A Ghost of Fire

by Sam Whittaker

  Chapter Thirty

  Breath or no breath, strength or no strength I would not allow Pine to continue his assault on Katie. With everything I had I pushed myself up on my hands and knees, ignoring the needles of pain in my side from where he had kicked me. The sound of Katie’s screams of pain propelled me to my feet. I picked up the shovel I had dropped after Pine had punched me in the back of my head.

  I staggered my way over to where Pine lay on top of Katie, pinning her to the ground. I took a few steadying breaths. If I was to be any good my muscles would need the oxygen to do their work. Meanwhile Pine continued his attack. His flaming arms slapped and scratched at Katie who covered her head and face with her arms as she tried to wriggle away from the menace.

  As I regained my balance and strength I saw the deep scratches and burns form on Katie’s arms. The sight surged adrenaline through out my body and my arms itched to swing the shovel and knock his diseased head off. An uncanny calm took center stage in my mind and the only things in the world were me, the shovel and the busy skeletal beast with its back foolishly turned to me.

  Pine drew back an arm for a hard slash at the girl. I whistled loud and he paused. I didn’t give him enough time to turn to see what I was up to, I just let it fly. The course took the shovel to dead center of Pine’s form. He was thrown to the side but not completely off Katie. More ribs shattered off from his chest and a good chunk was pulverized from three of his vertebrae.

  I reached down and tried to pull Katie away from him but she was still struggling against his attack. Pine went into another bad coughing fit. Smoke plumed out of his nasal cavity, mouth and eyes. When she realized she was not as pinned as she had been Katie moved an arm partially away from one of her eyes to survey the chain of events.

  I continued to pull at her and she began to work with me. Pine continued to hack and spew smoke. He made a few vain attempts to grab her from me but the spasms which racked him were too much for him to accomplish anything productive. As before the ghostly layer of Pine’s apparition over the skeleton disappeared, longer this time and two more of his ribs fell off by themselves.

  Trent appeared beside me and took one of Katie’s arms. At last she broke free and awkwardly got to her feet. Her injuries were not life threatening but neither were they minor. I maneuvered her behind me. I didn’t want Pine getting to her and I didn’t want her in the way incase an opportunity to get at Pine presented itself.

  Pine’s coughing trouble settled a bit and he looked up at the three of us. He locked gazes with me and all semblance of order in his attack vanished. With shocking speed he jumped at me arms outstretched, fingers clawing. I sensed when he reached me he would go for my eyes. I closed my eyes and turned my head away.

  The anticipation of Pine’s collision tensed every muscle in my body. There was no time to move out of the way. I could only brace for the impact. I waited for the hit but it never came. I opened an eye and peeked in the direction the attack was supposed to have come from. When I saw what had happened I couldn’t help but stare fully at the scene.

  The ghostly, skeletal form writhed and struggled suspended in mid air a few feet away from me. He swiped at me with his hands but I was out of his reach. I looked around but by the expressions on the faces of Katie and Trent they were just as confounded about what had happened as I was. I looked back over at Pine.

  “Let me go, sonny, or I’ll tear your friends apart and feed them to you piece by piece until you explode,” Pine cried. I was too astonished by the implication of the threat to care about its pledge. He thought I had been responsible for holding him. The more surprising thing was when I realized he was right. There was no one in the room apart from me who demonstrated any kind of psychic phenomena.

  As Pine persisted in his attempt to break free I closed my eyes, found the calm center of myself and explored the possibility of what I might do next. I opened my eyes and stared at him. He stopped the struggle and looked back. The wrath in his face changed into fearful comprehension at what would come next. I sent a wave of thought at him and he flew backward. He slammed into the far wall and I heard the bones begin to crack. I made sure to suspend him there a few feet above the floor in case I wanted to drop him. A furious groan escaped him and his eyes stabbed pure murder in my direction. The trouble was I couldn’t hold him for long. My mental capacity began to fatigue.

