A Ghost of Fire

by Sam Whittaker

  Chapter Twelve

  When I came back to the apartment it was late. I had bummed around town for a while then found a park and took a walk around a narrow blacktop path to clear my head. Also, I felt trepidation at the prospect of returning home after having the brief paranormal encounter in the basement of Spectra. After it had gotten too dark for me to remain confident of my safety in the park I found a few other things to occupy my time in town.

  I stopped and grabbed a bite to eat at a sit down place with decent Chinese food. As I silently devoured fried rice and sweet and sour pork, my eyes kept returning to a mural of a dragon astride the Great Wall. Smoke poured from its nostrils and flames licked out of the beast’s long toothy maw. And in one corner of the mural was a lone figure, masked and armored in ancient Asian style and brandishing a slender, curved sword. I thought of all the myths where the fire-breathing beasts thundered and destroyed until slain by some brave soul. I wondered at the place such stories occupied in the human psyche. What great tasks and dangers did they stand in for? What fires burned within us and terrified us so that we needed to mask them with the giant serpentine façades? I concluded there were probably different answers to those questions for many people. I certainly had my own dragon to slay.

  I looked around the restaurant and saw couples and families seated at booths and tables. I noticed I was the only loner. I finished, paid my bill and left, headed nowhere in particular. I was on the road maybe fifteen minutes before I passed one of those megaplex movie theaters with twenty or so screens. I went around the block and pulled into the parking lot on a whim.

  It wasn’t a weekend, so finding a spot closer than a million miles from the place wasn’t too much of a chore. I got out, locked the car and strode across the lot. As I maneuvered between the other cars I heard the sound of childish laughter from behind me. I spun around expecting to see the girl in the white dress. What I saw instead was a family of four, a father, mother, a little boy and a young girl walking through the parking lot together. The father was carrying the girl and tickling her sides. The girl, blond haired and no more than four years old, arched her back and erupted in gales of joyous laughter. The mother carried a boy of two or three years who rested contentedly against her shoulders. She also looked to be about halfway through a pregnancy.

  My mind raced back to Katie, unconscious and recovering in a hospital bed. At the time I didn’t know what association the synapses in my brain made between the two. Later I would suspect it had something to do with an impulse I had to not be alone, which was the same impulse that had earlier driven me to go to a restaurant where I could sit in close proximity to other people. It was also the same impulse I had followed which had led me to the movie theater, where strangers sat together in the dark. I now believe it is this togetherness we crave. It serves as a hedge against the dark for which we volunteer and sometimes which elects us.

  Inside the theater I stood in a large, open lobby and directly In front of me was a row of screens listing which films were playing at what times. I noticed a listing for a children’s movie, the latest sequel where toys came to life when their human owners weren’t around and solved some crisis. I’d seen both the previous installments in the series with my nephew. They had enough grownup humor in them to not make me want to get up and find something else to do every five minutes, so I chose that one. I wasn’t looking for drama or, God forbid, horror. I had enough of both in my life and just wanted something to balance them out a bit.

  An hour and a half came and went and I was remarkably distracted from my problems enough to barely notice the passage of time. It was now full dark outside as I stepped out of Hollywood’s dreams, pleasanter dreams than the ones I would have that night, and back into the real world. I found my way back to my car and headed home.

  All of these activities were performed not simply for themselves but for a unified purpose. They were my personal defenses, designs and plans to keep me from returning to the apartment. But they couldn’t last forever. I always returned.

  Not long after that the door swung in on my apartment as I pressed the fingertips of my left hand against it, my freshly used key dangled from my right hand, and I peered into the room where I had left the light on. Nothing waited for me but the things I had placed there. Still the silence unnerved me. I waited a few heartbeats and entered.

  I went through my routine of checking corners and items to see if they had been disturbed. It annoyed me that I had been drawn into minor obsessive compulsive behavior by the things that had happened but I did my best to shrug off the disappointment I felt in myself. I went into the kitchen for a snack, some comfort food for an impossibly uncomfortable life.

