If it was destined to be snuffed out with as little ceremony, it would take its would-be murderers with it.
It spun down the street in a ball of fire, burnt brick and charred corpses left smouldering in its wake. It rose up to look over the rooftops, and saw the sprawl of people was everywhere—but so was the amber glow of fire. The sky was full of smoke, countless fires belching blackness as it consumed a city desperate to stamp it out. Everything was there for the taking, and the wind was on its side. It would feast well tonight.
The sprite cast off the memories of its former life and danced.
Permanence
Dusty Thorne
MARCUS HEYES BEGINS his new job as a furnace operator at Phoenix Mortuary much like many people begin the first days of a new job: damp around the collar from a nervous sweat, tidy to a fault, and afraid to be seen as foolish, for he has no predetermined idea what on earth he is in for. Despite spending years studying funeral rites and practices to work at a job like this, he knows the real thing is never quite like what can be gleaned from classrooms, nor from the shiny, lacquered pages of mass-produced instructive pamphlets.
For the purposes of being shown around his new workplace, he is paired with one of the owners, an elderly man with more wrinkles on his head than hair follicles. Mr. Jamie Light does not seem young enough to still be working hard labour, but Marcus knows enough about life to realize he cannot possibly know the circumstances that bring people to where they are. As such, he merely listens and nods politely as Mr. Light shuffles around beside him through the building, the rubber tip on Mr. Light’s long, white cane tapping out an unsteady rhythm against the gleaming, blue tiled floor below their feet.
Much to Marcus’s relief, the crematorium in the basement of Phoenix Mortuary is both well lit and utterly pristine. Every visible surface is free from rust, funny smells, or powdery coats of dust. In fact, despite this being a place where the deceased are brought to their final rest, Marcus genuinely believes the entire building is quite possibly even cleaner than the various restaurant kitchens he worked at while still in college.
When he mentions this to Mr. Light, the old man shrugs a brittle shoulder in a slow, deliberate motion, like an iceberg jaggedly slipping from the glacier it has remained attached to for millennia.
“S’pose it is,” Mr. Light croaks in a cigarette-tired voice, and when he smiles, Marcus sees that the old man has several missing teeth, all but one of them filled in with golden crowns. “We pride ourselves on keeping the dust we make in its rightful place.” With a tremulous, arthritic hand, Mr. Light gestures to the shelving units that are set up in various locations throughout the crematorium, each stacked to the ceiling with either brown or navy blue cardboard boxes. On each box are labels with dates printed on them that begin in modern times and lead back to the early 1960s. “Of course,” Mr. Light continues, “there is some grey area.”
“Remains of the deceased?” Marcus asks, and then sucks his lips between his teeth when Mr. Light nods. Marcus isn’t sure how to judge his own reaction to this confirmation, except to perhaps be a little embarrassed by it. When he’d been a pallbearer at a different funeral parlour during his senior year at college, he’d occasionally have cause to enter that funeral parlour’s crematorium, but there is something unique about knowing he is now going to be working in a place where the dead literally line the walls around him.
“Mm-yep.” The rubber tip of Mr. Light’s white cane squeaks as he hobbles over to the nearest shelf, and then pulls the lid from one of the navy blue, hat-sized boxes. “Generally, we either give ’em to the families, or else scatter the ash in the big pond outside, but if the families want ’em kept here, we honour the request. You wanna see?”
Marcus prides himself on having a relatively strong constitution, but still he treads carefully across the cold, tiled floor as though approaching a wild, skittish animal when he peers into the box. Inside, there is a clear, plastic bag, and inside that bag are a few handfuls of silvery grey, fine dust.
“Not much left of us at the end, huh?” Marcus comments, as Mr. Light closes the box and slides it back onto its shelf.
“Nothing but the memories we manage to get out there in the big world before we go,” Mr. Light says. The old man does not sound troubled, only matter-of-fact. Although there is no dust on his hands from the box, still he brushes his palms together several times and then points to where a large, glass-doored furnace is mounted in the wall at the far end of the room. “Let’s hope you like fire! Lemme walk you through what you’ll be doing here, okay, sonny?”
