-The Immolation Scene
by John F.D. Taff
“From near his heart, he took a rib.
All fires have to burn alive to live.”
“All Fires”–Swan Lake
Ashes…
It’s snowing, the flakes are red, like snow in hell, and Corey thinks they taste of cinders. That’s what spills down his throat when they melt, leaves his mouth raw.
The warehouse before him is in full conflagration, flames leaping from its roof, flicking like reptile tongues from its burst, shattered windows, between the skeletal remains of its façade. He stands apart from the chaos, the twisting hoses, the intent firemen, spinning red lights, far enough to avoid being consumed, close enough to consume it–the roar of the flames, the avid heat, the burning grit.
He can also smell the rich scent, scummy and thick on the ash-laden air, of boiling human fat. He wonders if anyone else smells it, knows what it is.
They were here tonight. The Immolation Scene. I can feel it. I’m getting closer to them.
To her…
* * *
Amy.
She had come to fix his laptop. He’d been typing at home late the night before, trying to finish a report. Nodding off, fire had squirted from his fingers, singeing the Q, W, E and R keys, melting the A, S, D and F keys.
He was still wondering how he was going to explain it when she came in.
Amy’s hair was upswept in a ‘40s movie star style. It was red, the unnatural red of crayons, traffic lights and fire engines. She wore a dark, prim skirt and a severely plain, long-sleeved white blouse that revealed tattoos beneath its shifting edges. Each ear boasted three earrings, and there was a discreet nose piercing that glittered when the fluorescents hit it. Her heavily chewed fingernails were painted dark eggplant.
Corey was as uncomfortable with her quirky beauty as he was with the fact that he had dated her for a while a few months back. The attraction had been instant, over drinks at a departmental party at a nearby bar. Their relationship was swift, torrid, the chemistry definite and mutual.
But after six months, most of which Corey thought were pretty good, she abruptly broke it off. There were arguments, tears…so many tears…
He didn’t understand at the time, still didn’t.
I love you, he told her. Isn’t that enough?
Her answer was No.
You’re not willing to really love, to give yourself to it, let it change you. You’re not willing to let yourself feel anything.
It had been uncomfortable for a while, after the split, working at the same company. But the office was large enough that they didn’t see too much of each other.
“Umm…hi. Someone’s computer not playing nice?” she said, standing in the entry to his cubicle. She carried a small gray case before her, slung around the corner of his desk, holding it before her like a shield.
“That’d be mine, I guess,” he said, blocking her view of the keyboard.
“Mind if I take the captain’s seat?” she said, flicking her gaze across him.
“Sure,” and he leapt to his feet. They stood face to face for a moment; he looked into her eyes, eyes that he still saw in his dreams, eyes that were a beautiful, deep violet…the Technicolor of Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes in old photos, or of bruises, of twilight.
Then she was sitting and he was shuffling behind her, gritting his teeth wanting her to say something. “Usually I get Devon,” he said, as much to fill the silence as to offer a silent thanks to the Gods of IT for sending her instead of Devon (of the too-tight pants and the body odor that smelled of equal parts Big Mac and Axe body spray).
“Well, it looks as if you fell asleep smoking at the keyboard, which is generally considered a bad thing. Not as bad, I guess, as falling asleep in bed smoking, but…”
“You know I don’t smoke,” he said awkwardly.
“Ummm…well, that’s good, actually, because the company pretty much frowns on employees who burn up their laptops while smoking menthols. I’d probably have to report you or something.”
Corey realized that she seemed more nervous than he felt. He saw she was rolling up the right sleeve of her blouse, doing so conspicuously, as if wanting him to notice it and not her words. A magician’s misdirection in reverse.
Her arm was thin and gracile, lovely. The skin was smooth and pale, freckled with moles. Corey was a sucker for moles and freckles.
