of charge running through them, with flashes here and there, as if small electrical storms raged inside the cloud of feathers–

  A spasm surged through the cloud, every bit of feather rushing towards a middle point–

  Where, for the briefest of seconds, the feathers came together to make a great white bird, its wings outstretched, its neck unfurling high into the air, its head curled back in what might be ecstasy, might be terror, might be fury or sorrow–

  And then it blasted apart, uncountable feathers and sparks flung across the room as it exploded–

  The sparks caught cloth and books and wood and curtains as they landed in a hundred different spots, igniting them–

  The fire began like this (4).

  The volcano opened its green eyes and looked out across the vastness of the sitting room, a universe unto itself.

  The horizon of this universe told a story.

  The volcano stepped from the final tile to read it, his eyes showing first astonishment, then grief, as he read the tale along the skyline. He wept tears of fire to see the lady again, to see how things had gone.

  But as he read, he also began to grow angry.

  ‘This is not how it happened,’ he said. ‘There is more than what is told here.’

  The volcano’s anger began to make him grow, as anger inevitably did to a volcano. The valleys and glaciers along his flanks trembled and broke apart, re-forming as he grew larger and larger, taller and taller, his anger firing the furnace that burned within him.

  ‘You have misrepresented me!’ he shouted. ‘You have denied the truth!’

  He grew so large he filled the world of the sitting room, nations fleeing from him, cities crumbling under his earthquakes, forests and landscapes disappearing through crevasses big enough to swallow an ocean.

  ‘This will not stand!’ he shouted, raising clenched and furious fists. ‘This will not stand!’

  He erupted, sending ash and fire in an unstoppable cataclysm that burned the universe entire.

  The fire began like this (5).

  The house was silent, asleep. Nothing stirred, even in George and Kumiko’s bedroom, where they slept against one another, the blankets twisted around them like foothills after an earthquake.

  Down below, in a still moment, the front door of George’s house slowly opened, followed by silent footsteps inside. The door closed, just as quietly.

  Rachel made her way into the sitting room, holding the key that George had forgotten he’d once given her in the palm of her hand. She stood, squinting in the darkness, trying to read the tiles.

  She hadn’t been feeling particularly well lately. Whole swathes of time seemed to vanish from her day without her being able to account for them, and when she was fully aware of what was going on, the rushes of feeling that buffeted her were both exhausting and perplexing. She had always known who she was, it had been her greatest weapon, and then, one day, after ending it with George, she had woken up and not known. That had proved increasingly difficult to handle, increasingly difficult to live with, and there seemed no relief from it, as if she’d suddenly been given a burden to carry, one that slowed her down while the rest of life rushed away from her, leaving her
behind.

  Perhaps, she wondered, as she brushed her fingers against the barely visible tiles, she was going crazy.

  What on earth, for example, had possessed her to go and see Kumiko? She couldn’t even remember how she knew where Kumiko lived, though it can only have been something Kumiko must have mentioned at that party. But when she arrived, she and Kumiko hadn’t even argued. Rachel had calmly – really quite astoundingly calmly – told Kumiko that she’d slept with George, that he’d called her over and insisted on it, and that she had done so immediately and willingly without a thought to Kumiko’s feelings.

  Kumiko had taken it all without visible anger, except perhaps for a slight impatience, as if she’d been expecting the news all along and it was tardy in arriving.

  And then Kumiko had opened her mouth to speak, and the next thing Rachel remembered, she was downstairs, looking for her keys in her handbag. Which was really annoying, because she would have loved to have heard what Kumiko had to say about it, even if she couldn’t remember for the life of her why she’d gone over to Kumiko’s in the first place.

  Then she had glanced up and seen George sitting in his car.

  And oh, the shame that followed. The unbearable shame. It had been so painful, she’d had to sit in her car for nearly twenty minutes before the crying ebbed enough to let her drive.

  Which also made no sense. She’d never much bothered with shame before. And why so much, especially if George was the one who–

  No. No, it was crazy.

  It was, in fact, further proof that she was going crazy.

  As evidence, here she was in George’s sitting room, an action that made perfect sense and also none whatsoever, and frankly she’d had just about enough of that feeling lately. She’d also had enough of the endless dreams she’d been having – ridiculous dreams, of being made love to by whole countries, of flying through impossible landscapes, of being shot by arrows, for Christ’s sake – and what it really boiled down to, she supposed, was that she was exhausted by it all. She had nothing more to give, and even she knew she’d had very little to give in the first place.

  So here she was, in George’s house, and an anger was rising in her. Anger at all that had happened. Anger at all that had stopped feeling familiar and liveable. Anger, too, because she couldn’t even properly account for how she’d arrived here tonight. Or why.

  Her eyes flashed green. On an impulse, she picked up the matches she’d seen lying on a side table.

  She lit one.

  The fire began like that. Or that. Or that. Or that. Or that.

  And it burned.

  Amanda glanced in her rearview mirror. JP was still asleep in his car seat, having not even really woken as she picked him up out of bed, jammies, blanket and all.

  It was only JP that made any of this seem real. The tangibility of him was undreamable, his smell of milk and sweat and biscuits, that heartbreaking cowlick up the back of his head, and – she frowned in a little flash of shame – that stain of cranberry juice on his upper lip that she really should have washed off before bed.

  She set her eyes back on the road and took a corner as swiftly as she dared. No, if he was here, then she was here. But nothing else about this made any sense at all. Rachel (Rachel!) calling at this hour of the morning, screaming her head off in terror and alarm and – this was the part so difficult to process, the part that would take so very much unpacking at some unspecified date in the future – doing it at George’s house.

