Diamonds and Dimes

The boy had waited over an hour. First he sat alone in the December dark, watching as the other orchestra students were swept into parental cars: a car door opening, a whoosh of warmth, and a slam as the car spun back into the darkness.

The woman in the last car popped her head out the window. “Is someone coming for you? Can I call, or help, or—?” Her nose was red, and she looked cold, and like she was hoping he would say no. So he said no. Thanks anyway.

Snow began falling, large delicate flakes, seesaw-swinging down. He tried once more to call his father, got voice mail again. He held his violin case in front of him as the snow piled up in silent drifts.

Since he lost his job, his father had been getting less reliable, less predictable. Anything made him angry, some days; other days he laughed too loud and hard. Once, when the boy got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, he had found his father sitting in a chair with a can of beer in his hand, head thrown back, asleep. His mother worked late most nights, now, and had developed a tendency to slam doors.

The boy stood up for his long walk. Which way? The field was a shorter walk, but scarier, with no lights to guide you and greater possibility of getting lost. But the road was scary, too, especially in the snow and darkness—trucks roaring past too close on the narrow shoulder, cars skidding on black ice.

So the field, then. The boy heaved up his violin, heading into a wind that slipped like a sharp knife under his coat and skin. Snow crunched under his boots.

He walked for some time. The wind swept the snow into a veil that swirled around and around him. The lights of school and road were long gone. He was walking lost, maybe not even in the right direction. His boots plunged on through the thickening drifts. He tried not to be afraid.

Then, as happens, his right boot plunged straight through a snow crust and down. He stumbled, trying to straighten up. But it was too late—his foot could not find solid earth. And now neither foot could. He had broken through the crust of snow, and was falling impossibly, falling and falling and falling.

He landed, hitting hard on his back, violin in his arms. He lay on the snow. Stars glittered above him.

Wait, no: not stars. A man was standing over him, smiling, tossing tiny glittering objects from hand to hand, objects made of silver and light. That was the stars.

I must have hit my head quite hard, the boy thought.

The man was snowy pale, with hair as black as trees in snow, and silvery-cool eyes. His suit was as black as his hair.

“I’ll pay you,” said the man, dreamily. “I’ll pay you to play, in dimes. No, that’s not right—I mean, in diamonds. One of those two. Oh yes, that’s it: I’ll pay you to play in diamonds or dimes, your choice. You choose. But choose carefully.”

Now the boy saw: it was diamonds and dimes the snow-pale man was tossing from hand to hand: thin silver dimes, and diamonds like tiny shards of ice. He tossed them in a slow arc like playing cards, back and forth, back and forth.

The boy’s head hurt badly, but he thought: diamonds. If their money troubles were over, wouldn’t his parents . . . ? His father . . .?

“I choose to play for diamonds,” said the boy.

“Ah: for diamonds, then, you must play for the lady,” said the snow-pale, tree-black man. He turned and strode off, thrusting hands in his pockets jauntily, letting the diamonds and dimes drop to the ground.

And yet they did not drop to the ground. They hung in the spot where the man had been standing, like snow in a photograph, like stars come back to earth. Diamonds and dimes, slowly twirling in the air.

Carefully, the boy plucked starry diamonds from the air around him, until he had fistfuls, until he filled his pockets. The dimes he carefully avoided. That was the agreement.

Then he ran across the dim snowy space to find the man.

The pale man stood now beside a single black tree. The tree bent over an ice-covered lake, as if it were leaning down to look within. The man walked a few steps out onto the snow-crusted ice and bent over, just like the tree.

The boy with the diamond-stuffed pockets joined him.

Beneath the ice lay a frozen woman. Long white hair flowed from her head, mingling with the white ice. Her ice-colored eyes were wide open. She stared up at the man, the boy, the tree.

“Play for her,” said the white-and-black man.

The boy warmed his fingers under his arms for a moment. Then he lifted his violin from its case and played. It was a simple melody, threaded with yearning and tenderness, a melody that folded back into itself over and over, each passage reflecting the one before, like a hall of mirrors.

The boy didn’t see, because he looked only into the woman’s icy, frozen eyes. But as he played, each note became a snowflake twisting up and away in the cold wind. Snow poured out of his violin into the black sky.

The song ended. The boy looked up at the man; but the man’s eyes remained upon the woman in the ice. The boy looked back down.

Slowly, very slowly, the woman smiled.

And when she smiled, just to the left of her mouth, a tiny crack appeared in the ice.

Within seconds, the crack had spread beneath the boy’s feet. And before the thought had time to cross his mind, I’d better go— the ice beneath his feet groaned, and cracked, and collapsed.

So cold, the water. Gasping, the boy felt his heart had surely stopped. He knew his breath had stopped. For a moment, everything held frozen.

Then, in a split second, icy water, raging with its new freedom, dragged him under the ice.

Underwater, the current handled him roughly, turning him upside down, backwards, and around again, as if it were searching for something. Then the water found what it was looking for. Helplessly, dragged backwards, his hands outstretched, the boy watched as his pockets were turned inside out and the diamonds poured away from him like a school of wild, translucent fish, into the vast and icy lake.

“I didn’t say you could keep them,” said a silvery voice, far away.

The lake tumbled and turned the boy for a long time. It threw him up to catch his breath only just often enough, then pulled him back into its freezing depths.

Eventually, it spit the boy up onto a snowy bank. He stumbled toward a road, where a car swerved, horn blaring, and stopped.

In the hospital, in his fever, he kept saying, “My diamonds, my diamonds.”

“Darling, you’re dreaming,” said his parents, worried by the slivers of ice that flashed in his fevered eyes (slivers that would always flash there, afterwards, for the rest of his life).

Just before dawn, when the fever broke, the boy ran his hands through hair matted with sweat and lake water. Caught within its tangles, he found two small diamonds.

He gave one diamond to his astonished parents, who sold it. The money did solve some problems, but none of the important ones.

The boy kept the second diamond and used it to pay his tuition at a famous music school. He grew up to become a renowned violinist, who toured around the world.

But he never accepted concert offers in December, no matter how much they paid. During that long, dark month, he played only for himself, alone in his apartment high above the shimmering city. As he played his December music, snow poured out of his violin, a single delicate white flake for every note.