Then he saw them, and he froze. His mouth went dry and he felt it…that feeling he got when it came…when the fire came…
It was a tingling, a little ticklish buzz just beneath the skin, like the first electric pulse you feel on your lips before you get a cold sore.
She had a few small, red, circular welts across the smooth inner flesh of her forearm, grouped like crop circles.
You might think they were cigarette burns, especially given her hair, the tattoos, the piercings. And you might not be altogether surprised.
But he knew her, knew what he was looking at.
And he was surprised.
He had seen every inch of her closely, carefully. Why had he never seen these before?
Corey grabbed his own arm, felt the first pulse of fire push outward from his skin, singe the hairs there, felt its heat push against the cotton sleeve of his own shirt.
He saw her take notice, watch a small brown pinprick of heat scorch the fabric.
Grabbing the computer, she stood, almost frantically, stepped away.
“I’ll have to replace this,” she blurted, pushing past him. “I’ll move your files to the new one. I can get it to you in about an hour or two, if that’s okay…well, even if it’s not okay.”
Moving into the hallway, she turned, eyed him uneasily.
He slapped at his arm, patting the flame out, patting the flame back into his body.
“I’ll call when it’s ready.”
Corey watched her walk to the elevators, his laptop clamped under the arm still exposed by her rolled-up sleeve.
Corey waited, but she didn’t return.
He went home and sat on the couch, picked at the toppings on his frozen pizza. In his peripheral vision, the images on the television jumped and bucked, shifting colors, shifting lights.
Numb.
On his arm, he coaxed a small flame into being–crisp blue at its base, yellow-white at its flickering tip. He watched it bob and weave there, a tiny dancing wraith, burning his skin, tickling his mind, pleasant and unpleasant.
He thought of her, the burn marks pocking her arm.
Why hadn’t she said anything before?
When he looked back, his entire forearm was ablaze. He saw the skin turning pink beneath the gaseous blue sheet of flame that engulfed it. He stared at the fire in awe for a moment, never having let it come out this far before. He felt the delicious hotness of it atop his skin, beneath it…
…in it.
It was burning him, devouring his flesh, crisping the fine hairs.
He leapt to his feet, waving his arm over his head as if dispelling a cloud of bees. Slowly, the flames sputtered, faded.
Corey breathed heavily, shocked at how far he’d let the fire go. The skin was unbroken, mildly red as if sunburned. He smelled something acrid in the air, saw that all of the hair on his forearm was gone, burned away.
Quietly he went into the bathroom, let cold water run over the scalded skin, then applied a daub of burn ointment from his medicine chest.
When he went to bed that evening, that skin–new and pink and sensitive, burned to life by destroying the older layer above it–felt everything.
* * *
The coffee from the café downstairs sloshed out of the Styrofoam cup. He grabbed a few napkins to keep it from touching the new laptop that sat in the middle of his cluttered desk. Mopping the coffee away, he noticed a small white envelope addressed to him in a loopy, girlish hand.
Corey took the envelope and, impulsively, smelled it. A faint air of flowers hung about it, made his skin tingle. A
small card tipped into his palm when he ripped the envelope open.
If you’re still interested…and I am…meet at this address Friday at 9 p.m. We can talk more.–Amy.
Without realizing, he rubbed the new skin of his arm beneath the sleeve of his business shirt.
It was going to be a long week getting to Friday.
* * *
Corey steered through a section of the city he’d never been in before. It was almost 9 p.m., and the streets were lit only by the orange glow of dusk-to-dawns perched high above the pavement.
A figure stood beside the closed door of the building that matched the address on the card. The man barely looked at him as Corey pushed the heavy door open, stepped inside…
…a carnival, for that is what it seemed.
The space was enormous, industrial, dark. It seemed to recede into shadows that were moving, punctuated by lurid, red bursts of light. People filled the space, easily 100 or more, men and women of all ages, races, and shapes.
And the smell…the smell he would associate forever with them, the Immolation Scene. Like any bar, it smelled of close bodies, stale beer, the tang of lemons and limes, cigarettes. But there was something more, something at the back of all this, behind it, yet looming in its presence.
