Fire Spirit

by Graham Masterton

  Ruth said, ‘All right. So long as you’re back by eleven.’ She couldn’t help being reminded of what Jack had said that afternoon about the cremated remains in Tilda Frieburg’s bathtub. I wanted to see your face in live action when I told you.

  Jeff opened the front door, and as he did so a strong gust of wind blew into the hallway, almost as if a malevolent spirit had swept into the house. Then he slammed it shut, and he was gone, and the house was quiet again, except for Ammy singing upstairs in her room.

  Craig said, ‘Come on. Let’s go upstairs.’

  Ruth sat down in front of her dressing-table, staring at herself. She felt tired, but Craig’s words had cheered her up, and renewed her determination. I’m going to start climbing, no matter how difficult it is. And now that he had managed to find more work, she felt that their life might come back together again, the way it used to be.

  She was still sitting there, wiping off her eye make-up, when the phone warbled. Craig answered it, and said, ‘Yes? Oh. OK, Jack. Sure.’ He came into the dressing-room wearing only his shirt and his socks and handed the phone over to Ruth. ‘It’s Jack Morrow.’

  ‘Jack?’ said Ruth. ‘What’s happening?’

  From the blustery noise in the background, she could tell that Jack was outdoors.

  She could also hear the throbbing of diesel engines, and people shouting.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt your evening, boss. There’s been a bad one in Bon Air Park. A bus full of seniors has burnt right out. Multiple fatalities.’

  Ruth closed her eyes for a moment. ‘OK, Jack. Give me fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Take as long as you like, boss. These people aren’t going anyplace.’

  When she arrived at Bon Air Park, she found it crowded with police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, Fire Department support vehicles, two panel vans from the Howard County coroner’s department, TV trucks, press cars, and more than a hundred police, firefighters, paramedics, CSIs, reporters, cameramen and onlookers.

  Smoke was still swirling between the trees, even though it was raining harder than ever. The raindrops sparkled red and blue in the flashing lights from the emergency vehicles, so that from a distance the crime scene looked like a funfair. Ruth parked on North Jay Street and walked across the wet grass, with Tyson loping close to heel.

  She found Jack waiting for her by the police tape, in a glistening khaki waterproof, with only his nose protruding from his hood, so that he looked like some elvish character from Lord of the Rings. Detective Ron Magruder and two other detectives were there, too, shoulders hunched, all looking wet and miserable.

  ‘Where’s Bob?’ asked Ruth.

  ‘On his way here now. He was in Muncie, for a funeral.’

  ‘Well, he’s not the only one,’ said Detective Magruder. ‘So far as we can tell, we have at least six cadavers here, probably more.’

  Ruth ducked under the police tape and walked up to the burned-out bus, followed by Jack and Detective Magruder. Tyson lifted his nose and started to sniff, but Ruth said, ‘Stay.’

  The blackened carcass of the bus had been draped in gray tarpaulins. Heavy rain could wash away critical evidence in a matter of minutes, especially smoke and ash and accelerant, and it could distort the patterns of carbon residue which were essential to understanding how a fire had spread. Jack said, ‘The cops are bringing a forensic tent. Once they’ve done that, we’ll be able to get in there for a really thorough check.’

  Although it was partly covered, Ruth could see that the bus had been completely incinerated. Its tires were charred, right through to the reinforced steel belting, and the gas tank had exploded, so that the rear body-panel had been blown into a grotesque sculpture, like a shrieking woman flinging her arms above her head.

  Detective Magruder said, ‘This was the Spirit of Kokomo free bus service for seniors, on a regular run. I’ve sent an officer to City Hall to locate the list of reservations. That should give us all of the names and addresses of the passengers, as well as the route, so we can check who got picked up before the bus drove into the park, and who was lucky enough not to.’

  ‘Can I take a look inside?’ asked Ruth.

  ‘Sure,’ said Detective Magruder. He dragged over an aluminum stepladder and propped it up against the side of the bus. Then he dragged aside one corner of the tarpaulin, so that Ruth could climb up the ladder and shine her flashlight into the interior of the bus.

