Page 79 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

In fact the lights were only about fifty feet away, and they weren’t lamps, but sparks smouldering in a thatched roof. The thatch must have been damp, because it was smoking like hell, but it was still burning, some sections duller, some deep red and sparkling. The ashes floated and spun. There was no one to put it out. Other roofs were burning too, and even other houses. It was slow; some of them must have been burning for days. The smoke made a deep fog. He pulled his scarf further up and tied it tight. In places, the smoke sketched the ghosts of people doing ordinary things – leading cows, talking, scrubbing doorsteps. But there was nobody real left.

There was something in the road, something big and blackened. He slowed down as he came to it, his throat tight with the almost-certainty that it was a person.

It was too big to be a man. It was a cow; a dead cow, almost completely burned up from the head to its forelegs but whole after that, except for where the ravens had got at it. Something glinted in the shrunken bones. It was steaming. He didn’t touch it, but he knelt down and leaned nearer. It was a bell. Just an ordinary cow bell. He leaned back again and waited to stop feeling queasy. Even a hot cup of tea would burn right through you if you held it long enough. The cow must have gone mad with the bell getting hotter and hotter. He touched his watch again. Already warmer, even through the handkerchief.

It wasn’t until he’d picked himself up again that he realised he’d been relying on staying the night here. Not sure what to do, but very sure he needed to get out of the smoke, he trudged on, past a place that had been a neat little inn. It was a burnt husk now. Up ahead, a wooden sign, smouldering around the edges, pointed uphill and said, To the mountain.

By the mouth of the path was a shrine. The trees were much bigger here, great pines whose heights faded into the smoke and the mist. Little fires snickered high in the branches and sometimes there was a sudden static clatter of burning pine needles, but the trunks hadn’t caught yet, too soaked from the wet winter. Between two of them, up its own tiny set of steps, was a wooden cabinet with a statue of the local spirit in it; and beyond that, through a curving temple gate, the shrine itself, hardly bigger than the cabinet. One miniature window was open, so that it looked more like a souvenir kiosk than anything very religious, and through the spaces between the planks, it glowed.

When Thaniel got close, he saw that it was filled with lightbulbs. They were different shapes and sizes and none of them seemed to be wired to anything. They were hanging on strings, in clusters, like fishing floats. He wished Six could have seen. The air by the hut was warm from the heat in all the filaments. They lit up shelves of other things, prayer cards and ribbons, lucky charms, rice cakes. Thaniel looked up when he felt water mist over him. On the roof of the hut was a motor, turning a sprinkler that sat above a generous bucket of water. It was keeping everything too damp to burn.

There was a monk inside, reading a newspaper.

‘Light the way,’ the monk said happily. He was miniature and ancient. ‘Scare off the ghosts. Oh, goodness, you’re a foreigner, um …’

‘It’s all right, I understand,’ said Thaniel, confused. If someone had said he was dreaming, he would have clapped them on the shoulder and said yes, of course.

‘Oh!’ The monk looked delighted. He had a lamp on the end of a slim pole, a lightbulb with a paper cover over it, and now he poked it out to light up Thaniel better. ‘How in the world did you learn Japanese?’

‘Um, excruciatingly. How come you’re still here?’

‘Someone has to look after the shrine.’

‘Right, right.’ Thaniel looked at the bulbs for a second longer before he remembered what he was meant to be doing. ‘Listen, I wonder if you could help. Er … with two things actually.’

‘Oh, yes, yes. Thing the first?’

Thaniel smiled. ‘How long has there been electricity like this? Enough to …?’ He motioned back at the village. The motorised sprinkler misted his sleeve.

‘Oh, on and off for months,’ the monk said cheerfully. ‘Them on the mountain of course. If you want to kill yourself, you can find rope in there somewhere if you look about a bit,’ he added, waving at the forest. ‘The rangers leave it up. Would you like a lightbulb?’

‘Thanks.’ Thaniel passed the lightbulb between his hands twice. It stayed lit all the while. ‘What do you mean, them on the mountain?’

‘The scientists. Whatever they’re doing, it’s been very pronounced lately. The ghosts seem terribly flustered by it; there are a lot more of them than usual.’

‘So it’s not the volcano?’

The monk laughed. ‘How in the world could the volcano make ghosts? No, no, they’ve got machines, great big things. They’re doing it on purpose. I quite like it.’ If he was angry that the village was on fire, he didn’t mention it. He only pointed down, to where the ghost of a cat was curled up asleep close on Thaniel’s left, and then, anticipating the probable question, lifted up the real cat to show that it was all right. It had tiny rubber boots on.

‘They’re not always dead, the ghosts?’ Thaniel said, taken aback.

‘No, no. Sometimes, sometimes not,’ the monk said.

‘But then …’ But he couldn’t think what that meant. He couldn’t think what the hell kind of machine would generate free electricity across an eighty-mile radius. All at once he didn’t much like the idea of going up.

All around them, the ash was still falling, and it was hard to think through; it looked like white noise. Quite often, it became too heavy for the pines and they tipped a lot of it down all at once into soft piles around the trunks. Where it puffed up, there were maddening half-shapes that didn’t look like people, but not like animals either. It was making Thaniel more jumpy than ever. He had never minded crowds, but these were crowds he couldn’t see or name, and a horrible tight dread was building in his ribcage. ‘Then what are they?’ he said.

‘Pssht,’ said the monk, not bothered.

His nonchalance made Thaniel feel better. ‘Is it far up the mountain? To where the scientists are, I mean.’

The monk looked anxious now. ‘You mustn’t walk in the dark, it’s bad at night. You’d better stay with me.’

It would have been much more polite to go back and forth a bit, and pretend at least twice that he was fine, but suddenly he was so tired and so grateful he would have handed over anything for the chance to lie down. He said so, worried the monk would think he was being rude, and offered to pay.

‘Rubbish,’ said the monk. ‘I shall be glad of the company. You can play Go, can’t you? Oh, I’ll teach you, it’s easy,’ he added, with a wicked little spark. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve put up rubber everywhere. Safe as you like. I’m Daichi, by the way. You know, like Great Help?’ He traced out the kanji in the air. ‘Though really I’m Medium-sized Help now, on account of my age.’

Thaniel laughed and introduced himself. The monk thought about it, said he wouldn’t be able to say Nathaniel in a million years and would he mind awfully if he just called him Natsu. Thaniel didn’t mind. It meant summer, and he liked the idea that the man thought he was summery.