The Midnight Ground

by Eric Dontigney

  I leaned in closer. “What?”

  “Abby,” he gasped.

  I looked back at the house in horror. Someone was still in there.

  “Where?” I demanded.

  He lifted a trembling hand and pointed at the second floor. Of course, I thought. I stood back up, swayed on my feet briefly, and then started back toward the house. I wished I hadn’t left my cell phone in Miami. Or that I’d gotten another one along the way. I’d have called for help. I stopped short of the porch. I could feel the heat pouring off the building. I’d be no good to anyone if I passed out in there. I briefly considered using the hose to douse myself in water, until sanity kicked in and told me I’d be steamed to death. There was no good solution. I’d just have to make do. I took a half-dozen deep breaths and pulled my shirt over my face again.

  I had another moment of hesitation. I’d already saved the old man. It was more than most people would have done in that situation. I looked back at the prone figure of the old man. Abby better not be your cat, I thought at him. I bolted back into the house and went up the stairs as fast as sanity and my legs would let me. On the ground floor, the smoke had been an irritant. On the second floor, it was all but impenetrable. It was also hot enough that it was going to get dangerous to breathe before long.

  I guessed and went right, feeling for doors and knobs. I’d guessed wrong. By the time I’d gone five feet, it was clear that the room was on fire behind the closed door. I turned and went back, fighting the overwhelming urge to cough and an equally overwhelming urge to flee. Only someone suicidal or paid for it willingly goes into a burning building. I squinted through the burning and tears in my eyes. I knew I hadn’t been in the building more than a couple minutes, but that smoky darkness made it feel like an eternity before I found a door off to the left.

  I crouched down to where the smoke was theoretically less dense and opened the door. I shuffled into the room and tried to ignore the crackling and popping behind me. I felt along the floor, looking for a bed, or a body, and my hand landed in something wet and a little tacky. I went still, then moved my hand forward. I felt a tangle of hair and a cheek. It was all I could do not to just grab the hair and yank.

  My shirt wasn’t offering much protection from the superheated air and smoke. I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I started to cough, I wouldn’t be able to stop. If that happened, the building would come down around me in burning chunks while I hacked and coughed and wheezed my way into a searing, agonizing oblivion. I forced myself to slow down, to feel around for a neck, and then for a pulse. It was there, weak, irregular, but there. Something was off, though. The head and neck were at a strange angle.

  I reached out blindly and felt a thin leg suspended in the air. I traced it back to a sheet. I coughed and felt another building. I couldn’t fight the panic anymore. I grabbed the sheet and hauled on it with terror-fueled strength. It offered fractional resistance and then came free from whatever held it in place. I hated to do it, but I turned over the body I assumed was Abby. I had a feeling she’d fallen out of bed and banged her head because of that sheet. Her neck could be broken for all I knew, but we’d both die for sure if I didn’t get us out.

  I took off my suit jacket and draped it over her face and chest. It was the only protection I could give her. I picked her up and stumbled back toward what I thought was the door. I felt around with my foot at each step, while a big part of my mind was screaming for me to run. Each second lost was one second closer to death. I lost more precious seconds when I started coughing again—deep, painful coughs that threatened to send me to the floor.

  Something crashed to the floor behind me. A second later, the generalized heat transitioned into a wailing, stabbing spot of pure agony in my lower back. I sucked in a breath without any conscious decision and after that, everything became a nightmarish blur of heat, blindness, coughing and stumbling confusion. When the world started to make sense again, I was outside. I was beyond tired and the thing in my arms weighed a thousand pounds. A tiny spark of rationality screamed at me. Don’t drop it! I staggered the last few feet toward a prone figure I could barely make out with my stinging, tear-filled eyes. I sank to my knees and the thing in my arms slid to the ground. I started crawling away. My smoke and heat-baked lungs made me cough until I stopped to vomit. Then, I crawled some more.

  My hand landed against something rough and solid. I turned my back toward it and let it support my weight. I thought I might puke again, but that was when I passed out.

