Fire Spirit

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Before you go on,’ said Ruth, ‘you’d better know what Ron Magruder’s found out.’ She told him about Velma Jackson and her four sons, and how Velma and Andrew had been burned to death. She also told him about Helen McTighe, and her brother Billy. She told him about the photographs, and how Velma Jackson and Julie Benfield had looked just like sisters.

  ‘I guessed as much,’ said Martin. ‘Especially Pimo and his brothers. It’s all beginning to make sense.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad it’s making sense to you.’

  Martin set down his wine glass. ‘Right from the beginning I thought that the Creepy Kid was somebody who had made a deal with a lesser god. God, angel, I’m not really sure. But your Detective Magruder, God bless him, has pretty much proved it for me. When he was burned to death, young Andrew Jackson would have been sent to the ninth circle of hell because of what he did to his mother, and because of the unresolved feelings of revenge that he still had for his brothers. He would have burned and burned, day after day, night after night. Unendurable pain, twenty-four-seven, for ever. Think about it. Wouldn’t you sell your soul to be free of it, even for a minute?’

  ‘But why him? And how can he keep burning up to nothing but ashes and then come back to life again?’

  Martin said, ‘I can’t tell you why he was chosen in the first place. Maybe the gods sensed that he was ready to do what they wanted. Maybe he had sinned so badly that he needed redemption more than any other boy they could find. Whatever it was, they would have made a deal with him. They would have taken his immortal soul, in exchange for giving him darkness and peace. But once they possessed his soul they would have been able to resurrect his earthly remains. They would have been able to take his ashes and recreate him exactly as he was on the day that he died.

  ‘One morning, five years ago, Andrew Jackson woke up in the morning and put on his black T-shirt and his red jeans and went to school. He ate his free lunch and then he went home, and that’s the boy you can still see today. Except that he’s not that boy. He’s an angel of death, like I said. He’s a god, in a child’s body. And as far as I can work out, he’s going to go on taking revenge for every thirteen-year-old boy who ever got abused or mistreated, even if he’s doing it by proxy. He’s using Pimo and his two brothers to set up scenarios as near to their original abuse as possible – even if he’s burning up innocent people who just happen to look like his abusers.

  ‘Every time one of those innocent people dies, the angel of death gets to take possession of their soul. As far as I can make out, none of them suffer. Julie Benfield, Tilda Frieburg – nor any of those seniors who got burned on the bus. They didn’t go to hell to burn for ever, the way that Andrew Jackson did, and those people we saw in Doctor Beech’s clinic. They got that wall-to-wall blackness that all of us long for, in the end. They got absolute nothingness. And that’s what Andrew Jackson got, too, for surrendering his soul and allowing the angel to use his ashes. He got peace.’

  ‘But why do these gods want all of these people’s souls?’

  ‘You’d have to ask Professor Solway about that. But I think he would tell you that life in heaven and hell is not so very different from life on earth. The more human souls that any god can gather around him, the more influence he has. It’s spiritual politics. It’s all about the power, and the glory. All of those stories about the war in heaven, with Lucifer finally getting cast out, they’re true, in their way, although nobody knows what a god or an angel really is, or what they really look like.’

  ‘I’m trying to get my head around this, believe me,’ said Ruth. ‘But I’m not finding it easy.’

  Martin said, ‘I know. It’s like all wars, you only know half the story until it’s all over, and somebody’s lost or won. But we don’t have much time. Those voices that Ammy and I have been hearing, they’re people from the ninth circle of hell who think that if they start ritualistic fires, if they re-enact their own deaths, they could end their suffering, too.’

  ‘But if what you said about Andrew Jackson is true, they have to make a deal with this angel first, the way he did. They have to get Pimo or somebody like him to set everything up.’

  ‘They should, and they probably won’t find peace if they don’t. But they’re in agony, Ruth, and they don’t want to wait any longer. They just want to come through and set fire to everything. Worse than that, though – if the people from the ninth circle of hell can find a way back to the living world, they’ll all want to come back, from every other circle – plague victims, crash victims, drowning victims, all of them.’