  I reached for the cabinets and stopped. The image of the cabinets and the charred bones in the basement of Spectra averted my appetite. I reached for the refrigerator instead and pulled out a can of pop. I opened the thing and downed it all right there, a sign that I wasn’t drinking it because I was thirsty but because I was trying to use it as medicine for my soul. It didn’t work, of course.

  I crushed the can in my right hand and threw it in the sink. I walked into the main living area unsatisfied and plopped onto the futon. I waited for something to happen. Nothing did. No little girls. No darkly dressed torch wielding men. No smell of smoke. No phone calls from beyond the grave. Some might have considered that a small victory. I did not.

  You see, I was terrified of facing any one of those things. Terrified and yet compelled to want it. I can’t explain it but God help me I wanted it.

  I milled aimlessly around the apartment for another half hour or so and finally crawled onto the futon and pulled the covers over me. I don’t know how much time passed before sleep overtook me but I don’t imagine it was long. When it did come it brought with it the encounter I earlier expected and loathed and longed for.

  The first thing I remember from my dream is the night. The sky was black but there were no stars for something was obscuring them, something moving. I couldn’t tell immediately what it was. The air felt cool against my skin. In what way anyone can be said to experience such a thing in sleep is beyond me but I did feel it. Or at least I thought I felt it. I looked down at myself and saw a white cotton t-shirt, faded blue jeans and bare feet. It was what I’d been wearing when I went to bed. The grass poked up between my toes, cold against the soles of my feet. But all the feelings I experienced were not complete. They were in some way muted. Despite the coolness there was a magnificent blaze before me.

  I stood on the shaggy lawn of an oversized house. It peaked at three stories high. The top level was really cooking. Through the windows on the second level I noticed the faint beginnings of an orange glow. All the windows were caged by black wrought-iron bars. Smoke pumped madly into the sky. That was what obscured the stars, I saw. Bits of ash and glowing embers floated past me, some landing in my hair and on my shoulders. The smell of the burn filled my nose and I began to cough.

  My attention came down when the sound of screams entered. They came in not suddenly but soft at first then growing in volume, as if some movie sound effects artist added them from a mixing board by gradually increasing the sound level. That’s what the whole thing was like for me; like watching a movie. But I was also in it, feeling it. The cries disturbed me, cutting deep into a secret place in my heart. I began to feel sick and wanted to drop to my knees and wretch.

  My movie camera eyes tracked to a painted wooden sign which was difficult to read in the dark, but not impossibly so. My heart pounded faster as I read it, making the connection as to why the screams gripped and appalled me the way they did. The sign read: The St. Francis Orphanage. The screams were those of children. That was all I needed to motivate my dream-self to action.

  I tried to sprint forward but my body didn’t move as fast as my mind. The curse of dream slowness in the middle of a crisis only added to my sense of urgency. I fought against it but could not win. The muddled slowness of it all cast an angry red feeling into me wh
ich made me fight all the more to speed up. It made no difference, or so little difference that it did not matter.

  Soon I was being passed on the left by someone else who, while still in that same slow motion trap, had better command of his legs. The uniform and the hat sparked recognition in me. It was a police officer. But there was something off about him. My senses refused to reveal to me what it was although I knew it should have been obvious. Two more of them passed beside me, this time on the right. Then one more passed right through me. I staggered a bit at this and a clear message formed in me.

  I was a guest in this dream…my dream. I had been invited to watch, not to participate. If my heart had been a cauldron it would have boiled with rage at this. I wanted to be in control so bad, to be able to direct the course of the things playing out. But it was not meant to be. I realized then that I was seeing things which had already happened. They could not be altered, only viewed.

