Report from a Place of Burning

by George Looney

  I’ve never seen Harlan look so haunted. I wasn’t sure I should call, but I told my wife and she said the police might want to know.

  I thanked him and assured him he’d done the right thing in calling me, though I still can’t really say that’s true. It was odd enough, though, I felt I had to look into it. DeGreco agreed but left me to do it on my own. It was a test, I knew that. So I did some background on Harlan’s wife and found out that her team had been the one sent in by the insurance company to determine the cause of the Heinz plant fire a couple of years ago. That it wasn’t long after that she announced her pregnancy and requested a leave of absence. Now, her child’s the fifth victim in this hideous killing spree and she’s painting fires. Could of course just be coincidence. DeGreco says he doesn’t believe in coincidence.

  Coincidence, DeGreco says, is the world’s way of rubbing our noses in it. Whatever it may be, he adds.

  It warranted a visit, that’s for sure, and DeGreco said I should handle this one solo. On my way out to the Burke place, I decided I should speak to the husband about this first, alone. Get as much ammunition as I can before taking her on, was my thinking.

  Mr. Burke, I said when he opened the door. You might remember me. I was here a couple of weeks ago, with Detective DeGreco. About your son? I didn’t want to have to say anything else to remind him.

  Of course, detective. What can I do for you? It was creepy, the way his face didn’t seem to have any actual expression to it. How it didn’t change, not one muscle, not one subtle inflection of motion.

  I just have some follow-up questions, if you have a few minutes?

  He invited me in and we sat down in the living room, me in the chair where his wife sat with those burned arms held as though she were still holding onto the smoldering ruin of her child. Harlan found it hard to look directly at me sitting in that chair, which was fine by me. I asked if his wife was at home and he looked back towards the nursery and said she was, that she was working.

  Should I get her? Harlan said.

  No. Actually, sir, I wanted to talk to you first. He nodded, relaxed that he would not have to go back to that room where she was painting to get her. It’s come to our attention, Mr. Burke, that you may be concerned about how your wife is handling the loss of your son. I didn’t know how else to start this. Whatever I said was bound to be awkward, and likely to hit some nerves that no doubt were still awful raw. Bull’s eye, DeGreco, if he’d been there, would have said and smiled that odd smile of his, the one that isn’t really a smile.

  What are you talking about?

  One of your colleagues at work has told us you’re worried about what your wife’s been painting since Samuel’s death. That got the face to change. What it changed to wasn’t what I’d have expected, though. Harlan Burke looked afraid. Scared to death, actually.

  Someone told you about the paintings? he said. It was clear he was trying hard not to look down the hall toward the nursery.

  Yes sir, I said. I didn’t push it. I needed to watch what Harlan came to on his own, if anything. How he got to it, whatever it was, would tell me what I needed to know. I’d been working with DeGreco long enough to know that.

  What is it, exactly, Harlan, you’re afraid of? Bring it to the personal level, first names, and name it, the fear, what it was, was my thinking.

  What are you saying? he said. You can’t think, and he couldn’t get the rest out.

  I’m not accusing you or your wife of anything, Harlan. Believe me. It was clear he didn’t.

  Look, Harlan said, his face really something now, a muddle of different expressions, none of them matching what was coming out of his mouth, except maybe the undertone of anger, so she spends her time painting nothing but fires consuming buildings and animals and yes, maybe people. That doesn’t mean, and again he couldn’t say it out loud.

  Calm down, Mr. Burke. A little distance, a bit of formality, I’d decided, was what was called for. I’m not saying I think your wife is capable of setting a baby on fire, much less her own. But you must admit, sir, it’s strange, her painting all these fires.

  Harlan had turned at a noise in the hall, his wife going to the bathroom. Come here, he said. Come with me. I followed Harlan down the hall to the room I had taken so many pictures of. The crib was nowhere in sight. Probably put away in the attic, I thought. This was no nursery anymore. Canvases were strewn around the room, more than twenty of them, and each had at least the beginnings of flames. This room that hadn’t been touched by the fire that had taken their son was now consumed by fire, the fire this mother was condemning the room to.

  That’s how I saw it, and that’s what I would tell DeGreco later. She’s not the one, I’d say. Those fires she’s painting, it’s both a kind of revenge and a kind of survivor guilt. That room, the room she’s painting in, the room that used to be a nursery, she’s angry at it. Why, she yells through the paintings, why didn’t you burn with my son? You should have burned, the paintings scream. And she sits in the midst of these canvases of flame painting more fire, fire enough to consume her as well.

  She’s painting those fires to surround herself with a physical manifestation of her own hell, is what I would tell DeGreco later.

  Not bad, DeGreco would say. You’re catching on.

  But I had to deal with Harlan Burke first. I put my arm on his shoulder and led him back out to the living room. He was collapsing, inside, I could tell. Harlan was a wreck.

  You’ve got to let her work this out, Harlan. Remember that in the Bible, Harlan, the Holy Spirit is a flame. Fire, the Bible tells us, can purify without consuming. It can refine. Think of the fires she’s painting as purifying fires, cleansing fires. I assured him we’d keep at it till we found whoever killed their son, and the others, and shook his hand before showing myself out, leaving Harlan sitting with his face in his hands in the chair where his wife had tried to hold on to the ghost of their son.