  If the crime scene looked like a funfair, the inside of the bus was its ghost train. Four blackened figures were tilted at various angles in seats that had been burned right through to the springs. All four of them had their arms lifted like performing monkeys, and all four of them were grinning at Ruth as if they were delighted to see her, even though they were dead. Ruth didn’t believe in an afterlife, not as fervently as Craig, anyhow, but she sometimes wondered if the dead took comfort in their cadavers being found, and their remains being treated with reverence. She had once come across the papery, mummified remains of a three-year-old girl. She had been hidden in a tiny closet under the stairs of a house near Houston Park, and her body had only been discovered when the house had burned down to first-floor level. Maybe she had been playing hide-and-go-seek, years and years ago, and nobody had ever found her. Ruth had thought how lonely she must have been, even after she had died of dehydration.

  Jack said, ‘You probably can’t see them, but there are three or maybe four more victims on the floor of the bus. They’ve all been burned to pretty much the same degree, CGS level two. It looks as if the fire might have started in the second or third row of seats, that’s where the damage to the floor and the upholstery is the most intense.’

  ‘Any guesses?’ Ruth asked him.

  Jack glanced at Detective Magruder. ‘Come on, boss, you know I don’t go in for speculation.’

  ‘How about an educated hypothesis, then?’

  ‘OK . . . it doesn’t look like an electrical fault or a fractured fuel-line or any mechanical failure like that. The fire started inside the passenger compartment of the bus, and I would estimate that it had already been burning for five or maybe ten minutes before the gas tank blew.’

  Ruth climbed down and Detective Magruder hauled the tarpaulin back over the bus. ‘This was no accident,’ he said. ‘I mean, what the hell were they doing here, in this bus, right in the middle of the goddamned park?’

  ‘Suicide pact?’ Jack suggested. ‘Half-a-dozen old folks decided they wanted to go out with a bang?’

  ‘Well, I’m not laughing,’ said Detective Magruder. ‘Right now, I’m willing to believe anything.’

  A police department pick-up truck came jolting across the grass, carrying aluminum poles and sheets of folded PVC in the back. Police officers and firefighters unloaded it, and quickly began to erect a large white forensic tent around the bus, as well as laying aluminum stepping plates on the grass to preserve any footprints. The PVC flapped and rumbled in the squally wind.

  Ruth stood back, holding on to Tyson’s collar. He was growing increasingly restless and edgy, and he kept looking up at her and whining. ‘What is it, boy? What can you smell?’

  He let out a throaty bark and Jack said, ‘Seems like he’s gotten wind of something. Never seen him so jumpy.’

  At first Ruth thought that Tyson might have picked up the scent of accelerant, carried on the wind from the burned-out bus. But he kept straining his head to the left, away from the bus, toward the trees. His tail was wagging furiously, and he was growling in the same way that he growled whenever strangers came up to the house.

  Ruth strained her eyes. She couldn’t see what might have excited his attention. It was dark beneath the trees, and dozens of people were ceaselessly passing to and fro between them like figures in a shadow-theater. But if the bus had been deliberately torched by an arsonist, maybe he had dropped his empty container of accelerant there, before making his escape, and it was the smell of that container that Tyson had picked up.

  ‘I’m just going to check this out,
’ Ruth told Jack, and let go of Tyson’s collar. ‘Go on, boy! Go seek!’

  Usually, when Tyson smelled accelerant, he headed for it like a bullet. But this time he stayed where he was, still growling, but seemingly reluctant to go any closer to the trees.

  ‘Come on, Tyson,’ Ruth coaxed him. ‘Go seek. Show me what you can smell.’

  Tyson took three or four paces forward, but then he stopped. He barked twice, and looked up at Ruth, and barked again. She had never heard him bark like that before. My God, she thought, he’s frightened. He’s trying to tell me that he’s scared.

  She walked slowly toward the trees. The rain was rattling through the leaves, and behind her she could hear the clanking of aluminum couplings as the tent was put up. But underneath the trees it was strangely hushed, almost as if she had walked into a chapel and closed the door behind her.

  She lifted her flashlight and looked around. There was no sign of any container that might have been used to hold accelerant. No jerry can, no soda bottle. But even if there was no container, maybe the arsonist had emptied out the last of his accelerant here, and if she could find out what kind of accelerant it was, it might help her to identify its source. The problem was, only Tyson was capable of locating it. She couldn’t go around on her hands and knees, sniffing the ground herself.

