Fire Devil

by J L Bryan

  When I turned back to the mirror, the face had begun to change.

  Her mouth dropped open, and little streams of pitch-black fluid poured out. These crawled out over her chin, but also up her cheeks toward her ears, and up along either side of her nose to pour into her eye sockets.

  She seemed to scream, though no sound reached my ears.

  The black fluid, whatever it was, seemed corrosive, eating away the ghostly face and hair like acid, stripping it down to the bare bone underneath. Her skull was soon revealed—and that yellowed and crumbled, too, cracking and falling apart as if I were watching a time-lapse video of a human head decaying over months or years.

  That is not the sort of video I recommend you run out and watch for fun.

  “Ellie!” Jacob called, bursting out of the hotel room, in direct opposition to the quiet waiting he was supposed to be doing. “What's happening out here?”

  In the mirror, the rotting skull shifted and became my face again. That was fairly unsettling to watch, too.

  “I saw something,” I said

  “A woman?” he asked.

  “Yes.” I continued gazing at the mirror in case she decided to pop up again. “She was trying to communicate...I think. What can you tell me about her?”

  “She carries a lot of pain with her.” He gestured to his chest and abdomen area. “Here.”

  “Like, what kind of pain?”

  “Bones, organs, something like that. Maybe she had a chronic illness, or at least a heck of a severe one. Pain through her core.”

  “Okay. Anything more concrete? Name? Date?”

  “You know that stuff's hard to pin down. But I'd say...she's not really part of that group.” Jacob nodded to the door to room 33. “She's kind of separate.”

  “Did she die in the fire?”

  Jacob shook his head. “I'm not getting fire. Eaten up from the inside. Cancer, maybe.”

  “Any idea why she's still here?”

  Jacob closed his eyes and moved his lips soundlessly, or maybe speaking more quietly than I could hear.

  “So what's happening out here?” Michael asked, leaning out the door.

  “Aaaaaand she's gone,” Jacob said, opening his eyes. “I think the hallway got a little crowded for her.”

  “Did I screw something up?” Michael asked.

  “And maybe she doesn't trust men,” Jacob said. “She wanted to go when I showed up. When Michael stepped out, it was all over.”

  “Okay, I get it, sorry,” Michael said, sounding more annoyed than contrite. “You didn't really explain why you came running out here. I thought someone might be in trouble.”

  “It's okay,” I said. “Jacob said she wasn't connected to the haunting in room 33. Maybe she's someone who died here more recently than the 1895 fire. Or before it, for all we know. But I think Clay's interest is pretty focused on the fiery portion of the hotel's history.”

  “So did you get the door open?” Jacob asked.

  “Uh...working on it,” I said, then knelt and focused on the lock again.

  “What is happening over here?” Stacey poked her head around the corner. “Did I not get an invite to the party?”

  “Just keep watching the stairs,” I said.

  She made a little “hmph” sound and stepped out of sight.

  Under my fingers, the door lock to room 33 finally gave away.

  I nudged the door open into solid darkness, like a wall of black ice.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Jacob, you're with me,” I whispered. “Michael, stay back.”

  “You don't have to worry about me getting hurt,” he replied, matching my whisper.

  “I just don't want to crowd up the room and run them off. And I want our psychic with us. You can help Stacey watch the stairs.”

  “That's not really a two-person job, but okay. Just yell if you need me.”

  “Of course I will,” I said. Given the heavy presences we'd encountered so far, I was pretty sure that any yelling on my part might well be of the blood-curdling scream variety. If the shadowy lady in the mirror was the least of the hotel's hauntings, I wasn't looking forward to whatever awaited in the hotel's famously haunted room.

  I stood, brushed dust from my knees, and stepped over the threshold into room 33.

  If the chilly presence in the mirror had given me the creepy-crawlies, the heavy atmosphere in room 33 inspired a feeling of deep fear, like I was walking into the cavernous lair of some large primordial beast that would eat me on sight. The room had felt cold and unwelcoming hours earlier; now it felt openly hostile.

