Fire Devil

by J L Bryan

  The dead began to rise from the ground and the water. All of them walked silently toward Clay as though entranced, like cult members preparing to immolate themsleves in the flames. This was it—Clay was going to capture these souls and put them in his psychic to-go box, and keep them as his own.

  Well, I couldn't allow that.

  I didn't have many moves to make, but my first one was going to involve getting these freaky ancient dead priest guys out of my personal space, and more importantly out of my mind. Their whispering voices were already filling my skull.

  I knelt down in the charred earth and reached for the still-burning remnants of the shark-tooth sword. Melissa toppled over on her side as I did this, but most of the burning heat had been sucked up into Clay's devilish aura of fire.

  The dead shuffled in toward it like moths to a flame. Whatever arcane magic he'd learned from these creepy dead guys, Clay was using it now to draw in and consume the dead souls.

  I picked out a single tooth from the burning blade, which had broken into pieces when it landed. It had a dried patch of blood on it from where I'd stabbed Melissa.

  I pointed it carefully at the big emerald on the ancient ring, and squinted my eye to get my aim just right.

  The rotten sorcerer guy charged at me, his dried and rotten face filling mine. It was a horrible sight, and terrifying...but honestly, I've seen worse.

  I could feel him trying to communicate with me, deep inside my head: You cannot! You would not give up such power!

  “Oh, you don't know me,” I said, out loud. “I'd give up just about anything. No attachments, that's what the Buddhists say, right?”

  Then I plunged the bloodstained tip of the shark tooth into the emerald as hard as I could.

  Now, with a little more time, I would have taken the ring off, placed it on a nice firm surface like a brick or stone, perhaps some asphalt, and then rammed the shark tooth into as hard as I could. These were not ideal circumstances, though, and the dead sorcerers were getting handsy. And mindsy, too, to coin a word that means “getting groped inside your mind.” So apparently, using the ring gave you the power to command Amil, but the price was a little bit of your own soul. Sorry, that's a deal-breaker for me.

  Anyway, when I brought that tooth down and broke the emerald, I was still wearing the ring, right there on my middle finger. The impact was painful, but the cracking sound of the ancient gem was satisfying.

  The shrouded dead priests and sorcerers let out shrieks and drew back from me. They were instantly much weaker, paler ghosts, many of them becoming transparent, some of the fainter ones vanishing instantly.

  They drifted, like the dead bodies had drifted on the surface of the river. They drifted, limp and lifeless...toward the twist of fire surrounding Clay.

  I stood up. There wasn't much more I could do in this situation. I reached for the iPod at my belt, then remembered it was zippered into a pocket of my backpack. I'd done some last-minute loading, while thinking about poor, ill-fated Tucker Nealon had said: Find something sacred to you.

  So here went my final, probably useless move, but it was going to be one of defiance. I wasn't going to run from him. I wasn't going to cower, not right now, not here at the end.

  I shrugged off my jacket, placed it on the charred earth, and eased Melissa's head down onto it like a pillow. Then, for good measure, I unbuckled my utility belt, full of waterlogged gear that wouldn't be much help at the moment.

  I approached Clay barefoot, with no armor, no weapons but the small device in my hand, which I turned up to full volume, though it wasn't playing anything yet.

  Some of the dead slowed in their approach to the fire whirlwind forming around Clay. They turned to look at me instead. The whirlwind itself seemed to falter a little, shrinking as I diverted their attention.

  This is stupid, I thought. This won't work. And I'm going to die.

  The ghost of Greta knelt on the scorched earth. She was sobbing, crying streams of fiery tears from her jack o' lantern eyes.

  Beside her, touching her gently, knelt Amil, the ancient spirit who'd been forced into his monstrous role, and more recently had been known as the legendary “Snake Man” of the Smoky Mountains. Now he just looked like a boy again. He was no longer under my command, or anyone's command. He was doing as he chose.

  The happy tune slowed the dead some more. The fire whirlwind sputtered and slowed. I was starting to interfere with the dark magic Clay had summoned.

