Hellfire

by Jeff Provine

  “She’s called the Auster,” Nate Kemp said.

  “What?”

  Kemp let her go and pointed to a brass plaque at the front of the bridge, near the paper shutters that kept out the chilly wind. “The name of the airship is the Auster.”

  “That’s nice to know.”

  Ozzie reached for his hand and brought it back along with hers to the wooden wheel. As they nudged it, gears whined. They were really steering an airship. “We could call it whatever we like, I think, since it’s ours now.”

  Neither of them said anything for a moment. Ozzie felt the wheels pull in her hands as the huge external engines caught breezes and updrafts. The whole of Gloriana spread out before her, an unmarked map filled with possibility.

  “I wish we could stay like this,” Kemp said from behind her.

  She blinked. “Why can’t we?”

  Kemp made a long sigh. “Something very bad is going to happen.”

  She pulled away from him. “What?”

  He was quiet for several moments before admitting, “I don’t know, exactly.”

  Ozzie stepped between the wheels and into the open room. It was suddenly too much space, and she hugged her arms around herself, scooting the rolled sleeves down her wrists to cover her.

  Kemp was staring at her. “Why’d you go?”

  She stared back. “Because you said something horrible was going to happen, but you don’t even know what!”

  He let go of the wheels and dug his fingers into his red hair. The airship shifted under Ozzie’s feet as the wheels spun of their own accord. She held out her hands to keep balance.

  “It’s not my fault,” Kemp said with a growl in his voice. “The light never told me what, exactly!”

  She had seen the body language many times before. As patients, or anyone really, became confused, it caused them to bottle up more and more inside. She had to calm him down before his temper made him lash out. Especially that near the controls.

  Ozzie walked careful steps toward him and set a hand on his head. “I’m sorry.”

  “What are you sorry for?” he asked, still growling. He lashed the wheels in place with a leather strap. “You’re perfect! You sorted out what I tried to tell you when I was locked up in the asylum, and I…I can’t even figure out what the voice of God is trying to tell me.” He leaned over the podium where the wheels rested and sighed so deeply she doubted he had any breath left.

  Ozzie stroked his hair. It was surprisingly soft and still a little damp from where he must have washed. She made her voice just as soft. “It’s all right.”

  He raised his head slightly, just enough that the edges of his eyes peeked out. “I just told you, it’s not all right. Something very bad is going to happen.”

  She took a deep breath. Patience for patients.

  The monsters had appeared to her, too, so she knew he wasn’t insane with hallucinations, but the weight on his mind was obvious. She had to help him bury it, like she did. “Just let it go. Think about where we are now. Together.”

  He looked up all the way now, his head pulling away from her hand. “That doesn’t seem right.”

  “It is. Think about something else.”

  “No.” Kemp shook his head. He stood up straight. “No, I need to think on it. I have to keep going toward the goal. It’s too easy to be distracted.”

  Ozzie put her hands on her hips. “Am I distracting you?”

  He laughed suddenly, loudly. “You, ma’am, are very distracting.”

  Ozzie’s eyes popped wide open. She took several steps back and crossed her arms again. Her cheeks burned. “You know, it’s not proper for a man to speak to a young lady that way, especially when they’re alone.”

  “I never had much time to worry about ‘proper,’” Kemp told her. He went back to the airship and leaned on the wheels.

  Ozzie hummed. “Proper was all I was ever taught to worry about. My parents constantly reminded me ‘a Jacey does this’ or ‘a Jacey doesn’t.’”

  “Jacey,” Kemp repeated. “That’s not the Jacey of the Jacey & Co. Glove Factory, is it?”

  Ozzie closed her eyes and nodded. She heard Kemp gasp.

  “Your father’s H. Robert Jacey?”

  “Yes,” Ozzie said simply.

  Kemp was quiet. She opened her eyes to find him gaping at her. “What?” she demanded.

  “I, uh, nothing,” Kemp stammered. “It’s just… The Jaceys own whole blocks of Gloriana. What are you doing working in an asylum?”

  “Hospital,” Ozzie corrected him.

