Fire Spirit

by Graham Masterton

  Craig lifted his hand. ‘Don’t let’s get blasphemous here, Martin.’

  ‘No blasphemy intended, Craig. What you have to realize is that, apart from this one Supreme Being, there are many other lesser gods, who carry out the day-to-day administrative stuff. That’s what Professor Solway thinks, anyhow. He believes that there are gods of happiness, gods of grief, gods who console you when everything in your life seems to be going down the crapper, excuse my French.

  ‘You’ve heard about people in very dangerous situations, who have sworn blind that there was somebody next to them, kind of a third presence, who helped them out of it. Shackleton believed there was somebody walking next to his party, when they were stranded at the South Pole, somebody who guided them to safety. And there was a guy on the seventy-sixth floor of the World Trade Center on September eleventh who was sure that there was a stranger close beside him who told him to run headlong into the flames, even though that was the last thing his natural instinct would have told him to do.

  ‘Those are the lesser gods, Craig. But not all of them are sweetness and light. In the case of these fires, I think we’re probably dealing with the gods of retribution or the gods of ill fortune.’

  Craig stood up. ‘I’m sorry, Martin. But I really think that this is baloney. How about another drink and then we change the subject?’

  Martin was unfazed. ‘Craig,’ he said, ‘what evidence do you have for the existence of God? Absolutely none, do you? None at all. Yet you believe in Him absolutely. So at least try to have an open mind about lesser gods. Professor Solway is sure that there are gods or spirits or elemental forces which can save the souls of the damned from everlasting torture. The damned can do a deal with them, if you like. If they perform a ritual sacrifice which finally resolves the problems they left unfinished before they died, then the gods will allow them to have peace.’

  ‘This is such shit,’ Craig protested.

  Ruth said, ‘Craig!’ but Craig waved his hand dismissively.

  ‘Why do you think that, Craig?’ Martin persisted. ‘The Holy Communion is a re-enactment of the Last Supper, isn’t it? And Catholics believe in transubstantiation . . . that when they drink that communion wine and eat that communion wafer, they are actually ingesting the blood and the flesh of Christ. If that’s not a ritual sacrifice, I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘But these fires have killed totally innocent people. God wouldn’t allow that.’

  Martin shrugged. ‘If God didn’t allow the death of innocent people, this would be a very happy world indeed. But also a very dull one.’

  Ruth said, ‘Is anybody hungry? How about some three-cheese pie, and a little salad?’

  ‘That sounds very tempting, Ruth,’ Martin smiled at her.

  But Craig shook his head and said, ‘No, thanks. Not hungry. I had a burger with Mike Watterson at A&W’s.’

  At that moment, the front door opened and Jeff came in, his hair sticking up on end, wearing a black T-shirt with Cattle Decapitation lettered on the front. He was closely followed by Detective Ron Magruder and Detective Sandra Garnet.

  ‘Met these guys outside,’ said Jeff.

  ‘Sorry to intrude, Ruth,’ said Detective Magruder. ‘We heard about Tyson. You don’t know how sorry we are. He was one hell of a dog, Tyson. One hell of a dog.’

  ‘We’re all going to miss him so much,’ said Detective Garnet. ‘Especially you.’

  Ruth said, ‘Yes, I am. I saw him die right in front of me, but I still can’t believe he’s gone.’

  Amelia piped up, ‘He hasn’t gone! I told you! He’s coming back!’

  Ruth put her arm around Amelia’s shoulders and said, ‘Let’s talk about that later, sweetheart. Right now I think Detective Magruder has something he wants to say to me.’

  Jeff picked up a slice of three-cheese pie in his fingers and started to eat it. Then he went to the fridge and took out a can of Dr Pepper. ‘Dad? I thought we were going to pick up my new car this evening,’ he said.

  ‘Yes – yes, of course,’ said Craig. ‘In fact now might be a good time. Ruth, honey – Jeff and I are going over to Gus Probert’s house to pick up that Grand Prix. He only lives out on Meadow Drive, by the golf course, so we shouldn’t be more than forty-five minutes, tops. Jeff, do you want to call a taxi?’

  Jeff said, ‘Yesssss!’ and clenched his fist.

  Ruth introduced Martin. ‘Martin’s come down from Chicago, to help with Ammy’s therapy.’