Marcus smiles. Though the room is a trifle chilly, Mr. Light’s kind personality seems to warm it. “Sounds good.”
Mr. Light’s knobby, wrinkled hand lays gently on his shoulder, guiding him over to the wall. With Marcus not entirely sure which of them is supporting who, together, they walk.
“It’s mostly like a normal job,” Mr. Light assures, as he reaches under a table holding a large, metal tray and pulls up a long-handled brush, like a fireplace poker, only with bristles at the end. He hesitates for just a moment, frowning at the floor, but then visibly shrugs away a thought he doesn’t voice. “Well. With a couple’a noteworthy exceptions, it’s pretty normal, but that part’s separate from your job description anyway, so you don’t gotta worry about that.”
THE WORK DOES end up being relatively routine. After funerals on the ground level of Phoenix Mortuary are done, coffins are guided down to the crematorium in the basement on metal lifts. Once there, they are placed inside the large, glass-doored furnace of the crematorium for two hours. Mostly, Marcus does not even have to look into the coffins before burning them, so long as the paperwork checks out.
Marcus mostly works nights, and after some settling in, he eventually averages about three cremations every work shift. Despite the nature of the job, he is surprised to find the work is actually quite relaxing. When he’s not using the long-handled, metal brush to clean the inside of the furnace between cremations, or taking what remains in the furnace that did not become ash over to a secondary, crushing machine to complete the cremation process, he mostly tends to the operations and paperwork side of things. When he’s not doing any of that, he reads books in the odd, two-tone glow of the firelight streaming through the smoke-stained glass window of the furnace at his back and the stark, white florescent lights above his head.
There are nights that are more upsetting than others, nights when Marcus is brought the small coffins of babies or young children, or the nameless coffins of homeless people who had been designated the state’s problem after no known family could be discovered. Other times, Marcus will be reading his book with his back to the furnace when a sudden chill will run through him. During these moments, a reflection in his eyeglass lenses catches a split-second of motion behind him, or he hears a soft, whispery sound.
Generally, something shifts in the furnace soon after, casting flickering shadows and a crunching whiff of dispelling gas within the flames, and then Marcus will remind himself that coffins collapse as they burn, and go back to his book.
However, some nights his spine remains cold, no matter that he always keeps it turned towards the furnace. On those nights, Marcus has to tell himself even more insistently that the mind is capable of playing all sorts of tricks on a person who is alone in a place like this, especially in the middle of the night.
Logically, Marcus knows that nothing can live inside fire, least of all the dead, but this knowledge does not always lessen the cold, nor muffle the strange, echoey sounds of combustion within the smoke, which sometimes sound eerily like something crunching through bones.
MR. LIGHT ALTERNATES working as a funeral director and a furnace operator, but only ever works the day shift, so Marcus usually finds himself entering Phoenix Mortuary as Mr. Light leaves to go home. As Marcus hangs up his coat and clocks in at the crematorium, the two of them exchange pleasantries: Mr. Light asking Marcus about the latest book he’s been burying his nose ins
ide of, and Marcus asking about the health of Mr. Light’s wife, Esther.
“Still as luminous as the day I met her,” Mr. Light will say, with a wide, gold-accented smile. With shaking hands, Mr. Light will slip his arms into his wool coat and then cover his bald head with a bowler’s hat. This he’ll tip cordially in Marcus’s direction before hobbling to the small elevator that will carry him to the exit on the ground floor. “Happy reading tonight, sonny. Don’t burn your eyes lookin’ at the fire.”
Marcus only laughs and replies, “Yeah, as soon as I get everything set up in there, I always keep my back turned, just like you told me.”
Mr. Light nods. It’s just one of those things they don’t teach in books, he’d said with a grim look when he was still training Marcus, adding that no one in their right mind spends a full night looking into a place where bodies are burned, because no one needs the burden of their mind trying to find life inside a corpse.