Someone glancing up from the street below would have seen, sitting in a lighted window, a man with a violin,  snow swirled around him like a veil.

And for every December of his life, as he played alone, the famous violinist, who was once a cold and abandoned boy, would wonder what would have happened, if he had chosen to play for the dimes.

The Winter Machine

From the back of the workshop came an array of intriguing sounds. Pieces of metal clanged together, steam hissed, a fire crackled. It was a fine spring day, but anyone following the corridor toward the noises wouldn’t know it except as a memory, for there were no windows here to let the sunlight in, and the air was stale and dank as a coffin.

“I want to build something,” said a voice, a voice no higher than the countertops that were littered with gadgetry and tools.

A deeper voice chuckled. “All right then, son, it is time. What would you like to make?”

“Something like what you make, father! Something marvelous!” said the boy. And it was true that the older man made all manner of wondrous things. One only had to step outside, into the fine spring day, to see a whole hundred of them. Airships that buzzed through the fluffy clouds, grass-cutting machines that drove themselves along fine lawns in front of even finer houses. Toys that wound up and down and up again.

“Well, my Simon, you’d best get started. Do what you can, and show me when you’ve finished.”

Simon slid from the stool at which he always sat to watch his father, the great inventor, construct his great inventions. So many of them, now, that the city wouldn’t function without them. There had come imitators, of course, but anyone who wished for the best pushed open the door to Cracknell’s Clockwork Contrivances and placed their order, prepared to wait. Or else they sent letters written with elegant quills on thick parchment, sealed carefully with wax.

There was simply the small matter of deciding just what Simon would like to build, which wasn’t a small matter at all. He had toys, and games, and things that whirled and ticked and went clunk in the night. An automaton that looked quite like a person brought their dinners to the dining room each evening, and cleared the dirty plates away again to the kitchen, where a great, hulking, water-filled thing scrubbed them clean. Machines sharpened his pencils and tied his bootlaces tight, so that they never came undone and tripped him.

What did he need? What did he want?

It really was very warm, almost unseasonably so. The last of the frosts had turned the trees silver only the week before, but Simon removed his coat just a few minutes after setting off to wander the streets. A familiar creaking behind told him he was perfectly safe walking alone, the automaton Father had built just for this would never let any harm come to Simon. And so he walked, seeing the ladies in their fine gowns step into carriages surrounded by great swathes of steam and gentlemen stop to chat beneath gas lamps that would sputter to life at the first hint of darkness.

The first flowers were beginning to bloom, a dozen clocks in tall, stone towers counted the seconds away to summer, the sun arcing higher over the airships in the sky.

Down by the river, a wide, rippling river which cleaved the city in two, Simon stood. He had skated on it not a month earlier, spinning in circles as snow fell all around him.

Simon decided exactly what he wanted to make.

~*~

“And how is the great invention coming along?” his father asked, looking up from a table scattered with the pieces of a bird, fashioned from brass and copper.

“Fine,” said Simon, though that was not, strictly speaking, entirely true. He had tried many things, and so far, none of them had worked. But Father did not get to where he was by giving up, and Simon wasn’t about to, either. Asking for help would be precisely the same thing.

On a small counter in the corner of the workshop, just the right height, a collection of tools lay jumbled together. Hammers and chisels and blades thin as a hair. Buckets of water trembled with every footstep, waiting to be turned to steam, and tiny cogs glittered like snowflakes.

He had sneaked from his bed in the dead of night and inspected one of the many machines in the kitchen for so long the ice within it melted and puddles formed on the floor. The very next midnight, he’d taken the thing apart and only put it back together after carefully inspecting every piece.

In the morning, he had tried again.

It was a sweltering summer day.

~*~

The first leaf fell from a tree beside the river, and deep in the cool, dark workshop, an enormous machine chugged.

“What are you building, lad?”

Simon smiled. “You’ll see, Father.” Simon was close, he was sure of it, but there was one missing piece, a tiny filament or enormous wheel, that kept the thing from working. Oh, the mechanisms inside ticked and tocked, steam hissed and he had even, just this morning, managed to form a thin layer of ice on the inside, but it still did not work. Not really. Not quite.

He looked around at all of his father’s inventions, perfect moving parts and perfectly functioning wholes. They all had a spirit, his Father said, clucking over them as if they were children. A purpose, an essence. A machine needs a reason to run, not simply coal or gas or clockwork, but a reason why it must exist.

Aha.

It was a crisp, perfect autumn, with warm days, and cool nights that were growing colder. Simon waited, setting the clock beside his bed to ring in the depths of darkness, and when it woke up, checking the window before falling back to sleep. His ice skates sat beside the bed, waiting, too.

Finally, it came. The first frost. It would be weeks before snow fell, or the river froze over, but what is the essence of winter, if not the first frost stealing across a flower?

Simon tiptoed outside, his toes cold, and plucked it from a bush. He could not name the sort of flower, he didn’t know those things, but he knew it was right, that the silvery sheen was the missing element of his grand invention.

~*~

“It’s ready, Father!” he said, before the eggs had been put on for breakfast. Simon’s father smiled widely.

“Show me.”

In the workshop, Simon took a deep breath, and flicked the switch. Outside, the frost was gone and the sun was shining. The grass was green and the river glimmered.

And it began to snow. Simon ran outside to see, his father on his heels. Around them, the air grew cold and colder, and the ladies in their elegant gowns began to shiver. Gentlemen stopped beneath gas lamps to point up at the sky. The airships shuddered, knocked off kilter by the sudden wash of freezing air.

“It’s my winter machine!” said Simon. “Look, the water’s freezing!”

“Oh, now that is clever,” said his father, but Simon barely heard, already inside and halfway up the stairs to fetch his skates. Both his father and the automaton followed him down to the river’s edge to watch him tie the laces tight. Over the ice Simon glided and spun as snowflakes fell around him.

“Very, very clever,” said his father again and again, gazing about as winter fell upon the city. When the lamps sputtered on, he called to Simon to come back.

“We must go and turn it off, before we do any harm,” he said. “All the plants must die so they can come back in the spring. Animals must build their shelters before the cold truly comes, so they can sleep through it.”

