Fire Spirit (9 page)

She was woken by the
meep-meep-meep
of her alarm-clock. She opened her eyes and saw sunlight, shining on the carpet. She was lying on her side in the middle of her living-room, completely naked. The three masked men appeared to have gone, but when she raised her head she saw they had left her covered in scores of dark crimson bruises. She had bruises on her breasts, bruises on her stomach, bruises on her thighs. They made her look as if she were covered with fallen leaves, like one of the Babes in the Wood. Her lips were swollen and her left eye was puffed up, too. Her hair and her skin were sticky and she reeked of urine. She breathed in, and retched.

She managed to sit up, and as she did so she felt a hard, uncomfortable sensation between her legs. She reached down and felt herself and discovered that they had pushed the apple up inside her, with her own teeth marks in it.

‘
Oh God
,' she whispered. ‘
Oh God oh God
.'

She reached out for the arm of the couch and managed to heave herself on to her feet. The first thing she did was hobble over to the bedroom door and look inside, to make sure that none of the masked men was hiding in there. The alarm-clock was still beeping so she switched it off, and listened, but all she could hear was the muted rumbling of plumbing as the residents of her apartment block started to fill kettles and run showers and flush toilets.

She went to the closet and opened it, but there was nothing inside except her 1X dresses and her size forty-two sweaters. She went back into the living-room and locked the front door, and double-locked it, and fastened the safety-chain.

‘
Oh God
,' she kept whispering. ‘
Oh God
.'

The bathroom door was half-open and she could see that the tub was still filled, even though the foam had all disappeared and the water must be stone-cold. But she had to wash off the stench of those terrible men. Her mind was crowded with jumbled images of what they had done to her, but she made a deliberate effort not to think about them. First of all she needed to get herself clean.

She lowered herself into the bathwater, her teeth chattering with cold and shock. She lay back and pinched her nose between finger and thumb, and completely immersed herself. She stayed under the surface for as long as she could, and then she reared up again, gasping for breath.

Oh God oh God
.
As if I haven't been humiliated all my life. Teased and bullied at school, ever since I was three years old. Ignored by boys. Pitied by my girlfriends. And now I've been raped and beaten and defiled, as if I'm nothing but a dumb farm animal. And this is the first time that any man has ever touched me.

She turned on the hot water, full, and then she stood up and lathered herself all over, washing her hair and her face and her breasts and furiously soaping herself between her legs, even though she was so sore and swollen.

I will not let them
, she repeated.
I will not let them break me. I will not
. But at the same time the tears were pouring down her cheeks, and her mouth was dragged down in a silent howl of anguish and distress.

She was still soaping herself when a voice said, ‘
Belinda
?'

She twisted around, lost her balance, and dropped down into the bathwater with a catastrophic splash. A boy of about twelve years old was standing in the bathroom doorway, staring at her. He had dark tousled hair and a very pale face and he was wearing a faded black T-shirt and a pair of worn-out red jeans.

Tilda grabbed her big brown bath-towel from the stool beside the tub and covered her breasts with it. ‘
Who are you
?' She was so frightened that she was hyperventilating. ‘
What are
you doing in here
?
How did you get in
?'

The boy took a step nearer. ‘I've been trying to find you for
days
,' he said. His voice was very flat and bland, but with a strong local accent, so that his words came out as ‘ahbin tryna fahnjew'.

‘Get out!
Go away
! I'm going to call nine-one-one!'

But the boy ignored her. He came nearer, until he was standing close beside the tub. Tilda dragged the bath-towel into the water and stuffed it protectively down between her thighs.

‘Why didn't you never come back, Belinda?' the boy asked her. ‘You coulda saved me.'

‘Just get out of here,' Tilda quivered. ‘I don't know who you are or what you want but you have to leave now.'

‘I looked everywhere trying to find you but I never could. Where did you go, Belinda? Why didn't you never come back?'