  Those were just feelings, though. I couldn't see anything at all. The lights in the room were off, the curtains drawn tight, and the darkness seemed to absorb the faint lamp light trickling from the hallway.

  Jacob stepped into the room with me, and I closed the door, leaving the two of us alone in the icy darkness.

  Since I couldn't see Jacob, I reached out and held onto his hand. Maybe I was afraid of unseen forces attacking him in the darkness and silence, while I had no idea he was in trouble. Those who have the powers of a medium tend to attract the dead; often they're the only people who can really see or hear the spirits.

  Okay, and maybe I was afraid for myself, too. Either way, there was a little more safety in numbers.

  “What are you picking up?” I whispered.

  “This place is...active.” Jacob squeezed my hand, though I wasn't sure if he was trying to comfort me or what. “Now they're talking to me. Okay...I'm getting a woman, and a couple of men...the woman's coming forward to me. She's frantic.”

  “Is this same woman from the hall?”

  “No. Everyone in this room died together, in the fire. They have that in common. Imagine the room is full of fire...only...weird...”

  “What?”

  “The fire's cold. I get the feeling they don't usually experience it as cold...okay, slow down...I'm listening...”

  I assumed he was telling the dead woman to slow down, and not me, since I wasn't doing much except listening and shivering.

  It did seem strange, I thought, that the lair of these “fire ghosts” was so cold. Even the descriptions I'd read on the factually iffy ghost websites said that guests in the room experienced an uncomfortable heat, often just before the girl with the fire-tongue eyes appeared by the bed, begging for help or trying to climb into the bed.

  “She says her daughter's missing,” Jacob said. “That's what she's frantic about.”

  “But they all died in the fire, right?” I asked. “So did the mom and daughter get separated during the fire?” I could imagine the haunting that might result, both of them caught at the moment of their death—the frightened little girl ghost forever looking for her mother, the mother frantically trying to find her daughter in the fire.

  “That's not it,” Jacob said. “They died together, trapped in this room, while it burned down around them. And they weren't alone. There was a man. Two men. One of them was her husband...”

  “And the other?”

  “Not her husband,” he said. “What happened here during the fire is a confused mixture of smoke and screams...but there was anger in the air, and...betrayal.”

  “Like infidelity?” I asked. “Was the wife cheating on the husband with the other guy? Or maybe the husband and the other guy...” I was beginning to get the picture. A jealous murder, the innocent little girl caught in the middle.

  “She's—she says you don't understand,” Jacob said. “Her daughter is supposed to be here.”

  “Yeah, I don't understand.”

  Jacob was quiet for a long moment, and he pulled his hand away from mine, leaving me with a feeling of being alone in the dark. I didn't complain, though. Maybe my touch was interfering with his concentration, or his reception, or whatever.

  I pulled the thermal goggles over my eyes. The space around me was full of deep blues, purples, and blacks, except for the warmer colors showing me the outline of Jacob's body where he stood ne
arby. That was reassuring.

  “The girl's spirit is gone,” Jacob said. “Taken from the hotel.”

  “How?”

  “Someone took her,” Jacob said. “The woman doesn't understand how. They've all been here, you know, all these years together...and now the girl is gone. Somehow. She said where her daughter is supposed to be, there's only...”

  I felt cold little claws on me, on my legs and arm, and looked to see three tiny cold-blue blobs climbing up my limbs.

  Ah, here was the blood-curdling scream, ripping its way out of my lips as the ghostly rats crawled all over me.

  I grabbed my tactical flashlight and unleashed thousands of lumens of full-spectrum white light, pointing first at the little blob on my arm.

  Jacob was yelling something, his voice loud and deep, but I was a little too distracted to focus.

  The roughly rat-sized blob on my arm seemed to wither in the light, curling inward on itself and breaking up into pieces.

  I swept the light across my legs, and it seemed to have the same effect, making the rat-blob on each leg break up and dissolve.

