Fire Spirit (38 page)

Ruth looked across at Martin. She covered the phone with her hand and said, ‘It's the police.' Then, to Sandra Garnet, ‘What about the Tilda Frieburg fire?'

‘OK . . . in the past three years there were two separate and unrelated incidents of girls being burned alive in bathtubs, one in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the other in Champaign, Illinois. In both cases they were doused in accelerants and set alight, but the girl in Fort Lauderdale was black, and very thin, and lived with her boyfriend, while the girl in Champaign was white and overweight, like Tilda Frieburg. and lived alone.

‘Her name was Belinda Cusack. Until she was seventeen she lived with her mother and her kid brother on West Eureka Street, but her mother was a hopeless drunk and Belinda had to cook and clean and find a way to pay the rent, too. From the age of fifteen she brought men home to supplement her income. The family wouldn't have survived, otherwise. She wasn't pretty so she had to let men do whatever they liked to her, and some of what they liked was really repulsive, I can tell you.

‘In the end Belinda couldn't take it any more and she packed up and left home. But she went back one evening to find out if her brother was OK. Her brother wasn't there, but her mother was. They had a fierce argument about money and her mother attacked her and hit her over the head with a steam-iron, and knocked her cold.

‘Her mother thought that Belinda was dead, so she took off her clothes and dragged her into the bathroom. She poured a quart of potato vodka all over her and set her alight. She never admitted it, but it seems like she was trying to make it look as if one of her clients had murdered her.

‘Belinda must have woken up when she started burning, because the neighbors heard her screaming, although – surprise, surprise – not one of them came to find out if there was anything wrong. But it was then that her young brother came home. He tried to save his sister, but while he was trying to put out the flames his mother hit him with the steam-iron, too, four or five times, and killed him.'

‘That's terrible,' said Ruth. ‘God, that's terrible.'

Detective Garnet said, ‘Sometimes, the things people do to each other, it makes it hard to believe in God, don't it?'

By four p.m., Amelia was growing more and more agitated. She kept pacing backward and forward across the living-room, holding her hands over her ears, and saying, ‘Stop! Stop! I don't
care
if you're coming through! Just stop!'

Ruth tried to put her arms around her and calm her down, but she pulled herself away and started to walk from room to room, into the kitchen and through to the dining-room and back out to the living-room, talking to herself higher and higher.

‘
Stop
!
I don't care if you're coming through
!
Leave me alone
!'

Martin said, ‘Ruth, listen to me – we have to do something, and we have to do it now. We don't want Ammy to have a breakdown.'

‘Maybe I should call Doctor Feldstein, or Doctor Beech.'

‘Ammy doesn't need a doctor, Ruth. She needs to face up to these people who are coming back from hell. I can hear them myself, although Ammy can obviously hear them much louder than I can. They're growing more and more hysterical, and if we don't stop them – well, who else is going to stop them, except us? Nobody else believes in them.'

Ruth watched Amelia as she stalked out of the kitchen and back into the living-room, her hands still pressed over her ears, her eyes darting from side to side. She kept jerking, and sniffing, and colliding against the walls, as if she were having a fit.

‘What can we do, then?' asked Ruth. ‘Come on, Martin, tell me what the hell we can
do
!'

Martin laid his hand on her shoulder. ‘More than anything else, we mustn't panic. OK? We need to keep our heads because the people who are coming through, they're going to be out of their minds with pain. They're going to be hurting and they're going to be disoriented and above all they're going to be angry. But we need to find out
where
they're going to come through. Once we've done that, we can go there and send them back.'

‘But how can we do that?'

‘They're
burning,
aren't they? They're all on fire. You work for the Fire Department. Can't you call on a couple of fire trucks? If they come through but they can't set anything alight, what choice will they have? They're dead. They'll have to go back to hell.'

‘This is madness,' said Ruth.