  The cops reached the door of the house but couldn’t open it. The first one pushed with his shoulder while trying to turn a knob which would not rotate. Locked. Another one of them shoved the first one out of the way. He kicked against the door three times. When it still wouldn’t open he screamed something at it, something I couldn’t understand. Then he unsnapped his holster and drew his gun. He fired a few rounds into the door near the handle, splintering the wood.

  I was closer to the house now and could see the chipped white paint on the door. Again, the second cop kicked at it. The door moved inward a few inches but it didn’t fly open like I expected it would have. More kicks rained down, this time some of them came from a third cop as well as the second. Finally the door opened fully into the house. I saw tables and chairs had been piled behind the door. Someone had not wanted help to break through. The fire had been set deliberately.

  The cops scrambled over the pile of furniture clearing an escape path and poured into the house. I followed behind them and began to take in the interior of the place. Directly ahead there was a staircase leading up to the next level. There was a door at the top of the stairs located on a landing. A wooden chair had been wedged under the handle to prevent it from opening out onto the landing from the other side. Next to where it terminated I could see the beginning of another set going up which slanted back again toward the front of the house.

  On the floor level the foyer opened to the left and right into large rooms. There was also a narrow hall going back which ended in a closed door. It felt very strange, like some things were missing. Before I was able to begin working out what the absent things might have been my eyes fell upon the woman on the floor of the retreating hallway.

  She was probably in her fifties and wore a long dress, maybe it was black or dark blue but I couldn’t tell in the poor light. A lacey collar encircled her throat. The thought crossed my mind that this was a proper woman. All the good it’s done for her, I thought. It was like looking at a historical photograph, only live. Live in the loosest possible sense of the word anyway. She was dressed for the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. That was when it occurred to me what was missing from the house. There were no electrical outlets or light switches. All of the light was provided either by the fire above or by oil lamps placed here and there.

  She lay there as if she had decided to take a little nap in the foyer. She was not sprawled but completely straight, arms resting at her sides. Her head was turned to her left and her eyes were open and staring at nothing. A pool of blood created a dark halo on the rug around her head. One of the cops knelt to check on her, looked up at the others who had stopped and shook his head. Dead.

  Screams floated down from the upper levels. The cops jerked their heads up toward the sound. I looked up too and noticed the door at the top of the staircase tremble against the chair wedged beneath the door handle. The officers sprang into action and bolted up the stairs. I began to move in that direction too when I heard some indefinable sound beneath me. I stopped and looked at the floor as if it would all be made obvious through the rug. It wasn’t. When I looked back up to the landing of the second story I witnessed one of the cops rip the chair away from the door and attempt to open it but the door wouldn’t give. He picked up the chair he’d just discarded and began smashing it against the handle. The others disappeared in hallways to the left and right.

  I sprinted in slow motion up the stairs wanting to help, but knowing I could do nothing. Since I was there to observe I decided that I might as well do just that. But I didn’t know what I was supposed to be looking for and it made me wonder if I was supposed to know it when I saw it.

  I observed the cop smash the handle off the door, reach inside the hole it had occupied moments before and pull the door outward. There was only blackness at first. Then four children shuffled out. There were two little girls who looked like they were maybe six or seven years old in white night clothes. An older girl, of maybe fifteen years held the fourth girl who was no more than three. They all looked terrified and had tear-streaked faces.

  The cop pointed down the stairs and said something to them. They promptly ran down the steps and out the door. They ran through me, not even glancing up at me like I wasn’t even there. Which I suppose when it had all happened I hadn’t been there. I watched them retreat out the door and into the smoky night then turned my attention back to the cop who sprinted up the next staircase to the third floor. I glanced down the hallways to the left and right and saw the other cops removing more chairs which had been jammed against other doors. But my instinct told me to follow the cop going up into the fire and smoke of the top floor.

  As my legs pumped up the steps I trailed after the officer who soon disappeared around the corner at the top. I became aware of the heat as the feel of it grew more powerful against my skin. It wasn’t as hot as it should have been but I definitely felt it. I reached the top.

