Pyrophobia

by Jack Lance

  Since then, death had reared like a monster in Kayla’s mind. She just couldn’t seem to cope with it. Often, when a family member or friend died – such as recently with Uncle Chris – she fell into a deep depression that could last for weeks.

  Ralph’s heart attack was one of the few things Kayla never talked about, despite Jason urging her to discuss it to help bring closure to her. She had let something slip once, something that placed Ralph’s death in a strange light. It still wasn’t clear to Jason exactly what she had meant, but apparently Ralph had predicted his own death not long before it actually happened. He wished he knew more details, especially now.

  He tried to think about other things on his way to Tanner & Preston, but his brain would not cooperate. Foremost among the sea of questions plaguing him was where in God’s holy name the cemetery in the photographs was located. At first glance it looked like countless other cemeteries in the United States. It could just as likely be in California as in Maine. Random guesswork wouldn’t help. His Internet research had yielded nothing, and Lou – to whom he had talked briefly over the phone yesterday – had so far come up empty.

  His head was saturated with questions and void of answers as he followed the Pacific Coast Highway, the azure blue ocean on one side and the pleasant green of the Malibu hills on the other. He didn’t understand any of it. He was staring ahead as he navigated by rote through the rush hour traffic.

  His mind wandered back to his recurring nightmare that suddenly had surged back into his consciousness. Just as all the times before, he could not recall a single event from his past that could explain his pyrophobia. It was simply a part of his nature, in the same way that some people are afraid of heights and others are scared of open spaces. For as long as he could remember, the dream symbolized what he feared most: being trapped by raging flames, unable to escape, having to wait for the inevitable searing pain and a horrible death. As an icy shiver crept down his spine, he caught his breath. Pulling the car off the road and stopping on its grassy shoulder, he forced himself to inhale deeply and exhale slowly, several times.

  Cars sped past him. In the distance, beautiful Santa Monica beckoned. He saw pavilions on the beach and teenagers roller-skating, the more adventurous of them taking a dip in the bracing ocean water. Overhead, a yellow sun shone brightly from a cloudless turquoise sky. Another typical day in the good life of southern California.

  But he wasn’t feeling well. Not well at all.

  Something that had happened a long time ago reappeared before his mind’s eye.

  He is running, zigzagging between trees, branches scraping his skin, tree bark grazing painfully against his elbows. The torches! They are chasing him like terrible beasts with burning eyes. Everywhere was the stench of scorched earth. He leaps over a felled giant of a tree and barely manages to duck beneath a thick branch.

  He is gasping for air. He cannot go on. Desperate now, he jumps over a thorny bush and lands on the hard forest floor. He crouches down on his knees, making himself as small as possible. The glow of the fiery sticks approaches. Then they are floating beside him. The smoke scratches inside his throat. The heat is torture. The stinging smell of the fire dazes him.

  Suddenly he hears voices. Behind the torches. Shrill, yelling excitedly.

  ‘There he is! There! Jason …’

  He draws up his shoulders, wraps his hands around his head and tries to become even smaller, hoping they won’t see him. But it’s too late. The torches draw together in a circle around him. In their glow, he can now distinguish boys’ faces, those of Victor Pringle and Terry Boxall. And behind them Gavin, David and Peter. Victor is grinning wickedly.

  Get the fire away from me, he wants to scream, but his throat is incapable of uttering anything beyond a whispery, wordless squeal. He hardly notices the tears coursing down his cheeks.

  Gavin and Peter yank him up, drag him along. He is their prisoner now. They’re taking him to their camp; the hunters have caught their prey.

  The rest of that evening Victor and his friends torment him. Victor tells everyone who will listen that Jason Evans cried like a baby when he was found. Finally, Jason is the first to crawl into the tent.

  Summer camp can be a nightmare, but the core of the bad dream is still to come. After he falls asleep, he goes to another dark place, where there is another fire.

  It whips out its fiery claws at him. He starts awake and can’t go back to sleep, doesn’t want to. Across from him in the tent, Victor and the others are fast asleep. They don’t know of his fears, nor do the camp counselors.

