There was pillars of fire. I saw them devour everything and everybody. I felt the heat of them, burning the flesh off my bones. They ate Mummy Joy and Mummy Noreen, turned them to ashes. I mind screaming, soul afeart they would eat me too.

I saw Esther in the fire. The flames didn’t touch her. They couldn’t. She walked straight through them and she didn’t burn. Maybe it was because she was dripping wet from the water. I saw red ribbons in her hands, and she was holding them to her belly. She was lost, I could tell. Just wandering, wild afeart. I called out to her, and she turned her head to me, but she couldn’t see me.

She wasn’t all alone there. There was others. Children, I don’t know how many. All ages. I could see them and they could see me. Sometimes they came close, other times they stayed away. But they were always there. They were always, always watching.

I don’t mind much about them lock of days, when I had the fever, but when I came out the other side, the children were still there. They had followed me out.

27: Joy

27: Joy

Joy Turkington watched as Mary sank into the fever, a bundle of skinny arms and legs and sweat and fire. It had started as shivers, coming in waves, as if an angry sea raged through the child. Then the coughing, deep and hacking, and Joy wondered how the force of them didn’t break wee Mary open. When Mary’s eyes darkened and narrowed, Joy touched her forehead, and her hand recoiled from the heat.

“My God,” she said, “she’s burning.”

Noreen came to her side and placed the palm of her good hand, the one whose fingers weren’t broken, on Mary’s skin. First her head, then down beneath the nightdress they’d changed her into, feeling her chest. She said nothing, but Joy could see it on her face.

“What is it?” Joy asked.

“I don’t know,” Noreen said, “but we need to get her cooled down.”

She and Joy pulled the bedclothes aside, then Mary’s nightdress. Noreen fetched the washbowl and soaked a rag in water from the jug. She pressed it against Mary’s forehead, her cheeks, her chest, her belly, leaving droplets to glisten in the lamplight.

Fear took hold of Joy, a different kind of fear, one that coiled around her stomach, tightening like a serpent.

“Will she die?” she asked.

“No,” Noreen said. “No, she bloody won’t.”