Fire Devil

by J L Bryan

  The article described the destruction of the town during the 1895 fire in specific detail, listing each building—the livery, drugstore, the grocery, and various offices—as well as the dollar amounts of the losses.

  Then it described the victims. One was called Neu, described as “a stranger permitted to sleep in a barn overnight.” No other information was available about him, apparently, but he didn't seem connected to the deaths in the hotel. He'd died elsewhere in town.

  Four people had died in the hotel fire itself. Hugh McClaskey, 29, was one of the owners of the hotel, along with his brother. I knew about that one.

  The family of three was described as “travelers stopping at the hotel for the evening.” At last, I had their names: the Schroeder family. Otto, 41, and Beverly, 27, and their daughter Greta, 6. They were originally from Pennsylvania, just like the McClaskey brothers, but they'd been moving to Oklahoma so Otto could try to settle former Kickapoo Indian land, under the Land Run of 1895.

  All of this information had come from Dorian McClaskey, the surviving brother. “We knew Beverly Hampstead as children in Philadelphia. It was a pleasant surprise to see her arrive with her husband and child. My brother thought so, too. We rarely hear news of life back home.”

  I stretched and leaned back in the plastic chair. I was sitting at a computer in the library, while Michael paced around behind me. I texted the names to Stacey; she and Jacob were hitting the local courthouse, looking for death certificates and other clues to the hotel's history.

  “Well, at least we have names for them,” I said.

  “What difference does that make?” Michael asked. “We're getting bogged down studying this place while my sister's out there somewhere, doing who knows what.”

  “I'm sorry, Michael. This is the best I can do right now, trying to figure out what's going on in Clay's head. Or his mind, I mean. Which is technically inside Melissa's head at the moment, but—”

  “I know. I know exactly what it feels like to have him take control of you and shove you to the back. You become a passenger in your mind, while a madman drives.” He shook his head.

  “I still don't know how he managed to escape his usual haunting ground and come after you,” I said. “How you got possessed.”

  “Oh.” Michael stopped pacing. “Yeah.”

  I turned to look at him. “What does that 'oh...dramatic pause...yeah' mean?”

  “I sort of went to look at the site of your old house.”

  “You did?” This tossed me for a confused loop. “When?”

  “After you told me about your parents dying in a house fire. I kind of...looked it up, tracked down your old address, ended up going to look at it myself.”

  “Seriously? You never told me this.”

  “Yeah, well, it felt a little stalker-y.”

  “Sure, I guess looking up and investigating my past like that could be considered stalker-y.”

  “I was just trying to understand you better.”

  “Because I'm so mysterious.”

  “More than you realize, maybe.”

  “So you went to the site of my old house. That whole neighborhood's rundown now, not like when I was a kid.”

  “I went there one night after work,” Michael said.

  “At night? Alone?” I asked.

  “Yeah, looking back on it, I would have made different choices,” he said. “At least it wasn't a full moon on Halloween, though, right? Though I guess Halloween wasn't too far off.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I parked at the side of the road in front of the fence. I sat there for a minute in the dark, looking at the empty place where your old house used to be. I know what it's like to lose your childhood home. I grew up in a house out in the suburbs. Windsor Forest. Me and my mom, and my sister, and of course my dad. Then he left and we eventually lost the house.”

  “I'm sorry.”

  “I know, you've heard all this before.”

  “I'm still sorry.”

  “Melissa was only two when he left. She doesn't remember him, really. So in her mind, he's some magical invisible creature, like Santa Claus or the Tooth Bunny—”

  “You mean the Tooth Fairy?”

  “Yeah, but Melissa got them confused as a kid, and Mom and I never corrected her. So it was the Tooth Bunny in our house. And the Easter Fairy. Anyway, Melissa didn't know our father. I did. That's why I never daydreamed about him coming back, never had any illusions he would show up one day, and it would turn out he loved us all along and him taking off was somehow all just a big misunderstanding. No, I knew him too well for that. And I didn't want him to come back.”

