Mortal Fire

by Elizabeth Knox

  Sisema is sitting by herself in the gallery. She has a hat and a shawl. She is nursing her baby beneath the shawl. All the babies and small children are up in the gallery where they won’t be too noisy during the sermon. Among them is a little prince in a burgundy suit and bow tie. He looks like a pageboy from a fancy wedding. He is howling and will still be heard once the singing stops. All the women are trying to quiet him. All except Sisema, who isn’t sitting anywhere near the rest of them. Her seat is so far toward the front of the church that she will be behind the minister once he climbs up into the pulpit. She and her baby won’t be visible to him. Better not to flaunt a fatherless child in front of the congregation.

  * * *

  THERE’S A PATTERN. THESE ARE PIECES, not fragments. They fit together.

  * * *

  CANNY IS BACK IN THE VALLEY, and she thinks for one moment of wild relief that she will be able to find her body. But the woman beside her is her mother, not herself.

  Her mother is wearing a silk blouse, worse for wear, with missing buttons. Sisema is showing too much smooth, polished mahogany skin. Her khaki shorts are gathered with a belt at her waist, and her legs are long and strong. Her hair is pinned into rolls over her ears, loose at the back and ironed straight.

  Sisema is standing, unsteady, on the bottom, messy terrace of Ghislain’s garden.

  Ghislain is on the wall above her. He is giggling. His skin is glossy with sweat, and if voyaging Canny had any sense of smell she’d smell the whiskey fumes coming off the both of them. They are swaying and laughing because they’re drunk and what they are doing is very funny—even though one of them must know what will happen.

  Ghislain has a rope around his wrists, tied in a capable knot. The rope has a bit of slack. Canny can’t see what is at the other end of it, but from a little way down the slope, through the mass of overgrown rhododendron bushes, she can hear voices, men with American accents. And she can hear an engine revving.

  “Ready?” calls one of the Americans, laughing too, shiftlessly, drunkenly.

  Sisema goes to the edge of the wall and tries to peer through the trees. She puts a hand around the rope. She says, “Slowly off the clutch, James.”

  There is a hoot, lewd laughter, a teasing voice. “Hear that, Alex? Sis wants us to go sloooooowwwwlllly.”

  Chortle, chortle. “Right. I can’t go slowly enough for Sis.”

  Sisema’s hand is lifted by the rope as it grows taut. Ghislain is laughing harder and she turns to look at him, uncertain. His laugh is too wild. He is not amused, he is mocking fate.

  The engine revs. Ghislain is pulled forward. For a moment it looks as if he is braced against some invisible, slanted barrier, then his bunched fists burst through it. His feet are still on the lip of the wall, then only his toes. He is apparently resisting the pull of the jeep.

  (The jeep, of course, thinks voyaging Canny.)

  Sisema is baffled, because if Ghislain was resisting, he’d have planted his feet and leaned back and flexed his arms. His body isn’t in the position of a man resisting, but of a man whose feet are tied. The rope is far above Sisema’s head now and out of her reach. It is twisting gradually, and growing thin.

  The jeep revs. Ghislain is screaming with laughter. His fists are blue and red with trapped blood. The rope is so taut that Canny can hear it creaking. Then there’s a fibrous “pop.” Ghislain’s screaming laughter becomes a scream.

  Sisema shouts, “Stop! Stop!” She jumps at the rope, but can’t reach it. She runs to the wall and clambers up far enough to grab Ghislain’s feet. She tries to free them, to see how they’re caught, what’s holding them in place. Her hands scrabble in the dirt, but she can’t find anything.

  Ghislain is stretched out along the air. Downhill the engine howls. Sisema leaps back down, turns, about to plunge through the bushes to stop those deaf, mischievous men. Then Ghislain gives a grunt, and there is a series of popping and rending noises and his arms are pulled from their sockets, trailing quivering strips of muscle and tendon, ball joints suddenly exposed, clean and white and coated with healthy gristle. Blood spurts out in two streams and splashes Sisema. The bound arms crash through the trees, snapping branches. Down the hill there is a metallic rattle, a gravid thumping, and a very loud crash. The forest quivers, and all the birds leave the canopy in a panicked cloud.

