by Brian Harmon
He turned the knife over, holding it much as a murderer might hold it as he plunged it into the heart of his victim, and pinned the blackened scrap of paper to the desk.
This done, he stood up and walked from the room, his face still blank, his blood still poisoned with hate, and his heart still empty.
Upon the paper was all that remained of the suicide note he had written the night before, the one that had been meant to be found with his body after he cut his veins with the very knife that now held the page in place upon the desk. Only six words remained, barely legible in the smoky darkness of the room:
BEWARE THE MAN IN THE FIRE.
Daniel collected the old twelve-gauge from the wobbling kitchen table. It had been safe in the gun cabinet when the fires began. And yet, he wondered if perhaps the fire might have left it for him even if he’d left it out. The fire was arrogant, after all. It liked to mock him.
The rest of the house was much like the room where he had left the note: Most things destroyed, but a surprising many things remaining. There was a huge hole burned in the north wall of the living room, and the two outer walls of the kitchen were gone but for a few, smoldering studs, leaving the kitchen itself a smoldering mess of broken glass and warped metal. And yet the kitchen table still stood, as did the couch in the living room, though it was singed and smoldering. The fire worked strangely. It was selective, without any reason for what it took and what it left, like a child picking playthings from a toy box.
Now armed, Daniel stepped through the open door, into the empty and smoldering night. He had lost everything in his lifetime. Now it was his turn to collect. He was filled with a hatred that had been building up inside him all his life, and now it was time to do something with that dark power.
He walked across the bare yard, among the scorched trees to the driveway. His eyes drifted to the fire-ravaged Bronco which still smoked atop its melted tires. At the sight, his hand instinctively raised to his side where a fresh and painful burn whimpered under his shirt. His teeth ground together, making a sound that was, to him, like the growl of a dog who is about to bite the master who has abused him all his life. It was not a reaction driven by pain, but by fury.
He remembered how quickly the old truck had gone up. How the flames had seemingly charged him from the cabin, racing with unnatural speed and ease across the yard as though the summer grass had been drenched with gasoline. He had barely managed to leap away from the vehicle before the flames engulfed it.
Now he raised his hand to the scar upon his cheek. Throughout his lifetime, he had acquired many of these scars. His body was riddled with burns. The man in the fire had not let him forget.
He crossed into the woods, where the fire still glowed through the once thick brush. He could hear it crackle as he waded across the black and shallow sea of ash. It was still alive out here. He could feel it watching him. He could feel it reaching for him, teasing and threatening. It wanted to taste him, as it had so many times before. Every now and then, a yellow flame would reach up through the ash at his feet as he stepped, never strong enough to bite, yet bold enough to try.
His heavy boot fell upon a single, flickering flame, and he thought he could almost hear it’s tiny, whispery screams as it was dashed into oblivion. The thought brought a morbid smile to his face. He hated the fire with all the passion that his smoldering heart would allow. He had known for years that it was possible to hurt the fire, just as the fire could hurt him, but unlike himself, the fire could never be destroyed. If it was doused, it would simply spring up somewhere else. He could never defeat the fire. But the man who lurked within the fire…he could be defeated. Daniel felt sure of that. Furthermore, if he could defeat the man in the fire, then the fire itself would also be defeated. It would not be destroyed, but it might leave him alone.
He stepped down through the ashes and stumbled over a smoldering log, which rolled beneath his weight. One of its limbs, still red with heat, was forced up from beneath the smoldering ash as he stooped forward to catch his balance and it’s smoking tip slashed the air just before his eyes.
He stumbled backward in startled shock. Suddenly, he was six again…
* * *
Daniel screamed in terror as the flames swirled past his small face. He cried out for someone—anyone—to come to him, but no one could hear him. The living room was rapidly filling up with smoke. His eyes and throat burned. He couldn’t remember where the door was.
