by Eli Easton
We were running then, to the back of the big room, a room without another door, and it was in that moment I saw, just like that, my life—our lives—were at an end.
The fire had become an inferno in seconds. So fast!
We were going to die.
Where are you now, oh vodou spirits? I cried inwardly. Not real. You’re no more real than anything my mother believed in!
No more real than my mother’s God. Fake. Made up to help people sleep at night. For people who were afraid of what happens when we die.
And now I was going to find out, wasn’t I?
The heat rose higher, and I could not believe how fast it was all happening. It was like the store was made of paper and not cinder blocks and tile and linoleum and steel.
“Taylor!”
I turned to find Myles in front of me. His eyes were wide and desperate, and he looked so dark. In all this bright orange light, why was he so dark?
But it was soot, wasn’t it? The room was filling with smoke, and we were coughing, and he pulled at me. “The ground! We’ve got to get down on the floor! Under the smoke.”
I nodded. Under the smoke. But would it really make any difference? Give us ten seconds more of life? I could feel the raging heat. I looked down, saw the hair on my arms singeing, and felt my eyes—felt them boiling in my head.
We were going to die. We were dying! This was how it felt to die!
“Where are you now!” I screamed, the anger filling my heart. “Where the fuck are you now, Manjè Kè? Where are you now, oh, Bawon Manjè Kè?”
“Get down!” Myles shouted over the raging sound of the fire and yanked at my arm, pulled at me, pulled and pulled, but….
My foot.
It wouldn’t move.
It was stuck. Stuck as if nailed to the floor.
Did my shoe melt to the floor?
But…. But no. I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel my foot, and as I stood there—the flames catching at my clothes, my hair—my whole leg was frozen.
There was something….
…traveling….
…up my leg!
It was cool and it was hot and it was cool again.
I shook. Felt this… thing… this wave… this force traveling up my thigh, my torso, spread down my other leg. My arms burst into flames… but… they… weren’t… burning! It was cool fire. Heat and ice and then….
I WOKE up.
I was lying back and it was night and there was a man standing over me.
Myles was there too. He was looking down at me with an expression I could not read. His eyes were wide and wet and red. I saw his arm was bandaged and then I remembered.
I’d caught on fire!
But…. But I was alive. How? I looked around. I realized I was lying on a gurney. The man I didn’t know was an EMT. They were getting ready to put me in the back of an ambulance. A rush of panic went through me. I didn’t want to go in there. I looked back and saw the fire trucks, saw the smoking, smoldering wreck that was all that was left of Lucky Charms.
“You are one lucky fucker,” I heard and turned my head again and saw Brookhart. She was shaking her head, a complete sense of wonder on her face. “One lucky motherfucker.”
“W-what happened?” I asked. I couldn’t remember. I was on fire and then I was here. I looked down at myself—knowing I would see a mummy’s body, a mass of bandages.
But no. Just a blanket. And my bare chest. Bare chest?
I turned once more to Myles. “What happened?”
“Manjè Kè,” he whispered.
“What?” But before I could say any more, before he could answer, my eyes…. They were growing so heavy—I was falling. “What?”
“Manjè Kè,” Myles said again. And then I knew no more.
SHE WAS beautiful.
She had skin like obsidian, and her eyes were large and gold, like polished tiger’s eye, her head wrapped in red fabric—like a turban of some kind. She reached down and touched my cheek, smiled, and I felt myself fill with warm and golden light.
The drugs, I thought. It’s the drugs….
Rest, my child, she said in a voice like music, like gentle falling rain. But her lips didn’t move. It was in my head.
The drugs.
Rest, my Taylor, my son. I will watch over you. You are mine now. I will take care of you. All is well.
I woke up in St. Luke’s hospital.
I didn’t know that right away, of course. A hospital bed is a hospital bed.
A dream. All a dream. What had happened?
Gay was there. She was dozing in a big chair by my bed, and I saw there were wires and tubes attached to me, but no bandages. I looked and looked, but no burns.
How could that be? How long had I been out? Had I been in a coma? How many weeks? Months? Could it be months?
But no. The hair on my arm was still gone. Singed to the skin, but my skin—it was okay. Not even pink.
Was it all a dream?
“Gay?” I asked, wondering if I could even talk, and yet I did. Full and strong.
She jumped, her large lime-green hat with its wide black band nearly falling off her head. She stood and was at my side instantly. “Taylor. Thank Jesus.”
“Gay?”
“I can’t believe it. It… it’s a miracle.”
I looked up into her big brown eyes, saw the wonder there. And the love. Saw her love of me and immense, immense relief.
“Gay? What happened?”
She shook her head, mumbled something under her breath, and reached out and touched my cheek. “A miracle.”
“Miracle?” I closed my eyes. Miracle?
