Originalfic: DecoVerse - "Six White Horses", the DecoFiremen
So let's talk about the DecoFiremen.
The DecoFiremen are the counterparts to the previously written DecoCops (the Cops who can see ghosts). The DecoFiremen have similar preternatural abilities but they manifest in different ways. The firemen call it the Sear, a combination of connection to other firemen (especially crewmates), ghost-visions, and precognition.
Set approximately 1924 in an alternate history New York City
Pertinent Characters:
Company 14:
Captain Thomas "Silky" Castor
Lieutenant/Rescue Senior Copper "Sully" Sullivan
Driver/Engineer David Martin "Davey" Cleary
Lineman/Engineer Antonio "Domino" Vestry
Lineman Jack William Coughlin
Rookie/Juniormost/Station Mascot Mattimeus Gordon Joseph "Matty" Blake
Company 14 is located roughly in Brooklyn, not too close to the East River, in the northern part of the borough.
Other Companies mentioned are on the Piers, in Manhattan, and in the Bronx
What they say is that the cops see the ghosts of the city, but the firemen feel them, just as sure as they feel the red's heat, the flame's lick.
The firemen call it the sear, a funny joke, not always funny, what they call it.
It was what gave them a steady hand on the horses, and nowadays with the engines. Copper pipe and steel rail and coal-fire roaring, pushing water into the sky. It was what gave them eyes through the red, toward the heart of the dragon, that they could douse it out, run it right through its guts.
Company 14 sits at the bottom of two hills, at the junction of five roads (four roads and one alley and a streetcar line), if not in the heart of the city than somewhere in the bellows of its heaving lungs. Streetcars clang from five in the morning til after midnight, broad-chested horses toil down the road from dawn to dusk, hackneys and haulers, old money and old poor. Fewer cars, maybe, than in the fancier precincts of the city, but that's alright.
Mattimeus (Mattimeus Gordon Joseph Blake, and he hopes none of his new crew notices) arrives outside Company 14 in a city-owned wagon drawn by two tired dun-colored city-owned draft geldings. His brass gorget, bearing the department sigil, shines in the damp autumn sun, and his uniform - all wool, red shoulders and collar and red cuffs and brass buttons in two rows, is crisp and too-heavy. He sweats beneath his suspenders and down the back of his starched collar. At least in the dark woods upriver in Wyantskill they only wore cotton and canvas. They had learned to tame the fire like a beast, there, in the dark woods. Learned to tend its tongues and teeth.
The sear was whispered in the halls. It was up to their Companies to teach them its secrets. Wyantskill and its empty buildings - an old city quarantine hospital, from back in the days when fresh valley air and hope was all they had for the sick and indigent - would teach them the apparatus and the monster they tamed. The sear was whispered - but it hadn't seemed, then, like such a terrible thing. Something had whispered in Matty's head long before he'd grown up enough to join the Department, and it whispered still, though the words were brighter and the dreams stronger these days.
Company 14 is three stories of brick and granite, two bay doors and a hose tower on one corner. Fixtures of weathered copper and red leaded glass guard the doors, which are open. A man in uniform pants with his suspenders lagging off his shoulders is dug deep into the open hood of a fine-looking pump engine, and when Matty comes up the apron of the building he can hear him cursing softly, steadily. He's about to ask where to find the Captain when a rangy, dark-haired fellow with a day's grown of beard on his cheeks comes hurtling around from behind the engine, chased by the largest man Matty has ever seen in his life.
"God-damned sear-blown hose-licking - "
The man working on the engine drops out of it, throws a rag at the other men, and begins to swear again, a streak so sure and fine that Matty is sure if he looks up the very bricks will be turning blue with it.
"For pete's sake, Jackie, can't we go one god-hanged christlicking day without you causin' trouble?"
Jackie, all long limbs, leaps up onto the engine like a wild cat. The big man waits on the apparatus floor, snorting like a bull.
"Not my fault, Davey, blame Domino here, for bein' so easy to trick - "
"You give me my cap back, Jack," the large man says, soft and low as water, "I'll find it in me not to string you in the tower along with the hose."
"Aw, Domino, Domino, it's just a joke - "
Matty hopes no one will notice him now, especially not that very large man. He's like a horse - and not even some circus ring trick pony, no, he's like one of the great white percherons that pull the ladders.
"Jackie, I am tryin' to work on this nutting-damn engine, quit bouncin' on the damn thing - "
Finally, finally, from an office at the back of the bay, comes a deep, resonant bellow - "Boys. Gentlemen, I am ten times through with you, there's a lad from upriver coming down today and - "
The captain. At last.
"Oh. There he is, then."
The men - Davey on the running board, Jack leaning against the tanks, Domino on the bay floor with his arms crossed - all turn to look at him. Matty feels stared down, he feels like a boy, worse than even his first day upriver, so far from home or the city or anything he knew except the fire, and the licking whisper of the sear.
He's buttoned to the throat, and the gorget feels heavy, and the only one of the men even wearing his coat is the Captain. Jack is wearing his cap, and Domino's - apparently Domino's, the large man's very large cap - and Matty still feels like the biggest fool on the floor.
"Whaddya all about - " comes a voice from the other side of the bay, a sturdy man with greying hair trimmed so neatly you might almost miss the curl of it, just at the top where it's grown out. "Throwing up such a racket. Silky - "
The Captain turns, shrugs. "New boy," he says. "Upriver boy."
"Took 'em long enough," Jack snorts from on high.
"Knock it down, brat."
"He's the brat now, ain't he? House-youngest, Silky."
"Said knock it down."
Silky, the Captain, shakes his head and comes down the bay. "Chief Marlowe said you'd be along. Blake, is it?"
"Yessir, Captain. Matty Blake, sir."
"Two sir's!"
"Yessir, yessir."
"Davis! Jack! Knock it down." That's the greyer man.
Silky - the Captain, Thomas - Thomas Castor, yes, that's his name, it's on the formal papers they gave him at District Central after he got off the bus from Wyantskill; Captain Thomas Castor, Company 14, District D - looks down at him. He's tall, not rangy but not a beast, either. He's got a mustache running all the way across his jawline to the front of his ears, and a dozen scars spread over his face and neck, and large, kind, patient blue eyes.
"You can knock down the sir, Matty Blake." The Captain straightens up. "Meet the boys - Davis, primary driver, elbow deep in grease over there. And Jack, on the tanks, hiding from Domino. Y'can't have missed Domino. Domino's our second driver."
"Only when Davey breaks the engine."
"Domino's a farm-boy, don't let the accent fool ya. Loves those ponies."
"Rotten ponies, shit the floor."
"Least they don't shit the bed in the middle of a run!"
