Fire Spirit (24 page)

Doctor Beech slowly nodded. ‘I can understand that,' she said. ‘I've treated plenty of grief-stricken widows and widowers who have told me that they were looking to die in the same way as the loved ones they've lost: overdoses, hanging, throwing themselves in front of a train. Some of them have even prayed to get cancer. They think it's some kind of guarantee that they'll be reunited in the afterlife.'

‘Well, they're right,' Martin told her.

‘Excuse me?'

‘I mean it. How you die, that's all-important. Not when, not why, but
how
. It affects everything that happens to you after you're dead. It can make all the difference between resting in eternal peace or having to suffer everlasting torment.'

‘Please,' said Ruth. ‘I don't mean to be rude or unappreciative, Martin, and I'm very sorry for your loss, but I don't think any of this is at all helpful. Ammy's had enough anxiety attacks, thank you, without causing her even more stress.'

She stood up and said, ‘Come on, Ammy. Let's go. I'll take you to Crazy J's for a triple chocolate malt. I'm sorry, Doctor Beech. I know you meant well, but I really can't listen to any more of this.'

But Ammy clung on to her chair. ‘No, Mommy. Martin's right. I know he is. I want to hear him out.'

‘Ammy – it's nonsense. When you're dead, you're dead.'

‘That's not what Daddy thinks.'

‘I know. But Daddy . . . well, Daddy has different beliefs. I respect them, but I don't agree with them. We're all very lucky to have a life on this earth, but we should make the most of it, because when it's over, it's over.'

‘You're not one hundred per cent sure of that, are you, Ruth?' Martin put in.

‘I don't know what you mean.' Ruth was seriously beginning to dislike this man.

‘I mean that when I was telling you about Susan, you reacted in a very interesting way. You started to blink very quickly and your breathing rate went up. You didn't want to believe me, did you? But I'll bet you money that you've heard something similar before. Somebody else has told you about a loved one coming back. Or maybe you've experienced it for yourself, but you didn't want to believe it was true.'

Ruth sat down again, but she stayed very straight-backed. ‘All right. I was talking to one of my colleagues at the Fire Department this morning, and he told me that his dead wife came to visit him.'

‘And after he had told you, what did you think?'

‘I thought – I didn't really know
what
to think. I assumed that he had probably experienced some kind of hallucination, triggered by grief.'

‘How did his wife die?'

‘She committed suicide. She burned herself to death.'

‘Is that Uncle Jack?' asked Amelia. ‘Is that Uncle Jack and Aunt Lois you're talking about? Aunt Lois
killed
herself?'

‘I'm sorry, sweetheart, yes, she did. I didn't see any point in telling you. I didn't know myself exactly how she died, until yesterday.'

‘Oh my God, she
burned
herself. That's
terrible
.'

Ruth put her arm around Amelia and gave her a reassuring hug. ‘It's OK now, Ammy. She hasn't come back any more. Uncle Jack scattered her remains over the Ivy Tech garden, and now she's at peace.'

‘Intelligent man,' said Martin. ‘That was exactly the right thing to do.'

Ruth looked up at him. ‘Will you get to the point of what you're trying to tell us? I think we've all had quite enough distress for one day.'

Martin lifted both hands in mock-surrender. ‘Of course, Ruth. I'm truly sorry. But like I said before, none of this is easy to believe, and there's still a whole lot that even I don't understand.'

He sat down next to Amelia, and looked at Ruth intently. ‘After my experience with Susan, I did as much research as I could into post-mortem visitations, if only to prove to myself that I wasn't ready for the rubber room.

‘I made contact with almost every paranormal investigation society in the USA, and believe me there are dozens of them. Most of them turned out to be overexcited nerds with raging acne and high-tech video cameras, or middle-aged moon-howlers with their spectacles held together with Band-Aids. But I found one professor at Madison University in Wisconsin, Frederick Solway, who's been looking into PMVs for over twenty years. He has degrees in physics and the history of science going way back to Greek and Roman times.'

‘“Post-mortem visitations”?' Ruth challenged him. ‘Isn't that just a fancy way of saying “ghosts”?'

‘Unh-hunh. Because there's no such thing as ghosts.'

‘So what are they, these “PMVs”?'

‘The simplest way that I can describe them is to say that they are resonant reappearances of people who have died in violent or traumatic circumstances. They died, or they were killed, but they were never released. They all had unfinished business with the living, because of the way they died.'

‘Unfinished business?'

‘They couldn't move on, Ruth. They couldn't find peace. When you say that death is the end, you're absolutely right. If you die a quiet, natural death, it's just like being born in reverse. One minute you're conscious, and breathing, and part of the world around you. Then you're gone, back to the blackness where we all came from.

‘But people who die an unnatural death, they have scores to settle, they have problems to sort out. They have all kinds of loose ends to tie up. And they can't go into that blackness until they have. They're physically dead, but they're not
spiritually
dead. That's why they come back. They need to exorcize the past.'

Ruth took a deep breath. She wanted to tell Martin that she didn't believe a word he was saying, but at the same time she couldn't help thinking of Jack. ‘
Holy Jesus, there she was, standing in the yard, wearing the same purple dress she died in.'
Why would a hard-nosed man like Jack Morrow tell her something like that, if it wasn't true?

‘So what exactly are you trying to tell me?' she said. ‘That these people coming through from underneath, they're like
zombies
or something?'

‘No, not like zombies. Well, not like zombies in the George Romero movies, anyhow. But they do appear exactly like they looked on the day that they died.'

‘My colleague's wife burned herself to death, but she didn't
look
burned. Not according to him.'

‘She wouldn't have done, any more than somebody who died in an auto wreck would look all smashed up. It's not like that
Monkey's Paw
story, where the boy gets crushed in a mining accident and his father wishes him alive again, but when he comes knocking on the door he's still mutilated.