  Thick black smoke choked the hall making it feel smaller than it should have. I peered right and saw the cop, hunched over covering his mouth and coughing violently. He pulled a handkerchief from a pocket and tied it around his head, covering his face. It made him look like a hybrid cop/robber. Then another image replaced that one. In my waking hours I had visited the Chinese restaurant which had the mural of the dragon with a burning mouth on the Great Wall. In the corner of it there stood a lone, masked warrior with sword at the ready. The cop with the rag over his face recalled the image to me. The cloth wouldn’t provide much filtration, I thought, but it was better than nothing. He straightened up a bit and continued coughing as he moved down the hall.

  Flames licked the walls and smoke poured out from beneath some of the doors. The cop kicked away the familiar chair locking system. He moved to open one of the doors but he jerked his hand away from the knob. It was hot. He resorted to the old familiar kicking technique. A few kicks and the handle fell away. When I saw him move to open the door there was a tingling sensation at the back of my neck. I stretched out my arm and tried to shout at him to stop. He hesitated. Had he heard me? He drew the door open quickly staying behind it, using it as a shield. It was a good thing he had too, I saw, because if he hadn’t he would have greeted a furnace blast of scorching air and flame. The fool was lucky he didn’t meet the back draft full on. As it was, flame belched into the hall, roasting the wall opposite the door. Some of it curled around the door and singed the sleeve of his uniform.

  He pushed the door away from him and rapidly patted his sleeve to make sure none of the fire would continue to live there. He then looked in my direction and squinted, as if looking for something. Then he turned his head the other direction and looked that way. He looked back my way again. His head tilted slightly to one side. He then shook his head dismissively and bolted into the room he’d just opened.

  I stood motionless for a moment. It grew clear to me in that moment. The cop had heard me after all it seemed, maybe had even seen me just then. What had I done, I worried? I reasoned I was in some kind of window peeking into the past and therefore didn’t
think I should be able to interfere in anyway, only observe. But I was also in a dream and knew that some people claimed the ability to direct the course of their dreams. Had two worlds brushed against each other in my dream, an old one and the present one? And if so, had I reached across the gulf and touched the old one, changing it somehow?

  All the science fiction novels I’d ever read and all the movies I’d ever seen where the smallest change made in the past resulted in catastrophic alterations in what should have been the present came flooding back to me. Think, McFly, think! But then I thought maybe it was all just a dream. No reality, no consequences. But I didn’t believe that for more than a moment. Something very real had happened and I’d acted as architect to it.

  I rushed forward to the room the cop had just entered. Three small forms lay burning on the floor and one was on a bed. It was too late for the children in that room. The cop screamed something unintelligible to the deadness and darted back out the room, right through me. I followed him and listened again to the screams. They were all coming from the floor below. This didn’t stop the cop from going to the next door on the top floor.

  “What are you doing,” I demanded to know. “Anyone up here is gone, man! Get out of here!”

  If he heard me that time he made no show of it. He just kept to his futile task. There was more fire in the hall now. Chunks of wall paper flaked off the walls and floated around, burned up in the air or landed on the floor and danced themselves to cinders. I knew the heat would soon become too much for the cop to handle and he would be pushed back to the stairs and have to go back down or he would die with the rest of the third floor inhabitants.

  He came to another chair blocking another door. It was partially engulfed in flame as was the door it held closed. He kicked it away with everything he had. The punt was so hard the chair spun away and when it impacted the opposite wall of the hallway one of its burning legs shattered off sending splinters and ash out in all directions. He wasted no time with the door. He pulled out his gun and fired a single shot at the fire weakened door. The knob exploded off in a shower of sparks and black smoke immediately poured through the hole.