  • • •

  I’m not sure what’s worse. Facing people whose lives have been ruined by this bastard burning up babies, or staying in the office looking over lab reports and being watched over by all seven of the burned babies in the glossy eight by tens pinned to the walls. I can’t say for sure whether the silence of the babies is easier or harder to take than the noise the survivors make out of their anger and their pain and their fear.

  Death is a mute, I heard DeGreco tell an officer once, whose hands have been chopped off at the wrists.

  • • •

  This afternoon it was an old guy whose wife died years ago. He was pretty far down the list, but we’ve got nothing, no leads, and we’re desperate. Some of the neighbors said this old guy was a regular. He must walk, one said, for exercise. A woman told me he used to walk with a younger woman they had figured out, finally, was his wife, but she had died some time ago. Everyone said that, since he regularly walked the neighborhood, he might have seen something that, put into context, just might help nail the sicko setting fires to babies in their cribs. Or maybe, one woman said, a woman no one else talked to, a woman one of the other neighbors had suggested might be worth looking at for it, maybe that old guy is the one who’s doing it.

  I waited where several said he’d be by soon and, sure enough, before too long here comes this old guy obviously in pretty good shape for his age. He fit the description the neighbors had given me. At one point, when he was still several hundred feet off, I could’ve sworn he was talking to someone, though no one was there. He wasn’t just talking with this person who wasn’t there, they were arguing. The old guy was using his arms and, whatever the argument was about, I could tell something about the guy I’m sure DeGreco would’ve noticed, too. He was pretending he was absolutely certain about whatever it was he was saying. He wanted to be certain, maybe needed to be, but he wasn’t sure at all. In fact, he was scared he was wrong.

  Excuse me, sir, I said, holding out my badge,
which caught the sun and almost blinded the old guy. I was wondering if you’d mind if I asked you a few questions.

  No problem, son, he said.

  I’ve been told you walk through this neighborhood pretty regularly.

  It’s for my health mainly, though it’s a nice area to walk through. Some really beautiful older Victorian homes, he said, and the people here have their lawns landscaped nicely.

  I was told you walked by the house where a baby was found dead several days ago. I heard you walked by that night, and were seen stopped at the house, by the yellow police tape.

  What kind of man or woman could do such a sick thing, burn a baby, and do it over and over? The way he shook his head, there was sadness in it, sure, but there was wisdom, too. Even without DeGreco’s help, I could tell this guy was not involved. This guy knew guilt intimately and, despite the act he put on for the people he chatted with as he strolled past their homes, he had, as they say, a dark side. He had something to hide, but it wasn’t the murder of seven babies burned in their cribs. It was something more personal, more intimate. Something I knew I’d never get him to admit.

  I wish I could tell you, sir, I said. I asked if he had noticed anything unusual in the days leading up to the child’s death. I could tell there was something.

  Can’t think of anything, officer. Sorry, he said.

  Again, I knew whatever it was he had seen had nothing to do with what was happening to the babies, but that he had seen something odd. Something so odd he was afraid to admit it, afraid what it would say about him if he did.

  Another dead end, I knew, and watched him walk off at a good clip for such an old guy. Just before he turned the corner and headed south, he said something. I could see his face from the side and he was talking to someone, but there was nobody there. Great, I thought. The guy hears voices. Still, he wasn’t our guy, and I was sure of that. Leave him alone, I thought, to talk to whoever it is he thinks he’s talking to.

  Talking is always a good thing, DeGreco says, even if no one’s listening.

  Maybe, DeGreco. Maybe especially when no one is listening. Maybe the man who can go on talking when there’s no longer any reason to do so is the sanest one of us all.

  Or maybe I’m just trying to justify my singing lullabies when DeGreco is out of the office and it’s just me and the seven dead babies hung on the walls in their charred and smoldering final poses. It’s not really the babies I’m soothing with the singing. I don’t believe in ghosts. What haunts me isn’t the tiny spirits of the seven murdered babies, but the lack of evidence. What haunts me is that we still don’t know how these babies are being burned the way they are, why they’re being burned, or who it is burning them. We don’t have a clue, and that haunts me. No lullaby is going to change that, I know.

  • • •

  DeGreco called and left a message while I was out. Said he may have a lead, that we may have gotten the break we’ve been looking for. Said that we needed to speak to a prophet.

  I wanted to laugh at that. A prophet. Maybe it was the seven babies pinned up around the office, or maybe it was remembering how that old guy argued with someone who wasn’t there, but whatever it was I couldn’t laugh. Maybe faith, I thought, isn’t a bad direction to look in. Maybe, I said to no one at all as I turned out the light and left the babies in the dark, this prophet can tell us some things.

  The Prophet and the Gorge

  And the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, St. John wrote, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.

  Even modern medicine can’t deny the dragon its meal every time. The dragon, it will eat and know the fullness of wriggling life in its maw. Fire is the breath of this dragon which does not consume the flesh but the spirit.

  The local news is abuzz with reports of babies burned and dead in their cribs. People are talking everywhere I go about these babies, but no one is talking dragons.

