Fire Devil

by J L Bryan

  The old wood creaked under his footsteps. It would burn marvelously, when the time came.

  He could feel them gathering outside. He moved to a window and pushed open the grayed-wood shutter. The glass was long gone.

  They were all around the house, their energy and endless agony throbbing like waves of heat. He had called them here using the advice of those old souls in the ring, the ones that ceaselessly whispered suggestions to him now. The ones that were molding him into something far grander than he'd ever imagined.

  Then there would be no trouble about those enormous, shapeless...things, the vast and strange entities he could feel out there in the darkness, circling him like sharks in deep water, waiting and watching.

  Soon he would have no need to fear them, because he would be as one of them, eternal, powerful, untouchable.

  Below, the hordes of ghosts grew restless; this break in their routine had awakened them a bit more than usual, cracking open their endless pain. Each one burned with a slight reddish light, a weak flame.

  He would bring each of those thousand little flames together into a great firestorm.

  And countless more would die. He had foreseen it all; the voices within had guided him here.

  There was only one small detail to burn away, an old problem that lingered from his old existence. She was here; he could sense her faintly. She would be his, completely, before all of this was over. He would consume her, and perhaps she would even come voluntarily.

  Even easier to sense was the young man she'd brought, the one who could sense the dead so clearly, and speak to them so directly. All the ghosts in town whispered of his presence, of a seer who could see the dead and their suffering. The dead in this town had suffered their fate backward, experiencing the flames of Hell even before dying. Many believed themselves to be in that realm of eternal torment even now, Clay understood, all of them suffering together, renewing each other's pain, as though the physical flames had never ceased.

  They yearned for a messiah, for one to deliver them from their damnation.

  Clay was more than happy to play the role.

  “Come, ye lost souls,” Clay said to the mob below. “Come, for I have deliverance and salvation on offer, and an end to your pain at last. Come forward, and lay your many burdens at my feet.”

  And they moved in, the throng of lost and damaged souls. They moved toward his fire, towards his unholy red light.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Ellie

  The night couldn't have been colder, but I drew no comfort from the flickering red firelight in the trees ahead.

  We kept silent at first, but the ceaseless howling of the wind kept us company. The sawdust crunched softly under our feet, swirling in the wind, and soon my boots and the lower legs of my jeans were coated in the highly flammable stuff.

  “We'll all go up like torches if things get too hot,” Michael whispered, doing his best to knock the sawdust away from his own jeans.

  “Then let's make sure that doesn't happen,” I said, almost breezily, doing my best to hide the fact that I felt like crawling away somewhere I could curl up and die of fear in peace.

  “I'm seeing ghosts everywhere,” Stacey said. I'd given her my night vision goggles, since I was ready to switch back to my own eyes for now, as we made our final approach. “They're all over the road ahead, a bunch of them. It's like they're having a...fall festival, or something.”

  “That's exactly what they're doing,” Jacob said.

  “Really?” Nealon gave him a skeptical look.

  “Yeah, there's a bean bag toss, a gourd-carving competition—”

  “Let's keep the joking to a minimum,” I said. “This is life or death here.”

  “I wasn't going to say anything, but I think you're the least professional group of paranormal investigators I've ever worked with,” Nealon said.

  “You're right,” I said. “You shouldn't have said anything.”

  We rounded the bend in the road. We were now far beyond the sight of civilization, and even out of sight of the paved road. We could have been a hundred years in the past, or a thousand, traveling on foot through the forest.

  “We're walking right through a bunch of ghosts now. Ugh, I'm taking these things off.” Stacey removed the night vision goggles.

  She didn't need them, anyway. A dim light source flickered in front of us.

  A dilapidated old house sat in the woods, its wooden exterior gone gray. It had been abandoned so long that vines crept up the sides and shrubs grew up through the rotten wood of the front porch. Weathered gray shutters covered most of the windows, though some were missing or clinging loosely to their frames. The fiery red light we'd been following glowed from within these, both upstairs and downstairs.