‘My name isn't Belinda,' Tilda told him. ‘Now, I don't know how you managed to get in here, but I'm calling the police right now and you're going to be in big trouble, believe me.'

The boy looked bewildered. ‘Why can't you hug me, Belinda, like you used to? You went away and I never knew where you went, and Mommy was always sleeping or drunk or else she had the screaming meemies. You coulda saved me.'

Tilda gripped the handle at the side of the bath, and started to lift herself out of the water, still holding the heavy wet towel in front of her to protect her modesty. But without warning the boy pushed her back down again. He didn't have to push her very hard, because she was bruised and exhausted and still in shock, and in any case she always found it an effort to climb out of the bath.

Then, to her horror, he stepped into the bath and climbed on top of her, fully dressed, still wearing his sneakers. He wrapped his arms around her and pressed his head against the towel that covered her breasts.

‘
Get off me
!' screamed Tilda, trying to lever him upward. She rolled sideways and thrashed at him, dragging at his T-shirt, but his fingers were digging deep into the flesh that girdled her hips and she found it impossible to get herself free. His clothes were sodden and he was panting with effort, but he kept his grip on her, even when she seized his wet brown hair and forced his head back as far as it would go.

‘Just like it used to be, Belinda!' he said. His white face was shining with elation. ‘You and me together in the tub! Remember that? And then afterward, when we cuddled together, and you sang me that song?'

‘Get off me!' Tilda babbled. ‘Oh God, just get off me!'

‘But it's just like it used to be!' the boy repeated. ‘It's wonderful! It's just like it used to be!'

Tilda let go of the boy's hair and attempted to seize him by the throat, but he butted her with his forehead on the bridge of her nose, so hard that she felt her cartilage crack. She slipped backward and downward into the bath, with a riotous splash and a ribald squeak of bare skin against enamel.

Spluttering, half-choking, she reared up and went for his throat again. ‘
Kill you
!' she shrieked. ‘
I'll kill you
!'

‘Don't
hafta
!' crowed the boy, triumphantly. ‘Didn't you know that, Belinda? Don't
hafta
!'

With that, he exploded into a fireball. The flames that enveloped him were instantly fierce, and actually
roared
. His hair blazed, his face blazed, his whole body blazed, and for one terrible second Tilda could see him staring at her through the fire, his eyes wide, his mouth stretched open in a high-pitched scream.

Tilda screamed, too. She struggled wildly to get out from under him, but the flames overwhelmed her. She felt a scorching blast of heat, as if somebody had suddenly opened up a furnace door. Her curly hair frizzled and her eyebrows were burned off, and the skin on her cheeks tightened and shriveled, layer by layer, quicker and quicker, until her face was charred black.

The boy burned so ferociously that the bathwater started to bubble, and within seconds it had reached boiling-point. Tilda jerked and shuddered, her arms and legs moving as stiffly as a giant puppet. She had never known that human beings could feel such excruciating levels of pain. Surely it wasn't possible. Surely she ought to be dead. Her face and her shoulders and her breasts were being seared by fire, while at the same time her back and her thighs and her buttocks were being boiled.

Oh Mommy
, she thought,
oh please Mommy, help me
.

Then she screamed out, ‘
Help me
!' and her heart stopped.

The boy continued to burn until his skeleton dropped apart, and even his skull collapsed into fragments. The last of the bathwater crackled dry, leaving the bathroom foggy with steam. Tilda's blackened body lay on its back, with both arms raised as if she were still trying to fight the boy off; her legs raised, too. The plastic shower-curtain drooped from its hooks in long melted strings.

The morning passed. Nobody rang. Nobody knocked at Tilda's door. For a while, a Hoover droned in the corridor outside, and the cleaner sang ‘Baby, Don't Change Your Mind', but then there was silence.

