Fire Devil

by J L Bryan

  Stacey and I turned to the large patch of grass enclosed by the fence.

  “Three hundred people are buried right here, huh?” she whispered.

  “Yep.” I clicked on my flashlight for a moment so I could read the inscription on the monument inside the fence.

  It simply said: “Mass Grave of Fire Victims, October 8, 1871.”

  “I can't imagine,” Stacey whispered. “What a terrible disaster. And a week ago I'd never heard of it.”

  I nodded as I put away my flashlight. Then I pulled the heavy night vision goggles from my backpack and began strapping them onto my head.

  “Good idea.” Stacey pulled on some thermals and adjusted them around her eyes.

  My night vision goggles revealed the cemetery in stark, surreal green. I could see the trees and scattered grave markers in greater detail now. I couldn't read them all clearly—a century and a half of wind and rain had worn them down—but the date was the same on all of them. October 8, 1871.

  Farther away, I could see the back wall of the old church that was now the Peshtigo Fire Museum. It was a convenient spot to put the museum, I supposed, since the victims of the fire had already been buried just behind that church.

  “Wow, everything's super dark blue,” Stacey said. “I don't think I've ever used these on a freezing night before. You look like a walking bonfire, Ellie. You, too, Jacob. You're super hot.”

  “Thanks,” Jacob called back.

  “Let me know if you see anything abnormal,” I said.

  “If you want to see abnormal, you should check out Jacob's room,” Stacey said. “Monster movie posters everywhere.”

  “They're classic kitsch,” Jacob said. “That's all. Pop art.”

  “Uh-huh. So you only hung the UFO Zombies from the Moon poster ironically, huh?”

  “Exactly. You understand me.”

  “And you've watched UFO Zombies from the Moon how many times, again? Ten? Twenty?”

  “Shh. I have to concentrate. Some of these burned ghosts were finally starting to warm up to me.”

  “Is...that a really sick joke?” Stacey asked.

  “We should keep quiet,” I suggested, pretty firmly. “Let Jacob work.”

  “Oh, sure take his side—”

  “Quiet!” I snapped.

  “I was about to be,” Stacey said, and then she was. She wandered silently from one grave marker to another, looking and listening.

  I watched Jacob from a distance as he moved in the opposite direction.

  This left me standing more or less in the middle of the old cemetery, alone in the freezing wind that would not stop blowing, alone with the rasping leaves and groaning branches and strange night noises that, Jacob had said, did indeed contain the whispering voices of the dead.

  My heartbeat picked up, and my hand went to my flashlight. Ghosts were far more likely to approach an isolated individual than a group of the living.

  So it wasn't the greatest surprise when I started to notice the shapes moving around me. Even in the night vision, they weren't completely clear. They were partial apparitions, fragile things that faded away as quickly as I saw them—an oval shape suggesting a head here, an arm and bit of torso there. I didn't see any facial features, any sharp details like that.

  Every cell in my body told me to call out, or to run over to one of my friends now that the ghosts were getting more active and visible.

  I forced myself to stay put and take slow, deep breaths.

  After a couple of minutes, I noticed something. The bits and pieces of apparitions that I could glimpse all seemed to be moving, slowly but definitely, in the same direction. It was like they were all riding the current of some sluggish invisible river.

  I turned and walked with them, trying to see where they were going. I found myself walking toward the old church building and the front entrance of the graveyard.

  Then I stopped short before I reached the front gate.

  Or, rather, the place where the front gate had once been. Now there was just a gap in the chain link, flanked by metal posts.

  Moving closer, I could see where the gate had been removed, not just at the latch, but at the hinges. It looked like someone had used bolt cutters or something similar to snap them off.

  “Uh, Stacey?” I called. “We have a suspicious situation over here.”

  “They're leaving,” Jacob's voice said, startlingly close as he emerged from behind an old tree.

  “Who?” Stacey asked, coming over toward us.

  “The ghosts,” I said. “Right?”

