A Ghost of Fire

by Sam Whittaker

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  “You want to teach me something?” I asked Pine. “Okay, tell me how you managed to get out of the trunk. I know you died in it and I know you should still be in there, rotting away for all of time. Come on, magician. Come on if you truly are the Amazing Blazing Pine. Share your secrets with us lowly folk.” I wanted to throw him off his determination to cave in our skulls just long enough to distract him. I figured the best way to do was to reveal details I knew about him of which I should not have been in possession. It worked at least a little.

  His advance toward us hesitated. He said, “How did you know that I…” He trailed off. “How do you know any of that, sonny?”

  “I know a lot of things about you, Jonas Pine,” I practically spit the name out. “But what do you care? What I want to know is your magical escape secret. How long have you been out?”

  “What do you care?” He sneered in return.

  “Call it morbid curiosity. I’m fascinated by escapes, especially ones that take almost a hundred years. I mean, you’re not bad but let’s face it, you’re no Houdini. Come on, what’s your secret?” I saw he was trying to see through my ruse but he was so stuck on himself he could not see past the moment, or so I thought. Little did I know he was biding time to spring his own nasty little surprise.

  He pointed the burning end of the club at the empty steamer trunk. “Note the damage to the box,” he said as if he were back on stage preparing to perform an act. “One hundred years of age and rot made it weak. Also I had a powerful need to get out if you take my meaning. Some little upstart band of self-appointed busybodies was on their way and I wanted to get out and meet the folk face to face.”

  “Well, I’m impressed,” I said and clapped my hands in mock applause. The next part of my strategy was to make him too angry to think clearly. I knew sometimes the best way to accomplish that is by way of the good old fashion insult. “I’m impressed that after ninety years in rot you didn’t run away and hide after you broke out. I mean, you’d been on the run for so many years in life, why change strategy now? Why screw with a winning formula, you little coward? Couldn’t you find your mommy’s skirts to hide your face in? Couldn’t you run and cry to daddy?

  “Oh, that’s right,” I said, “You don’t have a mommy and daddy, do you? You probably didn’t deserve them in the first place, you useless retch. It’s a good thing, too. They would be so disappointed if they could see you now.” I shook my head in dismay. Pine seethed. The orange supernatural glow of the room increased the angrier he became and it also became much warmer. Fire danced in his eyes and the skeleton beneath the ghostly apparition trembled with wrath.

  “Sonny, I was going to save you for last so you could watch your friends die one at a time. Now I changed my mind. You burn for that.” He stepped past the others and started to raise the blazing bludgeon. I had casually put my hand in my pocket. There I felt the match box. I opened it with my fingers and withdrew a solitary match which I held between my forefinger and middle finger. The other fingers held the match box to the palm of my hand. I had to pull it all out and strike the match fast. It was now or never.

  “Stuart, splash him now,” I yelled. I heard the liquid in the container swish as Vox pulled it back in preparation for his coming act. The hand in my pocket rocketed out holding the things I needed. A few more seconds and we would be on our way to putting out the fire of Jonas Pine by burning his remains to nothing. They were seconds we would not get.

  I was so caught up with my frail momentary plan to attack a distracted monster that I had not realized the draft we noticed earlier indicated not only a way out but also a way in. Another detail which did not click in my mind until it was too late was the way in which the steamer trunk had been broken. The broken planks were pushed inward, not out. Pine did not let himself out of the box, someone let him out.

  I heard the scream and at first I thought it belonged to Pine as it dawned on him what our plan was. The scream came from behind me and in the direction of my friends, however, and it was very short lived. It morphed into a brief gurgle before it stopped completely. The sight which greeted me as I whipped my head around was almost too much to process.

  Vox held the gas container aloft and gasoline sprayed and poured in many directions. Much but not all of it landed on Vox himself. The smell of the stuff became heavy in the air. Trent and Katie stepped away from the writhing man who now crumbled to his knees. I could not at first see the cause for the horror on the other’s faces until Vox dropped the container and his arms spread out like the wings of some poor butterfly as he tried in vain to grapple with something behind him.