  ‘Tyson!’ she called, turning around, but Tyson was still standing where she had left him, his head lowered, his tail swinging. ‘Here, Tyson! Come here, boy! Now!’

  Tyson came a little closer, but then he stopped again, and barked.

  ‘Tyson! Bad dog! Come here, boy! Now!’

  She started to walk back toward him, but as she did so she became aware that a figure was standing between two trees, less than thirty feet to her right. She shone her flashlight toward it, and when she realized who it was, she actually shouted out in shock.

  It was the Creepy Kid – the pale-faced boy in the faded black T-shirt and red jeans. The same boy she had seen on South McCann Street, but hadn’t been able to catch on camera. The same boy who had been keeping watch outside her house, beside the basswood tree.

  She shone her flashlight directly into his face. He raised one hand to shield his eyes, but he didn’t turn away, and he didn’t move.

  ‘Hey, you – kid!’ she called out. ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ She tried to sound stern and authoritative, but her words came out much shriller than she had intended them to.

  The boy didn’t answer. He stayed where he was, between the trees, his hand half-covering his face. Ruth lowered her flashlight and he slowly lowered his hand, too.

  ‘Who are you?’ she repeated. ‘What are you doing here? Have you been stalking me?’

  Still the boy said nothing. Ruth walked up to him, until she was standing close enough to touch him. He looked up at her with an expression that Ruth could only think of as infinitely weary, tired of life. She had seen old people with that expression, but never a child. He was shivering slightly, too.

  He was an odd-looking boy. His head was elongated, as if she were viewing a picture of him from a very acute angle. His hair was thick and dark and wiry, and it had been cut so badly that Ruth could only guess that his mother had done it for him, or he had tried to do it himself. His eyes were wide apart, like a flatfish, and his lips were unusually red, and bow-shaped – a girl’s lips, rather than a boy’s.

  ‘What’s your name, kid?’ Ruth asked him, much more gently this time.

  The boy said nothing for almost twenty seconds, although the pupils of his eyes kept darting upward and to the left.

  Ruth was just about to ask him again, when he suddenly said, in a croaky voice, ‘Don’t you get it? Don’t you get it? You hafta leave me alone.’

  ‘What? What do you mean?’

  Again, there was a long pause and more eye-darting before the boy spoke again. ‘If you don’t leave me alone, there’s gonna be trouble.’

  ‘What are you talking about? What kind of trouble?’

  ‘If you don’t leave me alone, I’m telling you, there’ll be helltapay.’

  Ruth heard Jack call out, ‘Boss! Boss? The tent’s up and ready! You want to come inside and take a look?’

  She didn’t reply. Instead, she said to the boy, ‘How can you ask me to leave you alone when I’m not doing anything to you? I don’t even know who you are. As far as I can make out, it’s you who’s been following me.’

  ‘I won’t warn you again,’ the boy told her. ‘Less’n you want something rilly hawble to happen.’

  ‘Boss!’ Jack shouted.

  Ruth turned and waved her flashlight. ‘Won’t be a minute, Jack!’

  She turned back, but the Creepy Kid was gone.

  ‘Hey!’ she called out. ‘Boy, whatever your name is! Where are you? I need to talk to you!’

  She shone her flashlight between the trees, but the boy had vanished. She listened, but all she could hear was the rain, and the blustering sound of the wind, and the shouts of the rescue workers as they set up floodlights inside the tent. Then a portable generator started throbbing and drowned out everything else. She waited for a few moments longer, and then she switched off her flashlight and walked back to rejoin Jack. Tyson trotted beside her, looking up at her as if he were trying to say sorry. She bent over and tugged at his ears to show him that he was forgiven. ‘It’s OK, boy. I know that you were frightened. I was pretty frightened myself, to tell you the God’s honest truth.’

  They climbed up into the starkly-lit interior of the bus. The tent billowed all around them in the wind, and rain continued to lash against the PVC. They counted eight cadavers altogether – four of them sitting in seats and four of them lying on the floor – all burned beyond recognition. But Ruth’s attention was immediately caught by the heaps of charred clothing that were strewn across the seats.