It was heavy on the air the way a campfire or fireplace is if you’re sitting too close; piney and vaporous, as if you were inhaling the soul of what had burned, a thing too tenuous to carry with it an actual aroma, only a hint.
Below this, the scum, the oily smear of something…
To his left stretched a bar, slick wood and dirty brass. She was there, at the bar, draped over a seat. He noticed her bare arms atop the slick, dark bar, noticed the numerous small dots of red that freckled her flesh.
Her violet eyes sparkled like amethysts.
“You came,” she said, and it sounded to Corey less like surprise than a simple acknowledgement.
“Sure,” he said, sidling up to her. “You thought I’d stand you up?”
“No,” she said, her smile enigmatic. “I knew you’d come.”
“How’s that?”
She said nothing, reached to him, took his arm in her two pale hands. He shivered a little as her nails touched the skin of his wrist, undid the button of his shirt cuff, peeled it back to reveal the skin of his arm, still raw, red from the other night.
Exposed, he could feel the goose bumps she raised with her breath, the dangerous sharpness of her nails as they raked his flesh. She ran her fingers in a slow, looping curve up the swell of his forearm, and Corey nearly gasped in pleasure.
His arm twitched, and she giggled, letting loose of it so slowly, so gently he almost felt as if she were reluctantly passing its ownership back to him. He blinked, rolled the shirtsleeve back down.
“How’s that?”
A hand drifted up, pushed at a curl of hair near her temple, toyed with it in that most common of flirtations. Corey smelled the hint of her perfume, violets perhaps…or roses, gentle on the air in the narrowness between them.
He chose to believe, for no other reason than the color of her dense purple eyes, that it was violets.
“How come you never told me…never said anything?”
She considered that for a moment, toyed with a drink on a coaster, sighed. “How come you didn’t?”
A thousand answers flashed through his mind. Instead, he asked, “So, how did you know?”
Amy stirred at the slumped, yellowed ice in her glass. “Not too difficult, really. Just look for melted laptops. It’s a sure sign. Besides, there were those flames on your sleeve.” She nodded toward his arm. “It feels a whole lot better if you do it with someone else. Believe me, I know.”
Corey’s brows gathered in the center of his smooth forehead.
“Wikipedia defines spontaneous human combustion as ‘the burning of a living human body without an apparent external source of ignition.’ That frakked up computer, those burns on your shirtsleeve,” she let her voice fade.
“Yours, too?”
She smiled. “Wikipedia also says its victims are mostly lonely people,” she looked down at the bar, swirled a finger atop its pitted surface. “Are you? Lonely?”
Corey considered that for a moment. He had friends, a life. Since he’d split from her, he’d been out on the occasional date. But he also thought of the evenings at home on the couch, the cold meals, the long nights alone in his rumpled bed.
From all of these, it was her that was missing.
“So what is this place?” Corey swallowed, flexed his still tingling arm, looked around.
Amy tilted her head. “A place.”
“Does it have a name?”
“Not really. It’s just a place we meet. We meet at a lot of different places.” She shrugged, lifting the glass and tilting a melted chunk of ice into her mouth.
“Who’s we?”
Watching him carefully, certain that he was paying full attention, she pushed the chunk of ice to the front of her mouth with her tongue, caught it between her teeth. Another tongue, this one of fire, darted from her mouth, melted the ice cube almost instantly. A puff of steam escaped between her lips, and she smiled, giggled again.
“People who want to feel things…feel life. You know…one of us.”
“One of us? What are you? Magicians? Carnies?”
Amy laughed hard at that, taking in the dregs of her drink, and setting the glass onto the bar. “Are you a magician? A carnie?”
Corey shook his head.
“Then you’re one of us,” she said. “We’re, like, made for each other.” She looked up suddenly, her violet eyes dark as wounds in the dim light of the bar. “But I’m tired of the tears, Corey. So, how far?”