"Knock it down. Knock it down." The Captain sighs. "Sully, the long-suffering, Lieutenant."
"Rescue first."
"Only rescue."
"Not anymore!"
"We dunno that, do we Silky? What's his walking papers say, huh?"
The crew begins to crowd around him.
"What'd they assign ya, kid? You got rescue, back up our Sul?"
"Got too many drivers, god knows."
"Got too many Captains, too!"
"Aw, knock it down."
There's a rhythm to them - and Matty remembers boyhood days, the clang of the bell, being yanked out of the street and seeing six white horses paired in teams dragging the ladders, straining their tack, their leathers black, their brass shining as their coats. Six men on a crew and six white horses tossing sparks on the street stones. There's a rhythm to these men and he hardly sees how he'll ever fit among them.
"Well, Matty Blake?"
He swallows hard. "They told me general, sir - "
"Enough with the sir."
"Silky's just Silky."
"Silky - Captain - they told me general, it'd be my captain's decision to assign."
"General it is. See how you do after a run, or two, lad, and we'll see. Now, you best get to knowing the rest of the boys. Domino, Jack, didn't you have something you oughta be doing? Something about lunch?"
Domino lumbers toward - well, Matty imagines the kitchen - and Jack, after a respectable interval, springs from the engine and follows. Matty watches Domino pause to let Jack catch up, then pluck his own cap off Jack's head.
Davis, shaking his head, re-buries himself in the workings of the pumper, picking up his trail of profanity where he'd left off.
"Sully, show the lad around, bring him back to my office when you're done with him, alright?"
"Aye, Silky." Sully's expression softens slightly - from granite to, perhaps, marble - and he unfolds his arms, something like one of the ospreys upriver shaking itself loose for a flight across the Wynantskill grounds. "C'mon, boy, let's show you the house."
They start from the top - up three flights of stairs worn almost slick by years of soot and dirt and the bootsteps of rough men. Topmost floor is the officer's quarters, and there's two bunks and three desks, but also what looks like half a company's complement of chairs, and a crate of equipment - bells and boots and nozzles and fittings.
"Silky got the right to sleep up here," Sully nods. "Me and him both, as it happens, I'm second-senior here. Silky, though, sleeps down in the bunks with the rest of us. Most other shifts handle it same."
"How many shifts, here?"
"Oh, we just split with the one - we hardly ever see 'em, we're on five, they're on five, you'll catch on to it."
Five on five off. Easier, he thinks, than upriver, where it was day in day out for months, bathing in the river, no chance to go into town, sharing sweat and smoke and bunkrooms with the rest of the rookies. Upriver you had no chance for nothing but brothers and fire, and the creeping of the sear. Like soaking in it, like your mind was sopping it up like straw and rain.
"Got a place to stay just yet?"
"Not yet, sir."
"Y'call me Sully, alright?"
"Yessir - Sully."
Sully gives him a narrow-eyed look. He might be on the edge of cracking a smile. Down the steps to the regular quarters, Sully chats with him about the rest of the crew.
" - I know Domino's a sight, but he's the most godawful gentle fella you'll ever meet. Didja know we got a half-dozen stray cats comin' round the back alley every night, 'cause he won't stop feedin' 'em? Ain't got a pup yet, which to hear him tell it is the shame of God, but Silky's holding out."
"Why?" Even Wynantskill had dogs - some seven or eight of them, roaming the grounds. Scruffy mutts, not big and not small, mostly black-and-tan and thick-ruffed.
"Ah, Silky - "
When they cross the threshold into the regular quarters, the whispering inside his head gets real loud all of a sudden. It doesn't make a lick more sense, but it happens all the same. At the head of the room, at the sides of the door, are hooks with coats and helmets on them. There's twelve beds, each with a wood locker at the head bolted to the wall. The whispering is so loud. Matty walks through the room like he's in a trance.
He had a dream once upriver. Dreamed he walked down a long hall of bunks, and the red was in the windows, and it was so hot, and the smoke pressed on him like the hand of God, and he was looking, he was looking, and when he looked there was a man with a scar across his eye and his brass gorget was spattered with blood and his dress belt was white and Matty dreamed he could hear the hoofbeats, and the sparks their shoes struck up from the cobbles and the trolley tracks were the shine of this man's eye, only when he looked again the man was gone and the beds were gone and the hall was empty and he fell to his knees and when he woke up he was in the courtyard at Wynantskill staring up at the clocktower where they hung the hose to dry after a drill and he was screaming up at the moon laughing behind the clouds.
Domino's bunk. Davis's. Jack's. Sully's. Silky's, too.
He's stopped at a bunk stripped of sheets and blanket. The locker is open and empty. When he walks to the locker and feels for the crude carving he knows somehow is there. Yes. The fireman's cross, and the rough lines of a rearing horse. The same as on his gorget. The same as on the plaque on the front of Company 14, and every other Company in the city.
"See you found your place."
Matty can smell smoke. The whisper says it isn't real but it feels so close. Like the horses and the snap and creak of harness.
"Bad luck," Matty says. "Just damn bad luck."
Snap and creak. Something gives. Something gave. Caves in. Eyes and sparks.
"Aye, yeah. Damn bad luck."
"Wasn't planning I'd take someone's place - "
"Don't think he minds so much, anymore."
"Don't he?"
"You think on it. Matter of fact - stop the thinking. He mind so much?"
The man sitting on the edge of the bunk in his dream says, it's alright, lad, it's alright.
"Wish they'd teach you brats somethin' about the sear while you were still upriver."
Save you a load of trouble, Sully, says the man in his dream.
"Save you a load of trouble, huh, Sully?"
"He woulda said that."
"He says so."
"Guess he don't mind, do he?"
The man in his dream smiles and lies down on the bed with the red wool blanket, puts his arms behind his head. He doesn't look dead. But he died. Matty knows.
"Guess he don't mind."
>>
Down in the bay, the only sound is the clunk of metal parts and Davey's soft muttering - still profane, still unbroken.
"Does he always do that?" Matty asks.
"What?"
" - I mean, Davey - "
"What, the cussin'? Aw, yeah, he's alright. Just means normal for him, we only worry if he stops."
Matty wonders what could possibly make him quit his muttering. He feels something whispering inside his mind and he doesn't want to listen to it. Down in the bay with the doors open, all the outside sounds coming in - the clop of horses and the bang and shriek of trolleys and the shouting vendors and the sun is bright and hot and the shadows are heavy and smudged like watered ink on the house's apron. Matty thinks about these sounds, and not the whispering, but there is something inside him, a sensation like a dream, like the first smell of a new season.
