Soul of the Fire

Chapter 18

Nora stirred with a groan, thinking it must be light already. Her thoughts rumbled woodenly in the numb blur between asleep and awake. She wanted nothing so much as to sleep on. The straw beneath her was bunched just right. It always bunched just right in perfect, comfortable, cuddling lumps, right as it was time to be up and out of bed.

She expected her husband to slap her rump any moment. Julian always woke just before first light. The chores had to be done. Maybe if she lay still, he would leave her be for just a few moments longer, let her sleep for a few dreamy minutes more.

She hated him at that moment, for always waking just before first light and slapping her rump and telling her to get up and to the day’s work. The man had to whistle first thing, too, when her head was still a daze in the morning, rickety with sleep still trying to get out of her head.

She flopped over on her back, lifting her eyebrows in an effort to wake by forcing her eyes open. Julian wasn’t there beside her.

A feeling skittered up her insides, bringing her wide awake in an ice cold instant. She sat up in the bed. For some reason, something about him not being there gave her a feeling of queasy dismay.

Was it morning? Just about to be light? Was it still somewhere in the night? Her mind snatched wildly to get her bearings.

She leaned over, seeing the glow from the embers she’d banked in the hearth before she went to bed. A few on the top still glowed, hardly diminished at all from the way she’d left them. In that weak light, she saw Bruce peering at her from his pallet.

“Mama? What’s wrong?” his older sister, Bethany, asked.

“What are you two doing awake?”

“Mama, we just gone to bed,” Bruce whined.

She realized it was true. She was so tired, so dead tired from pulling rocks from the spring field all day, that she’d been asleep before she closed her eyes. They’d come home when it got too dark to work any more, ate down their porridge, and got right to bed. She could still taste the squirrel meat from the porridge, and she was still burping new radishes. Bruce was right; they’d only just gone to bed.

Trepidation trembled through her. “Where’s your pa?”

Bethany lifted a hand to point. “Went to the privy, I guess. Mama, what’s wrong?”

“Mama?” Bruce puled.

“Hush, now, it be nothin’. Lay back down, the both of you.”

Both children stared at her, wide-eyed. She couldn’t stick a pin in the alarm she felt. The children saw it in her face, she knew they did, but she couldn’t hide it no matter how she tried.

She didn’t know what was wrong, what the trouble was, but she felt it sure, crawling on her skin.

Evil.

Evil was in the air, like smoke from a woods fire, wrinkling her nose, sucking her breath. Evil. Somewhere, out in the night, evil, lurking about.

She glanced again to the empty bed beside her. Gone to the privy. Julian was in the privy house. Had to be.

Nora recalled him going to the privy house just after they ate, before they went to their bed. That didn’t mean he couldn’t go again. But he never did say he was having no problem.

Consternation clawed at her insides, like the fear of the Keeper himself.

“Dear Creator, preserve us,” she whispered in prayer. “Preserve us, this house of humble people. Send evil away. Please, dear spirits, watch over us and keep us safe.”

She opened her eyes from the prayer. The children were still staring at her. Bethany must feel it, too. She never let nothing go without asking why. Nora called her the “why child” in jest. Bruce just trembled.

Nora threw the wool blanket aside. It scared the chickens in the corner, making them flap with a start and let out a surprised squawk.

“You children go back to sleep.”

They lay back down, but they watched as she squirmed a shift down over her nightdress. Shaking without knowing why, she knelt on the bricks before the hearth and stacked birch logs on the embers. It wasn’t that cold—she’d thought to let the embers do for the night—but she felt the sudden need for the comfort of a fire, the assurance of its light.

From beside the hearth, she retrieved their only oil lamp. With a curl of flaming birch bark, she quickly lit the lamp wick and then replaced the chimney. The children were still watching.

Nora bent and kissed little Bruce on the cheek. She smoothed back Bethany’s hair and kissed her daughter’s forehead. It tasted like the dirt she’d been in all day trying to help carry rocks from the field before they plowed and planted it. She could only carry little ones, but it was a help.

“Back to sleep, my babies,” she said in a soothing voice. “Pa just went to the privy. I’m only taking him a light to see his way back. You know how your pa stubs his toes in the night and then curses us for it. Back to sleep, the both of you. Everything is all right. Just takin’ your pa a lamp.”

Nora stuck her bare feet into her cold, wet, muddy boots, which had been set by the door. She didn’t want to stub her toes and then have to work with a lame foot. She fussed with a shawl, settling it around her shoulders, fixing it good and right before she tied it. She feared to open the door. She was in near tears with not wanting to open that door to the night.