“All right,” said Simon, happier than he’d ever been. The machine had worked! He would let the real winter come now, and skate again then, but it had worked. Rubbing his numb fingers, he reached for the switch and flicked it once more.

But nothing happened.

~*~

It was a cold, bitter winter day. All the people who lived in the city huddled together for warmth, eating the last of the food, not knowing when the snows would melt on the roads that snaked in from the farms so more could be brought. Water pipes froze and split, fish were trapped and smothered by the solid mass of ice that was once a flowing river.

Simon watched it from the window, his skates buried beneath a crate in the back of the wardrobe. He had tried and tried, but the machine would not turn off. His father had tried, but Simon had built it too well. It would not turn off, or come apart, or cease working when hit with water or fire or rocks.

It was a cold, bitter winter day.

And so was the next one.

And the next.

Forever.

December will chill you to the bone

Dear lovely and curious readers,

Our first year in the Cabinet of Curiosities is drawing to a close as the cold nights draw in around us. Of course, many rooms in many houses will be glittering and warm, lit with candles and firelight, but here in our chambers things will get decidedly dark and wintry. This month you will find treasures of snow and ice and frost, of cold that bites at your fingertips, if not your very throat.

So step in from the chilly outdoors, darlings, into somewhere even cooler, and prepare to shiver to your toes.

Your Curators.

The Crimson Porter

The violins looked like the bodies of small, curly-tailed animals, hanging there in the darkened shop window, and they were in a way—dead—because no one played them.

Henty eyed them through the smudged glass. He felt the two heavy coins rasping together in his pocket. He decided he wouldn’t be sorry. Then he hurried into the grimy alley around the corner of the shop and knelt down.

The air was cold. Across the rooftops, the bells of St. Winnifred-in-the-Oak were ringing nine o’ clock, and the gables glistened with wet and moonlight. He began laying out his sweep-things quickly: a bristly black brush, a filthy oil cloth, an array of shovels and scrapers. He wasn’t a chimney sweep. Crimson Porters didn’t do that. But boys on the streets after dark where almost expected to be doing something illegal, and this way if he were caught he could tell whoever it was that he had gotten stuck in a chimney.

The bells were still ringing. In the distance he heard a rag-and-bone man pushing his cart, shouting as he moved between the buildings, shouting into the dark. Right now everything was green and black. Green moss, black wet, black stone, green chimneys. It wouldn’t be for much longer.

Henty took off his ratty gloves, rubbed his hands together and breathed on them. He tried to concentrate. He would prefer, of course, to be back in the Unders, warming up by a smoldering fire and eating whatever there was to be eaten. But Effie had sent him up into the city, and she would kill him if he came back without doing the job. Now he just had to make sure everything worked out as planned.

The bells rang one last time.

Henty placed his palms against the wall of Mr. Muckpearl’s Marvelous Music Shop and exhaled.

At first nothing happened. Henty shuffled his feet. He swallowed. He closed his eyes.

His breath began to come quickly, though he wasn’t moving. He squeezed his eyes closed. It was starting to hurt a bit, but it always did.

He opened his eyes. The wall where his hands were spread was beginning to smoke.  The stone was turning black as coal. And then, from between Henty’s splayed fingers, came a rush of sound, and suddenly the stones beneath his hands were smoldering a deep, dark red like cooling lava. The stones cracked a little. Fire erupted, devoured the moss, ran right up the cracks and seams in the wall, right up to the roof. . . .

Henty watched it. It was always a sight. A river of red was coming from his hands now, pouring up the stone. The flames caught on the roof beams. Soon the roof was a bonfire, crimson sparks rising into the night sky. The entire alley was awash in a violent, ruddy light.

And then: “Hey!”

A deep yell, too close for comfort. Henty didn’t move his hands, but his head snapped around. A man was coming toward him. A huge man in a bulky black greatcoat.

Uh-oh. . .

“It’s on fire!” Henty shouted. “The shop’s burning, I’m trying- ”

It was a stupid thing to say, but Henty had long ago realized that stupid things seem sensible to stupid people, and so he kept up the charade until the man was only ten steps away. When the man still showed no sign of slowing, Henty began to think about running. But the building wasn’t down yet, and the stone was wet. Burnt to the ground. No foundations. That was the job. If the water-belchers came soon it might still be salvaged.

Keeping one hand pressed to the wall, Henty threw the other one out, sending a spray of red sparks spinning toward the approaching thug. It was only supposed to frighten him. Usually it was enough.

Not this time. The man kept coming. He was bald, his pate glimmering in the firelight, and he had a tattoo of something snaking up his neck. He looked slightly insane.

Henty let go of the wall.

“Mister, you don’t wanna do that,” he started. “You don’t wanna- ”

The fist caught him in the mouth and he reeled back, almost falling onto his sweep things.

Oh, now you did it. Henty was up in an instant. His hands were up. He flicked his fingers toward the blazing wall and a jet of red flew from it and whirled in his palm.

“Give you one more chance,” Henty said, spitting blood onto the cobbles.

The man punched him again, this time in the stomach. The flames in Henty’s hand almost went out. Then he tensed his fingers and let loose, sending a burst of heat strong enough to melt iron swirling around the man.

Normally a blow like that would turn a body to cinders in seconds. But not this time. The blaze surrounded the man, his black coat and his tattooed neck. . . and it didn’t do a thing. The man smiled through the flames, all rotting teeth and cold eyes. He came at Henty again.

Henty’s heart dropped. This was new.

“Whada you want! What d’you-” He barely dodged a fist, only to be caught in the back by another one, and when he leaped back out of range, something long and black detached from the man’s neck and slithered toward him.

Oh.

The man was another one. One like Henty. But grown-up. And apparently immune to heat. This was getting worse by the second.

“Give me the cut,” the man growled. “The pay for the job. I know what you do, give it here- ”

Henty threw out the two silver coins, fast and hard against the wall at the end of the alley. Then he turned tail and ran, leaving his brushes, leaving his gloves.

By time the first men arrived, clanging buckets and shouting, Henty was gone. So was the instrument shop. And so was Henty’s money.