  “Was he...abusive to you?” I asked. I'd hesitated, trying to come up with a more gentle word for 'abuse,' but maybe there isn't one.

  “If you mean, did he hit me, or burn me with cigarettes, or dangle me out a window, no,” Michael said. “But most of the time, he acted like I was an intruder in his space. An annoying intruder, getting in his way, asking him to play games, trying to get his attention when all he really wanted was a cold beer and a game on TV. Preferably one he'd bet his paycheck on. I remember he took me to the beach a couple times, when I was five or six. By the time I was eight or nine, he acted like he'd had enough of me. He was gone most of the time, off with his friends playing poker or whatever they did. Then Melissa came along, and I guess the house got unbearable for him.”

  “You were eleven when he left,” I said.

  “And Melissa was two. Hence her imaginary version of him that deserved hero-worshiping. She never understood that he hated us.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Colorado, at one point,” Michael said. “Fighting wildfires for the Forest Service.”

  “Your dad was a firefighter, too?” I asked. How had I not known this?

  “Don't say 'too' like I did it in honor of him,” Michael said. “It just...worked out that way. Mom dated another guy at the firehouse for a while, one of Dad's old friends. Steve.” Michael rolled his eyes slightly, not a common expression for him. “He used to show me around the fire station, where my dad had never taken me. Talked about how somebody had to look out for people who couldn't look out for themselves. I thought he was talking about me at first, but he said he was talking about my mom and sister. He said I was responsible for them now that my dad was gone.”

  “You were a little young for that, though.”

  “But it was true.”

  “No, you were still a kid.”

  Michael shook his head. “Steve was more right than he knew. Of course, Steve was out of the picture by the time Mom got sick. So then it really was me taking care of Mom and Melissa. And then...just Melissa.” He shook his head, his eyes distant. “And now I screwed that up, too.”

  “None of this is your fault,” I said. “The only thing you did wrong was let me into your life.”

  “No,” he said. “I did more than just look at the site of your old house.”

  “What do you mean? What did you do?”

  He took a deep breath. “So I got out of the truck, and I went up to the fence, and I looked over. There wasn't much to see, just some high weeds, and kind of a hump at the center of the lot.”

  “Yeah, that hump is where my house was.”

  “It was pretty dark in there,” he said. “So when I heard the voice, it seemed like it could be coming from any of number of places. Maybe near the fence. Maybe from somewhere behind the...uh...”

  “The Hump of Death?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What voice?” I asked. “Anton's?”

  “No, it was a woman's voice, crying out for help,” Michael said. “I called back, but couldn't get any clear answers from her. So I climbed the fence to see if I could help her—”

  “Of course you did,” I said. “That helpful selflessness can get you killed.”

  “Yeah, I know, but taking those risks is just part of my job.”

  “So you called for help? From all your fri
ends at the fire department?”

  “I was going to, once I finished assessing the situation and providing any emergency care,” he said. “She sounded weak and in pain. I thought someone had been assaulted and left for dead in the empty lot. So I went in there...and things seemed wrong pretty much from the moment I hit the ground. The air was warmer than outside the fence, and there was a bad stink, like scorched meat and burned hair.”

  I felt ill at this, but just nodded. I glanced around the library, but there was nobody nearby to overhear our ghastly conversation.

  “I heard the woman's voice up ahead of me, just behind that hump of land. It sounded muffled, and low to the ground. I started to have this terrible image of a woman who'd been burned and buried alive. Maybe some psycho had tried to kill her and didn't realize she was alive when he buried her. Or, worse, maybe he did know she was still alive...I called out to her, walking closer, following her voice.

  “The ground started getting hotter and hotter with every step I took,” Michael said. “Like, weirdly hot, and a faint haze of smoke started to rise from the tall weeds. I thought about—I know this might sound random, but I thought about 9/11, and how the ground was hot enough to melt people's boots weeks later. All that molten steel under the ground. I thought the soles were going to burn off my shoes.

