The Arsonist’s Handbook
Other books by L.A. Detwiler
The Widow Next Door
The One Who Got Away
The Diary of a Serial Killer’s Daughter
A Tortured Soul
The Redwood Asylum
The Christmas Bell
Short Stories by L.A. Detwiler
“Mirrored”
“Slaughtered Love”
“The Christmas Bell: Rachel’s Story”
“It Started on Halloween”
“Her Darkest Hour”
The Arsonist’s Handbook
L.A. Detwiler
Copyright © 2021 by L.A. Detwiler
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing, 2021
Cover by Cover Collection
For ordering questions, please direct your emails to [email protected] or visit www.ladetwiler.com
To my husband
“You call it hope—that fire of fire! It is but agony of desire.”
~Edgar Allan Poe
Prologue
The boy’s screams echoed on the chilled autumn air, a desperate raven’s song resonating in the desolation of the field. His shrieks sounded more feminine than male. The commotion was pointless. No one heard him beg for his life, and no one who would save him, anyway.
He perused the boy’s body as sobs racked him. Sneering, hands in his pockets as he stood over the flailing boy, he realized he felt nothing. Drowned in a sea of apathy brought on by circumstance, by time, by choices that both were and weren’t his own, he deadened inside. Perhaps, he was too far gone after all.
A few months ago, there might’ve been hope. He might not have handled the situation with gasoline, terror, and a frenzied desire for burning flesh. His stomach would have turned at the thought of blackened skin and melting faces and death. He possessed his share of demons, certainly. Always had. Nonetheless, they were fiends that could be calmed, could be stowed away at least. These latest demons were of the soul-shattering variety.
He used to be a mostly good person. That person expired with the tragedy that forever morphed him. Circumstance, time, and sorrow metamorphosize even the most steadfast heroes eventually.
The field sat empty, save for the two of them—the victim and the murderer. The lost and the found. The prey and the hunter. But who was who? It was impossible to tell anymore.
The moonlight illuminated his pleading eyes, which incited an even stronger version of the primal hunger within. He needed to see him beg. He reveled in the sound of his jagged breaths as he realized his time to meet death had come.
It wasn’t a good way to die, after all. He knew this all too well. The images that haunted his dreams and his nightmares reminded him of the terrors of it all. And, in the sick depths of his soul, he extended gratitude for the searing pain the boy would endure. He deserved it. He fucking deserved it. Thus, without another thought, he doused the hoodie in gasoline, sprinkling it all over his victim recklessly but with purpose. He stepped back, wondering if the whole field would burn until they found him. Considering how fast he could get away or if he even should. It didn’t matter anymore. He’d lost it all. This was all he needed now.
From a distance, he flicked the lighter, thinking about stepping toward the fireball and ending it with him. But the shrieks that were more supernatural than humanistic sent a shiver of delight through him. He stared as it all ended quickly but beautifully, the conflagration sparking something even darker within him. Dazzled by the blaze, he almost forgot to move.
He didn’t expect this. After all that had happened, he could’ve never expected to feel the overwhelming relief as the fire burned.
Hope. Peace. Gratitude. These were the emotions that filled him now and validated it all. It had been worth it. It was worth every ounce of effort for the precious release he could finally indulge in. With the smell of burning flesh and misery cutting through the autumn wind, he turned and marched through the forest. He left the clearing to burn.
Let it burn. Let them burn. Let it all burn, he thought as he whistled his favorite song. Peace had, after all, come at last.
The stars twinkled, he noticed with a grin. The boy would agree if his eyes were still able to see the sky.
Rule 1: Flames don’t need a reason to burn.
I sometimes wonder what drives me to the flame, to the striking of the match, to the inhalation of ecstasy-spreading smoke. I wonder if, like Plato or Aristotle, I was born to be different. To stray from the crowd. I’ve always felt alone, been alone, sauntered this world alone. Don’t pity me, though. I prefer it that way. In truth, it’s been my choice to traverse this world in solitude. Partially, it’s because even as a child, I noticed the differences between myself and the others. It was always me versus the others. Now, I’m a stronger force to play against.
Sometimes I think perhaps I inherited a madness, passed on through the generations. Some families pass on the family trade of law or baking or farming. Our family? We pass down the flame, a literal torch handed off how many times? Once? Twice? I can’t be sure.
In the darkest of times, though, I decide I’m overthinking it all as I tend to do. Trying to seek meaning in a dark, winter night full of pointless observations and time. There is no rhyme or reason to the way I am. It’s damn fun to set fire, to watch the almighty beauty and power of the lapping flames.
I remember the first one like it was yesterday. If I close my eyes and lean back, I can still smell the scorched hair from the cat’s carcass. I can still imagine the sight of the flame seizing the corpse, of it turning to brittle ash. I was seven when I first felt the pull of the fire. A curious child with a penchant for death and a fancy for watching things burn.