Everything was going precisely according to plan.

*

Henty half-hobbled, half-ran back to the docklands. It had begun to rain lightly, a cold, disgusting rain that coated his skin. He wiped away the drops and hurried under an archway. In the distance he could still hear the rush of flames. His crow-black hair was much too long and it stuck to his face as he ran, making his sharp, pale face even paler. People used to call him baekir, little devil-boy. In the workhouse the cook would throw pans at him and cross herself when he watched her from around the door-frame. Henty was fairly certain that was exactly what he was, and he had no qualms.

He came to an old leaning house right up along the quays, in earshot of the river and certainly in nose-shot. Music and raucous voices were pouring out of the house, but Henty didn’t go to the door. He went around the back, into a little court where some damp, bone-thin chickens were scratching in the rain. Then he shimmied up a drainpipe, leaped onto a beam, swung once, and he was on the roof, running along the slick slates toward the tip of the gable. Quick as a shadow, he leaped out over an alley. He came down lightly on the roof on the other side and began to climb the peak. This roof belonged to an empty house, a ruin, gutted all the way through. Henty stopped three slates below the great blackened chimney. There was a moldering tile there that someone had scratched with an “X”, and on this he knocked, three times.

Sharp knock. Soft knock. Sharp knock.

Somewhere far below there was a clack, a squeak of turning wheels and racing pulleys. Then the slates beneath Henty boots flipped down and he dropped like a stone, so quick his hair flew up behind him.

He was falling through the gutted house. He saw its empty windows rush past. But instead of hitting the floor, he fell through a hole and kept falling, down, down. He bounced on a stretched sheet, fell another ten feet, bounced again, and landed with a thud in a pile of sacks and damp feather beds and old musty mattresses. He was far underground now. Surely fifty feet from the slate he had knocked on to here. He was in a great cavernous space that was part of the sewer system. There were lanterns lit all up the walls, lining a spiral metal staircase, glowing in the upper archways. Smoke and the smell of cooking meat wafted about and mixed with the stench of the water in the canals. And everywhere there were boys and girls, some in rags, some in what may once have been splendid clothes. They were going here and there, writing, speaking, pondering, sitting sadly.

Henty pulled himself out of the pile of mattresses and bedding and hurried along the edge of one of the canals. Pipes poked out of the walls above, dripping green liquid into black waterways. It was noxious and most likely poisonous, and Henty had once woken to a wart sprouting from his hand where it had slipped into the water. They would all die down here, living the way they were. But they would die either way, and this was a better place to die than elsewhere.

He turned onto a bridge. Halfway across he started climbing a chain, switched onto some pegs that had been driven into the wall, and then leaped out into nothing, over an abyss that went even further down, hundreds of feet into the depths. A greenish waterfall poured into darkness. Nets and lamps reached down a little way and then extinguished. Henty fell for perhaps a second, slid along a rope, and then collapsed with a grunt into a great hanging net a few dozen feet from the edge of the abyss. The net was occupied by a girl and a tiny, frightened-looking boy, and Henty landed so hard that they jolted, and all the little boxes and lanterns leaped an inch into the air.

“Took you long enough,” the girl said, straightening an abacus and ledger, and fixing Henty with a frosty look. “Split the cut, and you can go eat- ”

She must have noticed his bloody lip and the long purplish bruise growing along his cheekbone, because she broke off then. Henty pretended not to notice.

“What happened?” Her voice was sharp. “You better not tell me you’re useless self went brawling and skipped out on the job, or I’ll- ”

Effie was the only person, ever, Henty reminded himself, who would dare talk to him liked that. She was the undisputed mistress of the Unders, the boss, the swanbolly, the leader of these orphans and outcasts. All of fifteen years old, she was grubby and disheveled, and she had a heart of stone. And she was a Blue Pusher. If Henty tried any funny business—setting her braids on fire, or burning her stockings—he would be doused with black water from the canals quicker than you could say Jack Willard. He knew, because he had tried once, way back when he was just a nipper and didn’t know the order of things. He hadn’t tried again.

“I didn’t skip the job,” Henty said.

Effie waited for him to say more. To the left of him, he heard the other boy in the net lean forward.

“Then what happened?” Effie demanded. “Did someone see you?”

Henty took a deep breath. This would be the hard part. “No one saw me,” he said, but Effie wasn’t stupid. She didn’t have any mind gifts, like the Worms or the Teases, but she had Persnickety—that little boy with his great, disturbingly limpid eyes. Effie always kept him close. When you run a sewer full of children who can kill you easier than tie their own shoe a boy like Persnickity comes in very handy.

As if in response Persnickety’s eyes twitched and he smiled at Henty. Henty glared at him.

“Well, then, Henty. . .” said Effie, noting the exchange. “If nothing happened where’s my cut?”

Henty paused. He looked up toward the lanterns and the ropes. He thought about making a break for it. He had reported in and now maybe he could run off and Effie would forget about the money. But no. Effie wouldn’t forget. Effie would trap him in a bubble of water until he drowned. He started shuffling in his pockets, pretending he’d lost something.

“It’s right- Oh, look at that. I’m sure it was here- ”

“Henty.” Effie’s voice was like nail. Persnickety had crept a little closer. “If you’re thinking of keeping cuts from me, I won’t have it. I’ll- ”

All right, thought Henty. This is it.

“I lost it,” he said, and Persnickety’s eyes went wide. Henty thought of the huge thug, the red heat swirling around him, not even singing him. He pushed the image away quickly. “I tripped in the alley on the way back from Eastbourne and the coins slipped right out o’ my hand. But the house is gone. The job’s done. No one’s going to come asking.”

Effie watched him for a moment. Then she crooked her finger at Persnickety and he came over on all fours. Effie leaned down.

Henty couldn’t be sure if Persnickety ever opened his mouth, but he could swear there was a sudden flurry of whispers in the air, there for an instant, then gone.

Effie looked at Henty again. Her mouth twisted. “The great Henty, tripping over his own toes. My, my. . . Can’t handle your own feet on the streets, what? Double duty tomorrow, and don’t let it happen again or I may be needing a different Crimson Porter.”

