Fire Spirit

by Graham Masterton

  ‘I can’t kill him,’ wept Nadine. ‘He’s such a beautiful horse. I can’t.’

  Without warning the scowling man pushed himself right up behind her, so that his papier mâché nose jabbed the back of her head, and she could feel the buttons and the rough material of his overcoat against her bare shoulders. He reached around her and took hold of her breasts in both of his hands, and squeezed them so hard that she screamed.

  ‘You listen to me,’ he breathed, close to her ear. ‘You’re going to cut that horse’s gizzard right here and now, because if you don’t I’ll slice your tits off and chop ’em up bite-size and make you eat them raw.’

  Nadine turned in panic to the laughing man, but the laughing man simply nodded, as if he were assuring her that the scowling man would really do that, and that he wouldn’t do anything to stop him.

  ‘All right,’ she heard herself saying, although it didn’t sound like her at all. It sounded like another girl altogether.

  The scowling man released his grip on her. She took the knife from the laughing man and held it behind her back. She approached Nightlight slowly, lifting her left hand and stroking the blaze on his nose. Nightlight snuffled and licked his lips, because Nadine always brought him a sugar-lump when she brought him out of his stall.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Nightlight,’ Nadine whispered. ‘You know that I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you, don’t you?’

  Nightlight looked at her, and she was sure that he understood what she was going to do to him, and why. She had been brought up with horses all of her life, and she was convinced that they were not only brave but intuitive, and that they were prepared to give everything to the people who loved them and looked after them. It was what people who knew about horses called ‘heart’.

  ‘You will be in heaven, Nightlight, I promise you,’ said Nadine. ‘You’ll have sunshine, and sugar-lumps, and all the sweet hay you can eat.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, shut up and get on with it, will you?’ the laughing man demanded. ‘You’re making me nauseous.’

  Nadine held Nightlight close, lifting herself up toward him so that his nose was over her left shoulder, and she could feel his warm breath down her back. She knew that she needed to be decisive, and quick, and that any hesitation would only prolong his pain. She closed her eyes for a moment and then she raised the knife to the side of his neck. Nightlight remained unnaturally still.

  ‘Please forgive me,’ said Nadine. She took a deep breath and then she drew the knife diagonally across Nightlight’s jugular groove, severing his carotid artery and his jugular vein and the sympathetic trunk which carried his nerves from his brain to his spine. Nightlight let out an extraordinary noise, like a man shouting, and tilted forward, flooding Nadine with a bucketful of warm blood.

  Nadine lost her balance and fell heavily backward, hitting her shoulder against the side of the stall. Nightlight nearly collapsed on top of her, but the scowling man seized her arm and dragged her clear. She stumbled on to the sawdust and rolled over on to her side.

  She managed to stand up, quaking with shock. When she looked down at herself, she saw that she was smothered all over with blood, like some primitive woman warrior who had covered herself from head to foot in scarlet warpaint. Nightlight was lying in his stall, his legs still shivering. He gave a few spasmodic kicks, but Nadine knew what she had done to him. He was dead.

  The laughing man stepped back, giving her a slow handclap. ‘Well done, honeybun! Very well done! Wouldn’t have guessed you had it in you!’

  ‘See the way she dropped him?’ the scowling man whooped, with obvious relish. ‘That was something! Just like he’d been poleaxed! I never saw a horse go down like that before!’

  ‘OK, OK,’ the laughing man interrupted him. ‘That’s one down and six more to go. We’d best be hustling, before Ms Honeybun’s pa gets back and tries to spoil our fun!’

  Nadine shook her head from side to side. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t kill any more. Please don’t make me.’

  ‘Oh, come on, now,’ the laughing man cajoled her. ‘Of course you can kill some more! You’re a natural. You should have worked in an abattoir rather than a riding-stable. Besides, it’s essential that seven horses die. It’s essential and it’s necessary. Got to mollify those gods of ill fortune, girl! Got to give ’em what they crave and desire.’

  Nadine started sobbing again. ‘I can’t! I don’t care if you hurt me! I don’t care what you do! I can’t!’

