Hellfire Safety Precautions by Katie McCall (England, 33)

Fingers of smoke unspool across the hillside, reaching up to gunmetal clouds above. Charred, sunken beams mark the place where the roof of Boyd Whitefield’s house once stood, blackened giant’s ribs collapsing onto cold soil. In disbelief, I stand in silence; unable to comprehend the ash-covered scene. A shiver of guilt moves through me, and I pull my thin woollen shawl around my shoulders—perhaps, in another scenario, people might stare and say it’s unwise for a young girl to be out on her own, unaccompanied, but the flock of sleep-deprived neighbours peer instead at the decimated building, worrying that a stray cinder might jump from the wreckage and ignite one of their homes. The exhausted firefighters have nearly finished extinguishing the last remaining embers, which sizzle and hiss in protest. ​

    Now that the furore of flame-dousing and water-carrying has come to an end, the horses lashed to the fire wagon are dozing, their heads lowered. The upper floor of the ruined cottage has mostly collapsed in on itself, sunken inwards like the flanks of a starved beast. 
    “What’s the point of having safety rules in place to protect our town from moorland fires, if people are just going to ignore them?” Annabelle O’Toole’s clipped voice rises with the smoke plumes; she is referring, of course, to the fire safety pamphlets she distributed around the township only last summer, after the heath caught alight and turned the hillside into an inferno. She glares around the circle of spectators, casting around for someone to blame. 
    “No matter what the rules are, fires are bound to break out every now and then, Annabelle,” replies a weary neighbour. 
    Amidst the crowd, I catch the eye of my cousin’s wife, the stout, usually unflappable Mary Bryan. She has a look of mild surprise on her face, as if she can’t quite believe the destruction before us.  
    “I can see his feet!” A fireman shouts. The delicious titbit the neighbours were waiting for. This revelation injects movement and noise back into the crowd of spectators, they hustle and bustle towards the carcass of the house, a unified mass in search of evidence. Annabelle O’Toole clamps her handkerchief to her face in a show of distress and emits a theatrical gasp, but despite her efforts to draw attention to herself, all eyes are on the pair of legs, recumbent amongst the ashes. 
    I have no desire to see the feet in question—the urge to flee the scene is rising in my chest, but before I know what’s happening, my eyes follow of their own accord. I need to make sure that it is definitely him. When I see Boyd’s blackened, seared boots for myself, it isn’t a tug of pity that I feel. It’s something smooth and liquid, akin to relief. Then, I realise: those feet have followed me for the last time. The footsteps outside my bedroom window have finally been silenced. 
    “I can see one of his hands!” Annabelle O’Toole cries out, with a note of triumph in her voice. Her handkerchief drops to the floor, now forgotten, as everyone turns to her. “Poking out from nearby the fireplace.” Another murmur of excitement ripples through the crowd. 
    Unlike his leather-shod feet, Boyd’s hands are barely recognisable, now fingerless lumps of charcoal, hardly noticeable among the wreckage. The same hands that pawed at my front door, forcing notes through the post box—at first, flattering, simpering, uncomfortable, as if I had somehow reciprocated his attentions. 
    “Is this a love letter?” my father had said, struggling to decipher the words, a cloud of disapproval behind his eyes. I shook my head in dismay, my eyes fixed on the little flames that crackled in our hearth. I wished, then, that I had burned the letters. “Well, you must have given him some impression that you were interested, or else he wouldn’t be writing all of this to you.” And I groped around in my memory for some detail to explain why this sallow-faced stranger was fixating on me.
    When Boyd first approached me, I had spoken to him politely, as I’d been taught to do, thinking he perhaps needed directions. Instead, he claimed to have seen me winking at him from across the marketplace, the previous day, when I was perusing the stalls with my sister. In truth, she was regaling me with a caustic tale of Annabelle O’Toole’s latest ventures. Watching her flounce around, I squinted in the sunlight, rubbing the tears of mirth from my eyes. But whether I was winking, or blinking, or had a fly in my eye, the stranger’s attentions were focused straight on me. I wished they weren’t.  
    “I told him I wasn’t interested, though,” I replied to my father. 
    “Must you walk home by yourself back from work? Look what happens. It gives the wrong impression.”
    “But I haven’t got anyone to walk back with,” I pointed out, as my sister works late at the seamstress shop and, at that time of day, my father must trundle alongside the plough in all weathers to earn his wages. I wiped away a hot tear of frustration.  
    “Oh, well, it’s only a couple of love letters,” he said, frowning at the offending tear drop. “No need to cause a fuss.”
    Then, talking of sinfulness, the letters took an explicit turn, talking of twisted things. Acrid, dirty scribblings, blaming me for my failure to reciprocate. My cheeks burned hot as hellfire at the thought of my father picking up one of those messages from the jute rug by the doorway, so I hid them away from sight. 
    One night I fell asleep with my bedroom curtains open a crack and awoke to see Boyd’s pallid features pressed against the pane, watching me. The glass was smeared, as if a dog had been licking it. I couldn’t face telling my father about that; if he thought I’d elicited the love letters by speaking to the man for two minutes, imagine the coarse things he would assume if he heard about these nocturnal horrors. That was when I sought the advice of Mary Bryan, my cousin’s wife. 