Evil was out there. She knew it. She felt it.

“Burn you, Julian,” she muttered under her breath. “Burn you crisp for making me go outside tonight.”

She wondered, if she found Julian sitting in the privy, if he’d curse her foolish woman ways. He cursed her ways, sometimes. Said she worried over nothing for no good end. Said nothing ever came of her worrying so why’d she do it? She didn’t do it to get herself cursed at by him, that sure was the truth of it.

As she lifted the latch, she told herself how she wanted very much for him to be out in the privy and to curse her tonight, and then to put his arm around her shoulders and tell her to hush her tears and come back to bed with him. She shushed the chickens when they complained at her as she opened the door.

There was no moon: The overcast sky was as black as the Keeper’s shadow. Nora shuffled quickly along the packed dirt path to the privy house. With a shaking hand, she rapped on the door.

“Julian? Julian, you in there? Please, Julian, if you’re in there, say so. Julian, I’m begging you, don’t trick with me, not tonight.”

Silence throbbed in her ears. There were no bugs making noise. No crickets. No frogs. No birds. It was just plain dead quiet, like the ground in the lamp’s little glow around her was all there was to the world and beyond that there was nothing, like if she left the lamp and stepped out there into the darkness she might fall through that black beyond till she was an old lady and then still fall some more. She knew that was foolish, but right then the idea seemed very real and scared her something fierce.

The privy door squeaked when she pulled it open. She hadn’t even been hoping, as she done it, because she knew Julian wasn’t in there. Before she got out of the bed, she knew he wasn’t in the privy house. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did.

And she was right.

She was sometimes right about such feelings. Julian said she was daft to think she had some mind power to know things, like the old woman what lived back in the hills and came down when she knew something and thought she ought to tell folks of it.

But sometimes, Nora did know things. She’d known Julian wasn’t in the privy.

Worse, she knew where he was.

She didn’t know how she knew, no more than she knew how she knew he wasn’t in the privy. But she knew, and the knowing had her shaking something fierce. She only looked in the privy because she hoped she was wrong, and because she didn’t want to look where she knew he was.

But now she had to go look.

Nora held the lamp out, trying to see down the path. She couldn’t see far. She turned as she tramped along, looking back at the house. She could make out the window, because the fire was going good. The birch logs had caught, and the fire was throwing off good light.

The feeling of terrible wickedness felt like it was grinning at her from the black night between her and the house. Clutching her shawl tight, Nora held the lamp out to the path again. She didn’t like leaving the children. Not when she had her feelings.

Something, though, was pulling her onward, down the path.

“Please, dear spirits, let me be a foolish woman, with foolish woman ways. Please, dear spirits, let Julian be safe. We all needs him. Dear spirits, we needs him.”

She was sobbing as she made her way down the hill, sobbing because she feared so much to find out. Her hand holding the lamp shook, making the flame jitter.

At last, she heard the sound of the creek, and was glad for it because then the night wasn’t so dead quiet and frightfully empty. With the sound of the water, she felt better, because there was something out there, something familiar. She began to feel foolish for thinking there was no world beyond the lamplight, like she was on the brink of the underworld. She was just as likely wrong about the rest of it, too. Julian would roll his eyes, in that way of his, when she told him she was afraid because she thought the world was empty beyond the light.

She tried to whistle, like her Julian whistled, so as to make herself feel better, but her lips were as dry as stale toast. She wished she could whistle, so Julian could hear her, but no good whistling sound would come out. She could just call out to him, but she feared to do it. Feared to get no answer. She’d rather just come on him and find him there, and then get cursed for her foolish crying over nothing.

A gentle breeze lapped the water against the edge of the lake, so she could hear it before she could see it. She hoped to see Julian sitting there on his stump, tending a line, waiting to catch them a carp. She hoped to see him look up and curse her for scaring his fish.

The stump was empty. The line was slack.

Nora, her whole arm trembling, held up the lamp, to see what she came to see. Tears stung at her eyes so she had to blink to see better. She had to sniffle to get her breath.

She held the lamp higher as she walked out into the water till it poured over the tops of her boots. She took another step, till the water soaked the bottom of her nightdress and shift and dragged the dead weight back and forth with the movement of her steps and the waves.

When the water was up to her knees, she saw him.

He was floating there, facedown in the water, his arms limp out to his sides, his legs parted slightly. The little breeze-borne waves slopped over the back of his head, making his hair move as if it were some of the lake weed. He bobbed gently there in the water, like a dead fish floating on the surface.