  ‘You’re not serious.’

  ‘Ruth – Jeff is in the hospital fighting for his life and you think I’m not serious? This could happen everywhere. Every single person who went to hell with unfinished business with the living, they could all come back through from underneath and make sure that they finish it.’

  Ruth called Jack. She told him that Jeff was stable and that Craig was making good progress. Then she said, ‘Ron Magruder gave me your message about the remains from Weatherfield Stables – “more of the same”. I presume you meant cremated remains.’

  ‘You presumed right, Boss. I sent them over to Aaron Scheinman and he put a rush on them for me. Lo and behold, the DNA is identical to the other samples. That means we now have enough cremated remains from one individual to make two individuals and possibly half of a third. Impossible, of course. But true.’

  ‘Martin’s here. He’s explained it to me. I don’t really understand it, and even if I could, I don’t think I would believe it. But so far it’s still the only explanation that makes any sense.’

  ‘You’re not talking to a totally closed mind here, Ruth. Remember Lois.’

  ‘Did they bring Jeff’s car in yet?’

  ‘The Grand Prix? Yes, it’s in the garage. I’ll be getting down there as soon as I’ve finished the computer model from the Walters Clinic. I’ve only just received Tyson’s necropsy from the vet.’

  ‘Thanks, Jack. Call me as soon as you have any news, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course. And, Ruth – take it easy, huh? You’ve had some pretty serious shocks in the past forty-eight hours, and you’re only human, like the rest of us.’

  ‘Thanks, Jack.’

  She hung up the phone, but almost immediately it warbled again.

  ‘Hi, Ruth. It’s Sandra Garnet. Ron just had to go out to a hold-up at the Speedway gas station out on West Jefferson, but he asked me to call you asap.’

  ‘You’ve had some results from the NCIC?’

  ‘That’s right. I found one case of arson that was just like the Spirit of Kokomo fire, and another just like Tilda Frieburg’s. And guess what? In both cases, there was a thirteen-year-old boy involved.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Sandra cleared her throat. ‘In May 2007, there was a serious fire at a mental hospital in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Seven elderly patients were burned to death, as well as a hospital porter and the thirteen-year-old grandson of one of the inmates.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘According to the medical examiner, all of the patients had been prone to violent outbursts so they had been put on a new drug called Occus-Ex to keep them calm and sociable. Unfortunately, it seems like the drug had exactly the opposite effect on them. One afternoon, with no apparent provocation, they beat up on each other and tore each other’s clothes off and then they deliberately set fire to their day-room. The hospital porter was stabbed and wounded as he tried to put the flames out, and the boy was knocked unconscious when he tried to rescue his grandfather. They both died of second-degree burns and smoke inhalation.

  ‘The NCIC have sent me pictures of five of the deceased. At least one of them has a very strong resemblance to a woman called Ida Mae Lutz who died in the Spirit of Kokomo bus fire. The boy’s name was Ricky Billings. They sent me his picture, too, and apart from his freckles and his fair hair he’s the spitting image of Andrew Jackson.’

  Ruth looked across at Martin. She covere
d the phone with her hand and said, ‘It’s the police.’ Then, to Sandra Garnet, ‘What about the Tilda Frieburg fire?’

  ‘OK . . . in the past three years there were two separate and unrelated incidents of girls being burned alive in bathtubs, one in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the other in Champaign, Illinois. In both cases they were doused in accelerants and set alight, but the girl in Fort Lauderdale was black, and very thin, and lived with her boyfriend, while the girl in Champaign was white and overweight, like Tilda Frieburg. and lived alone.

  ‘Her name was Belinda Cusack. Until she was seventeen she lived with her mother and her kid brother on West Eureka Street, but her mother was a hopeless drunk and Belinda had to cook and clean and find a way to pay the rent, too. From the age of fifteen she brought men home to supplement her income. The family wouldn’t have survived, otherwise. She wasn’t pretty so she had to let men do whatever they liked to her, and some of what they liked was really repulsive, I can tell you.