"Silky's waitin' on ya. Get going. I better make sure Domino and Jack ain't burned the stew yet."
"Aye, sir."
"Don't call me that. No sir's in this house."
"What about Captain Silky - "
"Just Silky. Just - go on, he's waitin' on ya."
Sully never liked the way that nobody told you, upstate, what you were in for, wearing the coat and the eyes, wearing the brass at your throat. Sully never liked it when he was young, and never liked to see the lads go through their sear.
When Silky was a lieutenant and Sully drove the six horses, Silky had told him that if the fellows in charge upstate actually warned boys coming up what they were in for, nobody would ever cross the threshold and don the brass.
He told him this over the broad back of a roan-coated draft, a city horse, deep-chested and true. He told him this, barely pausing as he brushed down from withers to hindquarters. It had been a hard fire, and it was late, and they were both still dripping sweat as they tended the horses. In those not-too-long-ago days, you tended the horses just as you tended the hose - first and foremost. Just as now men like Davey tend their mechanical beasts. Some things didn't change, and the men in charge upstate - vague figures, the lot of them, though Sully knew they'd worked in the trade, got their hands rough and ate smoke enough - shifted their eyes and changed the subject and the lads under their tutelage sat on their heels in fear and didn't ask.
It's been a quiet week, which is good, Sully thinks, and terrible, Sully thinks, for the new lad in their keeping, for Matty. It's been a quiet week of smoldering haystacks and frantic housewives and coughing chimney fires and men dropping ash from their pipes into their soft velvet armchairs. Good for boy, to ease into it - to have a peaceful time to stumble over the embarassment of finding other men's minds in his own, a quiet time to respect and reflect on the embedded memories of their company and their house. And terrible, because it means they're due up, they'll get a call some middle of the night that wrenches them from dreams and Matty will find his sear, and pray to god he doesn't find some madness with it.
Sully's never seen a man go truly mad, but he's heard. Heard of a driver working by the piers whose company was killed - nearly to a man - by an arms explosion on one of the police boats. Six cops dead in the water, and four firefighters, and the driver they said gone white as milk, stepping wrong and looking around, stepping wrong and looking - cocking his head as if he heard something, as if he wished he would. Sully'd heard that fellow had gone away to a place in the mountains, somewhere lush and quiet.
It had been awful enough, he thinks, when Roddy had been struck out from them. Roddy - Roddy'd been with the company, been his side-by-side on rescue, and had died under a collapsing building six months before Matty'd been assigned to them. The old men of the department understood what having a man struck out from your side did to you, and they granted them time out of service for their grief, to re-orient themselves. The thing about the sear - the good and the bad - was how you felt the lives alongside you, and how you felt your brothers, your company, strongest, as you knew them closest. Slept beside 'em, ate beside 'em, mixed up your coats with 'em, laughed at their jokes even if they was terrible, railed about their stink after a fire even if you was long used to it.
The red and the crush took Roddy from them, in a wrenching way - how he was there, his heart beside, and how he was not, how he faded and then was gone like St Elmo's fire in the dark, the foo lights of the harbormen. You had a wound, then, and it bled, as if little shreds of god were pouring out of you in the dark. The chiefs gave them time out of service, and they healed a little. Jack and Domino had gone upriver to some cabin in the deep woods. They were mad, the both of them, but had each other's backs with honor. Davey had gone east, far east along Long Island to the ocean, alone. Because that was Davey, who needed a spell of peace. Sully had gone with Silky, and got roaring drunk for three nights with the men from the piers, who knew how to throw a party and a wake all at once.
The wound was less raw now. Matty, Sully knew, could feel it, though he hadn't asked. You could tell, looking at the lad, that he wanted to ask. He was polite. Somebody'd raised him proper. He even used a knife and fork rightwise at the table. Jackie had told him not to be so formal, he'd make the horses nervous.
"...but we haven't got - "
Davey had winked. And they could all hear it, the thump and snuffle of years of draft hooves on cobblestones, and they could smell the hay. The house, the Company, had a life too, and a memory of its own, tied in to all the men who worked it.
It's been a week now, and Matty can't decide if he's more scared or less. Funny thing of it is, one of the crew always seems to know when he's got a nervous lump in his throat, when he's got a rattle of leadshot in his belly. Someone's always coming over, someone's always by his side. They teach him make-work, things he already knows from Wynantskill, but it's good to hear their voices, good to share the task with friendly hands.
Domino teaches him to go over hose inch by inch, their bare fingers to the canvas like faith healers in street-corner churches. Domino's hands are wide and rough, black-haired like a bear's. When he is with Domino, Matty thinks, he feels like sunlight on the back of a work-a-day horse, that warm and dusty shine.
"My mother born me up in the country," Domino says, one late afternoon, as they tend to the fittings and nozzles of their trade. "I came to my cousins after she died, when I was a little one - "
"Were you ever little?"
Domino's laugh is a barrel of sweet water. "Once upon a time, lad, once upon a time. My cousins worked out the polo grounds in the Bronx, backaday, and I worked with 'em. Always was good with the horses, just like Davey tells ya, I always was. One day I seen this fella whuppin' a horse bad, and the horse just got madder and madder - I could feel that horse inside me. That was the sear, that's what I got told later, after the department came to see me. I could feel that horse mad inside me and I walked up to that fella and I took the whip off him and he never said a word, and I laid my hands on that horse nice as you please. Man from the city saw that, I got a drop-by from two men from the fire department couple days later. Asked me if I could do that with any horse."
Matty shines the coupling of a hose until he can almost see the ghost of Domino's mad horse in the brass. "What d'you do, Domino, now you ain't got the horses?"
"I got crew to tend. Jackie and Davey. Even Silky and Sully. Hard working can make for hardened men, boyo, and you don't want no leather-jaw snake-tooth man workin' on your team. A man who bricks himself up from his crew bricks himself up in his own tomb."
Matty thinks of the first day he walked in, Jack with two caps on his head, bright black eyes. Domino just waiting. Domino like sweet water and sunlight on a bay draft. Domino just one star in a far-away constellation.
"You'll find your place, lad, you'll find it. We already knows you belong. You'll learn it soon."
Matty can only nod. He is full of a thousand questions and Domino never makes him feel foolish, but some things he can't put words to, not yet, not now.
Sometimes, Matty feels things shifting inside him, as if his deepest soul is making room to share, and it sets him shaking in the night, or when they go too long without a call. He remembers, not so long ago, the long days and nights when his mother had left him with the nuns, the times when the wind blew just right and he could smell smoke in the orphans' yard, the times he woke suddenly in the dark and walked as if in a trance to the long window at the end of the dormitory hall. One night, he looked out, all of nine years old, and he could see the low red glow of fire in the distance. He'd thought it was the dawn at first. He had been dreaming of horses. He had thought he was still dreaming, when he heard the screaming inside his head.
