Alone in the waiting room she rubbed its cool surface. Maimun arrived thirty seconds later.
“I . . . didn’t feel good about how we parted,” she said, coming around the desk to stand in front of him. His heat and smoke made her breath catch, but she felt it important to bridge the gap.
Maimun nodded. “Nor did I.”
She took a deep breath. “I know you did the best you could, and I realize it’s unfair of me to blame you.” She’d ran through the words a few times in the bathroom, but saying them now wrenched at a knot inside her. It untwisted with each word she spoke, and she was terrified she would disappear with it. “You—you were doing what you had to, in the best way you could.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “It’s strange, what you said about Mom never stopping loving me . . . I’m still processing it, but I feel . . . better, I think.”
Maimun didn’t move, but his flame brightened until there wasn’t a crack of shadow in the oak panels. A purple halo grew beyond his body, and the smoke took on the deep and creamy aroma of sandalwood.
Charlotte was still intact, even though the knot had gone. “Your instincts are better than I give you credit for.”
Maimun bowed his head, then shook it. “You were right about the collateral damage. And you are the first person who’s turned down an offer for wishes, and who would deserve one most.”
Charlotte frowned. The eternal temptation to ruin lives for the sake of her own. “I haven’t changed my mind about that.”
“I don’t want you to,” Maimun said, spreading his arms. “But you’ve made me change. I haven’t the courage yet to tell Almasi, for he brought me into this world based on my need.
“Throughout my life, I had no sense of usefulness. No matter what job I tried, I wasn’t good enough. The only skill I seemed to have was knowing what others wanted, but mundane jobs couldn’t fill the need burning in me. I wanted to bring people what their innermost selves wanted, but they rarely asked for that. So I began granting wishes to strike at the heart of desire. At first I’d fulfil what wishes I could through material means alone. As my magic awakened from this newfound sense of purpose, I began to do all that you’ve seen in order to fulfil wishes. I paid a small price for the wishes, one that I didn’t notice at the time—giving up my own desires. It was a job, a way to feel useful, a task of meaning that surpassed anything I’d known before, regardless of the unsuccessful results in the aftermath.
“I wasn’t obliged to continue this lifestyle, but I did, especially after Almasi brought me here and created the expectation of my duties and a framework of rules, that this was what I did, this was the purpose of my existence. The more I did it, the less I wanted to do anything else. How could anyone see that I had other value?”
“You don’t need others to tell you your value,” Charlotte said, her voice just above a whisper.
Maimun nodded. “The words come easily, but true understanding does not. You’ve helped me learn, Charlotte. Shown me. My inner fire is enough. I don’t need to give wishes anymore.” He paused. “And I will never do to anyone else what I did to you.”
Charlotte’s voice caught in her throat. “W—what will you do now?”
“It’s been so long since I’ve wanted anything,” Maimun said. “But I think I will start by visiting an old friend—a troll.”
Charlotte wanted to say something as Maimun bowed and headed for the door, but she could do nothing but stare as his fire concentrated into a white flame in his torso, and he passed into the dusty air and out of sight.
ON HER LUNCH break, Charlotte phoned Alicia and took her up on an offer to go to a poetry slam. Alicia sounded wary at first, then surprised. Mirrored in Alicia’s voice Charlotte sensed the warmth they both felt in talking to each other again.
When Charlotte returned to work, Mr. Almasi walked through the hall, glanced back at her, then stopped and turned.
“Maimun must have rubbed off on you,” he said. “You’re glowing.”
Charlotte smiled.
The Second Great Fire
Laura VanArendonk Baugh
IN THE COMICS I liked to read hidden behind an oversized Look magazine, heroes came by their superpowers via startling and novel means. Captain America was injected with a serum by Dr. Josef Reinstein. Superman was born on a distant planet where his literally unearthly powers are commonplace. Both Doll Man’s shrinking to just six inches tall and Shock Gibson’s electrical attacks were acquired via chemical formula.
I died for my power.
I’d left the States behind and gone to London, blithely confident in my youthful optimism that there would be no war. After all, the grim-faced men with the task of politics had all seen the devastation of the Great War and knew its repetition must be avoided. Neville Chamberlain insisted that if we left Hitler and the Nazis alone, they would settle and be quiet, and at home in the States most of the talk was of letting things work themselves out.
So I went to London in 1939 on the pretence of furthering my education, but really in search of a good time, and I found it. I met a man who said he knew a fellow and could get me a job at the Windmill Theatre, performing in their tableaux vivants, but that I would have to audition for him privately first. I scrubbed my skin raw and shining, chose the lingerie which was the best combination of flattering and easy to remove, and climbed upstairs to the projection room of the Folly Theatre. I hiked my skirt with practiced nonchalance to ascend the short ladder into the booth, never giving a thought to the thick metal door I had to pass through, or the iron shutters hanging over the projection ports facing the silver screen, or the chains which ran between the massive projectors and the shutters. All this meant no more to me than the machinery of the projectors themselves, and I had come only for Harry.
So he started the film and gave me the nod, as A Girl Must Live flickered over the heads of the audience below. We had twenty minutes before the reel change, and I began my audition for Harry.
I must have done pretty well, for I distracted him from the cigarette he’d lit in blatant violation of the sign upon the door. When he rose to come toward me—“a girl in the tableaux vivant must not move, no matter what, so let’s test your resolve”—he let it fall to a stack of film canisters, one of many ringing the projection booth, but this one with a lid which was not quite closed over the coil of celluloid inside.
What I did not know then, but I know in exquisite detail now, is that nitrate film is very nearly the same substance as guncotton. It’s relatively safe when handled properly, but it becomes volatile with age. It is intensely inflammable, and great care is generally taken to keep it from igniting via the carbon arc lamp in projectors.
When a burning cigarette touches it, it is a candle to flash paper.
The roll of film burst into flame, and Harry jumped backward, cursing. He struck the projector with his shoulder and grasped at it to stay upright. A tower of fire leapt upward from the canister, and around it ominous noises came from the adjoining canisters, warming in the sudden blaze. Celluloid ignites from mere heat.
Harry whirled and ran for the door, leaving me naked behind him. He wrenched back the heavy metal shield and fled through it, pulling it and the attached chain shut behind him. I stared, uncomprehending, hardly understanding the danger or that he had simply abandoned me to it.
The room exploded.
Fire raced around the walls, shooting out from stacked canisters. I snatched up my discarded skirt and blouse and tried to press out the fire, but I only burned my hands and arms. Celluloid creates its own oxygen as it burns; there is no smothering it. The heat fuses in the chains overhead burned through and the shutters slammed down, trapping me in the rising inferno.
Smoke poured from the burning film, nitric acid which began to dissolve my skin. I beat at the door, screaming, but it held fast, designed to seal solidly against a wall of flame and expanding with heat against its frame.
There was a fire grenade on the wall, a red globe filled with fire extinguisher. Its restr
aint melted with the rising heat and flung the globe into the rising flames. The glass shattered and its carbon tetrachloride spread over the fire, quelling the places it touched and transforming with the heat. The incongruous scent of freshly-cut grass swept over me, and I gasped the new-formed phosgene gas—the trench gas of the Great War—as I screamed.
I burned. I burned from nitric acid without, from phosgene within, from fire everywhere. The booth was filled with smoke and flame and my screaming.
Mistress.
The word seared my mind as the fire seared my flesh. I could not respond to it as I clawed frantically at the door, the wall, the flame-spitting forge of a projector.
Mistress. Come to me.
I turned, less in heed than in desperation, and saw a great black dog standing unaffected in the fire. It looked like something between a wolf and a great hound, tall and lean and dark against the flame, and it watched me as if waiting for something.
The blood waits, mistress.
I did not know what that meant, did not know where the words were coming from, did not know how I could see a dog where there could be no dog, did not know how to end my agony.
Breathe the fire.
I had been breathing the fire, had been scorching my lungs with acid and gas and flame. I cried in pain and frustration and fury.
Yes! Claim it!
I threw myself upright, clenched my blackened fingers into fists, and drank deep of the smoke and poison and blaze. I flung my head back in my pyre and poured out my crucible-purified rage in one incandescent scream.
The scream became a roar, matching the inferno in intensity, and despite myself I hesitated, surprised even in my anguish.
But the work was done. The fire continued around me, but my fingers uncurled, the skin uncracked, the charred black crumbling off into the carpeting fire to reveal pure skin. I gasped, and my lungs did not burn. I looked down at my unnaturally whole flesh, and my eyes did not water and peel.
I looked at the dog. It did not wag—this did not look like a dog who would often wag—but it somehow looked pleased.
Yes, good, mistress. You have done well. It cannot harm you now.
I tried to speak and found that I could form words with what had been my blistered lips. “What—what happened? What am I?”
The dog’s ears moved back slightly. You are a child of dragons, though the blood had weakened through generations of disuse. But it was there, and enough to be claimed.
Child of dragons? I had a brief memory of Grandmother dragging me to sit through some part of Der Ring des Nibelungen, which had felt more like all fifteen hours of it. There had been a dragon. But I was still standing in fire and I could not think clearly.
Fire and poison are your birthright and your tools, the dog said to me, however it was speaking. They cannot harm you once you make them yours.
I relaxed my posture, gradually coming to grips with the fact that I was not burning to death. “Who are you?”
Brand.
The dog approached me, tail waving loosely behind him. Flame reflected in his eyes, or they were glowing with their own fire. I reached out and touched him—not giddily, as if he were a lap spaniel, but respectfully, as if he were a wolf-dog of fire.
The carbon tetrachloride was doing its work, and the nitrate film was burning out. But no one would enter the theatre soon, not with all the poison still in the air.
Brand went to the door. We can go before they come.
“I’m naked,” I said. My clothes were ash.
His ears flattened in a canine grin. Perhaps you should have considered that before disrobing.
“I didn’t know the room would catch fire!”
I, too, wear no clothes.
I resolved to steal one of the usherettes’ overcoats on the way out, in the likely event one had been abandoned in the evacuation.
The cooling door slowly shrank in its frame, and I pulled it open with fingers that should have blistered from its residual heat. We left.
I DID NOT go back to the nightclubs, and I never went to the Windmill Theatre. That part of me had burned away in the projection booth, and now I craved purpose. Also, I did not want to see Harry.
I spent time in the public library, looking up all the reasons I should have died. I replaced the books on the shelves myself, irrationally afraid a librarian should wonder at my assortment and guess at something I could not myself identify.
The Prime Minister was wrong, and war came. A new prime minister replaced him. And then the Blitz began.
I joined the Women’s Voluntary Services, aiding with evacuations, mobile canteens for the firemen, clothing and shelter for refugees, inquiries from survivors seeking those they hoped were survivors. It was hard, but worthwhile, and we did not bow beneath the bombs which fell so often on us.
Brand stayed by my side, and in daylight he looked much like any lurcher to be found in the English countryside, and few people gave him a thought beyond how much of my rations he must consume. By night, however, he took on the appearance of a hellhound, and he was careful not to draw attention to himself.
You are a dragon, he said to me one morning, as he did so often. You have power to make war. And yet you stand here and make tea.
“I am doing important work,” I said, and I waved to a woman kicking fresh debris from the night’s bombing off her doorstep as she retrieved the morning’s bottle of milk. She returned the wave with a smile. “I do not wish to make war, only to survive it.”
You are hiding from yourself.
That might have been true. I did not know what to make of my dragon blood, and alone in London I had no one to ask. Four times I had started a letter to my grandmother, asking about the dragon in the opera, and four times I had abandoned the half-filled sheet to the rubbish bin.
Christmas came. It was 1940, and much of London was rubble, although morale was still high and even the children were bearing up well. We at the WVS served refreshments and handed out toys to children, and I gave our Father Christmas a peck on the cheek to their great delight. We had gotten through the worst of the Blitz. Beginning in September, the nightly visits had come fifty-six of fifty-seven nights, and then the Germans seemed to have, while not given up entirely, at least exhausted themselves as much as their targets and to have slowed their attacks.
I’d treated myself to a viewing of The Great Dictator—it had been months before I’d entered a cinema again, and I was proud of myself for having done so tonight—and was heading home. I made a face as we crossed the Thames. The tide was exceptionally low this night, and the river stank with refuse and exposed muck. I went home to my flat, Brand at my side as always, and kicked off my shoes. It was Sunday the twenty-ninth, my night off-duty, and I meant to enjoy it. My flat-mates were away in their various roles, so I had the place to myself. There was an Anderson shelter in the back garden, should the sirens sound, but I meant to curl up in a comfortable chair with a novel and my windows safely blacked to hoard the light.
Brand curled into the matching chair beside mine, coiled into himself more tightly than seemed possible. I had not worked him out. He was a hellhound, he admitted that much, and he had recognized me for what I was when I passed him en route to that fateful cinema. Beyond that, he said only that he was adrift here much as I was. We should be doing more than we are.
“What more can we do?” I asked. “I cannot fly a bomber to Germany. I haven’t the skill.”
There are many women doing the war’s work, he answered with a reproving tone even in my own mind, and you have another skill.
I did not like to speak of the time that a bomb had splashed fire onto the exposed wood of a pub and I had smothered the smouldering corner with my bare hands. No one had seen what I had done, as they were too busy fighting the rest of the fire, and that meant I did not have to face questions to which I had no answers—except from myself and Brand, and myself I could distract with a novel.
We must fight them, he growled.
“T
he Germans?”
Those who drive them. They are warg, outsiders, outlaws. Their spread must be stopped.
I did not know if he meant the Nazi party or something else. I did not ask. I opened my book.
Sometime near six, the banshee wail of the air raid sirens began to scream their warning, and I groaned my annoyance. Should I go out to the Anderson shelter, beneath the earth of the garden, or should I remain where I was? Most citizens sheltered at home, and there seemed little difference in results. The Anderson shelter would be crowded with other flat tenants, while here I had only Brand and myself. I turned the page and kept reading.
But this night was not quite like other nights. I heard the planes, and the booming of the guns trying to bring them down, but I did not hear the explosion of heavy bombs. Several times I heard what sounded like a scuttle of coal being spread through the streets, but there were no familiar whistles and booms. I read on; after over a year of constant raids, it needed more than a curious sound to draw me out.
An hour or two passed, with my attention primarily on the book and only vaguely aware of the continuing drone of passing planes. What eventually caught me away from the novel was not the shaking roar of explosions, but an ever-increasing light which pierced even my black-out blind. The bombs had ignited buildings. I glanced at Brand, whom I’d observed to sense fire as other dogs sense their master’s returning footstep.
He was already looking at me. We must go.
I put on my uniform and we went out into an eerie London, with points of fire in all directions and planes screaming overhead, picked out by clawing searchlights.
Look.
I did not need Brand’s instruction to note the conflagration rising through the city buildings, drawing the returning bombers with its guiding light. Its flames whipped into the air and whirled, caught in a fierce wind I knew did not blow over the rest of London.
Firestorm.
I turned and ran ahead of the growing inferno. Telephone lines could go down in large fires, and the fire stations must know what was coming so they could meet it.
Fire: Demons, Dragons & Djinns Page 11