  Around me, the large, dark shapes retreated, as if Jacob's voice was driving them back a bit.

  I lifted my thermals off my eyes. Jacob had turned the room's lamp on, helping to drive back the supernatural attack.

  Michael and Stacey burst into the room, no doubt drawn by my scream, and they flooded the place with even more light from tactical flashlights.

  “Jacob, update me,” I said.

  “They're backing off. Like they're creeping back into the walls, the floor, shrinking away.”

  “Just when our chat was getting interesting,” I said.

  “How badly did he hurt you?” Michael asked me.

  “Hurt me?” I followed his gaze down to my legs, where my jeans had been shredded in two small spots. The skin underneath stung. I checked my arm, too, and found a tear in my jacket, but the leather had protected my flesh underneath.

  I stuck a finger through one of the rips in my jeans and touched the stinging within. My finger came back with a smudge of red.

  “You're bleeding,” Michael said, moving closer to me.

  “It's just a flesh wound,” I said. “Uh, probably. I've never been scratched up by ghost rats, to be honest. Got any ghost disinfectant?”

  “Very funny,” Michael said. “We need to get back to our hotel room and get your pants off.”

  “Aw, you should embroider that on a pillow,” I told him.

  “I don't—I'm not—I'm talking about first aid, Ellie.”

  “It'll wait,” I said to him. Then I looked at Stacey. “It sounds like Clay managed to kidnap the little-girl ghost.”

  “But why'd he have to kill the rats?” Stacey asked.

  “That must have been part of it,” I said. “Killing the rats must have somehow generated the psychic energy to do what he wanted. Like an animal sacrifice. That's the best I can figure.”

  “Yuck,” Stacey said. “The poor rats.”

  “Yeah, poor little guys,” I said, though my sympathy was a little lower now that they'd shredded my skin a bit. Not that the little rat-ghosts could help it. At least, I assumed they weren't any smarter as dead things than when they'd been alive. Usually, ghosts are less intelligent dead than alive, more narrowly focused, rarely able to learn new information outside of what happened when they were alive.

  “So what did Flame Boy want with the little girl ghost?” Michael asked.

  “Any ideas?” I asked Jacob.

  “Not many,” Jacob said. “It does seem like the little girl was the strongest, most energetic ghost here. Maybe that attracted him.”

  “And what will he do with her now?” Stacey asked.

  Jacob just shook his head, so Stacey looked over at me.

  “I don't have any answers,” I said. “This is pretty different from any case I've dealt with before. The ghosts are usually a lot more, you know, rooted into place. I'm not usually chasing them around the country. I hope I don't get more cases like this in the future, either.” I sighed. “Maybe if we figure out more about who these ghosts were, we'll get an idea of what's really happening here. We know Hugh McClaskey was one of the people who died in the fire. Maybe he was one of the male ghosts Jacob saw. We need to identify who the family was, though.”

  “They might have been travelers,” Jacob said. “Maybe nobody even knows their names, if they were just passing through town when the fire happened. Any records could have burned up in the fire.”

  “So maybe you could double down on your supernatural interrogation there, Jacob,” I said. “Would it help if we left you in here alone?”

  “Uh, no,” Stacey said, before Jacob could reply. “We're not leaving him in here to get all scratched up like you.”

  “You really need some disinfectant on that, Ellie,” Michael told me.

  “Yeah, yeah, and my pants off, I know,” I said. “Just hold your horses.”

  “We've run off these guys for a while,” Jacob said. “On the other hand...the lady in the hall...she might have something else to say. If I listen carefully. Alone.”

  “As long as she's not a scratcher,” Stacey said with a frown.

  “I'll set up a thermal in here that we can watch remotely,” I said. “We just need to come back and grab it before Willmore makes his morning rounds. With us being connected to Melissa, he'll probably check to make sure we didn't mess around with room 33.”

  “Which we have,” Stacey said.