‘Of course it's madness. Life is madness. Death is madness. Before we're born, we're nothing at all, we're not even conscious. Then we wake up and we live out these lives full of happiness and light. Then we're gone again. Click, finished. Lights off. If that's not madness, then I don't know what is.'

‘But you can understand why these people want to come back, can't you? These people who got burned, or drowned, or caught some terrible disease? Don't you think they feel cheated?'

Martin looked down at the carpet. ‘Yes. I know they feel cheated. Susan's told me that.'

‘You've felt her again?'

Martin said nothing, but Ruth said, ‘You
have
felt her again, haven't you? You felt her last night.'

Martin nodded. ‘Felt her. Heard her. This disturbance in the ninth circle of hell . . . it's spreading to all of the other circles, like a ripple effect. Susan, she's in the eighth circle, with all of the drowning victims like her. I was in the shower last night and she came to me. She came to me, and she held me very close – closer than she has for a long, long time. She said she was frightened, because the waters are getting all churned up, and people are screaming, and it's just like a dam's going to burst. They want to be saved, those people. Not from death, because they know that they're dead already. They just want to be saved from drowning.'

Ruth looked at him. She was tempted to reach out and touch his lips with her fingertips, as if to console him for what he had said. In another life, if she hadn't been married to Craig, and if she hadn't been Jeff and Amelia's mother, maybe she would have done. She had that unreal feeling that she had met a soulmate at the wrong time, under all the wrong circumstances, and all she could do was to watch him, and talk to him, and keep her hands and her feelings to herself.

‘So what are we going to do?' she asked him. ‘How are we going to find out where these people are coming through?'

‘I think Ammy can do it, if I guide her. We can do one of those Liébault sessions – just you and me and her, together. They're close, Ruth, and they're coming closer. This time, when they come through, we won't be able to stop them just by breaking the circle. This time it's going to be some kind of war.'

TWENTY-THREE

T
he three of them sat cross-legged in the middle of the living-room. Outside it was growing gloomy again and the wind was rising, so that they could see leaves whirling wildly around the yard. They didn't have a rotating glass ball on which they could focus, like Doctor Beech's, but Ruth managed to find a candleholder with a globe-shaped crystal shade. It had been given to them as a wedding gift by one of Craig's sisters, and Ruth had kept it in the back of the dining-room sideboard and never used it.

Now, however, she fitted a candle in it and lit it, and it sparkled with prismatic colors, almost as glittery as Doctor Beech's ball.

Martin said, ‘OK . . . let's make contact.' He reached out and touched his fingertips against Amelia's forehead, and Amelia touched her fingertips to Ruth's forehead. Ruth hesitated for a moment, and Martin glanced at her as if he knew why she was hesitating, but then she touched her fingertips to his forehead, too.

‘Let's look at the colors,' said Martin. ‘Let's see what kind of pictures they make. Let's empty our minds and see what images we can conjure up.'

They sat in silence for over three minutes. Rain began to clatter against the living-room window, and broken twigs, too, and a strong draft began to seethe under the door, as if a monstrous animal were trying to smell if they were in there.

The colored lights began to shimmer and dance in front of Ruth's eyes. She was sure she could hear the crackling of fire, and when she looked up she saw that flames were reflected on Amelia's face.

‘
Ammy
,' she said, but the fire-crackle was so loud that she didn't think Amelia could hear her. Yet when Amelia started to whisper, Ruth could hear that clearly enough.

‘“
We're coming through
,”' said Amelia. Her voice was harsh and high, and even though her lips were moving, it didn't sound like Amelia at all. ‘“
We're coming
through and there's nothing you can do to stop us. Not now
.”'

Martin closed his eyes. Ruth turned to him and there were flames reflected on his face, too. ‘I can feel you. I can hear you, too. What do you want?'

‘“
Have to settle it
,”' said Amelia. ‘“
Eyes on fire, fingers on fire. Have to settle it
.”'

‘How many of you are coming through?' Martin asked her.

‘“
Hundreds
,”' said Amelia. ‘“
Hundreds and hundreds. And you can't stop us now. Have to settle it. Fingers on fire. Eyes on fire. Hair on fire. The pain the pain we can't bear the pain! We can't bear the pain for a minute longer
!”'

Martin looked at Ruth. Then he turned toward the window. ‘She's right,' he said. ‘They
are
coming through. I can feel them, too.'

‘But
where
?' asked Ruth.

‘“
Here,
”' said Amelia, but this time her voice was different again. Softer, less panicky.

Ruth looked at Amelia and saw that her face was altering. It was almost as if she were wearing a transparent mask made of fluid, constantly-shifting light. She could still see Amelia's elfin features underneath, but she was wearing another face, too. A face that looked unnervingly familiar. It could have been Ruth herself, except that it wasn't.

It was the woman in the photograph on Amelia's desk – the photograph that she had found in her bedroom closet when they first moved in.

‘
Here
?' said Ruth. Her throat was so tight that she barely recognized her own voice.

Amelia nodded, and her ghostly superimposed face looked at Ruth with infinite regret in her eyes.

‘“
They're looking for me. I used to live in this house once. My husband, and me, and our young son Paul
.”'

‘Who are you?' asked Martin. ‘What's your name?'

‘“
Jennifer Steadman. The late Jennifer Steadman
.”'

‘Why are they coming here, these people? Why are they looking for you?'

‘“
Because of what I did,
”' said Amelia, in the same soft voice. ‘“
One day my husband Peter found out that I had been having an affair with his brother Greg. I told him it had been over for more than a year but he still couldn't forgive me, and he beat up on me so bad he broke my fingers. I took Paul with me and I got into my truck and I left. I was drunk. I was angry. I was in pain. I didn't know where I was going.
”'

Ruth wanted to hold Amelia's hand, but she knew that if she took her fingertips away from her forehead, the Liébault circle would be broken.

‘What happened?' she asked.

‘“
There was a pile-up on Route Thirty-five. Some girl had jumped off the overpass and three or four cars had all collided. I wasn't looking where I was going and I drove straight into them. My truck caught fire. My door was wedged tight, and Paul's seat-belt was jammed. All we could do was sit next to each other and scream
.”'

‘My God,' said Ruth. ‘That sounds like the accident that Doctor Beech was telling us about.'

‘“
We've been burning ever since
,”' said Amelia, although her words were fuzzier now, like a badly-tuned radio. ‘“
Paul and me, we've been sitting in those seats together for day after day, week after week, month after month, burning. It has to end, please. You have to let us go.
”'

The rippling mask of light that covered Amelia's face now faded away, and Ruth was sure that she could feel Jennifer Steadman's spirit slip past her, only a few inches away, the faintest warm current in the air. Amelia opened her eyes wide and looked at Ruth and then at Martin and said, ‘
What
?'

At that instant, however, they heard tornado sirens wailing, all across the city.

Ruth immediately broke the circle and stood up and went to the window. ‘What the hell is going on? This isn't tornado season.'

Martin and Amelia came up behind her, and Amelia put her arm around Ruth's waist and hugged her tight. Off to the east, toward the center of Kokomo, Ruth could see an orange glow in the sky. A few seconds later, she saw flames leaping up – flames that must have been at least a hundred feet high. The tornado sirens continued to wail, and then she heard fire trucks honking and warbling, and police squad cars scribbling, and the panicky
whoop-whoop-whoop
of paramedics.

‘It looks like the whole goddamned city's on fire,' said Martin. He didn't even say ‘excuse my French'.

‘They've come through,' said Amelia. ‘They've come through and they're coming this way. Hundreds of them.'

Even as they watched, the flames rose higher and higher into the sky, waving in the wind like gigantic banners of fire. It looked to Ruth as if a fifty-block area in the center of the city was burning, including Main Street and Union Street and City Hall. A thick column of smoke was rising up into the darkness, infested with orange sparks.