  Ghislain has been pulled onto the lower terrace, finally. He is facedown over the wall, by Sisema’s feet. She looks at him, not seeming to notice the streams of gore dripping from her head onto her cheeks and joining beneath her chin. Her face is utterly empty, so frozen that Canny sees how like her her mother looks. They could be twins. Perhaps Canny’s frozen face has always been a memory of this moment.

  Everything is silent. The frightened birds have disappeared. Downhill there is only the long dying gasp of steam from a split radiator.

  Canny keeps her eyes away from the anguished, flopping form at her feet. She tries to make herself noticed, but her mother is gone, flinging downhill, making a horrible sound that’s not scream or groan or whining, but a bit of all of them.

  Canny floats up toward the house. The sun swings back across the sky, and stops still. It is earlier in the same day. The bench by the kitchen door is occupied by a man in unpressed sage green cotton pants—United States Marine utilities—an undershirt, and dog tags.

  On the bench beside him is a nearly empty cup of coffee with three soaked cigarette butts in it. He has another lit cigarette between his shaking fingers. He looks up at her, shades his eyes, says, “Morning, Sis.” Then, “Where did you get that horrible outfit?”

  Canny opens her mouth to answer, but nothing comes out. She slips by him and goes indoors.

  All the curtains are drawn. There’s a little more light in the front hall from the stained glass around the door. A jacket is draped on the banister, cotton twill, with buttoned pockets and a corporal’s stripes.

  In the parlor the chairs and sofa are no more or less worn than they were. Another man is lying on the sofa. He is wearing shorts and undershirt, sweat is gathered in the hollow of his clavicle. He has a thin, yellow-tinged face and lank blond hair. The whisky jar by the sofa is empty and lying on its side, no sign of spillage, perhaps because it overturned before midnight and all mess is cleared up at midnight and all the house’s own things gathered up and returned to their rightful places.

  Canny would like to open the curtains and let in the morning sun. She’d like to get a better look at the sleeping man, but she knows she can’t alter anything, can’t even twitch a drape, and even if the man on the bench outside did see her, he only mistook her for her mother.

  Canny goes through into the library and discovers Sisema standing before the huge gilt-framed mirror above the mantelpiece. The mirror reflects the room, but not Canny in the doorway. Sisema’s arms are raised, her elbows cocked. She is rolling her forelocks and pushing hairpins in under the rolls to fasten them. She licks her palms and flattens the loose locks in the back, frowning with savage displeasure at the black, crinkly mass.

  Sisema is wearing a pretty, flounced blouse with sweat-stained armpits. Her arms are thicker and stronger than Canny’s, her breasts rounder, more attractive. Her skin is darker, but not the strip of midriff that is exposed when she lifts her arms to wipe more spittle as lacquer across the frizz on her crown, trying to tame it. Sisema is sun-darkened, stronger than Canny, and older too, by a few years. More curvaceous, and her eyebrows are plucked into thin arches. But Sisema is so like her that Canny is amazed she hasn’t ever noticed it before. (She hasn’t wanted to. The Sisema she knows is thirty-five, buxom, and schoolboys turn their heads to check her out as she sails by them. That Sisema is heavy and handsome, snooty and sly, and of course her daughter wants to be nothing like her.)

  Canny studies the rumpled hearth rug and bunched blankets. She thinks, shouldn’t she have gone back earlier? But she is glad to have been spared the sight of her mother naked—naked and drunk like Noah in the Bible, and look wh
ere seeing Noah naked got the son who cared enough to creep into his father’s tent and cover him up. Cursed.

  (“Really,” Canny thinks. “I’ve got to stop thinking of those Bible stories where it’s always the person in the story who I most understand who gets punished. The person who actually does something human.” Ghislain had told her that the Zarene magic originally came from God—and if she’s about to plunge her hands into the fountain of the magic and drink, she should be God-fearing.)

  “Shouldn’t I be here earlier?” Canny wonders. “To be in at the moment of conception?”

  Then she remembers biology lessons. Castlereagh Tech was a practical, progressive school. Her biology teacher had used words like “coitus,” which was more scientific than “sex.”