    “You should be glad of his attentions, a plain-looking lass like you,” Mary said, her words smarting like a slap. That was when I crumpled to the floor beneath the weight of all those letters, heavy footsteps, and accusations. 
    “But I can’t bear it anymore. Everyone thinks that it’s my fault that this man has taken a shine to me,” a painful penny of shame lodged itself in my throat, then. “I only spoke to him for a couple of minutes, and I’ve somehow ended up in this mess.” My voice sounded high-pitched, hysterical. 
    Mary looked around to check if there was anyone to witness my lack of composure. We were quite alone. 
    “I’m not saying it’ll work, but you could try making a poppet,” she said under her breath. I was stunned into silence, unsure if she was making a joke, to lighten the yoke of my distress. 
    “A poppet? You mean I should make a little doll?”
    She looked quite serious, though. The sunlight danced across Mary’s face, softening her expression, then she said: “Perhaps it’s worth a try, don’t you think? The fellow you are talking about just lives across the valley, you know. Not that far from here.” 
    The next week, after my shift, he followed me home again. With the filthy, unsettling words from his recent letter filling my mind, I didn’t dare turn around to face him, terror pulling at my insides. His thudding footsteps came closer, plumes of his rasping breath visible over my shoulder, like the devil himself was after me.  
    “Leave me alone!” I screamed, bursting forward, like a thoroughbred out of the gates and flew up the path. For what seemed like miles, I plunged through the dark woodland, up the steep hillside, hot rivulets of sweat streaming down my back. 
    Back at home, I left the lights off, in case they draw him towards the building, showing my whereabouts. In the darkness, I tore strips of fabric from an old rag and stitched them into a lumpen shape, something that resembled a man. Beneath the fabric, I stuffed one of Boyd’s foul-worded letters, and stitched it up, hiding it away from the world with my needle and thread. Eventually, my father and sister returned home, to find me hunched over in the darkened room. 
    “Why are you sitting in the dark?” my father asked, to which I stayed silent and hid my fabric creation in my pocket. There was no point trying to explain. 
    At least I had completed the task that Mary set me, but now I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with it. With all her helpfulness, she had failed to provide a meaningful set of instructions. In my pocket it stayed, until we fell into the usual evening rhythm; my sister and I finished cooking dinner and cleaning the pots, Father set the fire and the three of us sat around for the evening as we always did. With the steady click-clack of my sister’s knitting needles, and the metronomic snoring of the dog as he lazed before the hearth, I dropped off to sleep; the bolt of terror from earlier on had long since drained away, leaving me leaden with exhaustion. 
    My father shook me awake, and I sat bolt upright, half-thinking he must have found the poppet or another filthy letter. 
    “It’s time to go to bed,” he said, giving me a gentle prod. The only warmth to be had in the house was by the fireplace; I had been so distressed earlier, by the chase through the forest, I had forgotten to place the warming pans between the bedsheets. They would be as damp and cold as graves.  
    “I’m going to stay and keep warm by the fire for a bit longer,” I replied. “Goodnight.” 
    In the chair by the fireside I remained, drawing my seat closer to the hearth. Hearing father’s snores rumble from behind his bedroom door, I extracted the ugly, lumpen poppet from beneath the folds of my clothing, and held it in my hand. I put another log on the fire and watched the vermillion flames devour the firewood, intending to ask Mary for instructions the following day. Perhaps there was an incantation to chant, mug wort and sage leaves to gather—some magical rules to be followed, to dampen the flames of Boyd’s attentions. At a loss, I was exhausted. Soon the dance of the fire lulled my heavy eyelids shut, and I slid into a heavy sleep.  
    Dim morning light crept across the flagstones, and I jolted awake once again, cold, and stiff in the wooden chair. In my slumber, I had slouched forward in my seat towards the cooling hearth. My sleeping hands had unfurled, casting the figure into the fire. The poppet lay face down in the cinders, tumbled free of my grip. Beneath a pyre of charred kindling, it was blackened by the flames, reduced to almost nothing as if it had never been there. Along with the Boyd’s foul letter, the fibres of the little figure had long since turned to soot and smoke, carried away up the chimney by the morning breeze.
    That was when I heard the clamorous shrieks echo across the valley; neighbours crying out, in case the fire spread to their own houses, imagining the terror of the flames encroaching over their thresholds. Above the cacophony of surprised screams, Annabelle O’Toole’s voice could be heard, peeling like a bell.
     “How could a fire have broken out during the night when everyone was asleep?” She squawked. 
    Aghast, I looked on at the smouldering building’s carcass. It couldn’t have been my fault. 
    Yet even when the candles were dutifully snuffed at bedtime, and lanterns extinguished, it must have only taken a single spark. Where there’s fuel to burn, the flames will follow.
THE END.




​


Katie McCall writes uncanny, gothic fiction and her short stories have been published in Supernatural Tales, and Ghostlight, with another due to be published by Academy of the Heart and Mind this summer. Her first novel is out on submission and she has just completed her second novel, a folk horror tale set in post-war Britain. Follow her on Instagram for further spooky musings @katiemccall_author