Sunday, November 14, 2010

Soot: Chapter One

Soot is an old-fashioned children's story in which resourceful lass goes on a quest accompanied by enigmatic familiar. In fact most of the creatures and people she encounter turn out to be a little less trustworthy than they at first appear: fortunately her life has taught her to be wary, but is she wary enough?.

1

The strangest thing was that she wasn't frightened, not at all, not at first. Though it was hard to say when 'at first' had actually been. Did it begin when her father left her alone in the little old house on the mouth of the firth? Or did it really start before that, when her mother left both of them. Certainly, the first incident dated from his mad dash to patch things up, when it was perfectly obvious that her mother was never coming back.

She'd been perfectly calm that morning when she had read the scribbled note on the kitchen table: 'Got a text from yr mum. Wants to sort things out. Back soonest. Love, Dad.'

He'd obviously driven off at midnight again, drunk probably. She'd made herself a cup of tea and boiled an egg while she studied the note. What exactly are 'things', anyway? Not, apparently, clothes or books or plates or pans or furniture, which both parents left wherever they were, whenever they moved, which had been every three to four years for as long as she could remember.

She'd sighed, and resigned herself to a spell alone in this latest unfamiliar house with its draughty-panelled front room and its creepy landing with too many doors. (One was only a cupboard, but when you went to the toilet in the middle of the night you could never remember which.)

Then there was the tree that stared in through the window in her loft bedroom, with those shapes in its branches you couldn't help but see when you lay there and couldn't sleep. And she wouldn't sleep -- he could be gone a week, he had been in the past, on other hare-brained schemes, though at least in the past her mother had still been around.

But you couldn't say she was seriously alarmed then, nor was she three days later, which was when she realised something was actually wrong with the house as opposed to her life.

It was then, on the third morning, when she had come downstairs and found the paw-prints. Sooty black paw-prints, everywhere. On the grim grey carpet and the thready table-cloth, on the fake-wood kitchen worktop, and all over the neat desk he had set up in the hope of tempting her mother here, to the frozen north-east of a country she had never liked. As though she'd be prepared to work in the same room as them like that, as they presumably sat and gazed at her lovingly.

There were paw-prints on the two unhappy armchairs he had salvaged for them, and on the week-old newspapers. In the minute downstairs bathroom, there were paw-prints in the sink and in the chipped old bath, and on the already grimy green towels. (How she hated that lime green.) There were even paw-prints all round the seat of the toilet.

Obviously some neighbourhood cat had got in -- first into the coal-shed, and then into the house. She checked the shed but the door seemed securely shut, and the only window still slightly open was in her dad's bedroom, the door to which had of course been closed since he left. God knows how it had got in. She fretted over it all morning, as she cleared up the mess (the house was due a clean anyway, she'd just been putting it off). Could a cat get down the chimney, she wondered? That would explain the soot. She peered up the flue dubiously.

Her father had insisted on big banked-up fires for their first few weeks in the house, but then she hadn't really been sure how to prepare those, so she'd dragged an old three-bar heater downstairs from his bedroom. As a precaution she pulled the fireguard in front of the ash-filled fireplace. It was one of those copper wire jobs, hinged in three sections, and she leant the coal scuttle in front of it to hold it in place, then went and shut his bedroom window.

2

The next morning was even worse, but at least the cat's mode of access was clear: the fire-guard had been pushed over and there were identifiable paw-prints in the ashes, large and neat and white against the grey. As there were most other places, though neither neat nor white.

As well as the carpet and the kitchen and the bathroom and particularly the writing-desk, the cat had apparently climbed the curtains and left paw-prints all up them; it had stretched itself as far up the walls as it would go (and it was obviously pretty elastic), and left a rim of paw-prints all round there. In the kitchen it had walked on the tops of the storage heater and the cooker and the fridge. It had even, as she discovered when she tried switching on the TV and ignoring the mess, pressed its big sooty paws to the screen, so that nothing at all was visible of whatever the people on it were shouting about.

Everything smelt of horrible greasy soot, and it took nearly the whole day to sponge the house kind of clean, during which time two questions rattled round her head, both unanswerable: why would a cat do that? And then, why would a cat do that again?

Late that afternoon she went outside and looked around. A few hundred yards away was Mrs Dalrymple's place, pretty much the same cottage, but with its back turned to them, a little like Mrs Dalrymple, from whom they were renting the place, but who had spent the few brief meetings she and her father had with her staring at both of them in bewildered indignation, as though she couldn't quite work out what these awful people were doing on her property.