‘All the same, if somebody got themselves severely burned, but they subsequently died from some other cause – infection, maybe – then they
would
look pretty gruesome.'

Ruth said, ‘I still don't get it.'

‘Then let me explain it to you the way that Professor Solway explained it to me. He showed me that if you die violently, you go through a period of transition. It's like a living person going into shock. In early Christianity, they called this period of transition “Purgatory” – a place where your sins could be washed away and you could be made ready for heaven. That's unless you were such an unrepentant sinner that you were beyond redemption, and you had to go kicking and screaming down to hell.

‘And hell? What was that like? The concept of hell being a burning fiery furnace apparently came from medieval priests who had received post-mortem visitations from people who had died in fires. But Frederick Solway showed me documentary and scientific evidence that every single form of violent death has its own particular hell – not just fire alone. That's how I came to write my book about it,
The Nine
Circles of Hell
.'

Doctor Beech said, ‘That was it! I knew it was the Nine Circles of Something-or-Other. Was it ever published?'

Martin shook his head. ‘I tried very hard to get it into print. But the scientific publishers said it was too superstitious, and the religious publishers said it wasn't inspirational enough, and the general publishers said it was badly-written mumbo-jumbo. Which it probably was. Not mumbo-jumbo, but badly-written. I never pretended to be Norman Mailer.'

‘So tell us about these nine circles of hell,' said Ruth. She was growing increasingly impatient and irritated, but she was trying hard not to show it. Amelia was listening to Martin with such a rapt expression on her face, and after all she had brought Amelia here to the clinic to help her come to terms with the Creepy Kid and the people coming through from underneath, whatever they were, zombies or ghosts or PMVs.

Martin said, ‘Frederick Solway is certain that the nine circles of hell actually exist, and that they have a definite location in time and space, in the same way that medieval theologians believed that Purgatory was a place that you could actually visit, if you could find out where it was.

‘But Frederick Solway worked out that the nine circles of hell exist in our immediate future, always a split-second ahead of us. We can't go there until we die. After we're dead, however, we can take that split-second step back into the past and revisit the living – especially, like I say, if we have unfinished business, or we're looking for revenge.

‘Frederick Solway tried to explain the physics to me. It's all to do with Einstein's theory of relativity and something called the Lorentz transformation of time, but don't ask me to explain it to you because I don't understand a goddamned word of it. Pardon my French.

‘But there are literally hundreds of anecdotal accounts of dead people coming back to visit the living – right from the thirteenth century to the present day. Even John Hancock was visited by his dead mother, Mary Hawke, did you know that? In the winter of 1784 he saw her twice – once at the top of the staircase and once at the end of his bed. On the advice of his local minister he had her body secretly exhumed, and cremated, and her ashes scattered over Weymouth Fore River.'

‘I don't believe this,' said Ruth. ‘John Hancock, who signed the Declaration of Independence?'

But Martin ignored her. He said, ‘Frederick Solway divided the residents of hell into nine different categories. Disease victims are probably the most populous, because they run into millions; followed by the victims of starving or dehydration. Then there's freezing victims, crushing or falling victims, victims of strangulation or suffocation, drowning victims, stabbing or shooting victims, poisoning victims and fire victims – which is of course what we're dealing with here.'

‘But what do they
want
?' asked Ruth. ‘They're dead, aren't they? Why can't they just
stay
dead?'

‘Because they're suffering,' Martin told her. ‘They want release. They're screaming in hell and they would do anything at all for the agony to stop. They want that all-enfolding darkness.'

‘And that's how they get this “all-enfolding darkness” – by coming back and incinerating other people?'

‘So far as we can tell, yes. They employ what you might call hit-men, or assassins, to act out the circumstances of their own burning. These fires – they're like exorcisms, or passion-plays. The hit-men pick out somebody who resembles the original fire victim. Usually it's somebody totally innocent. Then they recreate the original victim's death. It's a sacrifice, if you like.'

‘A sacrifice? To whom, exactly?'

‘Professor Solway has a theory about it. He thinks that there are various lesser gods that dead people can do deals with, so that they can rest in peace. But like I told you, there's a whole lot that I don't understand.'

‘So where does this Creepy Kid fit in? You said that he caused the fires. You said that he was the catalyst.'

‘He is. I guess you could call him the angel of death. He's dead himself.'

‘How can that be? I've seen him standing outside my house. I've
talked
to him, for Chrissakes.'

‘I know that. Amelia's seen him, too, haven't you, Amelia? But I warn you here and now, Ruth. Get away from here, as soon as you can, and take Amelia and the rest of your family with you – and maybe your colleague at the Fire Department, too. Get the hell out of here before hell comes looking for you.'

SIXTEEN

N
adine tried to open her eyes but her eyelashes were glued together. She felt bruised all over and her head was banging so hard that she felt as if somebody was hitting it against the concrete floor, again and again, with every beat of her heart.

She tried to sit up, but when she did so her ribs crackled and she screamed out in pain. She lay back, sobbing. She couldn't think where she was, or what had happened to her, or why she was hurting so much.

‘
Daddy
!' she cried out. ‘
Daddy, where are you
?'

She raised her hands to her face. Her fingers were sticky, but she managed to rub her eyelashes until they became unglued. She peered at the crumbly red granules on her fingertips, and it was only then that she realized that her eyelids had been sealed together by dried blood.

Gasping with effort, she raised her head. She was still naked, but her bare skin was covered all over with a patchy varnish of dark red. She tried to sit up again but her broken ribs jabbed into her lungs and the pain was too much for her to bear. She had a hideous pain between her legs, too – a pain that made her muscles go into uncontrollable spasms, as if she had been impaled on a fence.