I must have slept again: my eyes were shut. I must have slept without stirring despite the brightening horizon. I slept until I felt another wetness on my cheeks. Damp bristles moved over my brow and caught on my eyelids. A new smell met the igneous residue. A musk. And lips. These were lips. Coarse, meaty, jagged lips, but kind, somehow inviting. And teeth that knocked at my scalp as the lips drew in lumps of my hair. And a tongue — long, viscous — moved down to my neck and wrapped itself around my jaw.
I opened my eyes. The head of a horse. Two large brown eyes, like snooker balls, rolled to scan my face, then the world around, then my face. The horse snorted and tossed her sooty forelock. The sun was full in the sky now, though not high, and as the horse swayed, her head moved in front of it, making a dark silhouette of her otherwise rusty fur, and a stilted halo around her otherwise silky mane.
‘Who are you?’
It was a question to the horse. In my state of half dream, it was a necessary question.
The horse continued to ruffle my hair. Her rider answered, ‘It’s Vivien, Daniel. It’s Vivien.’
If relief were a thing it was possible to feel when the full gush of dread was still swilling within, casked and stoppered, then I might have felt relief. But as it was, the sight of this friend, without much reason, put fear to boil. She did not dismount.
‘There’s been a fire,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘A fire at your house.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was there. I ran away.’
‘I had hoped …’
‘How did you find me?’
‘I’ve been riding for two hours,’ she replied. ‘You look ill.’
‘Not ill,’ I said.
Vivien rearranged the reins in her gloved hands. The horse stepped to one side and planted four hooves such that she stood side on, and Vivien turned too to look upon me. I raised myself up out of the dirt with the palms of my hands, then stood up.
‘Have you found anyone else?’ I knew that nobody had made it out, save for me.
‘I saw a figure.’
‘Who?’
‘I saw the fire last night, all the way from my house. At first I thought it was a bonfire and wondered why I hadn’t been told so that I could come up. And then I saw that it was too big. Far too big to be a bonfire. And I put on my coat and left the house and began to walk up the track. The wind was blowing in my face, so the smoke was too. Directly at me. For a while I stopped being able to see the flames, the smoke was so thick. But then I got closer, as close as I could get against heat, and saw your house. It was on fire. And I saw you, what I thought to be you, rushing down the hill away from me, running as fast as you could. I would have followed but, somehow, I couldn’t. I remained. I watched the blaze, I watched as the house fell apart. I thought I saw figures inside, but I couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t see well enough. I think the smoke had scorched my eyes, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s possible. And when it was almost over, such a long time later, I thought I saw a figure emerge. But it couldn’t have been. But I thought I saw a thin figure emerge. As the dawn was coming up.’
‘Who?’
‘I couldn’t say,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if it was real.’
‘Could it have been my sister?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t really know what I saw. I just had the image, and now just the memory of the image.’
‘But it could have been.’
‘Possibly.’ She peered down at me but I could not seem to hold her gaze. I looked out towards the reservoir.
‘Why did I run?’ I asked.
‘Running was the only thing to do.’
‘I left them.’
‘It was the only thing to do, Daniel.’
‘Cathy told me to.’
‘She was right to.’
The reservoir appeared to lilt from side to side. I stared instead at a sickening ash tree on its far bank. It was too brittle to sway with the wind.
After a while, she said: ‘You could come home with me.’
This time I looked up at her. It was a kind offer. ‘Thank you, but I have got my own family.’
We stood for a moment: Vivien, the horse, and a lanky lad, barely fifteen.
‘Which way did she go?’
‘Daniel, I don’t know. The figure I thought I saw, I thought it moved towards the tracks. I ran soon after, back to mine to get Daisy, to come and find you. I saw nothing clearly.’
‘Towards the tracks?’
‘Yes?’
‘Then where?’
‘I didn’t see.’
I nodded. I looked about me, to see if I had left anything on the ground. There was nothing, just an indentation where I had lain. I had brought nothing with me. I had nothing to bring. For no reason at all, I scuffed the marks in the sand with my foot. I would leave no trace, no tracks. No hunter would find me.
‘I’ll be going then,’ I said to Vivien, and, in part, to Daisy.
Daisy blinked feather lashes. Vivien let out an agitated sigh.
‘Remember what I said, Daniel.’
I walked away from the reservoir, and away from the woman and her horse, following approximately the route I must have taken the night before.
Needless to say, the idea of returning to our house on the hill was suffocating. I watched my feet take each step, one then another. Their tilt, the way they slapped the earth, the way the toes bent.
I did not look back, though a couple of times I heard the horse’s hooves stamp and drag, as Vivien kept there to watch me go.
After around half a mile, I came to a wooden, slatted bridge, barely more than four planks thrust together and stitched with rusted, hooked nails that led across a thin dike. The furrow carried excess water after heavy rain. These parts flooded regularly. In winter, and after summer storms, great torrents rushed from the nearby hills to the flat lands.
There had been rain last night, I remembered. It had rained as I had walked, though I had hardly noticed. It had been all around. I remembered suddenly: fattened, matured plugs of rain had cascaded past me and bounced at my feet. A summer storm. I had walked in it then slept in it. My clothes were still damp. And the reservoir had been high, too. High enough to slap my face, though I had rested on an upper bank.
I quickened my pace. I had to run. The whole landscape was wet.
The figure Vivien had seen. There was more than a chance it was Cathy, saved miraculously from the fire by storm to walk through the smoke to the only remaining landmark she could find in the gloom: the railway track.
I ran and ran. A cloud of smoke, soot and heavy steam rested on the hill. It filled the void where the house had been. I was thankful that I was spared the sight of the absence where, for a blissful year, there had been a home.
As I got closer, I saw baked ribs, the empty structure’s blackened frame. I saw cinders that stood precariously from the ground to the branches of charred trees, burning wood on a scale I had never witnessed. I saw a kind of black that was new to me, condensed, compacted, opaque.
I walked on. I had no desire to inspect the remains: there was no telling what I would find. Besides, the railway track, and the possibility of my sister, lay ahead. But as I walked on past the burnt house, past the burnt chicken coop, past the slim charred vegetable patch, past the ashen copse, I was harried by glinting sparks, the biting revenants of a shredded inferno. They swept and swirled about me like gulls at a trawler. I was their last scrap, their last taste of living tissue and hope of supper before they fell like those before them to the damp earth. I walked on, and they fell.