WHEN IT IS very cold outside, Marcus sometimes has trouble getting the furnace to stay hot enough. When this happens, he has to call up Mr. Light, who sends Esther over because she’s the only one who understands how to get the gas working again.
Esther is an older lady, though not as old as Mr. Light. Her face is wrinkled, but her hair is still naturally a vivid, strawberry blonde colour that falls in waves down her back, and she never wears a coat.
“I don’t ever get cold,” she’d said while laughing, when Marcus asked her about that, and then she’d shooed him out of the building so she could fix the furnace without having to worry about him breathing in gas fumes. “Only when you see smoke rising again from the chimney,” she had said with a wink, “are you allowed to come back in.”
Marcus had asked her if she was worried about herself, but Esther had only smiled without revealing any teeth and then patted the wall framing the glass door to the furnace at her back, saying, “What’s in there wouldn’t dare hurt me.”
THERE ARE A couple other people who work at the funeral home, like Mrs. Burnsen, an auburn-haired, middle-aged woman who minds the greeting desk in the mornings and boasts to everyone who asks that their cremation services use the most environmentally-friendly process that money can buy, and Kara Eld, who wears her bright red hair in tight braids, is about Marcus’s age, and has skin nearly as dark as his.
“I don’t know why we hired you,” Kara had complained to Marcus after his first solitary shift had ended. She had arrived to replace him for the morning shift in the crematorium, and had found him struggling to properly adjust the temperature controls of the furnace. She had shoved Marcus to the side so she could adjust the furnace controls herself, mumbling to herself the whole time about “cold people” quotas.
“I haven’t been told how to fix it yet,” he had tried to explain. “I was trying to figure it out.”
Her manicured, red nails clenching tightly around her hot coffee, Kara had immediately snapped back, “Did you ever think to just ask it to get hotter?”
Marcus hadn’t known how to respond to that, but after a few months Kara had stopped making fun of him and just started calling him their resident “bookworm” instead.
Marcus doesn’t mind that so much. After all, it’s far from being untrue.
Anyway, she makes amazing coffee, and sometimes she shares it with him, even if it is usually so scalding when she hands it to him that he has to wait for over an hour after he gets home to even begin thinking of drinking it.
“SO WHAT MADE you leave the last funeral home you worked at?” Kara asks Marcus one day, as she steps into the crematorium and drops her tasselled purse down on the nearest empty metal tray table.
Still immersed in his book, Marcus jumps at the metallic bang of her bag hitting the tray and feels an uncomfortable heat flush over his chest, followed by the clammy chill of blood draining from his face. Her question is one he doesn’t like being asked. Last time he’d talked about it had been at his initial interview to work here. Even then he had struggled to explain his reasons to Mr. Light, but had been grateful the man had seemed understanding.
“Uh,” Marcus stammers, looking for his bookmark. He sees the corner of it on the floor, sticking out from under a nearby shelf of boxed ashes, crouches to pick it up, and slides it into his book. Though he has an uncomfortable relationship with this particular memory, he swallows his discomfort and offers it to Kara anyway. “Well, when I was a pallbearer there, I dropped a coffin down a staircase.”
Kara puts a fist on her hip and tilts her head at him, her dark eyes squinting as if to say, “Yeah, and?”
“And the coffin opened, and the body fell out.”
Still, Kara remains squinting at him. She doesn’t ask if Marcus had gotten fired for this, which surprises him. She only waits for him to continue, so he does.
“I don’t know what happened, but she—I mean, the body of the deceased—was . . . she was . . . she had caught fire, like spontaneous combustion or something, and even inside the coffin, there was just . . . more fire, everywhere. It burned my hand, and that’s why I dropped the coffin.” He holds up his palm, to show Kara the long, thin line of a burn scar on his palm, which is lighter than the surrounding skin.
