Fire Devil

by J L Bryan

  “What kind of kids?” I asked.

  “The more delinquent kinds, who go out clubbing and drinking. Bethany's worried about her.”

  “And about her cousin Teri's dating life, sounds like,” Stacey said.

  “Yeah, I have met Teri, and that's not happening,” Michael said.

  “Why not?” Stacey asked. “Not cute enough?”

  “No, she's—it's really not important right now. We have to find my sister.”

  “Melissa? Where'd she go?” Stacey asked.

  We entered Michael's room, where she plopped down on Melissa's bed. Jacob and Michael sat at the room's small table, which came with two old chairs thinly upholstered with a faded Aztec-style pattern.

  “Melissa's in a lot of danger,” I said, and then we filled them both in on the situation. It didn't take all that long, actually. It helped that we weren't sure what any of Clay's plans might be.

  “That's terrible!” Stacey said, looking stricken.

  “Yeah, sorry to hear it,” Jacob told Michael. “I could tell Clay had left you, but I didn't know where he went.”

  “I wouldn't have expected Clay to choose Melissa as his host,” I said. “Not when he had a number of firemen coming and going, visiting Michael. There were lots of guys he could have possessed...you know, young, strong, good-looking firefighter guys. And anyway, I'd hoped he'd just return to his old haunts after the Hessian horseman struck him down.”

  “How do we know he hasn't?” Stacey asked. “If we don't know where to go, I mean. Maybe he went back to Savannah.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “He chose this time to make his break for it.”

  “Maybe he just really wanted to steal the Snake Man ring,” Michael said. “I really hate that snake guy.”

  “Amil was just an innocent boy when they killed him and made him into that monster,” I said.

  “Which was a couple thousand years ago,” Michael said.

  “Yeah. He's a monster now. And he's a powerful weapon for Clay.” I sighed. “Okay. Michael, you keep on with the phone numbers. Jacob, Stacey, come to the museum with me, help me collect my gear so we'll be better armed against Clay. And maybe help me move a dead body real quick. Ryan—my client—said he would do it, but I don't want him going down in those caves alone with those ghosts.”

  “Everything sounded good until those last two sentences,” Jacob said.

  “Yeah, that's why I want you guys with me,” I said. “But don't worry, the worst ghost is gone. This is a clean-up job.”

  I didn't mention the other reason I wanted to bring them with me: I was afraid of facing up to Ryan alone. The greatest danger his kids had faced weren't the ghosts of murder victims haunting the museum and the caves below it, nor even the Snake Man ghost. The greatest danger had been Clay, the ghost I'd unknowingly brought with me.

  I'd been concerned about getting Michael and Melissa hurt if they got too close to my work, but I hadn't considered that my personal demons would catch up with me and threaten my clients in a place hundreds of miles from home.

  “So I just sit here making phone calls?” Michael said. “I can come with you and do that.”

  “Nah, the cell reception is iffy around the museum,” I said. “And the wi-fi barely exists unless you're in Ryan's apartment. You'll be better off here at the hotel. Just let us know if you get any leads. We'll be back as fast as we can. Just stay here and heal up.”

  “I don't need to be treated like a hurt little kid,” he replied, which made me wish I hadn't said that last bit.

  “I'd rather stay here myself and do your job,” I told him. “But you're the only one who knows Melissa's life well enough to do it.”

  “There's an Indiana Jones marathon on TBS today,” Jacob said to Michael. “You could watch that if you get bored. But you should probably stop after the first three movies. You've already suffered enough this week, judging by those bruises on your face.”

  “We'll be quick, I promise,” I said. I was already on my feet, the van keys in my hands. “Come on, team.”

  “Team?” Jacob got to his feet. “Can't we be more of a gang?”

  “Ooh, what should our gang be called?” Stacey asked. “It should be something tough. Like The Lizards. Or The Junkyard Cats. Or The Peregrine Falcons.”

  “Why peregrine falcons?” Jacob asked.