  Nor does his father, when he returns home to Cornell a few days later. Jason looks Edward in the eye and sees resignation there. Even a holiday camp with his classmates is too much for Jason. Simple things like playing hide-and-seek in the dark send him into a panic.

  But it’s not about the dark. It’s the flaming torches.

  If they hadn’t been brandishing the torches, everything would have been fine.

  His mother urges Edward to cut their son some slack. She’s protecting him, like she always does; in his mother’s eyes he can do no wrong.

  It helps. The nightmare leaves him in peace after he returns from camp. Not that he has shaken the bad dream; little Jason knows that would be too much to hope for. But at least he can sleep in peace – for a while.

  TWELVE

  List

  That Monday morning, July twentieth, Jason invested several hours tweaking and improving the promotional campaign for Tommy Jones. But his heart wasn’t in his work. He wasn’t fond of the Automobile King to begin with, but today he hated him even more than he had thirteen years ago as he watched his red Plymouth Road Runner being towed to the scrap heap.

  He asked Brian for his feedback on the proposal. His boss recognized its strong points, but also its weak points.

  At eleven o’clock Jason convened a team meeting with Barbara, Carol, Donald and Tony to discuss Brian’s criticisms. Carol kept everyone focused and Barbara made some sensible suggestions for small changes here and there. But no one had substantive changes to recommend.

  At noon, Brian asked Jason to join him for lunch with Derek Eccles, a public relations representative for electronics giant Kaufman. Brian referred to such outings as ‘PR lunches’. Brian liked to pamper his best customers with lunch or dinner from time to time, convinced it was the most effective way to keep them as customers. After lunch Jason made a few phone calls and wrote several emails to keep a few current projects on track. The biggest problem that day was rejected text for a brochure touting Sunset Pleasure Paradise, a small chain of outlets that made beach pavilions. First he had to take an angry phone call from the client, and then take up the matter with Tony, the copywriter in charge of the project. Jason knew plenty of copywriters who would hit the roof if their creations were dismissed in such a perfunctory manner. But not Tony. He simply shrugged. ‘Some you win, some you lose, and some are rained out,’ he grunted matter-of-factly, and went back to the drawing board.

  Jason then called Kayla. He needed to know how she was doing. And he just wanted to hear her voice. They exchanged some small talk, without addressing the issue that was aggravating emotional wounds.

  It was nearly three fifty when he put the phone down. Every business item that required attention today had been seen to, so he had time on his hands to ponder the accident, the photographs, and who might have sent them. There was no doubt in his mind that this person knew him. In that case there were quite a few possibilities. But who on this earth would want to kill him? Or simply scare him witless with morbid messages?

  Something else ate at him. If he had died on August eighteenth, why had he received those Polaroid photographs now?

  Why not two years ago? Or five years ago, for that matter?

  Maybe because at that time I wasn’t dead yet.

  It was a bizarre feeling to think about his own demise in the past tense, as if it had already happened. He was alive.

  But that meant he h
ad to assume that someone was planning to kill him on August eighteenth. Or did it?

  He needed answers, but how to get them? Jason decided to go outside and take a walk, to clear his mind before again considering the facts. As he left Roosevelt Tower and started walking along Wilshire Boulevard, he reviewed the facts of the case for the umpteenth time.

  The photographs said what they said. If he interpreted them literally, then he could interpret them only as obituaries. The sender was addressing him, writing about him, as if he were dead, a corpse. The person in question was therefore someone who hated him enough to want him dead.

  Who hated him that much? Jason stopped and put his hands behind his head, knotting his fingers together. Time to draw up a list, he thought. If he did that, what would it look like? Who were his enemies? He thought hard, but no names or faces came to mind. Come on Jason, he berated himself, you can’t really believe you have only friends out there. That’s an illusion, surely. Everyone has enemies.

  Then who? Which names?

  Suddenly he received an inspiration, as if somewhere inside his mind the lid had been pried off a cesspool. Well, well, so even he had made a few foes along the way. And he couldn’t blame them all on his fear of fire, which had cost him a few friends and his break-up with Sherilyn Chambers. But he had made many mistakes before; bad mistakes; he was no angel. Once he opened his mind to such reminiscences, his bad decisions and moments of weakness came bobbing to the surface.