  His mouth still gaped.

  She turned away and looked out at the rolling treetops above the bayous. “I’m not going to be one of those prissy rich girls prettying myself every day to land one of my father’s business partners’ sons as a husband. I want to make an impact in the world.”

  “But you don’t have to.”

  “I do have to,” she told him. “I want to accomplish something worthwhile.”

  “No, I mean, you’re rich. You don’t have to work. I’ve never gone a day of my life not needing to figure out how we’ll be sure to make the week’s rent.”

  A lump formed in Ozzie’s throat. She swallowed, covering her mouth with a hand to hide her throat, as a lady should. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Kemp shook his head. “Don’t worry yourself. It’s the way it is for me. I work hard to take care of my family. I don’t regret it.”

  Ozzie sighed. “I couldn’t even imagine working for rent. The hospital gives me room and board in addition to my wages.”

  “Sounds like good work.”

  “It is. I really help people.”

  Kemp smiled at her. “I admire you.”

  She blushed again. “I don’t know that anyone has ever said that about me before.”

  “They should. Most girls in your position would let the servants bring you bonbons all day.”

  Ozzie laughed. She nearly snorted, but she controlled her breathing just as her tutor had drilled into her. “Oh, it’s not that easy of a life!”

  “Do you shovel coal into a furnace for eleven hours?”

  “No, it’s a different kind of work.”

  Kemp hummed. “I’d take it.”

  Ozzie glared back at him. “You would, would you? You’d take elocution classes that make you shove marbles under your tongue? You’d make needlepoints for young men you haven’t even met yet? You’d practice walking with two books on your head? And wear hoopskirts? And corsets! Ha! Eleven hours? Try all twenty-four!”

  “I guess it isn’t all cakes and candy, then.” Kemp looked down at his boots.

  “Hardly.”

  Kemp didn’t look up again. A pit opened in Ozzie’s stomach. How could she whine about carrying books when he moved tons of coal with weary arms? “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to complain, especially since you…”

  He finally looked up. “If it weren’t for the fact that you work in a hospital, I would have trouble believing you.”

  Ozzie pressed her lips together. “I am sorry.”

  He shook his head. “We all have our troubles. But, you’re rich. Why do you work in a hospital of all places?”

  “Because,” Ozzie began. Her mouth kept moving, but her voice stopped.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Ozzie lied. “Nothing. I just thought it would be a good use of my skills, since Gloriana has such a demand for nurses.”

  Kemp’s warm brown eyes watched her.

  She walked carefully to the front windows. The air outside was cool, much colder than it had been on the ground in the June sun. She shivered. He had told her the truth, so she should do the same.

  “Because I was in one.”

  Kemp blinked. “What?”

  “I was in one,” Ozzie repeated. “Not just one, the old hospital. My father put me there.”

  Kemp was quiet. She appreciated it.

  “I fought with my father,” she said, the words stilted as they tried to catch in he
r throat. “He’s a hard man. That’s probably the reason his glove company’s so big.

  “Then there’s me. I’ve always had a quick mouth, as they say. My sisters have no problem with ‘Yes’ and ‘No, never’ for whatever he asked, but I’ve spoken my mind since before I could say clear words. We’ve fought plenty of times, about whether I was to come in to dinner or what dress to wear. Childish things like that.

  “My mother would throw up her hands and have the nanny spank me, but my father would debate with me. He’d say his reasons in his deep, cold voice, and I’d always spit back a hot quip. Even today, they come out before I think about them.”

  The words were hard to say. Yet, as they left her, it was like weights lifting from her chest. She had buried the memories so deep for so long, they seemed to have grown roots into her very soul. She had to pull them out.

  “When I was nine, I was sitting on the stoop outside the kitchen door waiting for our cook, Tabitha, to finish up the biscuits for Sunday breakfast. She always made breakfast early on Sundays so that she could go to the little church the city-slaves had down by the river. Tabitha would sing her songs and tell me stories about Jonah and his whale and all that, and I’d sit there for hours, listening and smelling the sweet cooking.