He dropped to the floor and began to crawl away from the flames as they snatched at his bare feet. There had to be somewhere he could go. There had to be a way out of this smoke.
Again he cried out.
Where were his parents? Had they escaped the fire and left him to burn? Or were they, too, trapped in this nightmare inferno?
He had to close his eyes as a wave of heat and smoke forced itself into his face. Blindly, he crawled forward, trying desperately to outrun the heat. He heard something crash beside him, but dared not slow down, nor did he open his eyes. He could feel the doorjamb as he brushed past it and knew that he was now in the kitchen. In his panic, he did not register the heat before him until he ran into one of the burning kitchen chairs. His soft cheek fell against the melting vinyl, wrenching a terrible scream from his raw lungs. He pulled quickly away, but the greedy flames came with him. He stood up, shrieking in agony, a mask of bubbling fire devouring the tender flesh of his face. He ran across the hot floor and down the narrow hallway until he tripped over the small table his mother kept in the hall.
Through the smoke and the tears, he caught sight of a familiar door. It was the door to his parent’s bedroom. Surely it would be safe in there. It was always safe in there. The fire would not dare to invade such a sanctuary.
Certain that the flames would try to stop him, he leapt to his feet and ran as fast as his legs could carry him to that door. He wrapped his fingers around the doorknob and shoved the door open before his hands could register the pain from the glowing-hot knob. He cried out in agony as he fell to the floor again, clutching his blistered hand.
“Mommy!” he screamed, but as he raised his head, he found that no one could answer his cry. This room was also engulfed in flame. He saw his mother’s cedar chest as the blaze ripped up its sides, and his father’s gun cabinet, which seemed to breathe it in soft, whimpering breaths.
In the center of the room, his parent’s bed stood beneath a furious tower of flames. The stomach-wrenching scent of burning flesh enveloped him.
He remained motionless as he watched it burn, unaware that the flames had crept up around him. He no longer felt the pain. In that moment of shock, he felt nothing at all. It was heartbreaking and horrifying, but it was almost hypnotizing. It was a heartless beast, the fire, and it had his parents, but somehow it fascinated him.
It was his first real glimpse at how awesome the fire could be, how terrible it could be. Before this night, he never could have believed how horrifying this simple element of nature really was.
At last, his eyes drifted to the corner, where a man stood watching him from the flames. His face and hands were badly burned and his clothes appeared to be melted to his body. It was an indescribable sight, an unspeakably terrible vision, yet it filled Daniel with nothing more than dull and emotionless interest. He thought for a moment that he was looking at a dead man, but as he watched, the man in the fire gave him a wide and toothless grin.
“Hello, Danny,” the man said in an awful, strangled voice.
Daniel said nothing. He only continued to stare at the man as the fire caught the legs of his pajamas and wrapped around his legs. He could not feel the pain. He was far too fascinated by the man in the fire.
“No,” the man said, as though reading his thoughts. “This isn’t hell. But it’s close.”
From somewhere in the other room, a loud crash exploded over the roar of the fire and somewhere, so very far away, he heard voices.
“My god!” cried one of those voices, and he was suddenly scooped up
off the floor.
He stared up into the fireman’s mask, barely seeing him.
“It’s gonna be all right, Kid,” the fireman promised as he pushed back through the thickening flames and rushed him out of the burning house.
* * *
Pain tore through Daniel’s hand and pulled him from his nightmarish flashback. He had been clutching the side of a burning tree, and his hand had blistered. The pain was terrible, but it was something which no longer troubled him. He had learned to forget about pain. He hurt too much on the inside to care about the pointless pain he felt with his mere skin. Blisters went away, after all.
He turned and faced the north, where he could still see the glow of the fire. He was not far from it. It was just over the hill. And it would go no farther. The man in the fire would wait for him.