She gave him one last look and started clacking beads again and scratching at her ledger with the nib of her pen. Persnickety continued to watch Henty.

Henty bared his teeth at the boy. Then he was off the net, swinging back up toward the lights.

Talk all you want, Effie. You don’t know half as much as you think.

Effie didn’t know, for instance, that there was another Worm down here, an eight-year-old from South Kensington who had run away after making his governess leap from the second story window. Effie didn’t know that that eight year old was fond of chocolate and toy-soldiers, and Effie didn’t know that Henty had struck a little deal with the Kensington Worm. Chocolate and two tin soldiers for a little lessons in protection from probing minds.

Oh, yes, Henty had his own allies. Effie made a point to call every new arrival up to her net for Persnickety to read them. There were few secrets, few terrible pasts and horrid memories that Effie didn’t know. And she thought she knew Henty’s. But she didn’t. There were things in Henty’s mind that had a cage around them, a black spiny cage that the Kensington Worm had set up for him, and everything Henty didn’t want Effie to know, he put inside that cage. Sometimes he felt Persnickty’s fingers, poking at it, but even he couldn’t get in. One of the things in the cage was a box, hidden behind a brick in the south wall of the sewer. A box he wanted to fill with coins. That is where Henty went and that is where he lay down on a pile of straw, looking into a red flame in the palm of his hand and thinking.

*

“Crimson Porter!” the shout went up, flying from mouth to mouth, echoing through the cavernous sewer. “Crimson Porter to the galley net!”

Henty groaned. There were dozens of Crimson Porters in the Unders, but even though Effie threatened, Henty knew he was still the best of the lot. If she were calling a Porter it was him.

He propped himself up on his elbows, straightened his cap, and then set off at a quick clip. Effie ran a tight business. He had wondered how long it would take her to call him back about last night.

As Henty ran, he saw a girl lifting a wind and blowing it through her hair, swaying, her eyes closed, as if she were imagining herself somewhere else. Another boy had set himself a pathetic fire in his hand and was warming himself by it. By the way the fire flickered and limped Henty knew the boy was no threat to him. There were all sorts of gifted children down here. Ones who could control iron, pull the bolts from a moving carriage wheel, open the locks on near any door. Ones who could control glass, who could slip their hands through a jeweler’s window like it was water and make vases shatter into a a million razor-sharp bullets. There were those who could control water, like Effie, and heat, like him, and wind and trees. And there were ones like Persnickety. Worms they were called, because they got into your mind and wriggled about there, and they were nasty. They were always watching other people, looking for things, things you didn’t want anyone else to see.

Henty had a million of those.

He came to the precipice and swung down into the dark.

“What,” he snapped, when he arrived on the net. “It’s ruddy early in the morning.”

“It’s seven thirty,” Effie snapped back. She was dressed in her cleanest, nicest blue dress, which was still a sorry excuse for a dress, Henty thought. “And don’t give me any of your lip. You were seen yesterday.”

“Was not.”

“You were.”

“By who?” Henty puffed out his chest, but a flicker of fear passed through him.

“Don’t know. Persnickety ‘s only getting a shadow. But someone saw. And if they followed you here, you know what’s going to happen.”

Henty did know. It wouldn’t be the first time. There was a perimeter of Pokers all around the sewer, in the outer passages, children who could sense a living thing from a hundred yards away, from a heartbeat or a breath. Normally all they got were rats and perhaps a poor lost bird, but when a person came there were no exceptions. When a person came those children had orders.

Henty had seen the aftermath. A splatter of blood on the wall where all of it had been pulled from the trespasser’s veins at the same instant. The bloodless corpses would float out into the Thames and the gifted children would be blamed, but no one would be any wiser.

“But he didn’t follow me, did he,” Henty said smartly. “No one can follow me.”

“He?” Effie looked up.

“Well,” Henty started hurriedly, but it was no use.

“Persnickety says you’re lying, Henty. Lying about losing the coins. Persnickety says you might be keeping the cut.”

Henty turned to the little boy. Persnickety looked back, twitching, and suddenly Henty was filled with a loathing for the Worm and his huge, watchful eyes. Persnickety’s twig arms were wrapped around him. His fingers were digging into his shoulders. When he caught sight of Henty scowling at him, he rolled back his lips and smiled.

Henty turned back to Effie. “He doesn’t know a thing.”

“He knows everything. You’re lying.”

“I’m not, Effie, I swear!”

Persnickety began to bounce up and down, making the net judder. Effie put her ear close. Again Henty heard nothing, but Effie’s expression changed.

“There was a man,” she said, slowly.

“No!”

“There was. A man in a black greatcoat with a tattoo up his neck. He attacked you.”

“No!” shouted Henty again. “No one could have- ”

“You listen here, and you listen careful.” All at once Effie had cleared the space between them and there was knife in her hand, right against his ear. “I can handle it if you get robbed, if you get beat up, if you get the cut taken from you. But if you lie to me again just so I think you’re a tough lad, you’re out. I’ll throw your body to the Clowns myself. He stole from you, didn’t he? He stole the cut, and you didn’t have the guts to tell me.”

Henty didn’t say a word. Effie flicked the knife and a bit of his hair went floating through the ropes of the net and down toward the water. “Didn’t he, Henty.”

“All right!” Henty ducked under the knife. “He stole it. Happy? There’s no money either way.”

Effie folded the knife away with disgust. “Go on, then, pansy. Go on.”

She gave him a push, and he pretended to stumble on the netting. In the last instant he caught himself and leaped off, did a swan dive and grabbed hold of a rope, swinging above the water nearly thirty feet below.

*

It took him almost an hour to climb back up to the Unders. When he arrived, sweaty and tired, he went to a fire pit to grab a bite of bacon and a roast apple for his breakfast. Then, when he had eaten, he walk back toward the precipice and buried his hand in his pocket. He felt two heavy coins there, rasping together. The money from the job. The cut. He glanced out over the edge, toward the net hovering in the darkness like a little glowing island.

He could see Persnickety on it, shaking back and forth. He could see Effie, hunched up over her ledgers.

As far as she was concerned, Henty was a liar and weakling. And she could think that for all Henty cared. But he had just made twice as much he normally would and it wouldn’t be the last time.