When I opened them, Gay was gone, but Myles was there. He had pulled a chair up to the bed, and his head was resting on my pillow, and he was snoring softly, and I saw that one of his arms had a bandage from his right hand all the way to his elbow… but wait…. That was it? Nothing else?
How could that be?
“Myles?” I said quietly, remembering the way Gay had jumped, how I had startled her out of her sleep.
He shifted, and I said his name again, and then he was sitting upright, and there it was.
That look.
Just like the one on Gay’s face.
Wonder.
“What? What is it?” I asked.
“Oh, Taylor…,” he whispered. “You still don’t know?”
“Know what?”
OVER THAT day and the next, the story came out.
First from Myles.
Then the articles in the paper. The Chronicle, of course. Eye-witness accounts that the paper gave no credence to because it all sounded crazy.
From what I heard, from Myles, from the stories, from the whispers, this is what happened….
One minute, I was me—who else could I be? I remembered. Remembered the roaring of the fire and the smoke filling my lungs, and Myles trying to pull me to the floor so that I could… what? Survive five more minutes and then burn alive? And then the hair on my arms had curled up and burned away, and I felt, I felt, my eyes heating up, boiling….
I was dying.
But then I wasn’t.
I went away—to someplace cool and dark, and yet, so peaceful. I felt arms wrap ’round me and great golden eyes smiling down at me.
I went to sleep. Went into the rocking arms of a woman with skin like obsidian and eyes like polished tiger’s eye.
And my body?
WHY, THE Lwa took it.
It is impossible. I can hardly believe it. But what else could have happened? Could there be anything less crazy than what those people saw?
A full twenty people told the story.
One minute, I was burning. My clothes, my skin, my hair, all ablaze. I was on fire.
And then, I wasn’t.
“Like the burning bush,” one of the Reverend Doctor’s followers said. “He was on fire, but he did not burn!”
I rose up, the accounts read, naked and….
“He was glorious!” s
aid another follower.
“Glorious,” Myles agreed.
…on fire, and yet I did not burn.
“He had a heart painted on his face,” said someone else.
“A heart?” I asked Myles.
“A heart,” he said. “On your face. A big red heart. And there were crows. First one and then another….”
“Hundreds,” said one witness.
“Thousands,” said another.
“He was on fire!”
“And then the fire, it turned purple.”
“Blue,” said someone else, but most agree it was purple.
“Purple,” Myles said.
“I’ll say this only one time,” Daphne Brookhart told me, standing by the window of my hospital room and looking out at a clear blue sky. There was only one cloud—like a stretched-out cotton ball. A plane contrail crossed the window’s field of view from one side to the other. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. I had never seen Brookhart out of uniform. “I’ll say this once and never again.”
“Say what?”
“You came out of that store, and you was—were—on fire. You. Were. On. Fire. Your hair was on fire and your eyes—fuck me, Taylor—they were gone! But you… you weren’t on fire!”
“Like the burning bush,” one of the Reverend Doctor’s followers said. “He was on fire, but he did not burn!”
“It was like you were wearing it!” She wasn’t looking at me. I could only see part of her face, not in profile, but not turned away either. “You was—were—naked as the day you were born, my friend, and the only thing you were wearing was fire. Like it was some big old Bob Mackie costume.”
“Bob Mackie?” I said and then laughed. I didn’t like the sound of my laugh. It sounded crazy.
She shot a glance over her shoulder. “You think I don’t fucking know who Cher is?” she snapped. “I may not be a gay boy, but I do like women, remember.”
It was the first time she’d said it that way.
Brookhart—Daphne—looked back out the window.
“Then the fire turned blue, and then it turned purple…. And you opened your mouth and your teeth… they was—were—they were like shark’s teeth. They were huge and they were razor sharp. You laughed.” She shuddered. “Fuck me, Taylor, I don’t ever want to hear a laugh like that again.”
“Daph?”
She didn’t seem to notice the name I had used but went on. She had just pulled up, she told me. She and Townsend, and that was when I came out of the remains of Lucky Charms.
“One second the building was on fire, and the next… it was following you, Taylor! It was… wrapping around you, and it was so bright I couldn’t stand to look at you! I knew you was dead. And that’s when I saw you was wearing it. And it turned purple. You laughed!”
She shuddered again.
“That Reverend was there. The fucker was standing there with his mouth hanging open and a Molotov cocktail burning in his hand. I remember his coat catching on fire, and I knew I should do something, but I… I was frozen. I couldn’t move!
“You were laughing, and it was like… I don’t know. Like crashing cymbals and breaking glass and this… this huge… roar! You… you started… floating up off the ground!”
I lay there in that bed, listening to all of this. She might as well have been telling me the story of a war, or a school shooting, or who knows what. She was talking crazy. It was crazy. It was impossible.
But as she spoke, these images flashed through my mind, and it was as if I could see it.