“How far what?”
“How far are you willing to go…this time? How much of yourself are you willing to give?” Her eyes focused on him. “How much are you willing to feel?”
Corey blinked, not sure of what she meant…then sure of what she meant.
“As much as I need to, I guess.”
She considered this for a minute, weighed it.
“Okay, buy me a drink and I’ll show you around.”
* * *
Amy led him, her arm entwined in his, and she felt soft and warm. The new skin of his arm tingled as she rubbed against it, maddeningly painful and sensual at once. And she seemed to know, because she held her body close as they negotiated the crowd.
She seemed to have a destination in mind as she pushed through the crowd, leading him. As they progressed, Corey took in his surroundings.
Here, a man stood on a small platform, shirtless, bearded. A blazing ring encircled his head, forming a crown that burned white and gold. From his eyes, flames guttered. His hands were outstretched, palms facing the crowd, more flames, blue and violet, dancing atop his fingertips. He was talking, reciting poetry, his voice sonorous, enchanting over the rush of the conflagration. His gaunt appearance and blank eyes were startling, like a prophet of the apocalypse.
There, a woman, also topless, hair swirling as if caught in an underwater current. A necklace of fire crawled across her chest, her shoulders, a thin string of blue flame beaded with balls of orange the size of marbles. The whole thing moved, orbited her body, rolling across her flesh. Her face was raised, rapturous eyes cast to the dark ceiling. Corey could see their whites.
Barely visible through the crowd, a man and woman stood nude on a slightly raised dais, entwined, the entire circular platform rotating slowly, affording the crowd a changing view of the couple.
Amy’s tug on him lessened, and he realized that she wasn’t watching the couple, she was watching him…his reaction.
The couple was completely enshrouded, burning fiercely. Flames rose from their heads, squirted between their lips, followed the line of leg, the curve of hip. Rose-colored, amber, orange, jet-blue tinged with jade green, the blaze moved about them, sensuously, avidly, sinuous and alive.
Corey could feel the heat from the perfor
mance, could hear the flames crackle, the whoosh of the air that fed them like an open, uncontained furnace.
He turned to Amy, leaned into her, the sounds, the permeating smell of ash, the greasy smell of roasting flesh overwhelming his senses. She reached to touch his face.
He sensed, rather than saw, the corona of flames that surrounded her hand, felt its heat as it neared his face.
As if she had drawn it forth, a tuft of fire erupted from his cheek, guttered there in anticipation of her fiery hand.
When it came, when her enflamed hand softly caressed his cheek, the entire side of his face burst into luminous blue-green, covering it like a caul.
He watched her through these flames, watched her smile, watched her close her eyes and move in to kiss him.
Only then did he feel the heat…really feel it.
He pulled away from Amy, thrust her roughly from him.
Corey brushed at the flames. The skin of his cheek stung, throbbed.
Amy’s eyes searched his; something deep, pleading swam in them. He allowed her to press against him, allowed her to find his lips again. They were chapped, hot. He felt pressure building inside his skin, but willed it to stay down, stay inside.
They kissed, and this time he kept his eyes open.
They kissed and he saw the couple on the stage, now extinguished, saw them naked of their fire, saw the burns and scars and weals that covered their bodies, the raw, red skin, the charred flesh of thigh, of palm, of chest.
They kissed again, and Corey closed his eyes.
* * *
When he awoke, he stared at the ceiling for a minute, trying to figure out where he was.
Amy’s place. He recognized the crack in the ceiling, the muted street sounds through the closed window of her apartment.
He felt it as he moved, the sheets sliding over his body…that tingling, pain/pleasure sensation that raced electrically across him, across his new skin…
…new skin burned to life from the old.
He quietly rose from the bed and padded into the bathroom. The door closed with a gentle click, the light came on with another.
Horror Library, Volume 5 Page 4