Fire Devil

by J L Bryan

  “What?” I pointed my light in his direction.

  “The lady doesn't like us messing with her remains.”

  “Georgina,” I said. “We're going to see that your remains go where they belong, buried at the church you attended—”

  “Look out, Ellie!” Jacob shouted, while a male voice moaned, very unpleasantly, right into my ear.

  Jacob moved toward me, and I turned to confront my shadowy attacker, who was emerging from the damp wall of the cave as if through an invisible door.

  “Bawden!” I shouted, shoving my light in his face while reaching for my iPod.

  I wasn't fast enough, though. A cold, stabbing pain jabbed into my ribs on my right side.

  Bawden's transparent face was dirty and thick with stubble. His ghost reeked of cheap whiskey, a smell that grew stronger as his lips parted in an angry sneer, revealing crooked and rotten teeth within. The intense white light of my beam in his face appeared to be annoying him, at least.

  His blade between my ribs was doing more than annoying me, though.

  A dark mist was swelling rapidly behind Stacey, who was too busy hurrying toward me to notice. I had trouble drawing breath; I managed to point instead.

  Jacob turned and moved in front of the mist, commanding it to stop.

  The music that blared from my iPod was carefully chosen. It had been recorded at Georgina Charrington's own church, the place where she needed to be interred. The recording itself was just a childrens' concert from five years earlier, but maybe something about the way the place sounded would connect with her ghost and make her calm the heck down. Someone had uploaded it to YouTube, and I'd taken the audio.

  I wasn't sure whether it was the music that stopped the approaching mist or Jacob's command. I managed to pull away from Bawden's ghost. His blade scraped the inside of my ribs like an icicle as I drew free of him.

  “It's the guy in the top hat,” Jacob said, gesturing at the dim mist. “He's pointing out more pieces of her body for us to collect. Telling us to hurry. He's scared.”

  Stacey reached me and added a blast of her light to my own, really roasting Bawden. “Get away, Stinky the Unfriendly Ghost!”

  “Yeah, don't hold back on the insults, Stacey,” I grunted. “Really let him have it.”

  Jacob covered his ears. “MY BONES!”

  “What?” Stacey asked.

  “She keeps screaming. 'My bones! My bones!' Can't you hear her?”

  “No, Jacob,” Stacey said. “That's why we bring you to these places, remember?”

  “But she's so loud—”

  The ghost of Georgina emerged right at the center of the cave, within reach of all of us, a withered wraith with paper-white skin and black-ink eye sockets. A cold wind accompanied her, stirring the bits and pieces of her skeleton that peppered the floor, clacking some of them together like marbles.

  The cold wind shaped into low, moaning words, as her bloodless, transparent lips brushed together.

  “My bones,” the icy wind whispered. “My bones.”

  “That's what we're here to help with,” I said. “Tell her, Jacob.”

  “We're taking you to a proper resting place,” Jacob said. “Your chosen place.”

  The apparition turned toward him, her whole body rotating in the air. She wore a dress that had been gouged and ripped open, commemorating her death at the sharp hands of the Snake Man. She'd died on the orders of Ryan's uncle, who was the top-hatted ghost currently urging us to hurry up and collect her bones.

  “No,” Jacob said, replying to something I hadn't heard. “You can't stay here any longer. You can't bother the living. You have to move on—”

  She moved on, all right. Unfortunately, she moved onto Jacob, raising her long and bony fingers like talons, and letting out a birdlike shriek so loud and unnatural that the sound of it made me sick.

  “Stop!” Stacey shouted, narrowing her flashlight beam and stabbing it through Georgina's chest.

  Georgina's head twisted back to look at Stacey.

  Then, all around us, pieces of bones rose from the floor, hundreds of moldy, muddy fragments, swirling like a dust devil in a graveyard.

  They picked up speed, and the column of swirling bones began to expand.

  “Cover your faces!” Jacob shouted.

  I averted my eyes...but I stepped forward, pulling the zipper on the body bag open wider.