  After a sample of that, I jumped to the next track I'd hand-picked for this: “The Last Cowboy Song” by Ed Bruce (with some vocals by Willie Nelson). This was something my dad had played on our bulky wooden turntable, which had been outdated even when I was a kid.

  I had a memory of a night when I was a kid of seven or eight, and I'd crept downstairs much later than I was allowed. My dad had that particular song on the record player, a beer forgotten halfway to his lips, his eyes sort of shiny as he stared out into our back yard.

  He hadn't been a cowboy at all, but he had grown up on my grandparents' old farm, which they'd abruptly sold when my dad was a teenager. Rough times. As an adult, my dad lived in the suburbs and was a construction project manager, but I knew he thought a lot about the long-lost farm.

  So I'd picked that song.

  Then I jumped ahead, to my mom's favorite song, though the digital version lacked the familiar hisses and pops of the old vinyl album.

  “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong couldn't have been more out of place in the scene of death and ashes all around me. The dead stopped altogether.

  The column of fire was gone, too. Clay stood there instead, smirking at me, which didn't really boost my confidence.

  “This is all you have?” he asked. “The music of slaves and peasants? This is your last weapon?”

  “No,” I said. “My last weapon is you.”

  He frowned, looking at the mob of tortured souls seemingly frozen around him. “What do you mean?”

  “You overplayed your hand.” I slid off the ring with the shattered emerald and tossed it at his feet. “You let yourself be fooled by things older and more evil than you.”

  “I am...no fool...” he said, looking down at the broken ring between his soft black leather boots.

  The world around us was growing dark, the last fires dwindling. When I ended the music, I could no longer hear the river gurgling behind me.

  I looked back, and the river was gone. There was only a growing darkness back there—no water, no burning remnants of buildings on the other side.

  And in the darkness, I heard a young woman's voice singing a lullaby.

  “What is happening?” Clay asked. “What have you done to me?”

  The souls on our side of the river began to fall away slowly, with looks of peace on their faces as they faded into the ground, the lullaby soothing them. The words were in Welsh; the song was "Ar Hyd y Nos," which meant “All Through the Night.”

  The night around us grew darker with every soul that vanished, like candles being blown out.

  Mati Price appeared, with her wide, soft, youthful face, her blond hair formed into big sloppy braids over either ear. Every detail of her was transparent and as pale as milk.

  With every note she sang, a wisp of her flowed out and touched one of the suffering souls, and soothed it to sleep. This lullaby seemed to be draining her, unraveling her as she put down the hundreds of souls with her song.

  “Oh, that's my other secret weapon,” I said. “But I thought she'd misfired. I want to say it was my music that drew her here just now, but I'd bet it was the crying of all the little ghosts, the little kids and babies who died in the fire. She probably couldn't resist singing to them.”

  The world grew dark, smaller, and colder around us as more souls vanished into a charmed slumber. Mati kept circling around, putting more and more souls to sleep. I hoped Mati didn't come directly toward us too soon, since I didn't want Clay's ghost put to rest and out of reach.

  She
was putting them down quickly, though, so I had to move fast.

  I reached into my backpack and drew out a handful of the bright yellow flowers Calvin had sent me. Some of them had crumpled, and many of the sunny petals had fallen loose, but I didn't think it mattered.

  I scattered the flowers at Clay's feet. Some of the yellow petals landed on his boot.

  “What is this?” he asked. I noticed he was looking paler now, as if he'd grown ill. Souls continued vanishing around him.

  “The Mexican marigold,” I said, scooping more loose petals from my backpack to throw at him. “Also called the Aztec marigold, or cempohualxochitl.” I'd made myself memorize that ancient word so I could fling it in his face.

  “That's a mouthful,” Clay said. His voice was starting to crack, I thought. His blond hair looked like drab, dry straw.

  “It was sacred to the Aztecs,” I said. “And still sacred today. On the Day of the Dead, these flowers are put out to guide the dead to their offerings. Today, you're the offering.”