  (“The word ‘sex’ covers a whole range of behaviors,” said her biology teacher. “We are to speak of coitus. The actual act of procreation.” And then he cracked his ruler down on the chart and its cross section of the reproductive parts of a sheep. He ran his ruler back and forth from “vulva” to “uterus,” and then traced the wiggle of the fallopian tubes. The chart is definitely nothing to do with sex—Canny and Marli’s idea of it—which is Jimmy Stewart’s face the moment he wakes up and finds Grace Kelly leaning over him. Canny and Marli’s biology teacher proceeded to describe the meeting of spermatozoa and ovule, and how fertilization takes place a number of hours after coitus.)

  Sisema finishes fussing with her hair. She searches in the blankets for a packet of smokes, pulls one out and puts it in her mouth, finds matches in the pocket of her belt-cinched men’s shorts. She slides the box open, fishes out a match, and strikes it.

  The moment the match ignites, another light bursts into being. A spark, as bright as the flame of an arc welder, passes out through the bare skin of Sisema’s midriff, unnoticed by her. Something momentous has just happened inside her, and she isn’t aware of it. She touches the match to the tip of the cigarette and purses her lips to blow smoke up into her hair.

  The spark lifts free of Sisema. It seethes, diminishing in brightness as it grows in size. It floats, white, ectoplasmic. It is frozen ectoplasm, no longer mobile, but caught in the shape of movement.

  The burning shape hovers before Canny like a crackling ball of St. Elmo’s fire. She recognizes it, and knows it’s been with her her entire life. It was always present. It is the present.

  18

  IT WAS AS IF SHE’D BEEN in a decompression chamber, set to several atmospheres above normal air pressure, and that chamber had suddenly come apart at the seams. Everything flung itself off her, even the air. She felt the tiny hairs all over her body stand up and, at the same time, there was a wrenching, bursting noise, and a series of loud thumps.

  Canny opened her eyes. It was still night, the light around her was coming from a splattering of small fires. Molten lead had embedded itself in the walls, igniting the wood and wallpaper. The ceiling, walls, and floor were splattered with silver fluid. Some of the lead ideograms were still intact, but semimelted and curling up like dying spiders.

  Canny didn’t dare move. She didn’t have her shoes on, and the fragments of destroyed Spell Cage were still smoking. As she waited, the soft lead began to set and cool, and the flames on the walls died back, turned blue, and then went out. The room filled with a thin haze of smoke that stank of molten lead.

  Canny discovered that she was clutching a key. It wasn’t the key to the room—the one she had taken from Ghislain’s pocket. That was still in the door. This was a small, ornate key, something a cabinetmaker might use. Canny studied it, and then turned her gaze on the window seat.

  Before Sholto went back down the hill he had whispered in her ear, “You should look in the window seat. Lealand says Ghislain keeps it locked, but that its key is in the kitchen.”

  Canny stepped over the jagged circles of lead that were all that remained of the Spell Cage and picked her way through the smoking debris. She stroked her fingers along under the lip of the window seat till she found the embossed lock-plate that matched the decorative key. She inserted the key, turned it, lifted the lid, and stood poised over the shadowy interior.

  Since the fires were out the only light in the room was from the window, a trickling rain-light. As her eyes adjusted, Canny caught sight of a small, pooled gleam. She reached in and picked up a watch and fob chain, gold by their weight. The watch had been lying with a coiled rope, on top of a puddle of dull-colored clothes. Canny moved the rope and touched the clothes—heavy cotton over something stiff. She moved her hand and the texture beneath it changed. Now she was touching something that felt like beef jerky. She bent close. The puddled clothes were revealed as not-quite-flat pants legs and a stuffed, lumpy jacket. Then her eyes made out a clump of hairlike fiber. She bent still closer. The smell of mildew and corruption rose into her face, and she saw that her hand was resting on the browned, shrunken cheek of a mummified body.

  Canny jumped back. The lid of the window seat came down with a loud clap. She turned and fled, left her shoes—again—stumbled to the front door, out it, and onto the soaked lawn. There she stopped. The watch fob was still in her hand. There was more light outside, though it was before dawn and raining hard. Canny’s fingers were wet. She fumbled, but finally snapped open the watchcase.