  “I followed the voice to an open, smoking hole in the ground. It seemed impossible that a human being could be down there, I mean the hole wasn't that big, more like something a rabbit or gopher might have dug out.

  “I squatted down beside it. The smoke was thick and black, like a serious fire was going deep under the ground, but it only rose up in thin little columns. The heat radiated from the inside of the hole like it was some kind of volcano getting ready to erupt.

  “Then I heard her voice again. 'Help,' she said. 'Help me.' And, deep down in that hole, I saw her face.” Michael fell silent.

  “You saw a face?” I asked after a minute, to get him going again. I realized I was trembling; part of me didn't want him to go on. Part of me wanted to leap up and run screaming out of the library and maybe avoid him for the rest of my life so I'd never have to hear the rest of this story. But I needed to know.

  “Yeah, deep down there. She was outlined in a reddish glow, like she was burning. And there was no way for her to climb out, I mean her head barely fit in that narrow hole. She was screaming by that point. 'Help me! Help me!'”

  “This is terrible,” I said.

  “So, even though I couldn't possibly have dragged her out, I reached down in there, as if I could help her. I asked her if she could grab onto my hand. I kind of knew she couldn't, but...It didn't matter, because her face disappeared when I reached into the hole. But the heat and smoke didn't.

  “Something grabbed me from down there. I only caught a quick look at it. It was a hand with the flesh burned down to a layer of black ash. The fingers that grabbed me were just sharp, bare bones. And hot. They stabbed into me.” He held his hand, as if looking for wounds and burns that weren't there. “It felt like he would crush my hand. And I heard a laugh, a man's laugh....and that's my last clear memory before being possessed. My memories after that are just scattered and crazy in broken pieces, like a nightmare where some parts were real, some parts were memory, and some were just, well, Anton's fantasies. Which you do not want to experience.”

  “I can imagine.” I looked back at the story of the family burned to death in the hotel. Young mother with a little girl—that certainly fit Anton's usual victim profile. But Anton Clay had been long dead by 1895, and his ghost had been trapped at his place of death until very recently.

  At least, as far as I understood. Calvin had always seemed confident that Clay was anchored in place, like most of the entities we encountered. Ghosts tend to obsess over the place where they died, or where they lived, or where they suffered some horrific trauma. Occasionally, a ghost will instead obsess over a living person rather than a place, and stalk that individual to the ends of the earth.

  If the ghost becomes detached from its haunt, this usually means it has moved on and will trouble the living no more. Sometimes we pry a ghost loose with a ghost trap and deposit them within the walls of old cemeteries.

  Beyond that, the rules of the world of the dead remained murky. There was always something new to learn, a new kind of entity to understand and remove. Clay didn't need to be removed, though, because he was already out there, wandering free.

  He needed to be trapped and buried, preferably in a steel barrel dropped somewhere deep in the ocean.

  “I'm sorry that happened to you,” I said.

  “This is my fault,” Michael said. “That's what I'm telling you. If I hadn't gone nosing around in your past, Clay wouldn't have had his chance. He used me to escape that place. And then my sister to escape me.”

  “You were just trying to help someone in danger. You got tricked. I'm the one who should have seen it sooner, that Melissa was possessed by Anton Clay. I was just so...desperate.”

  “Desperate?” The word seemed to catch him off guard. He stopped pacing for a moment.

  “Of course. I wanted to believe that this could happen, that you and me and Melissa could be a sort of family, you know. I haven't really had that in a long time. I was blinded by my own wishful thinking. Stupid.”

  “Yeah, wanting to have people in your life that you care about really is the most evil thing I can think of,” Michael said. “Right after puppies and Sesame Street.”

  “I didn't say 'evil.' Just blind and stupid. In a way that happened to help out a very evil entity.” I sighed. “He's gathering up ghosts. Strong ones. First the ring with Amil's ghost, which he can use as a weapon. Now this little girl, Greta Schroeder.”