Maybe it was because my father had taken such care to teach me how to start a fire when I was only five. He was a survivalist by nature, having come from a difficult part of the world where one never knew when such skills would be necessary. Or maybe innate curiosity bubbled in me, like Shakespeare must have felt for plays and Einstein for numbers. Or maybe I’m kidding myself. Maybe I’m a monster. A modern Frankenstein creation, born and raised to be a scourge to the human race.
Whatever it was, though, that first monumental time I purposely set fire to the body, I was entranced. Hypnotized. Obsessed. I would sneak out of the house at night, crawling down the steep roof outside my bedroom window to escape to my hidden refuge—a derelict shed in the forest beyond our property. There, behind the shoddy walls, I would play and burn and practice. I kept it controlled, and that in itself delighted me. To be able to have some form of power in a house where I had none. Daddy taught me helpful skills, but he also taught me how to fear. When his crazed temper wasn’t unleashed at home, he was out for the night, giving free rein to his temper on the town. It took me years to discover that the nights he wasn’t home were the nights he was practicing our dark craft. When I was older, fourteen or fifteen, he let me in on the secret. By that time, I had sinister secrets of my own. We were and always will be a family who likes to burn.
We watch it burn. We set it ablaze. We incite fear from the shadows and spark horror with the flick of a wrist. And it is from those years I’ve lea
rned to master the craft. There is an art to it, certainly, one underappreciated perhaps. Or maybe it is misunderstood like so many things in life.
Still, over the years, as my conquests by flame have grown larger, I’ve learned fire burns no matter what. At first, it’s true, it started with curiosity. The wicked brightness of the flame consumed me. Then, in my teens, it turned into a way to handle vendettas. I saw myself as the Robinhood of arson. I set wrongs right with ash. I emblazoned the community’s scoundrels and cheats. I sought revenge on those who made me stay on the fringes, who made my life hell for being different. I was a hero in my own way and in my own story. I’d like to think that was what Daddy was doing during his triumphs with fire, too. I’m not sure that’s true.
Quickly, nevertheless, the heroism melted along with the burning plastic and rubber. It lost its shimmer, its attractiveness. Suddenly, I was out of rebels to make pay but still starving to see the flames grow bigger. I had an addiction only satisfied by one thing.
Fire. Uncontainable fire.
That was when the switch happened. The first fire I lit purely for fun. It was at the McMullen’s place, a large barn on the outskirts of town. Late at night, I crept onto their property, inebriation dulling my sense of logic. God, the flames dazzled.
I had no reason to burn down the McMullen’s place. John McMullen had been nothing but kind to me, I suppose. He always stopped by to purchase produce when I worked my family’s stand, and he often floated me a few extra dollars. I should feel shame about what I did to him, about his wife’s tears at church the following Sunday over all they lost.
And maybe I did. A little bit. Something panged in my chest as I watched him wrap an arm around her in weakly applied comfort. But then I thought of the sight of the barn ablaze. The mighty fortress crumbled after a few dainty flicks of my wrist. I, in truth, didn’t feel shame or guilt. I felt like God.
After all, fire doesn’t need a reason to burn. It doesn’t seek justice. It doesn’t weigh the heavy hand of what’s right or wrong. It simply consumes, chasing its sole mission of destruction.
There’s something magnificent about that, something that seemingly leaps from the flames into my soul. It emboldens me, the idea of being so unwaveringly focused on your goal. There’s real authority in that truth.
The power is, I must warn you, all-consuming. Once you flick your wrist, once you spark that first conflagration, there is no going back.
There is no going back.
Fire doesn’t need a reason to burn—and neither does the true arsonist.
Even when you watch from a distance, you can feel the veracity in the power of the flame.
Chapter One
Jameson
I am, in many ways, one in a sea of millions in the sense that I don’t actually know my father. He is a faceless man in my mind’s eye plagued by the indecisiveness of my imagination and clouded by the mysticism of his absence since my early days. Like many teenagers, I have spent my childhood craving to know his existence and dreaming of the day he would insert himself into my life. Nonetheless, at sixteen, there is one thing that sets me apart from so many in my shoes. Despite all that remains a mystery about the man whom I have no photographs of, I do know one important fact for certain.
My father was an arsonist.
Correction. My father is an arsonist—and I think he’s back.
The thoughts rattle through my brain as the English teacher drones on and on about fate and free will, like she has a clue about anything. Don’t get me wrong. English is my favorite subject. In middle school, I was a bookworm, reading everything from Shakespeare to Lovecraft to Dickinson. Maybe that was where my aloofness from my peers started. Still, her words about Poe’s dark tale aren’t holding my attention like they usually do. I’ve got more pressing issues at hand than antiquated words of horror.
I sit in the back row as I always do, the forgotten, quiet kid in the sterile desk with too straight of a wooden backrest. I am the invisible one who wears the same navy hoodie every day, who most probably assume is mute, who does his best to blend in. Typically, I’m thankful for this invisibility cloak because it gives me ample time to think. And today, as my mind dances around the letters of the word arsonist, I am eternally grateful to be left to my own devices in the haze that separates me from the others.