  “Ellie, don't!” Jacob moved toward me. He'd pulled his sleeve down over his hand and was using that to block his face.

  I'm sure he meant well, but I'd already committed to my dangerous and fairly desperate plan.

  I swept the body bag down over the whirlwind of bones like I was trying to catch the world's most hideous butterfly with a giant macabre net.

  As I did, the whirlwind exploded.

  It was like a thousand sharp teeth had been mounted on the outside of a bomb, and now flew out in all directions like shrapnel.

  My leather jacket protected me, mostly, but a couple of bone fragments scratched my face. I tried not to think about what germs they could be carrying.

  I heard Jacob and Stacey cry out, too, as if they were also getting cut.

  The body bag expanded and slapped into me; it felt like a hundred sharp stones had been flung at me at high speed, slowed only by the thin plastic of the bag. They punched against me like hail through paper.

  Still...the body bag had caught the brunt of the explosion, and the majority of the bone fragments, too.

  I brought it down with such force that I toppled forward and landed on my knees, in a fairly jarring and painful manner. Kneecaps aren't designed to be the body's landing pads.

  The body bag slammed and slapped against me like a wild animal was trapped inside. I thought of some half-remembered old myth about the four winds—north, south, you can probably guess the other two—being released from the bags where the weather gods kept them stored.

  I grappled with the bag.

  Stacey cried out. Bawden was on her, jabbing his ghostly blade at her. Jacob yelled at Bawden and moved to protect Stacey. There was no help coming for me in the immediate future.

  The dead old woman's voice shrieked all around me, and the cold, icy wind whipped my hair around my face.

  The stiff, weak fingers of my burned hand closed around the pull tab on the body bag's zipper.

  Her face passed through the body bag like it wasn't even there. Her face drew close to mine, much too close for comfort. Her eyes were solid black, her jaws wide like she intended to bite me in the mouth. She let out another horrible wail.

  I pulled the tab, but it was reluctant to move. Either it was stuck or my fingers were.

  “Get...away,” I managed to mutter at the approaching deathly visage, as its eyes grew closer, filling my vision.

  With a last jerk, I zipped the bag shut, sealing most of her bones inside.

  There was a deep, strange gasping sound all around me.

  Then the icy wind stopped, her face was gone, and the last few bones clattered to the floor.

  “And stay gone!” Jacob shouted at the cave wall behind Stacey. Bawden's apparition had disappeared, leaving Stacey with assorted minor cuts, most of them only clothing-deep, thankfully.

  “Everybody okay?” I asked, looking from her to Jacob. Jacob had some little nicks on his face, from which blood was welling. I could feel little trickles of blood on my own face, too, from the bony splinters.

  “You got her?” Stacey asked.

  “Most of her.” I gave the body bag a shake.

  “Don't do that,” Jacob said. “It'll stir her up.”

  “Because she was calm, collected, and friendly until now,” Stacey said.

  “She's in the bag with her bones,” Jacob said. “She might even feel sealed in there with them. The body bag does create a sort of psychological barrier for her. We don't want her realizing that she's perfectly capable of moving through a thin layer of plastic—”

  “Okay, so don't spell it out,” I said.
“Let's get out of here. This is the worst museum I've ever visited.”

  We started back, following our rope back toward the tunnel that would lead us up and out of the freezing darkness under the ground.

  Chapter Six

  “Well, that was loads of fun,” Stacey said, as we stepped off the museum loading dock for what I hoped was the last time. We'd carried all of our gear out, including the monitors in my makeshift nerve center on the second floor.

  The body bag with Georgina's remains lay just outside the locked front gates of the building. The coroner would pick them up for now, and presumably the county would try to get in touch with Georgina's closest living relatives or the law firm that had managed her affairs. The police might have some questions about how she came to be dead in the caves fifty years earlier, but it was a cold case. A murder, I happened to know, but the murderer was already dead.

