Mortal Fire

by Elizabeth Knox

  It must have been that the back of Canny’s mind was was still occupied by a gnawing worry about how on earth she could explain any of this to Marli—it must have been—because as she stood staring at the lamb and ewe, Canny suddenly heard Marli’s voice. It was as if her friend were there beside her. Marli asked in her gentle, straightforward way, “Don’t you have sense enough to be afraid?”

  Canny opened her mouth to answer, then remembered she was alone. And she was. Alone—despite the two animals in front of her, the sight and sounds of them, and the gusting emotion she had about them.

  In the course of her life, she’d had moments of fright. There was the time she’d run out between two parked cars and her mother had grabbed her by the hood of her rain jacket and pulled her back out of the path of a truck. And there was the time she missed the second step on a flight of stairs and fell. She remembered the spurt of fright, the feeling of calamity, and cursing herself for clumsiness and the pain when she landed, and how surprised she was to find herself bruised but not broken. She remembered all that, but hadn’t there been something cold sitting behind her animal fright? Something sitting scornfully in the very next moment and saying, as her mother always said, “This isn’t something we have to bother with.” Come to think of it, maybe she only felt really truly afraid when she was with Marli and properly looked at her friend’s twisted body behind the greenish glass of the iron lung’s portholes. That separation always seemed to promise the next one, when the lung would be replaced with a coffin, and the coffin with a grave. That frightened Canny—it terrified her.

  Canny did speak then to her absent friend. “Yes, I am scared, really scared. But this is magic, Marli, and who knows what magic can do?”

  She took a deep breath and walked past the lamb and ewe and went on up through the forest.

  * * *

  THE NEXT CLEARING CANNY REACHED she recognized as part of an overgrown road, one that had once climbed, zigzagging, up the hill. Of course if there was a house, there must have been a road.

  The ground had bits of gravel on it, under moss and saplings. Canny turned to follow the road and, thereafter, her climb was fairly easy; she had only to contend with the scrub. There were no misdirection spells, no injured animals to ambush her. The slope became shallower and the road wound back into the sunlight. The day was hot—and Canny nearly made the mistake of mopping her brow with her arm. She stopped herself just in time; after all, she’d still want to be invisible to the wild pigs on her way down.

  The road became clearer and clearer, then suddenly terminated at a vine-covered, tumbledown garage. On the downhill side of this garage there was a partial break in the forest, and Canny glimpsed what looked like the bumper and back wheels of a vehicle, hood down in the undergrowth, run off the road. After all her trouble Canny didn’t like to go even ten paces downhill; still, the wreck made her curious, so she slid down far enough to see that there were letters stenciled in white paint on the driver’s door. She lifted the curtaining vines and read: “USMC.” After a moment her mind supplied “United States Marine Corps.” There were no other clues as to why a Marine Corps jeep should be abandoned, front bumper down, in a trackless forest.

  Canny returned to the slumped garage. Cracked cement steps went up beside it. She climbed them, passed through some overgrown rhododendrons, and came out on a terrace covered in the remnants of a garden; plum trees, a thicket of raspberry canes, and blackcurrant bushes so old that only their tops were in leaf. It looked to Canny as if someone had recently cleared a path through the tangle, for the cut stalks were still leaking sap, and there were broken branches whose leaves had only just begun to wilt.

  “So,” she thought, “someone comes here.”

  She followed the roughly hacked path. It took her to another set of steps that led to a higher terrace. These steps were less dilapidated, and the flight was edged in red bricks with frothy alyssum planted in their cracks.

  The next terrace was light and sunny, the sky almost open above it. There were more trees, peaches and pears and cherries, all full of fruit and tended. There were vegetable beds, recently watered, the water taken from rain barrels that stood at intervals along the wall of a higher terrace. The garden curved to follow the conical top of the hill. Canny looked left and right, but couldn’t see another set of steps, one that would take her to the top. She chose to go left and keep the sun on her back. She picked a cape gooseberry, eased it out of its origami envelope, and ate it—then stopped and ate several more. They were delicious, sweet, and powerfully aromatic. She went on. Eventually she came to a flight up. She did pause to wonder about people who’d want to make their way from a parked car to a house by such an indirect route. It was so nonsensical. Canny was sure it would turn out that it was another crazy Zarene Valley contrivance meant to baffle, like the lack of signposts on the tracks or, come to think of it, the kids’ strange rhyming names.