  Now aware of the back draft problem he opened the door with the same technique as before, standing behind it and shielding himself with it, but this time he opened the door slowly so as not to create a vacuum in the hall which would pull the dragon’s breath out and onto himself. When the cop was sure there would be no burst of killing flame he rounded the door and entered the room. I followed again expecting a scene like the other room. What I saw instead was a burst of simple human brilliance.

  Huddled in the center of the room was a blanket over a large trembling lump. One of the edges of the blanket lifted to reveal childish faces of three boys. The kids had apparently stayed close to the floor and covered themselves with the blanket to keep from inhaling the smoke, which I knew was the thing which killed most people in a house fire. The boys sprang up and moved toward the door. The cop stepped out of the way and shepherded them out the door and toward the stairs. When the last one was out he followed. I brought up the rear.

  The cop shouted for them to stay low as we all moved down the hall. A loud clap of sound reverberated through the house behind us. I turned to see a large section of the roof as it finished its collapse. Burning beams of wood slid over each other and a wave of smoke washed over everyone in the hall sending up a chorus of coughs. The rest of the hall was completely barred from the cop or anyone else. If anyone was still alive over there they were on their own. The officer must have realized this too because he stared in the direction of the wreckage a moment and then followed the boys down the stairs.

  With nothing more to observe on the top floor, I fled to the second level. I came to the landing in time to see the boys who had been liberated from the third floor join another small group of girls from the second floor who exited the house through the path of piled furniture in the foyer and out the open front door. Down one end of the hall on the second floor I saw two of the other cops finish clearing out rooms and a few girls running at me, or rather running for the stairs next to me. They dodged and weaved around chairs scattered on the floor. When I looked the other direction I saw much the same theme.

  Instead of staying on the second floor and observing I chose to move back to the ground floor and see if anything important had developed there. When I got there everything was much as it was when I had come in. The major difference now was that the dead woman was covered in a blanket. From below me arose the sound of something as it crashed and shattered. This sound was followed by the revelation that there was a basement and something important was in process down there. Beyond the dead woman was the short hall which terminated at a door. I jumped over the body and dashed to the door knowing it had to be my path to get into the basement.

  When I reached the door and wrapped my hand around the knob I felt eyes on me. It was a strangely familiar feel… intimately familiar, I want to say. But the sense was not threatening to me in any way. When I turned to see who was watching everything went white.

  The next thing I knew I was sitting up on my futon in my apartment. I was breathing heavily and I could smell smoke and ash. The smell hung around for a few more moments and then it was gone. I sat still waiting to see if anything else was going to happen. Perhaps the girl would arrive again and explain everything I had just seen in the dream. And maybe she would have something to say about what I had done there too. But she did not show up. There was only silence.

  Light streamed in through the windows. It was mid morning already. The day had begun without me. I didn’t have to work until the evening but I couldn’t get my mind to slow down.

  After waiting for something to happen and having received no result I jumped out of bed and desperately hunted for paper and a pen. I found some in my computer case and took it to the counter. I sat on one of the bar stools and began to write furiously, recounting every detail I could remember from the dream. I did not want to lose any of it to time and faded memory, although that would prove to be a non-issue later. Later I would not be able to shake a single detail of it from my head even if I wanted to.

  When I finished hand writing the account I turned on the computer and began to type it out so I could have a copy stored electronically and so I could easily go back and make revisions and corrections if I needed to. This consumed my time all the way to lunch but I hardly noticed. I was too consumed to think about time or even food. When I finished the last draft I saved the document onto the hard drive and onto a memory stick.

  I composed a quick e-mail for Trent telling him that I had another experience, this time in a dream, but I decided to withhold the content of it from him for the time being. I wanted to tell him that part in person so I could see his reaction. If he wanted he could have a copy of the document for review later. For now I was going to keep that to myself. I sent the e-mail and closed down the laptop.

  As I stood from the barstool my back cracked and popped. I stretched and yawned away the hours of being hunched over typing out of my system. I looked over at the open bathroom and into the empty shower. It was time for me to catch up with the rest of the day.