  He broke free of the mental bonds and slid down the wall to land on his feet. He swayed there until he regained his balance. I had to hunch over and rest my hands on my knees. I was out of breath and now vulnerable to whatever he might devise.

  Trent picked up a shovel and began to move between us. Pine flicked his eyes at Trent and the wooden shaft in Trent’s hand caught fire and he had to drop it.

  “Stay out of this,” I cautioned Trent. “It’s between him and me now,” I said. He shifted his attention between Pine and me a few times. He weighed his options and reluctantly stepped back.

  Pine took a few steps toward me but faltered. He tried again to move the leg that failed him but it still would not come. He looked down to see what the problem was and got quite a surprise.

  I also looked to see what had happened and discovered a set of hands which grasped at Pine’s ankle. They were the hands of a young boy with dark skin. They extended from the wall. The boy pulled himself fully onto Pine’s leg, hugging it to his chest. It was the boy with the ruined face Pine had killed as he hounded Susan through those same tunnels one hundred years previous. I then remembered the boy had been killed in that very chamber. Now he helped to return the favor.

  Pine furiously tried to shake the boy off but he would not be moved from his purpose.

  “Rueben, you’ll get punishment for this. It will be easier for you later if you let me go now,” Pine warned.

  “There ain’t going to be no ‘later,’ Jonas. You’re all finished up tonight,” the boy said defiantly. Then the boy turned his attention to me and said, “Now mister, separate him. Finish him off. I can’t hold him like this forever.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I pleaded. “What am I supposed to do?”

  Pine began to smack at the boy who cried out in pain.

  “Separate him,” he cried. “Pull the two halves apart and destroy him. Do it now!” He continued to hold Pine under the barrage of the beating.

  I studied the monstrous being that was Jonas Pine and then I understood. There were two parts: the material and the immaterial. I focused my thought on the physical part, the bone structure beneath the terrible ghostly visage which was held by the boy. Pine began to break free of the boy’s grip, to shake him off. The boy, Rueben, screamed and then more hands appeared from the wall and grasped part of Pine, pulling him back against the wall.

  They were mostly sets of children’s hands but there was also an adult pair which grabbed Pine by the neck and pulled him back. Faces and bodies appeared from the wall. They belonged to the other children who had died in the orphanage fire. The adult was the woman I had seen dead on the floor of the foyer of the orphanage in one of my earliest visions.

  Pine railed against their grip but it was no use. Smoke poured out of his mouth and eyes and nose as he screamed and raged. He tried to move away from the wall but was quickly slammed back. There were too many of them and they were determined to stop him.

  I concentrated on the bones in one of his hands and mentally tried to pull. Nothing seemed to happen so I increased my focus. Nothing.

  “It’s not working,” I called to the boy. “What am I doing wrong?”

  “You need to be calm,” he said. “You’re trying too hard.”

  Pine had pulled one of his arms free and slapped at the hands holding him to the wall. He was beginning to have some success in getting away which made my heart begin to race. Yet I had to be calm to do this right. I closed my eyes and took a few slow breaths.

  When I opened my eyes again I focused on Pine’s free hand. I used my mind to pull again and this time all of the fin
ger bones flew out of his hand and clattered to the dirt floor. He stopped his struggle to look at his hand. Then he looked at me incredulous. I pulled again and all the bones in his hand and forearm likewise came out and joined their brothers on the floor.

  “No!” he yelled. “You can’t.” Oh but I could. I did. His protests were nothing. There would be no mercy for one so merciless in life and after.

  He pulled against his captors and freed his other arm. He leaned forward and reached toward me pulling away from the wall as hard as he could. It was becoming too much for the little hands. I saw tired fingers begin to slip from him. I reached out with my mental strength and focused on his newly freed arm.

  All of the bones broke free from the arm and tumbled out onto the pile forming a few feet in front of him. They were soon followed by the last bone in his other arm.

  “Start picking up the bones,” I said to Katie and Trent. “Put them back in the trunk.” They followed the order and ran to the bone pile and began collecting the dusty old things.

