Pyrophobia

by Jack Lance

  Chuck scraped his chair back.

  ‘This is very important to me, Mr Cleigh,’ Jason added, moving his chair in. ‘You have no idea how important.’

  Chuck said nothing for several moments. He cast a puzzled look at Jason, his grimace a clear signal that Jason’s welcome in his office was rapidly running out.

  ‘You could try the newspaper,’ he said eventually. ‘The Mohave Herald. Or, better still, talk to Freddy Padilla. He’s a retired reporter for the Herald and currently the manager of the city archives. I know him well. If anyone can help you, he can. He knows everything there is to know about Mount Peytha City. The man is a walking encyclopedia.’

  ‘Do you have the address for this city archive?’ Jason asked.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Chuck Cleigh allowed.

  In a corner of the city archives, Freddy Padilla sat behind a modest wooden desk with a green banker’s lamp perched on it. At least, Jason assumed it was Freddy Padilla. He guessed the man to be in his mid-sixties, judging by his white beard and his long hair curling up at the back of his neck. He had a bulging stomach, the natural consequence of beer and gluttony, and the red-and-white checkered shirt he sported stretched across it like table linen.

  Jason walked up to him. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said in greeting. ‘My name is Jason Evans. Are you Mr Padilla?’

  A flash of bright blue eyes gazed at him for a moment. ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Could I ask you something?’

  ‘Sure,’ Padilla said jovially. ‘Have a seat. What’s on your mind?’

  Jason sat down and brushed a hand through his hair. ‘I’m conducting an investigation. Chuck Cleigh of Cleigh Abbeville’s Funeral Home advised me to contact you.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Chuck!’ Freddy exclaimed. ‘Please continue.’

  ‘I need some information,’ Jason said, adding, ‘I’m told you might have that information and if so, I would of course be happy to pay you for your time.’

  ‘Money? Means nothing to me,’ Padilla said with a harsh laugh. ‘I’m the exception in this country of money-grubbers. That’s why I’ve always been poor.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jason said, because he didn’t know what else to say.

  As on a mission, Padilla added, ‘It’s a shame the casino palace in Laughlin keeps expanding. Even here the money-grubbing is getting worse. It’s a blemish on our beautiful Mount Peytha City. But unfortunately I can’t change the world by myself.’

  ‘I guess not,’ Jason dead-panned.

  ‘Some people walk around with dollar signs in their eyes, but not me,’ Freddy continued. Then: ‘But enough of that. What do you want to know?’

  ‘Mr Padilla,’ Jason launched in, ‘I hope this is not going to be too complicated …’

  ‘Please call me Freddy.’

  ‘OK, Freddy. Here’s the thing …’

  Freddy plucked at his beard, nodding to Jason to get to the point.

  ‘There’s a grave in St James Cemetery that interests me.’

  ‘Really. Whose grave is it?’

  ‘It’s the grave for the Chawkins family: for Robert and Amanda and their son Mike. I’d like to know a bit more about this family.’

  ‘Why?’ Freddy wanted to know.

  ‘It has something to do with genealogy.’

  Freddy shrugged.

  ‘I’ll look into it. Give me an hour.’

  Jason waited outside until the hour was up. He thought of Kayla and decided to call her. She picked up, but it was an awkward conversation. He repeated what by now seemed almost like a mantra, that in this circumstance he could not be an ostrich, sticking his head in the sand and hoping that evil would leave him alone. Some lunatic had sent him three photos with inscriptions, and perhaps had even caused their so-called accident in the car. Fate had led him here, to this town, and he couldn’t leave until he understood why. What would happen, he wondered out loud to her, on August eighteenth? He repeated that he wanted her to stay at Simone’s house until he got home. Kayla responded by repeating her mantra: that he was imagining things and he should seek help from Mark.

  He hung up with nothing resolved and was soon back at Freddy’s desk.

  ‘I actually remember this incident,’ the former reporter informed him. ‘I wrote about it for the paper, so I did a quick read through my own stories. I didn’t think of it straight away, since it happened so long ago.’