  Jacob nodded. “They're not in a big rush about it, but they're all kind of moving...that way.” He pointed at the empty gap where I stood.

  “Where's the gate?” Stacey asked.

  “Someone took it.” I pointed to the sheared-off remnants of the hinges. “And they weren't happy to just unlock or prop open the gate. They wanted to make sure there was no way it could be closed.”

  “That's...pretty weird,” Stacey said. “So they wanted the graveyard to leak ghosts?”

  “Maybe,” Jacob said. “But I think there's more to it. Just removing the gate wouldn't make them all go out like this, just the most restless and energetic ones. For all of them to go...there must be another aspect of the situation.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “I'm not picking up anything inside the cemetery pushing them out,” Jacob said. “So...there must be something outside the cemetery that's attracting or pulling them.”

  “What kind of thing?” Stacey asked.

  “And where?” I added.

  Jacob shrugged. “All we can do is follow them.”

  “Then let's follow them,” I said, and I walked out the gate, trailing the spirits of the dead to their unknown destination.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Jacob led us away from both the little downtown area and the quiet residential streets, northward along the Peshtigo River. We passed large institutional buildings that sat silent and empty, and probably had since sometime before Christmas—the local school and the affiliated sports stadium, followed by Badger Park, where Stacey had half-seriously suggested we camp for the night. We passed a couple of small wooden buildings there, but these, too, were dark and unoccupied.

  In short, there didn't seem to be a living soul for miles.

  Maybe that was just a feeling, and there were houses tucked into the woods somewhere around us. I didn't see any evidence of it, though.

  The five of us stayed fairly tight together, Jacob and I in the lead since his psychic sense was guiding us, plus I was glimpsing the partial apparitions here and there in night vision as we walked along unlined, unlit back roads.

  Nealon took up the rear; whenever I looked back, he seemed to be touching a different amulet or symbol among the two dozen or so hanging from his neck, as though charging himself up from different sources, or praying to different gods. Another time, he had his shark-tooth sword out, pointing it at the shadows around us as though concerned they would attack. It wasn't really an unreasonable concern, in my experience.

  Sometimes we heard the dead, usually just a moan or phantom footsteps that seemed to trail behind or alongside us.

  Sometimes, one of the dead appeared much too clearly. At one point, Stacey walked up beside me, weirdly close to my side, like she was going to whisper something in my ear—or I thought it was Stacey, until I turned my head to look.

  The girl beside me was about Stacey's size, but her face was badly charred, her eyes black sockets full of crumbling ash, her head misshapen as though the extreme heat had distorted her skull.

  Her fingers were sizzling hot when they touched my arm. They were crumbling gray ash on the outside, but a thin red glow emanated from within.

  I screamed, in surprise more than pain, since I had some insulating layers of clothing to protect me. The sudden casual appearance of the strange face beside me, though, was a little much.

  I grabbed my flashlight and blasted the apparition with
white light. I had to squeeze my eyes shut so the night vision goggles didn't blind me as they amplified the flashlight's intense glare.

  The ghost was gone with a shriek, or at least I couldn't see it anymore when I opened my eyes.

  “What happened?” Michael asked. “Are you hurt, Ellie?”

  “Jacob, where's the one that grabbed me?” I swung my light from one side of the road to the other.

  “It's retreated,” he said. “Sorry I didn't see it coming.”

  “It was a sneaky one,” I agreed.

  Michael looked me over, then kept close to my side where the entity had gotten me, as if to shield me from further attack.

  We kept going, and the ghosts kept leading us northward along an ever-rougher road. We could hear and sometimes glimpse the near-freezing river through the trees on our right; on our left was the park, which was nothing but trees at this point.

  Then I slowed down as I sensed something else ahead.

  “Do you smell...?” I asked aloud, to everyone.

  “Smoke.” Michael nodded.

  “Oh, yeah.” Stacey sniffed. “It's like a huge campfire.”