The sister on duty had been angry with him, furiously angry, for waking the other boys. But he could not stop the howls of horses and men.
At the end of his ninth day at Company 14, Matty chances himself to be alone with Sully. They are making beds in crew quarters.
"Sul - " Matty says, and he takes a breath, when Sully does look up and pierces him with those stormcloud eyes, the color of the harbor on a winter day. " - Sully, can I ask, you been in City Fire a while, haven't you?"
"I ain't gone flat-toothed yet, lad."
"Wasn't what I meant, sir."
"Sully."
"Sully, sir."
Sully frowns and none of this is coming out right.
"What I wanted to know was - " Was I dreaming, Matty thinks? That night with the horses and the red glare? " - about maybe, ten some years ago, was there a big fire in the city?"
"Lotta big fires." Sully is not a man of many syllables. He is tightening the sheets on a bed so hard you could bounce a penny off them. Jack's bed. Matty knows where all of them are, in the dark, at a moment's breath, the snap of an eyelid to the bells.
"But one you might see, from a long way off?"
"Aye, yeah. The Piers fire, by the docks. Godawful thing."
The pieces of a fever dream fall together. A team of horses, breaking through hissing wood, plunging into the cold harbor, writhing in their brass and leathers. The dull thud of coalfire bursting underwater. A man with his leg caught in the reins, the bone snapped.
Matty realizes that Sully is peering at him.
"You seen it, didn't you."
Not a question.
Matty gulps and nods. "The driver, in the water - " He can feel the bone-deep cold. He can hear the cries. The man is not screaming because there is water in his mouth and in his lungs. The man is slipping, slipping.
Covered in his own coat, the leather helmet on his stilled chest.
Matty feels sick, of a sudden. He holds it. But the nausea is bright in his belly. Bright as the red across the horizon.
"Was like that for me, too," Sully is saying. "You was just a boy, I bet. Not that you ain't, still, but barely out of your milk teeth. It was a dream for you."
Matty nods. "The sister on duty - she told me I was crying, I woke the other boys."
"A lot of us, we get the sear come on us in dreams, when we're kids. Makes some of us half-mad. When I was a rook, at Company 27, our driver had been recruited right out of the asylum in Plattsburgh. He wasn't crazy like them patients, just had the sear come hard on him, and no one to have his back through it. Some of us get the brushes of it soon. I remember, the night it hit me full on, as a rook - "
Hope rises in him, a hawk in an updraft, smoke clearing, sweat cooling. Hope, his own, or someone else's, he is not sure, that part frightens him, or is it something else, some riding edge of premonition -
The bells ring. They clamor. Down the pole and into their gear. Matty near slips on the running board of the pump engine and Jack grabs him by the collar.
Away they go.
Some fool told him once (Josiah, Silky thinks, Josiah before he was Captain Birch, before he was Captain Castor) that firemen were like birds on the wing.
It was night-time, and Silky was still more a boy than a man, and Josiah not much older, and they sat up by the coalstove keeping watch by the stamping of the horses in their stalls. Six horses, two black, two dapple-grey, one chestnut with socks like spun gold, and one shining white as the moon. Six stall doors at the back of the bay. Hardly enough light even to see down the end, hardly enough light from the gaslamp but to see the gleam of brass fittings on the wagon.
Josiah said funny things in the night-time. It was not his most polished hour. It never was for any of them. No man among them was ever quite sane on the best day, and when the sun went down the sear burned brighter, as if to be their eyes for them in darkness, as it was in the smoke, as it was in the red.
"Them out there," Josiah said to him, leaning his hands toward the coalstove, stretching his fingers, "they think we're crazy. But maybe, I think we're like them birds in autumn, them birds flying south in great swoops, like they's all one bird or the hand of God, maybe."
Silky (who shaved every day though he didn't have to, as if to prove a point) squinted at his crewmate, though he saw him clear as day under the sear.
"You sayin' we're angels, Josiah? Flocks and feathers?"
"What kinda angel you think'd take some sweaty, sooty, sear-blown fireman up the clouds with him? I don't think no kind. We'd bloody up Saint Peter's carpet. Naw. We're like the birds."
"Pretty songbirds," Silky had scoffed. The horses shuffled and stamped. When he's older, when he's Captain and got his own house to mind, he'll miss the horses, miss their mad, kind eyes reflecting fire.
"Crows," Josiah said, back in the days when they were both young, before they had any rank to hang on their collars. "Y'shoot down the one of us, the rest come down and peck the pecker's eyes out." Josiah had laughed at his own crude joke. "Soot-black crows, chokin' up the trees in Central Park and hawing all the day. Crows is like the embers, like the ash. You ever seen slag in a burnt-out house? Like eyes."
Silky had shuddered then.
Eyes. No fireman trusts eyes til he sees 'em blink, that's what Declan Morse had said upriver in Wynantskill. Captain Morse had a scar that quilted his body from his left jaw down below his collar, wove around his arm, and gnarled like a map across his hand. Rumor was that his back looked like a map of the Maine coast downeast all the way to Cape Cod. The fire, the red, is a living thing to them, a beast all fangs and breath, eyeless and merciless. The past and the future cleave and connect in the sawing of the flames, and you don't trust no eyes you can't see blink. Eyes, Captain Morse had told them - limping across the cold, dim classroom with a brace around his whole leg, his left arm tucked against his side - had drawn firemen to their deaths as sure as sirens drowned sailors in the straits off Long Island.
Silky's sear had come on him two days into his assignment to Company 49, after a tenement fire that sweated them all through the night and killed fifteen people, seven children. Silky had fever-dreamed of eyes, and hands, and hearts in roaring darkness. It was Josiah, not much his senior, who'd guided him on through it, a brother in the smoke, a gentling hand as if he'd reached right down into the maw of the beast to pull Silky back. It was Josiah's voice he'd come to, five days hence, when he woke on bare sheets, smelling of smoke and feeling as if he'd sweated all eighteen of his years right into the mattress, into the bed, into the very boards of the floor and the bricks of their house.
It had been Josiah leaning over him, and telling him, welcome back, welcome home.
By the coalstove, Josiah told him that firemen were like crows, mad and hawing.
"Crows fly true," Silky'd said, watching the coalfire glow in the iron belly of the stove. "Crows fly true, no matter the storm, ain't that right?"
"S'what they say."
"We ain't no angels, no, but maybe, in the black, we got some wings of our own."
Josiah had raised his head, shoulders lifting, not to reply, but because the alarm bells would ring the very next minute, and they had to hitch the horses.