  Detective Magruder and Detective Garnet shook his hand and said, ‘Pleased to meet you, sir. Any friend of Ruth’s . . .’

  ‘Have you been out to Weatherfield Stables yet?’ Ruth asked them.

  ‘Yes, we did,’ said Detective Magruder. ‘Jack’s still out there, along with Val Minelli. You never saw anything like it in your life.’ He nodded his head toward Martin and said, ‘Is it all right if we talk about this now?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Ruth assured him. ‘Martin’s been helping us to make sense of all this. But Ammy, sweetheart – why don’t you take your pie upstairs to your room? I don’t think you want to hear any of this horrible stuff.’

  ‘I saw Tyson on fire, didn’t I?’ Amelia protested.

  ‘Yes you did, and I wish you hadn’t. I don’t want you having nightmares.’

  ‘Tyson’s coming back,’ Amelia told Detective Magruder, with complete confidence.

  ‘Oh, really? Well – I guess that dogs have souls, too, don’t they?’

  ‘No, they don’t. But he’s still coming back.’

  ‘Ammy, please,’ said Ruth. ‘I need to talk to Detective Magruder without you being here. There’s a good girl.’

  ‘O-K,’ sighed Amelia, and picked up her plate and went upstairs.

  ‘She’s such a character,’ said Detective Garnet.

  ‘Oh, she’s much more than that,’ Martin put in. ‘She’s a genuine sensitive. Because of her William’s Syndrome, she can pick up all kinds of disturbances in the atmosphere that none of the rest of us are aware of. If anybody can help us to find out who’s been causing all of these fires, then she can.’

  Detective Magruder said, ‘Amelia? You really think so?’

  ‘I’ve been having some of the same feelings myself, but nothing like as clearly as Ammy. Did you hear her, just now? She said that somebody had whispered “Andie’s ashes” in her ear, but none of the rest of us heard it. She’s amazing.’

  ‘Sit down,’ said Ruth. ‘Tell me about Nadine Gardner. Do you have any idea what happened?’

  Detective Garnet sat down and took out her notebook. ‘A KPD patrol car answered a nine-one-one call and went out to Weatherfield Riding Stables on Isaac Walton Road, where they found Mr Charles Gardner, the owner of the stables, in a state of severe shock. He said that he had been turning into his driveway when a horse and rider had come galloping toward him, both of them blazing, and had collided with his SUV.

  ‘Horse and rider were both explosively dismembered by the impact. Mr Gardner said it was like a bomb going off. There were pieces of both horse and rider scattered over a thirty-foot area, but Mr Gardner found a human forearm lying on the driveway close to his SUV and it was wearing a silver charm bracelet that he and his wife had given to their daughter Nadine to celebrate her graduating from vet college.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Ruth. ‘I met Nadine quite a few times at charity horse shows. She was such a sweet girl.’

  Detective Garnet flipped over a page, and then said, ‘The attending officers went to the Gardner house where they interviewed the housemaid Cora Wilkins and the handyman Duncan Scruggs. Neither of them had seen or heard anything prior to the collision between Nadine Gardner and her horse and Mr Gardner’s SUV.

  ‘The attending officers then went to the stable-block where they found that seven out of a total of eighteen horses had been slaughtered by having their throats cut open. There were bloody handprints all over the horses’ stalls and the officers also discovered a large bloodstained knife which was almost certainly the wea
pon used to kill them. We’re still waiting for a fingerprint match, but there was no indication that anybody apart from Nadine Gardner was present in the stable-block at that time, and the handprints were described by the attending officers as “small, likely to be female”.

  ‘Incidentally, they found all of Nadine Gardner’s clothes on the floor of the stable, including her underwear, so it was likely that she was naked at the time of the incident.’

  Ruth slowly shook her head. ‘So it looks like Nadine killed seven of her family’s horses and then somehow climbed up on to another one and set fire to the both of them?’

  ‘Looks that way, on the face of it.’

  ‘Was there any stress between Nadine and her family? Anything that might have triggered this off?’

  ‘Not that her father and mother can think of. They both say that Nadine seemed to be blissfully happy. Her whole life was horses, and riding, and she loved working for the stables. She had no other issues that they could think of. No boyfriend trouble because she didn’t have a steady boyfriend. No drug problems, no drink problems, no psych problems. Nothing to explain why she would have flipped like that.’