  The first people he thought of who might still have a bone to pick with him were Tracy and Carla.

  His heart suddenly felt leaden. He had opened the door to a Pandora’s box that contained some of his worst memories. It was almost like voluntarily sticking his hand into a wasps’ nest.

  He had not talked to Tracy in years. The last thing she had screamed at him was that men were not to be trusted, and he was the cad who had taught her that. What if he called her? What would he say to her?

  Trace! Hi, I was curious about you. Are you still on a-bottle-per-day plan? Or doesn’t that cut it for you any more? And by the way, did you happen to stop by a mailbox, driving to and from the liquor store the other day? With a manila envelope, maybe?

  No, that would be a bad idea.

  In his mind, he replayed the manifold scenes of his eighteen months with Tracy. She had been his most serious girlfriend at Cal State Northridge. Fair-haired, slim, attractive, lively, intelligent. The world had been her oyster. She gave all indications of a great career in her future. But booze had interfered and messed up everything. What made good people walk into these kinds of traps with their eyes open wide? He hadn’t noticed at first that she was an alcoholic – yes, she drank a lot at parties, but so did everyone else. When her cheap Limestone Creek bourbon and her rot-gut brand of Russian vodka started appearing on the counter within easy reach, she had become hammered almost every night. In her rare moments of sobriety, he had tried talking to her, to no avail. In the end he had suggested Alcoholics Anonymous, and that had been like waving a red flag at a bull. Shortly after that, with nothing left to prop up their relationship, it had caved in.

  Goodbye, Tracy Dufresne.

  The next person on his list was Carla Rosenblatt. He had met her while working for his first employer, DRW Advertising. Jason had been a traffic manager there for fourteen months when Brian Anderson invited him to dinner one night. DRW and Tanner & Preston had cooperated on a number of projects, and Jason had succeeded in impressing Brian. Over an exquisitely tender rib-eye steak Jason was offered a job at Tanner & Preston, for quite a bit more money than he was making at DRW. Even though he had been happy in his current job, the generous hike in pay had convinced him.

  Carla was an assistant art director for DRW and was even more ambitious than Jason. Before he transferred to Tanner & Preston they had had several arguments about starting a family. She usually brought up the subject, to emphasize the point that she wanted to have her cake and eat it, too. She wanted children and a career. She implied that she had no intention of cutting back on her hours, and that her work was more important to her than being a mother. He suggested they postpone the decision for a few years, but that didn’t satisfy her. I don’t want to wake up one day and realize I’m thirty-five years old, only to find you no longer want this.

  And then he had switched to Tanner & Preston. His boss at DRW, Walter Murphy, had sworn that Jason’s decision to change jobs would not reflect badly on Carla. But soon after Jason left she was bypassed for a promotion to art director, a position she had coveted for years. At the same time, DRW cut back her involvement in important projects. Somewhere down the line she was informed in no uncertain terms that if she wanted to advance her career, she had best apply for a position in some other firm.

  Carla blamed Jason, of course. He was flying high at Tanner & Preston, while she was in danger of crashing and burning. Couldn’t he pull some strings for her with his boss?

  He couldn’t, nor did he want to. He had had his fill of her moaning and nagging. He couldn’t deny, however, that he had improved his position at her expense, and that realization had bothered him.

  A nasty break-up ensued. With Tracy it had been a relatively brief process and he had moved on. With Carla it was months before they finally went their separate ways.

  She had done well for herself in the end. Steve, a former co-worker at DRW with whom Jason had remained in touch, had told him she’d had a healthy baby girl the previous spring. Jason had not received a card, of course. The baby’s father, Steve had further told him, was an obedient stay-at-home-husband. And Carla had secured a new and demanding job.

