by J L Bryan
When this many ghosts haunted the same place, focused on the same traumatic moment, the past could become more solid than the present. Battlefields are a common place to experience small time slips, if you go at midnight, and listen close for the roar of the cannons and the cries of the wounded.
“Where are we going?” the woman asked.
“Looking for my friends, and Melissa. I'm Ellie, by the way.”
“Brenda.”
We heard the ghosts before we saw them. Their voices cried and shrieked, echoing up and down the seemingly empty street of burning buildings. Horses neighed, dogs howled, babies cried, but none of them appeared.
Veins of fire snaked through the sawdust street, which felt scorching hot under my torn-up socks. This was such a bad time to not have my boots.
“The fire's everywhere,” Brenda whispered. “Even the sky is burning.”
She was right. The sky was full of glowing red, and all kind of burning debris was floating in the air, clouds of ignited dust billowing overhead.
Then the ghosts appeared around us.
They crowded the streets. There were a couple of wobbling wagons, making slow progress on the sawdust road, and a few more people trying to lead panicked horses. For the most part, people were on foot, screaming, shouting, running in a stampede down the street as the wind whipped the fire into high walls around us.
The thick dust in the road was burning, too, rising in little whirling devils as the wind blew across it.
The wind was hot and dry, and it smelled like death. I yelled for Michael and the others as we navigated the crowded, riotous streets, but my voice was just one in a cacophony of voices yelling names or crying for help.
A great roaring arose behind us, like a freight train was going to plow its way up the street and flatten us all.
That, however, would have been a more welcome sight than what was actually approaching.
It was a fire devil. The giant whirlwind of fire was several stories high, spinning at blinding speed. It moved from building to building, lifting them from their foundations, shredding them in midair, and igniting their shattered wooden components.
Human beings caught up in the towering fire tornado vanished altogether, pulverized by the heat and shearing winds.
The spinning devil moved almost like it was alive, as if it delighted in its feeding, in its speed and destruction and the death it dealt everywhere it went. It was hard to believe this was just a blind force of nature rather than something with a mind and intention, or at least a kind of glee in carving a wake of burning destruction through the town, leaving everything behind it in flames.
“Get to the river!” a man shouted, which sounded like a great idea to me.
Everyone in the street was already fleeing in that direction, anyway. I saw the bridge that spanned the river—it had been made entirely of wood, and now looked like it was made entirely of flames. It wasn't exactly a safe crossing to the settlement across the river, which was completely in flames, anyway. There was no safety to be had there.
Instead, we all went over the riverbank and down into dark, cold water. It was Wisconsin cold, too, not Georgia. I wouldn't have been surprised if there were chunks of ice floating in there.
The near-freezing water was a shock that made my muscles seize up at first. I splashed around and managed to tread water, which wasn't too easy with the shark sword in one hand. The river water felt like partially dried cement, so thick and hard to move.
People splashed into the river all around me, some of them already burned or injured, most of them screaming or crying. They struggled to keep their heads above water; parents struggled twice as hard to keep their children's faces out of the water.
Nowhere was safe. Walls of fire burned along each side of the river. The air above the river was on fire, too, clouds of it drifting overhead; it was pure fire-red up there, no hint of the starry night sky somewhere far above.
Even the surface of the river was on fire; it was cluttered with driftwood and broken logs, and I remembered from my reading that the lumber camps sent their felled timber down to the mill on this river. The river had been abnormally low in 1871 because of the drought, which also meant the timber didn't float so well on it.
The logs and driftwood on the river were burning, too—the firestorm was hot enough to dry and ignite the logs' upper halves, even while their lower halves were still submerged in the water.
Nearby, I saw a terrified young woman chin-deep in the river, repeatedly pouring water over her infant's head, one handful at a time, to protect the baby's head from the deadly heat.
I turned away, resisting the urge to help. I reminded myself, as forcefully as I could manage, that all of these people were ghosts, and nothing I did could change the past.
The only real, currently living person was Brenda, so I focused on trying to find her first. I screamed her name, and soon we found each other again in the water. She was pale, her hair plastered against her face, her eyes wide and terrified.
“Just hold on to me,” I said, gripping her arm. “We'll find a way out.” I tried to sound confident, tried not to remember that everyone around us had already died more than a century earlier, either burned by the wildfire or killed by hypothermia in the river.
We moved closer to the bank, just enough that our feet could touch the bottom. My face dried out and felt like it would blister in the furnace-like heat from the fires on the land.
Then we trudged downriver, avoiding burning driftwood, making our way through the people crowding the water. Brenda tried to help some kids with an overwhelmed mother, and I had to pull her away.
“They're not real,” I told her. “They're all ghosts.”
“Ghosts?” she said, unable to tear her eyes off a boy, only eight or nine himself, struggling to keep a crying toddler girl's head above water.
The water was too deep, though, and both the boy and the girl slipped under the surface.
Brenda broke away from me, unable to leave them alone. I knew it was useless, but I couldn't stop her.
She reached under the water, grunted with an enormous effort, and lifted both kids out of the water.
They were both dead already, stiff and frozen. Their bodies were pale and lifeless, distorted and bloated, the way they'd probably been found in the days after the fire.
Brenda screamed and released the corpses, letting them slide into the dark water again.
“It's okay,” I said, taking her arm again. “They died a hundred and fifty years ago. We need to focus on the living. And we can't save them until we save ourselves.”
She came with me, seemingly quiet and in shock again, or maybe all her energy was focused on keeping her head up and her legs moving.
I watched the burning riverbanks as we walked downstream. It was hard to draw a strong breath, between the painfully hot air I was inhaling and the freezing cold water that was like a huge steel band around my chest. When I had enough oxygen, though, I called for Michael, Stacey, or Jacob. It was hard to yell, and even harder to be heard over all the panicked voices around me.
Something slammed into my back, knocking me down into the silent abyss of water below.
The massive fires above cast a red glow into the river, so I could see a couple of feet under the surface.
Bodies floated here, on all sides of me, their faces frozen in expressions of terror.
I fought my way up above the surface and drew some desperately needed air.
I'd thought it was a heavy tree limb or something similar that had struck me, but now I saw it was a dead horse floating on its side down the river, its upper half burning.
I looked away and grabbed onto Brenda again. She said nothing, but came along easily enough.
“Michael!” I called hoarsely as we resumed walking. “Stacey! Jacob!”
I didn't see any of my friends, but I stopped walking when I spotted two familiar people on the bank above me. Unlike everyone else, they weren't screaming, or burning,
or leaping into the cold river in a desperate attempt to escape the firestorm.
They were smiling and watching, their clothes looking brand new and freshly starched instead of burned and covered in soot, their faces and hair spotless as if they'd just stepped out of a bath.
Anton Clay didn't look like Melissa at all now. Maybe it was the effect of the time slip. He looked as he had in life, as he always had in my nightmares.
His hands rested on the shoulders of six-year-old Greta. Her white dress twisted around her in the deadly hot wind. She watched all the burning and drowning people below her with a crazed rictus of a smile plastered across her face, as if she'd never seen anything so delightful in her short life. She gazed at the suffering and death the way most kids look at ice cream cake decorated with their favorite cartoon characters.
I planted my feet in the thick mud at the river bottom and gave Brenda's shoulder a shake.
When I had her attention, or at least when she turned her glazed eyes toward me, I gestured up at Clay and Greta.
She just looked puzzled. Of course, she'd only seen Clay while he was wearing Melissa's form, and she had no clue who Greta was.
“That's the true face of your kidnapper,” I whispered, very close to her ear, though there seemed little chance of being overheard between the roaring fire and the screams all around us. “Go on. Go find your way back to your kids. I'll deal with him. It's my job.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yep. I've never been more sure of anything. Keep moving, and find a safe place to get out. This is...the most intense time slip I've ever heard of, but they don't last. It will end. Just hang on.”
She looked distraught as I pulled away from her to the bank, but she continued going with the flow, traveling along the river with the other escapees from the fire. She was the only one in the river with any chance of living, though. The rest of them were already dead, doomed to relive their fate as long as they remained captive here.
I climbed the bank several yards down from where Clay stood, then I readied myself with the shark-tooth sword. The river had long since rinsed off the droplets of blessed water—or had it? The river, despite how cold and wet it felt, was created from the poor lost souls of Peshtigo and their memories. It wasn't real.
Regardless, this was my big chance.
I stalked toward Clay, trying my best to hide behind whatever I could. Mostly this meant people and horses on their way into the river. I'd come up on the same side I'd just left. Now there was no town, just burning land, towering flames that had been prehistoric forests, columns of fire reaching up into the awful red sky.
I couldn't help thinking of the River Styx, the one that the dead are said to cross into the underworld. At the moment, the Peshtigo River reminded me of that, a river full of ghosts. The main difference between the Styx and the Peshtigo was that Hell was only located on one side of the Styx. At the moment, the Peshtigo seemed to be flanked by it on both sides.
Clay wanted the power to make events like this happen whenever he chose, to summon and inflict monstrous fires like the one that had demolished the town, and to kill in massive numbers.
I steeled myself, holding the shark-tooth blade out in front of me as I closed in on him at last.
This was going to be it, I knew, at long last after all these years. It was the end for him, or me, or both of us.
Clay saw me coming, and he smiled.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“Eleanor,” he said. “I'd almost forgotten you were in town.”
He tugged one of Greta's blond braids and leaned down to whisper in her ear. She turned her evil smile toward me.
Then she advanced on me, her big blueberry eyes turning to jack o' lantern flames, a thick worm of fire crawling through her fingertips like a devilish serpent.
“I'm surprised, Anton,” I said. “You're going to send a little girl to finish me off? I always thought you'd want that pleasure for yourself.”
“You engage in too much self-flattery,” Clay said. “I realize I must be of great importance and meaning to you, of course. This does not mean you are still important to me, certainly not now that I have such larger designs to follow. You are a nuisance to be swatted. Watching my new favorite girl burn my old one will be a great pleasure for me.”