  I saw no sign of electrical or telephone lines running to or from the house. There was nothing remotely modern about the place. Many of the boards looked blackened and crumbling, as though damaged by fire many years past.

  “Wow,” Stacey said. “You think this house dates back to the big fire?”

  “No, any wooden building would have been obliterated back then,” I said. “This looks like a more recent fire. Though obviously not that recent. It could still have been...I don't know, eighty or a hundred years ago. But if it had been the 1871 fire, there wouldn't be anything left but a few nails.”

  “This house did burn, though,” Jacob said, approaching it slowly. “And it might have been linked to the ghosts of the old fire.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I would say this place was haunted already, for years. By a couple of people who died in that fire...and, I think, maybe a couple of old ghosts who started it. But now, tonight, it's become some kind of rallying point for all the ghosts in the area.”

  “Is it on fire?” Nealon asked, looking at the glowing red light from the windows.

  “No,” Michael replied. “Not yet. Those look more like candles, maybe a fireplace, but it's not out of control.” He frowned. “It could go that way fast, though. Especially with the sawdust all over the porch and the ground around it.”

  “Great,” I said, feeling my guts tighten up like they were full of rusty springs. “Nealon, I hope you've got that holy water ready. It looks like we're about to walk into some very unholy flames.”

  “Yeah, I don't have that much,” Nealon said. “And I need it for the exorcism.”

  “Okay.” I took a deep breath. “So the plan is: get in there, grab Melissa so Nealon can do his thing, and watch each other's backs so nothing sneaks up and kills us in the process.”

  “An impressive plan,” Nealon said. “It's the small details that will really make it work.”

  “We don't have enough information for much more,” I said. “I have no idea what we're going to be facing in there. I say Michael and I are in charge of the grabbing, the Texan exorcist is in charge of the ghost-exorcising, and Stacey and Jacob are in charge of the back-watching.”

  I started toward the sloping, decayed front steps up to the porch, then I hesitated. It was like an invisible wall was stopping me. It was no supernatural force, though, but the intensity of my own feelings holding me back.

  Ahead waited everything I feared—not just a tinderbox of a house that was ready to go up in flames, but of course Clay himself, the individual who'd killed my parents, the one who'd made me so terrified, the one who'd sent me down this path of spending my life hunting ghosts in dark corners of the world. In some other universe, maybe I was out there doing something normal, being a doctor or lawyer, or waiting tables, or staying home being a mom, or maybe being a teacher. I tried to imagine myself finger-painting with a bunch of kindergartners all day. It would have been a laughable idea, if I'd been remotely in the mood for laughing.

  Instead, though, I was staring at the flickering red light behind the broken windows of that old house and thinking This is it. End of the road.

  That was exactly how it felt. I was suddenly, coldly certain that I was going to d
ie in this final confrontation with my old enemy. Maybe it would be the end of Anton Clay, but it seemed like it was the end of me, too.

  Michael came up beside me and took my hand, as if to lend me the strength that I definitely didn't have.

  “Ready to go?” he asked, his voice low and gentle, like he understood my reluctance and fear.

  “I'll never be ready,” I murmured to him, too low for the others to hear. “But it's time.”

  He nodded.

  “Okay, everyone,” I said. “Uh, saddle up, or whatever. The bad guys are waiting beyond the door. It's time we go in and say howdy.”

  “I don't know how you can be so relaxed about this,” Stacey said, apparently having no idea how bad my nerves were raging.

  “Jacob,” I said. “He's in there, isn't he?”

  Jacob nodded. “He is. And he knows we're here. He's waiting for us.”

  “Oh, good.” I took a deep breath.

  Then I started up those old porch stairs, which creaked and cracked under my weight. Michael was on one side of me, Stacey on the other.

  When the five of us were there, ready with what meager weapons we had, Michael stomped the door open, just as he'd done at his father's trailer.

