Sacred Fire

by Tanai Walker

  Before I could open my mouth to object, one of the kids pulled the neckline of his T-shirt over his nose.

  “H-One N-One,” he shouted.

  The other kids stepped back, shrieking, “Swine flu, swine flu. Cooties.”

  I followed suit, alarmed at their sudden clamor. The girl retreated reluctantly. Still scowling, she removed a deck of cards with the same sun lion logo from her pocket. The girl flipped through the deck and removed a card, then tossed it onto the dead possum. The flies hovered above the carrion in a dense, humming cloud. Curious, I peered down at the picture on the card. It glittered with stars and read: Soul-Recycle! Transmorphation!

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “It’s a Sun-Monster card. It’s a death card so the Snake Cat can come back as Viper Cat.”

  “Viper Cat,” some of the other kids echoed.

  “How strange,” I said under my breath as they gathered themselves and their bikes. I began to walk back to the car. The soulful-eyed kid circled me on a mountain bike way too big for him. He stretched out one arm toward me. In his hand, between two fingers, he held another one of the colorful cards.

  “Take it,” he said.

  I hesitated.

  “Take it,” he insisted. “Go on.”

  I took the card and studied the graphic. It featured a lanky, brown-skinned man in a lab coat, with a rooster-red pompadour coiffed into a single red curl over his forehead. He had one eyebrow cocked, and round spectacles perched on the end of his nose. He could have been my anime caricature.

  I grinned despite myself.

  “It’s Professor Swiggleslock,” the boy said. “His specialty is alchemy.”

  “Alchemy?” I laughed. “How does a little thing like you know about alchemy?”

  “He changes the monster’s elements,” the kid said as he pedaled away fast to catch up with his friends.

  I climbed back into the Volvo, tossed the card onto the dashboard, and used the remote to open the gate and garage. The door rolled down behind the car and shut out the bright light of the day. It was good to be home, in my dark, quiet, stuffy garage. I slipped out of the car and quickly gathered my suitcase and carryall from the trunk.

  I walked the short, covered breezeway that connected the house to the garage and let myself into the kitchen. I tossed my keys on the counter, and tapped the code into the pad for the alarm system. Beyond the kitchen was once the vestibule—now the living room—where the congregation once sat in their oiled wooden pews. I had restored one of the pews myself, and it sat against a wall near the front door.

  A staircase led to the second floor. A short hallway led to my bedroom, bath, and my office. I parked my suitcase in the hall and took my carryall to my office, the largest room on the second floor. The desk where I kept my workstation was a stainless steel, L-shaped behemoth I admired in the showroom for its efficient look, but hated once I got it home. Half the desk was designated for sketching, the other half for three panels of computer monitors and two PC towers.

  There was still plenty of time left for a little alone time before giving Sandra a call. I removed the new postcards from my satchel and scanned them into digital copies to be saved on a memory stick. The originals would go with the others, locked in a small antique rolltop desk. Before stashing them away, I lined them up on the desktop like a child introducing old dolls to new ones.

  The first of the postcards I had ever acquired, the pride of my collection, featured a woman who looked to be dressed in a shining Egyptian-styled costume. A gauzy skirt hugged her hips; the sheer fabric revealed her sex between parted thighs. A metallic-looking girdle began at her midriff and stopped below her bare breasts. On her head rested a massive headdress that circled her face like a halo, with horns protruding from the sides. She wore shining plates on her shoulders and an array of bangles and bracelets on her outstretched arms. One hand held a crop, the other a flail.

  I called her the Golden Goddess.

  When I was a teenager, I found the photograph and two others of the same woman inside a copy of Justine by the Marquis de Sade. Since that summer, I have studied the images and wondered who she was and why I have been looking for her in all the others I have collected. My fingers trembling as if I was fourteen again, I took the Golden Goddess and the reclining girl purchased from Cosmo to my sketching area. I turned on the lamp and lay them side by side.