  The disturbing detail of the scene was the jet of blood which sprayed from Vox’s neck. His throat had been sliced open and his head was being pulled backward to allow the wound full access to the environment. A sick breathing noise issued from Vox as he was pushed forward to land twitching on the ground trying to close the wound with his hands. His eyes looked up at me and pleaded for something I could not give. I was helpless to do anything but stand by. He kicked and coughed in the last throes of his life. The light went out in his eyes and Stuart Vox was gone.

  I looked up at the monster that was Jonas Pine. He stood proud over the event. He no longer held the burning table leg as a club but had planted it on the ground and used it as a cane to lean upon. A smirk adorned the corners of his mouth. “There’s a good little dog,” he said to someone in the shadows.

  I looked back to where Vox had been standing. Positioned directly behind the spot was the slumped and wild looking James Price, madman extraordinaire. His eyes were wild, not human at all. He clutched a bloody kitchen knife in a quivering hand. The hand slashed forward a few times in answer to his master’s praise, like a dog wagging his tail. He must have come in through whatever other exit there was to the place and snuck through the tunnels until he emerged behind us as we journeyed to Pine’s chamber. All he had to do after that was to follow us and spring forward at the right time.

  All of the hope in me seemed to dissipate with the loss. All of the times Vox protested and tried to turn back flashed through my mind. These instances were followed by all of the times we eased him and told him he needed to come with us. I wanted to vomit. I felt guilty and responsible. I briefly contemplated lying down and allowing Pine to finish me off quickly. Yet the one thing which could bring me out of such an insane stupor happened. Katie put her hand on my arm and spoke to me.

  “You didn’t do that,” she soothed. “It’s not your fault. It’s theirs. They did this. You snap out of this right now Steve so we can finish this job and go home.” Her words were a blazing sun to cut through the dense fog which clouded everything reasonable in me. She was right. There was blame to place but it did not belong to me. Vox made his own choices and played his own role to the best of his abilities. Pine and Price were the ones who cut into the man, not me.

  I looked at Pine, the satisfied bastard, standing there laughing at our loss, the loss he had initiated. He laughed again, hard this time, and I heard its intent. It was there to mock, to tear down, to demolish whatever was good and worthy of caring about.

  “One down,” Pine said gloating, “Three to go. Who wants it next?”

  I looked between Pine, Vox’s body and Price. I noticed something, a smell. There was the smell of smoke with which I had become well acquainted but there was also another smell. When Vox had been interrupted by the knife in Price’s hand gasoline had gone everywhere. I noticed that Price’s clothes had gotten soaked with the fuel. I also remembered the box of matches in my hand.

  “Hey Price,” I called to get his attention. Something in the wild depraved mind of the man still recognized his own name because his head turned and his eyes tracked for the source of the call. I struck the match against the rough red strip on the side of the box and the little torch blazed to life. “Catch, doggy.” I tossed the burning stick at him. It seemed to float through the air forever, a shooting star on an
eternal path to a different universe. When it contacted his shirt the gas fumes coming off him combusted and the man was on fire.

  Whatever common sense had been a part of the life of James Price before Pine corrupted him had packed its bags and vacated the premises of his mind. He could have used the old stop, drop and roll technique to get most of the fire out quickly. Instead the man shrieked at the sensation of his skin being eaten alive by the fire. He thrashed about and finally ran. He staggered around behind us and then vanished down the tunnel entrance we had come through. At the end he would find an elevator that was not interested in opening for him. He was finished.

  I looked over to Pine who quickly hid an expression of shock. The self-satisfaction was gone at any rate. It quickly was replaced with contempt and murderous desire.

  I said to him, “One down, one to go. You’re next Smokey.” The cavities of his skull where his eyes rested in life became flooded with bright fire. The skull around the area blackened a little and I saw Pine wince in pain. I saw in that pain the validity of my plan. The only problem now was implementing the plan.

  The next move came from neither of us and surprised both of us. The shovel whistled through the air as it made its way along an arc toward the ghostly figure. The head of the shovel was aimed at the head of the reanimated human remains. If allowed to make contact it would powder some of the old, dry bone for sure.

  Before the weapon could reach its mark it was met by the club in Pine’s hand. I heard the bones in that arm crack a little with the force of the impact but that did not stop Pine from regaining his advantage in very short order. Though Trent pressed the fight we all soon discovered Pine was faster and stronger in this form than we might have expected.

