The Last Cinder

In the autumn of 1994, the small coastal town of Portharrow watched its primary school, St. Marnoch’s, expand to accommodate a rising tide of students. The Victorian-era main building, with its turrets and leaded windows, had served the community for over a century, but now it stood too small. The council ordered a series of prefabricated huts to be erected on the playing fields, their corrugated iron panels gleaming like silver beetles against the green. When the new brick classroom block was completed, the huts were not dismantled. Instead, they were repurposed: one became the music room, another a science lab, and a third a woodwork shop. The rest were filled with the detritus of decades—broken desks, cracked blackboards, and piles of dusty textbooks.

I was twelve in 1994, in my last year before secondary school. My name is Eleanor, and I was part of the school choir. We practiced every Tuesday afternoon in the prefab music room, which always smelled of damp wood and stale chalk. Our teacher, Mrs. Hartley, was a stern woman with a penchant for outdated songs, but she insisted we give our best for the upcoming inter-school eisteddfod. The piece we were to perform was called ‘The Cinder Tree’, a haunting folk song about a tree that burned but never died. I remember the lyrics vividly, because they would become etched into my memory for reasons I couldn’t then comprehend.

One afternoon, after everyone had left, I returned to the music room to fetch my forgotten recorder. The door was unlocked, and the room was dim, with the heavy curtains drawn to protect the instruments from the sun. As I stepped inside, I noticed a strange smell—a mix of smoke and something sweet, like burnt sugar. The stale air seemed to cling to me. I found my recorder on the windowsill and was about to leave when I saw that one of the old desks stacked in the corner had a loose drawer. Curious, I pulled it open. Inside, nestled in a nest of old rags, was a small, blackened object that looked like a lump of coal, but with a faint, ember-like glow pulsing at its core. I reached out to touch it, and a shock of cold, not heat, shot up my arm, making me pull back.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing the glow, and I heard a faint, humming melody—the same as ‘The Cinder Tree’ but twisted, like a record played at the wrong speed. The next day, I told my friend, Samuel, about the object. He laughed, calling it a piece of ‘volcanic rock’ from the science lab, but his laugh faltered when he saw my face. Together, we snuck back to the music room after school. The power was out in that part of the building, so we used a torch from Samuel’s backpack. The drawer was still open, and the object still glowed, but now it seemed to pulse with a deeper rhythm, like a heartbeat. As we watched, the glow intensified, and the humming grew louder, filling the room with a sound that vibrated in our bones.

It was then that the temperature plummeted. Our breath became visible, and the windows frosted over despite the autumn warmth outside. A voice, cracked like old wood, whispered from the corner, ‘Leave the cinder.’ We spun around, but there was no one. The voice came again, ‘You who touch the ember will hear its song.’ Samuel grabbed my hand, and we bolted out of the hut, not stopping until we reached the playground, gasping for air.

From that day, strange things began to happen. The school’s old custodian, Mr. Dray, who had worked there for decades, started acting erratically. He was seen carrying old photographs of the school from the 1920s, muttering about a fire that never went out. He began to sing the same twisted melody during his rounds, his voice echoing in the empty hallways. Then, the music teacher, Mrs. Hartley, announced that she had rewritten our eisteddfod piece. Instead of the cheerful folk song, she had composed a dirge that she claimed came to her in a dream, but it was exactly the same twisted version I had heard.

The day of the eisteddfod arrived. We stood on the stage of the local town hall, the bleachers packed with parents and teachers. As we began to sing, something felt wrong. The words were not what we had rehearsed; they came from our mouths without our control. The melody grew lower, more dissonant, and the lights flickered. In the audience, Mr. Dray stood up, his face pale, and shouted, ‘Stop! You are feeding the cinder!’ but no one heard him; they were all entranced, their eyes wide and unblinking. The air grew thick with smoke, and I saw, at the back of the hall, the glowing coal from the music room hovering, its light pulsing in time with our song.

When the final note faded, there was silence, then a collective gasp. The coal had vanished, but the stage was scorched, and the curtains were singed. We were all unharmed, but Mrs. Hartley collapsed, and Mr. Dray ran into the night, never to be seen again. The eisteddfod was cancelled, and the school was temporarily closed while the huts were inspected.

But the cinder was not gone. It had found a new home. In the months that followed, I would hear the melody in my head, and I would see the glow in my peripheral vision. The story that spread through Portharrow was that the prefab huts were built on an old burial site, but that was a lie we told ourselves. The truth, which I carry to this day, is that the cinder was a remnant of a fire that should have consumed everything, but didn’t. It waits, buried somewhere in the town’s foundation, for another song to be sung, another voice to carry its melody. And sometimes, on cold autumn nights, I hear it humming beneath the floorboards, and I know that the last cinder is still burning, waiting for its song to be heard again.