A smile threatens to spread on my face as I doodle a flame in my notebook. I think about how the snobby girl in front of me would react if she knew. I contemplate how the jock across the room who thinks he’s God’s gift to football would look at me if the truth was revealed. They look right through me, assuming I’m a nobody. They don’t know, though, that the blood coursing through my veins is something to be feared. Me, the quiet kid whose mom works at the bank and who is never picked for group work. The one who eats in the cafeteria alone like the cliché teen movie.
I am the son of an arsonist.
I can’t explain it, but somehow it makes me sit up even straighter, my back separating itself from the desk I’m confined in. The truth of the words makes me feel like for the first time in my sixteen years of pitiful, droning existence, everything is right.
When I found that journal hidden in the crevice of the attic, a surge of awareness and greatness pulsed through my veins. It was how a monk must feel holding a holy book or the founding fathers felt holding that almighty declaration. Standing in the hollows of our dusty attic as I perused the bowels of the forgotten space for my hockey stick, a knowledge that life was about to change rattled through me.
I’d dusted off the red leather cover of the unmarked book, curiosity usurping all reason. And that was when I saw the words scrawled onto the first yellowed page.
Rule 1: Flames don’t need a reason to burn.
I sank to the ground, staring at a handwriting that was unidentified and unfamiliar. Somehow, in my core, though, I recognized it. As my fingers touched the ink on the page and I exhaled years of tension I didn’t know I was holding in, I connected to it. I read through those first pages, confused but dazzled as my father was by the flame. It settled into place. The man who had been absent from my life since I was four, the man who was nothing but a bland memory, an invention in my mind, surged to life on the pages. My mind couldn’t read the words fast enough, his voice rattling in my blood as I perused the words.
It had to be his book. It had to be. I felt the truth of it vibrating in my bones, awakening me at the core. It was like the pages were shouting, “Here’s who you are.” And I was, as I had always been, eager to listen.
I devoured his expressions. I studied the confessions about his crimes. I drank in his reasons and rules and his advice, swallowing down any sense of morality and letting it simmer deep within. I internalized who he was at the core. And as I flipped page after page, I realized the words for what they were—a call to arms just awaiting for me to hear them. It was like a mirror held up to my skin for the first time in all of my years. I’d spent so much of my life floundering in and out of identity, trying to pick just one. Now, I’d unearthed what was lurking beneath. It was like the man knew I’d find the journal someday, like I’d find his handbook of instructions for how I could be like him, too. Suddenly, his absence dissipated, morphing into something foreign.
Emerging from the attic with the book carefully tucked under my arm, I unearthed a sense of purpose in every step I now claimed.
I’d ached to ask Mom about it. When we sat down to Hamburger Helper after her shift at the bank—a rare night that she decided to make us something to eat—I’d wanted to pull it out and confront the secret. I wanted to know if she was privy to this side of my father, too. If she had known, and why she hadn’t told me. I wanted to know everything.
But even mentioning the word “Dad” or playing certain songs or sometimes, even just looking at me, Mom gets pissed. She clams up at random intervals and makes it known that my father is not a man we talk about. Ever. Under any circumstance. My face has felt the sting of her physical reproach on more th
an one occasion as I made the mistake of uttering the familial relationship.
I’m smart enough now to avoid uttering the word father. Still, the evidence of her distaste for him is ever present. She thinks I don’t notice, but whenever we come across someone with the name Jim, her face drops an infinitesimal amount. I used to think that was my father’s name, but she denied it. She said Jim was the name he wanted to name me, after his favorite alcohol—Jim Beam. Being a whisky drinker, though, she won the battle and settled on her favorite—Jameson. I suppose even at birth, I was destined to be a disaster in many ways. For so many years, I wished my name was Jim but didn’t have the guts to tell Mom I wanted to change it.
So I know what name he wanted to call me, but I don’t know his first name. How fucked up is that?
My father, who passed his physical genes to me because Mom often commented how I looked like “him”—we never use his name, like some shit out of Harry Potter or something—was a man who was dead to us. And so he was for all these years. He was an enigma, the man who gave me life. He was a silent token I carried with me every day, tugging at the strings of who I was but never knotting themselves into a known, identifiable shape.
Until now.
There is a power in knowing, I’ve come to learn. A power in the knowledge of not only who you are but of who you might become because of it.
The class shuffles to turn papers in around me, and I snap back to the sad existence of high school. I pull out a blank sheet of paper, toss my name onto the first line, and scribble a response to a question I have to assume is what the teacher asked. I’ve read all of Poe’s works, so it isn’t hard to give an analysis that will make the English teacher happy. I know all the words, all the tricks.
My mind is elsewhere as I pass the paper forward, only half-hearing groans from the students around me that signal an essay is coming due. My brain is back in the dusty living room with the sad excuse for a television last night. I heard the words that stirred something within me, set every fiber of being to attention. For as the newscaster announced another potential arson a few towns over, I knew there was a chance. Every hair on my body vibrated with possibility. As she droned on and on about the crime, I was incited to dream, to believe, to hope.
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