  It didn’t compute. Not in any way. Why would Rachel be parked outside George’s house?

  Why would Rachel be the one who saw the fire?

  Even Rachel hadn’t seemed to know. She’d said it outright. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here,’ she’d shouted, ‘but you have to come!’

  There’d been something in her urgency that had struck Amanda as utterly true, beyond all manipulation, beyond whatever crazy bullshit Rachel was entirely capable of pulling. Rachel’s terror had reached right through the phone and sunk into Amanda’s guts like a frozen stone.

  So here she was, driving as fast as she could get away with.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, cutting across a surprisingly late night taxi. The driver gave her two fingers, which she absentmindedly returned.

  Her father didn’t live all that far from her, three miles at most – though in this city that usually meant thirty minutes anyway – but she sailed through the nearly nonexistent traffic, cresting the small hill that took her down to her father’s house.

  Where she saw the pillar of smoke.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ she whispered.

  It stretched impossibly high in the air, straight up, too, on a clear, windless, freezing night, like an arm reaching up to heaven.

  ‘No,’ she whispered as she took the last few turnings. ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no.’

  She pulled around the last corner, expecting to see–

  Not this.

  There was nothing in the street. No fire engines, no neighbours out in nightgowns and slippers watching the blaze.

  No sign of her father or Kumiko.

  Just Rachel, frantic, beside her own car, as George’s house blazed in front of her.

  Amanda screeched to a stop in the middle of the road.

  ‘Maman?’ she heard from the back seat.

  She turned to him. ‘You must listen to Mama, JP. Are you listening?’

  His eyes were locked solidly out the window, hypnotised by the fire.

  ‘JP!’

  He looked back at her, frightened.

  ‘Sweetie, you do not get out of that seat. Do you hear Mama? Whatever you do, you do not get out of that seat!’

  ‘Un feu,’ he said, eyes wide.

  ‘Yes, and Mama has to get out of the car for a minute, but I’ll be right back. I’ll be right back, do you hear me?’

  He nodded and gripped his blanket around him. Hating herself for leaving him there, hating Rachel with irrational zeal – and perhaps a little bit rational, too – for being the person who brought her to this place, Amanda leapt out of the car.

  ‘WHERE’S THE FUCKING FIRE BRIGADE?’ she screamed.

  ‘I called them,’ Rachel said, looking stunned. ‘They’re on their way.’

  ‘I don’t hear any sirens! Why am I here first?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I panicked, I called you and then it took me a minute to–’

  But Amanda had stopped listening. Flames were leaping out of the sitting-room window, and it looked as if they might even have reached the stairs. There was so much smoke, though. So unbelievably much.

  ‘GEORGE!’ she screamed at the top of her lungs. ‘KUMIKO!’

  ‘They’re still in there,’ Rachel said behind her.

  Amanda turned on her. ‘How do you know? And what the fuck are you doing here?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ Rachel shouted back. ‘I don’t even remember how I got here. I was just here, and there was a fire and . . .’ She trailed off, her face so scared, that Amanda turned back to the house without pushing her further.

  At last she heard faint sirens, but in the distance, too far, arriving too late.

  Something was wrong here. Something more wrong than just the fire, which grew even as she watched it. Lights were starting to come on in nearby houses, but she had a weird feeling they’d only been woken by her shouting and then noticed the fire.

  She looked back at Rachel, whose expression was almost that of a madwoman. She went to speak to her, to demand what she knew, but then a loud exploding sound came from the house. They couldn’t see exactly where it came from, but it boomed across the night nevertheless.

  The house blazed even more, almost disappearing behind smoke and fire. If Rachel was right – and Amanda knew somehow she had to be – then her father was in there.

  George. And Kumiko.

  And the fire brigade, their sirens still far in the distance, were going to be too late to save them.

  She grabbed the front of Rachel’s blouse with a fist
so tight Rachel cried out. ‘You listen to me,’ Amanda hissed, their noses actually touching. ‘JP is in my car and you are going to watch him right now, and I swear on my life, Rachel, that if anything, anything happens to him, I will put a knife through your heart.’

  ‘I believe you,’ Rachel said.

  Amanda let her go, ran to her car and stuck her head in. ‘Everything’s going to be all right, sweetie. This lady’s going to watch you for a minute. I’m going to get grand-père.’

  ‘Mama–’

  ‘Everything’s going to be all right,’ she said again.

  She leant over the seat, squeezed him ferociously for a brief second, then turned and ran into her father’s burning house.

  By the time they realised how very bad it was, first smelling the smoke, then seeing it push under the door with alarming force, they were already trapped.

  They’d tried to run for it anyway – George still naked, Kumiko in the barest of nightslips – but they only managed two or three stairs before the smoke beat them back.

  ‘I cannot,’ Kumiko had said behind him, coughing out the words with an alarming wetness.

  It wasn’t just that the smoke was unbreathable, it felt like a living thing, a cloud of snakes trying to reach down your throat to not just choke you, but poison you, burn you with darkness. George understood in the worst possible instant what news stories meant when they said people died of smoke inhalation. One or two breaths of this and your lungs no longer worked, one or two more and you lost consciousness forever.

  Through flashes of it, he could see flames already coating the bottom of the stairs, so there might not have been a route for them even if they could have made it down.

  They retreated to the bedroom, shutting the door behind them for all the good that it did. George felt dangerously light-headed, from the smoke and from how quickly cataclysm had overtaken them.