  I grabbed the small thermal I'd brought. We hadn't been able to smuggle in a tripod, so I set it up on the dresser in room 33.

  We turned out all the lights in the suite, as well as the lights in the hall, and every light and lamp we could access on the third floor. A little hazy illumination drifted in from distant streetlamps outside, but aside from that, the darkness was almost absolute.

  Michael, Stacey, and I retreated into the suite, leaving the door cracked open so we could listen in on Jacob while he attempted to contact the first spirit again in the hallway. The three of us sat together on the couch, which meant we were a little crowded, but it was better than sitting alone in the dark.

  “Willmore's full of it,” Stacey said, shivering. “This is a totally active haunting. He'd have to be the least sensitive person in the world not to notice. And he doesn't seem like that to me. I mean, he kept this crummy place open in memory of his wife.”

  “He could be a big softie without being at all psychic,” I said.

  “Yeah, but still...doesn't totally fit for me.”

  I nodded, though no one could see it in the darkness. “Let's keep quiet and listen.”

  Out in the hall, Jacob was murmuring to himself, too low for me to make out the words at first. I had to strain my ears and concentrate.

  “It's okay, I'm listening...” Jacob whispered. “I'm here to listen. Just tell me...okay. Okay. Just your first name, then?” There was a long pause. “I can't help you if you don't tell me anything.”

  This went on, with many long pauses, for a while. I kept watch on the thermal in room 33 through my tablet. Small, indistinct, profoundly cold shapes moved around the corners of the room, no bigger than orbs, indicating the entities were still present, but they weren't doing too much in there.

  It would have been interesting to also have a camera in the hall, trying to capture evidence of the entity to whom Jacob was speaking, but you can't have everything.

  Eventually, Jacob came in to join us, shaking his head. He turned on the room lights.

  “She didn't reveal much,” he said. “Except that bit about how she died. She definitely wasn't killed in the fire like the others. But we already knew that. I get the impression that she was middle aged—not super young, but not elderly. She died with a lot of pain through her midsection. Not blunt trauma or stabbing. It was disease or poison. She's cagey about the details. I think she wants to talk more, she's just afraid to.”

  “Anything I can do to help?”
I asked.

  “We just have to wait,” Jacob said. “I can try again tomorrow night. Then I'll be familiar to her.”

  “We'd better be gone by tomorrow night,” Michael said.

  “Then I don't know what to tell you,” Jacob said. “But I'm exhausted, and I'm going to go crash over here now.” He walked into the suite's bedroom.

  “With the big buffalo head?” Stacey asked.

  “Yep. With Big Buffy,” Jacob said. He kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the big bed. He went out like a light; the long drive and the communication with the dead must have really taken it out of him.

  We were all pretty exhausted, actually.

  Later, I lay in bed in the dark, listening to the occasional creaking of floorboards, the whispering gusts of wind outside, and some annoying metal thing that clanged when the wind blew. It sounded like it was on the roof somewhere.

  I wondered whether I might see what others had witnessed in the hotel: a pale, quiet young girl slipping into my room and approaching the bed where I lay, begging me for help, little flames burning in her hollowed-out eye sockets.

  I didn't see her, not that night, but I had nightmares about a mother searching desperately through a burning, smoke-filled building, crying out for her daughter. That could have been the little ghost girl's mother, or it could have been my own, searching for me before she died.

  Either way, it was a rough night for me, trying to sleep in that rundown, haunted old hotel.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The next day started with no news—nothing from Calvin, nothing on Michael's credit card. We were hopeful, though, that Clay would soon check out of whatever place he'd stayed the previous night, giving us another crumb to follow.

  In the meantime, we went out for breakfast while we waited for the library to open, but my appetite wasn't too much stronger than Michael's. My stomach was still full of knots. I was jittery from stress but exhausted from my sleepless night. Thank goodness for coffee.

  The library, it turned out, had digitized its microfilm archive of The Daily Ardmoreite, which had been the town's paper since the 1890s.