  These steps were perfect, as if they’d never been walked on before. Canny peered up them. She could see the crown of a black beech tree some distance off. The beech was darkening already and would be deep red, almost black, by the summer’s end. Now its leaves were green below, red above, overlapping, rich, stirring colors. There was another tree, a golden ash, cascading green-yellow. Perhaps it was just that she’d been down in the tangles of the native forest so long that her eyes couldn’t adjust, but there was something terrifying about the intensity of the color in the crowns of those trees. They were too brilliant, too lovely, and Canny had the momentary mad impression that it wasn’t she who was looking at them, but someone infinitely more alive, and great, like a god.

  She swallowed and began up the steps, touching each one, feeling the cold brick, as smooth as marble.

  The roof of the house came into view. A clay tile roof in perfect condition, white weatherboard walls, white gingerbread work on the veranda, beveled window frames and veranda posts—every angle perfectly sharp as if a master carpenter had only just finished, and the house had had its first three coats of paint and hadn’t even been rained on yet. The windows were all bright and clean.

  The house was set on a lawn. The grass was freshly mown, and the lawn was in that state of natural perfection achieved a few days after mowing in early summer when the buttercups and daisies come up faster than the grass and cover the lawn. This lawn was a galaxy of daisies, and the air was filled with their light perfume. There were shrubs around the house—lavender, roses, rosemary, sage, thyme. All the shadows were still, and blue-black. The roses were perfect. Everything was perfect.

  A white grit path skirted the edge of the lawn to approach the house. Canny stepped onto it. The grit made a satisfactory noise under her sandals. Two monarch butterflies appeared before her, tumbling over one another. They flew away over the grass. Canny followed them with her eyes—and caught sight of someone.

  It must have been seven in the morning, and the boy, or young man, was only just up. He looked sleepy and disheveled and underdressed, in a pair of clean striped cotton pajama pants and nothing else. He had the same haircut as just about every other man Canny knew—short back and sides, long on top—but just about every man Canny knew (barring a few of Sholto’s friends who were growing their hair longer and sporting youthful, moth-eaten-looking beards) used hair cream to keep the long bit on top firmly in place. The young man’s fall of hair was a sleek black flag. It was currently hanging down toward the ground because he was stooped over, feeding cut carrots and beetroot tops through the wire of a cage full of white, lop-eared rabbits.

  Canny, embarrassed to catch sight of a man in his pajamas, took a couple of steps back down so that only her head showed. The young man didn’t notice her. He finished pushing the vegetables into the cage and stood up, watching the rabbits eat. It was a quiet, tender sight, and very reassuring. Surely a man in his pajamas feeding rabbits couldn’t be a dangerous person.

  He went indoors through some side door. The house had a grand entrance with double doors and stained g
lass, but Canny guessed the man had gone from the side veranda into a kitchen. She took off her sandals and left them under a rosebush, then ran lightly up the steps and across the lawn. The grass was very soft. She gingerly crossed the graveled path and climbed up onto the veranda. She ducked down under each window and made her way around the side of the house. The rabbits stopped nibbling and turned her way, their eyes seeking and noses quivering. One sat back on its hind legs, grabbed the wire and began plucking at it with its claws. Canny put her finger to her lips—though the gesture would be as invisible to the animals as she was. She then took a quick careful look into the kitchen—a big room with black-and-white floor tiles and a long timber table, scrubbed white. The room was empty. She crept inside.

  There was a loaf of bread on the table and a plate filled with oozing honeycomb. There were crumbs on the tabletop, and a trail of them leading out the kitchen door.

  Canny followed.

