Kraken by M. Caspian Read Free Book Online Page A

more suited to a five-year-old. Something about Cyrus made him irrational.
     
    He was nearly to the pretty Victorian house when he heard footsteps on the gravel behind him. “All right. Fine. You win this one. I can come back later and get it. We’ll walk back. You’ll need your shoes, though.” Cyrus thrust Will’s damp footwear at him, and they paused where the path met the rocky shoreline, while he laced them up.
     
    Will wiped his hands on his trousers as he got to his feet, gesturing to the grand old home. “It’s unexpected, finding this on an island.”
     
    “This was the mine manager’s house.”
     
    “There’s a mine?”
     
    “Was. Long gone now.”
     
    “For what.”
     
    “Copper.”
     
    Will nodded absently.
     
    “And that was the smelting house,” said Cyrus, pointing at the ruins of the sandstone building ahead. “The chimney’s still standing, see?”
     
    Beyond the wooden fence the ground was a tangle of dandelions, wrapped around the foundations of the factory. Small poplar saplings with feathery leaves were growing inside, where once men worked the bellows to keep the coal burning. Modern wooden beams had been installed to hold up the crumbling sandstone walls.
     
    Giant metal doors lay open on the ground, heavy iron chains disappearing upwards. Will craned his neck and saw them attached to the heavy steel beam overhead. He peered over the edge of the pit, the large open space below lined with red brick.
     
    “Oh, old school, huh?”
     
    “What?”
     
    “It’s a reverberatory furnace. It’s an old Cornish way of refining copper. When were they mining, mid eighteen hundreds?”
     
    “Ah, yeah, about then.”
     
    “There’s a pulley system for opening and closing the doors. They’re too heavy for a person to lift, or even three or four.”
     
    Will walked around to the other side of the ore pit. There on the wall was a large ratcheted wheel. He gave it an exploratory turn. The doors groaned and then rose an inch. “Hey, better than I expected. Someone must come in here with some CRC every now and then.”
     
    “Probably Mr. Falconer. His family have been on the island a long time. Did you see all the photos in the store? He gets a kick out of all this old stuff.”
     
    “There should be another door over here, for the coal.” He pulled up a creeper, revealing a smaller heavy metal door set into the stone floor. “It’s kind of like a big wetback for an open fire. You shovel the copper ore into that big oven and close the doors. The fire pit is over here, next to it. The big smokestack draws the heat from the fire pit into the furnace, and it bounces of the sides and melts the rock. There will be a room on the other side of the furnace with very narrow slits in the thick walls. You stick a scraper in and take the dross, the slag, off the top of the melting rock. You do this thing called poling, too. That what all the poplar is for. They would have planted them specially. At the end, you ladle it into ingot molds and voila, copper.”
     
    Cyrus nodded as Will bent down. Under the ground cover melted rock littered the area. Will picked a handful of stones up. “Slag,” he said, throwing a rock at a ruined wall. “All that’s left once the copper is extracted.”
     
    He held a piece of rock up, and let the play of sunlight bring out the oily rainbow slick hidden inside the black. “Only leftovers, but it’s still beautiful.” He tossed it into the ore pit, the echo rolling faintly around the ruined building. “They wouldn’t just leave this behind, now,” Will said. “They grind it up and sell it as an industrial abrasive. Gotta get every last cent out of the land. I’m surprised it’s so open like this. Anyone could get in there. You fall into that furnace, you’re not climbing out without a ladder. And those walls don’t look too stable.”
     
    Cy picked up another stone, and threw it at a seagull perched on top of the wall, missing by a scant