  The front door ruptured and swung inward.

  Beyond it lay an old foyer built of faded gray wood, with dangerously rickety stairs leading up to the second story, where firelight flickered down through cracks and holes in the floor. Candles were scattered here and there, some on the steps, some shoved into nooks in the collapsing wooden walls. The candles weren't even in holders, they were just sitting in soft puddles of their own wax. I resisted the urge to run through the room blowing them all out.

  A couple of first-floor doors led deeper into the house, both of them closed. Firelight pulsed around one of them, as well as through cracks in the wall around it, so we started in that direction.

  The other door creaked open, catching us off guard.

  “My friends. Welcome.” It was Clay's voice, barely altered by the fact that he was speaking through Melissa's vocal cords and lips. He'd always had kind of a light, silky speaking voice anyway. Creepy.

  On top of that, he'd managed to round up some clothes that were a little closer to his preferred outfits in life—a dark suit, vest, silk cravat. Melissa's long blond hair was tied back in a ponytail with black ribbon, the way Clay had worn it in life. There were some scratches along one of her cheeks.

  He approached us from the darker doorway, a tall white burning candle in his hand.

  “Anton,” I said. “Congratulations on finding a new home. It looks perfect for your primitive tastes.”

  “I am no barbarian,” he said. Melissa was so tall that he looked down on basically all of us except Michael. “And I am certainly not immune to the pleasures and comforts of your modern life. I have grown fond of having so many luxuries readily available.”

  “But you can't change what you are,” I said, which drew an angry scowl from him. “You're just an old echo of yourself, Clay. Your soul is broken. The only way for you to heal is to let go. Renounce the things of this world, and this sad attempt to cling to life, and move on. You still have the choice to be free.”

  He looked at me for a long moment, and then twisted Melissa's features into a sardonic smirk.

  “Do you believe I'm a fool?” he asked. “I am on the cusp of...far more than you can understand. But you can join me. You can be a part of my glorious expansion. Just like your parents.”

  I glared at him, my hands balling into fists. “Then you refuse to move on?”

  “It was never under consideration.” He placed the burning candle onto some horizontal blocking in the exposed woodwork of the decayed wall. Then he held out a hand toward me.

  Flames appeared at his fingertips.

  “You ask me to surrender of my own free will,” he said. “I will give you the same chance, Eleanor. I have no interest in your companions, not even your handsome lover.” His eyes passed over Michael for a moment. “Only you. Surrender yourself to me now, give in to the fate that was always yours...and I will release the four of them unharmed.”

  “I wasn't aware we were prisoners,” Michael said.

  “The matters of which you are unaware would fill volumes.” Clay looked from Michael to me. “I had time for a bit of fun along the way. Including a pleasant visit to the father of your hulking idiot of a lover here, Ellie. I've arranged for him to burn, as your parents burned. A gift from me to you. I'm sure it will bring you closer together, this common suffering.”

  “You're wrong about that,” I said. “Michael's father is alive. Michael saved him.”

  “What did you say?” Clay looked confused.

  This seemed like our best opening to attack, so I looked at Michael and nodded.

  We charged toward Melissa from either side.

  Behind us, Tucker Nealon began some kind of chant or prayer. It wasn't in English, or Latin, but I certainly hoped it was a chant or a prayer, and he wasn't taking this time to recite verb conjugations from high school.

  Jacob and Stacey tensed up, ready to join in.

  Then things went a little crazy.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Michael howled in pain as slash marks appeared on his chest and he was lifted from the floor by an unseen force, which had to be Amil. Michael levitated there a second, then flew off into a weak wooden wall. The boards shattered on impact and he toppled right through. A candle that had been sitting in a nook there fell to the floor.

  Flames spread quickly across the dry floorboards, which had more sawdust scattered on them. It wouldn't take the fire long to race through the ruined old house and turn it into a crematorium for all of us.