  The laughing man stepped right up to her and slapped her face, twice, once each way. ‘Shut the fuck up!’ he barked at her. ‘Shut the fuck up and do what you’re told! You can’t even imagine what the consequences are going to be, less’n you do! You want to see hell, in all its blazing glory? You want to see the whole world burning up like a burning fiery furnace? Because that’s what’s going to happen, less’n you do what you’re told to do, and quit that moaning and howling and constant complaining.’

  He stood over her, breathing harshly. He suppressed a cough, and then another. ‘All right, then. Are we agreed? Yes? So let’s get down to it. Pick me another winner, doll! This is better than an afternoon’s racing at Indiana Downs!’

  FIFTEEN

  He arrived at the Walters Clinic a few minutes after four p.m. A battered silver Taurus drove into the parking-lot outside Doctor Beech’s window, and Ammy immediately said, ‘There he is! That’s him!’ Ruth and Doctor Beech glanced at each other, but neither of them asked her why she was so sure. They didn’t really understand Ammy’s sensitivity, but they both respected it.

  It was still raining, harder than ever, and the low clouds were billowing like a filthy gray circus tent with its guy ropes adrift. The door of the Taurus opened up, and a tall man in a brown wide-brimmed hat and a long white trench coat climbed out. He kept his hat clamped to his head to stop it from blowing away, so that as he crossed the parking lot his hand masked his face. He walked quickly toward the clinic entrance with his coat flapping in the wind.

  After a few moments, Dora, the receptionist, knocked on the door. ‘Mr Watchman’s here, Doctor,’ she announced. But Doctor Beech didn’t have time to reply before Martin Watchman entered the room, lifting off his hat as he did so.

  ‘Doctor Beech!’ he said, in a low, hoarse voice, holding his hat over his heart and extending his hand. ‘I can’t tell you what a great pleasure it is to meet you again, in spite of the circumstances.’

  Ruth would have guessed his age at thirty-five or thirty-six. He had dirty-blond hair – collar-length, and wildly messy, as if he had only just woken up – and he obviously hadn’t shaved in three or four days. He was handsome, in a lean, hollow-cheeked way, with unusually pale green eyes, the color of a shallow sea, and he had a faint, faded tan, as if he had visited someplace exotic sometime in the spring.

  He took off his white trench coat and handed it to Dora, who accepted it with a look of disdain. ‘I’ll hang this up for you, shall I?’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ he told her. ‘On the chain, please. It’s a Burberry. Bought it in London. Oh – and here. My hat. Thanks.’

  ‘This is Ruth Cutter, Amelia’s mother,’ said Doctor Beech. ‘And this is Amelia.’

  Martin Watchman came across the room and shook hands with both of them. ‘So you’re the arson investigator,’ he said. ‘I’m delighted to meet you. And I’m very pleased that Doctor Beech had the good sense to call me. I remember how skeptical you were when I talked to you in Chicago, Doctor Beech, but I believe that you have a critical situation here, and we need to deal with it as a matter of urgency. It could be too late already.’

  Ruth couldn’t quite place his accent. It was educated, and it certainly wasn’t Chicago. He lifted up the ends of his words and said ‘here’ like a Bostonian: ‘he-yuh’.

  Doctor Beech said, ‘Why don’t you sit down, Mr Watchman? How about some coffee, or a soda? You’ve had a long drive down from Chicago.’

  ‘A glass of mineral water will do for me, thank you. No ice.
’

  ‘Is that all? Anything to eat?’

  ‘I’m good, thank you. And please – do call me Martin.’

  He went over and lifted up an armchair, carrying it across the room and placing it close to Amelia. He sat down next to her, turning his head and staring at her unblinkingly with those sea-green eyes. Amelia gave him an uncomfortable smile and shifted in her chair.

  In spite of his unruly hair and his stubbly chin, there was an old-school formality about the way that Martin Watchman was turned out. His suit was well-worn, but it had obviously been expensive when it was new. It was light gray, immaculately cut, but it was double-breasted, with wide lapels, and who wore double-breasted suits any more?

  His tan loafers were the same: expensive, but with scuffed toes and worn-down heels. Ruth noticed that he wasn’t wearing a wedding band, although he had a heavy gold signet ring on the third finger of his right hand.