  ‘In the end Belinda couldn’t take it any more and she packed up and left home. But she went back one evening to find out if her brother was OK. Her brother wasn’t there, but her mother was. They had a fierce argument about money and her mother attacked her and hit her over the head with a steam-iron, and knocked her cold.

  ‘Her mother thought that Belinda was dead, so she took off her clothes and dragged her into the bathroom. She poured a quart of potato vodka all over her and set her alight. She never admitted it, but it seems like she was trying to make it look as if one of her clients had murdered her.

  ‘Belinda must have woken up when she started burning, because the neighbors heard her screaming, although – surprise, surprise – not one of them came to find out if there was anything wrong. But it was then that her young brother came home. He tried to save his sister, but while he was trying to put out the flames his mother hit him with the steam-iron, too, four or five times, and killed him.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ said Ruth. ‘God, that’s terrible.’

  Detective Garnet said, ‘Sometimes, the things people do to each other, it makes it hard to believe in God, don’t it?’

  By four p.m., Amelia was growing more and more agitated. She kept pacing backward and forward across the living-room, holding her hands over her ears, and saying, ‘Stop! Stop! I don’t care if you’re coming through! Just stop!’

  Ruth tried to put her arms around her and calm her down, but she pulled herself away and started to walk from room to room, into the kitchen and through to the dining-room and back out to the living-room, talking to herself higher and higher.

  ‘Stop! I don’t care if you’re coming through! Leave me alone!’

  Martin said, ‘Ruth, listen to me – we have to do something, and we have to do it now. We don’t want Ammy to have a breakdown.’

  ‘Maybe I should call Doctor Feldstein, or Doctor Beech.’

  ‘Ammy doesn’t need a doctor, Ruth. She needs to face up to these people who are coming back from hell. I can hear them myself, although Ammy can obviously hear them much louder than I can. They’re growing more and more hysterical, and if we don’t stop them – well, who else is going to stop them, except us? Nobody else believes in them.’

  Ruth watched Amelia as she stalked out of the kitchen and back into the living-room, her hands still pressed over her ears, her eyes darting from side to side. She kept jerking, and sniffing, and colliding against the walls, as if she were having a fit.

  ‘What can we do, then?’ asked Ruth. ‘Come on, Martin, tell me what the hell we can do!’

  Martin laid his hand on her shoulder. ‘More than anything else, we mustn’t panic. OK? We need to keep our heads because the people who are coming through, they’re going to be out of their minds with pain. They’re going to be hurting and they’re going to be disoriented and above all they’re going to be angry. But we need to find out where they’re going to come through. Once we’ve done that, we can go there and send them back.’

  ‘But how can we do that?’

  ‘They’re burning, aren’t they? They’re all on fire. You work for the Fire Department. Can’t you call on a couple of fire trucks? If they come through but they can’t set anything alight, what choice will they have? They’re dead. They’ll have to go back to hell.’

  ‘This is madness,’ said Ruth.

  ‘Of course it’s madness. Life is madness. Death is madness. Before we’re born, we’re nothing at all, we’re not even conscious. Then we wake up and we live out these lives full of happiness and light. Then we’re gone again. Click, finished. Lights off. If that’s not madness, then I don’t know what is.’

  ‘But you can understand why these people want to come back, can’t you? These people who got burned, or drowned, or caught some terrible disease? Don’t you think they feel cheated?’

  Martin looked down at the carpet. ‘Yes. I know they feel cheated. Susan’s told me that.’

  ‘You’ve felt her again?’

  Martin said nothing, but Ruth said, ‘You have felt her again, haven’t you? You felt her last night.’

  Martin nodded. ‘Felt her. Heard her. This disturbance in the ninth circle of hell . . . it’s spreading to all of the other circles, like a ripple effect. Susan, she’s in the eighth circle, with all of the drowning victims like her. I was in the shower last night and she came to me. She came to me, and she held me very close – closer than she has for a long, long time. She said she was frightened, because the waters are getting all churned up, and people are screaming, and it’s just like a dam’s going to burst. They want to be saved, those people. Not from death, because they know that they’re dead already. They just want to be saved from drowning.’

