The Key

18

Davlat Hastenesi Hospital

The challenge of working out how to reveal Oscar’s hidden message using the limited resources at her disposal had given Kathryn the greatest feeling of hope and purpose she had experienced in days.

From her fieldwork she knew you needed three basic things to start a fire: fuel, an accelerant and a flame. For fuel she had torn a couple of pages from the middle of her medical notes, not daring to risk taking any from the notebook, then shredded them to make a loose pile on one edge of the window ledge.

For the accelerant she’d had to think laterally. Roughly speaking it could be anything that would intensify a fire. She’d found what she was looking for in the hand sanitizer-gel dispenser by the door, the sort used in all modern hospitals. The label told her this particular brand was 40 per cent alcohol. Alcohol evaporated quickly to leave skin dry and had antiseptic qualities of its own. It was also a very effective accelerant.

She squirted a thick dollop into her hand, scraped it on to the sill then stacked the pile of shredded paper on top of it so it could start absorbing the flammable fumes as they evaporated. The longer she waited, the more saturated the paper would become and the better her chance of lighting it. But she still needed a flame, and for that she needed the sun to come out.

She lay on her bed, staring out of her window at the bright band of sky between the passing rain clouds and the tops of the mountains. The last time she had lit a fire this way had been on the final trip she had taken with John. It had been one of those spur-of-the-moment things arranged, before Gabriel returned to college and John headed off to Iraq on the dig he would never return from.

They had spent the day off-season hiking along the Presidential Range in New Hampshire and got caught in a freak storm. By the time they made it to where they’d parked their hire car they were soaked to the skin, only to discover they had a flat battery. They headed back to a Ranger’s hut they had passed on the path where some weekend walker had used up the firewood and not bothered to restock it. She and Gabriel had collected as many fallen branches as they could, but it was all too wet to light. They hadn’t even noticed John had gone until he stepped into the cabin brandishing one of his socks on the end of a long stick, dripping with diesel from the car’s fuel tank. They had piled the wet sticks on top of the sock and waited for the fumes to permeate the stack, the same way Kathryn was waiting now. Liquid diesel doesn’t burn well, but the ether-infused sticks had burned just fine. They had spent the night there, huddling together, warmed by the fire — the last time they were all together. Kathryn smiled as she recalled it, remembering their closeness and their firelit smiles while the storm raged outside. Then she realized that the warmth was not in her mind, it was on her skin and flooding the room. The sun had come out.

She leapt out of bed and lunged towards the window. Sunlight was filling the street with warm afternoon light. It had dropped below the clouds and would soon fall behind the distant mountains. She needed to move fast.

She fumbled her reading glasses from the top of her head, and held them over the pile of shredded paper, the magnifying lenses focusing a pinpoint of light on to the top of it.

A tiny image of the sun appeared on the paper and she held it as steady as her hand would allow. The bright dot darkened. It started to smoulder. The paper curled into ash around the dot, but it did not light. She moved the glasses, chasing the edge of the blackening paper with the bright dot, focusing the heat on the meagre kindling she had made. A curl of red glowed at the edge as the paper turned to ash but still it did not catch. She cupped her hand round it and blew gently across the top, trying not to disturb the pile or blow away the alcohol fumes trapped inside. She continued to blow, gentle and steady, focusing her attention on the red ember until her lungs were empty. Then, just as her breath was almost exhausted, it finally caught and flame started to devour the ripped-up paper.

She grabbed the diary from the bed and opened it to the centre pages, which she had marked with several more squares of torn paper. She had no idea how long the hidden message might be, but she only had a limited amount of fuel and the flame was burning quickly. She screwed up a square of paper, fed it to the fire, then gently offered up the first blank page to the flame.

The effect was almost instant. The heat darkened the paper wherever acid ink had soaked into it, creating swirls of symbols that steadily filled the page. The body of text, arranged to form the shape of an inverted Tau, was a mirror of the first prophecy she had grown up with and written in the same ancient script. Kathryn’s eyes scanned the Malan symbols, the language of her tribe, translating them in her head as she read:

The Key unlocks the Sacrament

The Sacrament becomes the Key

And all the Earth shalt tremble

The Key must follow the Starmap Home

There to quench the fire of the dragon within the full phase of a moon

Lest the Key shalt perish, the Earth shalt splinter and a blight shalt prosper, marking the end of all days

She read it again, trying to dig meaning from the words. It seemed like a warning, but was too incomplete for her to understand.

There had to be more.

She grabbed another scrap of paper and fed it to the dying flame. The fire was burning faster than she had anticipated and smoke was starting to fill the room. She turned to the next page in the diary and held it over the flame.

More darkened text emerged, much more, but the fire was burning so quickly she didn’t even stop to read it. She knew she was almost out of fuel and the smoke levels in the room were getting dangerously high so she kept moving blank pages over the heat, one after the other, feeding the flames until there were none left and the fire shrank to nothing and died in a final curl of smoke.

Outside she could hear footsteps approaching. In a few moments someone might walk into her room with the priest right behind them. She pulled open the window as far as it would go, scooping up the evidence of the fire and feeding it to the breeze. She left the window open in an effort to dilute the smell of smoke and scrubbed her hands with sanitizing gel while she cast around for somewhere to hide the diary. The room was bare. There were no hiding places. Kathryn lunged towards the bed and hid the diary in the only place she could see and undoubtedly the first place anyone would look. She hid it under the mattress.