  “Are you kidding? Peregrine falcons can dive-bomb their prey at more than two hundred miles per hour—”

  “Can we focus on Michael's missing sister?” I asked. “Besides, I don't think actual, serious gangs call themselves after animals these days.”

  “What about the T-birds in Grease?” Stacey said. “Or the Sharks in West Side—”

  “You're kind of proving my point,” I told her. “Let's get the job site packed up so we can leave town. I'm getting sick of driving on the snow.”

  “Be careful,” Michael said. “I still think I should go with you.”

  “It's more important for you to figure out where we need to go next,” I said. “Right now, we have no direction at all.”

  I hurried out of the room, not looking behind me to see whether Stacey and Jacob were following or not. We needed to move fast, and it was up to them to keep up.

  I tried to ignore the growing feeling of dread at returning to the haunted museum and facing Ryan.

  Chapter Five

  “I thought you were just going to observe at the museum until we got into town,” Stacey said, scolding me as I drove slowly and carefully up the snowy road away from town. Jacob sat in the uncomfortable rear of the van, among rattling ghost-hunting gear.

  “The ghosts had different plans for me,” I replied. “Clay especially.”

  “And I thought you weren't going to involve Michael in any cases—” Stacey began.

  “His sister's possessed. So he's kind of involved whether I want him to be or not.”

  “So this is kind of a continuation of the Pine Hollow farm case,” Stacey said. “Any chance we can summon the headless horseman to whack Clay like last time?”

  “Hessian horseman...and he already moved on,” I said. I thought about the ghost of Mati Price, sealed in a ghost trap back in my apartment. I'd held onto her ghost, thinking I might be able to use her supernatural lullaby as a sort of weapon against Clay or some other dangerous spirit. So far, no such chance had arisen.

  “Well, I hope you have a plan, then,” Stacey said.

  “I don't. But I'm sure I will by the time we catch up to Clay.” That was a lie. I wasn't sure of any such thing. But hey, it's good to project confidence to your team. Or your gang. Whatever.

  “Wow, looks like somebody was a little DUI over there.” Jacob pointed as we drove past the shattered ruins of a split-rail fence. A couple of people were out there today, assessing the damage.

  “Maybe they were dodging a deer,” Stacey suggested.

  “Maybe a ghost appeared in their passenger seat, threatening them with a knife, and they swerved to get the ghost back onto its home property in a desperate attempt to make it disappear before it stabbed them to death,” I said.

  Stacey and Jacob stared at me.

  “I mean, it could happen.” I shrugged.

  I slowed to a near-crawl as I took the sharp turn where Davey Bawden's ghost had jumped out at me two times before. The second time, he'd landed in my passenger seat and acted pretty menacing. Fortunately, he'd vanished after I'd plowed through that fence.

  “Oh, wow!” Stacey said, sitting up. “Jacob, check out this billboard.”

  Jacob leaned up, straining against his seatbelt to peer between our seats.

  Stacey pointed at the Monster Museum billboard, featuring the wacky visage of Ryan's late uncle, “Dr. Weirdman,” in his trademark striped hat and wacky beard.

  “Wow,” Jacob said. “Bigfoot? Monsters? Ancient Mysteries? This place is going to be awesome! I can't believe you didn't save this case for me, Ellie.”

  “Yeah, Jacob loves cheesy junk like that,” Stacey said
. “

  “It's a form of folk art,” he said. “It reflects a part of human culture.”

  “See?”

  “Plus, I kind of believe Bigfoot really exists,” he added.

  “You do not!” Stacey just about shrieked.

  “He's just misunderstood,” Jacob said, clearly struggling to keep a straight face. “He's a simple, camera-shy missing link between man and ape.”

  “I thought australopithecines were the missing link between man and ape,” I said.

  “Shh. Don't botch up my pseudoscience with established facts.”

  “You really are going to love this museum,” I told him as we pulled into the cracked, potholed parking lot.

  “I love it already,” he said, taking in the museum's castle-like facade, which was just a false front concealing the boxy, crumbling three-story building behind it.

  Jacob may have been enthusiastic about it, but my stomach was tied in knots.