Henty tossed the coins up into the air, caught them again. There had been no thug in a black greatcoat, no tattoo, and no flying fists. Henty had done his job and split his lip with the back of his hand. Then he had gone back to Mr. Muckpearl’s burnt down shop, picked up the sweep things and returned to the Unders.

No firestorms. No fights in alleys. No stolen money. All there was was a figure in a spiny cage in Henty’s mind, a figure in a black greatcoat and a tattoo up his neck, a figure who did not really exist unless Henty thought of him.

There were other things in that spiny cage, and as Henty shoved the man inside again, he saw them briefly. Dark things. Sad things. A little boy with crow-black hair and a pale sharp face standing barefoot in a rainy street. A little boy burning, and a little boy crying, and a little boy running. But Henty closed all that away. He felt the coins in his pocket, and he smiled.

The Fire Tree: A Play in One Act

*

CHARACTERS

 KATJA, a thirteen-year-old girl, quiet and serious

 LORE, her hard-working older sister, an apothecary

 MAMA, their mother, deceased

 PAPA, their father, deceased

 BENNO, the village shaman, appointed last year

 THE NIGHT PEOPLE, those hungry ones who come out in the long dark of winter

 THE FIRE TREE, a tree of mysterious light

*

SETTING

 An isolated, troubled village in a land that is not our own, surrounded by woods and rivers.

 TIME

 Evening. Late autumn. The taste of winter is in the air.

*

Scene I

(Inside a humble cottage, patched with uneven repairs. Katja sits on the floor by a dim fire, sorting through bottles of poultices and tinctures. Lore enters, bundled up in winter clothes. Snow sits on her shoulders.)

 LORE

 Hurry, sister. The first snow has come. It is time to find the Fire Tree.

 KATJA

 (Katja looks up from her work, confused.)

What is a fire tree?

LORE

(gently)

No. It is the Fire Tree. And it is time to find it.

KATJA

(reluctantly)

But we have so much work to do. Winter is our busiest season, and it is so cold out!

LORE

Yes, and it will only get colder. We only have so much time to find it.

 KATJA

To find the Fire Tree?

(beat)

What is it, sister? Tell me, what is the Fire Tree?

LORE

(Lore is quiet for a long time. She looks at the bed where their parents once slept. This is the first winter the girls have spent without them. Katja changes the linens every week so that the bed continues to look fresh and happy in the far corner.)

If we had found the Fire Tree last year, sister, our parents might still be with us.

 KATJA

(Katja grows very still, thinking of the horrible night last winter when the lights went out. She is afraid of winter, though she does not tell Lore this. She wants Lore to think she is brave. Lore is the bravest girl Katja knows. Lore works so hard to keep them fed and warm.)

The Fire Tree would have kept Mama and Papa safe?

LORE

The Fire Tree would have given us light all winter.

KATJA

The lights would have never gone out?

(whispering, suddenly tearful but trying to hide it)

 The darkness would not have come?

LORE

(Her face and voice are hard. She does not let her sister see how she is always afraid.)

 The Night People would not have come. The Fire Tree would have kept them away.

KATJA

The Night People?

(beat)

Do you mean the pieces of darkness that came? The shadows that whispered our names and laughed at us?

LORE

Sister. Dear sister.

(Lore kneels in front of Katja and takes her hands. Katja’s hands are bare and cold. Lore warms them in her fraying mittens.)

I know this will be frightening to you. That is why you have never heard of such things until now—things like the Fire Tree and the Night People. But now you are thirteen, and now Mama and Papa are gone. Now I feel that you deserve to know, and Benno agrees.

KATJA

(Katja thinks of Benno, the village shaman with striking blue eyes who was appointed last year before winter set in.)

You talk to Benno too much. He keeps you from working. He keeps you from—

LORE

—from you? Sister.

(Lore kisses Katja’s forehead.)

You know that I will never love anyone more than I love you. Not even Benno.

KATJA

(satisfied)

Tell me about the Night People.

LORE

(hesitates)

They come the night after the first snow of winter. Every night they find a fire and put it out. They whisper and they laugh. They tear your secrets from you. They beg you to tell them your dreams, and then they laugh at you for what you dared to dream. They inhabit mirrors and turn your  reflection into something ugly, so that you dread looking at yourself. Every night they find a fire and put it out, and after they put out a fire, that fire can never be lit again. And when all the fires are put out . . .

KATJA

(shivering, remembering)

When there are no more lights and the village goes dark . . .

LORE

(Lore pulls Katja beneath her coat to warm her and hold her close.)

When that happens, and the cold bites at your skin, that is when the Night People feed. They feed upon those who have the most light inside them.

KATJA

(whispering)

I remember Papa screaming. I remember Mama. They dragged her out across the river. Dark hands. Hands like pieces of night torn loose from the sky.

LORE

(closing her eyes)

You understand now why we must find the Fire Tree, sister. We could not find it last year. We did not try hard enough. We were foolish. But if we find it this year, we can provide light for the entire village, all through the winter.

KATJA

I will not lose you, Lore. Not you too.

LORE

And you will not. And I will not lose you. We will find the Fire Tree. I have a hopeful feeling inside me, Katja.

KATJA

Why?

(quietly)

I cannot remember what a hopeful feeling is like.

LORE

I feel hopeful because now you are with me.

 (Rising, she leads Katja toward the door.)

 Come. They are waiting for us.

(Katja slips into her winter coat, trimmed with fur, and slips on her matching gloves. She puts a scarf around her neck. She takes her sister’s hand, and together they step out into a light snow. Beyond their cottage, a group of villagers with lanterns and torches are waiting. Benno is among them. The  other villagers are gathered around him. They are hoping that since he is the shaman, he will save them.

BENNO

I see we have a new hunter in our group this year.

(He places a hand on Katja’s head. He is smiling.)

Hello, Katja.

KATJA

You do not hunt the Fire Tree, Benno. It is not a thing for you to use as you will with no thought to what you are doing.

(Katja does not know what she is saying. She only just learned about the Fire Tree. But the words come out of a deep place inside her, the same deep place that tells her she loves Lore, the same deep place that urges her to keep her parents’ bed clean and tidy even though it makes no sense to do so.)