The DecoFiremen are the counterparts to the previously written DecoCops (the Cops who can see ghosts). The DecoFiremen have similar preternatural abilities but they manifest in different ways. The firemen call it the Sear, a combination of connection to other firemen (especially crewmates), ghost-visions, and precognition.
Set approximately 1924 in an alternate history New York City
Pertinent Characters:
Company 14:
Captain Thomas "Silky" Castor
Lieutenant/Rescue Senior Copper "Sully" Sullivan
Driver/Engineer David Martin "Davey" Cleary
Lineman/Engineer Antonio "Domino" Vestry
Lineman Jack William Coughlin
Rookie/Juniormost/Station Mascot Mattimeus Gordon Joseph "Matty" Blake
Company 14 is located roughly in Brooklyn, not too close to the East River, in the northern part of the borough.
Other Companies mentioned are on the Piers, in Manhattan, and in the Bronx
What they say is that the cops see the ghosts of the city, but the firemen feel them, just as sure as they feel the red's heat, the flame's lick.
The firemen call it the sear, a funny joke, not always funny, what they call it.
It was what gave them a steady hand on the horses, and nowadays with the engines. Copper pipe and steel rail and coal-fire roaring, pushing water into the sky. It was what gave them eyes through the red, toward the heart of the dragon, that they could douse it out, run it right through its guts.
Company 14 sits at the bottom of two hills, at the junction of five roads (four roads and one alley and a streetcar line), if not in the heart of the city than somewhere in the bellows of its heaving lungs. Streetcars clang from five in the morning til after midnight, broad-chested horses toil down the road from dawn to dusk, hackneys and haulers, old money and old poor. Fewer cars, maybe, than in the fancier precincts of the city, but that's alright.
Mattimeus (Mattimeus Gordon Joseph Blake, and he hopes none of his new crew notices) arrives outside Company 14 in a city-owned wagon drawn by two tired dun-colored city-owned draft geldings. His brass gorget, bearing the department sigil, shines in the damp autumn sun, and his uniform - all wool, red shoulders and collar and red cuffs and brass buttons in two rows, is crisp and too-heavy. He sweats beneath his suspenders and down the back of his starched collar. At least in the dark woods upriver in Wyantskill they only wore cotton and canvas. They had learned to tame the fire like a beast, there, in the dark woods. Learned to tend its tongues and teeth.
The sear was whispered in the halls. It was up to their Companies to teach them its secrets. Wyantskill and its empty buildings - an old city quarantine hospital, from back in the days when fresh valley air and hope was all they had for the sick and indigent - would teach them the apparatus and the monster they tamed. The sear was whispered - but it hadn't seemed, then, like such a terrible thing. Something had whispered in Matty's head long before he'd grown up enough to join the Department, and it whispered still, though the words were brighter and the dreams stronger these days.
Company 14 is three stories of brick and granite, two bay doors and a hose tower on one corner. Fixtures of weathered copper and red leaded glass guard the doors, which are open. A man in uniform pants with his suspenders lagging off his shoulders is dug deep into the open hood of a fine-looking pump engine, and when Matty comes up the apron of the building he can hear him cursing softly, steadily. He's about to ask where to find the Captain when a rangy, dark-haired fellow with a day's grown of beard on his cheeks comes hurtling around from behind the engine, chased by the largest man Matty has ever seen in his life.
"God-damned sear-blown hose-licking - "
The man working on the engine drops out of it, throws a rag at the other men, and begins to swear again, a streak so sure and fine that Matty is sure if he looks up the very bricks will be turning blue with it.
"For pete's sake, Jackie, can't we go one god-hanged christlicking day without you causin' trouble?"
Jackie, all long limbs, leaps up onto the engine like a wild cat. The big man waits on the apparatus floor, snorting like a bull.
"Not my fault, Davey, blame Domino here, for bein' so easy to trick - "
"You give me my cap back, Jack," the large man says, soft and low as water, "I'll find it in me not to string you in the tower along with the hose."
"Aw, Domino, Domino, it's just a joke - "
Matty hopes no one will notice him now, especially not that very large man. He's like a horse - and not even some circus ring trick pony, no, he's like one of the great white percherons that pull the ladders.
"Jackie, I am tryin' to work on this nutting-damn engine, quit bouncin' on the damn thing - "
Finally, finally, from an office at the back of the bay, comes a deep, resonant bellow - "Boys. Gentlemen, I am ten times through with you, there's a lad from upriver coming down today and - "
The captain. At last.
"Oh. There he is, then."
The men - Davey on the running board, Jack leaning against the tanks, Domino on the bay floor with his arms crossed - all turn to look at him. Matty feels stared down, he feels like a boy, worse than even his first day upriver, so far from home or the city or anything he knew except the fire, and the licking whisper of the sear.
He's buttoned to the throat, and the gorget feels heavy, and the only one of the men even wearing his coat is the Captain. Jack is wearing his cap, and Domino's - apparently Domino's, the large man's very large cap - and Matty still feels like the biggest fool on the floor.
"Whaddya all about - " comes a voice from the other side of the bay, a sturdy man with greying hair trimmed so neatly you might almost miss the curl of it, just at the top where it's grown out. "Throwing up such a racket. Silky - "
The Captain turns, shrugs. "New boy," he says. "Upriver boy."
"Took 'em long enough," Jack snorts from on high.
"Knock it down, brat."
"He's the brat now, ain't he? House-youngest, Silky."
"Said knock it down."
Silky, the Captain, shakes his head and comes down the bay. "Chief Marlowe said you'd be along. Blake, is it?"
"Yessir, Captain. Matty Blake, sir."
"Two sir's!"
"Yessir, yessir."
"Davis! Jack! Knock it down." That's the greyer man.
Silky - the Captain, Thomas - Thomas Castor, yes, that's his name, it's on the formal papers they gave him at District Central after he got off the bus from Wyantskill; Captain Thomas Castor, Company 14, District D - looks down at him. He's tall, not rangy but not a beast, either. He's got a mustache running all the way across his jawline to the front of his ears, and a dozen scars spread over his face and neck, and large, kind, patient blue eyes.
"You can knock down the sir, Matty Blake." The Captain straightens up. "Meet the boys - Davis, primary driver, elbow deep in grease over there. And Jack, on the tanks, hiding from Domino. Y'can't have missed Domino. Domino's our second driver."
"Only when Davey breaks the engine."
"Domino's a farm-boy, don't let the accent fool ya. Loves those ponies."
"Rotten ponies, shit the floor."
"Least they don't shit the bed in the middle of a run!"
