Fire Devil

by J L Bryan

  “Then we'll ring in the New Year like champs,” Michael said.

  “Uh-huh. Champs.” My lids closed, and that was that.

  All I needed was a few hours of deep, warm, dreamless, uninterrupted sleep.

  Unfortunately, that was not what I got, not at all. Later I would wonder whether the intense smoke smell in my clothes helped trigger the intensity of my nightmare, or maybe the presence of an active ghost in the old hotel.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  I found myself walking down a dirt street paved in thick, smoking ash that clung to my bare feet like hot sand. I wore a silky white night gown, the kind of thing I hadn't possessed or purchased for myself since my early teen years. No utility belt, no tactical flashlight—I was unarmed against the ghosts that lay ahead.

  The smoldering ruins of a town flanked the street where I walked. Dark, empty windows of burned-out buildings looked down on me. The buildings were all wooden, like I was in the Old West. They'd turned entirely to gray ash, and they seemed to be just waiting for a good strong wind to scatter them into dust.

  The sky was a dull red color, neither night nor day. I heard the roaring, crackling sound of a wildfire. Columns of smoke rose from behind the buildings. Whatever had burned this town was still active.

  And I knew there were ghosts here.

  “Mom? Dad?” I called out to the empty street, thinking they might be here for some dream-logic reason. It was like I could feel them nearby.

  “Eleanor.”

  I turned to see him emerge from one of the crumbling ash-buildings, flickers of candlelight behind him. He was smiling, his features striking, his long blond hair tied back with black ribbon. He looked ready to attend a fancy dress ball of the antebellum era, clad in a fine coat and vest, silk cravat, high intricately embroidered leather boots.

  “Where are my parents?” was the question that came out of my mouth, though I hadn't planned to say it.

  “Who, Eleanor?” He approached me. The soot and ash drifting through the air seemed not to touch him, leaving him spotless while it clung to me and my now-filthy nightgown.

  “My parents,” I said. “They must be here somewhere.”

  “Here? With me?” Clay looked slowly up and down the street, an amused smile playing over his lips, as if he were just humoring me. “I see no one.”

  “Let them go.”

  “Oh, I'm afraid I can't do that,” he said. “They're so much a part of me now. Just like the others.”

  He made a slight gesture toward one of the burned-ash buildings. Pale faces emerged, one at each window, their features too dim to see.

  “Everyone I kill, I get to keep,” Clay continued. “A little piece of them. Each one gives me a little more to feed upon, a little more fuel for the fire. You were meant to be among them, Eleanor. You were meant to be with me.” He stepped close, his cut-glass blue eyes so intense they seemed to glow. He reached out and traced his finger down my cheek. “My dear little girl. So feisty. The one who got away. I admit...I may have grown overly fond of you. The most elusive prey is the most rewarding, after all. The fastest deer in the woods, the prettiest girl at the party. The consummation of such a hunt is ecstasy. The ecstasy of expanding one's dominion.

  “However much I may have longed after you all these years, though, I'm afraid you are no longer first in my heart, Eleanor. Another has taken your place—prettier, sweeter, a delight to my long-dead soul.” He gestured toward the ash building with the dim pale faces watching us out the windows.

  A pale form emerged from an empty doorway. It was murky at first, as though swimming up from great depths under black water. When she stepped out, though, walking atop the still-smoking coals of the ash-filled street, she became instantly clear.

  The girl was small, no more than six or seven years old, her golden-blond hair gathered up in an elaborate array of braids and ringlets. She wore a blue dress that was definitely turn-of-the-last-century, with a high neck and lacy ruffles all around the shoulders. Her eyes were a matching blue, wide and taking in all that burned around us. She had a gaping, shocked look.

  “Greta,” I said. “Greta Schroeder?”

  She turned to look at me, then narrowed her eyes in undisguised suspicion. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Ellie—”

  “Greta is a young lady of grand talents.” Anton moved behind the tiny girl and placed his hands on her shoulders, like a proud father presenting his daughter. She looked up at him with a tentative smile shaded with more than a little fear. “I searched for her, using your modern methods that my host understands. As I drew close to her, though, I needed no map, no address. I could feel her, pulsing with such power, guiding me through this shadowy fallen world like a pillar of fire. Such power she has...and she is prepared to share it all with me quite willingly, aren't you, my little candied rose petal?” His fingertip brushed her cheek, and she giggled.