  I had even more immediate problems—specifically, the horrible surge of heat that blasted me when I tried to grab Clay.

  Peals of girlish laughter rose as I staggered back, off balance, and finally crashed down to a sitting position on the floor.

  “Grab her!” Stacey yelled. “I mean him! Grab Clay!”

  She and Jacob charged toward Clay, but with similar results, getting thrown aside and badly slashed.

  “Stacey!” I screamed, watching her roll across the floor. I started to push myself up to my feet, but another painful wave of heat struck me, with even more force this time. With more girlish laughter, too. “Greta, stop it!” I snapped.

  The sawdust on my boots smoldered and smoked, suddenly hot. I kicked them off and sent them across the room, and while this kept my feet from roasting in the short term, I wasn't thrilled with the solution.

  I noticed some of the sawdust smoldering on my jeans leg, too, and mashed it out as best I could against the floor.

  The girl became somewhat visible in front of me, a partial apparition, but I'd seen her in my dreams and knew just how she looked.

  Of course, she couldn't stop attacking me. Not until we got that ring away from Clay.

  That would be a pretty challenging task, though, considering none of us could get near Clay at the moment. His pet ghosts would see to that.

  “Time to break glass in case of emergency,” I muttered. Instead of trying to get up again, I reached into my backpack.

  I brought out the ghost trap Calvin had overnighted me.

  It looked empty. I tapped the clear plastic shell with my knuckles, like a mean kid annoying hamsters at a pet store.

  A narrow, pale twist of what looked like mist or fog appeared in the middle of the trap, floating at the center of the leaded-glass jar at the center.

  “Oh, a Loynessian trap, huh?” Nealon said. His shark sword was out, but he wasn't approaching Clay. That was probably for the best, since none of us wanted Melissa to get hacked apart. “That's kind of nineteenth-century, isn't it?”

  “The design's been updated a bit,” I said, loosening the lid so I could pop it open. “They don't leak battery acid as much, for one thing.”

  Heat and pressure slammed into my hand that was holding the trap, knockin
g it loose while causing me a lot of pain. I was pushed one way across the rough floorboards while the trap went rolling the other way.

  The fiery blond girl stood over me, giggling.

  Her eyes changed, from a steely German blue to hollow sockets with live flames dancing in them. She had the eyes of a jack o' lantern. Visitors at the Gatwich Hotel had sometimes described seeing her that way, when she woke them up late at night, standing over them in their beds, the hotel room uncomfortably hot. Other times, she was just a disembodied giggle in the room when all the lights went out.

  Her partially formed ghostly face glowed reddish from the inner fire that licked inside her eye sockets. She opened her mouth. Her tongue was a larger flame, dancing in her lower jaw as she giggled at me.

  “That's...enough.” Stacey, looking badly wounded all over, managed to crawl to where the trap had rolled against the wall. “It's time for the fiery little brat to...take a nap.”

  She opened the ghost trap.

  I watched. The fiery girl apparition ceased her giggling and faded a little—not going away, just seeming to stop to watch things unfold.

  As it turned out, nothing much happened.

  “Mati!” I said. “Mati Price! The children aren't sleeping. Come sing your deadly lullaby.”

  Jacob tried to get up, but was swatted back down, his coat and shirt ripping open along the back, claw marks appearing on his skin.

  Greta giggled and became more visible, glowing red as she looked down at me, flames flickering where her eyes should have been.

  I turned my head to see what Clay was doing...just in time to see him open the door to a glowing red room, presumably the location of the downstairs fireplace, and duck away inside it.

  Nealon followed after, swinging his sword.

  “Ellie,” Michael said, struggling to get up. Greta went after him so fast that she lost most of her form, becoming a blur of flames and giggles. She knocked him to the floor.

  Apparently the dead nanny ghost didn't feel like singing a lullaby. She wasn't even showing up in the room as an apparition, a mist, anything. For all I knew, she was still in the open trap. Our secret weapon had turned out to be a total dud.