  Maybe Ryan wouldn't be there. Maybe we could just slip in and out, get our work done, get out of town, never encounter him again...

  His Honda Odyssey minivan was parked outside. No good. Maybe, theoretically, we could take care of everything in the museum without alerting him to our presence. But there was also gear in his apartment to collect.

  “Okay,” I sighed. “I'd better let him know we're here.”

  Reluctantly, I stepped out and called Ryan.

  “What is it?” he answered, stonily. Clearly he recognized my number.

  “Hi,” I said. “We just have to collect our stuff really quick. Sorry. I have help, so it won't take long.”

  A long pause. Then: “Okay. Start in the museum.”

  “You got it.”

  I still had my key, so we were able to enter through the loading dock. We passed through the dim storage area and out to the museum lobby.

  “Whoa!” Jacob said. “Where do we even start? The Hall of Monsters? Or the Medical Maladies exhibit?”

  “We start by taking these cameras off their tripods and packing everything away,” I said.

  “Boring,” Jacob said, but he got to work, taking direction from Stacey while I went to collect the microphone.

  Once the gear in the lobby was packed, I texted Ryan to see whether I could come up.

  “Make it quick,” his reply text read.

  I intended to.

  I led Jacob and Stacey up the creaky stairs to the second level, where I'd set up some monitors and such in a disused office. Leaving them to break down the gear, I headed down the hall to the main office.

  Alone, I approached the glass-fronted cupboard, full of old curios, and pulled the two halves of it apart, rolling them to either side along wooden rails thinly disguised as wainscoting. A narrow staircase waited behind it.

  I emerged into the small, musty library on the third floor, in the private apartment Ryan had inherited along with the rest of the museum.

  He was waiting for me there, arms crossed, not looking happy. Ryan was an attractive guy, had dropped out of a band on the verge of stardom to get a steady job and marry his pregnant girlfriend...who'd died four years ago. And he'd asked me out. And if I had been available...

  But those interesting little possibilities were permanently part of another, unreachable universe now.

  That was probably for the best. I was a danger to him and his kids.

  “Hi,” I said. “Um. Again, I'm sorry for...everything. When I took your case, I didn't know all this would happen. Especially with your daughter getting endangered like that. Normally I come into a haunted house and reduce the danger there, and I feel sick that things went so wrong—”

  “Yeah, you're a real pro at this, I can tell,” Ryan said, his tone so acidic I could pretty much feel the burn.

  “So, I'll just get my stuff—”

  “Are all the ghosts gone?” a girl's voice asked. One of the twins walked in, dressed in a black sweatshirt and dark purple jeans. From her clothing and the directness of her tone, it had to be Penny. She was rubbing her arm, as if something ached under there.

  “They will be,” I said. “We're just going to wrap up a couple of things.”

  “Go back to your room, Penny,” Ryan said. “Ellie's just getting her cameras and leaving.”

  “I also need to take my team down in the caves,” I said. “Remove the...remains.”

  “You mean the skeleton.” This voice was whispery. Polly stood in the hallway dressed in bright tie-dye. She kept herself mostly hidden behind her twin sister, her face obscured by a curtain of long red hair.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Girls, back in your room! Now!” Ryan snapped.

  “What about Amil?” Polly asked. “Is he coming back?”

  “No, Polly,” I said. “I'm sorry, but—”

  “Hey, how about this,” Ryan interrupted, stepping in between me and the girls. “You don't talk to my kids. You get your stuff and go. We'll all breathe a lot easier when this is over.”

  “Okay.” I nodded, chastened, and felt like crying. He'd been so warm to me before, but now I was nothing but a threat to be removed from his home. Just like the three ghosts in the caves below.

  Ryan kept his kids away while I gathered up and packed away my gear. He did help me carry several of the black packing cases down, at least to the second floor hallway, where he left them just outside his uncle's old office.

  “Thanks,” I said, as we set the last of them down.

  “Don't leave anything behind,” Ryan said.

  He stepped back inside the office, and I heard the deadbolt slide into place.

  “Wow,” Stacey said. “That guy is not a satisfied customer.”

  “At one point, he wanted to date me,” I said. “Then he got to know me a little better. Come on, let's head down to the caves. I don't want to wait until sunset.” I loaded some basic gear into a backpack—thermal goggles, spare flashlight.

  We needed some extra items for this job. I found a couple of brooms in the maintenance and storage area in the museum.

  Then I grabbed a black body bag from my van, the basic zip-up kind found in any neighborhood morgue or coroner's office.

  “Wow,” Jacob said, watching me carry the body bag inside. “Do you always carry one of those in your van?”

  “No, I always carry three,” I said. “Any more dead bodies than that and you're getting into a major public health and/or archaeological situation.”

  “So dead bodies come up a lot,” he said.

  “Only if they're buried in the basement, and it floods,” Stacey snickered. “Then the bodies come up!”

  “I'm in awe of how gross that joke was,” Jacob said.

  “Seriously, it happens,” she said, as I led them toward the Tomb of History and the cave entrance within. “How many times have we found dead bodies, Ellie?”

  “Plenty,” I said. “And the ghosts might be offended watching us scoop their mortal remains into a Hefty lawn bag. This shows a little more respect.”

  We walked past the historical artifacts, some of them seemingly legitimate, like arrowheads and rusty remnants of the Civil War. Jacob shook his head, amused, at the ancient Egypt and Atlantis exhibits.

  I wasn't feeling amused as I looked at the glass box where the “Cursed Ring of Ancient Phoenicia” was supposed to be. Instead, there was a ring-shaped clear spot on a dusty black pillow. Whoever wore the ring commanded the Snake Man...as local handyman and cheap booze aficionado Davey Bawden had discovered when he was sent to kill my client's uncle and got clawed up for his trouble.

  His was one of the three entangled ghosts we still had to release before we could close the museum case.

  We passed through the cage-like door and into the freezing, downward-twisting rock tunnel below.

  Jacob and Stacey were able to enjoy the corny nature of the place, joking about the old department-store mannequins in the “wax museum” section. I'm sure they were worried about Melissa, too, and wouldn't have acted that way if Michael h
ad been there.

  The place was creepy, though, and often your best defense against getting the creeps is a well-placed joke.

  Their joking ended as we passed through the charred remains of a barrier that had divided the official tourist area from the uncharted tangle of underground caverns and tunnels beyond.

  Those caves connected, somewhere miles away, to the old ruins of the neoclassical bathhouse and mineral springs resort that had closed down more than a century earlier. Clay had made it out through there and escaped. We'd only known that because the Snake Man had shown it to me; this was one reason I thought that, somewhere inside Snake Man, there was still an innocent Amil, trying to do some small good while trapped in a web of evil, commanded by whoever held the ring.

  Although, maybe that had been a trick, too. We'd driven to the ruins in Michael's truck, and Clay had swiped that truck while we searched the ruins. Clay had gotten himself some transportation, while Michael and I had nearly frozen to death hiking back to town. In Clay's book, that probably counted as a win-win. So maybe the Snake Man really had been serving Clay's will, not trying to help me, after all.

  It was impossible to tell.

  We followed the rope Michael had laid down as we'd pursued Clay down into the caves. In time, we reached the cavern where Georgina Charrington's skeleton lay.

  “This lady is unhappy,” Jacob said, looking around the cave, which was even chillier than the tunnels that led to it. “I'm seeing a man next to her—”

  “Watch out for Davey,” I said. “The sleazy-looking one. He's armed.”

  “I'm seeing a guy in a tall striped hat, pointing to his heart...wow, these two really hate each other...”

  “So where's the skeleton?” Stacey asked.

  “All over the floor,” I said. “It...got a little banged up. So let's get sweeping. Jacob, keep an eye out.”

  Stacey and I set about collecting the broken remains. She winced as she swept tiny bits of finger and hand bones into a dustpan.

  “This is so...disturbing,” she whispered.

  “I think I found some skull over here,” I said, sweeping up the round bone fragments.

  “Uh-oh,” Jacob said.