"Knock it down. Knock it down." The Captain sighs. "Sully, the long-suffering, Lieutenant."
"Rescue first."
"Only rescue."
"Not anymore!"
"We dunno that, do we Silky? What's his walking papers say, huh?"
The crew begins to crowd around him.
"What'd they assign ya, kid? You got rescue, back up our Sul?"
"Got too many drivers, god knows."
"Got too many Captains, too!"
"Aw, knock it down."
There's a rhythm to them - and Matty remembers boyhood days, the clang of the bell, being yanked out of the street and seeing six white horses paired in teams dragging the ladders, straining their tack, their leathers black, their brass shining as their coats. Six men on a crew and six white horses tossing sparks on the street stones. There's a rhythm to these men and he hardly sees how he'll ever fit among them.
"Well, Matty Blake?"
He swallows hard. "They told me general, sir - "
"Enough with the sir."
"Silky's just Silky."
"Silky - Captain - they told me general, it'd be my captain's decision to assign."
"General it is. See how you do after a run, or two, lad, and we'll see. Now, you best get to knowing the rest of the boys. Domino, Jack, didn't you have something you oughta be doing? Something about lunch?"
Domino lumbers toward - well, Matty imagines the kitchen - and Jack, after a respectable interval, springs from the engine and follows. Matty watches Domino pause to let Jack catch up, then pluck his own cap off Jack's head.
Davis, shaking his head, re-buries himself in the workings of the pumper, picking up his trail of profanity where he'd left off.
"Sully, show the lad around, bring him back to my office when you're done with him, alright?"
"Aye, Silky." Sully's expression softens slightly - from granite to, perhaps, marble - and he unfolds his arms, something like one of the ospreys upriver shaking itself loose for a flight across the Wynantskill grounds. "C'mon, boy, let's show you the house."
They start from the top - up three flights of stairs worn almost slick by years of soot and dirt and the bootsteps of rough men. Topmost floor is the officer's quarters, and there's two bunks and three desks, but also what looks like half a company's complement of chairs, and a crate of equipment - bells and boots and nozzles and fittings.
"Silky got the right to sleep up here," Sully nods. "Me and him both, as it happens, I'm second-senior here. Silky, though, sleeps down in the bunks with the rest of us. Most other shifts handle it same."
"How many shifts, here?"
"Oh, we just split with the one - we hardly ever see 'em, we're on five, they're on five, you'll catch on to it."
Five on five off. Easier, he thinks, than upriver, where it was day in day out for months, bathing in the river, no chance to go into town, sharing sweat and smoke and bunkrooms with the rest of the rookies. Upriver you had no chance for nothing but brothers and fire, and the creeping of the sear. Like soaking in it, like your mind was sopping it up like straw and rain.
"Got a place to stay just yet?"
"Not yet, sir."
"Y'call me Sully, alright?"
"Yessir - Sully."
Sully gives him a narrow-eyed look. He might be on the edge of cracking a smile. Down the steps to the regular quarters, Sully chats with him about the rest of the crew.
" - I know Domino's a sight, but he's the most godawful gentle fella you'll ever meet. Didja know we got a half-dozen stray cats comin' round the back alley every night, 'cause he won't stop feedin' 'em? Ain't got a pup yet, which to hear him tell it is the shame of God, but Silky's holding out."
"Why?" Even Wynantskill had dogs - some seven or eight of them, roaming the grounds. Scruffy mutts, not big and not small, mostly black-and-tan and thick-ruffed.
"Ah, Silky - "
When they cross the threshold into the regular quarters, the whispering inside his head gets real loud all of a sudden. It doesn't make a lick more sense, but it happens all the same. At the head of the room, at the sides of the door, are hooks with coats and helmets on them. There's twelve beds, each with a wood locker at the head bolted to the wall. The whispering is so loud. Matty walks through the room like he's in a trance.
He had a dream once upriver. Dreamed he walked down a long hall of bunks, and the red was in the windows, and it was so hot, and the smoke pressed on him like the hand of God, and he was looking, he was looking, and when he looked there was a man with a scar across his eye and his brass gorget was spattered with blood and his dress belt was white and Matty dreamed he could hear the hoofbeats, and the sparks their shoes struck up from the cobbles and the trolley tracks were the shine of this man's eye, only when he looked again the man was gone and the beds were gone and the hall was empty and he fell to his knees and when he woke up he was in the courtyard at Wynantskill staring up at the clocktower where they hung the hose to dry after a drill and he was screaming up at the moon laughing behind the clouds.
Domino's bunk. Davis's. Jack's. Sully's. Silky's, too.
He's stopped at a bunk stripped of sheets and blanket. The locker is open and empty. When he walks to the locker and feels for the crude carving he knows somehow is there. Yes. The fireman's cross, and the rough lines of a rearing horse. The same as on his gorget. The same as on the plaque on the front of Company 14, and every other Company in the city.
"See you found your place."
Matty can smell smoke. The whisper says it isn't real but it feels so close. Like the horses and the snap and creak of harness.
"Bad luck," Matty says. "Just damn bad luck."
Snap and creak. Something gives. Something gave. Caves in. Eyes and sparks.
"Aye, yeah. Damn bad luck."
"Wasn't planning I'd take someone's place - "
"Don't think he minds so much, anymore."
"Don't he?"
"You think on it. Matter of fact - stop the thinking. He mind so much?"
The man sitting on the edge of the bunk in his dream says, it's alright, lad, it's alright.
"Wish they'd teach you brats somethin' about the sear while you were still upriver."
Save you a load of trouble, Sully, says the man in his dream.
"Save you a load of trouble, huh, Sully?"
"He woulda said that."
"He says so."
"Guess he don't mind, do he?"
The man in his dream smiles and lies down on the bed with the red wool blanket, puts his arms behind his head. He doesn't look dead. But he died. Matty knows.
"Guess he don't mind."
>>
Down in the bay, the only sound is the clunk of metal parts and Davey's soft muttering - still profane, still unbroken.
"Does he always do that?" Matty asks.
"What?"
" - I mean, Davey - "
"What, the cussin'? Aw, yeah, he's alright. Just means normal for him, we only worry if he stops."
Matty wonders what could possibly make him quit his muttering. He feels something whispering inside his mind and he doesn't want to listen to it. Down in the bay with the doors open, all the outside sounds coming in - the clop of horses and the bang and shriek of trolleys and the shouting vendors and the sun is bright and hot and the shadows are heavy and smudged like watered ink on the house's apron. Matty thinks about these sounds, and not the whispering, but there is something inside him, a sensation like a dream, like the first smell of a new season.
"Silky's waitin' on ya. Get going. I better make sure Domino and Jack ain't burned the stew yet."
"Aye, sir."
"Don't call me that. No sir's in this house."
"What about Captain Silky - "
"Just Silky. Just - go on, he's waitin' on ya."
Sully never liked the way that nobody told you, upstate, what you were in for, wearing the coat and the eyes, wearing the brass at your throat. Sully never liked it when he was young, and never liked to see the lads go through their sear.
When Silky was a lieutenant and Sully drove the six horses, Silky had told him that if the fellows in charge upstate actually warned boys coming up what they were in for, nobody would ever cross the threshold and don the brass.
He told him this over the broad back of a roan-coated draft, a city horse, deep-chested and true. He told him this, barely pausing as he brushed down from withers to hindquarters. It had been a hard fire, and it was late, and they were both still dripping sweat as they tended the horses. In those not-too-long-ago days, you tended the horses just as you tended the hose - first and foremost. Just as now men like Davey tend their mechanical beasts. Some things didn't change, and the men in charge upstate - vague figures, the lot of them, though Sully knew they'd worked in the trade, got their hands rough and ate smoke enough - shifted their eyes and changed the subject and the lads under their tutelage sat on their heels in fear and didn't ask.
It's been a quiet week, which is good, Sully thinks, and terrible, Sully thinks, for the new lad in their keeping, for Matty. It's been a quiet week of smoldering haystacks and frantic housewives and coughing chimney fires and men dropping ash from their pipes into their soft velvet armchairs. Good for boy, to ease into it - to have a peaceful time to stumble over the embarassment of finding other men's minds in his own, a quiet time to respect and reflect on the embedded memories of their company and their house. And terrible, because it means they're due up, they'll get a call some middle of the night that wrenches them from dreams and Matty will find his sear, and pray to god he doesn't find some madness with it.
Sully's never seen a man go truly mad, but he's heard. Heard of a driver working by the piers whose company was killed - nearly to a man - by an arms explosion on one of the police boats. Six cops dead in the water, and four firefighters, and the driver they said gone white as milk, stepping wrong and looking around, stepping wrong and looking - cocking his head as if he heard something, as if he wished he would. Sully'd heard that fellow had gone away to a place in the mountains, somewhere lush and quiet.
It had been awful enough, he thinks, when Roddy had been struck out from them. Roddy - Roddy'd been with the company, been his side-by-side on rescue, and had died under a collapsing building six months before Matty'd been assigned to them. The old men of the department understood what having a man struck out from your side did to you, and they granted them time out of service for their grief, to re-orient themselves. The thing about the sear - the good and the bad - was how you felt the lives alongside you, and how you felt your brothers, your company, strongest, as you knew them closest. Slept beside 'em, ate beside 'em, mixed up your coats with 'em, laughed at their jokes even if they was terrible, railed about their stink after a fire even if you was long used to it.
The red and the crush took Roddy from them, in a wrenching way - how he was there, his heart beside, and how he was not, how he faded and then was gone like St Elmo's fire in the dark, the foo lights of the harbormen. You had a wound, then, and it bled, as if little shreds of god were pouring out of you in the dark. The chiefs gave them time out of service, and they healed a little. Jack and Domino had gone upriver to some cabin in the deep woods. They were mad, the both of them, but had each other's backs with honor. Davey had gone east, far east along Long Island to the ocean, alone. Because that was Davey, who needed a spell of peace. Sully had gone with Silky, and got roaring drunk for three nights with the men from the piers, who knew how to throw a party and a wake all at once.
The wound was less raw now. Matty, Sully knew, could feel it, though he hadn't asked. You could tell, looking at the lad, that he wanted to ask. He was polite. Somebody'd raised him proper. He even used a knife and fork rightwise at the table. Jackie had told him not to be so formal, he'd make the horses nervous.
"...but we haven't got - "
Davey had winked. And they could all hear it, the thump and snuffle of years of draft hooves on cobblestones, and they could smell the hay. The house, the Company, had a life too, and a memory of its own, tied in to all the men who worked it.
It's been a week now, and Matty can't decide if he's more scared or less. Funny thing of it is, one of the crew always seems to know when he's got a nervous lump in his throat, when he's got a rattle of leadshot in his belly. Someone's always coming over, someone's always by his side. They teach him make-work, things he already knows from Wynantskill, but it's good to hear their voices, good to share the task with friendly hands.
Domino teaches him to go over hose inch by inch, their bare fingers to the canvas like faith healers in street-corner churches. Domino's hands are wide and rough, black-haired like a bear's. When he is with Domino, Matty thinks, he feels like sunlight on the back of a work-a-day horse, that warm and dusty shine.
"My mother born me up in the country," Domino says, one late afternoon, as they tend to the fittings and nozzles of their trade. "I came to my cousins after she died, when I was a little one - "
"Were you ever little?"
Domino's laugh is a barrel of sweet water. "Once upon a time, lad, once upon a time. My cousins worked out the polo grounds in the Bronx, backaday, and I worked with 'em. Always was good with the horses, just like Davey tells ya, I always was. One day I seen this fella whuppin' a horse bad, and the horse just got madder and madder - I could feel that horse inside me. That was the sear, that's what I got told later, after the department came to see me. I could feel that horse mad inside me and I walked up to that fella and I took the whip off him and he never said a word, and I laid my hands on that horse nice as you please. Man from the city saw that, I got a drop-by from two men from the fire department couple days later. Asked me if I could do that with any horse."
Matty shines the coupling of a hose until he can almost see the ghost of Domino's mad horse in the brass. "What d'you do, Domino, now you ain't got the horses?"
"I got crew to tend. Jackie and Davey. Even Silky and Sully. Hard working can make for hardened men, boyo, and you don't want no leather-jaw snake-tooth man workin' on your team. A man who bricks himself up from his crew bricks himself up in his own tomb."
Matty thinks of the first day he walked in, Jack with two caps on his head, bright black eyes. Domino just waiting. Domino like sweet water and sunlight on a bay draft. Domino just one star in a far-away constellation.
"You'll find your place, lad, you'll find it. We already knows you belong. You'll learn it soon."
Matty can only nod. He is full of a thousand questions and Domino never makes him feel foolish, but some things he can't put words to, not yet, not now.
Sometimes, Matty feels things shifting inside him, as if his deepest soul is making room to share, and it sets him shaking in the night, or when they go too long without a call. He remembers, not so long ago, the long days and nights when his mother had left him with the nuns, the times when the wind blew just right and he could smell smoke in the orphans' yard, the times he woke suddenly in the dark and walked as if in a trance to the long window at the end of the dormitory hall. One night, he looked out, all of nine years old, and he could see the low red glow of fire in the distance. He'd thought it was the dawn at first. He had been dreaming of horses. He had thought he was still dreaming, when he heard the screaming inside his head.
