by Dale Mayer
“Are you still in touch with these foster parents?”
She gave a brief nod. “Yes, to a certain extent. They got me through school to the point where I went to university, got an education and landed a job as an associate professor. They were very proud of that. Without them I’d be a basket case. They were stable, sound, practical people. Whenever my nightmares or memories would overwhelm me, and I’d go into panic mode, their sensibilities brought me back. They would tell me how I could do nothing but walk away, and then I needed to write it all down. I needed to get it out of my head. I saw a shrink for years. That helped. As much as people make a mockery of the profession, I needed to tell someone about the horrors I’d been through.”
“And the counselors handled that okay?”
“No,” she said. “One left the profession after me. Another had to seek a professional to talk about everything I’d been through, for their own sake. But over time I managed to find a new normal.”
“And this is the last thing you need to do?”
She looked down at the letter clenched in her fist.
He watched as she stared at it with loathing. “Or is it the fact that it’s the last thing you have of your father and you want to throw that into the pit?”
Finally after a pensive pause, she said, “It’s a lot of things, I think. It’s the only thing I have of my father’s, except for my DNA, and that’s something I can’t get rid of. It’s also a message he left me. A message that’s been emblazoned on my brain, and I don’t know why I feel like I have to throw it in here, but I do.”
“What’s the message?” he asked. She may not want to tell him, but it was important. He just didn’t know why.
Her lips twitched. “I’m really not making this up, you know? Neither is this some big horror movie that’ll go bump in the night. I just want to throw this into the lava.”
“I might know where there’s a stream of lava you can throw it in,” he said. “But I guess I’m not willing to do that until I know what it is you’re expecting from this.”
“Expecting?” She looked at him in surprise. “I just want to let it all go,” she said. “I want to know his wishes for me won’t be fulfilled and that he was wrong.”
“Wrong in what way?”
“He felt I could walk through fire,” she said. “I was named to rise from the ashes and to become someone special.”
“But you have already lived out that legacy,” he said.
She shook her head. “How is that possible?”
“Look at the purgatory you were raised in,” he said. “Look at the horrors of what you’ve already survived. You lived through that. You rose from the ashes of that cult life to become someone completely different.”
He could see from the shock in her eyes that she had never once considered that. She sagged against the retaining stonewall and looked at him. “I don’t think that’s what he meant.”
“Doesn’t matter what he meant,” Rowan said. “What matters is what you do with the information. It’s obvious it’s good for you to be here, if for no other reason than to understand he isn’t here. He wouldn’t have had the strength to exist in a place like this. I don’t understand his fascination with fire,” he said. “Do you?”
“He could make fire,” she said simply. “It didn’t burn him like it burned me.”
“What do you mean, he could make fire?”
She shrugged. “At least, to the child in my mind, he made fire. Whether it was a magic trick or not, I don’t know,” she said for clarification. “But he didn’t have to use a match or a stick to burn me. He would just use the flames coming off his fingers.”
Rowan made a strangled exclamation. How unbelievable was that story?
“I know you don’t believe me,” she said. “I get that. But I’m not sure how else to explain the memories.”
“So then why would he burn you? And why didn’t it burn him?”
“It did burn him, if the flames touched him anywhere else on his body but his fingers,” she said. “And he figured that I was the same.”
“Could you make fire come out of your fingers?”
She hesitated.
He leaned forward and repeated, “Can you?”
She glanced away and shook her head.
He stared at her. “I don’t believe you.”
“Doesn’t matter if you believe me or not,” she said, turning to face him. “It’s the truth.” But her voice lacked conviction.
“Even if you could do that, why would he want to kill you?”
“Oh, he didn’t want to kill me,” she said in surprise. “He was training me.”
“For what purpose?” he asked. “That’s nonsensical. It’s not as if you’ll be a fireman and walk into a burning building and rescue people—not without a fire-retardant suit.”
“I don’t think he thought it through,” she said, her lips tilting. “Remember that insane part? That whole premise that he was the cult leader and could make up whatever he believed or wanted his disciples to believe? He kept telling me that I was supposed to walk through fire, and I would be the Phoenix that rose from the ashes.”
“And so, your real name is Phoenix?”
“Even worse it’s Phoenix Rising,” she said with a laugh. “My first name and last name.”
“He thought he knew who you were, already from your birth?”
“I did ask my mother that a couple times, and she said I was special right from the beginning.”
“What about the other kids?”
She gave a headshake. “As far as I know, none of the others were”—she paused—“special.”
“Were they tortured or hurt in any way?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “They were considered normal. Sure, they did chores and were homeschooled, but they were never tortured like I was.”
“Did they understand why you were being tortured?”
“They understood I was being prepared for something nobody could understand yet, but it was super important,” she said.
“That sounds just vague enough to be believable.” But he certainly didn’t understand it. “What’s your father’s name?”