  I felt ill.

  “Greta, you can't trust him,” I said. “Whatever he's told you is a lie. I don't know what he wants from you, but he's using you. He only wants to hurt people. To kill people—”

  Greta drew in her shoulders and seemed to shrivel inward in fear—and backward, against Clay, looking to him for protection.

  Against me.

  Yeah, I was never great with kids.

  “Please be kind to Greta.” Anton stroked her golden hair while looking me over. “She is sensitive.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Where are you, Clay?”

  “I'm here, with you, naturally.”

  “I mean in the flesh.”

  “Oh, Eleanor. You know I discarded the flesh centuries past. Though I do miss it so.”

  “Where is...” I struggled to remember, half-aware now that I must be dreaming, that this place wasn't real. “Where is Melissa?”

  “Ah, that. Greta, why don't you run along now?” he said, and the little girl ran, giggling, back to the doorway from which she'd emerged, though she faded out of sight before reaching it. “I would hate to corrupt the poor girl's soul, wouldn't I?” he asked me with a smirk.

  “You get more sick and twisted every time I see you,” I said.

  “Then that must be the effect you have on me, Eleanor. You help me to find the darkness inside myself.”

  “You seem more than capable of finding that on your own.” Now that I was growing cautiously certain that this was a dream, I was feeling a little more emboldened. Logically, I shouldn't have—a dead murderer was in my mind as I slept—but what else was I going to do, cower? “Now tell me where to find Melissa.”

  “She's just here.” His hand twitched, and suddenly he held an iron chain. It snaked away across the smoldering-ash road, glowing red in some places where it was in contact with smoking hot spots in the street.

  The chain trailed away out of sight down into a smoking crater near the ruins of what might have been an old railroad depot. A crumpled boxcar lay nearby, looking like it had been grabbed up by a giant's hand and crushed like an old Coke can. The giant's hand must have been red-hot, too, because the rail car had a partially molten look around the corners, like it had been worked over with a welding torch.

  “I don't see her,” I said.

  “We don't see the dead when we visit their graves,” he said. “Yet there they lie.”

  My stomach roiled at his words.

  I followed the chain, walking closer and closer to the pit. Ash-coated steel rails led toward it, the wooden ties long since burned away in whatever unimaginably devastating fire had consumed this town.

  A red glow radiated from below, as if I were approaching the caldera of an active volcano, or a gateway to some kind of demon-haunted lower realm. Which, honestly, was where I felt I was, in a place that was both real and not real, dream and not dream. A hellish place where Anton Clay was in control.

  I didn't know the rules here, or the dangers.

  I approached the glowing pit with caution, reaching instinctively for the flashlight holster that shoul
d have been on the utility belt at my hip, but of course there was no flashlight, or holster, or belt. In Clay's nightmare world, I wore a useless lacy gown without even basic defensive weapons, because of course I did. Creep.

  “Melissa?” I said, as I reached the lip of the smoking pit and looked over. My toes were over the edge, sending crumbles of scorched, ashy earth down into the space below.

  She was down there, maybe twenty or thirty feet below, though things like space and distance felt hazy and hard to determine.

  Melissa huddled in a pit of ash, filthy, her clothes charred to her skin, her blond hair barely visible under its layer of soot. Little fires burned here and there around her, as though she sat on a smoldering coal heap.

  Chains bound her, and she was gagged, unable to speak, barely able to move. She stirred as I looked down at her, squirming in the hot ash, making some grunting, panicked sounds.

  “Melissa, I'll help you!” I shouted. I grabbed the chain and pulled. It was heavy, and burned what was left of the skin on my hands. I screamed in pain, but managed to pull the chain up a few links. Then a few more.

  “Enough of that!” Clay struck me, suddenly beside me, sending me toppling to the ashy street, but away from the pit.