Flames now danced all around him, lighting up the smoky forest where he walked, springing up from the ground before him and dying away behind him. Anger boiled within his guts. He knew that they were mocking him. He knew that they were teasing him. He hated them, those little, golden, flickering things. And yet there was never more than one. Every flame was just a finger or a hand or an arm that was all a part of the one beast that was the fire. He had discovered what the fire really was. The fire was not something physical. The fire was beneath him, within the earth, within everything. The fire was a living, breathing, feeding thing. It was also a cruel thing and a playful thing. Right now it was playing with him.
Let it, Daniel thought. Let it come. Let it tease. Let it anger me. His dark eyes glared down at the laughing flames and he smiled at them, his scarred face widening in a grim, lunatic grin. The angrier it makes me, the more I’ll enjoy killing you, you son of a bitch. He stomped down upon another flame, his ears filling with that whispery screaming that was so very soft, so very tiny. Only one who knew the fire as well as he did could ever learn to hear those screams. He was glad he could hear them. Those sounds made him feel good.
As the hungry blaze grew in the distant shadows, and the flames tickled his ankles all around him, his mind drifted back to his own, painful past. He could remember perfectly each time that the man in the fire had taken everything that he loved away, how he tore it all to pieces before his very eyes, like a selfish child might break another’s toy, just because he could not have it for himself.
Every detail was so perfectly clear. He only had to allow himself to remember and he could smell the strangling smoke and feel the stinging fire. His heart raced and his teeth were clenched against pain and fear.
* * *
“Not again,” he breathed. “God, please not again!” He raised his foot and kicked open the door. He had to close his eyes against the heat which rushed out at him. “Sherry!” he screamed through coughing gasps.
Ignoring the intense heat which ravaged his skin, he stormed through the flames and into the room. “Sherry!” he screamed again. His eyes washed over the bed as the ever-present memory of his last look at his parents filled his mind.
Squinting his watering eyes, he peered though the smoke and at last saw the shadow that was curled up in the corner. “Sherry!” he cried again and ran to her. “Sher—” His last breath faded away like smoke in the breeze and he stopped. There was nothing left. “No…” he whimpered as he looked upon his young wife. Her face and hands were badly burnt. Her fair and sensitive skin was now black and cracked like the flesh of a hog cooked over an open flame. Like his parents so long before, she was dead. In her arms, she still cradled his tiny daughter.
“No…” he managed again. His emotions were quickly growing, choking out the angry fire and smothering smoke around him.
“Pity,” came a cracked voice from behind him. It was a voice he had often heard in his dreams. It was the voice of the man who had found him so many years before and had been stalking him ever since.
He blinked away the tears as his sorrow was almost instantly quashed by a wicked hatred. Slowly, he turned to face the man in the fire.
There was no question this time as he looked into his hunter’s boiling eyes. He knew exactly what was before him.
“Such a beautiful family.” His cracked and blistered lips curled into an evil grin. “So sweet…so innocent.”
Daniel lunged at the heartless creature, wrapping his hands around his throat. Fire shot from between his fingers and forced him back again. He could feel his skin blistering from its contact with the monster.
“You can’t kill me, Danny,” he explained. He was still smiling his evil smile. He was still mocking him.
“Watch me.” Daniel grabbed a ceramic pot from the bookshelf and hurled it. It struck the man’s face and exploded into a ball of fire. Blood boiled from the new wounds and burned down his disfigured face. Never did the man in the fire lose his mocking grin.
“Now look what you’ve done, Danny. You’ve broken Sherry’s favorite decoration.”
Daniel’s expression faltered for a moment, then flared. “Why me?” he screamed at last.
“You?” asked the man in the fire. “Why you? Just what do you think I feel like?” He stared at the man who stood trembling before him. His grin had faded away. What was left was hollow and eerie to look upon. “I envy you, Danny. You’ve had everything that I could ever have wanted. But by now you should know that what I can’t have…neither can you.”
“What are you?” Daniel demanded.
“Me?” the man in the fire asked shyly. “I’m just a poor, soulless man, cursed to spend the rest of eternity walking on charred earth.”