  Signs are signs despite blindness.

  • • •

  The gorge we played in and around as kids, despite the gorge where it was legal to swim being just a mile or two away, holds more than the fiery body of the diver in its murky water. They dragged the gorge for his body but all the hooks ever brought up out of that brackish water was a red hand, torn from the arm at the wrist. The rest of that red diver is a mystery.

  I was the last to see it. Tied to a fence, I watched that body, which plummeted like some fanatical star off a bridge to collapse against stone and slide gracefully under what water there was in the gorge. It was lower than usual due to a drought, one reason why no one could figure how the hooks could have missed the body.

  I refused to swim in the gorge that summer. My brother and others, Jack and Ted included, would come back from taking a swim in those illegal waters, their bodies already beginning to break out in the rash that would take days and at least half a bottle of calamine lotion to get rid of, and they would tell me stories of their encounters with the red diver.

  He’s alive, my brother would start.

  Yeah, alive and swimming around down at the bottom of the gorge, Ted took up the story. That’s why they didn’t find him when they dragged the gorge.

  That’s right, Jack chimed in. He ripped his own hand off and stabbed it onto the hook so they would go away and leave him alone. The one he has left, Jack said, is webbed now, just like his feet. I saw them, up close, he said. Between the fingers and all the toes he’s grown flaps of skin he can stretch taut. They help him swim, he said.

  Not only that, my brother said. He’s got gills. I saw them, swear I did. Along his torso, where you can sometimes see the shadows of the ribs under the skin and muscle, that’s where the gills are. Pink slashes in his red sides. I was close enough to see them move and bubbles were let go from inside those gills, from inside his body.

  I doubt he even uses his lungs, Jack said.

  Sure he does, Ted said. When he climbs out of the water and claws his way up one of the sides of the gorge to come out and walk around town at night when people are sleeping. They say he’s looking for his lost hand, Ted said. They say he wheezes from his wet lungs and whimpers his way through town, looking.

  They would tell different versions of these stories. Sometimes as cautionary tales. Behave or the red diver will come for you, that sort of thing. Sometimes they were just variations on horror stories, the red diver just a figure of mindless fear, an indiscriminate killer, especially of little boys. Once or twice the red diver became a sort of angel sent down to bless and swim the holy waters of the gorge, and the only ones who could see him swimming through the green water were the consecrated.

  Seeing the red diver, in these stories, was a good sign. Swimming by the red diver without touching was good for calming the heart, they said. And to be touched by the one remaining red hand was a blessing.

  Local myths don’t ask any less for faith just because they’re local.

  Over the next few years, stories of the red diver were told less and less, though those that were told became more and more detailed, more and more believable despite being outrageous. The red diver took on more of a personality in these later stories, and worked his magic more one on one. And, of course, as with almost any local legend, there were miracles associated with the red diver.

  Like the boy, I think he was related to Ted in some way, who had an epileptic fit sunning on one of the flat rocks of the gorge and rolled off the rock into the stinking water. Ted watched him go under and dove from another rock down into the foul pond. When he came back up a minute later, gasping and spitting out water, his arms were wrapped around the pale body of what was his cousin, I think. They say he’s never had another fit. They say the doctors can find no evidence the boy ever had epilepsy. It’s a miracle, they say. It’s as if the boy who slipped off that rock into the water died that day and a new boy, fixed and whole, was dragged out by his cousin a
nd had the water forced out of his lungs so hard his ribs would ache for days.

  Then there were the stories of women who woke up in the wee hours of the morning and found themselves walking towards the gorge. Sleepwalking, they were. That was the explanation the doctors gave it. The women would wake up outside in their pajamas or nighties. It’s said those who didn’t wake up would walk all the way out to the gorge and lay down on one of the flat rocks around the water in the gorge. It’s said the red diver would crawl out of the water and sit beside them looking down at their faces and undo the nighties and slip off the pajamas and have his way with the women right there on the rocks under a full moon.

  Just the other day I heard someone say that maybe the babies burning up around town had been spawned by the red diver. The red diver, a man in the grocery store said to his wife, he’s been busy again. It’s his offspring that are going up in flames. His wife hushed him and looked around to make sure no one else had heard what her husband had said to her.

  Don’t say things like that, she said. That’s just awful.

  And it was an awful thing to say. Especially if it’s true.

  Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and of the sea, St. John wrote, for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.

  • • •

  The gorge holds other signs. The gorge is a place of miracles, a place of revelations. It was two years before I was able to swim in the gorge’s murky waters. By then I had begun to think of the red diver, whoever or whatever he had been in the beginning, as a kindly figure, almost a sort of protector. He had become so familiar, what with all the different stories told about him, that he seemed family. I still had not read St. John’s Revelation and was years away from understanding what the red diver had really been, and who he had dove into that vile water for.

  Even though I only half-believed the stories my brother and his friends told, I expected to bump into his rotting body. Of course the red diver made no appearance while I swam. It was a warm day, and the water in the gorge was lukewarm. It’s better swimming when the water’s still cool, but it was wet and I was swimming and there were no bodies floating in my way and that was good enough.