Greta moved toward me, flames licking out of her eyes, giggling as her whole body ignited. She reached out to me with burning hands.
I'd already reached into my jacket pocket, though, where the near-freezing river water had cooled off the ancient ring, which had been as hot as a branding iron when I'd picked it up.
Now I had no trouble slipping it onto my finger, then raising my hand and pointing at Greta.
“Amil, stop her!” I shouted.
The reptilian ghost's scaly, moss-green back appeared in front of me, reeking of swamp water. He shielded me against Greta and her fire, letting out a roar.
Then he tore into the little-girl ghost with his claws.
Greta stopped giggling. She looked down at her abdomen, gored open now. Fire poured out of her, down to the ground, like streams of lava or ignited jet fuel.
The girl began to scream, and it was awful.
Something chuckled close to my ear. I say “something” because it didn't sound remotely human, remotely alive.
I turned to see a dark shadow of an apparition at my shoulder. His purple robes were rotten, and so was his face, the leathery skin dried and split to reveal bone and teeth.
Despite his decayed condition, I recognized the ghost from the brief glimpse Amil had given me of his past. This was the sorcerer, the ancient priest who had transformed the boy Amil into the monstrous killer ghost of the ring.
More gloomy, deathly-looking shades stood behind him, and I felt the ring, icy cold on my finger.
The ring was doubly haunted, by the men who’d created it, and by those who’d wielded it. And their ghosts were moving in around me, their voices whispering in strange ancient tongues.
“They like you,” Clay said, paying no attention to the kneeling, screaming girl bleeding liquid fire all over the ground, though he'd claimed to adore her.
“That's why you left me the ring,” I said. I could already hear their whispering filling up my brain. “They wanted you to. You're under their control.” I advanced on him. “You've possessed Melissa, but they've possessed you.”
“No.” Clay's smile faltered a little. “That's not—”
“I wondered where you were getting all this arcane dark-magic stuff. That's not you. You're a simple ghost. You like curvy women, and you like fire, and that's all there is to you.”
Clay glowered at me, his face taking on a fiery red cast. “You know nothing—”
“I know you're a fool,” I said. “You thought you were the master. But all this time...you've just been their slave. The slave of spirits much older and smarter than you.”
I couldn't risk much chatter, because I could feel the dead sorcerers sink the cold hooks of their minds into my soul, trying to take control of me. My recovery of the ring from Clay had seemed like good luck, but really had just been another trap for me.
“I am no slave!” Clay advanced on me in a mindless fury, which was exactly the kind of fury in which I wanted him.
I jabbed the shark sword forward, so that the front teeth where I'd sprinkled the blessed water jabbed through his new suit, right over the heart, hopefully puncturing the flesh beneath.
“By all that is holy,” I said, imitating Tucker's words. The next phrase was definitely Biblical: “Come out of this woman, unclean spirit!”
Clay looked down at where I'd punctured him. Suddenly the rage went out of his face.
“You...” He looked up at me. “How dare...”
Then he dropped to his knees, and started to topple over. I drew back my sword and hurried to catch him with my free arm. There were hot coals and embers all over the ground, and I wanted to avoid burning Melissa as much as possible. I'd already stabbed her, and t
he front two teeth of the shark sword were red with blood.
He thrashed and writhed, and I had to drop my sword to hold him with both arms.
The rotten old spirits moved in around us, watching closely with their dead faces, many of them shrouded like corpses.
Clay bucked and screamed.
Then it wasn't Clay in my arms anymore, but Melissa. She was unconscious, slumped, and there was nowhere I could easily set her down without burning her. My other option was to drop her to the river below, where she would drown, so not really a great option at all.
The dead sorcerer made life worse by touching me with his cold, skeletal fingers, the tips of them rubbing along my cheek and ear. I picked up the shark sword, ready to hack the long-dead evil priest to ectoplasmic bits.
A roar sounded ahead, much like the screaming-locomotive sound that had heralded the arrival of the massive spinning fire devil that had torn through town.
Clay stood not far away, glowing and red, his entire body seemingly sculpted out of raw fire. Between the flickering flames, I glimpsed bone and charred skin. He seemed to be grinning widely, though that could have simply been his lack of lips, cheeks, or gums.
I'd seen him as a walking, charred dead man before, but now he had an aura of flame that made him seem truly demonic. It revolved slowly around him, like a tornado of fire, a fire devil just beginning to form.
“Eleanor,” he said, his jaw opening, the words arising less from his burned-away mouth and more from the rumbling ground below my feet.
I half-stood, very awkwardly, raising the shark-tooth sword in one hand while doing my best to prop Melissa up with the other.
Clay gestured, and the sacred koa-wood hilt of the sword burst into flames. I yelped in pain and dropped it on the smoldering ground.
Well, so much for that weapon.
“Now, we end all of this,” Clay said.
“Finally,” I said.
The ghosts of long-dead sorcerers crowded around me, which was fairly awful. They smelled like decay, their fingers sharp and bony. Their minds burrowed into mine, and I knew it wouldn't be long before they had control of me.