“You won’t be here for an eternity. I’ll make sure of that.”
“Is that a challenge, Danny?”
Daniel glared at the man for several heartbeats, and then turned to look at the bodies that had once been his wife and daughter. He could feel the tears swelling up again. Sherry had been the only woman who had ever loved him. She did not even care about the scars that ravaged his body. Her heart had often been the only thing that made his life worth living. “Sherry…” he began. He could no longer feel the heat or taste the smoke, though it was slowly strangling him.
“It’s a date, then,” said the man in the fire.
Daniel looked up, ready to strike at his foe, but there was no longer anyone there. “I’ll kill you,” he promised as he fell to his knees beside his wife. He reached out and touched his daughter’s cheek one last time. “I swear I’ll kill you.”
He could feel the intense heat as the flames gnawed his already tortured flesh.
Outside, sirens screamed as the fire trucks raced into the driveway.
* * *
Now the fire was growing thicker. Its yellow hands clutched at him from every tree and bush and laughed at him for as far as he could see in the thickness of the forest. He could taste the bitter smoke, but did not choke. He had spent too many horrible hours in the fire to be bothered by such weak annoyances.
He tried hard to fight back the memory of the night before, when he and the man in the fire turned the forest around the old cabin into a hellish, burning battlefield, but the images would not stay buried. It had not merely been an incident, like with his parents and with his wife and daughter. It was a war. He could still hear the explosion as the Bronco’s gas tank blew, showering him with white-hot metal and glass. He could still see the ball of fire that belched into the darkness as the tool shed collapsed. He could still smell the thick odor of the black smoke that had rolled from the melted shingles as they poured and dripped from the roof of the cabin like the runoff of a heavy downpour. For several hours, he had endured a physical hell. Even the water that gushed from the severed pipes in the ceiling of the cabin had been scalding hot.
He had come to the cabin to find an end to his horrible life, and there, the man in the fire found him once again. Twice the monster had taken his family, but those were not the only times Daniel had been victimized. A factory and a sawmill where he worked had both gone up, as did his home on several other occasions. There were the apartments
in Georgia and Ohio, the houses in Arkansas, California, and Nebraska, even a hotel in Illinois… The man in the fire had followed him all across the country. Those who knew him, thought him to be insane, a pyromaniac. And how could he expect them to think anything else? Wherever he went, the fire would follow him.
Even he could not be certain that the man in the fire was real, or if he was merely another piece of himself, another part of his own brain, the evil twin. Perhaps it was the very personification of the horror he perceived the night he witnessed his parents burning to death in their own bed. The one thing he knew for certain was that on this night, one of them would die. The nightmare would end one way or another.
At last, as he stepped through the groping flames and into a circle of dancing fire at the edge of a small clearing in the forest, he stopped. He looked out at the green grass just beyond the blaze, then turned and faced the blackness behind him.
“I know you’re here,” he said as he clutched the gun in one trembling hand. “Come on out.” He looked back over his shoulder knowingly. “It’s payback time.”
“Is it?” asked the man in the fire as Daniel turned to face him. He had appeared behind him, just as he had expected, just as he had planned.
“You killed my parents…you killed my wife…” he took a step forward and pumped the gun, “…you killed my little girl.”
“Oh, but I’ve killed more than just them,” said the grotesque beast with his same evil grin.
“Yeah, well it’s my turn.”
“What are you going to do with that? Shoot me?” His gruesome grin never left his hideous face. “You can’t kill me. Bullets will never hurt me.”
“No,” agreed Danny, “but this thing does pack a hell of a kick.” He raised the gun and aimed it at the monster’s chest. Now it was his turn to grin. He watched with satisfied pleasure as the killer of his family stared back at him with eyes full of hell. His expression shrank to a curious confusion, then gave way to pure and unobstructed fear as he realized what was about to happen.