  ‘I’m very curious what you found out,’ Jason said, struggling to maintain his composure.

  Freddy gazed past him.

  ‘It was a terrible accident. A trucker pushed them off the road. The driver was drunk or out of his mind, or both. With that enormous rig of his, he rammed into the Chawkins’ car from behind, causing it to somersault and explode in a raging inferno. Those poor people died horrible deaths. And the trucker? He drove on – a hit-and-run driver – although he was caught eventually. His name was Silverstein. Steve Silverstein.’

  Jason’s mouth went bone dry. In his mind’s eye he saw the headlights from behind that had blinded him. His body twitched with the memory of the crash that had ensued.

  ‘Go on,’ he said hoarsely.

  ‘As I said, Robert, Amanda and Mikey died horrible deaths. It happened on State Highway 98, just outside Sacramento Wash, five miles from Mount Peytha City. Robert, the father, was active in the life of the community, as was Amanda. They lived at Mount Peytha Ranch, which Robert had built himself. He had made a name as a horseman and horse breeder. And the truck driver? I checked him out as well. He swore he hadn’t seen the car roll over and catch on fire. He heard about it later. When he had sobered up and realized what he had done, he was devastated and filled with remorse. Or so he claimed.’

  Freddy’s phone rang and he picked up the receiver. ‘Beth! Can I call you back? I’m in the middle of something. Yeah, thanks.’

  He put the receiver back in its cradle. ‘I found some other details in my files. A report from Tom Daunt, the firefighter who was first to arrive on the scene and remove the bodies from the car. He said there was nothing the emergency services could have done. And the pathologist, James Felch, said that identifying the bodies had been one of the toughest jobs in his long career. A baby was a victim, and that had affected him deeply.’

  Freddy sighed heavily. ‘Silverstein was convicted and sent up the river for thirty years. The ranch was sold to a friend of Robert’s, a man named Joe Bresnahan. Joe still lives there now.’

  Another story that Jason had found on the Internet, just last Sunday, crossed his mind. It was about a sixty-year-old Russian woman named Anya who had been experiencing the same nightmare for years. In her dreams she ran past houses and across rooftops fleeing from enemies dressed in Nazi-style uniforms. Sometimes she heard strange screams. They were unbearable, demon-like, as Anya had described them. When she heard these screams, she would clap her hands over her ears to block out the horrible sound. On one day, during a yoga class, she had a horrifying vision. A mass grave had appeared in her mind’s eye and she heard people screaming.

  When those sudden, terrifying images disappeared, she started to believe in reincarnation. It felt so intimate. As if a fountain of sorrow had sprouted from inside me. The vision was related to my own past, Anya had said in her story.

  She went into regression and returned to a past life. She ended up inside one of Joseph Stalin’s prison camps, a starving and haggard woman in her late twenties. Anya remembered incidents of torture and sexual abuse, and ultimately her death. During her regression she had seen how sickness and exhaustion had finally killed her inside a small, dark room void of any light. When she relived the horror of that life, she understood why in her present life she sometimes suffered panic attacks in the dark.

  Dying inside Stalin’s camp had ended the pain. After that, everything had been bright and white and peaceful. She had the feeling she had ‘been asleep for a little while’, and she had been reborn as Anya only a few weeks after her demise in the death camp.

  After her regression therapy
she became aware of her previous life, and also of the people who had been her friends and relatives in her other existence. She had looked them up, but of course these people from ‘before’ hadn’t recognized her. I wanted to shout at them that it was me. I’d been dead for a little while, but now I was back, Anya reported in her story. Finally, however, she had come to the realization that she had to let go of ‘before’ and find her own way in life ‘now’.

  Was this what Jason was experiencing? Could it be that a previous life was at the root of his anxieties? He had been born on September second, 1977, as Jason Evans. But had he been Mikey Chawkins before that?

  Jason remembered another strange but apparently true story. It concerned a young Lebanese boy who had memories of a previous incarnation. One day the child was walking outside in his birthplace and met a man he had never seen before. But the boy walked straight up to him and called him his neighbor.