  Every time Trent swung the shovel Pine easily met it with a parry from his club or he simply avoided the attack altogether. At first it seemed the fight would go on this way forever. All the while Pine never made an attack of his own, he only defended.

  Trent gave another swing of the shovel. Instead of blocking the blow or dodging it this time Pine caught the shaft of the shovel in his free hand. Skeleton fingers wrapped around the wood in a vice-like grip. With a great yank the ghostly remains tore the tool out of Trent’s grasp. Trent was thrown off balance because of the unexpected move. As a counter move Pine brought the shovel back around smacking Trent across the face with the head of it. Blood spat out of the corner of his mouth as he was spun around.

  The professor recovered from the assault with miraculous speed and launched his own counter attack. He leapt forward and thrust his leg out in a kick.

  Pine let the shovel fall and seized Trent’s leg. Then he dropped the burning table leg he’d been using as a club and slashed with his free hand, raking his bony fingers across Trent’s cheek. The bone fingers cut deep on his face and Trent shrieked in pain. Pine let the man’s leg go and planted his own kick in Trent’s gut sending him breathless to the dirt floor. He lay there injured and incapacitated, curled into the fetal position on his elbows and knees. He could only moan in pain for the time being which left only Katie and me to deal with our problem. I didn’t like the way the odds were now trending against us. I began to wonder if the journey beneath Spectra had been such a good idea after all.

  Pine stepped forward and placed a foot on the downed man and kicked him over onto his back. “I warned you, didn’t I? See what you get?”

  Katie seized the moment of Pine’s gloat over Trent and launched her shovel at him in an overhand throw. The shovel wheeled through the air and Pine looked just in time to see it reach him. The weighted end of the metal crashed through several of his ribs breaking them off and they spun off to clatter on the ground behind him. Bone powder and fragments flew backward from the staggering figure.

  Pine shrieked a combination of pain, surprise and anger. He looked down at his broken rib cage in disbelief. He began to cough and gouts of smoke issued from the skeleton’s mouth. The figure doubled over with the coughing fit. The ghostly form of Pine faded away briefly and returned. When the coughing stopped he stood tall again and leveled a hateful gaze at Katie who now stood with no weapon to defend herself. I had to do something to distract Pine so Katie at least had the chance to find another shovel to use in defense.

  “Hey Skeletor,” I yelled, “I’m not finished with you yet.” I held my shovel like a baseball bat and jumped at him swinging it. Pine leaned far back and avoided the blow. The shovel whistled harmlessly through the air and Pine snapped fully upright. Before I had a chance to bring the weapon back around he threw a left hook and connected his knuckles with the back of my head. Stars danced in my field of vision and I lost my balance. I toppled over to the floor losing my shovel along the way.

  I crashed to the ground where the wind was knocked out of me. With my head dizzy and my lungs screaming for breath the attempt I made to prop myself up was ill fated. I tried again but was discouraged by pointed bone toes which were swiftly planted into my side. The little air I had managed to draw into my lungs was now evicted by the kick. I lay on my back and coughed and gasped.

  Pine towered over me, fire glowing behind his eyes. I expected him to finish me off but apparently he was done playing with me. He looked behind him then disappeared from my sight.

  I propped myself up successfully enough to see him acquire his next target: Katie. She was on the floor scrambling toward the shovel she had thrown at Pine earlier. Pine jogged over to her. As she laid a hand on the handle and began to pick it up Pine reached the tool also. His left foot came down on the shaft, pinning it to the ground.

  Katie looked up at the grimacing Pine from her place on the ground then scrambled away and managed to get herself up on her feet. I watched as she backed away slowly from him. He matched her pace following her then he stopped. This caused her to stop too. She eyed him suspiciously trying to anticipate what he was going to do.

  I coughed violently and a little blood came up and out from the kick I had received. I spat it on the ground. Pine turned a little at the waist to make sure I paid attention to his activity. A wicked grin formed on the transparent features of his face. He turned back to face Katie who stood frozen in place with terror.

  Pine spread his arms out wide. Smoke began to rise from them. Suddenly they burst into flames. His face grimaced in pain again when the fire touched the old skeleton. He said, “Let’s not fight like this. How about a hug, darlin’?” Then the burning skeletal form launched itself at Katie. He tackled her to the ground floor and she began to scream.