Mrs Dalrymple favoured scratchy heather-coloured tweeds and blue and turquoise silken scarves she wore over her shoulders so they didn't touch her neck. She gave them to understand that their money wasn't quite as good as that of fishermen of a certain social class, who normally stayed in the cottage, but that she would somehow force herself to accept it.

Mrs Dalrymple definitely didn't have a cat, in fact she'd be surprised if any living creature could come within half a mile of her without dropping down dead, felled by that forcefield of sheer disdain. She wondered if her fishermen ever caught anything living. She certainly didn't feel like going and asking about weird cats.

Beyond there the road petered out by the salmon house, a little old stone building which more or less marked the point where the river bank turned into beach. Her father had explained this was where salmon fishermen would store their catch upon great heaps of ice. Proper fishermen with nets, not rich hobbyists with rod and line, as he had put it, still smarting from Mrs Dalrymple. So that gave the salmon no chance whatever, she had thought.

Either side of the stream (it was so narrow at this point, it was hard to think of it as a river), the white pepper beach and open grey sea stretched away. 'The Northern Riviera!' he had declared it, though it had been too cold and blowy since they'd arrived for that title to stick.

She turned to look in the other direction: it was a three mile walk to the town, though cottages and farms could be sighted every mile or so. She didn't know anyone who lived in any of them, though. In fact, just about the only person she did know was the second-hand bookshop owner in the town, since that was the place where her father had spent most time with her. Shopping for groceries was done in a flash (an inefficient flash, usually); the pub was where men went by themselves, for hours; but bookshops were where father and daughter hung out and socialised with...well, second-hand bookshop owners, basically.

This one was a short woman with flyaway grey hair designed to cover up sticky-out ears, two pairs of glasses on silver chains ('For near-seeing and far-seeing'), flyaway blouses in mauvish tints, mohair shawls in lavender and purple, silver brooches with cairngorms and other semi-precious stones -- presumably jaspers and agates, whatever they looked like, since there were numerous books on that sort of subject. Well, the bookshop owner it would have to be. It was a pity she couldn't remember her name. Wondering how many miles she could walk per hour and when second-hand bookshops shut (when they felt like it, in her experience), off she set.

3

'You have a soot-kitten!' the second-hand bookshop owner (her name was Katriona, as it turned out) exclaimed with delight.

'A what?'

'It's a supernatural being, dear, part of the folklore in these parts. I've read about them, of course, but never encountered one.'

'Yeah, that'll be right.'

'Well, let me describe it, and you tell me whether it's right or not,' Katriona had retorted, with a flinty little flash of her far-seeing lenses.

'Soot-kittens are made from all the soot that builds up inside a chimney year after year. The story is a bird will come and try to nest on top of the chimney in an abandoned house. Then someone new moves in, lights a fire, and smoke billows out into their living room. Then they get a sweep in to poke brushes up it and drop weights down it.'

'We had to get a sweep,' she reluctantly confirmed.

'Well, this gets rid of the bird and all the twigs that are choking up your chimney, but it also annoys the soot. Imagine all the soot that lines a chimney after long disuse. Suddenly there's the heat of a fire -- usually too big a fire -- then brushes poke their beards up and weights crash their cannonballs down. Naturally, it wakes the soot up.

'Now, when soot wakes up it gathers into a furious black ball on the ledge just above your fireplace. It has two red hot-coal eyes and long fine black ash ears and sharp coal-black claws. Its fur and its tail and even its crinkly whiskers are made of fine black soot, all sticking together into a cat-shape filled with annoyance and spite.'

'Look, there's no such thing as soot-kittens, but thanks for the ghost story.'

'You might as well know the story's end, then I'll give you a lift back to your house which definitely doesn't contain a soot kitten.' This time Katriona's eyes were glinting with good humour. It was getting dark: she knew when she had a captive audience.

'When soot-kittens are still little they are messy but they're just playful, and they can be kept quiet by lighting a fire and keeping it burning, so that they drowse during the day. But the more coal you burn the more soot you send up the chimney, and the more soot there is, the bigger it will grow.

'And when you've got a full-grown soot-cat, then you're in big trouble. A cat can blow out of the top of your chimney and form a black cloud that drops soot on everyone’s cattle for miles around, spoiling the milk. Washing doesn't exactly stay clean either. A soot-cat can burn a whole house down. You know those black cats that bad witches have in the drawings, perched on the end of their broomsticks? Those are always soot-cats, arsonists to a mad, quivering whisker.'

'So when that happens I'll pass it on to Mrs Dalrymple, she's the baddest witch I've met round here.'