  Jason sighed and wondered who might be next on his list of personal enemies. He remembered Jordan Avins, the man who had taught him the ropes when he first started working for Tanner & Preston, but who had been fired six months later for stealing company property. Not money or anything major; a pen here, a paperknife and printer supplies there. One night, perhaps to mollify his conscience, Jordan had confided in Jason that he was a kleptomaniac. So his stealing had been a compulsion more than petty theft. Avins, five foot two and insecure, had begged Jason not to tell Brian. He didn’t have any friends, he said. There was no one else he could talk to. Jason had kept Jordan’s thievery to himself for several weeks. To make the man feel more at ease, Jason had told him about his own irrational fear of fire.

  But when items kept disappearing, Jason felt compelled to inform their boss. Brian gave Jordan a verbal thrashing and – at Jason’s request – gave him one final chance to mend his ways. But it made no difference. Within forty-eight hours an expensive calculator had disappeared, and when Brian confronted Avins with the theft, Avins insisted that Jason be present when he was officially fired. During his exit interview, the poor man had pleaded with Jason with his eyes. Jason, my friend, I can’t help myself. Please, I beg you, make Anderson understand. But there was nothing Jason could do; Jordan Avins had had his chance and he had blown it. When Jason watched him walk out the front door for the last time, he knew he had gained another embittered enemy.

  Jason shook his head, turned around, and found himself staring into the dark eyes of a skinny young man who had crept to within six feet from him.

  Just then, another doorway into the past opened. Doug Shatz! Doug had been just as slender as this skinny boy, and he had the same sour look on his face.

  Open your mouth! Let’s see your grin, your teeth!

  If Jason could see the chipped tooth, he would be convinced that once again Doug stood in front of him, fifteen years after they had last met.

  A dark cloud seemed to pass over the sun and envelop the young man in shadows.

  He did grin, but he didn’t open his mouth. Then he turned away and ran off without uttering a word.

  As Jason watched him go, he felt a painful cramp in his stomach. The boy had looked so much like Doug. Could it be that—?

  He didn’t finish the conjecture. Of course it hadn’t been Doug. This boy was about sixteen, and
Doug by now was long past that age. More likely, the boy had intended to pickpocket him or mug him, and Jason had turned around in the nick of time.

  Cars drove past on Wilshire Boulevard, always a busy thoroughfare. Jason felt sunshine prickling at the back of his neck as the skinny boy disappeared around the corner of a building. His thoughts, however, remained firmly focused on Doug.

  Dick Shevelow had taken Doug in tow for a while.

  A calm and gentle guy, Dick had decided while attending Cal State Northridge that he wanted to work in the healthcare industry. Doug Shatz became Dick’s first ‘patient’, along with Dick’s pal Mark Hall. Doug was a highly gifted young man, but he was also pathologically disturbed, socially awkward, unpredictable and outright violent at times. He had trouble keeping his temper, and if there was a fight somewhere, Doug was often in the middle of it.

  Mark Hall and Dick tried to help him get his act together, and even Jason had offered his help. He had come to deeply regret that decision, in part because in trying to help Doug, Jason had confided in the skinny young man about the things that troubled him, including his pyrophobia.

  Some weeks later, a small fire broke out in a girls’ dressing room. It was no big deal, just a lot of scared girls and some damage, and no one got hurt. But afterward, there was talk about the fire being intentional and that Jason, so obsessed with fire, was an arsonist. He was called in by the school principal, who demanded to know if Jason had started the fire. Indignant and shocked, Jason had denied the charge vehemently. The principal had let him off the hook, but suspicions remained. The real arsonist had never been caught, but every time he looked in Doug Shatz’s sour, dark brown eyes, and saw the chipped tooth whenever he grinned, Jason suspected who had falsely accused him.

  A year later, more trouble erupted at the college when a coed was raped. Maria – who had a long, impossible to remember Spanish last name – claimed she didn’t know who the perpetrator was. Jason, however, had a strong hunch who had done it. He won Maria’s trust, and after meeting with her a few times, she admitted that Shatz had been the one who had raped her. But Maria was terrified of him. He had threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone. Jason managed to talk her into reporting Shatz, and Shatz was arrested. He confessed, and that was the last time they had seen him at Cal State.