  I dreamed in blurry, disconnected patches. I was back in Miami. Tony Damelus, the city’s self-styled high priest of dark Vodou, was chanting a spell to kill me. I was in Seattle, and trying to convince Marcy not to go to work that day. I’d had a premonition. I was hiding from my life in the mountains of New Mexico, and accidentally getting an education in Pueblo religion. They invited me into a kiva for a ceremony and swore me to secrecy. I crossed into Canada under false pretenses and a false name. Friends of mine believed there was a wendigo.

  “Jesus Christ!” someone yelled.

  I opened my eyes and squinted. A fireman stood a few feet away with an oxygen mask in his hand. I reached up to rub at my eyes.

  “Hey mister,” said the fireman. “Mind calming your cat down? I need to give you some oxygen.”

  I wondered if oxygen deprivation gave me brain damage. Cat?

  “Wha,” I murmured and then I felt something moving on my legs.

  I looked down and saw a cat standing on my thighs. Its ears were laid back against its head and it was crouched, as if it might attack. At motion and noise from me, it looked back and its ears popped up. The cat was dark gray and, even through my bleary vision, I could see it was missing part of an ear. It made a noise at me that sounded questioning. I reached a hand out and rubbed the cat behind its ears. It started to purr and then curled up on my lap. The fireman stepped toward me. The cat gave him a dark look, but didn’t get up.

  He gave me a thumbs up. “Thanks. Never seen a cat do that before. Must really like you.”

  “Not mine,” I wheezed.

  “Weird,” said the fireman.

  He put the oxygen mask over my mouth and nose and instructed me to take slow, deep breaths. I closed my eyes and leaned my head, which hurt in nine different ways, against the tree. I did as I was told and took slow, deep breaths. This, I discovered, led to a series of nasty coughing fits. One of them was bad enough that the cat looked up at me and, once again, made a noise at me.

  “Mrow?”

  I reached out and stroked the cat’s head some more, which seemed to satisfy my feline protector. On the periphery of my consciousness, I was aware of people moving around. Vehicles came and went like extras on a movie set. I ignored them. I was so damned tired. The oxygen started to clear my head after a few minutes. I pushed aside the nightmare of the fire. There had been an old man and a woman. I opened my eyes and flagged down the first uniformed person whose attention I could get. It was a burly guy in his late twenties who looked like he could bench press a bus.

  “You okay, mister?”

  “Yeah,” I croaked. “The old man, the woman. They make it?”

  He squatted down next to me and gave me a serious look that I didn’t much care for. “They’re pretty sure Old Man Simmons will make it. His granddaughter was touch and go when they took her out of here.”

  “Granddaughter?”

  “You didn’t know? Who’d you think she was?”

  I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders. I took a few more deep breaths and pulled the mask away. “Old man said Abby. Thought it was,” deep breath, “his wife. Couldn’t see.”

  “Mr. Hartworth, I thought you were leaving town this morning,” said a voice I recognized.

  I looked up at Patty with eyes I was certain were bloodshot. Then I rolled them. I pulled the mask away from my face. “Tried.”

  She shook her head and looked down at my legs. “I’ll be damned. That cat hates everyone.”

  The c
at demonstrated its interest in the goings on with an enormous yawn. Then it put its head down and went to sleep. I had a quiet few minutes while I soaked up oxygen. I wondered if the cat was depositing fleas all over me. Patty and a paramedic came over.

  “Okay, Mr. Hartworth, time to clear you out of here,” said the paramedic.

  I nodded and tried to set the cat on the ground. The cat gave me the death glare of a lifetime and stepped, with a somewhat unnerving amount of purpose, right back up onto my legs. The cat sat down and all but dared me to try that stunt again. I frowned and settled on picking the cat up and setting it in the crook of one arm. That seemed to pass muster, so I held a hand out to the paramedic, who pulled me to my feet. I took a sharp breath as the pain in my back sent signal flares to my brain.