  ‘But?’ said Martin.

  Ruth turned to him, and Martin said, ‘I’m sorry, but I sense a “but”.’

  ‘Well, you’re right,’ said Detective Magruder. ‘There is a “but”. When I interviewed Charles Gardner he said that what had happened was “just like the Flying X”. I didn’t know what he meant, but of course he’s in the horse business so he knew all about it. It seems like, three years ago, a young woman who worked for a riding stables outside of Scottsdale, Arizona, did almost exactly the same thing. She cut the throats of seven horses and then she set the stables alight. She suffered seventy-five per cent burns and died in hospital about four days later.’

  Detective Garnet said, ‘After we’d finished up at the Gardner place we went back to headquarters and checked with the Scottsdale PD. They sent us a PDF file on the Flying X. Before she died, the young woman gave the police a statement. She alleged that she had been kept as a virtual prisoner at the riding stables and repeatedly abused by its owner and his two grown-up sons, who were both in their twenties. She had slaughtered their horses and set fire to their stables as an act of revenge.’

  ‘So what happened to the owner and his sons?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Detective Garnet. ‘There was no evidence against them, and no witnesses, apart from the owner’s thirteen-year-old son, who told police that his father and his brothers had treated the young woman “mean”. However, the boy was evaluated by a police psychiatrist and judged to have a very low IQ, and to be prone to making up fantastic stories.’

  Martin had been listening to all of this attentively, with his hand pressed over his mouth. But now he sat up straight and said, ‘I thought so. Just like I told you, it was a ritual sacrifice.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ said Detective Magruder.

  ‘That young woman in Scottsdale, whoever she was, she died of her burns, but she still had unfinished business in the world of the living. What she did – cutting those horses’ throats, setting fire to herself – it all had to be re-enacted so that her pain would finally be over and she could find peace.’

  ‘A ritual sacrifice?’ Detective Magruder repeated. He glanced at Detective Garnet and raised his eyebrows. ‘I see.’

  ‘I don’t really expect you to understand what I’m talking about,’ said Martin. ‘Even if you do, I don’t expect you to go along with it. But that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you’ve given me the confirmation that I’ve been looking for, that certain PMVs are coming back from the Ninth Circle of Hell, and that they’re playing out the circumstances in which they died.’

  ‘So that they can find peace?’ said Detective Magruder. Ruth had to admire the way that he kept any hint of sarcasm out of his voice.

  ‘You got it,’ said Martin. ‘All they want is to end their agony, and go back into the darkness, and they don’t care what they do or who they hurt. Let’s put it this way: if you were suffering unbearable pain – all day, every day – with no prospect of it ever ending, would you care what it took to relieve it? Would you care if some stranger died, so long as it stopped?’

  ‘I’m not too sure I’m following any of this,’ said Detective Magruder. ‘But don’t get me wrong, I want to find out who’s causing these fires, and why, and I don’t have any preconceptions about any of the evidence that we’ve collected so far, because so far it doesn’t amount to a hill of mixed beans.’

  Ruth said, ‘You’re right, Ron. All of these fires have been pyrotechnically inexplicable, and none of them bears any relation to any of the others. So far, Martin’s explanation is the only one we have. And I have to tell you that I’ve seen these post-mortem visitations for myself, these PMVs. I have, and Amelia, and Martin, and Doctor Beech, too.’

  She told the detectives about the Liébault session. While she did so, Detective Garnet frowned at her intently, as if she wanted to tell Ruth that she had a speck of spinach on her front tooth, but didn’t want to interrupt; while Detective Magruder constantly cleared his throat and jiggled his left leg.

  ‘Well,’ said Detective Magruder, when she had finished by telling them how Tyson had been burned to death. ‘Stranger than fiction, huh? Gee-whiz. I don’t really know what to say.’

  ‘Is there any way you can check on Pimo Jackson?’ Ruth asked him. ‘He should still be in prison, right? They gave him eleven consecutive life sentences, after all.’

  Detective Magruder jotted a note in his notebook. ‘Sure, I’ll check on him for you. But if he’s only a talking mask I don’t think you have too much to worry about.’