  Ruth looked at him. She was tempted to reach out and touch his lips with her fingertips, as if to console him for what he had said. In another life, if she hadn’t been married to Craig, and if she hadn’t been Jeff and Amelia’s mother, maybe she would have done. She had that unreal feeling that she had met a soulmate at the wrong time, under all the wrong circumstances, and all she could do was to watch him, and talk to him, and keep her hands and her feelings to herself.

  ‘So what are we going to do?’ she asked him. ‘How are we going to find out where these people are coming through?’

  ‘I think Ammy can do it, if I guide her. We can do one of those Liébault sessions – just you and me and her, together. They’re close, Ruth, and they’re coming closer. This time, when they come through, we won’t be able to stop them just by breaking the circle. This time it’s going to be some kind of war.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  The three of them sat cross-legged in the middle of the living-room. Outside it was growing gloomy again and the wind was rising, so that they could see leaves whirling wildly around the yard. They didn’t have a rotating glass ball on which they could focus, like Doctor Beech’s, but Ruth managed to find a candleholder with a globe-shaped crystal shade. It had been given to them as a wedding gift by one of Craig’s sisters, and Ruth had kept it in the back of the dining-room sideboard and never used it.

  Now, however, she fitted a candle in it and lit it, and it sparkled with prismatic colors, almost as glittery as Doctor Beech’s ball.

  Martin said, ‘OK . . . let’s make contact.’ He reached out and touched his fingertips against Amelia’s forehead, and Amelia touched her fingertips to Ruth’s forehead. Ruth hesitated for a moment, and Martin glanced at her as if he knew why she was hesitating, but then she touched her fingertips to his forehead, too.

  ‘Let’s look at the colors,’ said Martin. ‘Let’s see what kind of pictures they make. Let’s empty our minds and see what images we can conjure up.’

  They sat in silence for over three minutes. Rain began to clatter against the living-room window, and broken twigs, too, and a strong draft began to seethe under the door, as if a monstrous animal were trying to smell if they were in there.

  The colored lights began to shimmer and dance in front of Ruth’s eyes. She was sure she
could hear the crackling of fire, and when she looked up she saw that flames were reflected on Amelia’s face.

  ‘Ammy,’ she said, but the fire-crackle was so loud that she didn’t think Amelia could hear her. Yet when Amelia started to whisper, Ruth could hear that clearly enough.

  ‘“We’re coming through,”’ said Amelia. Her voice was harsh and high, and even though her lips were moving, it didn’t sound like Amelia at all. ‘“We’re coming through and there’s nothing you can do to stop us. Not now.”’

  Martin closed his eyes. Ruth turned to him and there were flames reflected on his face, too. ‘I can feel you. I can hear you, too. What do you want?’

  ‘“Have to settle it,”’ said Amelia. ‘“Eyes on fire, fingers on fire. Have to settle it.”’

  ‘How many of you are coming through?’ Martin asked her.

  ‘“Hundreds,”’ said Amelia. ‘“Hundreds and hundreds. And you can’t stop us now. Have to settle it. Fingers on fire. Eyes on fire. Hair on fire. The pain the pain we can’t bear the pain! We can’t bear the pain for a minute longer!”’

  Martin looked at Ruth. Then he turned toward the window. ‘She’s right,’ he said. ‘They are coming through. I can feel them, too.’

  ‘But where?’ asked Ruth.

  ‘“Here,”’ said Amelia, but this time her voice was different again. Softer, less panicky.

  Ruth looked at Amelia and saw that her face was altering. It was almost as if she were wearing a transparent mask made of fluid, constantly-shifting light. She could still see Amelia’s elfin features underneath, but she was wearing another face, too. A face that looked unnervingly familiar. It could have been Ruth herself, except that it wasn’t.

  It was the woman in the photograph on Amelia’s desk – the photograph that she had found in her bedroom closet when they first moved in.

  ‘Here?’ said Ruth. Her throat was so tight that she barely recognized her own voice.