  “That morning I set it into my head that I should go to church, too. I’d always heard the bells ringing, back before the Office of Standards put a stop to that and only permitted municipal bells. I decided I would go see what all of the ruckus was about. Tabitha certainly wouldn’t let me go to the slave church, and I vowed I’d march down to the cathedral on the city square. That was just about a year before they tore it down.”

  “I remember,” Kemp said. “My mother would take us there every Sunday. I did my best to stay out so late on Saturday nights and have such a hangover Sunday morning that I couldn’t stand straight to walk out of the house, but she always dragged me there.”

  “So you’ve been?”

  “Every week until the city condemned the lot… sinkholes under the foundation or something? Pretty coincidental that they were able to start work on the City Center on the same spot just a couple of years later.”

  Ozzie hummed. “Well, Father had several reasons for me not going.” She puffed out her chest and spoke in a deep voice to emulate him. “It isn’t fashionable for us citizens of the world, a Jacey doesn’t buy into that superstition, it’s all a scheme to get at our money!”

  Ozzie let her air slip out as a sigh and returned to her normal tone. “It became a contest of wills. One time I just left the house without telling anyone and made it almost two blocks before they caught me. I couldn’t sit flat the rest of the day. Finally, my father took me by the shoulders and demanded to know why this superstition had gotten so a hold of me. I told him that he was going to burn in Hell and I was going to laugh at him from Heaven.”

  She winced after she had said it then, and she did again now. Even fifteen years later, she could remember it vividly. Her father was standing over her with his fashionable muttonchops and housecoat; she had already dressed herself in her best dress. Her words were the clueless spouting of arrogant child, but one second after she said it, she realized how mean it had been. Clapping both hands over her mouth didn’t do any good. Her father’s dark eyes seemed to turn darker, though the rest of his expression didn’t change at all.

  “He took me by the arm,” Ozzie said. “It was a long carriage ride out to Oak Grove from our house in Lake Providence. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I knew I had done something very bad. I cried, and I begged for forgiveness, but there wasn’t any to be had.”

  She choked a little and had to swallow again to clear her throat. She covered herself by going to take a seat on one of the long-running benches below the windows. The breeze threw her hair around her face.

  “He turned me over to the warden at the old hospital and said I had to be committed for my wild ideas. It was where I belonged if I was going to keep spouting all that nonsense. Then he left me there.”

  “He committed a child!” Kemp blurted. He fell forward a little, and the airship rocked.

  Ozzie nodded. She hadn’t noticed she had begun crying. The tears were warm as they rolled down her cheek.

  “He did. He left me there, and the warden gave me a private room. For two nights, I slept on the floor with the hay and the mice. I screamed when I saw the first mouse, and I tried to run from it, but there wasn’t anywhere to go. By the end of the third day, they were crawling over my dress, and I let them.”

  Kemp was quiet, but his expression was stern. She appreciated that.

  “I spent my time walking in a circle and counting how many times I could go around the room. When I slept, I tried to sit up so the mice couldn’t get in my ears. Not that I could sleep much since it was so loud with the guards and the patients screaming at each other. The air was atrocious, thick and salty, like I could feel it more than smell it. They fed us gruel and sometimes soup. It wasn’t a lot, but I cried so much that my stomach hurt too badly to eat anyhow.

  “When my father came back to collect me, I swore never to disobey him ever again.” Ozzie paused to bite her lip. “I came home to find that he’d sold Tabitha; our new cook never got the biscuits right, even if she did have all Sunday to work on them...” She squeezed her eyes shut until the tears welling there dried up. When she opened them, she looked up at Kemp. “I don’t know if it is just superstition or what, but I still pray. I prayed Zane Weatherford wouldn’t die. Do you think it helped?”

  “Couldn’t hurt.”

  “But did it help?”

  Kemp let out a long breath of air. He scratched his red hair and then nodded. “I suppose it helps.”

  Ozzie squinted at him. “How do you know?”