  And he kept talking about an accident in which a truck had run over a man, severing both his legs. In addition, the boy kept pestering his parents that he wanted to visit a nearby village, even though he could not explain why he wanted to go there.

  The boy’s parents did some research and found out that the man their son had called ‘neighbor’ lived in this nearby village. They also discovered that someone in that same village had lost both legs in an accident involving a truck and had died shortly thereafter. The man the boy had addressed as neighbor had actually been the victim’s neighbor.

  There were other similarities. As it turned out, the boy could tell exactly what the victim had said just before he died. Also remarkable were the many characteristics that the child and the man who had died had in common: the man had been an avid hunter; the boy had an intense interest in everything to do with hunting. And the deceased had been fluent in French; the boy’s command of the language was exceptional for his age.

  Researchers had no explanation for this case other than reincarnation. After the man’s death, his essence and energy had lived on in spirit form until recalled to Earth to live in physical form.

  So the boy had become a new person with new possibilities, but inside his mind he would forever remain connected to the man who had died in the accident.

  Could Jason be carrying inside of him the fears and memories of little Mike W. Chawkins?

  It was a scenario that billions of people on Earth who believe in reincarnation would deem more than a possibility. For him, no matter how down-to-earth he had assumed himself to be before being plagued by hallucinations and visions, the same thing applied.

  But what still made no sense to him was the role of the photographer. Whoever that person was, he seemed to be aware of Jason’s previous existence – and that was the Achilles’ heel in this entire theory. The photographer also had to know about the Chawkins’ accident, because Jason and Kayla had experienced a similar chain of events as had that unfortunate family. So the crash on Monte Avenue between Cornell and Fernhill had been deliberate, although Jason doubted whether the police would see it that way. No, they would not take this bridge to a previous life seriously. Which meant that he was still on his own, that he needed to continue this investigation on his own.

  Now he knew what his next step would be.

  He thanked Padilla and, once outside, attended to some practical business. He needed a car. He had taken a cab to Chuck’s, and he had covered the three miles to the city archives on foot. But Mount Peytha Ranch was outside of town, Freddy had informed him, and that was too far to walk.

  When, a short time later, he was behind the wheel of a rented GMC Yukon, Jason drove off for his third visit of the day.

  The stately farm located on Bullhead Road featured a long dirt road leading up to it. Behind it, on the distant horizon, Jason noted a scenic landscape dominated by mountains. A sign to the left of the dirt road read: MOUNT PEYTHA RANCH. Next to the sign was a mailbox, and beside that was an old fence with a gate closed across the road.

  Jason put the car in neutral, got out and walked up to the gate. It was ornately decorated, and the bars had been cut out in the middle in the shape of an oval. At the center of the oval a letter had been welded to the iron.

  It was the letter M.

  The same elegant, curly M as depicted in the third Polaroid photograph.

  TWENTY-SIX

  ‘M’

  Joe Bresnahan sported a sagging beer belly and paper-white hair. He was as hospitable as he was loquacious, and he treated his visitor like an old friend. He never asked why Jason had such an interest in Robert, Amanda and Mikey Chawkins – which suited Jason just fine. He was content to listen while Joe talked.

  After his initial gut reaction to seeing the M in the gate outside, Jason had taken a bold step. He had come to Mount Peytha Ranch to uncover the secret of the grave, and the mystery of the letter M played a key role in that investigation. He felt sure the Bresnahans knew the salient facts.

  The gate had been unlocked and he had walked across the dirt road toward the farmhouse. Next to one of the twin adjoining sheds was a tidy vegetable garden set beneath a row of small Joshua trees. From what Jason could discern, a wide assortment of vegetables grew in the garden: tomatoes, Brussels sprouts, peppers, radishes and onions.