When Katriona was dropping her off back at the house she pulled a book out of her glove compartment. 'Here,' she said, 'just in case it is a soot-kitten, you might want to consult this.'

It was a warped thing, not very thick, more of a booklet, its cover so blackened she couldn't read the name on the spine. She flicked it open and read the title page in the light from the open car door, 'Soot: the Keeping of Its Kitts and Containment of Cats Fashion'd Thereof'.

'I'm not really sure I want to keep it,' she said, then remembered the purse was still in the kitchen. 'How much is this?'

'No charge for the time being. Just tell me how you get on.'

4

That night she settled down in front of the nearest to a roaring fire she could build, and read the book. Almost the first thing it said was 'Do not bank the fire up at night. While a lit fire during the day keeps the soot sleepy, a banked fire at night will only feed and make the kitt larger.' Great, that had taken an hour to get wrong.

'You must feed the soot-kitt on a proper diet by night,' the book went on, 'to keep it even-tempered.' But what was a proper diet? 'Field-mice, headless, well-scorched. Milk, boiled till the pan burns.'

That was a good one. She amused herself by imagining where she might get field-mice at this time of night: a rodent kebab shop? What about that 'headless'; were you supposed to chop them off yourself? And as for burning a pan of milk; she knew from six months of her father's cooking what that smelt like -- no way.

She realised that she had advanced a certain amount of the way towards taking the book (and the bookshop owner) seriously. Funny how darkness influences your decisions in these supernatural matters. She thought for a bit, and then remembered a tin of pilchards her father had bought without thinking whether either of them actually liked pilchards. It was tucked away at the back of the larder.

(The one thing she liked about this house was that there was a kind of triangular cupboard built into the corner of the living room nearest the kitchen, lined with shelves and filled, when they'd arrived, with rusty old tins. They'd thrown most of those out, but christened it the larder, and put it to the same use. It reminded her of a similar-shaped cupboard in her grandmother's house -- what was it called again?)

'Cats like fish,' she thought, 'even supernatural ones.' So she went to the cupboard (the 'aumrie', she remembered), opened the tin and threw the pilchards on the fire to hiss and burn. Then she went to bed. For once she slept right through.

The next morning -- apart from the stink of scorched pilchards -- everything seemed fine. There were no paw-prints in the living-room or the kitchen or the bathroom. She sighed with relief, and went to treat herself with the last clean white top from her cupboard.

It was horrible. Every top (she only had four) was covered in black paw-prints. She went to the chest-of-drawers and both drawers were the same: paw-prints on her winter vests, paw-prints on her pants. She went to the ottoman on the landing and lifted the lid: paw-prints on the spare sheets, paw-prints on the change of towels. How had it got into the drawers then closed them again, how had it lifted the lid?

Then she had a horrible suspicion. She went to the kitchen and opened the sugar jar. There it was, a single black paw-print. She checked the flour jar: another paw-print. 'Fooled you,' she thought bitterly: 'I never touch the flour jar.' She remembered when her mother would make them pancakes on a Sunday morning, then, sighing, she went to the bathroom and slowly unrolled the toilet paper; there was a single paw-print spoiling each sheet as far as she cared to look.

'Two things,' she told herself. 'Firstly either cats can open jars, or there is such a thing as soot-kittens.' (Even here, perhaps because it was morning, she didn't feel afraid.) 'Secondly,' she thought, 'this particular soot-kitten does not like pilchards.'

5

She went to the butchers in town to see if he had any headless field-mice, but, after getting her to repeat herself so the whole shop could hear, he had just given her a very funny look. As indeed had the whole shop, including, it felt like, the pigs' heads. She hung about outside the pet shop for a while, peering in at the little pink-nosed white mice, but couldn't bring herself to buy one, just to chop its head off.

Eventually she went back to the bookseller and told her what had happened.

'It screwed all the lids back on the jars and rolled the toilet paper up neatly?' she laughed. 'That is a very clever little kitt. They're so playful at that age.'

Of course it wasn't her clothes and food getting covered in paw-prints when there wasn't money to buy new stuff. Katriona grasped this after a while and stopped grinning so broadly. 'Clearly only fresh field-mice will do. Have you tried the spells at the back of your book?"

'Spells? I didn't realise it had spells in it. Would that work?'

'Oh, you need to know some magic if you're going to keep a soot-kitten,” Katriona replied airily.

'I never said I wanted to keep it.'

That night she studied the spells at the back of the little black book. There was one for forming a cloud-mouse in the sky, but that was for a full-grown cat to play with and it was very long. There was one for getting soot out of your laundry; she made a note of that. There was one to conjure up a fire-dog to chase your soot-cat off, but fire-dogs, whatever they were, sounded even worse than soot-cats, and the book stressed that this spell was only to be used in the direst emergency.