SIX

R
uth was twenty minutes late arriving at the Fire Department headquarters on West Superior Street. She pushed open the door to the Fire & Arson Laboratory with her elbow, because she was carrying a cappuccino in one hand and a raspberry espresso and a bag of donuts in the other. Jack was bent over the burned-out mattress from South McCann Street, wearing his white lab coat and magnifying eyeglasses, so that he looked like a studious insect. The whole laboratory was filled with the sour reek of charred cotton.

‘Sorry I'm so late,' said Ruth. ‘I had to do the school run this morning and the traffic was a nightmare.'

‘I thought you had good old Craig trained to do that,' said Jack, without looking up.

‘He usually does it, yes. But when Ammy came down to breakfast this morning she was acting kind of fretful, so I thought that I ought to take her.'

‘She's OK, though?' Jack was Amelia's godfather and always took a special interest in how she was doing.

Ruth put down the two cups of coffee and the bag of donuts. ‘She was much more settled by the time I got her to school. But she kept on saying that she felt worried.'

‘
Worried
? She's only fifteen! I know she's kind of special, but what does
she
have to worry about?'

‘Believe me, Jack, even ordinary fifteen-year-olds have just as much to worry about as we do, if not more. But she couldn't say
why
she was worried. She said she felt like a storm was on its way. You know her. She says things like that.'

Jack came over, pushing his magnifying eyeglasses on to the top of his head and snapping off his latex gloves. He took the espresso and removed the lid. ‘Thanks. I've been gasping for this. What flavor donuts did you buy? Right at the moment, everything tastes like charred mattress.'

‘Apple spice cake.'

‘My favorite. Why are you so good to me, boss?' He said it so dryly that he was right on the edge of sounding sarcastic.

Ruth patted him on the shoulder. ‘Because a good boss has to show the people who work for her that she appreciates their skill and their expertise, and apart from that, apple spice cake is
my
favorite too, so don't eat them all,
capiche
?'

Jack sipped his coffee and then he put his cup down. ‘I've found something passing strange,' he said. He walked over to the mattress and Ruth followed him. Most of the interior of the mattress had been burned out, leaving only the springs, and heaps of blackened fiber.

‘You can see here the remains of the cotton batting, and the springs, which have been annealed by the heat. Of course there are still a few bits and pieces of human residue, too, which originated from the cadaver we found. I'd say that on the Crow-Glassman scale, the cadaver burned to a little over CGS level two. Unrecognizable as to sex and identity, of course, but not totally destroyed.'

‘OK,' said Ruth. ‘So what's so strange?'

‘
This,
' Jack told her, holding up a test-tube. It was half-filled with very fine gray powder. ‘When I sieved through the ashes, I picked out five or six sizeable skin fragments from the cadaver as well as the distal and middle phalanges from the cadaver's left little toe. But
these
remains were mingled in with them, too. They're human, but they come from somebody else – another victim, maybe, but a victim who was burned well beyond CGS level five.'

‘So we have
two
victims?'

‘I can't say for sure, not yet. However this other person died, it looks likely that he or she was cremated in a professional crematorium. Not particularly well, because we still have a scattering of larger bone fragments, but I'd still say that after the body was incinerated the remains were put through a cremulator, which is not a piece of equipment you can readily obtain from your local Handy Hardware.'

Ruth took the test-tube, put on her half-glasses and examined it closely. The gray powder looked exactly like the human remains that undertakers hand to relatives after a funeral – not technically ashes, although that was what they were commonly called, but very finely crushed bone. Some undertakers called them ‘cremains' – a portfolio word for ‘cremated remains'.

‘How much of this did you find?'

‘By weight? Less than a kilo, so it could have been a child. On the other hand, I can't tell you if what I found was all of that individual's remains. It depends where they came from and how they got there.'

‘But you think this second person was cremated sometime well before the first person was burned, and most likely at a crematorium?'

‘That's right,' said Jack. ‘Which means, of course, that we have no way of knowing how he or she died. Not yet, anyhow. Not unless we can find out who it is. Could have been a homicide victim. Could have died in any kind of accident. Could have died of natural causes. Who knows?'