  “You think the little girl is powerful?”

  “Well, she's energetic, at least, because she's the one who manifests most often and most clearly. She's usually the one who scares guests. A child has more energy, psychic and otherwise, and their emotions are gigantic, so there's more of a chance to leave a highly charged ghost behind. Clay could be using Greta as an extra power source, a kind of battery for his own fiery powers. The way she died, with the combined trauma of burning alive and watching her parents die horrifically...that could make her a great fit for Clay.”

  “Clay and his ghostly gang,” Michael said. “By the time we catch up with him, he'll be all set to destroy us.”

  “That's what I'm worried about. Maybe he's setting a trap.”

  “Maybe that exorcist your boss is lining up will know what to do.”

  “Tucker the Texan Deliverance Minister,” I sighed. “I can't say I'm filled with hope. But possession by a powerful ghost is no joke. We need an expert.”

  “So we're done with the library, right?” Michael asked.

  “You're as bad as Stacey,” I said. “We need to read all we can about the 1895 fire, and check on that second fire in 1915. We don't want to overlook any possible influences.”

  Michael was clearly feeling twitchy and impatient, maybe freshly upset by his memories of being possessed. He had to be worried to death about his sister, too.

  “It was your mom,” he said, almost too quietly for me to hear. Almost.

  “What?” I said, not because he'd spoken so low, but because the words had seemed to come from nowhere, as shocking as a pitcher of cold ice poured down the back of my shirt.

  “I didn't realize it until the last second,” Michael said. “I mean, the situation was beyond bizarre already. But I've seen her picture at your apartment, and...yeah. It was your mom calling for help, down that hole.”

  I felt a weird, dizzying vortex of feelings at that, all of them intense and none of them good. I wanted to throw up and scream and run away from there and not stop running until I collapsed somewhere on the icy Oklahoma prairie.

  Instead, I sat there, feeling ill, trying not to imagine my mom buried and burning underground, until I could finally force myself to get back to work.

  Chapter
Seventeen

  “You're in luck,” Calvin said over the phone. We'd gone back to the hotel after the library, and now I was in the room alone. Michael was outside, presumably pacing and acting agitated. “Tucker Nealon is available. He's less than a hundred miles from your location.”

  “Well, tell him to hold his horses,” I said. “We don't know where Melissa is just now, which sort of makes an exorcism impossible. The only thing I'm pretty sure of is that she's not around here anymore. Any word from that P.I.? Badger? Beaver?”

  “Bodger. The man is not being cooperative. He seems to be dodging me. But I'll get him to talk. I have a plan.”

  “What kind of plan?”

  “The kind you don't need to worry about. I'll get the information by tomorrow.”

  “You sound pretty confident for a guy who's getting stonewalled.”

  “I've faced stonier walls than him. How are things unfolding over there?”

  “We're putting together the ghosts in this hotel. I don't think Clay chose it randomly.” I told him about the fire and the ghosts it had left behind. “Why do you think Clay might want the little girl ghost?”

  “He might have a use for her energy, like you said,” Calvin said.

  “What kind of use?”

  “I don't know, but I doubt he's planning to make s'mores.”

  “I'll strike that off the list of possibilities, then,” I said. “That narrows things down.”

  “Keep me updated, Ellie. And be careful. Clay will know we're searching for him. He may be planning for your arrival.”

  “Well, I hope those plans involve dropping some big, obvious hints about where he went, or I'll never even have a chance to walk right into his trap.”

  After the phone call, we went over to the suite, where Stacey and I compared notes.

  “If you ask me,” Stacey said. “It's not a coincidence that the McClaskey brothers knew the lady who died in the fire. Greta's mom...” she checked her notes. “Beverly from back east, who was only identified because Dorian McClaskey knew her name. I think there was more than just a fire that night. I think there was a murder.”