Nora had feared to find him there, like that. It was just what she feared, and because she feared it so, she wasn’t even shocked when she saw it. She stood there, water to her knees, Julian floating like a dead bloated carp twenty feet out in the lake. The water was too deep to wade out to get him. Out where he was it would be over her head.

She didn’t know what to do. Julian always did the stuff she couldn’t do. How was she going to get her husband in to shore?

How was she going to live? How was she going to feed herself and her children without Julian? Julian did the hard stuff. He knew the things she didn’t know. He provided for them.

She felt numb, dead, stunned, like she did when she’d just come awake. It didn’t seem possible.

Julian couldn’t be dead. He was Julian. He couldn’t die. Not Julian.

A sound made her spin around. A thump to the air. A howl, like wind on a blizzard night. A wail and a whoosh lifted into the night air.

From then—house up on the hill, Nora could see sparks shooting up out the chimney. Sparks flew up in wild swirls, spiraling high up into the darkness. Thunderstruck, Nora stood in frozen terror.

A scream ripped the quiet night. The awful sound rose, like the sparks, screeching into the night air with horror such as she had never heard. It was such a brutal cry she didn’t think it could be human.

But she knew it was. She knew it was Bruce’s scream. With a wail of wild terror of her own, she suddenly dropped the lamp in the water and ran for the house. Her screams answered his, feeding on his, shattering the silence with his.

Her babies were in the house.

Evil was in the house.

And she had left them to it.

She wailed in feral fright at what she had done, leaving her babies alone. She screamed to the good spirits to help her. She squalled for her children. She choked on her sobbing panic as she stumbled through the brush in the dark.

Huckleberry bushes snagged and tore her clothes. Branches slashed her arms as she ran with wild abandon. A hole in the ground caught and twisted her foot, but she stayed up and kept running toward her house, toward her babies.

Bruce’s piercing scream went on without end, lifting the hair at the back of her neck. She didn’t hear Bethany, just Bruce, little Bruce, screaming his lungs out, like he was having his eyes stabbed out.

Nora stumbled. Her face slammed the ground. She scrambled to her feet. Blood gushed from her nose. Stunning pain staggered her. She gagged on blood and dirt as she gasped for breath, crying, screaming, praying, panting, choking all at the same time. With desperate effort, Nora raced to the house, to the screams.

She crashed through the door. Chickens flew out around her. Bruce had his back plastered to the wall beside the door. He was in the grip of savage terror, out of his mind, shrieking like the Keeper had him by the toes.

Bruce saw her, and made to throw his arm around her, but flung himself back against the wall when he saw her bloody face, saw strings of blood dripping from her chin.

She seized his shoulder. “It’s Mama! I just fell and hit my nose, that’s all!”

He threw himself at her, his arms clutching her hips, his fingers snatching at her clothes. Nora twisted around, but even with the bright firelight, she didn’t see her daughter.

“Bruce! Where’s Bethany?”

His arm lifted, shaking so much she feared it would come undone. She wheeled to see where he pointed.

Nora screeched. She threw her hands up to cover her face, but couldn’t, her fingers quaking violently before her mouth as she screamed with Bruce.

Bethany was standing in the hearth, engulfed in flames.

The fire roared around her, swirling in tumbling eddies as it consumed her little body. Her arms were lifted out into the angry white heat, the way you lifted your arms into the warm spring afternoon sunlight after a swim.

The stink of bubbling burning flesh suddenly wormed into Nora’s bleeding nose, gagging her until she choked on the smell and taste and couldn’t get another breath. She couldn’t seem to look away from Bethany, look away from her daughter being burned up alive. It didn’t seem real. She couldn’t make her mind understand it.

Nora lunged a step toward the flames, to snatch her daughter out of the fire. Something inside, some last scrap of sense, told her it was far too late. Told her to get away with Bruce before it had them, too.

The tips of Bethany’s fingers were all gone. Her face was nothing but yellow-orange whorls of flame. The fire burned with wild, roused, determined fury. The heat sucked Nora’s breath from her lungs.

A shrill scream suddenly rose from the girl, as if her soul itself had finally caught fire. It made the very marrow in Nora’s bones ache.

Bethany collapsed in a heap. Flames shot up around the crumbled form, tumbling out around the stone, licking briefly up over the mantel. Sparks splashed out into the room, bouncing and rolling across the floor. Several hissed out against the wet hem of Nora’s dress.

Nora snatched at Bruce, clutching his nightshirt in a death grip, and ran with him from the house, as evil consumed what was left of her daughter.