This is not a game. You should not be smiling. How can you be smiling when you failed to find the Fire Tree last year? You are the reason our parents are dead. You are a shaman. You are supposed to save us. But you did not. Maybe you should not be shaman at all.

LORE

(scolding)

Katja!

BENNO

It is all right, Lore. Katja has been hurting. I understand.

(Benno turns away. The eyes of dozens of frightened villagers meet his. The youngest of them are thirteen years old, like Katja. The eldest are white-haired and frail. The ones who have seen the most winters have the darkest eyes, as if the Night People have left shadows behind, year after year, and the shadows have sunk into the blood of these people, and linger there.)

(As everyone makes for the forest, Benno turns quietly to Katja.)

Sometimes, Katja, I am frightened. The Night People frighten me. It frightens me that I may never be able to find the Fire Tree as my predecessors did, that people in my village will die every winter because I am not wise enough to know the right places to look.

(beat)

Sometimes, Katja, I talk about hunting and games because those are things that I know. And things that I know help me pretend I am not frightened. I do not feel so cold when I think of things that I know.

(They pass beneath black trees rimmed white with snow. Katja is between Lore and Benno. She thinks of Benno’s words. They run under her skin like bugs, stirring her to think too many thoughts. The forest whispers and rustles, hiding things.)

*

Scene II

(It is true night. The villagers have been searching for the Fire Tree for hours. They have separated  into smaller group, and they comb the forest. Their torches are sputtering; their lanterns dim. The wind picks up, scraping dead leaves along the forest floor. Night sounds do not emerge—no animals, no running river water. Only the wind, and the scraping leaves, and the crackling torches, and the footsteps of the villagers.)

(Katja is in a group with Lore and Benno. She is shivering. Every sound makes her jump. She does not recognize her own forest, not this night. Snow is falling.)

KATJA

Explain to me again what the Fire Tree looks like?

LORE

(hushed)

I have told you many times.

KATJA

Tell me again. The world is less frightening when I hear you speak.

LORE

It is a white tree, gnarled and thick. Its branches are bare, yet it sparks with leaves made of fire—red and yellow and gold.

BENNO

(takes Lore’s hand)

It is beautiful, isn’t it? I remember. I remember the first time I saw it, when I was thirteen.

LORE

I also remember. It was like seeing something out of a dream. Something that should not be, and yet there it was. I was frightened, and I was glad. I put my hand in the flames, to grab a branch, and yet I did not burn.

KATJA

(sniffling—angry, impatient, afraid)

How can that be? Where does the fire come from? Who starts it? What happens to the tree after it burns? How can a fire not burn your skin if you touch it?

BENNO

Some things, Katja, you cannot explain with sense.

LORE

 Some things you cannot explain at all.

KATJA

 (quietly, turning away from them)

I do not trust things I cannot explain. Like the way Benno looks at  Lore, and the way she looks at him. Like Mama and Papa no longer being here. Like pieces of night that come to life and feed on mothers and fathers.

(An outcry arises from somewhere in the thick tangle of trees. Lanterns fall to root and stone, and clang and shatter.)

(Someone screams. Two, three people scream.)

(A high, whistling sound. A high, screeching sound. Unkind laughter.)

(The wind is suddenly still.)

KATJA

(gasping, tugging at her scarf)

It is too dark! I cannot breathe in this darkness! Lore?

(A rushing of darkness, all around Katja, that is blacker than the night sky.)

Lore? Lore! Sister!

(Katja runs wildly, searching, but in the chaos of darkness and the screams of her neighbors, she stumbles and becomes lost.)

(Hands snatch at her. She cannot see the hands, but she knows they are hands. She feels the lengths of fingers, and the sharpness of fingernails. Both are longer than they should be.)

I must find the Fire Tree. I must! Lore? Lore, please answer me!

(But Lore does not answer.)

Benno? Are you there?

(Katja is desperate. She claws through the darkness, pushing past trees, falling and coughing up dirt, plugging her ears against the sounds of the Night People feeding. For surely that is what is happening.)

(Katja screams into the forest, at the Night People she can and cannot see—slivers of darkness, human-shaped, long and lean.)

Why did you not wait? You did not even give us a chance to find the Fire Tree! You are supposed to put out one fire a night, and only then are you supposed to feed! Why are you doing this? What are you?

(She is sobbing. She hears screams that have Lore’s voice inside them.)

(Then, she sees it, ahead of her: a swarm of darkness, and a ghostly flicker of white.)

(It is a horde of Night People, and they are wrapped around a tree. They are crawling over it, clawing at it. They are tearing it to pieces. It is little more than a sapling, having been shredded to bits.)

Stop! No! Stop it! Leave it be!

(The Night People turn in one movement, their heads snapping like the heads of birds. Their faces are darker than the rest of their bodies. They are holes into which Katja feels close to falling.)

THE NIGHT PEOPLE

Pretty girl, pretty girl!

(Katja clamps her hands over her ears. The Night People’s voices are a din of anger and thunder.)

 Tasty girl, scrumptious girl!

(The Night People are approaching. Some remain affixed to the tree. Others crawl quickly through the dirt toward Katja, like spiders.)

KATJA

Get away from me!

(She kicks them. She hits them. She runs, and they  grab her ankles and pull her down.)

Lore! Benno! Lore!

(Then Katja hears it, as night cloaks her vision and plugs up her ears and stings her lips with cold.)

(Voices, familiar and whispering.)

MAMA

Darling Katja, darling one, don’t be afraid.

PAPA

Little Katja, brave Katja, be still and listen.

MAMA

We are here, very close.

PAPA

We are all here, not so far away.

(Katja raises her head from the dirt. It is a huge effort. The Night People are pressing down on her. They are feeding on her. They are biting and gnawing and dousing out her light.)

KATJA

My light. My light. Don’t take it from me!

(She raises herself up onto her hands. She scrapes the darkness from her face. Night peels away from her like layers of tar. It hurts. It is so cold.)

They want my light. They wanted your light, Mama, Papa. And they took it.

(She is sobbing. She feels sick.)