  “It reminds me of California,” I said.

  As we moved on, the road became increasingly rutted and muddy.

  Then it ended.

  At least, the pavement ended.

  “Uh, I don't recall a dirt road on tonight's menu.” Jacob raised his phone to check his digital map.

  “It's not dirt,” Michael said, kicking at it. “It's sawdust. The whole road's paved in sawdust.”

  “Just like in Peshtigo,” I said.

  “We are in Peshtigo, lady,” Nealon said. He had his long shark-toothed blade out again.

  “Put that thing away,” I said.

  “Yeah, nobody wants to see that,” Stacey added. His sword did look pretty garish, slightly curved with all those sharp teeth—the Polynesian weapon was like a big, deadly smile.

  “I'm talking about before the fire,” I said. “The road was paved in several inches of sawdust because of the big sawmill in town. Sawdust blew over all the buildings. The townspeople had to sweep it out off their roofs and out of their doorways. So when the wildfire came, all these wooden buildings in town were completely coated in sawdust. That's one reason the fire leveled the town so fast. But it makes no sense for the road to be like this today.”

  “I'm not getting a signal,” Jacob said. “My map won't refresh.”

  “I think we're off the map,” I said, as the smoke smell grew stronger.

  “Look up ahead.” Stacey pointed at something that registered as a shapeless green glow in my night vision.

  I took off my goggles to see it with my bare eyes. Somewhere, maybe a quarter mile up the sawdust-covered road, red light glowed softly through the trees, the hue of fire, crackling gently.

  “Jacob, anything?” I said.

  “Yeah, still trying to get a signal,” he said, waving his phone at the sky.

  “I don't mean with your phone,” I said. “You may as well put that away. I think...we're here.”

  Jacob blinked at me, as if confused, then looked at the sawdust road ahead, and the flickering red light. “Oh. That's where they're going, huh?”

  “Looks like it,” I said.

  “What exactly is happening here?” Nealon glared at me.

  “Yeah, I'm with Tucker on this one,” Stacey said. “I feel like you guys are over on page 108 and we're way back on page 74 or something.”

  “It's like the Lathrop Grand,” I said. “A time slip.”

  “No.” Nealon stepped up to the edge where the paved road became sawdust. The constant wind drew little eddies and whirlpools in the dust, like it was powdery sand at the beach. “I've experienced time slips. One time I saw a whole camp of settlers around a campfire. Their wagons were cracked and sun-bleached. Their horses weren't much more than skin and bones. That fire didn't give off much light, just a dead red glow. Just enough that I could see their shriveled-up faces staring into it. And I could see when they all looked at me instead.

  “And another time, I was at a Civil War battlefield, and I started to hear the cannons and the shouts of men—”

  “Let's keep it to one anecdote,” I said.

  “My point is, those time slips came and went pretty quick, and in bits and pieces.” Nealon gestured at the swirling dust road with his shark tooth. “This is too big. And too stable.”

  “Maybe it's just a bigger, longer time slip than we've seen before,” Stacey said. “I mean, thousands of people died here, even more than all those poor soldiers who got treated...and mistreated...at the Lathrop Grand during the war.”

  “That's a pretty big reservoir of negative psychic energy to draw on,” I said. “Like an underground spring waiting to be tapped.”

  “Or a volcano waiting to erupt,” Jacob said, nodding.

  “Or a swimming pool full of gasoline, waiting for a match,” Michael said. I looked at him, and he said, “What? Bad example?”

  “We can only hope,” I said.

  “If this is real, this is a heavy situation,” Nealon said. “A heavy, heavy situation.”

  “Well, thanks for the insight, Marty McFly,” Jacob said.

  “Okay, let's get ready,” I said. “We are crossing the Rubicon here. Last chance to back out.”

  I looked among the group. Nobody backed out.

  “Expect things to get hairy,” I said.