“I don’t know.”
He waited and she groaned. “Why? You want to listen to all that lovely garbage on the internet about him? His name was ‘the Ancient One,’” she said with a snort. “And, yes, that’s what he was called.”
“What name was he born with?”
“That’s more mundane,” she said with a smile. “He was John Hopkins.”
“Like Johns Hopkins University?”
“Yes, but no relation. John has got to be the most popular name in the US. Or the second-most popular. And Hopkins is not far off.”
“So, in other words, it will be hard to find information about him?”
“Oh, I doubt it,” she said. “The news was pretty full of details at the time. Everybody had ideas of how he managed to stay under the radar for so long.”
“What did he do for money?”
“No clue,” she said. “I was only eleven when he died. Remember?”
Rowan had forgotten that. He settled back. “Sounds like your foster parents were a godsend.”
“They were. I think one of the biggest benefits was the fact they were so pragmatic. They knew my history, but they weren’t full of visions and dreams and prophetic statements. They didn’t pretend to be God or my boss or my leader or my whatever you want to call it. They made it clear who they were, what they were, what they expected of me and what I could expect from them. Those rules were never broken, and I appreciated it. It gave me an understanding of what life should be and what life could be. And I flourished within those boundaries, within those restrictions.”
“What about boyfriends?” he asked. “I can’t imagine that was easy.”
“The boyfriend part definitely not. Even just having friends was something I struggled with a lot.”
“Because you didn’t trust them?”
&n
bsp; “As far as I was concerned, they would betray me, like all the siblings did.”
“But these were friends, not siblings?”
“True,” she said. “But we didn’t have any friends outside of the cult family, so they were one and the same for me.”
“Did you have any boyfriends growing up?”
“Not until I was quite a bit past the normal dating age,” she said. “I could only handle so many new experiences at once. I was all about learning in school. I wanted freedom, and, to me, education and money would give me freedom. I didn’t want anybody to have any power over me ever again.” She smiled, looked around and said, “I don’t have a clue why I am standing here telling you all this.”
“Because you want something from me,” he said. “And I have the power to make that happen.” He could feel her gaze on his face. But he was busy staring down at the fistful of crumpled paper. “I still want to see what’s in there.”
She turned her palm up, uncrumpled the paper and spread it against the stone wall. “There,” she said, holding it for him.
He frowned when she refused to hand the letter to him, so he read it out loud. “Dear child, Remember you were destined to die and to be reborn. We are one with the Burning Fires. Only if we have prepared you well and truly will you rise again as the Phoenix you are bound to become … and save us all. I made you. I will guide you. Remember it. Remember it well. Don’t cross me because I will travel from this plane to yours, and I will make you pay. Or you will triumph as the Phoenix you are, and we all will achieve immortality.”
Rowan let out a long whistle. “Wow, that’s a hell of a letter.”
“That’s the epitome of my life with him,” she said quietly.
“Are you sure you don’t want to keep this?”
She gave a broken laugh. “Would anybody want to keep something like this?”
He shook his head. “Maybe not but I think you should keep a copy.”
“I have one, and the cops have a copy too.”
“What happened to all the other mothers?”
“They all committed suicide,” she replied solemnly. “For all I know, all the kids died too. I really don’t know.”
He nodded, but, in the back of his mind, he knew he had to confirm that. He didn’t really have a reason to help this woman, but they were already bonded and connected in a way he didn’t understand. “We’ll find a way. Just don’t do anything without me, please.”
“Why’s that?” she asked, crumpling the letter back up. The paper almost instinctively shriveled into a ball as she’d done it so many times. She was surprised it had lasted all this time, but something was weird about the paper’s texture—almost a plasticity.
“Because I don’t want you getting into trouble over this. Enough weird things are going on, and you have this odd energy about you. So let’s not have a combustion where things go really bad.”
“You’ll help me then?”
He thought about it for a long moment, then nodded. “I’ll help you throw that letter somewhere into lava—”
“It has to be in the Burning Fires lava,” she insisted.
“That’s fine,” he said. “As long as it can be a runoff or run into the lava. I can’t get it into the actual gates.”
She liked that answer.
“I’ll try. I don’t know for sure yet. I do have a couple things I could check out, but …” His voice trailed off.
Phoenix let her shoulders sag slightly. She looked at the spot where they stood and, as if realizing she couldn’t do it on her own, said, “Fine, but please, you must understand how important this is to me. I get that it doesn’t matter to anybody else, but, to me, it’s huge.”
“Understood,” he said. “Leave it with me. I don’t have an answer right now. I’ll have to check into it.”
“You’ve got the rest of today,” she said. “We’re leaving first thing in the morning.”
“No pressure, right?”
They laughed together and returned to the crowd.
*
The Supplier sat outside at a table, drinking a coffee, watching the world go by, waiting for the last bus to come in. Finally he heard its heavy engine shifting gears as it slowed and came in to park alongside the other two.