  I heard a muffled curse behind me. “Dammit, Hartworth. Bill, he’s burned too.”

  If I’d just had me to worry about, I might have passed out again. I was worried I might crush the cat beneath me, so I settled for slumping to my knees and swaying. I heard some yelling in the background and the word ambulance. After that, things got hazy again.

  Chapter 5

  There is nothing good about waking up in a hospital bed. To start with, there is almost always a TV turned on somewhere in the room. By itself, that annoys me. In a hospital, though, that TV is inevitably tuned either to a rerun of a show you didn’t like the first time or a cable news channel you despise. Apparently, the wheel of pain came up News Channel that time and I was regaled to a paranoid screed about the socialist agenda of everyone more liberal than Cotton Mather. I started looking for something heavy to throw at the TV after ninety seconds. I came up empty.

  I gave the cloth divider that separated me from my roommate a baleful stare. “Could you at least mute that television, please?”

  There was a rustle and something that might have been a word, or a bodily function, but the TV went silent.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  There was an unpleasant pressure on the side of my face and I reached up to figure out what it was. My hand met a mask that I could only assume I’d displaced with some movement in my sleep. I put it back over my mouth and nose. The high purity oxygen made me groggy and I drifted off. When I came around again, I’d been pushed over onto my side and someone was doing something painful to my back.

  “Christ,” I muttered.

  “You’re awake,” said a woman.

  I looked over my shoulder at the nurse. She looked at me over a pair of half-rimmed glasses. There was an air of crisp efficiency to her, from her hair in a bun to her motions.

  I pulled the mask away from my face. “Stabbing pain has that effect.”

  She tutted at me in annoyance. “It’s not the worst you’ve had, judging by your back.”

  “I’m clumsy.”

  “You’re a liar. I worked in Detroit for fifteen years before I moved here. I know what bullet and knife scars look like. You in law enforcement? Some kind of private security? Career criminal?”

  “Just unlucky.”

  “No kidding. Put that mask back on. I’ll be done here shortly.”

  I did as I was told. In medical care, you ignored nurses at your own peril. She did some more painful things to my back for a minute and then put a fresh bandage over what, I finally remembered, was a burn. That would probably leave another interesting scar for some nurse to wonder about some day, I thought.

  “Alright, Mr. Hartworth, you can roll onto your back if you can stand it. Really, though, you should lay on your stomach.”

  I rolled onto my back and gave her a defiant look. It wasn’t the worst I’d been through. I risked her ire and pulled the mask away from my face again.

  “What’s the prognosis?”

  “Doctor Sumner will be in to talk to you about that shortly, but barring complications from smoke inhalation or an infection of the burn, I expect you’ll live.”

  “Awesome,” I said.

  She frowned down at me. “They think that Paul and Abby are both going to make it. They were lucky you were there.”

  “I’m glad they’ll be okay.”

  “Put your mask back on,” she said without conviction. “I think that girl is cursed sometimes. Both parents dead. Grandmother died a few years later. Then she turns up with cancer and now this. It’s not right.”

  I didn’t say anything. She wasn’t really talking to me. She was unburdening herself on a stranger she expected would be gone soon. It happened to me more often than I cared to think about. What she told me was still food for thought. Some families were just unlucky with no outside interference, but it always made me curious. Maybe she really was cursed. Back in the day, old country witches, warlocks, and gypsies didn’t screw around. They knew how to lay down absolutely vicious curses that carried for centuries.

  “I suppose it’s not right,” I agreed, after she went silent but didn’t leave.

  “I’m sorry. Thinking out loud. Old age is getting me, I think.”

  I snorted and put my mask back on before she told me to do it, again. The corner of her mouth quirked up a little and she left the room with purposeful, efficient steps. I dozed for a bit before the doctor came in to talk to me. The visit mostly consisted of him telling me they were keeping me for a few days of observation. Smoke inhalation was tricky business and they didn’t want to take chances with such a hero. I did my best not to gag. Hero, my scarred white ass. I’d figured out early on that most heroism was stupidity that you didn’t recognize until after the fact. Running into a burning building qualified.

