The Fire Eternal

by Chris D'Lacey

  Tam glanced across to the opposite side. The traffic there was flowing but had been slowed down by accident watchers, and debris was spilled far across the road. In the distance, on the crest of a long stretched hill, he could see a radio tower. It was swaying. Not much, but enough to suggest that the wind strength was greater than he’d first imagined.

  He switched off the vents. A radio bulletin filled the space. Among the first words it spoke were “… tsunami, in the Pacific….”

  “A tsunami?” said Lucy, vaguely concerned. She felt the rainstorm crashing in around her and shuddered.

  Tam turned up the volume a little, which only seemed to increase the disaster quotient. In what a reporter was calling “The Day the Weather Went Crazy,” there were stories of tornados on the east coast of England, hailstones the size of golf balls in France, and volcanic disturbances in Guatemala and the Aleutian Islands.

  “Perhaps the most bizarre thing of all,” the broadcaster continued, “are the reports we’re receiving of polar bears moving north in great numbers. They seem to be migrating, en masse, toward the ice cap. Some even throwing themselves into the ocean and swimming — to what must surely be a certain death. Scientists here at the Stavanger Conference for Climate Change are baffled, though they say the phenomenon is not completely new. A year ago, when the population of bears on certain areas of the Svalbard Archipelago diminished in number, it was discovered, from data collected on animals already collared with radio tracking devices, that they were relocating farther north. But that was a Sunday constitutional in comparison to this. Scientists have commented that in human terms, this is nothing short of a pilgrimage. Our guide here joked, ‘Perhaps they were on their way to the conference and got lost?’ One senses that a small element of these scientists wishes it were true. For it’s clear that these great icons of the Arctic have been attracted by something — the question is, what?”

  “Bears again,” said Lucy, like a frightened little girl.

  “Hmm, I rest my case,” said Tam, hiding his concern in his softly spoken accent. “Take a nap. This could be quite a drive.” He accelerated and the car sped away, rocking now and then as a gust of wind caught it.

  And all the while the radio whistled and the news poured out in broken patter. Eventually, Lucy could take no more and silenced it with a petulant prod. She laid her head on her shoulder and closed her eyes. In her pocket, she felt her phone vibrate. The sixth time since she’d left the house. She glanced at it quickly. A message from Zanna. She must be one guilt-ridden witch by now. Tough. No way was Lucy going to read it. Even so, she kept her hand tight around the phone. Home in her fist, just a button press away. But Tam was right, there was no turning back.

  When she woke, a couple of hours or so later, the wind had subsided and the rain had filled out into a moderate snowfall. She rubbed the misted passenger window. They were in a suburban housing development, not unlike Wayward Crescent, though the houses here were smaller and the trees were few. Each dwelling was like a little boxed clone of the next.

  “Perfect timing,” said Tam. He tapped the navigation system. “According to this, Thoushall Road should be first on the left.”

  “I need the bathroom,” said Lucy.

  “Well, maybe you can go at David’s house,” he said, chewing a little cynicism off his lip.

  David’s house. The sign for Thoushall Road was looming closer, screwed to a fence just twenty yards ahead. Lucy held herself nervously as Tam turned the corner. What would they be like, David’s mom and dad? Would they be here at all? Maybe he hadn’t even lived with his parents, but had lived with someone else before coming to the Crescent? Some other Lucy, with her own injured squirrel running circles in the garden? She shuddered and let the window glide open, checking the house numbers as they rolled past. They were in the high thirties.

  “Far end,” said Tam. “It’s number four we want, yes?”

  Lucy nodded. “You will come up to the door with me, won’t you?”

  He took a breath and said, “Get ready with the letter.”

  Lucy unzipped her bag, still counting the houses. Ten. Golden Labrador chewing on a bone, RV taking up too much space. Eight. Neat and tidy, nothing special, curvy paving and a pretty box hedge. Six. An American flag in an upstairs window. Two. A broken gate and a wallpapered garbage can, motorcycle covered over on the way.

  Ten, eight, six … two.

  “But … where is it?” she gasped.