  She picked up the shriveled remains of Mrs Petersen’s pink corset. ‘Look at this. And look at this skirt. And these corduroy pants. And this bra. Before the fire started, they all undressed.’

  Val Minelli held up some scorched tatters of blue cotton, with a lavender floral print on them. ‘When they were burned, they were wearing only these, by the look of it. Hospital gowns. This is a standard pattern from BMH Supplies. All the local hospitals use them.’

  ‘Now why the hell would they take off their clothes?’ said Detective Magruder. ‘These are seniors, for Christ’s sakes, seventy and eighty years old. Not your average orgy-goers.’

  ‘I can only guess that they were forced to,’ said Val. She knelt down to focus her camera on a grinning, bristly-haired skull, which was still wearing a pair of spectacles, their lenses black with soot. Then she took a picture of another skull with a melted pink hearing-aid in its ear cavity. ‘The Lord alone knows why.’

  Ruth walked slowly up and down the aisle. Jack had been right: the fire appeared to have started in the second row of seats, where they found a cadaver that was much more seriously burned than all of the rest, at least CGS level three. Even though the lower part of its skeleton had fallen apart, Val was confident from the shape of its pelvis that it was a woman. ‘Probably seventy-five to eighty years old, if this osteoporosis is anything to go by.’

  Tyson trotted up and down the bus, too. It took him only seconds to sniff out the gasoline residue from the vehicle’s own tank, but he could find no trace of any accelerants where the fire had first started. He looked up at Ruth as if he could guess what had happened here but couldn’t explain it. Ruth said, ‘Come on, Tyson. You’ve done your stuff. If you can’t find anything more, that’s OK.’

  She helped him to jump back down the stepladder and led him into a corner of the tent. She reached into the pocket of her squall and gave him a Grrriller to chew, and affectionately slapped his flanks. ‘Good dog,’ she told him. ‘I’m proud of you.’ But when she climbed back up into the bus he sat with the untouched treat at his feet, looking deeply disconsolate, as if he felt that he had let her down.

  ‘What’s wrong with Tys
on?’ asked Jack, as he crawled along the floor of the bus on his hands and knees, taking samples of ash. ‘He looks kind of depressed. I mean, do dogs get depressed? I had a macaw once, and he used to get so depressed that he dropped off his perch.’

  ‘I was going to talk to you later,’ said Ruth. She hesitated, and then she said, ‘I just saw that Creepy Kid again.’

  Jack sat up on his heels. ‘You mean here?’

  ‘Yes, here. In the trees. Tyson must have picked up his scent, but for some reason he wouldn’t go near him. I think he was frightened.’

  ‘Frightened? What of?’

  ‘I don’t know. But you know how sensitive Tyson is. Anyhow, I went up to the kid myself and asked him what he was doing here.’

  ‘OK . . . what did he say?’

  ‘He said we should leave him alone, or else there’d be trouble.’

  ‘We should leave him alone? It’s more like he’s following us around.’

  ‘That’s what I told him. But he said that if we didn’t leave him alone, there’d be hell to pay. Those were his exact words. “There’ll be hell to pay.”’

  ‘Hey – you need to tell Ron Magruder about this. Like, what’s he doing, this kid? This is the second fire he’s turned up at. That’s not a very healthy pastime for anybody, let alone somebody of his age.’

  ‘I didn’t tell you, but I’ve seen him outside my house a couple of times, too.’

  Jack said, ‘Your own home? That is serious. Like I say, tell Ron about it. It may be nothing, but on the other hand, who knows? Just because he’s a kid, that doesn’t mean he’s no kind of threat. Remember that old guy out at Studebaker Park last year? Got himself stabbed to death by an eight-year-old because he wouldn’t throw the kid’s baseball back.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll tell Ron. But I don’t want to get paranoid about it.’

  Jack said, ‘Paranoid? You’re kidding me. I’d be plenty paranoid, if I were you. We have three separate cases of people being lighted on fire without any apparent use of accelerant – and at two of those fires, this kid shows up. Like I told you before, there’s something really weird going on here, and maybe this kid could be involved. You know what they say about firebugs. They always like to come along and relish what they’ve done.’