  Then, with my hand on my holstered flashlight, I led the group across to where the road turned to sawdust, toward whatever infernal mysteries and horrors waited ahead.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Clay

  The woman's name, not that it mattered to him, was Brenda Reynolds, and she was thirty-eight years old. He'd learned this much by rummaging through her purse.

  He'd kept her tied up, gagged, and blindfolded, crammed into the floorboard of Michael's truck as they'd driven north through this miserably cold region of the country. It was easy to coerce her into cooperation. He had the strength of Amil at his call, not to mention his own, which could be channeled through Melissa's body.

  Clay was learning all kinds of new tricks.

  The reason, he now understood, was the ring. Designed to capture and control the soul of an innocent, it could do more than that. It absorbed a little of the soul of each person who'd used it. That was its price.

  This meant that Clay, when he wore the ring, had fragments of knowledge and memories going back many centuries, though there were long gaps when the ring had been hidden or deliberately buried and sealed in one tomb or another. It had lately been uncovered by amateur British archaeologists of the nineteenth century, which Clay knew because one of them had later used the ring's power to covertly murder the other.

  Altogether, Amil had accumulated a great deal of blood on his reptilian hands. It amused Clay to sense the boy's helpless reluctance to obey his commands.

  Clay had only begun to glimpse the possibilities. Ancient necromancers had turned ghosts into servants, assassins, even spies. Those arts were long lost in the modern world, it seemed, but the fragments of those ancient sorcerers whispered to him like voices from the ring, filling him with ideas.

  The ideas had led him to research, and finally to this glorious place—glorious despite its inhuman cold. Clay had always been a creature of the heat and sunlight, sipping rum on his veranda while his slaves worked the rows of luscious cotton below, cotton that brought such high prices in the markets of Europe, that had built his fine mansion and supplied him with the daily luxuries and finery he'd required.

  All of that was long past...but Clay was master to a new herd of slaves now. Some he'd captured himself, others had come with the ring.

  Each one gave him added power, like another strip of dry wood added to the fire.

  Tonight, he would gain more than a few added souls. He would gain hundreds, an army of ghosts. And the power to take countless more lives for himself.

  At times, a stray t
hought crossed his mind—what if those old, long-dead souls, with their whispered inspirations and suggestions growing ever more constant, were in some way controlling or manipulating him? What if he was becoming yet another soul bound to the ring, under its sway? What if he was becoming a tool of his tools, as Thoreau had written?

  Then he would consider the delights and pleasures ahead, and discard such musings as distracting.

  He looked down at Brenda, bound on the rickety old floor in front of the crumbling fireplace, where he had quite a blaze going, and the sloping chimney. She was being cooperative, mostly. She had little choice. He'd told her that he'd taken her children, too, and they were being held elsewhere. That was a lie, but it kept her in line.

  Clay would have liked taking the children, too, of course, but the voices in his head, the voices of the ring, had insisted he refrain, that he take only what was needed rather than indulge himself. It had been risky enough to take one captive in the old pickup truck. Throwing roped-up children in the back would surely draw unwanted attention.

  He'd considered stealing her much larger car for this purpose, but that would mean leaving Michael's truck behind, and that wouldn't do. Clay liked wearing Melissa's body, feeling the world through her skin. He didn't want any evidence connecting her to his crimes.

  It was an interesting parallel, he thought, Melissa bound and trussed inside of him while Brenda was in the same physical state on the floor in front of him.

  Clay looked at the two shining jewels in his constellation, the most powerful ghosts he commanded, Amil and Greta, both of them now yoked to him, forced to obey him whether they liked it or not. The ring made slaves of spirits.

  Soon there would be so many more.

  He ascended the staircase to the second floor, stepping over the most broken and rotten stairs, ignoring how the whole staircase wobbled under his weight.

  The upstairs was lit by scattered candles, as well as the upstairs fireplace. The fire there was smaller than the one downstairs, though. It would not need to serve as many purposes as the downstairs fire, and so did not need to burn so large and hot.