  Tam glanced across the road to be doubly certain that the numbers there were definitely odd, then reversed the car and parked between the houses numbered six and two. “I don’t believe this,” he said.

  But it was plain to see — or not to see — like a gap in a row of teeth.

  There was no number 4 Thoushall Road, Blackburn.

  23

  DANDELION ALLEY

  Instead, there was a muddy strip of earth, no more than ten feet wide. It was bedded with deep-set cobbled bricks, and where seeds hadn’t fallen on the stony ground, clusters of wild dandelions grew.

  Lucy stepped out of the car in a daze. And then, as if one shock weren’t enough, across the street another car door opened and a voice said, “Forget it. You’re wasting your time.”

  Lucy jumped back as if she’d seen a ghost. “Hhh! What are you doing here?”

  Zanna came flowing toward her, dressed in a calf-length black velvet coat. “You forgot to take your toothbrush. So being the good and caring person that I am, I drove at breakneck speed up the highway to make sure you’d always be popular in Blackburn.”

  “B-but …?”

  “Save the lip-flapping, Lucy. You weren’t too smart, were you? It didn’t take us long to figure it out. First you ask your mom about David’s parents, then you disappear the next day with his letter. I must admit, we weren’t expecting an accomplice.” She glared at Tam, who was watching this over the roof of his car. “How did you revive him?”

  “She used her dragon,” he said, noticing the flash of fear in Zanna’s dark eyes. He pointed at Gwendolen, who was still acting solid. “Memory implants. Very impressive.”

  The spotlight fell again on Lucy.

  “He knows stuff,” she gulped. “Things he shouldn’t.”

  “Your daughter’s very pretty,” Tam complimented Zanna.

  “You —”

  “And now here we are,” he added quickly, falling back against his car and speaking up into the cloud-heavy sky, “on the trail of your enigmatic boyfriend, who sends letters from an address that doesn’t exist.”

  “He must have written it down wrong,” Lucy said frantically. “It must have been fourteen or forty-nine or —”

  “I’ve checked,” said Zanna, cutting her dead. “I’ve been up and down the road. No one’s heard of David. And the families on either side of the gap have lived there for ages. As far as they know, there’s never been a number four.”

  “So he fooled us,” said Tam. “Or covered his tracks. Now, why would Saint David do a thing like that?”

  “Shut up,” said Lucy. “David was good! There must be a house here. It must be around the back.” She slammed the car door and stormed off to investigate.

  “Lucy, I’ve looked,” Zanna shouted after her. “It’s just empty plots and waste ground. Get into my car, please. I’m taking you home. Lucy? Lu-cy?! Oh!” She gave up and flipped her cell phone open. As she leaned her head into it, she glared at Tam.

  “Plots,” he said, jiggling coins in his pocket. “Maybe he was born under a mulberry bush? Or perhaps he went AWOL on a Boy Scout mission, erected a tent in the corner of a cabbage patch, and painted a great big ‘4’ on the flap?”

  “Why don’t you crawl back into your hole, Farrell?”

  “Face it,” he said to her, not unkindly. “There’s something wrong here. We should —”

  But she had spun away by then to speak into her phone. “Hi, Liz, it’s me. I’ve got her. Yeah. No, she’s safe. She arrived a few minutes ago. No, with Tam. Not e
xactly. It’s all a bit … well, it’s one for Arthur’s scrapbook. I’ll tell you when we’re home. What? Can’t hear you. It’s snowing a bit up here, I’m losing my signal …”

  While she was speaking, Zanna was walking toward the gap, her conversation fading into the distance. She disappeared, shouting Lucy’s name. Tam finally saw his chance. Climbing into the rear of his car, he took Gwendolen off the rear shelf. He turned her, shook her, clinked her with a fingernail, tried unsuccessfully to wiggle her tail, had an embarrassed try at tickling her feet, even blew (very warily) into her nostrils. Nothing. Nothing would make her move. Then for some reason he opened his shirt and put his hand on the invisible scars of Oomara. Throw her, said his thoughts. Throw her onto the road. If she’s real, she’ll save herself. That’s the test.

  A devil on his shoulder, or an Inuit ghost? The idea was wicked and wrong — but it excited him. Animated clay. Hold the front page. The physics of the universe entirely rewritten. The complete paranormal, here in his hand. Base elements turning to literary gold.

  Throw her.

  But something stopped him. A jingle of music — more like a chime. The weirdest ringtone he had ever heard. The sound was somewhere in the ether of the car. He could almost scent the notes as well as hear them. His chest itched again. This time he ignored it. Confused, he laid Gwendolen down and slipped his hand along the side of the passenger seat. Double gold! Lucy’s cell phone, which must have fallen from her pocket while she was sleeping. He flipped it open. Standard-issue phone but … no caller’s name on the display. Stranger still, no number. Instead, a single dot of light was strobing back and forth, leaving a fading grille across the screen. Tam flexed his toes. He could make no sense of what he was seeing, yet he did not feel that the phone was malfunctioning, just receiving in a different kind of way. He touched the button. The screen lit up in a pulse of violet. At the same time, he heard Zanna’s voice again and saw she was returning with a recalcitrant Lucy. In a flurry of panic, he hammered the keys, trying to shut the signal off. But by now the screen was bulging with light, an ectoplasmic stream, weaving its way like a ribbon through the window. Too stunned to move, he watched it wrap around the falling snowflakes and draw hundreds of them down, compacting them into … He gasped and let the phone fall from his hand. There was a gray squirrel on the pavement. A gray squirrel, conjured from snow. In a flash, it turned and hopped toward Lucy. It paused briefly by her feet, then hurried on past. She squealed in delight and began to give chase. Tam heard Zanna shout, “Lucy, come back here!” A sudden rush of air brushed the shell of his ear. When he looked again, Gwendolen was not on the seat.

  Even though she had not plugged into the phone, Gwendolen could sense it was operating at a frequency well outside the range of any cellular network. It wasn’t sending words or any other form of binary. It was sending thoughts.

  She shot past Zanna and landed on a fence post right beside Lucy just as the squirrel turned and chirruped. It was sitting among the dandelions, halfway down the path.

  Gwendolen let out an urgent hrrr, a warning to Lucy that she ought to turn back.

  “But it’s a squirrel,” Lucy whispered, and took a step forward.

  And in a blinding flash of light, she completely disappeared.

  She came to on the floor of a darkened room. A room chilled by age and constant neglect. The rounded stone walls were mossy with damp. The only source of light was from a partially eclipsed and rust-colored moon, leaking in through a high slit window. Flakes of snow were puffing in under the lintel.

  Lucy sat up, rubbing her arms. “Hello?” she called. Her voice rang with the sharpness of a winter frost.

  “Welcome,” said a voice.

  She squealed and scrabbled around.

  In a chair behind her was a hooded figure. His calves were bare. There were sandals on his feet. He appeared to have a cell phone in his hand. His thumb moved across it. A small square of violet faded into the darkness.

  “Who are you?” she said. “What am I doing here? Wh-where’s Zanna? Where’s Tam?”

  “We have met,” said the figure. “In … a previous existence.”

  Previous existence?

  “Help!” Lucy shouted and jumped to her feet. “Help me, someone! Anyone? Help!”

  “You are in no danger,” the figure said, as if he was both fascinated and amused by her behavior. “Look at me. You know me.” He pushed back his hood.

  “Brother Bernard!” she gasped. She fell flat against the wall. “How …?”

  “You are in a folly on Farlowe Island,” he said, with a slight, uncertain stutter in his voice, as though the words were correct but he couldn’t quite justify the movement of his lips.

  “But how did I get here? I was chasing a squirrel and —”

  “You were probing, child. Reaching out in your mind … and heart. You were looking for David.”

  “Is he here?” She ran forward and dropped to her knees.

  Brother Bernard clamped her hands in his. “Everyone is seeking David, child. Now, stand. You must come with me.”

  Lucy shook her head. There was something unnatural about the monk’s face. And his palms felt cold and scaly, like a lizard’s. “No, send me back.”

  “That won’t be possible.”

  “Send me back!” Lucy shouted, and opened her lungs to their deafening maximum, but with a movement of his finger, the monk put her back to sleep. And the last thing that came to her before she slumped was the reason for the strangeness in his face. He possessed all the features of the man she remembered, right down to the threaded veins in his cheeks and the bushy eyebrows and the small round mouth. He was Brother Bernard — but with one difference. There was no color in his eyes.

  The irises were black.

  24

  A GIFT FROM HOME

  How do we fight it?” Kailar said, the afterburn of running still dripping from his mouth. He looked back over his shoulder. The mammoth stood before them, as calmly as a cloud.

  Gwilanna stretched her wings and took to the sky. “With any luck, it will stamp you to pulp. The real question is, what’s it doing here, shaman?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ingavar, who seemed more fascinated by it than afraid.

  The mammoth lifted its trunk and released a sharp bellow from the flap of its mouth.

  “We should split up,” panted Kailar. “Attack from three sides.”

  “It doesn’t look harmful,” Avrel said, watching ghosts that had once come freely to him layer themselves all around the mammoth’s body. They were gliding over its shaggy contours as if welcoming it into their midst. He saw foxes weaving around the pillars of its legs, seabirds in a spectral halo above it, seals in a mirage of pack ice below.

  “What’s it doing?” caarked Gwilanna, sweeping in figure eights overhead. “Has it come for the eye or not?”

  Ingavar looked at the spirits in the sky. Their mood was good. He took a slow pace forward.

  “Here, guard this,” Kailar whispered to Avrel. He bent his head and let the eye of Gawain slip off his neck. It landed with a ringing thud. Several lines of blue-white fire radiated out from the site of impact, all of them petering out within a few seconds and drawing back, tidally, into the eye.

  “But —?”

  “Don’t argue,” Kailar hissed. “You saw what happened with those ravens. Why should this be any different?” He nudged the eye between Avrel’s paws, then swaggered away on an arcing path designed to irritate the mammoth and draw its attention away from Ingavar.

  “Kailar, wait for my command,” said Ingavar.

  The mammoth turned toward the fighting bear and shook itself playfully, as if trying to throw a million fleas off its fur. In that moment, Avrel saw a gathering of lights above it, as though half a dozen stars had just dropped from the sky and were eager to join in with the posturing. As he watched, they formed a glinting frame of tendrils spreading over the heads of the mammoth and the bears. The sky spirits reacted with an agitated horror
. Their voices wailed and their drums began to beat. They became a storm cloud, turning, turning. Ingavar raised his head in alarm. Avrel saw the disquiet in the Nanukapik’s face. He was still considering what to do when the frame of light reduced to a single point and flashed toward Kailar, striking him directly between the eyes.

  Kailar gave out a fighting growl and immediately drew up parallel to the mammoth’s flank. Ignoring Ingavar’s previous instruction, he began pacing back and forth in a threatening manner, his head held low, his black tongue issuing from the side of his mouth. It was a gibe to the creature to come and challenge him.

  Avrel tightened his claws. There was going to be trouble.

  The mammoth flexed its trunk, making a deep concertina of the thick folds of pachydermal skin that bridged its forehead. It had eyes like a fish. Small, staring, expressionless orbs. It gave another high-pitched trumpeting call, which resonated right through Avrel’s chest. Yet the creature did not seem hostile to him. He was hearing confusion and hurt in its roars. It was a giant of gentleness, clearly unhappy to be intimidated so. If anything, the lights were the real danger. Avrel felt it in every hollow fiber of his pelt. Giving counsel as his forebear Lorel would have done, he called out to his Nanukapik to draw back. But Ingavar did not hear him. He was, by then, in the shadow of the mammoth, sending out a series of whuffing noises, trying to establish a common language. But the mammoth had turned to face Kailar instead, throwing its head about in all directions as if scooping a hole in the air with its tusks.

  Kailar rose up, showing his claws.