The Fire Baby - By Jim Kelly
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Beverley Cousins, my editor, for providing inspiration and advice in perfect measures, Faith Evans, for her determination to elevate the quality of writing in The Fire Baby, and Trevor Horwood, for creative and meticulous copy-editing. This book again centres on the case of a car-accident victim locked in a coma. I am grateful for the welcome extended to me by the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability, Putney, and am happy to point out that donations can be made through its website: www.rhn.org.uk. I would like to thank Donald and Renee Gillies, and Jenny Burgoyne for helping with the text. Darren Fox, of Ely Fire Station, provided technical advice on the properties of fire. The US Air Force let me tour Mildenhall base, a privilege for which I am grateful. The oddities of the East Anglian weather system were expertly explained to me by Weather-quest, the forecasting company at the University of East Anglia. Midge Gillies, my wife, stepped in brilliantly to break the occasional logjam of ideas.
The Landscape of the Fens is, of course, real but topographical and historical details have been occasionally altered for the sake of the plot. All characters are entirely fictitious and any resemblance to real persons is entirely coincidental.
Tuesday, 1 June 1976 – The Great Drought
East of Ely, above the bone-dry peatfields, a great red dust storm drifts across the moon, throwing an amber shadow on the old cathedral. Overhead a single, winking plane crosses the star-spangled sky. Flight MH336, just airborne from the US military base at Mildenhall, flies into the tumbling cauldron of dust.
The diamond-hard sand begins to shred the turning turbines and the dislodged blades scythe each other like spinning knives. The fuselage dips as the engine suffocates, and begins a descent of such violence that the passengers float, despite their seatbelts, in a weightless fall towards their deaths.
At precisely 11.08 pm, according to the pilot’s watch recovered at the scene, the fuselage buries itself in the soft earth. The distant cathedral tower shudders with the impact and the crows, roosting on the Octagon Tower, rise in a single cloud. Heads turn ten miles away at Littleport with the earthy thud of the crash, followed by the crackling combustion of the airfuel.
A fireball marks the point of impact at Black Bank Farm. Here there is too much sound to hear. At the heart of the fire a cold white eye burns where 50,000 gallons of kerosene turns to gas in a single second. Then the flames come, licking the stars.
At the foot of the vast white pillar of rising smoke the air crackles with the heat. And in the ashes of what had been Black Bank Farm she stands alone. Her, and the baby.
They are the only ones alive. Her, and the baby.
The family died at the table: her mother caught in the act of drowning in a flame, her father’s blackened arm still stretched towards his throat. His last words will stay with her to her deathbed: ‘The cellar, Maggie. A celebration.’ She’d gone to get the bottle, leaving Matty in his cot by the empty fireplace. Celebration: a family christening to come, now that Matty had a father.
In the dry damp of the stone cellar she heard it coming. Machines, like people, can pretend to scream. But the pretence was gone in the final wail of the failing engines, the ripping metal, and the blow of the impact.
Sometimes she wished she had died then, as she should have.
Instead she saw the light and heard the sound that was the fire, the dripping fire, falling through the floorboards. The liquid fuel from the tanks, the quicksilver light that saved her life. So she found the stairs and climbed up to count the dead, hung, like game, from the burning rafters. Then the real horror, in the tiny swaddled bundle with the blackened limbs.
Outside, with her secret in her arms, she felt him kicking, and nudging with the jerky half-conscious movements only a child can make.
Even here, in what had been the kitchen garden, she felt the heat prickling her skin. She smelt her hair singe, as the black hanging threads turned to ash-white corkscrews. A lock ignited, and burnt into her cheek. She had a lifetime to feel the pain, but even now it terrified her with the slow, insidious intimation that the worst was yet to come.
A fire in her blood. And the baby’s.
A silent fire. The only sound a flapping inside her ear, like a pigeon’s