She started talking again. “And then, Taylor…. You said, ‘Reverend Doctor Royle Van Young! You liar. You hypocrite. You killer. You murderer. You took out their hearts and you wasted them. You cast them aside. You didn’t even eat them!’ And then…. Taylor… you flew back! Your body hit the ground. But that… that thing. The thing with the teeth? It was still there. It was like it threw you off like an old coat. It rose higher off the ground… oh, fuck me!”
Brookhart spun around, her eyes wide and crazy, and there were tears running down her face. “It laughed. It laughed! And then it had the pastor, the reverend—whatever the fuck he is—was—and they—that thing…. God…. It… It dug its face right into that man’s chest… and then it pulled back and there was blood. I’ve never seen so much blood! Never.”
Brookhart staggered to a chair and fell into it. She dropped her face into her palms, and I lay there forever, trying to believe and believing at that same time, and waiting forever for her to finish.
Brookhart cried. She cried in huge, gulping breaths, and when she finally calmed down… she finished her story without looking up. She said: “There was his heart. It was in the thing’s mouth. It was still beating…and then it was gone. Just… gone.
“Vanished.”
“And Van Young…. He fell forward like an old doll. And he was dead.”
THEY KEPT me at the hospital for three days. They would have kept me longer. They were trying to understand, but hey. Insurance. The insurance people wanted me gone.
The hospital administration wanted me gone.
Because everything that happened was impossible, of course.
GAY KEPT me company. I actually saw her in sweats one day. Sweats! I didn’t know she owned sweats. Of course they were bright pink and had rhinestones all over them. But sweats!
She would come to my place in the evenings and make martinis, and sometimes I would just take the Tanqueray bottle and upend it in my mouth.
She let me.
Myles would call, but I didn’t answer the phone. I didn’t return his calls. I didn’t answer the buzzer when someone called me from the lobby, and I didn’t answer the door when someone knocked.
Not for two weeks.
But then she came calling.
SHE CAME in my dreams, of course.
Black skin like polished obsidian.
Great, glowing eyes.
“He is yours and you are his,” she would tell me.
Night after night.
“I don’t want this!” I told her. “I don’t want it!”
“Too late,” she whispered. “You are mine.”
Finally, I gave up.
I called him.
“Myles,” I said when he answered the phone.
“Taylor. Oh my God!”
“I want to try that coffee. The kind from New Orleans?”
“From Café Du Monde?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s the best,” he said. “With chicory. And lots of sugar and lots of real cream….”
“And not that powered nondairy stuff either.”
“No,” he replied quietly. “Thick and rich. I can be there in an hour.”
“Okay.”
I hung up the phone and waited.
Rest, my child, she said in a voice like music, like gentle falling rain. Rest, my Taylor, my son. I will watch over you. You are mine now. I will take care of you. All is well.
He is yours and you are his.
I sat and I waited.
I waited for my life to begin.
B.G. THOMAS lives in Kansas City with his husband of more than a decade and their fabulous little dog. He is lucky enough to have a lovely daughter as well as many extraordinary friends. He has a great passion for life.
B.G. loves romance, comedies, fantasy, science fiction and even horror—as far as he is concerned, as long as the stories are character driven and entertaining, it doesn't matter the genre. He has gone to literature conventions his entire adult life where he's been lucky enough to meet many of his favorite writers. He has made up stories since he was child; it is where he finds his joy.
In the nineties, he wrote for gay magazines but stopped because the editors wanted all sex without plot. "The sex is never as important as the characters," he says. "Who cares what they are doing if we don't care about them?" Excited about the growing male/male romance market, he began writing again. Gay men are what he knows best, after all—since he gre
w out of being a "practicing" homosexual long ago. He submitted a story and was thrilled when it was accepted in four days.
"Leap, and the net will appear" is his personal philosophy and his message to all. "It is never too late," he states. "Pursue your dreams. They will come true!"
Visit his website and blog at http://bthomaswriter.wordpress.com/ or contact him directly at [email protected].
By B.G. THOMAS
All Alone in a Sea of Romance
All Snug
Anything Could Happen
Bianca’s Plan
Bones (with Eli Easton, Jamie Fessenden, and Kim Fielding)
The Boy Who Came In From the Cold
Christmas Cole
Christmas Wish
Desert Crossing
Grumble Monkey and the Department Store Elf
Hound Dog and Bean
How Could Love Be Wrong?
It Had to Be You
Just Guys
Men of Steel (Dreamspinner Anthology)
Riding Double (Dreamspinner Anthology)
A Secret Valentine
Soul of the Mummy
Two Tickets to Paradise (Dreamspinner Anthology)
SEASONS OF LOVE
Spring Affair
Summer Lover
Published by DREAMSPINNER PRESS
http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com
Gothika #1
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