The Fire Baby

They drove north on the old Aio past fields the colour of sackcloth. Before Southery they turned east beneath a sky beginning to boil with clouds. To the east, coming towards them on an angled path, Dryden spotted the first Fen Blow – a dust storm a mile high and rolling forward like a giant tumbleweed from an outsized Western. It rolled across the sun and a burnished gold shadow dashed across the landscape.

Humph suddenly slowed the Capri, swung it off the metalled road and hit the shingle of a drove road. A small copse of half-hearted pines was a sheaf of fire in the middle of Adventurer’s Fen. The rest lay before them as it had always done in Dryden’s dreams: 300 acres of blissful solitude and beauty. To the north and west the Little Ouse was its boundary, edged by fields of reed marsh. To the east lay the razor-sharp edge of Thetford Forest, the ancient border between the black peat of the fen and the sandy brecklands.

A single drove road ran down to the river past Flightpath Cottages. A hogweed grew from an upstairs bedroom window and both doors had crumpled in the damp of the last winter. Two ‘For Sale’ boards stood at crazy angles in the peat.

‘I guessed wrong,’ said Dryden, amazed that intuition had led him astray.

‘There!’ said Estelle, at the moment he saw it too. Leaning between Dryden and Humph she pointed down the drove road to the edge of the reed marsh. It was a new house, despite the old reclaimed bricks. It was roofed in slate and an old-style wooden verandah appeared to surround it at ground level. At the southeast corner a tower rose above the second floor, a tiny folly. A kitchen garden had gone to seed on the south side. A gate stood, but no fence. Dryden’s heartbeat quickened, but he kept at bay the knowledge that it was with recognition.

Humph rattled down the rutted track to within a hundred yards of the house and then pulled up as the Capri’s suspension groaned and cracked under the strain. The white Land Rover, until now hidden behind the house, had come into view.

‘Tell him I love him,’ said Estelle, terrified, Dryden guessed, at what she would find inside the house. ‘Tell him it’s OK.’

Dryden swung the door out and in the oppressive silence heard the rust scrape.

He leant back in through the open passenger window. ‘I’ve got something to tell him. Something he still doesn’t know,’ she said. ‘If he’s alive, tell him that.’

Humph struggled out on the driver’s side, sure testimony that he thought Dryden was about to do something stupid. Dryden nodded to the Capri. ‘Stay with her.’ Humph simply raised a finger and pointed east to where the forest edge had stood a minute earlier. Not now. The tumbling front of the dust storm rolled out from the trees towards them. Dryden felt his guts liquidize and in the panic of the moment he simply repeated himself. ‘Stay with her.’

So Humph ducked back into the Capri and Dryden was alone when the dust fell. At first it merely shimmered over his skin, accompanied by a slight fall in the light level. A hissing of minute particles of dry earth seemed to fill Adventurer’s Fen. Then the light clipped again, the sun disappeared, and the wind began to drive the dust into his eyes, nose and ears. The house had disappeared but the path remained at his feet. Dryden staggered down it, away from where the car had been. He choked once, then stopped, doubled over, and filled his lungs with the air close to the ground. For a minute, less, he ran in a void of orange-brown dust. Then the façade of the house appeared, like cheap scenery, a one-dimensional grey, featureless outline. He threw himself against the door and tried the handle, knowing it was locked. He took another breath from below his knees but this time it too was clogged with dust. The muscles at the back of his knees fluttered with fear. He needed to find a door that opened. The windows, if they were all like the one beside the front door, were double-glazed and locked.

He sensed the lightning bolt before it struck and turned to see it plummet through the gloom, followed by the frenzied crackle of trees burning.

He began to skirt the house, cupping his hands at the first window to the right of the door to view a sitting room, furnished cheaply, with rugs on the polished floorboards, job-lot pictures and unmatched lightshades. There was no sign of life. ‘Rented,’ he said out loud, pressing his forehead against the window for coolness and sucking in air by pressing his lips to the glass. He left the kiss on the pane and moved on, past another locked door, and round the far corner. The wind here dropped and looking up he could see the weight of the dust storm tumbling over the pitch of the roof. He could smell the earth now, a stringent aroma of blood and rotted wood. The smell of the grave.