by Frazer Lee
He felt the heat first, then heard the rush of air coming down the flue. The entire fireplace erupted into a sudden ball of flame. He recoiled from the sharp singeing of his eyebrows and smelled the putrid stench of burning hair. Mike dropped to the floor and crawled on all fours as fast as his hands and knees would carry him. He felt the rug give way to the exposed flagstones of the kitchen floor. Even those stones, usually so cold even beneath the thickest socks, were now hot to the touch. He felt another rush of heat at his back, and heard the crashing of glass and groaning of breaking timbers. The fire was devouring the house at a frightening rate. He dared not even glance over his shoulder – to delay another second might trap him inside the house to burn along with it.
The heat was unbearable, and the oxygen thin. He gritted his teeth and let out a primal growl of desperation as he clawed his way across the hot, unyielding stone floor. Another few feet and he would be at the door. He could see its vague shape through the smoke, almost shimmering in the heat like a beacon. Mike cursed under what little breath he still possessed as he scraped his arm against one of the kitchen chairs. It too was on fire, and he could already feel the skin at his elbow bubbling and blistering from the flames. The pain willed him on, somehow, until with one final push of energy he reached up for the handle of the conservatory door. He twisted it hard, pushed against the door with all his might, and tumbled outside into the open air.
Mike swallowed oxygen down like a draught, but then he began coughing up – and throwing up – all the foul, noxious fumes he had inhaled. Grim spools of claggy black phlegm hit the blades of grass where he crouched, prostrate above the ground as though he was worshipping it. The cool sensation of the soil and grass against his fingers was a welcome relief from the oppressive heat of the cottage fire. He was just about to collapse to the ground in thanks that he had made it out when he heard a scream.
He bolted to his feet and saw flames licking at the window. Movement revealed the horrific truth – someone was trapped inside the conservatory. What he had taken to be flames licking against the glass was actually a lock of bright red hair. Meggie was trapped inside, beating her fists against the glass.
“The door, Meggie! The door!” he yelled, then realized that her route had been cut off by the burning table and chairs in the kitchen. The furniture had become an indoor bonfire, blocking her escape. He heard another crash, followed by her desperate scream. He saw the palm of her hand, so pale against the inside of the glass. She was going to die in there, a butterfly trapped in a glasshouse.
He had to do something to help her.
He licked at his dry lips and glanced around for something that he could use to aid her escape. He thought of it then, the woodpile next to the art studio, and the garden tools leaning up against it. Forgetting the black smoke that still held his lungs in a crushing grip, Mike sprinted around to the rear of the cottage. He grabbed the heavier of the two shovels he found leaning against the woodpile and, with barely a second to draw breath, dashed back to the conservatory windows. He stepped right up to the one where he had seen Meggie’s hand and lifted the shovel.
“Mind the glass!” he shouted, but he could not tell if Meggie had even heard him.
He gritted his teeth and hit the glass as hard as he could. The shovel’s metal scoop rebounded from the glass, and it felt as though he had tried to break open pack ice with it. A fierce shock wave penetrated the bones of his forearms, and he staggered back in bemused shock and pain before dropping the shovel. He saw Meggie’s hand flailing in the smoke that had now almost completely engulfed her. He heard a faint whimper, and for one idiotic moment he could not be sure if it had come from her lips or his. The furious flames had spread from the furniture and into the kitchen proper, licking angrily at the kitchen cupboards. Even the refrigerator was on fire. Meggie was losing her struggle against the inferno. With his heart in his mouth, Mike saw her claw at the window, then fall back into the smoke and flames. Mike let out a cry of frustration, picked up the shovel once again, and charged at the glass with it.
The conservatory exploded outward before he could strike. The ball of flame had all the fury and intensity of an incendiary device, knocking him from his feet. He hit the dirt, dumbly realizing that his t-shirt had caught on fire. He sat there on the grass, patting down the flames that were licking at his stomach. Meggie had disappeared from view, but he knew she was still in there. Where once they had all sat and feasted together, now the flames were feasting on her flesh. He couldn’t bear it. If only he had been quicker. What if he had tried kicking the glass instead of retrieving the shovel? Maybe she would be alive now. He clambered to his feet and made for the window next to the blazing, ragged hole of metal and glass where the conservatory door had stood just moments ago.
“Meggie!”
He knew she was gone, but he shouted her name over and over all the same. He had reached the window now, and perversely found it and the pane next to it still intact. He beat his fists against the glass, careless of the heat. He called Meggie’s name over and over into the mocking flames that had consumed her. He could see his own muddy reflection in the blackened glass, a dark approximation of the scrying mirror that had once stood above the fireplace. Beyond his reflection a black shape moved, somewhere deep within the inferno.
“Meggie!” he shouted, his lungs almost bursting from the smoke and the grief.
“What the fucking hell do you think you’re doing?”
It was Helen. Thank goodness. She was alive. She must have seen the fire and come back to find him out here, screaming Meggie’s name into the burning building.
He turned to see Helen. She was dressed in her nightclothes, her hair tousled and her eyes wide with disbelief. Mike saw that it was night, and the garden had the stillness of those hours left stranded between midnight and morning. A gossamer layer of ground mist swirled all the way down to the loch.
Perplexed, Mike turned back to the cottage and found it intact. There was no fire. No devastation at all. He felt suddenly cold and looked down to see that he was standing alone on the grass in his boxer shorts.
“What the…?”
“Jesus Christ, Mike,” Helen hissed.
Mike turned to face her once more and struggled to find the words. How had he come to be in the garden? Was he sleepwalking now – was that a thing? And, oh bloody hell, had he been shouting in his sleep too? If so, it would explain why Helen was looking at him with her eyes brimming with what looked distinctly like murderous thoughts.
“Helen, I don’t know how I…I mean, I.…”
A window opened then, and Mike heard Alex and Kay’s laughter coming from their bedroom. Mike turned and looked up at their bedroom window. A flicker of movement caught his eye and he noticed Meggie’s curtain twitch. He lowered his gaze to the conservatory window to where he had seen – or, rather, dreamed – Meggie falling back into the flames. It had felt so real. But all he could see was a shadow across the flagstones, cast by the kitchen table.
He looked back at Helen again, dumbfounded.
She shook her head and then stomped silently past him, inside the cottage.
Mike walked across the lawn, away from the conservatory, and tilted his head back to the stars. He let out an agonized breath, which dissipated like smoke on the wind from the imagined fire of his all-too-vivid nightmares. He guessed he would be spending the remainder of the night, if not the entire rest of the holiday, on the sofa.
Chapter Fifteen
Mike walked into the darkened kitchen. The only smoke he could smell now was coming from the still-glowing embers of the fire in the next room.
He followed their glow, the fire no longer a threat to him, and stood before the hearth, warming his bones. The black glass of the scrying mirror offered a vague reflection of his face, echoing his nightmare of the conservatory glass. He blinked away an unwelcome image of Meggie being consumed by the flames. On instinct, he
reached for an object on the arm of the chair nearest the fireplace. He lifted the whisky glass to his nose and inhaled deeply. The drink was near finished, with only a centimeter or so of liquid in the bottom of the glass, but it was enough to remind him of its inebriating effects. He crossed to the coffee table, where the whisky bottle stood, uncorked it and refilled his glass all the way to the brim. Turning his attention back to the ruddy-orange coals in the fireplace, he took sip after sip of whisky until the glass was almost empty. Then he filled it to the brim once more and sat down in the chair beside the hearth. Gulping back his drink, he felt oblivion approaching fast.
But oblivion, it seemed, would not come to him this time. He had almost finished the remainder of the whisky bottle – in the vague hope that it would put him down without the fear that he might walk, and talk, in his sleep again – when he had the gnawing realization that the drink was having the opposite effect and was in fact making him more wakeful. He glared at the coals in the hearth, crackling at him mockingly, like the chattering teeth of some village gossip. He recalled how bloody amused Alex and Kay had looked to see him standing in the garden, in his smalls, yelling into the night. And the thunderous look on Helen’s face.
It struck him that he was most embarrassed of all to have seen Meggie’s curtain twitching. He hoped against hope that she hadn’t heard him shouting her name. It would be just too embarrassing to contemplate if she had.
The crackling from the fireplace subsided for a second, and he felt a throbbing at his temples. Too much whisky, or not enough, he couldn’t be sure now. Then a spitting sound came from the burning hot coals, as loud as a gunshot. Mike felt furious at the noise, which had made him jump, and threw his whisky glass into the fire. The glass shattered, and the remains of his drink spat and sizzled against the embers. It sounded like a protest somehow, like the very cottage itself were hissing at him and taunting him. How could he have dreamed that it was burning down? The four walls around him had been built to last, but the smoke and the flames had seemed so real to him. And Mike couldn’t fight the sneaking suspicion that the cottage itself was the problem. He’d been feeling out of kilter ever since they’d arrived. There was something wrong with the place. It didn’t feel welcoming anymore, not at all. Not like the last time he had visited. The vibe at Hearthstone Cottage had changed, perhaps irreparably.
Sighing, Mike reached for his glass dumbly, then realized he had tossed it onto the fire. Picking up the bottle, he swigged from that instead. He stood, his legs buckling slightly from the alcohol coursing through his veins, leveled with the scrying mirror and stared at his reflection. He could see the room behind him stretching out in every direction – a trick of the curved surface of the glass. Wait a minute, had the mood at the cottage changed, or had he himself changed since being there?
Give yourself a break, buddy, he thought drunkenly. Your girlfriend just told you she’s pregnant and planning on playing happy families. You spent the last of your student loan on some Scottish hooch, no way you can support a family. Have to settle for the first dead-end job that offers you a new-starter date, and a new-starter rate to match, no doubt. Add that to the fact that you’ve been hallucinating your brain off ever since you got here. Now that’s going to harsh anyone’s mellow, isn’t it?
He smiled grimly at this thought, and the general ridiculousness of his situation. All he had wanted to do was chill out, party. He’d prefer to deal with the big stuff like employment, and becoming a baby daddy, much, much later. If at all. What was it his dad always said?
Make sure you can feed yourself, son, before you commit to feeding anyone else.
That was it. That, and—
I didn’t, Mikey. And just look at me now. Your dear old dad’s a wage slave, son. Just like the rest of them. Don’t become a slave to their grind, my boy. Once they know you need the work more than they need you, you may as well kiss any chance of a promotion, and a decent pay rise, goodbye. Mark my fucking words.
His father’s entire worldview was built upon how much of his hard-earned money he had to spend supporting his family. No wonder he was becoming such a bitter man in his old age. Mike was suddenly struck by something. He pictured himself, sitting in the family living room, cup of tea cradled in his lap. Then he imagined the looks on his mum’s and dad’s faces (but especially his dad’s) when he’d say, after a lengthy sip of tea and a heartfelt sigh, that he had something important to tell them.
That girl from uni, you remember the one, Helen? That’s her, yeah. You only met her twice, and only really acknowledged her once. Well, her anyway. She’s pregnant! Yes, we’re going to have a baby. And you’re going to be grandparents! How awesome is that? We know we can count on you, Grandad, to help with the deposit for a mortgage? Fifty thou, that ought to do it. Think of all the weekends you can enjoy looking after Mikey Junior while his dad goes raving in Ibiza. Help him, Mum! Grandad’s fainted from pure joy!
Mike felt his lips stretch into a grin, a distant, numb sensation that had become anaesthetized by the effects of drinking over half a bottle of single malt whisky. He looked at his face, reflected in the concave surface of the black mirror. His grin looked wider than it really was due to the curvature of the glass. He moved his head from side to side and laughed at the comical distortion of his features as though he was a punter in a fairground hall of mirrors.
But the laughter died in his throat when he saw what the mirror had to show him next.
His mouth had narrowed to a slit, which looked disturbingly like a knife wound, and which had stretched across the full width of the mirror. His eyes had taken on a dead, glassy quality, a disturbing mirror of his hallucination on the loch when he and Alex had gone fishing. But there was something else. Instinct told him not to look, but he could not take his eyes off his dark reflection. Or rather, reflections, because he realized his eyes were overlapping with the black, malevolent pools of another, then another, pair of eyes that seemed to be peering out at him from inside the depths of the mirror. The flesh of his face looked puffy and gray, the rims of his eyes – and all those dark and horrible others – becoming loose red sockets that oozed clear fluid. He was reminded of the gutted fish that had released its belly full of maggots—
Or had it?
Mike felt the fevered grip of madness clawing at the inside of his skull. He no longer knew what was real and what wasn’t. His face was laughing back at him, and in his heart he felt only fear.
He tried to back away now, frightened of the hold the mirror had over him, but he was rooted to the spot. He willed his feet to move. Even if he could just shuffle back a few inches, it would be a start.
Then the sound of a hoof scraping against stone stopped him from attempting to move at all. He saw its red eyes in the mirror, watching him from where the sofa should be but, impossibly, wasn’t any longer. The stag’s antlers arced out and above its proud head, forming forks of black lightning. Mike felt a piercing pain in his heart when his eyes—
Not just mine, though, all those others.
—met the stag’s.
You killed me, those red eyes sang in a pained eulogy that made Mike’s ears feel like they were bleeding. You and your friends. How will you repay? More souls are needed. So many more.
The voice was the old woman’s now, as terrifying as the moment he had met her at the stone circle. He could almost smell the blood, almost hear the sharp metal of her blade scraping against little canine bones. A sensation not unlike squirming maggots shifted inside his belly. He made a sound, like Oscar whining.
Mike braced himself against the mantelpiece. He tried to cling to what was real, and to put this phantom creature out of his thoughts and back to wherever he had conjured it from. It was born of something deep inside him. He could feel that now. Somehow, the stag was his own complex fears made manifest. Mike locked his teeth together in a snarl. He willed the creature away, just as he willed the voice of the hag from the
stone circle to leave him alone too. He heard a little laugh, foul and untrue, and then the red eyes were gone. He could see only his reflection in the black mirror.
Mike let out a sigh of relief. Relaxing his shoulders and removing his hands from the mantelpiece, he straightened up and saw the mirror for all that it was. A piece of glass. He would throw it into the fire too and be rid of it. If Helen got pissy with him about it, he’d deny any knowledge.
I was fast asleep, he would say.
A haunting image of Meggie, flailing in flames, her pale body consumed by them. He visualized her clothes being burned away, exposing her skin to the heat. He closed his eyes and imagined seeing her exposed breasts blistering in the incendiary heat. His cock stiffened even as revulsion lapped at his throat. He felt aroused and repulsed in equal measure. Mike opened his eyes. Grabbing the mirror, he leaned over the glowing embers of the fire and tried to throw it into the hearth.
But the mirror was gone. His hands were empty. Perplexed, he looked around the edges of hearthstone for any sign of the damned thing. It wasn’t there; it had just disappeared. Then, looking to the mantelpiece once more, he found the mirror sitting there in its usual place.
You’ve got to be bloody kidding me, he thought.
After reaching out for the mirror, and making sure he had a firm grip on it this time, he removed it from its roost and swung it into the fire. But exactly the same thing happened. No sooner had he let it go than he realized it was back on the mantelpiece once again, as though he had never touched it.
Okay, okay, you win.
He was clearly much drunker than he had given himself credit for. Backing away from the mirror, which mocked him blankly from its high place above the hearth, he stumbled toward the little sofa. It would be uncomfortable, but it would have to do for a bed for the remainder of the night. Or the morning. Whichever it was, he didn’t really care. He just needed to close his eyes and forget about the insane things he had witnessed tonight. Mike allowed his body to fall back onto the sofa—