  The same heavy-lidded eyes stared back at me from both photographs, seeming to challenge comparison. Their secret half-smiles were identical, so slight they seemed to be water-colored on in some clever turn-of-the-century photo editing. The breasts were small and pert, the nipples dark.

  The same girl.

  I went to the rolltop and put the pictures away. The desk looked like it would be hard to move, but there were wheels hidden beneath. I easily pushed it away from the wall and removed the framed Kalmakov print of his interpretation of Astarte. The wall there was blank save the outline of a door. I pushed the left side of the panel, and it turned to reveal a small room. A motion-sensor fluorescent light flickered on.

  The room was a ten- by ten-foot cell with a floor and padded white walls. A small table and chair waited in the center of the room. On the table sat a black projector and a laptop. I booted up the computer and projector and ported the memory stick. I activated a screen to slide from a compartment mounted to the ceiling. With the push of another button, the lights dimmed. From speakers mounted on the walls a selection from a local string quartet began to play its dark, moody music. I settled into the chair.

  The slideshow started. My face flushed hot from the usual pangs of shame. This was my sanctuary. Nothing could touch me here. I unbuttoned the fly of my jeans and slipped my hand between my thighs, beneath my underwear. I kicked off my shoes, as they felt tight and uncomfortable suddenly. As the postcards flashed on the big screen, I visited with each of them, one at a time, the girls I had collected over the years, staring at me through time. My Golden Goddess appeared, her arms stretched out, with her crop and flail.

  The music reached its crescendo, and I followed soon after. The slide show ended with the Golden Goddess without her regalia, reclined on cushions. Perfection. I gazed at her until the screen went black, her image burned as a negative afterimage into my eyes. My heart hammered in my chest, and I attributed it to the excitement of my activities. I sat up and took a few deep breaths. Though the room was cooled by several vents, sweat dripped from my temples, and the wetness in my pants increased with sweat. I straightened in my chair, and a wave of pain bent me over. Every muscle in my body seemed to spasm at once, while my bones trembled as if threatening to leave my body.

  I cried out and eased myself to the floor.

  The change. The curse.

  It could not be. The beast had never manifested itself until midnight of the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year. Then again, how could anything so strange and otherworldly be on a fixed schedule?

  The pain receded slowly. The power of it always took me by surprise. The worst part was the fleeing of my consciousness like black water down a drain. It didn’t happen this time, and I hoped that it meant the change wouldn’t come until its appointed time.

  I began to stand slowly, not sure of my balance. Halfway up, I happened to look down at my feet. The sight turned my legs to rubber, and I fell on my ass.

  Just below my toes, two thick patches of coppery hair had grown on the tops of my feet. I gasped and shook them briskly as if the hair would just fall away. I folded my leg to examine the new growth and found it coarse and bristly. I tugged at it a bit and sucked in air at the pain.

  “Oh shit, oh shit,” I muttered and began to pace the small area. I could never get used to the transformation. That year made my fifth cycle, the third here in the safety of my house, locked in the hideaway room for seven days and seven nights, hardly conscious of anything but a clinging, desperate loneliness.

  I left my padded room and replaced the desk and the Kalmakov pri
nt. In the rolltop, I kept my journal. The book didn’t document my daily life, but the cycle I had been cursed with since the age of fourteen. The last entry was dated nearly seven years before, July fifteenth.

  The dreaded seven days has come and gone once again. As usual, there is little memory of the previous week past the moment I locked myself in. A close call this time. The change came upon me fast on the evening of the sixth. Barely made it to the safe room. I do not know who to thank that it held. I feel tired and achy and may take an extra day from work to recover.

  I read back to my second cycle, when I decided to document the change. The first page of the book was titled “Signs.” It was a list of symptoms that preceded the change.

  Nausea

  Racing pulse

  Slight fever―worsened as transformation day approached

  Heightened sense of smell

  Pain in joints and muscles

  Fatty food cravings (body fat greatly reduced before and during transformation)

  Strange impulses

  I thought of Sandra. As much as I wanted to see her, I was too rattled to be of much company. Then there was the risk. I padded out of the room to find my phone. There was no text message from her, so I sent one of my own.