  When he rang the doorbell, Joe Bresnahan had answered it. After a few preliminaries, Joe confessed that he was alone at the moment. His son was out working, and his wife had gone over to a friend’s house for a tea party. As the conversation progressed, Joe explained that he had retired years ago, and as long as his son did not kick him out and put him in an old folks’ home, he would stay put. He loved it here, he said. Joe chatted cheerfully on and told Jason that he had known the Chawkins family quite well. In fact, he and Robert had grown up together in this backwater town, before Mount Peytha was incorporated as a city. He had considered long and hard whether or not he should buy this farm. But Robert’s family had insisted, and in the end he had found he couldn’t resist. He loved it here, he informed Jason again. Robert had been a fine man, Joe said, the salt of the earth. He was a horse trader and everyone in town knew that Chawkins had the best stock in town. The man had a gift for handling the animals, Joe said.

  His wife Amanda had been a beautiful woman, as lovely on the inside as the outside. She was always friendly, always smiling. The two had been highly valued in Mount Peytha City because they had always contributed so much for the community. Always the first to volunteer for charity work.

  Jason let him continue on his happy passage down memory lane for a while before asking the question he was there to ask. ‘Mr Bresnahan, the gate outside has a letter “M” embedded in it. Does that letter stand for Mikey?’

  Joe waved his flabby arms. ‘Oh, yes! When Robert became a father, he was so happy he was living on cloud nine. He wanted the whole world to share his joy. He forged that letter and welded it into the gate himself. He was so happy!’

  ‘Not long after that, the accident happened,’ Jason observed. ‘You probably attended the funeral.’

  Joe Bresnahan nodded. ‘The place was packed, as you can imagine. It was a sad, sad affair, but impressive at the same time because it embraced nearly everyone in Mount Peytha City. Even people who hadn’t really known Robert and his family sat there, crying. I’m telling you, there wasn’t a dry eye in the place.’

  Jason thought of his vision in the cemetery. He had seen the funeral procession.

  Or had it been a hallucination after all, a sign that he was losing his mind? But somehow it didn’t feel like that any more.

  ‘Mr Bresnahan—’ Jason began, another question bubbling to the tip of his tongue. But Joe cut him off.

  ‘I have some photographs of the funeral somewhere, if you’d like to see them.’

  Jason’s jaw dropped.

  ‘The Chawkins’ funeral?’

  Joe nodded.

  ‘You have photographs?’

  Again, Joe nodded.

  ‘Yes, I’d most definitely like to see them,’ Jason said ea
gerly.

  ‘All right. If you’ll wait here, I’ll go get them.’ Joe Bresnahan hoisted his considerable frame up from his easy chair, shuffled out of the room and walked up a flight of stairs.

  Jason remained seated, the tension becoming unbearable. Would he soon be faced with images from his vision? Would the same people be in the photographs, dressed in their old-fashioned garb? He did not need to wait long to find out. Joe came stumbling down the stairs with a stack of yellowed black and white photos in his hands.

  ‘Here they are. A newspaper photographer took these. Like I said, Robert’s death was big news in these parts.’

  Jason took the photographs from him. After a brief flick-through, he found nothing of value. The photographs had not been taken at St James Cemetery, but outside of a church, presumably the place where the memorial service had been held. A procession of people was leaving the church. All five photographs had been taken at approximately the same time. The photographer had clicked away, sent the photos to the newspaper, and had probably let the editor pick one. Somehow, Joe had ended up owning the entire set.

  The only thing Jason recognized in the photos was the clothes worn by the mourners. He had recently seen jackets, ties, hats and dresses just like these. But everything else …

  Something caught his eye. No, it could not be. It was impossible.

  He lifted the picture and stared at it. Moved it closer to his eyes.

  Impossible or not, he was there.

  Jason put the picture aside, his heart skipping a beat. He picked up another one of the black and white images – yes, there he was again. And in the next picture, and the next.

  Of course; if all of the photographs had been taken at around the same time, he had to be in them all.

  ‘One is missing. Now where did that one go?’ he heard Joe Bresnahan mumble to himself.

  Jason looked up. ‘That’s OK, Mr Bresnahan. I’ve seen enough. You have no idea how grateful I am.’

  Yes, he was grateful.

  And shocked out of his mind.