  “I don't understand,” he said. Clay wasn't smirking anymore.

  Thin, barely visible apparitions began to appear behind him, like gray shadows.

  “You were always just a simple territorial ghost,” I said. “Repeating obsessively the murders you committed in life. What changed? How did you get loose? How did you get clever enough to lure Michael over the fence?”

  Anton held out his cupped hand, as he sometimes did when he was about to summon flames, but only thin, pale smoke curled out.

  “I'll tell you,” he said at last. “A girl came to ask me about you. Many questions, as though she wanted to learn all about you. I felt compelled to answer her. She made offerings of wine, milk, and goat's blood. Oddly difficult to resist.”

  “What girl?”

  “She didn't offer a name. European.”

  “Kara?” It took a moment to recognize the name of the Russian psychic girl from Paranormal Solutions, as if my mind had tried to suppress all those memories.

  “Possibly.”

  “Then she just left you loose?”

  “She did say some words to the effect that I should go back down into my grave, but she seemed careless and rushed about it. I found myself left...strangely awake when she departed.” He tried again to summon flames to his fingertips, then snarled when it failed.

  Behind him, more and more of the thin gray apparitions formed. I worried about Mati Price getting too close too soon; she was running out of Peshtigo ghosts to put to sleep.

  I saw the faces of the new apparitions that stood closest to Clay.

  They were my parents. These new entities showing up were Clay's own ghosts, his victims from the houses he'd burned down over the years.

  My parents were closest to him, either because they were his most recent victims, or because it was their daughter who had summoned them with the music and the Day of the Dead flowers. If I'd really had time to prepare, I might have picked up some bread, fruit, and those yummy little sugar skulls.

  What I'd done seemed to be working well enough, though.

  “When we capture a ghost like you,” I said, “We put you in a distant graveyard, hundreds of miles from the place you haunted. We use old abandoned graveyards so you can't bother anybody, and the walls or fences usually keep the spirits inside. You might understand this. You understood it enough to remove the gate from the Peshtigo cemetery.

  “But the distance is important, too,” I continued. “You're strongest in your home territory, in the place your spirit refused to leave. You don't belong here, Clay, a thousand miles north in the freezing cold. You're exhausted. And you don't have your ancient evil spirit guides anymore. They assumed that anyone who used the ring would be tempted by its power. But I'm not really into having other people murdered, even at a distance, even if I could completely get away with it. Plus, I don't want to end up as another ghost attached to that ring. Spending eternity with your rotten-faced old Phoenician friends doesn't sound like a great future existence to me.”

  The gray, transparent horde of ghosts behind Clay had grown clearer as I spoke. The sight of my parents emboldened me; I knew these were just ghosts, just fragments of the people who had lived, but seeing them made me feel bolstered and supported by them, which was not a feeling I'd enjoyed in many years.

  As for the others, I recognized their faces from my research, and my nightmares. Clay's other victims, the other families he'd murdered over the years.

  They came forward, one by one, each one touching Clay briefly, then disappearing for good. Each touch seemed to take something from Clay, to make him diminish and fade. His skin turned gray and began to wrinkle and crack. He seemed helpless to fend them off.

  Good.

  Mati Price's lullaby approached, and the world grew ever darker and smaller as the last of the Peshtigo souls vanished, sinking down to a peaceful rest.

  There wasn't much left of Mati herself, either, just a nearly tiny, thin gossamer of light as faint as the new moon. The lullaby was less than a whisper now; I could only hear it because I was listening for it, and because there was so little other sound to be heard. No gurgling river, no roaring fire, no voices crying out.

  I watched the ghosts of Clay's victims pass by, draining him as they vanished. Fathers, mothers, children, all claimed by him over the years, all of them scarred by burns from his fires.

  As they left, he collapsed to his knees, reduced to a gaunt, shriveled wraith in fine silk clothes. He swayed, barely holding himself up. His eyes seemed to recede into their sockets, no longer filled with his usual bright glare.