  Can’t do dinner. Not feeling well. Sorry. See you Monday.

  She answered right away: Whoa, that was sudden. I’m beginning to think you’re avoiding me.

  I texted back: Of course not.

  I paced around the room until my phone chirped again.

  You’re full of it Tinsley Swan. See you Monday.

  For once, I wished that I were, that I could go out to dinner with her and bring her home to stay the night. Hell, she could stay forever if her presence would ward off the beast. But I could never have that. I could take lovers in between the cycles, but there was always the fear I would meet one and not want to let go, that I would attempt to lie to her on that seventh week of that seventh month of that seventh year. There was the chance the beast would come and devour some poor woman in the night, leaving me in a bloody bed to sort it all out.

  I turned my attention to my feet and let out a dry laugh of relief. The patches of hair had vanished just as mysteriously as they appeared. After inspecting my feet closely, I put my shoes back on. None of this mattered. Soon, the change would take over me, as it would every seven years for the rest of my life.

  Chapter Two

  For the remainder of the weekend, I stayed cloistered in my home, close to my secret room, just in case the beast returned. I felt tired, achy, and restless. After a nearly sleepless Sunday night plagued by dreams I did not remember, I woke feeling somewhat myself.

  Usually, working from home was no problem, but the medical illustration studio I worked for had recently been swallowed up by a larger firm. Being the longest tenured employee, corporate handed down an art director title, which meant longer hours and less time in my home office. Grateful not to be in my early forties and searching for a job in this economy, I complied.

  Armed with a thermos of strong tea, I made my way straight to the conference room for a nine a.m. meeting, the first since the finalization of the acquisition of Zidonis Medical Publishing by OddDuck Studios.

  I said hello to everyone and took my seat on the right side of the long mahogany table, and quietly sipped my tea as I listened to the creatives and the executives talk about their weekends. There were three of us salvaged from Zidonis, me and two guys, both named Bill.

  The rest of them were OddDuck people, young, hip, and chatty. They were the types who went to music festivals to see obscure bands and attended food truck tastings. I cooked at home to avoid eating out alone, while the Bills were both married with college kids.

  I shifted in my seat. Someone was wearing way too much aftershave, an oppressively masculine scent that made my eyes water slightly. I straightened and rolled a foot away from the conference table, slowly, so no one would notice. I glanced around the room at the faces of my colleagues. None of them seemed to be bothered.

  “Sandra’s late,” someone remarked.

  I gulped down my tea and considered stepping out for a brief breath of fresh air. A tug at my elbow, and I turned to face Bill Macy, who grinned wryly.

  “You don’t look so hot, Swan.”

  I wanted to tell him that I didn’t feel so hot when a new smell assaulted my nostrils. It was the moist smell of decay as if Bill Macy had eaten roadkill for breakfast.

  On the other side of me, the other Bill, Bill Sands, whispered conspiratorially, “Hit the bottle too hard last night, Tinsley?”

  I smelled alcohol-tinged sweat and whiskey fumes. Someone had indeed imbibed, and Bill and I both knew it hadn’t been me.

  “I’m fine,” I managed, but the smells were multiplying like a chorus of whispers. Coffee, hair products, leather, polished wood, ink, starch. The beast had come through without so much as a warning pang to share its sense of smell. I stiffened in my chair, prepared to bolt at the first sign of the beast’s physical approach. In seconds, I felt dizzy to the point of lip-numbing nausea. A dull throb bloomed from a bud of sharp pain behind my ear and slowly claimed my sinus cavity and right eye.

  Then Sandra Ortega, creative director of OddDuck’s brand-new Houston studio, stepped into the room. She wore a short-sleeve pearl-colored dress that twisted at the neck and hung lower on the right side, revealing her delicate collarbone. Her honey-brown hair, expertly highlighted with blond streaks, hung between her shoulder blades in a ponytail. She brought with her the smell of good, subtle things like fruit and flowers and face powder. She scanned the room, her eyes falling on me last.