  ‘I’ve already told Ruth and Amelia about our meeting at the psychiatric convention,’ Doctor Beech told him. ‘What you said about “people coming through from underneath”.’

  Martin nodded, without taking his eyes away from Amelia. ‘I’m flattered that you remembered me, Doctor. You meet so many goddamned fruit-loops at those conventions, don’t you? Pardon my French.’

  ‘Well, I won’t deny that I thought you were a fruit-loop, too. To begin with, anyhow. I’m sorry.’

  Martin smiled. ‘You don’t have to be. The things that I’ve found out, they’re not at all easy to believe in. For a very long time, I didn’t believe in them myself, even though all the evidence was right there in front of me, staring me in the face.’

  ‘Personally, I’m still reserving judgment,’ said Doctor Beech.

  ‘I know, and I don’t blame you,’ Martin told her. ‘But you have to admit that if Amelia here has been talking about people coming through from underneath, it’s a coincidence at the very least.’

  ‘But what exactly is so critical? Why did you think it was so urgent for you to come down here?’

  Martin didn’t answer her for so long that Doctor Beech said, ‘Martin?’, but then he immediately turned away from Amelia and said, ‘The fires. It was the fires that convinced me.’

  ‘The fires?’ Ruth asked him.

  ‘That’s right. Totally by chance, I caught a report about one of them on the TV news. It was the one where the girl was burned to death in her bathtub.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Ruth, cautiously.

  ‘Fires like that, they have a very specific cause, unlike any other kind of fire, and they very rarely happen in isolation. Like, you’ll almost always have a pattern of four or five consecutive fires, and sometimes many more. The highest number I’ve heard about is eighteen, in Indianapolis, about three years ago. I checked on the Internet and saw that you’d had a similar fire here in Kokomo only a couple of days before. And now all those seniors have been burned to death on that bus. I heard all the grisly details about that on the radio while I was driving down here.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ said Ruth. ‘But I still don’t understand how these fires can be connected to what Ammy’s been saying about “men and women coming through from underneath”. Or how they’re connected with each other, even.’

  ‘Listen to me: the same boy keeps showing up at every fire, doesn’t he? And Doctor Beech told me that you’ve also seen him mooching around outside your own house.’

  ‘That’s right. Amelia calls him the Creepy Kid. But we have no idea who he is, or what he’s looking for.’

  ‘The Creepy Kid,’ said Martin, and allowed himself a thin, slanted smile. ‘That’s a really appropriate name for him, I have to tell you.’

  ‘But what’s the connection? We’re still investigating these fires, but there’s no obvious link between any of them. The first victim was a young mother, abducted from a supermarket parking lot, and burned on a mattress. The second was that poor girl who was cremated in her own bathtub. And the third one was all of those seniors in their bus. Each fire was very unusual. Each of them was started by an intense, highly-concentrated source of heat, but that’s about all they had in common.’

  Martin shook his head. ‘You’re wrong. They have the Creepy Kid in common. And the fact that he’s been hanging around outside your house is the proof of that. He knows who you are, Ruth, and he knows that you’re trying to discover the cause of these fires, but he doesn’t want you to. Right now, you’ve been lucky, and he’s only been threatening you. But you could be in very real danger, I warn you.’

  Ruth said, ‘I saw him in the woods at Bon Air Park, after the Spirit of Kokomo bus fire. He said that if I didn’t leave him alone, something terrible would happen to me. But come on, when it comes down to it he’s only a kid. Creepy, for sure, but still a kid.’

  ‘No way. He’s much more than that. He’s a catalyst, don’t you get it? He’s the one who’s been causing these fires.’

  ‘All right,’ said Ruth. ‘You want to explain it to me?’

  Martin got up. He went to the window and looked out, then he came back and stood directly behind Amelia’s chair, with his hands on her shoulders. Amelia didn’t seem to be at all disturbed by him doing this, and turned to look up at him with a smile.

  Martin said, ‘My mother was what you might call a psychic. She could tell fortunes and she could also clear disturbing vibrations from houses and apartments in which something traumatic had happened in the past – like a suicide or a murder or an accidental death.