  “You're a monster,” I said.

  “Perhaps, but I am becoming much more.”

  “What?” I said. The ground was blistering hot beneath me, but I didn't try to stand up yet, didn't give him the chance to enjoy knocking me down again. I sat up, in as defiant a sitting stance as I could manage. I'm not sure the “defiance” thing really telegraphed, but hey, I tried. “What do you think you're becoming, Anton Clay? You're dead. You'll never be more than a shade of your former self. Why hold yourself prisoner to this world? You could move on. There's peace to be had, on the other side. Peace and freedom.”

  He looked down at me for a long, silent moment, and I thought I saw...something in his blue eyes. A moment of vulnerability. Of hope.

  Then his eyes flashed red, reflecting some of the loose, scattered fires gnawing their way through this city of ash, under its gloomy, smoky red sky.

  “You have no idea what's out there,” Clay said. “The things that...wait. That watch me. I must prepare myself to stand against them. The afterlife is predatory. We must feed on the living, if we want to grow strong and thrive.”

  “No. You can let them go. You can find peace—”

  “Why do you bother me about peace? I am no monk, I do not crave peace. Peace is not pleasure. Peace is lack. Peace is emptiness and starvation. I wish to feed, to indulge, to ravage—”

  “Nothing you do will bring you back to life,” I said. “Not even that Greta ghost, I don't care how strong an entity she is. How did you manage to capture her, anyway? She was already dead. You just sacrificed a few rats? Is that the price of a little-girl ghost these days?”

  Clay smiled. “She is a treasure. More than you know.”

  “So go ahead and enlighten me. I'm here to learn.” I took this opportunity to get to my feet. My hands throbbed in agony, burned down to the bone, but I couldn't afford the luxury of focusing on my own pain.

  “That is not why you are here.” Clay gestured with his other hand, an emerald ring gleaming on one finger.

  A reptile monster rose from below, with jaws like a crocodile and an elongated body like a snake. I'd glimpsed it before, in the shadows, a figure of scales and fangs and claws, but here in the nightmare city of ash, I could see it more clearly than ever. And smell it, a dark green stench like sour swamp water.

  It roared and reached for me.

  “Amil,” I said softly.

  The monster's approach slowed, and it shrank with each footstep. By the time it reached me, it had shifted into a dark-eyed, dark-skinned boy, about twelve years old, dressed in a tunic. The boy had lived in a Phoenician city thousands of years ago, and been murdered in some ritualistic fashion that captured his ghost and bound it to the emerald ring, using necromancy that was completely alien to me. The innocent boy had been changed into a hideous and powerfully psychokinetic ghost, then used as an assassin.

  Now the ring that commanded him was in Clay's possession.

  The boy gave me a sad look...then raised his hand, still thick and scaly, with sharp yellow claws at the end, reeking of swamp water.

  “Amil, you don't have to do this,” I said, but that wasn't true. He had to do whatever his master commanded.

  Amil said something I didn't understand in his native language, but it sounded soft and apologetic.

  Then he leaped at me, slashing me across the stomach.

  It might have been a dream, but that pain was as real as it came.

  I turned and ran, screaming, toward the nearest path out of there that I could find. I couldn't just bolt down the road and hope to outrun him. I needed cover.

  I ducked into a dark, smoky doorway and raced into the depths of one of the buildings. The walls seemed to be nothing but crumbling gray ash. The floors were the same, except hot underneath. My bare feet sank deep into the ash with each step, only to burn on hot coals below as they pushed off the ground for the next step.

  My immediate goal was to avoid running in a straight line. I twisted and turned, leaping through every doorway I saw. I didn't dare look back. I could hear him grunting and panting behind me.

  I reached a steep, narrow set of stairs and raced up them, into smoky darkness.

  The stairs seemed to go on and on, taking me up at least two stories before I reached a landing. The stairway continued up beyond that, but it was crumbling and burning, so I opted not to try it.

  I hurried down the gray-ash hallway instead, the boards crumbling under my feet.

  The hallway was strangely familiar to me.