  “Good,” she said blandly. “Everyone’s here.”

  A murmur of good mornings echoed throughout the room, and my new boss, and lover, waved them away as she sat at the head of the conference table while she finished a text message on her smartphone. Her scents gathered around her like an aura. I tried to focus on them, ground myself in them. I thought of watching her asleep in my arms. My heart began to hammer in my chest, and suddenly, it was too hot in the room.

  Sandra raised her head and flashed everyone a perfectly capped smile. She spoke with a smoky, sugary South Texas drawl that could cajole or cut like a knife.

  “What have we got, people?”

  One of the younger designers pointed a remote control at a projector mounted to the ceiling and flicked off the lights. When he passed me, the smell of sickish sweat trailed behind him, breaking my focus on Sandra. My only line of defense crumbled to bits, and the world seemed to cave in on me in the form of scents.

  A screen glowed blue on the opposite wall. The illustrated image appeared: a caduceus with two serpentine ducks wrapped around the staff in the place of snakes. The words OddDuck Medical Multimedia swirled around the new logo.

  Everyone applauded halfheartedly. The young man looked pleased with himself. There were more slides and talking. I hardly heard any of it. My head throbbed, and it felt as if all the smells would strangle me.

  I stood slowly, determined to make my exit as smooth as possible. The light in the hall nearly blinded me, and I stumbled forward to the nearest ladies’ room.

  It was blessedly immaculate and silent of any activity. I went for the sink and turned on the cold tap. I bathed my hands, dashed two palmfuls of cold water on my face, and watched my dripping, panting reflection in the mirror. I felt drained. My skin, usually the color of toasted ginger, looked more like blanched almonds. I slowly sighed out a breath, and inhaled.

  A familiar pain streaked from the base of my spine to the base of my neck, and the throb in my head accelerated. My ribs buckled inside my chest and rippled at my back. A moan escaped my throat and echoed off the tiled walls and floor.

  I felt my shirt tighten around me, the collar constrict around my throat. With a fumbling hand, I tugged at the fabric. A button popped against the mirror and ricocheted onto the counter.

  My knees buckled, and I leaned on the sink to keep my balance
, gripping the rim with hands stiffened into claws from the agony.

  The beast was coming, and I was nowhere near home and my secret room. I needed to hide. I let go of the sink and crawled backward to the stall behind me. I managed to prop myself onto the toilet and lift one cramped leg to close the door.

  My panting came quicker now, and I was burning up with fever. The leather of my loafers began to creak with strain. I slipped my feet free. They had sprouted copper hair, the same shade as that on my head. Curved black claws grew before my eyes. I checked my hands to find them in the same state. Hair peeked from my cuffs.

  The hinges on the restroom door squeaked. I held in my short, shallow breaths and waited.

  High-heeled shoes clip-clopped toward the stall where I sat. The heels were on the feet of familiar caramel-colored legs.

  “Tinsley Swan,” she said. “If you weren’t feeling well, you should have stayed at home.” She stopped before the stall. “Are you dead in there?”

  I felt pretty damned close. I opened my mouth to speak, to tell her I was fine and she should go back to the meeting if it wasn’t over. A raspy growl came out instead of words.

  “Tinsley?” Sandra asked. “Why are your shoes off? Tinsley?”

  She could not find me like this, her lover, a hideous beast.

  “Go.”

  I was barely able to form the word, and it sounded more like a bark. I tried again.

  “Go.”

  The stall door swung open, and there stood Sandra clutching her smartphone. Her eyes widened when she saw me, her jaw hung open, and a bleat of terror rang out from her tanned throat.

  She slapped her hand over her mouth and stared for a moment. I was helpless under her scrutiny. Frozen.

  She kneeled next to me, on the ladies’ room floor, in her white dress. Her phone fell to the tiles with a clatter. Her hand left her mouth, and she whispered my name, then used the hand that stifled her scream to touch my leg. I jumped. Sandra gasped, startled.