The sisters clapped their hands together in excitement, jumping up and down and squealing as the conflagration spread around the room. Only the tangerine tongues licking from the Salamanders’ heads had any colour, Michael noted. All the other flames now roaring in the cluttered cottage were bright white around the outside with profound grey hearts as they ascended like a line of ants towards the ceiling’s timber beams. Phyllis grabbed Michael by the scorched, discoloured collar of his dressing gown.
“Come on, we’re gettin’ ayt of ’ere. We don’t wanna be all stuck jostlin’ in a burnin’ doorway with the two o’ them.”
The elder of the crackling, spitting females had now hopped onto the table and was executing a variety of cancan, while her younger sister laughed and posed coquettishly amongst the smouldering curtains. The wraith children burst out through the doorway like a spray of playing cards, all Jacks and Queens, all spades and clubs without a splash of red between the six of them.
St. Mary’s Street was in the grip of an incredible commotion. Dogs and people ran this way and that, their barks and shouts and panicked screams uproarious despite the ghost-seam’s dampening effect. Two or three men were racing frantically to the afflicted home with slopping pails of water in their hands, but only got to within ten feet of its door before what Phyllis had predicted came spectacularly true: the Salamanders leapt together from the house into the street, accompanied by loud peals of hilarity and a great furnace blast of white flame that drove back the would-be firemen and their useless little buckets. It was almost ten o’clock upon the morning of September 20th, 1675.
Michael was asking John why the two easily-amused fire-fairies were called Salamanders when the younger, thinner one began to clamber effortlessly up the front wall of the burning cottage, reaching its thatched roof in seconds with her fleshier and more formidable big sister scuttling immediately behind her. Neither of the young girls moved like people, Michael thought. They moved like insects, or perhaps like …
“Lizards.” This was John.
“A salamander, with a little ‘s’, that’s like a lizard or a newt. But people once believed that salamanders lived in flames, so when we talk about a Salamander with a big ‘S’ then we’re talking about what’s called elementals, spirits of the fire.”
Marjorie interjected here, reflected firelight flaring from her spectacles.
“The ones that govern water are called Undines. The Nene Hag, who almost got me when I had me accident down Paddy’s Meadow, she wiz one of them. Snail-shells for eyes, she’d got. Then there’s the ones what rule the wind, they call them Sylphs although the only ones I’ve ever heard of have been horrible old men who stand a mile high. Spirits of the earth, they’re what’s called Gnomes officially, although round here we call ’em Urks or Urchins. You don’t see ’em much above ground, but they ride round the tunnels underneath upon these big black dog-things what are known as … oh, hang on. Looks like they’re off and running.”
The drowned girl was pointing up towards the rooftops, where the brace of Salamanders were commencing an outlandish waltz along the ridge of the thatched buildings. The incendiary beauties clung together tight, helpless with mirth, whirling each other round with an accompanying flame-tornado rising from the parched straw at their heels as they progressed from roof to roof. The dozens milling in the lane below watched helplessly as cottage after cottage was consumed by the fire-spirits’ unseen choreography. Unwittingly, the mob were following the sisters’ dazzling performance as they moved with the west wind along St. Mary’s Street towards Horsemarket, kicking up a loud din as they did so. There were curses, groans, despairing cries and several different sorts of weeping. An old man with cataracts was calling up above the clamour in a high and reedy voice, declaring that the fire was punishment from God as a result of papists in the Parliament withdrawing Charles the Second’s Declaration of Indulgence for dissenting congregations. A cross-looking youth who stood beside the raving ancient pushed him over in the mud and was immediately set on by two burlier and crosser-looking fellows who’d seen what the boy had done. A fight broke out in the already-distraught byway while, above, the Salamanders danced amongst the chimneypots with sheets of flame rolling and billowing about their bare legs like flamboyant ball-gowns. As the pair approached Horsemarket, people at that eastern end of Mary’s Street were already evacuating their doomed dwellings, moving what they could of their meagre possessions out into the frantic and stampeding avenue.
Michael ran hand in hand with Phyllis through the crowd, literally in some instances, as the Dead Dead Gang kept up with the devastating Salamander ballet. By the time the incandescent nudes had reached the wide dirt track of Horsemarket that sloped north-south across the thoroughfare’s far end, both sides of Mary’s Street were angry walls of fire with burning straws from the disintegrated thatching carried on the wind across the road. Chains of combustion snaked off down the incline towards Gold Street while at the same time the brilliant rivulets trickled uphill into the Mayorhold. Pausing only to squat down in turn over the chimney of the last house in the row and piddle streams of golden sparks into its darkness, the two sisters swarmed face first down the end wall, both snickering like cracking hearth-logs.
Hopping from one burning, bolting wagon to another they crossed Horsemarket and scampered gaily eastwards up St. Katherine’s Street, with townsfolk scattering before them, the ghost-ruffians and their after-pictures hurrying behind, not wanting to miss anything. When they were nearing College Street the redheads stopped before the gated entrance of what seemed to be a family-business tannery. The gorgeous monsters gazed towards the premises, then at each other, struggling to keep a straight face as they did so. Each one with an arm draped chummily around the other’s naked shoulder, the two giggling sisters stepped through the now-blazing gateway, vanishing from sight into the walled yard. Before Michael, Phyllis and the gang could follow them, the whole establishment blew up. It didn’t just ignite in a great rush like all the other buildings had done; it exploded, with a tower of fire erupting up towards the overcast September sky and needle-shards of debris trailing threads of smoke behind them raining for a hundred yards in each direction, falling through the spectral children while they stood there gaping in astonishment.
Michael spoke first.
“Whop wiz all that big clangerbang?”
John shook his head, staring in disbelief as the two Salamanders stepped from the inferno of the flattened workplace with volcanic lava-coloured tears of mirth now streaming down their silvery cheeks, holding each other up to stop themselves collapsing in a quaking, sniggering heap.