  It was reminiscent of the upstairs hall at my parents' house, but much, much longer, and in deep disrepair. Smoke stains discolored the walls. A small, copper-smelling electrical fire sputtered in an empty light fixture overhead.

  Broken picture frames hung on the walls, their panes cracked. Some pictures were completely coated in black soot. Others showed long-lost images of me and my family. One showed all of us when I was about twelve, my smile tight-lipped to hide my braces. Others showed me as a little girl in a soccer uniform, a middle-schooler in a softball uniform holding a bat. I'd once been a mediocre halfback, and later a mediocre shortstop. I saw my sixth-grade history award, for a report on the Creek Indians that had once lived in the Savannah area. The old paper blackened and crumpled as I passed it by.

  Artifacts of my childhood were scattered all along the hall. I skirted a pile of burning paperbacks, noticing A Wrinkle in Time and Anne of Green Gables among the sputtering, curling heap. My old bicycle lay further along, half-buried in ash like a lost treasure of Pompeii.

  Doors rattled up and down the elongated, smoke-stained hall, flames and smoke streaming out around their frames, voices screaming within. Men, women, children, their voices getting higher and more desperate as the heat turned up.

  Moans sounded from a burned-out doorway ahead. I slowed to look inside.

  A family squatted in the bare, fire-blackened room within, covered in ash and soot, their clothing burnt and ragged. The father was a thin, balding man, the mother also slight, as was their son. The mother clutched an ash-covered baby at her chest, but it was limp, not moving at all.

  I knew them, had seen their pictures in my research. The Oberson family had lived in a two-story house that had once stood on the same site as my childhood home. Unfortunately, this was the same site as the home of Anton Clay's adulterous lover, Elizabeth Sutton, and like all houses on that site, it had been destroyed in a fire.

  All four members of the Oberson family had died in 1969. My family's house had been the next one built on that lot, maybe twenty years later.

  Pity washed over me at the sight of them, but I was in the middle of running for my life, so I raced onward.

  The next room I passed was even more crowded. In one corner, three children dre
ssed in the filthy, sooty remnants of fine antebellum wear huddled around their mother, who was similarly attired, also covered in filth. The husband stood off from his family, his back to them, an older man with terrible burns all over his face, his business suit burned and ragged.

  This had to be Charles and Elizabeth Sutton. Charles might have been in a pose of rejection, his back to his wife, because of his wife's affair with Clay.

  And there was Elizabeth herself, whose choice to end the affair had brought death on the entire family. Her face was obviously pretty despite being covered in filth, her cheeks round, her nose upturned, her lips full. She had long, dark hair like mine, but full of soot and dirt.

  Everyone in that corner of the room was white.

  In the other corner huddled three more people, an elderly woman, a young woman, and a young man. The elderly one was grandmother to the others, I knew. These were the Suttons' slaves, who'd died in the same fire.

  Clay had quietly blocked or wedged shut the doors and larger windows on the bottom floor, making escape difficult for those who'd been at home that night. He'd wanted to make sure he killed as many as possible.

  I ran on...but couldn't help slowing at the sight of the next room.

  My parents.

  Like all the others, they were pale, shrunken, covered in ash, their clothing in rags.

  They both stirred at the sight of me. My dad half-rose from where he'd been squatting on the floor next to a ring of smoldering ash. My mother gasped and grabbed her soot-filled hair.

  Then the claw seized me from behind.

  Amil turned me to face him. Both his hands were reptilian now.

  Tears rolled down his cheek as he raised his other claw while holding me in place, preparing to rip out my throat.

  “Ellie, Ellie,” Clay's voice said, in a scolding tone.

  Instead of plunging his claw into me, Amil suddenly began to shake me, hard. He called my name: “Ellie! Ellie!”

  He was speaking in Michael's voice.

  I was suddenly surrounded by a flood of searing, blazing sunlight as Michael shook me awake. I struggled against him on the bed at first, confused about where I was and what was happening. I was completely drenched in sweat, too, like I'd just emerged from a hot and salty bath. However, my smell made it clear that I hadn't. Sweat doesn't smell quite like scented bath salts.