 Is this some kind of nasty trick? Where are you?

THE NIGHT PEOPLE

 (mockingly)

Where are you? Where are you? Mama! Papa! Where, where?

MAMA

Think, clever one, dear one.

KATJA

(beginning to understand)

But it isn’t possible! It doesn’t make sense!

PAPA

Believe, clever one, precious one. Believe what your heart tells you.

MAMA

Believe what your light tells you.

THE NIGHT PEOPLE

(slobbering, chomping, gnawing)

Believe, stupid girl. Believe the darkness.

(Katja scrapes night from her eyes. It is cold. She is made of cold. She tries to find what is left of the sad silver tree. She can still hear the screams of Lore, of Benno.)

(The Night People are howling, tearing at her scalp.)

KATJA

My light is going out, Mama. Papa, they are taking it from me. I am so cold.

MAMA

But our light does not go out, not ever, not truly.

PAPA

It may change, it may be hidden, but—

KATJA

It may change.

(beat)

It may change!

(Katja now understands.)

The Fire Tree. The Fire Tree is us. The Fire Tree is the light of everyone we have ever loved.

(Katja struggles to her feet, shaking the Night People off of her, dislodging their frigid claws.)

That is why the Fire Tree does not burn when we touch it.

(Katja fights her way toward the sad silver tree half-hidden in its swarming cloak of night. She scrapes night from her ears and hears a whispering of many, growing louder.)

The Fire Tree’s light is our light. Our light never goes away, even when we die. It simply changes. Mama! Papa!

(Katja throws herself at the sad silver tree, and when her skin touches it—her skin, torn and bloody, marked by Night People teeth—the tree comes to life.)

(It blooms like a fresh fire.)

(Its light is a universe of tiny flaming leaves.)

(Katja’s blood—Katja’s light—feeds it, and it is hungry.)

(And Katja does not feel pain. She feels only warmth, and a feeling of comfort. She feels her mother, and her father, and many other villagers who have died over too many years for little Katja to comprehend.)

(Their light brings the Fire Tree to brilliant life.)

THE NIGHT PEOPLE

Wicked girl, wicked girl!

Nasty, foul, vile girl!

(The Night People are blinded. In the light of the Fire Tree, Katja sees how the Night People are not soft and dark, but brittle and graying.)

KATJA

Mama? Papa?

MAMA

 Yes, sweet one?

PAPA

What is it, my child?

KATJA

(She does not want to watch the fire catch on to the Night People and burn them. She does not want to listen to the Night People’s awful cries as they writhe and crumble. But she makes herself, because she feels that this is important.)

The world feels full of people right now. I don’t understand it. They’re coming from the Fire Tree, and I don’t understand it. Some of them I feel like I know, even though I can’t see them. Like you, Mama. Like you, Papa. But some of them, I don’t know. I feel them, but I don’t know who they are.

MAMA

I know, Katja.

PAPA

I didn’t understand at first, either.

KATJA

(quietly)

I feel you around me, as if you’re alive again. But you’re not, are you?

 (silence)

 You’re just helping us. You are the Fire Tree, and the Fire Tree is you, but you’re no longer Mama and Papa. Are you?

(silence)

(Katja whispers, crying)

I don’t understand this.

MAMA

It’s all right. You don’t need to yet.

KATJA

(Katja plucks a branch from the Fire Tree. The touch of its light against her skin feels like her mother’s kiss.)

Is this all right? Can I do this?

PAPA

You know what you must do.

KATJA

I must go help the others. Lore, and Benno. Even though I am afraid.

(Katja holds the branch up higher, flooding the forest with light. It pulses with her heartbeat.)

I must light the fires, and keep winter away. I must bring your light to the others.

PAPA

Yes.

KATJA

I must not sit here forever, in the Fire Tree, and talk to you, even though I want to.

MAMA

(whispering)

No, my daughter.

KATJA

(crying)

It is not fair. I don’t understand any of this. Why now? Why did the Night People do this? They were trying to hide you forever. They were trying to tear down the Fire Tree so we might never find it. They are supposed to put out one fire a night, all winter, and only then are they supposed to feed. That’s what Lore told me.

(silence, except for the Night People’s withering screams)

MAMA

Because this winter was different.

PAPA

Because this year, you came to the forest.

MAMA

Because, Katja, you are so full of light.

PAPA

Because, Katja, you are so very bright.

MAMA

They wanted to lure you.

PAPA

They wanted you most of all, because you have so much to give.

KATJA

(Katja takes another branch from the Fire Tree. She is a blazing creature of light, and the Night People shrink before her.)

I must go help the others. I must tell them what I have seen.

The people of our village have been so afraid for so long.

PAPA

Be kind to Benno. He is so new and eager. He has many secrets to learn.

 MAMA

Take care of Lore. She works too hard.

KATJA

Will the Night People leave after this? Is this the end?

MAMA

No.

PAPA

No.

THE FIRE TREE

(whispering, in many voices—young and old, old and new, familiar and not)

There will always be evil to fight.

And there will always be light as long as there are those brave enough to find it.

MAMA

Good-bye, daughter. For now.

PAPA

Shine on, daughter. Shine, shine.

(Katja leaves the Fire Tree burning behind her with the light of a hundred thousand souls. With a blazing branch in each hand, she proceeds through the tangle of screaming Night People. Their claws are dull. Their teeth fall out. They are trails of darkness behind Katja’s feet, and they melt into the snow.)

(Katja finds Lore, bleeding but alive, half submerged in the frozen river. Katja puts the flame of the Fire Tree to the ice, and the ice melts. She helps her sister out and warms her, and others emerge from the night, drawn by the light in Katja’s hands.)

LORE

(shivering)

Katja? What is that? What is in your hands? What happened to us, sister? You have been crying. The Night People—are they gone?

KATJA

I will tell you all of those things. But first I must tell you the secret of the Fire Tree.

LORE

You found it? Dear sister. You look different. What happened to you?

KATJA

(tearfully)

I think, sister, that I have remembered what a hopeful feeling is like.

(Katja and Lore rise, and find Benno, and find others—but not all—and walk home to prepare their waiting hearths for winter.)

(Blackout.)

FIN