  The man was upstairs. Canny could hear drawers opening and closing, and the sticky sound of bare feet moving on polished floorboards.

  Canny listened for a moment, then realized that he was on his way back down.

  She bolted aimlessly, then took a quick look around and dashed into the darkness beside the staircase. There was a cupboard under the stairs. She tried its handle, but it wouldn’t budge. The man was on the last flight. Canny saw his hand above her, running along the banister. She crammed herself into a gloomy corner and froze.

  He didn’t see her—and probably should have when he turned to walk into a room to one side of the front door. She could see him clearly, his handsome profile against the light. He’d combed his hair, but hadn’t tamed it with cream. He was wearing a grandpa collar shirt and baggy tweed pants. The clothes were old-fashioned, but looked brand-new. Canny’s own clothes were light-colored. She should have been seen. But it seemed that her spell worked on people as well as pigs and rabbits.

  The man went from view. A voice faded in—a radio. The announcer’s smooth, woody tones swooped in, as if he’d slid a distance down the sky bodily on a wire and had come in through the window. The radio’s valves warmed, and the announcer was there, talking about an air crash in Brussels.

  It was then that Canny saw the spells. They were in the woodwork, signs that wove around one another, carved in large motifs and small, on the banister, the newel post, the lintel and doorsill, and a decorative strip that ran above the wall panel just below where the wallpaper started. The signs were even on the timber picture rail, and in each panel of the stained glass. The only patterns that were merely patterns were the embossed geometries of the pressed paper ceiling and the leafy swirls on the wool rug, both of which had been manufactured outside the valley.

  The house’s glass and woodwork were speaking to Canny—placidly, profoundly—in a language she couldn’t understand. Everything gleamed, there was no dust anywhere, or sign of wear. The woodwork looked as if it had been carved yesterday, or maybe even tomorrow, as if the house were still a dream, or an ideal place, as perfect as carvings were in a craftsman’s imagination before he took a saw, or plane, or chisel to seasoned timber.

  The man who reared rabbits and wandered about in pajama bottoms or his granddad’s clothes—he seemed harmless. The house, now that Canny had really looked at just this bit of it, seemed utterly terrifying.

  So she very sensibly decided to creep away, to go somewhere and think about what she’d seen. But once she came near to the door of the room the man and radio were in, curiosity got the better of her. She eased around the door frame.

  The man was sitting at a desk covered in neat piles of paper and books. He was writing. He didn’t look up when she came in, and she was at liberty to stare. He really was good-looking. His setting was cultivated—the books, the polished teak desk—but he struck Canny as being like some rare wild animal, as beautiful as some young people are, but more graceful than anyone she’d ever seen.

  Canny gazed at him, and a hard lump formed at the base of her throat. The last thing she wanted was to be noticed by him, but she hated to go away without speaking to him.

  What could she say? It suddenly struck her that she had nothing much inside her—no good stories, no fun games, no jokes or chatter or forceful opinions about movies or music, like the kids in her class. She had Marli, nursed very close to her heart but somehow encased and concealed in Canny’s love for her—and immobilized, as she was in the iron lung. People were always saying, or at least implying, that there was something wrong with Canny, and she at last understood that those people were right, and that it mattered.

  Canny crept forward to get a better look at what the man was working on. Some of it was mathematical. Vectors. And some of it was recognizably the Zarene Alphabet, and some, she saw after a moment, was made of only bits of Zarene symbols in layers. It looked a little like Chinese writing.

  The man sighed, put his hands behind his head, and tilted his chair. He stayed like that for a long time. Then the chair dropped back onto four feet. He got up to sharpen his pencils, leaving the curled shavings on the spotless rug. Then he sat down again, pressed his thumb between his eyebrows to massage away a headache, and bent over his pages.

  Canny slowly dropped into a crouch and then sat down. She stayed to watch him work. Gradually the sunlight moved till it was coming in the window behind him. He got up and opened that window, then went right back to work.

  It was several hours before he stopped, stood up, and left the room.

  Canny took her time following him, not wanting to be heard. She took note of where he put his feet, but none of the floorboards made noise.