  Something was crawling on its white face. Canny nearly dropped it. Then she saw that the crawling thing was an arrow, and that the object on the fob chain wasn’t a watch, but a compass. The compass arrow swam to orient itself. It pointed ahead of her, due north, down the valley. It seemed to be showing her the way she should take. She raised the compass to her eyes to make out the inscription on the inside of its case.

  Thomas Afa. Harbor master.

  Arahura. Lost Link

  There was a splashing behind her, then Ghislain was on her. He wrapped his arms around her, and as she fell to her knees, enfolded her with his body. The compass case closed in her hand with a bright little “click.”

  The stink of molten lead had followed Ghislain out the door. It mixed with the wet-garden, cold-earth smell of night. Ghislain was weeping. “I agreed, I know,” he said. “But you can’t just go and not say—” But he couldn’t say it either.

  Goodbye.

  The rain increased. The lawn was sizzling, and the wormholes audibly bubbled. Canny and Ghislain knelt inside a silvery capsule of drenched air. His mouth was warm against her neck. It was the only warmth in the world. Canny wept too. She choked out, “After everything you said, you closed me in the cage.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You said even you’d die in the cage if the house wasn’t in the habit of keeping you alive.”

  “Canny, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “You said it was impossible. You said that, without an anchor, I’d be lost.”

  “We’ve both been asleep,” he said. “You must have been dreaming, love.” He got his arms under her sternum and pressed her to him as if he meant to incorporate her body into his.

  Between sobs she said, “Didn’t you look in your locked room? Didn’t you see what’s happened?”

  He raised his head. Cold rain leached off her hair and washed away the warmth where his mouth had been. “What’s that smell?” he asked.

  “Molten lead.” She opened her hand and showed him the compass. “I looked in your locked window seat.”

  He touched the compass, but didn’t take it from her.

  “You must have known all along,” she said. She freed herself enough to turn around and look at him. “You must have known who I was. Who my mother was.”

  His face was gray in the twilight, his eyes dark, liquid, miserable. His expression told her that he understood what she was saying, and knew what she suspected. He said, “I was badly hurt. Or I was dead, and death left a hole in my memories. The house restored everything, including my peace of mind. I went back to my everyday—I hadn’t any other option, except madness. More madness. I tried not to think about
things. It was too horrible. I didn’t really consider what had happened until weeks later, when I was finally able to trace the source of the horrible smell. I found the compass with the body. It belonged to that woman. Sis. I read the inscription, but I didn’t make a connection till tonight, when you said your grandfather’s name.”

  “So you’re telling me you didn’t kill the man in the window seat?”

  “I don’t know. Not with any certainty.”

  Canny tried to shake him off. She struggled violently. “You’re a liar! You tried to kill me!”

  Ghislain tried to calm her. “Canny, I don’t know what you think I’ve done.”

  “You shut me in the Spell Cage!” Canny burst out of his grasp. The ground was so wet that her feet couldn’t find traction, and her flight was inefficient and slithering. But he didn’t follow her, and the rain came down in curtains between them. Before long she was in the forest. She let herself be washed down the slot of the pig path, sometimes skidding on her feet, sometimes stumbling with water pushing up around her, and plastered with leaves and mud.

  * * *

  WHEN CANNY AND GHISLAIN WENT INTO THE HOUSE and closed the door, Sholto followed the Zarenes down the hill. He soon discovered he couldn’t get back up it again. He tried and tried, and sometime before midnight Susan joined him. She had coats, umbrellas, apples, and a big flashlight. They made a mutual, unspoken agreement not to try the hill again and just waited, only once shifting to a higher section of the path as the river rose and the rising stream tugged at the green fronds of the willows.

  They waited all night on the river path, huddled in the figure eight of clear air under their kissing umbrellas. They didn’t say much, having already exhausted all their information and arguments.

  By sunup they could actually feel the river under their feet—a constant quiver in the earth. “I’ve heard that the Lazuli Gorge road sometimes closes,” Susan said, sounding fearful.