  “What happens to a minor territorial ghost when it gets completely cut off from its territory?” I asked. “They can get very confused. They lose focus. Their connection to the earthly plane can get weak. And that's a good thing, Clay. Because, let's be honest, this world is far from perfect. Don't you want to see what's waiting on the other side?”

  Then I found myself talking to empty, blackened earth. Clay was gone.

  I looked up at my parents, and at the last few of Clay's victim ghosts, including his first victim—Elizabeth Sutton, his former lover. Her slaves and her husband had already grabbed their pounds of flesh from Clay and moved on. Her three children stood behind her, gray and transparent.

  My parents lingered behind, among the last to go. They seemed sharper and clearer than the others, maybe because of my little offering to them, which I had hoped would empower them to lend a hand from their side. Maybe it had worked, or maybe I'd just gotten lucky.

  I understood they were only ghosts, only fragments, but I wasn't going to miss this chance to speak to them.

  “Mom, Dad,” I said. “I—”

  Then Clay was up in my face, a smoldering skeleton, his skull seeming to grin through its thin layer of smoking ash. His blue eyes regarded me from deep inside his eye sockets, like predators lurking in caves.

  His hand grabbed my throat, his bony fingers like hot steel.

  “There's still time for you, Eleanor,” his voice whispered. “Never mind the others. There's always you and I—”

  Then he hissed and released me.

  My parents' ghosts had grabbed him from either side, pulling him back from me and weakening him at the same time. They seemed to be taking back their share of energy from him, too, like the other ghosts had done.

  “I love you,” I said, finally finishing my sentence. This might have been my last chance to speak to them, and I wanted to do a bit better than my previous last thing I'd said to them, which was “I hate you.” For not letting me go to a concert with a somewhat delinquent-ish boy. Okay, very delinquent-ish.

  “Ellie,” my mother's apparition said, and she reached out to touch my cheek.

  Her fingertips were like ice.

  My father's apparition touched the other side of my face, his fingers also freezing.

  I shivered, and I was terrified and exhilarated and wanted to collapse and cry.

  Then they faded together, movi
ng on, lost and broken pieces of my parents' souls going home to eternal rest. Or whatever lies beyond the veil. Don't ask me, I just work here.

  Each of Elizabeth Sutton's children touched Clay, then vanished.

  Only Elizabeth remained, the first and last of his ghosts. She looked at Clay, a deep sadness clear on her face.

  Then she seized his long straw-colored hair, and a malicious smile formed on her ghostly gray lips,

  “Never mind the others,” she whispered into his ear, drawing his head close. “There's always you and I.”

  She turned him to face me. Clay's skeletal form swayed as though too weak to stand, as though her grip on him was the only thing keeping him on his feet.

  Elizabeth had repeated his exact words to me. Maybe it was something he'd once said to her in life.

  “No,” Clay said, his voice raspy and weak now, like his vocal cords had turned to old leather. He was pathetically shriveled now, his ripped and burned suit hanging loose on his bones. “They're coming for me.”

  He was staring at me, and the look on his face was something I'd never seen from him—sheer, helpless terror. I'd never expected him to look at me like that.

  No, wait.

  He was looking at something behind me.

  I turned, but all I saw was a thick fog rolling in behind me. It was unbelievably cold as it surrounded me, blocking my view of Clay and Elizabeth, of everything except fog.

  Then I had the sensation that something was passing very close to me in the freezing fog, maybe only inches away—something immense, like I was a deep-sea diver and a giant beast I couldn't see was passing in the underwater darkness, like a whale, or a shark. It was even colder than the fog, and I thought that if I reached out and touched it, it would be like plunging my hand into a tank of liquid nitrogen. Including the part where my hand shatters like glass afterward.

  Ahead of me, Clay screamed, his voice high and sharp. I can't say I'd ever really heard him terrified like that before,

  Elizabeth's voice arose, too, in a brassy, merry laugh, the laugh of the crazed and jubilant, the laugh of a woman who'd suffered so long, who'd watch her children die, and now, at last, had her hands on their murderer.