But here it was: a spell to call up all the mice caught in traps around your neighbourhood that day. The book advised you to stand on a chair to recite it.

'Yeah right,' she thought. 'That's for elephants and the wives of elephants.' So she stood in the middle of the kitchen, and recited the spell, which, as it was in old language, was by no means easy to get right:

May ilka breidless, heidless moose
Cam intae this guidly hoose --
May aa the prancin, dancin mice
That deed the day
In trap or hay
Appear afore me in a trice.

She threw some stale breadcrumbs on the floor (the book said they had to be stale, and fortunately she just happened to have a loaf of pretty stale bread to hand). And then she waited. Nothing happened.

She waited some more, thinking, 'I am an idiot for believing any of this,' and then thinking, "How will they get in if I don't open the back door?'

She glanced towards the door and back to the floor, and then, for the first time, she was actually afraid, since, standing around her in a circle, balanced on their hind legs, and without a trace of a head on their blood-streaked little shoulders, were twelve dead field mice. She began to tremble and realised she couldn't stop, but neither could she bring herself to step over them and get away.

'If I'd been standing on a chair I could've jumped,' she thought, and realised that, even if this was all madder than bats, at least the book was giving her straightforward advice. There was something here she could cling onto. She clung to the book, though her hand was trembling so much it made the print wobble, and recited the next part of the spell:

Noo I have spreid
A feast o breid
Sae in ma hoose
Be unca gweed --

Dinna loup aboot ma legs,
Dinna sowp ma hennies’ eggs:
Follow faur I dae retire
And rest yirsels upon ma fire.

With that you were supposed to lead the mice to the fire, keeping your eyes on them all the time (the book said not to look away even for an instant, and, given what had happened earlier, she was determined to follow it to the letter). She led them into the living-room, pulled the guard from the fire, and one by one they leapt into the flames. She shivered, despite the heat, and thought, 'I hope twelve is enough.' Then she went off to burn the milk.

6

That night she was woken by a most curious sound. It was like that noise a fire makes sometimes, a sort of hissing and wheezing, as though there’s some water trapped in the coal and it’s trying to get out. But it was also like the crackling, snapping noise that wood makes as it burns. In fact it was like both those sounds, combined, and really loud, and coming and going. It was like having a food-blender with a blocked nose in the bedroom. She opened her eyes cautiously and saw two red hot-coal eyes floating in the darkness at the bottom of her bed. Then she knew she was looking at the soot-kitten and it was looking at her.

Curiously, once more, she was not afraid. Not like when she had seen the mice. In fact she felt oddly calm. Of course, she thought drowsily, two things were happening back then: the thing I didn't believe in was turning out to be true, and that's always a shock, and then the way it was true was pretty gruesome. Now, however, I already know it's true about the soot (though a bit of her still couldn't quite believe it), and it's nice. Well, sort of.

She couldn't make out its shape, but sensed that the darkness was denser where its body should be. It seemed a lot bigger than any kitten she had ever seen. Thankfully, she also sensed that it was pleased. That horrible ratchety noise was only purring. The bedroom was really hot and sweaty because the soot-kitten was giving off a lot of heat, so she carefully peeled a blanket off the bed. It showed no signs of moving, so she settled down and went to sleep again, lulled by the peculiar noise. The last thought she had before dropping off was that the kitten should really be called 'The Soot' -- not 'Soot,' but 'The Soot.'

That morning the house was spotless (apart from the foot of the bed, where the wood was scorched). It was also very snug and warm. At breakfast she was trying to remember the name she had given the kitten before falling asleep, so she opened the little black book at the chapter called "Benefits of The Soot-Kitt", and ate her stale toast, and read:

'A well-fed kitt will radiate warmth and well-being throughout the home. It can also help with cooking: fish should be hung up in the fireplace. The Soot will come down and breathe upon them overnight. Ham and cheese can also be treated in this way.'

'"The Soot" -- that was it,' she thought. 'Perhaps I should invite the bookseller over for breakfast tomorrow.' She didn't want to be owing her for the book, and perhaps that would make it alright. She'd have to buy some unsmoked fish first, though.

She wondered how much money she actually did have left. Sometimes there were five pound notes scrumpled up among the receipts her father jammed into his pockets or the desk drawer. Then she saw the heading 'Soot Magic' which was followed by a warning in brackets: '(For the Adept)'.

'Cool,' she thought. And that was when everything started to get seriously frightening.

No comments: