‘If we’re going to do it, let’s do it right.’
My shoulders are tight, ready for a fight. He’s here. He’s in it. But I want to get on. The earth’s turning away from the sun. Night is coming and I suddenly know I haven’t got time.
There’s no way we can do this.
‘Time, Frank.’
‘I know.’
He goes to the front door. Puts the end of the bar in the gap between the door and the jamb and heaves. The door cracks and slams open, inwards. It bashes against the wall and comes back.
Frank stops it slamming closed with a strong hand. Then he waves me in.
I go back and get the bottle, then head into the house. I look around, and as I was hoping, there’s a cupboard there, under the stairs.
There’s more wood here than anywhere else, apart from maybe the roof. It seems like the best place to start a fire.
Frank watches me.
I light the cigarette sticking from the top of my bomb. I worry it’ll go out without someone to puff on it, but it’s a tailor made and there’s all kinds of shit in those to make them burn. As the stranger knew well enough.
Watching the cigarette slowly work its way down toward the match, I gain a new, perhaps dangerous, respect for the stranger. He’s been with me all along. Even when I didn’t know, he was there, watching out for me. I don’t know if I would have made it this far without him.
I remember the kettle and the cold fire in my arm. I thought it was my idea, but that hand, that’s my stupid hand, and that’s where the stranger lives. Maybe it wasn’t my idea at all. Maybe it was his. His way of protecting himself, and by degrees, me.
I’ve got to trust him. I walk away, but a last doubt makes me turn to go back in. I want to watch. Make sure it works. I don’t know if it will. I’m not an anarchist, or a pyromaniac. What do I know? The stranger...why would he know?
Frank knows what I’m doing. He just puts his hand on my shoulder. It makes me jump. I’d forgotten him.
‘Come on. It’ll work. It’s burning.’
‘I’ve got to be sure.’
‘No, Sam. We’ve got to move. Keep moving.’
I stare at the glowing tip of the cigarette, offer a prayer to a god I don’t believe in, and turn away. I know he’s right. We don’t have the luxury of time. I need faith. Maybe I don’t believe in any kind of God, but if we’re all going to get out of this alive, I’ve got to have faith in the stranger.
‘Let’s go,’ I say.
It’s slow going after the first house. Frank’s limping heavily. We move on. Always moving, the sky getting darker all the time.
Onto the next house. Then the next, and the next.
We get a rhythm. Frank breaks the door, I go in. Some places have a cupboard under the stairs. Some don’t – they have a small toilet instead. It takes longer in those ones. I put the bottle somewhere with wood, instead. I see furniture, think that’s a good place, but then I remember Frank telling me nobody ever lived here. I don’t know if the furniture’s real, or the carpets, or the curtains. I do know the houses are real, though. I do the best I can. It’ll have to be enough.
We’ve done five houses when smoke starts coming from the front door of the second house.
It’s good, but it’s bad, too.
It’s good, because it’s working. My little bombs are going to work. But they’re too quick.
‘Shit.’
Frank nods in agreement as we stand outside number five, staring back at the smoke.
‘New plan. You drive. I get out. Pop the front doors. Leave the boot up. I’ll take a bottle on my way.’
There’s no time for finer points. We’re doing this on the fly now. We’re racing the fire brigade and the dark.
I don’t argue. Frank’s slower than me, but he’s got two good hands. He can do things I can’t. We’ve got 32 houses left to do, and only one crowbar.
I drive.
Frank goes as fast as he’s able.
We’re getting into a rhythm by the time we’ve done a few more houses, but Frank’s limp is noticeably worse. He says nothing when he gets into the car between houses, but I can see he’s struggling. I don’t say anything, either. We’re both cripples, and there’s a job that needs to be done. There’s nothing for it but to do it. We have no other choices.
Three houses are already smoking. I can’t see the flames, and the smoke is pretty pathetic. Maybe the fires will just burn out.
A few years back, Helen and me stayed in this country cottage for a weekend. There was an open fire, with some coal in a scuttle. It took three attempts to get a fire going. Starting fires isn’t as easy as it should be.
Our rhythm slows. Short drive. Stop. Frank gets out, takes a bottle. Goes to the door, breaks it. Back to the car, bottle, cross the street, break, burn. In. Out.
But the walk to the door takes longer, and longer.
Some houses, Frank just pushes the door. I guess if I could see, those doors would be hanging off. Even so, it’s too slow.
The sky is a bright, pure blue. The sun is somewhere out of sight, but from the shade I know there’s a little bit of it, a sliver, still above the horizon.
Twilight, coming. Coming soon, soaring in from the east, chasing the sun.
‘Frank,’ I call, as he makes his way back from number 22.
‘What?’
He gets in. We drive. Stop.
‘It’s taking too long. Twilight’s here, Frank. We’ve got to go faster.’
‘I can’t go any faster.’
I think. There’s a limit to what we can do. Physically.
It’s time to change tack. Heavy smoke pours from the first house. I can’t see the flames, but I can see a glow, a hint of light, down the street. A few more houses, and it’ll be out of sight. Maybe some won’t catch. I’m having doubts.
I look up at the sky. I can tell the sun’s gone down now. My yellow’s going to come.
Frank says, ‘Do you see it? Yellow?’
I see dark blue rising. Night, chill and unrelenting. I imagine them, burning, waking, stretching.
There are fifteen houses to go.
‘It’ll come. Soon,’ I say.
We’re so slow.
I drive, I carry. Frank breaks the doors, points out doors that look closed to me but are really open. I do some, Frank does others. We’ve both got lighters.
Still, we’re too slow.
I’m not worried about the fire engines. Not anymore. I see the flames from behind us, at last.
I’m not worried about the fires burning out.
I’m worried about the glow up ahead. I’m worried about the golden yellow stretching across the sky. My sunset, the one only I can see.
I’m worried because I know what that means. It means night is truly come.
As I watch the last of the yellow after sun fade to black, a new fire rises. The glow is in houses we’ve yet to reach. One by one, those houses come alight. Come alive with the fires of the damned.
*
53.
We park in the middle of the road. We both go, fast as we can. I’ve got seven bottles, five resting in the crook of my arm, two held in my left. The fumes from the bottles are getting up my nose. I feel dizzy and sick and my legs are weak from effort and from fear.
We walk as fast as our cripple legs will take us. We can’t run.
Up one side, down the other, back to the car. Then out.
That’s the plan.
It works. Then, there’s only seven houses to go.
I can’t believe how much we’ve done. We’re burning an estate. A whole street. I want to laugh. It’s so fucking insane.
Frank feels it, too. He’s not laughing. I’m not laughing. But we’re both wearing mad grins. I know, looking at him, that my grin’s just like his, in a mirror.
He nods at me, turns, breaks a door. Takes a bottle, takes off the top, just pours it over the door. He flicks the wheel of the lighter and holds the flame against the dripping petrol.
It doesn’t just burn. It blows. We both get singed.
The smell of burning is overpowering now.
I can hear fire engines. The scream of sirens and the cackle of fire.
We’re not going to get out. We’re going to jail, or we’re going to die. One or the other. Did I ever think otherwise?
It doesn’t matter. It’s nearly done, and I’m holding in a laugh that could end it all right here.
Frank breaks the next door, takes a bottle from me, turns to the open doorway, and I shout a warning too late as the fire light reaches my eyes.
A man lurches forward, burning brighter than any natural fire I’ve ever seen. He walks like a man in a dream, but his hands are nimble. One darts out and grabs Frank’s arm, the one holding the bottle. Flames leap up Frank’s arm, climbing up to his shoulder in seconds. The petrol in the bottle doesn’t ignite, because this fire is cold.
Frank’s mouth is moving, but I can’t hear anything. I can’t move. I can’t see the burning man anymore. All I can see is the terror in Frank’s eyes. He sees the burning man, at last. Really sees him. Sees his arm on fire.
I pull Frank away from the hungry thing in the doorway and we both stumble back. I’m quicker than Frank. I take the bottle from his hand as he falls, and splash the petrol from the broken cap, like it’s holy water. I kick the burning man back and as he reaches out to grasp the frame of the door I step in and with the lighter set him aflame, with true flame, one that burns hot.
And he screams. He screams, but there is no sound, just a vibration in the air.
Frank’s voice is the only sound I can hear now, drowning out everything else. He’s sobbing, crying in horror and agony.
The creature is writhing on the floor, done. There is no smell of charred flesh. Maybe that’s because he’s already dead. I don’t know.
I turn to Frank. He’s on his feet, waving his arm around, trying to put out the flames withering his flesh.
‘Frank!’
He sees me, just for a second.
‘So cold,’ he says.
‘Listen to me!’
‘So cold.’
He stumbles away. There’s still water in the car. I want to get it, quench the hungry fire eating away at him.
But I know it won’t work. It needs heat to put it out.
My heart goes cold as the fire as my friend stumbles around in an ever widening circle, flames leaping across his chest, down his legs, through his hair.
I can’t touch him, or I’ll burn, too.
But Frank has become a torch and the burning men are what he draws to his flame. They come from all around, pouring out from broken doors and burning houses. Some scream and drop to the floor as natural fire takes them. But there are far too many. They come on, and on, in a great mass of stumbling, clawing bodies.
I can hear the sirens over Frank’s screams. The sky is dark. The estate bright with cold fire and true fire that left to burn may cleanse this place.
But coldness holds sway here, and as I watch Frank burn, the creatures swarm over him.
I can’t watch, but I see what Frank means to do and I can’t help myself.
I shout, shout myself hoarse.
‘No! No! No!’
I shout over and over, but I don’t think Frank hears me.
He pours petrol over himself, over his head so the liquid runs down his face.
‘I feel their fire, Sam,’ he says, ‘...it has an old feel.’
I can barely hear him, over the sirens.
They’re all around him.
He pulls his own lighter from his shirt pocket, flicks it with his thumb. He’s slick and slips, but second time it catches.
This is how they took Sarah. They made her kill herself, even though she wasn’t theirs to take.
They took her because they hunger.
‘No.’ It’s all I can say. A simple, flat no. Frank wouldn’t hear it over the roar of the flames.
Frank burns. The most terrible thing is the light, the life, coming back into his eyes. The relief on his face. He doesn’t scream anymore. He looks happy. Free. He’s saying something to me, through the knot of creatures swarming over him. He says it again, and again, but I can’t tell what it is, because his lips are blackened worms and his face, his face, is melting.
I want to bear witness. To remember his last words. But I fail in this, too.
‘I’m sorry, Frank,’ I say, though my throat is raw with smoke and screaming.
They are on him, their hunger their undoing. Where they touch him, they burst into sweet, hot flame. Frank twirls among them, catching them alight. He can’t see them. His eyes are just drips of fat on his melted face, yet he moves among them as they come for him.
I run. They forget me. They’re fascinated by the fire, the heat.
The sky’s aglow.
I take the remaining bottles from the boot of the car, pull the tops as I go, run. My heart’s burning. My limbs are leaden, but I push, hard. My leg buckles again and again, but some inner strength holds me firm and lets me keep my feet.
My heart can’t take it, but I don’t die. I won’t.
I splash the fuel over doors of the last few houses, just light the doors. I know now, for all my cunning, for all the time building the bombs and setting them down, any flame would have been hot enough to burn Townshend.
The last of the houses leap into flame with this realisation. I run back to the car, trying not to look at Frank’s dead body, because I haven’t got the time. But I look, just the same.
The burning men are alight. Frank holds one in a death embrace.
He must be dead, but for some reason he’s kept his feet.
The car is still running. Every house but one is burning. I don’t know how long they will burn for. I do know that I’m not going to make it out alive. I don’t think about that, though. I don’t think about Frank, or Helen, or jail, but the end. I think about the end of all this and nothing more, as I put the car into gear and drive.
There is only one way out for me.
The tyres snarl over the pavement and there’s a moment where the front end is in the air as I bump over the kerb and onto the green. I crash into a burning woman, broken, old. Her arm twists round at an insane angle. In the rear view mirror I see her rise and follow my course, slewing across the slippery grass.
I slam the wheel round and skid to a stop, ready for the long run up. Straight for the show home. The house of blood. I forget to change gear, but taking off in second is fine. The car holds to the grass. The engine’s roar, low to start, then louder.
I drop onto the road, then through the low wall around the house. Some of my teeth break with the impact, when my mouth slams shut. I taste blood, enamel, fillings. I can see the fire engines, over at the start of Townshend. If I can see them, they must be able to see me.
I see so much in no more than a second. Then the car slams into the front door. I think I break some ribs on the steering wheel.
I get out, stumble round the back of the car. The boot shut with the impact.
I open it, hold the lighter out with a shaking hand and lower it into the fuel.
I don’t get far. There’s a massive explosion as the fumes ignite and I’m blown backwards, into the remains of the low wall. My head hits the top of the wall. Something cracks in my back. Everything goes black. The last thing I see is the house, the car, burning so bright. The last thing I hear is the burning men.
They scream as they die, but as I fade out, it doesn’t sound like hate, or terror, or pain.
It sounds like peace.
*
Part Six
-
Eventide
54.
The sky is white, the house, the garden, white. The sky, like a cloud has fallen. The earth, like a blanket.
The heat is terrible. My face is burnt. Embers fall all around me.
At first I think it’s ash, thrown into the air from the burning estate. The estate is roaring, glowing red and orange and a ki
nd of grey which I know is gold, all hinted at through the white sky. The sirens are drowned out by the fire’s rage.
The car is an inferno.
Nobody sees me. Not the firemen, not the cars parked rubbernecking on the old Fakenham Road, not the damned.
I can feel it. The damned are gone.
It all comes back to me, as I lie there.
Frank, whirling, burning with true fire, pure and hot. The screams of the burning creatures as they died around him. The explosion of my car that took out the last house. The last of their homes. With nowhere to live they have returned to the dirt.
I want to cry. I can’t. I’m going to jail. I’m not dead. I won.
Some of those things are good.
I’ve set fire to a whole estate. Frank’s body will give testimony to my crime. There are things I won’t be able to explain. Like my car, embedded in a show home.
I’m not done yet, though.
I spit blood from my mouth, and some pieces of tooth that I haven’t swallowed. My chest is cracked. I’ve twisted my knee.
I shift and feel blood-crusted crack on the back of my head. It starts to pour from my scalp again. No one will help me. There’s too much going on. The fire engines have blocked the road. I know it, because I can just make out the glow of the emergency vehicles’ lights, refracting off the white flakes falling from the sky. No one will come for me. I’ve got to make it on my own while I can. Before they find me.
It’s not ash. It’s snow.
A blizzard.
The firelight winks off each flake as it drifts down to settle on the land.
I wipe it from my lashes and push myself up, then cry out from the pain. My ribs grate and my back is torn. My head pounds as I shift it, thumping frighteningly, like I might pass out or maybe just die.
But I’m not dead yet and I can move.
I want to laugh now. To me, it seems just as natural as the urge to cry.
I’m going to jail, without any doubt, but they’re free. I won. I hold that to my heart, cherish it, because it’s a victory that not even jail can take away from me.
The snow is beautiful.
I don’t believe in signs, but this…
RAIN/Damned to Cold Fire (Two Supernatural Horror Novels): A RED LINE Horror Double: Supernatural Page 40
