Kiss The Flame_A Desire Exchange Novella

by Christopher Rice

  “Why would anyone make a candle that smells like a dirty fish tank?” Cat asked.

  A special recipe intended to stimulate the centers of the brain that promote passion.

  Isn’t that what Bastian Drake had told her? That or something similarly dramatic. But if the candle smelled so different to Cat’s nose than to Laney’s, maybe that gave some truth to Bastian’s self-promoting ridiculousness.

  “Laney Foley.”

  She didn’t imagine it. The beautiful black woman from the night before is standing a few feet away, just steps from the entrance to Laney’s dorm.

  “I need to speak with you,” the woman says. “It’s important.”

  “Listen, I don’t know what you think was happening last night. But he just gave me a candle. That’s all. I’ve never seen him before and I’ll probably never see him again. He seemed nice, but apparently he’s not all that nice if you think he’s—anyway. Just a candle. That’s all. I promise.”

  “It is not just a candle,” the woman answers.

  “Ma’am, please. I’ve had kind of a rough day and I just…I don’t mean to be rude, I just really don’t need any more drama right now.”

  “If you don’t want any drama in your life, then don’t light that candle.”

  If the woman really thinks Laney slept with her man, where’s her self-righteous outrage? She seems conflicted. Like there’s more she wants to say, but can’t.

  “What is it?” Laney asks. “A bomb?”

  “No.”

  “Poison? Drugs?

  “Is there somewhere we can talk?”

  “I’ll throw it away. How does that sound? As soon as I get upstairs, I’ll throw it in the trash. And we’re done, and it’s all good.”

  “No. We’re not all good.”

  “Okay. I’ve said my piece and I’m done, so I’m gonna go. Take care and please don’t follow me or else I’ll call campus security. Have a nice afternoon.”

  And with that, she starts for the entrance to her dorm. In what feels like one motion, Laney slides her keycard through the reader, steps inside the foyer and pulls the glass door shut behind her with both hands. When she turns, the woman’s nowhere to be seen. Just a loose smattering of students on the distant lawn. She should still call someone, campus security maybe? File some kind of stalking report. If that’s even a thing.

  The elevator’s on the tenth floor and she doesn’t feel like waiting for it so she bounds up the fire staircase to her room on the seventh. The door is open a crack which must mean Kelley’s home. Laney pulls the knob, already scripting a speech for Kelley about how they should all be on the lookout for a strange woman who just stopped her outside and probably thinks she banged her weird, Jazz Age-obsessed boyfriend.

  As soon as Laney steps into her dorm room, the woman in question turns from the open window as if she’s been waiting patiently for several minutes. A scream reaches the bottom of Laney’s throat. The woman raises one index finger and quietly says, “Please don’t scream, Laney. Everything will be all right if you just listen to me.”

  10

  “What the fuck?”

  “Is the language necessary?” her visitor asks.

  “Yes. What the fuck?”

  “I guess it’s preferable to screaming.”

  “Which you asked me not to do. And which I’m not doing. So I repeat. What the fuck?”

  “What’s the question exactly?” her visitor asks.

  “The question is what the fuck?”

  “I’m not really sure how to respond,” the woman answers. “Perhaps my name will do. I’m Lilliane. And once you’ve calmed down a little, I’ll show you something else that will also make you curse a lot. I can’t wait, honestly.”

  Lilliane extends her hand. Laney refuses to take it, refuses to move an inch from where her feet are planted just inside the doorway to her dorm room.

  “We’re on the seventh floor,” Laney says. “How did you—?”

  “What the fuck?” Lilliane finishes for her.

  “Yeah.”

  “Laney Foley, we can do this one of two ways. I can show you a variety of things I’m capable of, none of which you will ever be able to explain in any rational or scientific way. And a great many of which will reduce you to a sputtering wreck in the corner of your room. Or I can show you only those things that you will eventually be able to dismiss and discount once I’m on my way. Option two, I can assure you, will allow you to lead a far more balanced and normal life. And believe it or not, despite the manner in which I have entered it, my objective is for you to lead a balanced and normal life from here on out.”

  “There’s nothing normal about jumping seven stories through an open window.”

  “It wasn’t open. But yes, you’re right. There’s nothing normal about it. Just as there is nothing normal about this candle.”

  The candle in question is still on Laney’s desk, right next to her open laptop, easily within Lilliane’s reach, but the older woman refuses to touch it. Instead, she studies it as if it were a dead rat.

  “Have you calmed down a bit or do you need to curse some more?” Lilliane asks.

  “I’m done cursing. For now.”

  “Good. Then read the webpage I’ve opened on your computer.”

  At her desk, Laney tilts the monitor back until the sun isn’t whiting out the screen. When she hits the right angle, she finds herself staring down at a black and white photograph of Lilliane. Her hair is different, and the posed, black-and-white photo looks like it’s from another era, but it’s definitely the same woman. The site is called FORGOTTEN INJUSTICE, its title framed by ghostly human profiles with no facial features. Laney scans the captions above and below Lilliane’s picture, then clicks on some of the links in the header to make sure the site is legit. On another page, she comes across a recent Times Picayune article praising the site’s mission, which is to document old, unsolved missing persons cases within the black community local newspapers refused to report on at the time. The woman standing right behind her is one of those cases. And she hasn’t aged a day since she went missing.

  And there it is, Laney thinks. One day, you’re walking along and then suddenly something totally inexplicable drops right down in the middle of your life. Either you lose your mind or this extraordinary thing—a woman who hasn’t aged a day in fifty-six years, for instance—becomes as undeniable as gravity. After all, wasn’t there a time in all of our lives when complete sentences sounded to us like magic because we couldn’t yet speak one ourselves? How was this any different? How is the woman and what she might be capable of any different to Laney’s everyday life than a complete sentence is to an infant?

  “This is you,” Laney hears herself say.

  “Yes.”

  “This is you in nineteen fifty-nine.”

  “That is me, four months before I met Bastian Drake.”

  “I see.” No, I don’t.

  “Do you need to curse again?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It doesn’t offend me. It’s a sign that you’re not focused and I would like you to be able to retain everything I’m about to say to you.”

  “Okay. Fuck. There, I said it. It’s out of my system.”

  Laney sinks down into her desk chair. It occurs to her, too late, that Lilliane now stands between her and her only exit. But there’s nothing menacing in the woman’s expression. She looks sheepish, and after a few seconds, she manages an indulgent smile.

  “He’s a ghost,” Lilliane finally says.

  “A ghost? Bastian Drake is a ghost?”

  “Yes. Last night you had an extended conversation with and accepted a gift from a ghost. Just as in April of nineteen fifty-nine I wandered into a strange little candle shop in the French Quarter I’d never seen before and had an extended conversation with and accepted a gift from a ghost.”

  “Am I dead right now?” Laney asks.

  “No. Focus. What did it smell like?”

  “Bastian?”

/>   “The candle.”

  “Vanilla. Vanilla and campfires.”

  “And I take it the man for whom you have deep feelings smells exactly the same way?”

  “Yes,” Laney whispers.

  Lilliane smiles distantly, nostalgically, and for a second Laney thinks her visitor is blinking back tears. But none come. Maybe this woman, this being, isn’t capable of making them.

  “Mine was pears and cinnamon,” Lilliane says. “Pears and cinnamon,” she adds, her voice a hoarse whisper.

  “Are you a ghost too?” Laney asks.

  “No. Changed, yes. But not a ghost.”

  “Changed by what? By Bastian?”

  “Close. By his candle. By that candle,” she says, pointing to the one next to Laney’s elbow. “His shop. It never appears in the same place twice, you see. And it only appears to someone like you, someone struggling with what they want and how they want it. Bastian only appears to someone like you, I should say, and he only gives a candle to someone suffering under the same struggle.”

  “And you were suffering?” Laney asks, and then forces herself to gulp before she says, “In nineteen fifty-nine?”

  Lilliane closes her eyes, shakes her head as if shrugging off the memory.

  “He’ll tell you that most of the time his magic, the magic in that candle, only does good. That once lit, the flame releases a force that allows a person’s true passion to become their everyday life. And how can that be a bad thing?”

  “And what would you tell me about his magic?”

  “That there is a risk to it,” Lilliane says. “A risk he doesn’t disclose. I would tell you there are some people in whom fear runs so deep, in whom resistance is so strong, the flame’s energy isn’t strong enough to overpower them.”

  “Wait a minute,” Laney says. “Just tell me, if I were to light this candle right now, what would happen? What would I see?”

  “You would see something that would either make you scream bloody murder or fall down on your knees in prayer. Or possibly both. And then, shortly thereafter, you would have the most intense orgasm of your entire life. Then you would regain consciousness covered in a kind of gold residue which you wouldn’t be able to wipe off or shower away, and you would go to the man you currently desire with absolute surrender and abandon and a total absence of fear.”

  Neither one of them speaks for several minutes. Outside, a bird chirps madly. Is it trying to warn her the woman she’s talking to just flew seven stories up the side of Berry Hall?

  “And you don’t want me to light this candle?” Laney finally asks.

  “What I’ve just described is one possible scenario. There are two. If you’re one of the obstinate ones, like I was, if your mind is strong enough to talk yourself out of your desire, even when that desire is amplified by the flame’s energy, things will go very differently.”

  “Okay…”

  “Are you a stubborn person, Laney Foley? Are you full of reasons why it will never work with the man you can’t chase from your thoughts and your heart?”

  Her answer is in the speed with which her eyes drop to the pockmarked linoleum floor between them.

  “I see,” Lilliane whispers. “It’s a good thing I warned you then.”

  “And what happens to the stubborn ones?” Laney asks. “What happened to you?”

  “We call ourselves Radiants. It’s far better than what he used to call us.”

  “Bastian?”

  “Yes. The Refused. That was his nickname for us in the beginning. Because we had refused his gift, you see.”

  “How?”

  “The flame’s energy is drawn from those who have lived out their deepest sexual desires. That’s what fuels his candles. The life force of desire, if you will. Bastian used to collect this force himself. I’m not exactly sure how. There’s much he won’t tell me. Now I collect it for him, at a place I run called The Desire Exchange.”

  Amazing that the name of a silly urban legend seems like the only real thing in this entire conversation. Maybe because it’s familiar.

  “I always thought that place was a joke,” Laney says.

  “Everyone does. It’s how we stay exclusive.”

  “You run it?”

  “Yes. It’s where I’ve managed to put some of my abilities to use. To good use, that is. I was the first, you see. The first person to refuse his gift.”

  “But, Lilliane, what does that mean, to refuse his gift? I don’t understand.”

  “It means that for twenty-four hours after you light the candle, twenty-four hours after you see spirits emerge from it and you’re bathed in an energy that fills you with a desire like you have never known, even then, you still don’t go to the person you desire with all your heart. You don’t complete the connection the flame is driving you to make. And so, the flame’s energy never reaches its final destination. It becomes trapped within you and as a result you are forever changed.”

  “How?”

  Lilliane looks into Laney’s eyes for the first time in several minutes, and while she’s yet to shed a tear, the pain is so raw and evident it’s hard for Laney to hold the woman’s gaze. But it would be too rude to look away.

  “I don’t want to say,” Lilliane says.

  “Why?”

  “Because it will sound better than it is. And I don’t wish my life for you. For anyone.”

  “Don’t I have the right to make a choice?” Laney asks. “Isn’t that why you came? So that I could know the risk?”

  “I’ve stayed out of Bastian’s affairs until now. But I wasn’t prepared for how I’d feel when I saw it all again. When I saw you standing there just like me. The shop exactly like it was all those years ago, just on a different street.”

  “You think I’ll want to be like you if you tell me what you are?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “If all you wanted was to keep me from lighting this candle, why didn’t you just jump back out the window with it before I got upstairs?”

  “I don’t know,” she answers. It sounds almost petulant.

  “Of course you do. You waited. You waited to tell me all of this. So don’t just give me half your story. Please.”

  The woman takes a seat on Laney’s bed, her posture as casual as a friend who just dropped by for a chat and Diet Coke. The forced nature of this gesture chills Laney to the bone.

  “I don’t age, as you can see from that picture. I don’t sleep, because I don’t need to. I don’t eat. And I don’t fly, exactly. But I leap, which is sort of like flying but you can’t let the mind wander for very long.” Then, as if she’s just rattled off the items on a grocery list, she smooths her dress over her thighs and offers Laney a weak smile.

  “Is that all?” Laney asks in a hoarse, strained voice.

  “No,” Lilliane says primly. “If I suck in a little bit of your breath, I have the power to make your deepest sexual fantasy materialize in your immediate physical area for an extended period of time. To do this, I literally dematerialize.”

  “Dematerialize?”

  “I cease to exist as an individual being on this physical plane. I become your fantasy. All of it. The room, the props, the players. It’s another fun perk of the energy that’s been trapped in me for fifty-six years.”

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t. And it’s my hope that you never will.”

  “Because you think if you just tell me about this stuff and don’t show any of it to me, I’ll be able to pretend like none of this ever happened once you leave.”

  “Once I leave with the candle. Yes.”

  “You can’t just wipe my memory or something?”

  “No. I cannot.”

  “Good, I guess,” Laney says. “So the energy in this candle, you collect it for him even though you know the risk, even though it turned you into something amazing you don’t want to be?”

  Lilliane averts her eyes. “There was no one else like me in the beginning. Bastian was all I had. And even he was
n’t sure what had happened to me. We figured it out together as best we could. And then a few years later, there was another. And another. And we saw the trend. By then, I’d become comfortable with my new abilities so I took over some of his operations. I thought it would allow me to control him. But there’s no controlling him. He can’t even control himself.”

  “How come?”

  Lilliane meets Laney’s stare again. “He’s a servant to forces he doesn’t fully understand. But if you must know, I help people at The Desire Exchange. They leave enlightened, not transformed. And by God, I help far more people than he appears to on the streets of the French Quarter. That’s for sure. It’s good work I do.”

  “And ten bucks says it’s got something to do with your other power. The one where you…” Laney can’t even bring herself to repeat the words Lilliane just used. Dematerialize? Become a fantasy? It’s all nuts! “So is that all?” Laney asks.

  “All of what?”

  “All of how you’ve been changed.”

  “No,” Lilliane says, shaking her head, staring into Laney’s eyes again with a piercing look that threatens to break Laney’s heart. And then the piercing look is joined by a dazzling gold radiance that fills both of the woman’s eye sockets, a radiance that rides the swell of emotion within Lilliane. It’s a full-fledged display of something Laney only glimpsed in Bastian’s eyes the night before. Then it’s gone and Lilliane once again stares back at her with beautiful, but very human brown eyes, filled with pain, but not with otherworldly golden light.

  “I can feel lust,” Lilliane says, her voice almost a whisper. “I can feel raw sexual attraction to another person. But I have no desire to commit to them. To anyone. I have never again had the experience of looking at a man and believing that anything would be possible if he just took me in his arms.