  “I don't know when I've failed at a case so fully,” I said, climbing into the driver's seat.

  “Relax.” Stacey climbed in beside me. “Ultimately, you've gotten the ghosts out, right? The place has been pretty much de-haunted. Just scatter around some ghost powder and we're good.”

  “Is ghost powder a real thing?” Jacob asked from the back seat.

  “I wish.” I drove carefully through the old parking lot, taking a long last look at the castle-like front of the museum. I thought I glimpsed someone looking out at me through a third-floor window, but the image was gone by the time I looked directly at it. I don't know whether it was Ryan, or one of his kids, or just my mind playing tricks on me.

  My phone dinged, and I passed it to Stacey, not wanting to take my eyes off the snowy road.

  “It's a text from Michael,” she said. “He says he's found some questionable things, but no burning arrow pointing the way ahead.”

  “That's what he wrote?”

  “I'm paraphrasing.”

  “Tell him we're on our way back.” I turned on my headlights, because the sun had sunk and it was getting dark fast, and I sighed. “Looks like we're stuck in town for another night. If we don't get some direction by tomorrow, I guess we should head home to Savannah. No point running up our hotel bill hanging around here.”

  “Aw,” Stacey said. “It's like that song where the guy gets totally defeated in California and slinks back home to Georgia. On a midnight train.”

  We returned to El Grande Chalet, muddy and battered from the caves below the museum; it was the second time in as many nights I'd arrived at the hotel in that condition, so I guess the staff were getting used to it.

  Up in the room, Stacey and Jacob went to get cleaned up, while I sat with Michael to see what he'd found.

  “Some of them were Melissa's friends,” he said. “Almost none of them answered their phones, so I left voicemails and texts for them to get in touch with me if they have any idea where Melissa might have gone. A couple of them got back to me fast, but they didn't know anything. They just wanted more details from me.”

  “Did you find anything else?'

  “A couple of numbers with generic voicemails, no idea who they were,” he said. “And one guy who just called himself 'Bodger.' He sounded older, definitely not a teenager. So I didn't leave a message. I looked up the number, though, and he's apparently Lance Bodger, private investigator in Augusta.”

  “Seriously? That's weird.”

  “He doesn't have much of an online presence, either. No website. He's mentioned on some professional listings, offering things like divorce-related investigations.”

  “So he specializes in taking pictures of cheating spouses?”

  “Sounds like that's one of his services, anyway. I thought you might know more about him.”

  “Calvin might.” I texted the question to Calvin right away. “What else?”

  “Melissa and Bodger had a few contacts over the past month. Before that, she put in a call to a family law firm in Savannah. The receptionist wouldn't give me any information when I called, though.”

  “Maybe that was where Melissa got the investigator's number,” I said. “She could have been calling for a recommendation.”

  “But why? What does she want?”

  “If we figure that out, we might know where to go. For now, I say we get ready for dinner—”

  “Still not hungry.”

  “You said that at breakfast. Or I guess it was more like lunch. Brunch.”

  “And I wasn't. I'll just get something out of the cooler.” He gestured to the large cooler with groceries we'd bought to avoid burning money eating every meal at restaurants.

  “That last soggy piece of salami in the leaky Ziploc?” I asked. “You sure?'

  “There's a couple of cheese crackers, too.”

  “Anyway, after that we canvas the town again, at least the hotels, so we can talk to the night-shift workers,” I said. “If Melissa did come back to Foxboro last night after the ruins, those are the people who are more likely to have seen her.”

  “But you don't think she did that,” Michael said.

  “I don't. But we may as well study her last known whereabouts, until we get some idea of her current unknown ones.”

  “At least we'll be out there doing something. I can't stand sitting in this hotel room any longer.”

  We grabbed a nice, low-priced dinner at a tiny deli called Vladimir's, which unfortunately was not decorated according to a Dracula theme. There were a large, large number of old Dennis the Menace cartoons cut out of yellowed newspaper hung on the walls, which struck me as a little weirder than a few vampire decorations would have been.