  ‘My gift has never compared to hers – that’s if you can call it a gift. It’s more of a curse, to tell you the truth. But I’ve always been sensitive to the resonance that remains in a room after a tragedy. I can even walk into a doctor’s surgery like this and feel the pain that people have talked about while they’ve been here. Human distress, Ruth! It echoes, and it goes on echoing for years.’

  Oh God, thought Ruth, I hope we’re not wasting our time here. This man is beginning to sound like a nut job. Or a charlatan. Or a Scientologist. Or all three.

  ‘I first felt it when I was only five years old,’ Martin went on. ‘We went to stay with my grandparents in Maine, my mother and me. I woke up in the middle of the night and saw a young curly-haired boy in a white nightshirt hanging from the back of the door. I screamed and ran into my mother’s bedroom. At the time she told me that it was only a bad dream. But years later, she said that her younger brother Thomas had accidentally hanged himself with the cord from his bathrobe, fifteen years before, and that my description of him fitted exactly.

  ‘As I grew older, I had experiences like that more and more often. I very rarely see anybody, not like poor young Thomas. We were related, maybe that was why I saw him so clearly. But I can feel people, I can feel their presence, and sometimes I can hear them, too.’

  ‘Same as me!’ Amelia burst out, with sudden enthusiasm. ‘I can walk into a room, and I can tell right away if people have been sad in there, or if somebody got hurt, or if somebody died. And those people coming through from underneath, I can hear them whispering. Whisper-whisper-whisper. It’s like sand, when the wind blows it.’

  Martin nodded. ‘You see?’ he said. ‘Me and Amelia, we’re pretty much the same. I used to think that being sensitive to human resonance was like being a medium, or a clairvoyant. But it isn’t. It’s nothing to do with the supernatural, it’s a physical ability that you’re born with – or a disability, depending on how you look at it. It’s genetic. Me – I don’t have William’s Syndrome like Amelia here, but I do have a chromosome disorder which makes me aware of stuff that normal people simply can’t pick up on. It’s just like some people can hear dog-whistles, or see infrared light—’

  ‘OK,’ Ruth interrupted him, ‘but what does any of this have to do with these fires?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m getting around to that,’ said Martin. ‘As I grew older, I kind of learned to live with all of the voices that I could hear and all the pain that I could feel. It became like background no
ise, you know, like living in some crowded apartment where you can hear everybody’s TV playing and people arguing and doors slamming.

  ‘But then I met a girl called Susan and we fell in love. Susan was a very talented painter and she was funny and bright and pretty and we talked about getting married. But we had only been together for seven months and four days when we went swimming at Breakheart Reservation near Saugus and Susan just disappeared under the water. A beautiful summer’s afternoon, a flawless blue sky, but she just disappeared. The lifeguard dived down and found her tangled up in weeds on the bottom of the lake. He tried to resuscitate her, but it was too late. To this day I still don’t know what happened. Could have been a cramp, who can tell?’

  ‘Breakheart Reservation,’ said Doctor Beech. ‘That was a sadly apt place to lose the love of your life.’

  ‘This is the whole point, though,’ Martin told them. ‘I didn’t lose her. Not completely, anyhow. About a month after the funeral, when I was taking a shower, I felt her put her arms around me. I practically jumped out of my skin, I can tell you, but when I turned around I couldn’t see her. I could still feel her, though. Her face, her hair, her body. I stayed in that shower for almost twenty minutes, holding her, but when I turned off the water she was gone. How can I describe it? It was just like she evaporated.

  ‘After that, almost every time I took a shower or a bath, I felt her clinging on to me, although I never saw her. I put my hands into the kitchen sink once, to pull out the plug, and under the water I felt her hand taking hold of my wrist, as if she didn’t want me to empty it out.

  ‘I was scared, I can tell you. But in a strange way I didn’t want her to stop doing it. I didn’t know if she was a spirit, or if I was gradually going mad, but at least I felt that I hadn’t lost her for ever.’

  He gently stroked Amelia’s hair, as if he were giving her a blessing. Amelia closed her eyes. Ruth was sorely tempted to tell him to take his hand off her, but he seemed to calm Amelia down, and she didn’t want to appear too prickly.