Walking with Ghosts

entered his eyes. He turned and, with the rope, he swept the remaining candles off the surface of the writing desk. The room began to erupt in small torches of fire.
    Through the light and the gathering smoke Billy sprang at Sam. Making a successful grab at Billy’s knife hand, Sam hung on to it as he felt himself falling over backward. Billy was sitting astride his chest, and although Sam refused to let go of the hand which held the knife, he couldn’t stop Billy whipping at his face with the rope.
    Concentrating on trying to save his life, Sam didn’t hear Marie’s footsteps on the stairs, and was only aware of her when she wrenched the rope from Billy’s hand. In one movement Billy placed his knee in Sam’s face and reached up to push Marie away. The full force of his body was behind the shove and Sam saw Marie topple backward into the landing and fall over the prone body of Charles Hopper.
    She got to her feet again, and came back for more, shaking her head from side to side. Sam still couldn’t manage to throw Billy off him, and he realized that the gathering smoke was affecting their ability to breathe. He rolled his left hand into a fist and punched upwards into Billy’s face. It was a hard blow, and he saw Billy’s head ride away with the force of it. In the instant after the punch Sam was able to roll Billy off his chest, and the two of them came face to face on their knees. Sam still had hold of Billy’s knife hand, and Billy still grasped the knife.
    ‘No,’ Sam said to Marie, his voice breathless. ‘Get Hopper down the stairs.’ He had barely got the words out of his mouth when Billy butted him in the face. Sam went down again, but even as he went down he realized that Marie had begun dragging the body of Charles Hopper down the stairs. The antique furniture in the room was like tinder, already beginning to crackle, and it was becoming increasingly obvious that the whole house could go up in flames.
    Sam felt his head crack against something hard on the floor, but he didn’t dwell on the pain. He wrenched at Billy’s wrist with all his might, and heard Billy cry out as the knife flew away to the other side of the room.
    Where Sam had fallen the carpet was running with flames, and soon his hair was alight. He quickly smothered the flames and struggled to his feet. A stream of flame ran along the carpet, out into the landing, and began chewing away at the stairs. Billy had gone in search of the knife, but now the smoke was so dense that anything more than a metre away was invisible. Sam plunged into the smoke and found Billy on all fours, crawling around in what was quickly becoming a sea of fire. He grabbed him by the hair and the seat of the pants and lifted him bodily out of the room on to the landing.
    Billy got him by the throat, but Sam quickly broke his grip. He pushed Billy up against the wall and gave him two hard punches, left and right, both of them low in the stomach, way below the belt. Billy sagged and as he did so Sam ducked and caught the weight of him on his shoulder. He grabbed Billy’s wrist and hoisted him down the stairs. As he looked back the fire had spread from the room out on to the landing, and was now engulfing the upper staircase.
    A window cracked and shattered and oxygen began to be sucked to the centre of the flames, giving more fuel and energy to the fire.
    Sam stumbled out of the front door and dumped Billy on the road. Marie was there with the prone body of Charles Hopper, and a small group of neighbours had begun to gather and watch the burning house.
    Sam pulled Billy to his feet and pushed him down against the hedge, but there was no longer any necessity for force. When Sam looked at him, there were tears rolling down his face.
     
    The smoke curled out of the door and windows on the first floor, blackening the upper facade of the building. A house is like a head, a skull. Door and windows are like mouth and eyes. There was a definite sense of resistance to the burning. The house had held its form for close to a century, and it didn’t want to let go. It was old and cracked, but it wanted to remain; it was stubborn and fought against the fire.
    In a matter of minutes the outside bricks were warm. Inside it was like an oven. The fire acted like a bellows. It sucked air inside and consumed it in enormous gulps. In the tension between the resistance of the house and the greed of the flames there was rage, a spitting passion which split oak and cracked