The Kingdoms

‘Jesus.’
‘Hm,’ Kite said, as unflustered as he had been in the sea.
‘I went round with a tape measure, there’s nowhere broad enough for anyone to hide in the walls,’ Joe said. ‘I was outside before because I was trying to work out what was going on.’
If Kite was angry not to have been told that he’d been bundled into a haunted lighthouse, he didn’t show it. ‘At least you haven’t got anyone living here with you.’
‘But I have got a haunted room. Don’t suppose you know any exorcists?’
‘No.’ He glanced over again and Joe saw him pretend not to notice the panicky edge in the question. ‘I met a part-time deliverance minister once in Glasgow.’
‘What’s a deliverance minister?’ Joe said, grateful, and guilty to be leaning on a much younger man.
‘An exorcist without the Latin. He just sort of mumbled at the stairs and then everyone was very impressed that the strange noises stopped right after the neighbours moved out.’ He touched the wall with his fingertips, then tapped it again, in more of a pattern than before, so particular it must have been the rhythm of song lyrics. There was a pause. Kite shied when the wall knocked at them again. It didn’t sound like someone on the other side. It sounded exactly like it had when he had done it, as if there was an invisible person next to him. Joe didn’t care as much as he could have. It was reassuring, very, to see someone else flinch. It made him feel less stupid.
‘Let’s go back downstairs,’ Joe said. ‘If we’ve got a ghost, we might as well leave him to it. He can knock on the door if he wants something.’
Kite nodded and closed the door behind them. The voices began again, as though they had been waiting for them to leave. They glanced at each other, but neither of them tried to touch the door again.
‘You’re coming in with me tonight if you want to sleep at all instead of being woken up at three in the morning by a hysterical mess,’ Joe told him. He didn’t feel embarrassed about asking. It was amazing what meeting in haunted isolation did to your capacity to trust someone. Just then, he would have trusted the man with his life, or even Lily’s.
A cautious voice at the back of his mind said that this was not a good idea at all.
The mercury dropped and dropped, even inside. The barometer swung around to stormy, and the wind hammered at the bars of the lamp-room gantry. They went down to the furnace to stoke it for the night together, then back up together, to the nests of pillows and blankets they’d made on the floor by the pipes. Outside, snow slithered over the frozen sea in snake patterns. Where the light beamed, the ice sparkled. After an hour or so, the voices in the upstairs room went away. They looked up at each other over the newest card game – the betting was only matches this time – and neither of them said anything.
Something smashed against the wall. It took Joe a lot longer than it should have to understand that it was only one of the shutters, blown loose from its catch. It banged again.
‘Are you all right?’ Joe said, because Kite had let his neck bend and drawn both hands over his ears. It didn’t look urgent – Kite was too measured a person to yelp and hide – but it didn’t look like he had chosen to do it, either. Joe would have bet more than matches that he was hearing a worse noise than a bit of wood on a wall. The burn scars must have come from somewhere.
‘Yes, sorry. Careful,’ he added, because Joe had got up to open the window and close the shutter. Hail pinballed on to the floor. Having hauled the shutter into place, Joe had to stand for a second while he got his hearing back. Kite was still watching the shutters, tense.
‘Was it bad?’ Joe asked eventually.
‘It … you know,’ Kite said. Although he was speaking quietly, there was pressure behind the words. He had put up a dam in his mind.
‘I don’t know,’ Joe said, aware he was pressing. ‘I hide in engine workshops, the closest I’ve come to war is artillery production.’
Joe could see Kite searching the dam for an extant fissure that wasn’t doing too much damage by itself. He nodded once when he found one. ‘We put sand on the deck before any action. It gets everywhere; it’s like walking on a beach.’
Joe nodded. ‘What are your feelings about beaches?’
‘Dominated by passionate hatred,’ he said, and they both laughed, and the pressure behind the dam seemed to ease.
Joe turned up their oil lamp. Even in ordinary light, not the monstrous brightness of the arc lamp, Kite was so white he was translucent in places. The veins showed electric blue in his wrists. Dry, his hair was red, but dark, a deep colour Joe had only seen before in church windows. He had let his hands drop around his own neck, as though he were imagining martyrdom. On his burned side, he kept his fingers just above the scars to keep from touching them. Joe gave him the deck of cards to deal.
Voices came from upstairs again. Joe stared at the ceiling. He looked down when Kite shuffled the cards, flicking two piles of them together with a zingy clatter. His eyes were on Joe, though, full of the silent recommendation to ignore whatever was happening upstairs. Joe settled down next to him, back to the wall, and arranged some matches into a pyramid.
Not long after that, the voices faded and left only the sound of the wind in the rocks and the sparse gorse, which made it whistle in a way that sounded morning-like, because it was just the pitch a kettle hit on the very edge of singing.
Joe fell asleep so quickly he was unaware of