  The rest of that day was a long crawl interrupted only by nurses doing painful things to my burn and a series of various kinds of imaging of my chest. The doctor had made it clear that until they were sure that my respiratory system wasn’t going to suddenly go critical, a very real possibility when smoke inhalation was involved, I should settle into my new sedentary life. I tried to apply whatever good humor I could to it. It turned out that my good humor was in short supply.

  Marcy’s warning rubbed against my inactivity like sandpaper. The longer I stayed, the worse it would get. I couldn’t say how I knew that, just that the intuition was undeniable. On the other hand, it did me no good to check out against doctor’s orders, since that could mean my untimely death someplace where medical help wasn’t nearby. Given my penchant for lonely highways and byways, that was most of the time.

  I dreamed of smoke and fire that night. Hot, blistering fire and blinding smoke that hid the danger until it leapt out at you and seared skin and flesh. I stumbled through it in search of escape. Sparks landed on my skin and burrowed into my veins, carrying the searing pain into my heart. Or maybe, it just reminded me that the pain was always there, waiting, watching, biding its time until I wasn’t paying attention. I crashed through a door and stumbled into the night. I fell to the ground and landed in grass made cool by condensation. Dewdrops reflected flickering orange.

  I looked back and the Byzantine church-turned-high-school was in flames. Fire roared in the doorway like an open gate into hell or the mouth of a dragon. A figure stood next to me. He was a small man, with a tweed jacket and polished shoes. He looked down at some index cards in his hand, cleared his throat, and began speaking as though he was giving a lecture.

  “It is important to note that most mystery school traditions started their lives as minor cults, typically beginning with specific families that embraced unorthodox beliefs, rather than as schisms in mainstream religions. The majority of mystery school traditions do have certain commonalities, such as a fixation on the death-rebirth cycle common to numerous religions and exemplified in figures such as Ishtar, Osiris, and of course, Christ.

  “However, some mystery schools seemed to have developed with specific goals in mind beyond mere acts of faith, although the goals themselves remain obscured by a regrettable paucity of known records. These schools, perhaps the most mysterious of the mystery schools, may still be with us today, operating in the shadows and working toward t
heir unknown goals.”

  “Professor, you don’t actually believe that do you?”

  I turned my head and found myself sitting on a stage and looking out over an auditorium of eager young minds. A young man stood six rows back and waited on the professor’s response.

  “I have my doubts, of course,” said the professor, “but the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Intellectual rigor demands we at least entertain the possibility until a definitive answer presents itself.”

  A young woman in the front row stood and said, “We cannot let the liberal agenda derail the lives of good, honest Christians. We need to make a stand.”

  My eyes snapped open. I registered that the television was tuned, once again, to cable news of the least reliable sort. I wondered if mental self-defense would stand up as a legal argument if I murdered the person in the next bed.

  “Mr. Hartworth,” said a low, slow voice.

  I turned my head. The sheriff sat next to my bed. I pulled the oxygen mask off my face. “Sheriff.”

  “Thought you were planning on leaving my fair city.”

  “You know how it is. These kids and their parties, just a bit too much for an old guy like me.”

  Sheriff Barnes gave me half a smile. Then, he turned serious. “Brave thing you did. Stupid as the day is long, but brave.”

  “Just stupid. I didn’t think it through.”

  “Any reason you didn’t just call the fire department?”

  “No cell phone.”

  “Lose yours in Miami?”

  I felt my jaw tighten. He had looked into me. I nodded. “Yeah, it got lost in the shuffle.”

  Sheriff Barnes’ forehead bunched up and deep creases appeared. I had thought he was around fifty, but those deep creases made me wonder if he was older. The burn on my back sent a deep throb of pain up my spine and I winced. Burns weren’t the worst kind of pain a person could suffer, but they made my top five list.