He had been waiting to see which one would hold his best opportunity. So far, the first bus had been an incessant array of loudmouthed overweight people, who seemed to only glorify in themselves.
They didn’t understand the wider world at large. They definitely weren’t sacrificial material. The Supplier must have someone good enough to give to the Elders. Someone clean. Someone healthy. Someone full of spirit and life. The Elders deserved the best.
Sure, some he could easily throw into the pits of the Burning Fires, but they didn’t deserve the honor. They weren’t all goodness. They weren’t clean. They were nothing.
The first bus had been full of disgusting specimens. So, when the second bus had arrived, the Supplier had been full of hope. Surely, out of the three buses, there had to be somebody. The tourist attraction of this town had swelled massively. But, when the tourists left, so did most of those people. And that left him with only the locals. It was one thing to play with the locals like he had, but he had to choose the right ones.
Irene had been his choice. His treat. She deserved death whether she understood it or not. He knew the rest of the town was still in shock over her suicide, and they probably would never learn any differently. He could never forget why he was here and what he was here to do.
All he could do was make it fun and make his days less of a hardship. But he had to find his next sacrifice first.
The second bus yielded little potential. Again filled with more older people, some fighting, some just so tired and exhausted that they dropped immediately. Others eating as they got on and eating as they got off. Unclean bodies. Some so diseased he couldn’t believe they were still walking. The Supplier could see the disease in their souls and in their physical forms.
He could not anger the Elders by tossing in somebody already with one foot at death’s door. The Elders needed the pure energy of the young. They could take the old if they had to, but it took so many more to do the job. And these were already nasty pieces of humanity. He would never insult his Elders with such offerings.
It was getting harder and harder to find acceptable sacrifices, and his time was running out. If he couldn’t find somebody soon, he’d have to settle for a local again. Or somebody who had moved in temporarily. Lots of people came to the region to work for the summer and then left. Some people were so rotten, they could not be allowed to exist, and that was where the Supplier stepped in. He wished he had a well where he could toss in the despicable ones at will. Like a sorting process. Cleaning up the garbage.
The longer he waited to find his perfect sacrifice, the worse it made him feel, and, in order to appease that anger and frustration within himself, he had to find victims for his own stress relief. Yet too many victims were dangerous. He couldn’t get greedy, as it could get him caught.
The last bus finally parked, and the double doors opened. The Supplier had also visited the Burning Fires today, a chance to inhale the essence of the Elders, even as the Supplier searched for their next sacrifice. The buses had all been there today. And many more people. Too many people. The Supplier had been forced to leave early and had been sitting here ever since, watching the buses return and the visitors disembark.
One bus at a time.
From where he sat, he watched the passengers of the third bus as they stumbled out. The first out was a couple, arguing. They were almost having a physical altercation. He watched in amazement, wondering how people could go through life like that.
He should toss them into his despicable well, just to dispose of their pain and suffering and how they inflicted that onto others. People should pay the Supplier to take care of those two. But, of course, they wouldn’t. Humanity had a problem cutting short a life.
In
this case it wasn’t much of a life. Sometimes he chose to end their suffering, and sometimes he chose people who deserved it. They were either nasty or vile. Sometimes the line between the two blurred, but the Supplier didn’t give a damn. His job wasn’t the easiest and, if it gave him an outlet for fun and games, then fine.
He used to justify every person’s life he took; now he didn’t bother. Why? Nobody ever knew who he was and what he did. After all these years he’d never been questioned about the deaths. That just blew him away.
On the one hand, he was very good at what he did, and he had a few extra tricks that helped preserve his secret. So whatever. All he had to do was keep doing what he was doing, and the Elders would take care of him. Or, if they didn’t take care of him, he’d know it was time for him to be replaced, to be reincarnated. That time would come; he just didn’t know when.
The issue right now was that the Elders needed another sacrifice, and, so far, nothing appropriate was in sight. Another couple exited the bus, so bent over they needed help to get down the steps. And a middle-aged couple, much younger, waited politely behind.
The Supplier looked at them with interest. Then he searched into their souls and snorted. Both were using fake IDs. They were married to different people but here to have a holiday together. The lies and fabrications people lived with astounded the Supplier.
Nobody was honest anymore. Another young woman exited. She then turned and snapped something at the person behind her, who shook his head. When she turned around again, he realized she wasn’t as young as she first appeared. In fact, she was a good twenty to twenty-five years older. He sighed and settled back, watching as everyone exited the bus.
The bus driver got down and then turned to look back inside the bus. How was it possible yet another bus was full of rejected potentials?
And then he saw her.
She had shoulder-length brown hair and moved slowly, as if her body wasn’t as young. He glanced into her soul and froze. She was physically young, but her soul was old, and she had scars everywhere. He frowned. A strange light surrounded her.