  Ruth said, ‘Ron, this is serious! I know it sounds totally crazy, but it really happened and we all saw it.’

  ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Ruth, but you saw what was going on inside of Amelia’s and Martin’s heads. A whole lot goes on inside of my head, too, but that doesn’t make it real. If it did, you wouldn’t be able to see me for the crowds of lap-dancers all around me.’

  ‘Your lap-dancers don’t set fire to your drapes,’ Ruth retorted. ‘And your lap-dancers don’t bring some creepy kid along with them – a boy who burns your dog to death.’

  ‘Like I’ve been telling you right from the beginning,’ said Martin, ‘the boy is the key. He’s the catalyst, the fire starter. He’s the angel of death.’

  ‘But if he burned up when Tyson burned up, that’s the end of him, right?’

  ‘He was probably burned up years ago,’ Martin told him. ‘He died, and he was properly cremated, but he keeps coming back. He left his ashes at the clinic, and Ruth tells me that she found similar ashes at all the other fires, so the chances are that they all belong to him.’

  ‘That sounds like one hell of a lot of ashes,’ said Detective Magruder. ‘Exactly how big was this kid?’

  Martin said, ‘He only looks like the same kid. But each time he reappears, he’s somebody else, another PMV. That’s what I think, anyhow. I may be wrong. But as far as I can work out, that’s the only way he can be constantly reincarnated, in the flesh, and leave so many ashes when he burns up.’

  ‘All right then, answer me something else. Why is he appearing here, in Kokomo? That Flying X business was in Arizona.’

  ‘Don’t ask me. But from what Professor Solway says, hell is everywhere and nowhere, both at the same time. I don’t think PMVs have the same sense of location as we do. The only place they know is pain.’

  ‘OK.’ Detective Magruder tucked his notebook into his inside pocket. ‘So what do you think we ought to do now? Any suggestions?’

  ‘I’m not sure. There’s no pattern to these fires, so we can’t predict where the Creepy Kid is going to strike next. Somehow we have to close off the way through from hell, and I’m not at all sure how we’re going to do that. Or even if we can.’

  ‘Ruth?’ asked Detective Magruder.

  Ruth said, ‘That’s something we’ll
have to put our minds to, isn’t it? How do you close off the way through from hell when you don’t even know if it exists, or even if it does exist, where to find it? But – sure – we’ll give it a try.

  ‘That doesn’t mean that Jack and I won’t be carrying on with all of our routine computer models and all of our forensics. Maybe these fires do have some supernatural cause, but I still want to understand the science behind them. Even if it’s weird science.’

  ‘OK,’ said Detective Magruder. ‘We’ll catch you tomorrow, right? Don’t have too many bad dreams. Personally, I think I’m going to.’

  The two detectives left. Ruth and Martin sat down together and Ruth poured them both another glass of wine. Upstairs, Ruth could hear Amelia singing one of her songs.

  ‘I knew the rain would come before the morning

  I knew that he would leave before it came.’

  ‘I should be going after this,’ said Martin.

  ‘You can stay over if you want to.’

  ‘No, thanks all the same. I sense that your husband doesn’t altogether approve of me. Besides, I need to do some serious thinking about how we can close the way through, and that means I have to pace up and down, and maybe make some phone calls, too.’

  ‘Do you believe it’s possible? Do you think we can close the way through?’

  ‘I have no idea. I don’t have any real conception of what it is, or where it is, or what it looks like – if it looks like anything at all. It might be a shining archway, or a mirror, or a window. It might be nothing more than a thin slit between two walls, or a crack between two floorboards. Even if we do manage to find it, I don’t have any idea how to seal it off. There’s no instruction manual – How To Keep The Living Dead Out Of Your House.’

  ‘What about your Professor Solway? Do you think that he might have some idea?’

  ‘Professor Solway? He’s away right now. I’m not exactly sure where.’

  They sat in silence for a while. Ruth felt exhausted, both physically and emotionally, but she still felt guilty that she wasn’t over on West Superior Street, helping Jack to analyze the remains from the Weatherfield Riding Stables fire. She kept thinking that she ought to feed Tyson, too, and take him for his evening walk. His dark blue Sunday-best leash was hanging on the hat-rack by the front door, next to Craig’s fishing-hat and her own red beret.