Kara’s eyes flicker to his hand, but she does not look surprised. If anything, her face seems to get even more impassive, more forged from concrete than ever before. “And after that happened,” she says, “your reaction was to come work at a job where that happens all the time?”
For just a second, Marcus glances behind him at where a white coffin is burning behind the closed, glass door of the cremation furnace, but then quickly turns away. He shrugs. “It’s not so bad, if you know why it’s happening.”
Kara huffs. She shakes her head back and forth. “It’s only bad when you don’t know, huh?”
Marcus sucks his lips between his teeth, biting them just enough to feel the sting. Wincing, he slides into his coat in preparation to leave the crematorium, making sure his book is secure in his pocket as he nods. His throat is too tight to speak.
Kara watches him for a long moment, and as Marcus tries to walk past her to leave, he notices the air around her is too warm. She grabs his arm. This makes him pause, and then he looks at her, to which she solidly returns and holds the eye contact.
“Did the girl you dropped get back up?” Kara asks him, very quietly. Her voice vibrates with some kind of inner power that makes the room around them seem too small, but maybe he’s just on the verge of a panic attack, and so perceiving things a little oddly.
Marcus swallows deeply, to calm himself. “What do you mean?” he says, faintly. He’s been through enough therapy for this to know the answer, even if it doesn’t feel true when he thinks it. “The girl I dropped from her coffin was dead.”
“Was she?” Kara asks, still holding onto his arm. “Or did the fire bring her back?”
Marcus’s stomach twists at the memory of that young girl, caught in a ball of flames on the staircase outside of the funeral home, her limbs twisting as a sound like a bird’s shrieking howl tore from her throat.
A phoenix, the thought had jumped, unbidden, to his terrified mind.
“Air currents,” his therapists later contradicted him, “or maybe even your own mind, or someone standing near you.”
Kara continues to hold her long, hard look at him, and then she says, very softly, “The next time you’re here, maybe you should look into the fire.”
For just a moment, Marcus does. He sees the flames, and their shadows.
For a moment, they look like wings.
He turns away, mouth dry, and pretends he has not seen what he has seen.
Old Flames
V.F. LeSann
Vatnajökull, Iceland
Research Team Three
February 7th, 2023
WHEN ICELAND WAS formed, Hell should have been taking notes. Fire and brimstone couldn’t compete with a mid-winter storm on an endless plain of blue-grey ice that was just barely older than Alastair.
&n
bsp; Shielding his data screen from the driving snow with a gloved hand, he peered through his goggles at the numbers. Still wrong. Nothing drastic, just enough discrepancy to be annoying. And with the weather getting worse, he didn’t have the luxury of retaking the measurements.
The bitter air was a maelstrom of whirling cloud, turning the rest of the team into grey shapes around him and the icy wind screaming down the glacier had sleet for teeth. It sought out the seams of their jackets and turned Alastair’s beard into a heavy lump of ice.
The cold hardly touched him. Demons ran hot. He could tolerate the storm to recalibrate the numbers, but the rest of the team certainly couldn’t last in this bitter winter chill, and there was the need to keep up appearances, so he let his discomfort metamorphose into a shiver.
“What’s the matter?” Mike bellowed over the roaring wind. “Getting cold feet, old man?”
Alastair’s annoyance over the skewed data boiled into anger. Every team had its asshole, and theirs was Mike. Alastair had established a hands-off policy concerning humans ever since the 1500s, but there was just something about the smirking blond that made him want to drop the guy down a crevasse.
“Speak for yourself,” he yelled back, putting the screen away and trudging onwards. “I love this.”
He did not, in fact, love it. He missed the research station in Hawaii, where he didn’t have to bundle up in a half-dozen layers to keep the heat of his hellfire heart from damaging the environment around him. He missed trekking up to the volcanoes, hiking over miles of sun-baked black rock with a team where everybody’s skin was hot to the touch by the end of the day. But mostly, he missed life without Mike.
Fire: Demons, Dragons & Djinns Page 5