The sister on duty had been angry with him, furiously angry, for waking the other boys. But he could not stop the howls of horses and men.
At the end of his ninth day at Company 14, Matty chances himself to be alone with Sully. They are making beds in crew quarters.
"Sul - " Matty says, and he takes a breath, when Sully does look up and pierces him with those stormcloud eyes, the color of the harbor on a winter day. " - Sully, can I ask, you been in City Fire a while, haven't you?"
"I ain't gone flat-toothed yet, lad."
"Wasn't what I meant, sir."
"Sully."
"Sully, sir."
Sully frowns and none of this is coming out right.
"What I wanted to know was - " Was I dreaming, Matty thinks? That night with the horses and the red glare? " - about maybe, ten some years ago, was there a big fire in the city?"
"Lotta big fires." Sully is not a man of many syllables. He is tightening the sheets on a bed so hard you could bounce a penny off them. Jack's bed. Matty knows where all of them are, in the dark, at a moment's breath, the snap of an eyelid to the bells.
"But one you might see, from a long way off?"
"Aye, yeah. The Piers fire, by the docks. Godawful thing."
The pieces of a fever dream fall together. A team of horses, breaking through hissing wood, plunging into the cold harbor, writhing in their brass and leathers. The dull thud of coalfire bursting underwater. A man with his leg caught in the reins, the bone snapped.
Matty realizes that Sully is peering at him.
"You seen it, didn't you."
Not a question.
Matty gulps and nods. "The driver, in the water - " He can feel the bone-deep cold. He can hear the cries. The man is not screaming because there is water in his mouth and in his lungs. The man is slipping, slipping.
Covered in his own coat, the leather helmet on his stilled chest.
Matty feels sick, of a sudden. He holds it. But the nausea is bright in his belly. Bright as the red across the horizon.
"Was like that for me, too," Sully is saying. "You was just a boy, I bet. Not that you ain't, still, but barely out of your milk teeth. It was a dream for you."
Matty nods. "The sister on duty - she told me I was crying, I woke the other boys."
"A lot of us, we get the sear come on us in dreams, when we're kids. Makes some of us half-mad. When I was a rook, at Company 27, our driver had been recruited right out of the asylum in Plattsburgh. He wasn't crazy like them patients, just had the sear come hard on him, and no one to have his back through it. Some of us get the brushes of it soon. I remember, the night it hit me full on, as a rook - "
Hope rises in him, a hawk in an updraft, smoke clearing, sweat cooling. Hope, his own, or someone else's, he is not sure, that part frightens him, or is it something else, some riding edge of premonition -
The bells ring. They clamor. Down the pole and into their gear. Matty near slips on the running board of the pump engine and Jack grabs him by the collar.
Away they go.
Some fool told him once (Josiah, Silky thinks, Josiah before he was Captain Birch, before he was Captain Castor) that firemen were like birds on the wing.
It was night-time, and Silky was still more a boy than a man, and Josiah not much older, and they sat up by the coalstove keeping watch by the stamping of the horses in their stalls. Six horses, two black, two dapple-grey, one chestnut with socks like spun gold, and one shining white as the moon. Six stall doors at the back of the bay. Hardly enough light even to see down the end, hardly enough light from the gaslamp but to see the gleam of brass fittings on the wagon.
Josiah said funny things in the night-time. It was not his most polished hour. It never was for any of them. No man among them was ever quite sane on the best day, and when the sun went down the sear burned brighter, as if to be their eyes for them in darkness, as it was in the smoke, as it was in the red.
"Them out there," Josiah said to him, leaning his hands toward the coalstove, stretching his fingers, "they think we're crazy. But maybe, I think we're like them birds in autumn, them birds flying south in great swoops, like they's all one bird or the hand of God, maybe."
Silky (who shaved every day though he didn't have to, as if to prove a point) squinted at his crewmate, though he saw him clear as day under the sear.
"You sayin' we're angels, Josiah? Flocks and feathers?"
"What kinda angel you think'd take some sweaty, sooty, sear-blown fireman up the clouds with him? I don't think no kind. We'd bloody up Saint Peter's carpet. Naw. We're like the birds."
"Pretty songbirds," Silky had scoffed. The horses shuffled and stamped. When he's older, when he's Captain and got his own house to mind, he'll miss the horses, miss their mad, kind eyes reflecting fire.
"Crows," Josiah said, back in the days when they were both young, before they had any rank to hang on their collars. "Y'shoot down the one of us, the rest come down and peck the pecker's eyes out." Josiah had laughed at his own crude joke. "Soot-black crows, chokin' up the trees in Central Park and hawing all the day. Crows is like the embers, like the ash. You ever seen slag in a burnt-out house? Like eyes."
Silky had shuddered then.
Eyes. No fireman trusts eyes til he sees 'em blink, that's what Declan Morse had said upriver in Wynantskill. Captain Morse had a scar that quilted his body from his left jaw down below his collar, wove around his arm, and gnarled like a map across his hand. Rumor was that his back looked like a map of the Maine coast downeast all the way to Cape Cod. The fire, the red, is a living thing to them, a beast all fangs and breath, eyeless and merciless. The past and the future cleave and connect in the sawing of the flames, and you don't trust no eyes you can't see blink. Eyes, Captain Morse had told them - limping across the cold, dim classroom with a brace around his whole leg, his left arm tucked against his side - had drawn firemen to their deaths as sure as sirens drowned sailors in the straits off Long Island.
Silky's sear had come on him two days into his assignment to Company 49, after a tenement fire that sweated them all through the night and killed fifteen people, seven children. Silky had fever-dreamed of eyes, and hands, and hearts in roaring darkness. It was Josiah, not much his senior, who'd guided him on through it, a brother in the smoke, a gentling hand as if he'd reached right down into the maw of the beast to pull Silky back. It was Josiah's voice he'd come to, five days hence, when he woke on bare sheets, smelling of smoke and feeling as if he'd sweated all eighteen of his years right into the mattress, into the bed, into the very boards of the floor and the bricks of their house.
It had been Josiah leaning over him, and telling him, welcome back, welcome home.
By the coalstove, Josiah told him that firemen were like crows, mad and hawing.
"Crows fly true," Silky'd said, watching the coalfire glow in the iron belly of the stove. "Crows fly true, no matter the storm, ain't that right?"
"S'what they say."
"We ain't no angels, no, but maybe, in the black, we got some wings of our own."
Josiah had raised his head, shoulders lifting, not to reply, but because the alarm bells would ring the very next minute, and they had to hitch the horses.