The Fire Child

by S. K. Tremayne

  Cassie was thirty yards away. Three seconds, two. She must see him now. Two seconds, one. But the chains fell open, and David pushed the door, slipped inside, and shut the door behind him.

  Saved.

  The mine greeted him like an old friend. It was all as he remembered. Strangely quiet, sheltered from the ceaseless wind, but utterly cold. Roofless, like a ruined church tower: a grim and primitive temple of oddly fine proportions, solidly built. And there was that great big void: the pit that descended a mile.

  David’s heart was beating fast: he felt like a frightened kid. This place, where she died. This place of hurt and suffering, shouts and horror, of men going down into the pits of Hell to work, a mile under the sea, with only the tiny fires of their candles.

  Cautiously moving closer to the shaft, David took a brief look down into the blackness. It was too dark to see anything, too deep. A place out of which you could not climb. The perfect place to dump a murder victim.

  Picking up a random stone, a quartzite chunk of the deads, David tossed it down the shaft. He used to do this as a boy, to see how long it fell, before the splash. It was somehow irresistible. Everyone did it.

  He counted the seconds of silence. The splash, when it came, was strangely muffled. More like a thump, than a splash. As if the stone had bounced on something, then skipped into the water.

  Fumbling in the cold, David reached in his pocket; he didn’t have a proper torch, but he had the torch in his phone. Switching it on, he went as close as he dared to the very edge of the pit. The sensation was deeply unnerving. These stone slabs were so dangerously slippery. It would be so easy to skid, and topple in. And if he fell he would die too. But he had to see what had muffled the splash.

  Crouching, then squatting, David peered over the edge, and held out his phone. Giving him enough light to see the black surface of the water, thirty feet down.

  At once, he was sliced to the core with cold horror. Because, quite visible, floating face-down in the ink-black water, was a body.

  It was a little bloated, distended by some process of decomposition. Resisting the urge to reel away, David stared. The red dress had been bleached, shredded. It was pinkish-grey, and half dissolved. But the blonde hair, that haloed the head like silvery seaweed, was very distinctive.

  It was his first wife.

  Nina Kerthen, née Valéry, had returned. Suspended this way, she looked exactly as if she were swimming in the sea off Collioure, snorkelling, hunting for sea urchins with Jamie.

  He gazed, rapt, yet aghast, mesmerized by this gruesome spectacle. He couldn’t, at first, compute the coincidence: for the first time in a year he had visited Morvellan and this very same moment he had seen the body?

  But it made entire sense. Nina might have been floating here for months, unseen. The detectives and pathologists always said there was a chance she would return, one day, it was all a question of those mysterious undersea tides and currents. No one ever came to desolate Shaft House, scene of that Christmas tragedy.

  No one would have noticed Nina’s corpse, until now. She could have been suspended down there since the summer. Floating on the waters in that dissolving dress, unheralded and unmourned. An astronaut in the black, spinning in darkness.

  Now the sadness surged. Grief, and anger, and steely regret. This thing, this pitiful spectacle, was his first wife. The woman he had loved so much, the woman for whom he had taken the most dangerous risks.

  And the gruesome sight of her gave him resolve: he had sacrificed almost everything for Nina, Jamie, Carnhallow, the Kerthens. He had taken the greatest of chances to keep it all together, to keep it going. If Rachel threatened to destroy all that, he would do whatever was required.

  David placed a hand on the wet slabs, preparing to leave. But as he did a gurgle from the waters below made him pause.

  The body was moving. Some shift in the current, or some underground gas, was flipping the corpse. With a saddening gush the body turned over. Now he was staring at the remains of a face, dead yet partly preserved, expressive yet seriously defleshed. He could see the grin of half a skull, teeth exposed, as she smiled at him.

  Was this horror truly Nina? It was impossible to tell, the decomposition was severe. It had to be Nina, yet the effects of two years in the freezing water were so distressing that she was unrecognizable.

  The urge to escape was too much. Cassie must surely have gone by now. Creaking the door open, David stole out into the cold, and ran for the woods. Running away from what he had seen. The seabirds laughing at him as he fled.

  Eight Days Before Christmas

  Morning

  I am having a solitary breakfast of toast and Marmite, my childhood comfort food, when Jamie comes into the kitchen. He is already dressed: jeans and Chelsea football shirt. He looks thin, and pale, but his beautiful eyes are as bright as ever. As sad as ever.

  ‘Hey, you. Toast or boiled egg?’

  Jamie looks my way and tries to smile. His hair is tousled from sleep. ‘Um. Boiled egg and soldiers?’

  ‘Coming right up.’

  My stepson pulls a stool and sits at the counter and stares at the windows, and the soft grey sky beyond. We are all lost in a fog of melancholy and anxiety.

  ‘Daddy is seeing me again today.’

  ‘I know, Jamie.’

  It’s the third day in a row David has asked to see Jamie. I have acceded. We’re into the Christmas holidays, and even though I fiercely resent David I will not keep a father from his son. Not at Christmas.

  But when Jamie comes back from these now-daily visits, when he steps out of Cassie’s car, he doesn’t tell me anything. What he did with David, where they went, what they might have discussed. Generally, when he is in Carnhallow, Jamie goes to his room and shuts the door, communing with the silence.

  At least he is here now, in my presence, in the kitchen. Dipping a soldier in his egg, exploding the yolk so it drips like golden blood, he munches, dutifully, silently. Then he stops, slants a glance in my direction – and he rises, and crosses the kitchen to his advent calendar, tacked to the wall. He does this every morning, counting the dates.

  ‘Eight more days till Christmas’, he says. Then he shrugs, neither happy nor unhappy. ‘That’s not long.’

  ‘I know. It’s exciting.’

  I suppress my anxiety. Eight Days. Just eight days until Christmas.

  ‘It’s a penguin. In the picture.’

  ‘Is it? That’s nice.’

  ‘Have you heard about how the fathers take care of the baby penguins? I read that once at school. About the penguins, waiting in the snow. It was sad. But the mummy penguins always come back.’

  I stare at him. There’s a memory here. I can’t remember what.

  Penguins.

  Returning to the kitchen table, he finishes his breakfast toast and I get the sense he is expecting something to happen very soon. But we are all expecting and waiting, and asking. What is going to happen to us? What will happen at Christmas? How have we ended up in this terrible place?

  I want to scream these questions, but no one will answer. Jamie’s grandmother sometimes refuses to pick up the phone these days. She is my only friend, and yet it seems like she is also avoiding me. Like I am becoming absolutely nothing. Totally unwanted.

  I know I shouldn’t think this, yet I feel it – deep in my mind. I feel it when Jamie finishes his egg and soldiers and I put him in a coat and install him in the car, and Cassie turns the wheel and heads up Carnhallow Valley to the moors. As the car trundles away I sense that Cassie must be staring in her mirror at me. Watching me recede from view. See, there’s your stepmother, disappearing. Soon she will be gone. Christmas is coming.

  NO.

  I must shake off this depression. So I busy myself with chores, I rinse the dishes and neaten the kitchen and check the fridge for butter and milk, then I lock myself in my own car and drive through Botallack and Zennor, and over the last moortop hill, where I descend into St Ives, and the big Tesco supe
rstore on the outskirts of town. The store that looks down to Carbis Bay and the lighthouse. Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse. The novelist who committed suicide.

  The lighthouse is invisible today: a chilly sea fog obscures the view.

  Shopping. What could be more ordinary and sensible and regular than shopping, at Christmas? Even though we don’t need much.

  I am only doing this to distract myself, to get out of the house. My family doesn’t talk to me. No one knows me any more, even if they knew me once. So why is everyone looking? Patrolling the festive aisles, pretending to be interested in the finest Christmas puddings and the luxury mince pies, all I can hear is the piped carols aimed at me. Personally.

  Twelve drummers drumming.

  Drumming on my head. Bang bang BANG. Eight days left.

  A little girl is watching me. She is with her mother. They are lingering in the fruit and veg aisle and the mother is examining tomatoes and standing right beside her, her little girl is gazing over at me with great curiosity. A look of entrancement.

  The girl is in a white dress with black leggings, under a pink anorak. She is smiling, her eyes locked on mine as if I am something new yet bizarre, something unwelcome but amusing. Embarrassed, I turn away, pretending to be interested in walnuts and dates and Christmas cheese selections, but I can feel her eyes burning into my spine.

  I turn. The girl is still there, she hasn’t moved a millimetre and she is staring, rapt, without blinking. Her mother has disappeared.

  The tension claws at my skin. Maybe I should help the child, help find her mother, but the idea of doing that is horrific. I am paralysed. And this fucking song bangs out its stupid tune. Twelve drummers drumming, just eight days left, just eight till you die, just get out get out get out. Drum drum drum, bang bang bang!

  The girl is walking towards me and now I realize she is wearing little black boots. Boots which are cripplingly too small for her. And I am seized with dread.

  I have no idea why. I look left and right, seeking help, hoping for someone to save me from an eight-year-old girl with tight black boots, but I know that she wants to hurt me.

  BANG BANG BANG DRUM DRUM DRUM

  I can hear the steppy tick-tock of her tiny feet on the polished supermarket floor. And I know that if the child touches me with one of her pointing fingers she will kill me, I will bleed, I will hurt. My mouth will cough blood like that spitting hare in my hands.

  Ten lords a-leaping. Nine ladies dancing.

  I am in Tesco supermarket on the edge of St Ives, and there are adverts for special Belgian Christmas chocolates everywhere, and now the child runs to me, she is running right at me, coming for me, and I am cornered, I cower against a wall, crouching down, knowing that when her cold finger touches my skin I will scream and collapse and—

  ‘Stop! Stop stop stop!’

  My own shout snaps me open, turns me inside out, and dumps me in grey reality.

  Half the store has turned to look. Trolleys are paused, faces are tilted, shoppers are horrified. Look at the mad woman, look at her CROUCHING by the readymade canapés.

  Gentle Christmas muzak fills the startled silence. And the little girl has run past me. I can see her, over there, down at the distant tills, leaping into the arms of her mother.

  This is worse. This is, in its own way, even more ominous. Dumping my trolley by the stacks of brandy butter, I seek the exit. A supermarket manager regards me placidly as I run out of the shop into the drizzly cold air and jump in my Mini. The mad woman at the supermarket. Did you see her?

  I race the tormenting miles to the house. The moors are grey, the sea is grey, the sky is grey: only the cliffs provide colour, where the green-blue breakers of the sea shatter into silver lacework on the rocks, then retreat in stunned and seething confusion.

  Arriving at Carnhallow, I run inside, slamming the door behind me. I lean back on the wall, trying to regain myself. Taking long, long breaths. Gulping chilly quiet air. Inhaling the stillness. Calm, Rachel. Calm.

  I must survive. I must be better. I cannot let them win. They are coming for me and I need to outwit them. My Christmas is close, the time of year I fear most of all, and they are making it worse.

  But I will not be defeated. Not now, not here, not after all this. I have a good enough brain. I am going to work out the puzzle of what happened to Nina Kerthen and why. I need to find an answer before Christmas Day, when, it seems, all our presents will arrive at once.

  Closing as many doors as I can, sealing off the damp black corridors that stretch into disused basements and saddening bedrooms, I walk the hallway, past the prints of Wheal Chance and the Kerthen Count House, and make for the silent, lonely warmth of the Yellow Drawing Room, where the Christmas tree fairy is still grinning at me. Her wand twinkles.

  Hello, Rachel.

  The noticeable warmth, compared to the rest of the house, is welcome: it shows me I am not entirely losing my way. Because the reduced heating is a logical and coherent choice I have recently made. To lower costs. As I am in charge. Frugal Rachel is running Carnhallow.

  Why did we heat so much of Carnhallow, anyway, wasting David’s money? Pumping useless warmth into unused sculleries and spidery attics? It was nuts. Now most of the great and ancient house has returned to its ancestral and deserted chilliness, a cold that sharpens day by day as the promised December snowfall approaches.

  They say the snowfall might be heavy. Weather announcers are positively relishing the prospect: people love bad weather, the same way they love a murder mystery. Yet here in Carnhallow the murder mystery is real. It is my life. A mystery I need to unravel. And quickly.

  The loneliness surrounds me, it hurts me in the heart, the chest, like a species of cancer. Something growing and nasty. A loneliness I thought I had left behind. The girl who cowered in the bedroom. But at least it aids my concentration.

  Reaching for my files on the coffee table, I pick up that gossip magazine article of Nina and David and baby Jamie. When I first saw that particular photo of the three of them, months ago, I thought that it held a clue. Some hint as to why Nina might be dead but still alive, some reason why her son seems able to see things in the future.

  And I still sense some concealed truth in the photo. The perfect family. Too perfect. But how?

  I am – or I was – a photographer; this is a photo. I should be good at this. What am I missing here?

  The barely seen child reaches a hand for the mother. For elegant Nina. David stands beside them, tall, manly and protective. It is practically a Nativity scene. Christmas in a photo.

  The radio is playing ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’. Stung by a sudden memory, I look up, eyes misting. My mother used to sing this wistful, lovely, chiming song: I see her swaying, a glass of cheap Chardonnay in her hand, on our rancid Christmas family dinners. I can remember it all, I am too good at remembering. I see cans of lager on the table. Cheap turkey roll cooked in the microwave. Stilton that my dad probably shoplifted.

  The day unfolds. My dad getting drunk at 11 a.m. My sister itching to escape. The horrid stuff on the shower curtains. Mummy asleep. My dad looking at me. I go upstairs, but I cannot get away. Later his fingers slip inside me, his dirty fingers. His whisky breath on my trembling, bare and frightened skin. Happy Christmas, Rachel.

  They said there’ll be snow at Christmas

  They said there’ll be peace on earth …

  Too much, too much. Wiping a couple of stupid tears from my eyes I focus on the photo. Puzzling, thinking, deciphering. But nothing occurs to me, nothing solid or usable. The thoughts slip away.

  Exasperated, I slap the photo down, and open Nina’s notebook again.

  This is maybe more fruitful. I read on, intently, while the silent Drawing Room waits.

  As the months advanced – as the initially happy years paraded – Nina Kerthen’s note-taking got more chaotic. Her enthusiasm definitely waned over time. In the end she was reduced to taking down snippets of family history, and local folklore: no do
ubt learned from Juliet.

  For trip to Lizard with Jamie. Teach him. History. Cornwall. Lizard is wrecking and smuggling country. Origins of Kerthens. Breage, Prussia Cove. Gunwalloe.

  Wrecking lore. If they saw a ship in trouble they would come down to the coast and wave lights. Beckoning them in to safety, or so the sailors thought, but really they were seducing the ships on to the rocks, so the ships would founder. Break up. Then some of the wreckers would rush down to the beach and break the skulls of any survivors. So they could steal the rum and tobacco, the sherry and molasses, the gold, brandy, silk foulards.

  Why was she writing this? And why was she writing this:

  Profit and loss. Death and life. I wonder if he ever felt guilt, Jago Kerthen: tristesse for the miners he sent down under the sea, the children he poisoned with arsenic. The villagers he worked from the age of 10 to 30. Juliet says she can remember the scenes in the villages, Four Lanes, Carnkie, St Agnes. On Sundays she says she would walk down the streets of the villages and every cottage would have a window open, and there would be a man sticking his mouth through the gap, désespéré, sucking in air on grey winter Sundays. They were trying to breathe, trying to stay alive one more week, to get them through one more winter. Desperate for cold fresh air to clear their unclearable lungs. And all of them dead within six months? & this is how the Kerthens made their fortune.

  The rest of this page, in her notebook, is largely blank. Except for one final sentence. Isolated at the bottom, dated June:

  Familles anciennes. Continuing the line.

  Again I get the sense of a clue, a piece of thread that if pulled might unravel everything, but I have no idea how this might be achieved.

  After this scribbled entry, the remarks dwindle away. Her writing gets more slipshod, in contrast with the previous neatness. But then, at the very end, she notes one last, piercing image, which reads like a diary entry: