The Fire Child (25 page)

‘Sorry, Rachel.’ He drops the torch, and flicks a switch, dimming it.

‘Jamie. How did you know I was here?’

He shrugs, diffident and embarrassed; face pinched with cold. He steps nearer, almost into the Shaft House, gazing around this awful place.

He must not see in the pit.

‘I saw the open cupboard in the kitchen, and the key was gone. No one comes here very much, not any more, not since …’ His words stumble to nothing. He looks around. He steps closer.

‘No!’

I stand up and push him back, before he can see. Then I physically grab him, pulling him away from the Shaft House door.

He is startled. ‘What? What is it? Is there something in there? Is it Mummy? Is she back?’

‘No. No, Jamie. She’s not there, not there.’ Hastily, fumbling in the chill, I rechain the door and close the padlock. ‘Jamie, it’s too dangerous down here. Your father called to ask me to lock the mine door. That’s all. Let’s go back. Watch some more TV.’

Jamie looks at me, then at the cold dark brickwork of the minehead, and his eyes fill with sadness as he gazes up at the pointing chimney, accusing the starry sky. This is the death-place.

‘I come here sometimes as well, I do, but don’t tell Daddy, he told me never ever to come here but sometimes I come here and stand outside and think about Mummy. But I can never get in. Never get in to see if she’s really here.’ His voice is incoherent with sadness. He is still staring at the chimney. Then he looks out, to the turmoiled sea.

‘Jamie, we have to go.’ I place a guiding arm firmly around his shoulder. He does not resist. ‘Come on, let’s go home.’

Together we retrace our steps along the treacherous path, my heart stopping up my throat with tension. Arms linked, we make it on to firmer ground, the gravelled path up the snowy valley. Flakes are drifting, I have snow in my nostrils, clean and pure and fragrant. We are both as silent and stifled as the snow-killed landscape. I have one thought that dominates all others. Nina Kerthen may not be dead. Someone else drowned in the mine. Perhaps that solves it all.

I open the kitchen door and we step inside. Close the door. And Jamie reacts, instantly. Clutching at my arm as he yells:

‘Mummy is here. That’s her perfume. She’s here. You said she’s not in the mine so she must be here now.’

Night

‘Jamie!’

I don’t know how to soothe him. His little body is stiff with fear. My own fears are barely confined. The kitchen is so normal with its sparkling red kettle, the grey steel fridge, the cool granite worktops. Yet everything glints, now, with extraordinary potential. Every reflection in metal and glass might be her, moving, entering, opening. Smiling.

I can hear you.

‘
Rachel?
’

I struggle towards logic.

I need to be as normal as possible. So I must do Christmas. I have to perform the rites and rotes of Christmas Eve: they will soothe my stepson. And me.

‘Jamie.’ I take his clammy hand and sit him at the kitchen table. Then I fetch him a glass of milk. He takes a big brave gulp, as I talk. ‘Jamie, there’s no one here.’

You are lying.

White milk smears his red lips.

‘But that perfume! It’s Mummy. Can’t you smell it? I want Mummy to stay dead now. It’s enough now, isn’t it?’

‘I can’t smell her perfume.’

And I cannot. Not this time. But I can maybe detect another presence. An evil woman, capable of evil things.

‘I want Mummy to stay in the mine. Or in the grave at Zennor, wherever she is, I miss her but I don’t want her to talk to me any more.’

‘Jamie, she isn’t talking to you. She can’t be.’

But how can I be sure? That face in the darkness, I saw it, coming from the Old Hall. And I have not been inside the Old Hall since. An entire wing of this house scares me; I am returned to being an infant. Frightened of the thing behind the door. Terrified by the voice of my drunken father, at the bottom of the stairs, climbing up to see me.

‘She does talk to me. Does.’

‘How?’

‘She won’t let me tell you.’ Jamie is blinking rapidly, the deep and painful confusion visible in his eyes. ‘I even met her, I did, but it wasn’t her, yet it was. It was like a dream, it was my mummy but it wasn’t. I met her at the mine. With the man engine.’ He stands up, abruptly, and runs to the door, shouting down the hallway, ‘Don’t need you here, Mummy! Stay away.’

The house answers with a contemptuous silence.

Jamie waits at the door, for his dead mother to respond. I wait for my own voices. The madness he pushed inside me, with his fingers and his whisky breath.

Perhaps David is right and I am in no state to look after a child: perhaps I am deluding myself. Perhaps I ought to give up, call the police, leave Carnhallow, let David take over. But then, he is no better. He is implicated in the death of Nina. Maybe he’s not Jamie’s father anyway.

The confusion is labyrinthine. Yet again, all the tunnels terminate in a great darkness. I force my mind back to the necessary rituals.

‘Jamie, it’s Christmas. Let’s put some stuff out for Santa.’

The boy, unsurprisingly, looks at me as if I am insane. He sees my gathering madness.

‘You know, Jamie. A carrot for Rudolf, a glass of sweet sherry for Santa. Let’s put them by the fireplace for when Father Christmas brings the presents.’

This is what my mum used to do. It’s one of my only happy memories of Christmas. My mum and my sister and me, we would put out the carrot and then mum would pretend to chomp it like a reindeer and we’d laugh because we knew it was all fake but somehow we wanted to believe at the same time. Because reality was so fucking inferior.

The charm works. In the bottom of the fridge I find a slightly mouldy carrot. In the back of a cupboard: sweet sherry. Jamie’s expression softens into a forlorn hopefulness. The white magic of Christmas doing its thing.

Together Jamie and I boldly walk down the hall into the Yellow Drawing Room, where the green tree glitters and the white fairy smiles. Her wand is poised. The TV is still on, broadcasting a church service somewhere in deep and snowy England, people in suits and coats singing hearty carols.
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

I realize it must be late, so much time has passed. Is this a Midnight Mass? I gaze out, the curtains are open. Clouds are breaking, and showing a yellowish moon, yet more soft snow is falling, making manic, obsessive patterns beyond the leaded windows. My house looks like a Christmas card. A leering face appears at the window.

Cunt.

No. I will not listen. I’m not going to let the voices spirit me off. If I do then I won’t return, not this time.

‘Come on, Jamie, it’s very late now.’

He nods, obedient, trusting. The rest of the house stretches away around us, huge and dark, totally out of scale. We are two people in one of a hundred empty rooms.

‘Let’s put these out for Santa then get to bed. It’s really late and tomorrow it’s Christmas, and after Christmas you can see Daddy and everything will be fine again.’

‘Yes, Rachel.’

The sherry glass goes on the mantelpiece. Then the carrot, wobbling on its saucer, is placed on the flagstones right in front of the fire.

And now everything goes black. The TV squirts and dies, the lights blink out. An infinite yet barely heard music has stopped abruptly, leaving a pounding silence.

It’s a power cut. That’s all. But we are immersed in darkness. The house is invaded by night. The only light comes from the starlit snow at the window, and the rigid fear in Jamie’s whitened eyes.

‘She did it.’ He grabs me, hugs me. ‘She did this. Please don’t let her do it, please don’t go, don’t die, Mummy, don’t leave me here with her.’

Reaching for the sound of his voice I take him and hug his trembling shoulders.

‘Shh. Jamie. Shush. It’s only a power cut, the snow must have brought down the lines.’

‘Scared, Rache. Scared scared scared.’

My heart beats outrageously in my chest. Far too hard. It hurts.

‘Don’t be scared, don’t be. We’ll be fine. Let’s go to bed now and I bet by the time we get up the power will be back on.’

His body language says
Don’t believe you
, and I don’t blame him. There are now lots of faces behind him, curious, pressed to the window, lots of whorls and eddies of snow, caught by the moonlight.

‘Jamie, I’m back, hello, sweetheart.’

That voice was real?

Help me. I am crumbling. The voice sounded sickeningly real – like it came from behind the Christmas tree, a triangle of black in the black corner, or maybe over the other side, by the TV, another dark shape in the darkness. I have to hide my terror and confusion. I mustn’t let Jamie know that I am crumbling, too: falling too far, and much further than him.

Desperate, urgent, I look for my phone. And its torchlight. Another pang of fright seizes me as I realize I left the phone in the kitchen. We will have to go back to the kitchen, in the darkness, past the long corridor that leads to the Old Hall.

‘Let’s get my phone then go to bed,’ I say to Jamie, reaching for him in the cloying dark.

He comes close, buries his head in my stomach, his face downturned. Like he did at Levant, when he predicted my death. That was when it all began, my madness. That was where I had my first hallucination. The little girl with the crippling boots. Like the child in the supermarket. A deformed child, roughly the age my daughter would have been, if she’d lived.

But now it is too late. I have understood too late.

Yes, it’s too late now.

Jamie mumbles, ‘Scared, Rachel, scared of the dark, don’t want to go out there where Mummy is.’

‘Shush. Um um …’ I am flailing for a solution, some way of getting us through the next twenty-four hours: getting us
both
through, unharmed. I may have to call the police, condemn myself. Yet my mind rebels, ferociously, at the idea. I
won’t
let my father win. I can do this.
I just have to get through Christmas.

‘All right, Jamie. I know what. I know what we can do. You can sleep in my room. My and Daddy’s room. For tonight.’

He looks up at me, and his eyes sparkle with faint hope. ‘Can I?’

‘I’ll make up the little bed. Yes.’

‘And can we have candles? We always had candles on Christmas Eve, because Mummy liked them, that’s why she liked Christingle.’

‘Yes. Yes of course. Yes.’

The nausea rises inside me and is bitten back. I gaze out at the darkened room, to the windows, where so many black roses bloom. I swear I can smell their scent, it is not unlike Chanel.

‘Come on.’

My hand is trembling more than his. Together we fumble our way across the room, linked like miners in a dangerous tunnel, the blind leading the doomed. The dark ungraspable shape of the door is waiting. The blackness has made the house quieter than ever. All the sounds are outside. The freezing wind raking the rowans, the distant sea with its endless anger.

‘This way.’

It is even darker in the hallway than in the Drawing Room. I can just make out the white shapes of the old prints, of the old mines, on the wall. The ancient photos of the bal maidens, staring, frowning, into the future. Their dirty miserable faces accusing the Kerthens.
You did it, you did it. It’s your fault we died
.

Onwards down the landing. We’ve got to make it down the corridor, then we will be safe in the kitchen – and we can find a light.

‘Jamie, I’m home.’

My stepson didn’t hear it. Only I heard it.

Jamie clutches my hand tighter. ‘I heard something.’

‘What?’

Jamie’s face is a blurred oval in the black, eyes wide with amazement. I feel a need to touch his face, to know that something, someone, is real. ‘I heard her. Just then, Mummy.’

‘The kitchen’s not far.’ I am tugging him so fast he might fall over. I am so frightened. I cannot look at the corridor.

Jamie tugs me. ‘But I heard her! And I know where is! She’s in the Old Hall. She called out to me.’

‘Jamie, nothing’s in there.’

He is yanking me now: pleading and demanding. He is a formless shadow in the starlit dark. ‘We have to go there!’

I am choiceless, and panicked. ‘All right, Jamie, shh shhh. We can look tomorrow—’

‘No! No, no, it’s Christmas Eve. She must be coming back and she’s in the Old Hall, she is she is she is—’

‘But wait.’ Desperate now. ‘Let’s get some light first. It’s too dark to see anything. We might fall.’

I have to do this quickly – that’s if I can do it at all. Half-stumbling, knocking into chairs, we flee through the corridor of shadows and gloom, and we get to the kitchen. The moon casts her antique light on the glittery emptiness. But yes, there it is, on the granite worktop: my phone. When I switch on the app, the cone of brightness makes deeper shadows in the crowding dark.

‘OK. We’re good. Now let’s go upstairs and—’

‘No. You said we could have candles! You said we could go into the Old Hall! You did.’

He runs away from me, and stands in a corner – leaning against the kitchen wall, arm over his face. Trying not to cry. The brave, brave boy.

Every part of my mind burns with pity. The imperative and unignorable tears of a child who has lost a mother. The fear stings, but so does the guilt.

Accepting my allotted role, I stoop, fumble in a kitchen drawer.

‘Look. Here we go.’

Two candles and a lighter. He half-turns. I find two saucers, and light the candles. At least this will save my phone battery.

‘Let’s stick them on these. See.’ Tilting the wicks into the lighter flame, I melt the wax, and adhere the candles.

Jamie shifts himself, and eyes me – and comes nearer, his features dancing in the flickering candlelight.

‘It’s better, isn’t it, Rachel? It’s what Mummy wants. She loves candles. I want to show her.’ He is staring at the yellow flames as they gutter in the noiseless breeze that has no explanation. Unless somewhere in the house a door has been opened.

‘There. You have one candle and I’ll have the other. Make sure you don’t drop it.’

‘OK.’

The long dark landing shivers in astonishment at the sight of us, emerging from the kitchen, a stepson and stepmother, each carrying a saucer, and each in charge of a fragile candleflame.

Now we are walking down the hall, turning right. We are actively doing it. Walking along the corridor, crossing the line where the restoration ended, where Nina died, where someone died. The door to the Old Hall looms in front: bewildered by our idiocy.

I can’t do it: can’t push the door open. I’m too stupidly scared: my father is in there.

Jamie presses the door.

It swings open to a different kind of darkness. That retreats, with a disconsolate whisper, as we enter, with our candles.

We are inside the Old Hall. Where she waits, staring like the woman who floats in her dress in the mine, grinning her fixed and skeletal grin. I wonder if she can see us, in her endless dreams, as her hair drifts on the freezing water.

The darkness is as intense as the cold in here. The tall narrow windows show the perfect circle of the winter moon like a white Japanese mask. Jamie is absolutely still, and staring intensely, his face uplit by the twitching candleflame. He gazes in wonder at something in the corner. I daren’t look myself, I cannot face this. Perhaps she is stepping nearer to him: over there, coming nearer, coming for her son.

‘Hello, Rachel.’

A hand grabs me, from the darkness behind. It grabs my hair, it twists my hair, forces me down.

I gasp, and fall forward. Did I imagine that? Of course I did. The horrors of my childhood return. I am on my knees, punched from behind, by my own hallucinated fears. I have dropped the candle, its light dies away on the stone floor. Jamie gazes at me, astonished by the sight of his stepmother, terrified, on her knees.

‘Rachel, are you all right? Did you see her? You saw her, didn’t you?’

‘No, no. I was only. It was nothing. It’s nothing.’

I pick up the candle. With wobbling, horrified hands. I flick the lighter, reignite the wick, scare the darkness away. The Old Hall is releasing us. She is not here. No one is here. There is no one for miles, the bald moors are snowbound, the cliffs desolate and icy.