  The man went into a downstairs bathroom, and she heard a flush and water running. He came out with a wet face and hair spiked at the nape of his neck.

  Once he’d gone back into the kitchen, Canny used the bathroom herself, positioning herself to pee on the side of the bowl so it didn’t make any noise. The water in the bowl was now yellow and Canny hoped the man would imagine he’d just forgotten to flush. She checked her reflection in the mirror, careful not to look too closely at the inked signs on her forehead. It was reassuring to see herself, a bright-eyed girl, not the bodiless ghost who had been steering her body about all day—inside it, but blind to it.

  Canny left the bathroom and continued the way the man had been headed. As she went, she fingered the long strip of signs at the top of the panels. There were whole sentences there, with full stops but without capitals. The words—if they were words—all ran together, and Canny got the feeling she was looking at whole stories that amounted to a single instruction. She had no idea what that instruction was, or why it would take such exhaustive exactitude, such persuasion, to turn it from a request into a law.

  Canny went through the kitchen. The honey and bread had been put away. She hurried out the back door and was confronted by a startling sight.

  The young man had strung up one of the rabbits by a thong tied around its back legs. Its head wobbled on its broken neck. Its eyes were still bright, but the spark of life was falling away from them. As Canny appeared, the man had just finished making a series of deft incisions around the rabbit’s bound legs. He then clamped the bloody knife in his teeth, grimacing to keep his lips off its sharp edges. He fiddled with the insertion, got purchase, and stripped the rabbit’s skin off, like someone pulling off a very tight sock. Then he spat the knife back into his hand and cut the rabbit down. All this was done within sight of the other rabbits. They were staring, and utterly still. They were transfixed; and so was Canny, so much so that when the man turned to the kitchen door and came on, knife in one hand and rabbit in the other, Canny drew a startled breath and dodged out of his way.

  The man broke stride and stopped completely still. Canny froze. Only a foot separated the two of them. When he’d stopped the rabbit had swung, and several drops of blood splashed Canny’s ankle. She saw that the rabbit’s ears still had fur on them. Droplets of blood were beaded on the fur.

  The man’s
head swiveled away from Canny, then back toward her. His nostrils flared and his mouth opened. His eyes were unfocused—they flicked back and forth. Then he dropped the knife and the rabbit and lunged forward. He pushed Canny back into the wall, and his sticky palm slapped her forehead and started scrubbing—wiping away her spell.

  9

  “IRIS SENT YOU, didn’t she?” His hand stayed on her brow, pressing her head against the door frame. Her shoulders were bent into the right angle of wall and door, the tips of her shoulder blades smarting where they had struck. His knee was between her legs, and she couldn’t move. His hand stank of blood. It was smothering her. She could only say, muffled, “No. No.”

  He shook her, and she let out a squeal of fear.

  “That’s Iris,” he said, and jabbed his fingernail into the flesh of her forehead.

  Canny could see her own hands now—or she was finally able to look at them properly. They were bunched on his chest. She was too intimidated to grab his shirt or to hit him. The muscles her hands rested on were springy. His skin radiated warmth through the fabric of his shirt. She was too shaken even to make her hands into fists.

  His eyes were a vivid black, softened by long thick lashes. The way he was looking at her, it was as if he still couldn’t see her, or she wasn’t quite real to him.

  Canny managed to say, “You’re hurting me.”

  He let go, stepped back, and she came up off the wall, not meaning to make a break for it, only to relieve the tortured tendons of her neck and shoulders. He put up a hand, palm out toward her, and she was pressed back again. He didn’t lay the hand on her, instead the air between them seemed to compress and solidify, and she was held painfully in place.

  “Iris can’t care about you,” he said. “I hope you understand that.” He flexed the fingers of the raised hand and inscribed a series of graceful symbols in the air. Semitransparent sparks of sign appeared around his hand. They formed a kind of ghostly chain, and then he cast the chain toward her. It lashed out and wrapped itself around her, pinning her arms to her sides.