  “Stop!” Pine screamed, “stay away from those. STOP!” They ignored him and carried about the task, hurriedly picking up the bones, included the fragments which had been broken off earlier in the confrontation.

  I continued to pull bones out of him. After his arms were empty I started in on his legs. The more I did it the easier it became. Pine was exerting so much energy to break free from the other ghosts he lost his hold on his own bones. The legs were empty in short order so I moved north. Next came his pelvic bone. It clattered heavily on top of the few other bones left on the floor. Katie grabbed it and threw it into the trunk.

  The broken ribcage, spinal column and shoulder blades were next. The last was the skull. A little more effort was required. Pine apparently had exerted a fair amount of energy to keep his hold on it but it was not enough. The jawbone came away and was quickly followed by the rest of the head. I ran forward and grabbed the skull and tossed it into the trunk then helped with the rest.

  I located the gasoline canister Stuart Vox had dropped after Price had murdered him, grabbed it and ran over to the steamer trunk. There was thankfully about a quarter of the contents left. I emptied the gasoline all over the bones inside the trunk. I scanned the room to be sure there were no more bone fragments lying about. When my search was satisfied I found the box of matches I had dropped somewhere in the course of the confrontation.

  “Do you know how they say you should fight fire, Pine?” I asked the struggling ghost. Just then he broke free from the grasp of the children behind him. He lunged forward as I struck two matches at once against the side of the box. I dropped them into the steamer trunk where they ignited the gasoline fumes and everything in the trunk. “You do it with fire,” I completed the old proverb.

  Pine stopped dead in his tracks. He was completely motionless at first. I thought for a split second I had made a terrible mistake. Then the apparition started to tremble. He also convulsed uncontrollably and screamed. But it was not a normal scream. It was the most terrible noise I had ever heard in my entire life and it seemed to come from everywhere. He arched his back and bright orange light shot out of his mouth. Lines of light seemed to split him at every joint, every place where a bone ended and a new one began.

  The same light shot up and out of the trunk where his remains were blazing and the box itself was consumed by the fire.

  The light coming from the multiple points on Pine’s form soon consumed his entire figure. We could see only a black silhouette inside the light which rapidly shrunk. All hell had broken loose inside of him and now it consumed him.

  He let out one last scream of agony and then the light dissipated into a small pinpoint and was gone. A puff of smoke appeared and arose from that point and it was soon gone, a mere ghost of fire here one moment and then gone the next. As it should be, I thought.

  The orange supernatural light faded away slowly and then was gone. It was back to the pitch black of an underground tunnel.

  I shone my flashlight around the room. It was then I noticed we were completely alone.

  “They’re gone,” I observed.

  “What? Who’s gone?” Trent asked.

  “The other ghosts,” I said, “the ones who helped me with Pine.”

  Trent and Katie, who had their flashlights back in their possession, exchanged questioning glances then looked back at me.

  “What other ghosts?” Katie asked. “We only saw Pine.”

  “There were little kids,” I urged, “probably ones lost in the orphanage fire. You really didn’t see them? They’re the ones who pinned him to the wall in the end while I pulled him apart.”

  Trent said, “I didn’t see anyone else. I thought that was all you.” He seemed to consider it a moment then said, “But I did wonder who you were talking to at the end when you were having trouble getting the bones to come apart.”

  “You didn’t see them either?” I asked Katie. She shook her head. I wondered what perplexing law of the universe could possibly be at work in all this then dismissed the whole phenomena.

  The fire in the trunk continued to burn. I walked up to it and peered inside. The bones were blackened and shriveled. Cinders peeled off of them from time to time and floated up past my face to burn orange and go out leaving only the dead black ash to float away. Trent and Katie came and stood on either side of me. We watched the flame lick the wood of the trunk. It was no moment to talk, only to see. Katie leaned against my shoulder and I put my arm around her. Then I discovered there was one appropriate thing to say, something which needed to be said.

  “It’s over.”