  I had some vegetable soup that was shockingly good, and a turkey sandwich that was not. We got in and out of there pretty fast and cheap, which was the main point.

  Then we split up, dividing the town between us. Michael and I took the somewhat cheaper and seamier side of town, with more motels than hotels, and an iffy-looking convenience store with a lot of guys hanging outside smoking cigarettes. None of them had seen Melissa.

  Michael remained tense and worried, not surprisingly. I was terrified for Melissa, and for anyone else who might cross Anton Clay's path.

  I gripped Michael's hand tight as we walked through the icy streets, so much darker than they'd been a few nights earlier, now that Christmas had been taken down and put away for the year.

  When we spoke to hotel clerks, Michael was cool and professional; he was trained to function calmly in emergencies. But when it was just the two of us walking on the sidewalk, he was quiet and withdrawn, out of reach inside his own thoughts.

  We didn't get any leads from the motel clerks, but Calvin called me as we were walking past the Dancing Leprechaun Irish Pub. It was a good thing they included “Irish” in the name, because the neon shamrocks in every window and the leprechaun figure on the roof with dancing animatronic legs didn't make that clear enough.

  We stopped in the shadow of the leprechaun's swinging legs, and Michael brushed some powdery snow off a bench so we could sit down.

  “Are you staying safe up there?” Calvin asked me.

  “Yep. And hey, I didn't spend Christmas alone, just like you wanted. I had a real family-esque experience. My client, his kids, Michael, Melissa, the ghost that murdered my parents, and an ancient supernatural killer. It was very Norman Rockwell, actually. How about you?”

  “Mine was...similar,” he said.

  “Was that a joke? Florida's really softening you up.”

  “I would hope so.”

  “Found anything about Bodger?”

  “I've actually run into him a few times over the years. He comes off pretty sleazy, and that's because he is, and he seems at peace with that. Which is convenient for the kind of work he usually does.”

  “Cheating-spouse jobs?”

  “And other dirty-laundry work.”

  “So why would Clay need a guy like that?”

  “It's not all he does. My guess is Clay wanted an investigator from outside Savannah, someone less likely to k
now us or Michael personally. Someone connected to family law, it sounds like. Maybe someone good with digging up dirt.”

  “On who?” I asked. “Michael? Me? I don't get it. Bodger better tell me.”

  “I'll handle Bodger,” Calvin said.

  “Thanks. In a related story, we need an exorcist, or we won't be able to do much when we grab Melissa except maybe keep her prisoner, if we don't get burned to death in the process. Should I call Lachlan?”

  “I'll do that, too,” Calvin said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “It's the most I can do from here, until I can come and meet up with you.”

  “You don't need to do that,” I said quickly, worried about his safety as much as anything else. “Besides, we don't know where we're going. The trail here is as cold as ice. Literally. Because everything's covered in snow and ice. It's...unnatural.”

  “Snow is unnatural?”

  “Snow is fine. Inside snowglobes. And in department store displays, where it's actually made of cotton.”

  “So you're going to say you didn't enjoy your Christmas?”

  “I almost did. Under slightly different, less lethal conditions, I really would have. You were right about not sitting home alone with my cat this year. I guess I have future Christmases for that.”

  “It's always better to connect with others.”

  “Yeah, except when you've got supernatural baggage like mine,” I said. “And that's more than enough about me. How's your daughter? Grandson?”

  He caught me up on his daughter and her family, very quickly, and then the call was over.

  Michael and I resumed our canvassing, but as I'd expected, there had been no Melissa sightings.

  Clay hadn't come back to town and checked into a hotel. He'd fled toward...wherever.

  The mood was somber as we returned to the hotel and got ready to settle in for the night.

  Chapter Seven

  Clay

  He found his way there, like a snake sensing its way toward its next meal, though his senses felt weaker during the daylight hours. He'd lost the trail more than once, but then he could rely on the maps he'd purchased at the gasoline station.