  “If you had asked me yesterday, I would have said you’d be better off doing it yourself. I always told myself I didn’t have much time to pray since I was busy solving my own problems.” Kemp himself winced now. Still, he went on. “I did pray, I suppose, when those hellions were bearing at me, after I’d fallen against the tree.”

  “Hellions?”

  “The monsters,” Kemp said. “It’s what Weatherford called them. Biggs and Parv…” He didn’t seem able to finish the short hunchback’s name.

  It was just as well. The image of the creatures stripping off their leather coats to reveal their twisted bodies flooded Ozzie’s mind’s eye. She put her hands around her temples and tried to chase it away. They were too horrible to be real. “Let’s not talk about the monsters.”

  “But, you saw them.”

  “I know,” Ozzie said. She wanted to bury them deep, far from where she would ever think about them again.

  Before he could say anything else, Ozzie sat up and asked, “What did you pray?”

  “I wanted the light to come help me. It didn’t, but you did. You bashed the big one’s head in with a branch.”

  Ozzie winced. “I was so afraid.”

  Kemp looked at her. His copper-bright eyebrows rose, worried. He turned away from her a moment, readjusting the little leather straps that fit onto the pegs of the wheels to hold them in place. When they were secure, he walked across the wooden floor with his borrowed boots thudding.

  He sat down beside her. “Afraid? No, you were brave. You hit Biggs with a log the size of a house beam!”

  Ozzie tucked her hands between her legs. The room suddenly -turned cold as the memory of fighting in the woods came back to her. “I wasn’t going to.”

  Kemp sat silent.

  She thought back to the woods. “I fell behind the brush, and I scooted myself down into the dirt as far as I could. I wanted to help you when I believed I was running from men, but when I saw those… those hellions with their demonic limbs, and the little one with no head… no head!”

  She stopped. Her whole body shook. The monsters had been so wrong, too disgusting to be anything but from a painting of a nightmare. Yet, they were real. All she wanted to do was hide from
them.

  Kemp put an arm around her shoulders and held her tight. The cold seemed to fade, and her body slowed to a shiver. He let her go.

  “I guess there is something to it, even if I did swear off it years ago,” Kemp mumbled. He shrugged one of his shoulders. “I was a bitter boy. Just about anything made my temper go off, and it got me into a lot of trouble. I shaped up a lot after my father died. I started taking a lot of things into my hands then.”

  Ozzie gasped. “Your father passed away? I’m so sorry.”

  “Me, too.”

  Ozzie’s heart sank in her chest. Kemp stared ahead; his eyes were cold, almost like a statue’s. She wanted to go hug him back, warm him, but it wouldn’t be proper. Ozzie turned away.

  “I was going to hide,” she confessed. “When the monsters came after us in the woods. I was going to let them take you away, and I didn’t care what happened as long as they didn’t come near me.”

  Kemp blinked. “But you didn’t.”

  “No.” Ozzie had lain there, too scared even to cry, even to breathe. “All I wanted was to be away from the monsters, and then something told me I had to get up. I had to fight them. I didn’t want to, but I knew I had to. I had to help you.”

  Kemp’s head slowly sagged. He looked away a moment, and then he looked back. Ozzie’s eyes led straight to his brown ones. “You’re my miracle,” he said.

  Her heart skipped a beat. No one had ever said such a thing about her. “What?”

  Kemp didn’t repeat himself. He closed his eyes and leaned toward her, his lips on hers. Ozzie was torn between pulling away and falling into him. She let her eyes roll.

  The sheriff stood at the edge of the hallway. Ozzie gasped and scooted away from Kemp. He stood up quickly.

  “He’s awake,” the sheriff said.

  “What?” Kemp blurted.

  “The man I, uh,” Blake began. He stammered, took a breath, and then said firmly, “The man I shot. He’s awake.”

  Ozzie frowned at him. “And you just left him?”

  “He said he wanted to be alone,” Blake replied. “There’s just something discomforting about being next to the man who shot him, I suppose.”

  Ozzie’s frown deepened. She wanted to hate the sheriff for what he had done, but his kindness wouldn’t allow that. She was still angry, but it was a hollow anger.