Fire Spirit (26 page)

But at that instant, with a soft
whoomph
! like a gas boiler firing up, the boy exploded into flame. He let out an ear-piercing scream and Nadine screamed, too, and Bronze Star reared up and let out a terrible bray that was almost like laughter.

Within seconds, the boy was blazing from head to foot. Nadine felt the hair on the back of her head frizzling down to the scalp, and her shoulders scorching. She tried again and again to break the boy's relentless grip around her waist, but his arms were on fire, too, and her own hands started to blister.

‘Help me!' she cried out. ‘Oh, God, help me!'

Bronze Star bucked and kicked and screamed with pain, because the boy's fiery legs were clenched around his flanks and were searing his hide. Nadine tried to pitch herself sideways out of the saddle, on to the ground, but the boy was holding her so tightly that she couldn't break free of him. He blazed hotter and hotter, with a steadily-rising roar, and his temperature rose so rapidly that Nadine began to blaze, too, her skin shriveling and her body fat spitting and flaring. Within a few seconds, the whole of her upper body was seared, the skin cracked apart to expose raw red muscle, and her contorted face was a grotesque parody of Darth Maul, scarlet and black.

Maddened with fear and pain, Bronze Star went berserk. He bolted wildly through the rain and the darkness with Nadine and the boy on his back, both of them trailing flames behind them like burning flags. To begin with, he swerved left and right, kicking and rearing in a frantic attempt to dislodge them, but by the time he reached the driveway that led to the main road, he was burning as furiously as they were, and so he galloped hard and straight, as if he could run fast enough to leave his agony behind him. His mane was a crest of flames and his tail was a thick shower of whirling sparks. His shoes clattered on the asphalt in a sharp, hysterical drum pattern, and as he galloped he left a long trail of smoke behind him, which whipped and twisted in the wind.

Bronze Star had nearly reached the archway over the main entrance to Weatherfield Stables when Charles Gardner, Nadine's father, turned into the driveway in his dark green Explorer. He was singing along with the Bee Gees' ‘Stayin' Alive'. ‘
Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother you're stayin' alive, stayin'
alive
.'

He saw a billowing mass of fire careering toward him and he stamped on his brake-pedal, but it was too late. Bronze Star and his two riders collided with the front of his SUV at a closing speed of over forty miles an hour, and burst apart in a whirling, blazing cascade of legs, arms, ribcages, cannon-bones and skulls.

The noise of the collision was deafening, and Charles Gardner was instantly punched in the face by his air bag, which broke his nose. He sat back, bruised and stunned, while pieces of burning flesh pattered on to the roof of his Explorer, and his daughter's smoking pelvis banged down on to the hood, right in front of him, and rocked from side to side.

SEVENTEEN

R
uth said, ‘I'm sorry, Martin, I don't believe a word of what you're saying.'

‘
Mommy—'
Amelia protested, but Ruth shook her head emphatically.

‘I'll admit these three fires are totally unlike any fires that I've ever come across before,' she said.

‘You don't know how much,' Martin told her.

Ruth shook her head again. ‘In the past five years I've investigated hundreds of fires, and some of them have started in really weird ways. Chemical fires from non-combustible chemicals, electrical fires after the power was switched off, freak lightning strikes, gas leaks. I've even had spontaneous combustion in stores of pistachio nuts. But, come on, Martin. Dead people coming back from hell?'

‘All right,' said Martin, raising his hand. ‘I can't say that I blame you for being skeptical. But why don't we forget about the technicalities for the moment and concentrate on why Zelda asked me to come down here? Your daughter and I share a common feeling that people are coming into this world from someplace underneath, and I think that's too much of a coincidence for us to ignore.'

‘It
is
a coincidence, I agree. But you said yourself that you suffer from a chromosome deficiency, just like Amelia. Maybe that deficiency makes you both suffer the same kind of delusion.'

‘What about Susan?' asked Martin. ‘I saw Susan after she was drowned, and your colleague saw his wife after she had burned herself. How do you account for that?'

‘I don't know. Grief can play some pretty strange tricks on us, can't it? Maybe there are times when we want to see somebody so much that we think we can.'

‘And the Creepy Kid?'

‘I don't know about him, either. But, like I said, he's probably just a kid who happens to be creepy. We'll find out who he is, given time – same as we'll find out how these fires were started.'

‘I'm sure you will,' Martin told her. ‘Except that in my opinion, solving one conundrum will solve them both. Cause and effect. Or
vice versa
.'

‘What do you think, Doctor Beech?' asked Ruth.

‘I think Martin's right,' said Doctor Beech. ‘We need to find out more about this feeling that he and Amelia have both been experiencing – these “people coming through from underneath”. We need to know why they're having it, and what it symbolizes.'

‘So how do we do that?'

‘I'm proposing a kind of hypnosis. But before we talk more about that, does anybody want coffee, or a soda? How about you, Amelia?'

‘Yes, please.'

Doctor Beech went to the door and asked Dora to bring them three cups of coffee and a can of Dr Pepper. Then she sat down again and said, ‘I've never been very happy about using hypnosis. After some people have been hypnotized, they can suffer some very undesirable after-effects, some of which can last for years: delusions, paranoia, personality disorders.

‘But there's a method of suggestion which I sometimes use in cases of severe psychological trauma, especially when there are two or more people involved. It's called the Liébault Technique, and it was devised by Ambroise-Auguste Liébault, who was a very respected nineteenth-century hypnotherapist. It encourages patients to share their thoughts not only with their therapist but with each other. It makes it possible for them to see whatever it is that's been disturbing them in three dimensions, so to speak, and also to see themselves as other people see them.'

‘OK . . .' said Ruth, cautiously. ‘How does it work?'

‘Simply by encouraging patients to play back the images that they already have stored in their minds. You know, like playing back the tape from a CCTV. The last time I used it was for five people who had been involved in a serious auto accident on Route Thirty-Five. Four people had died, and both of the surviving drivers each thought they were responsible for what had happened, while two of their surviving passengers blamed one of them and the third surviving passenger blamed the other.

‘As you can imagine, the drivers' families had both been torn apart by what had happened. How can you live with a man when you blame him for killing your mother and three young girls and permanently crippling your baby daughter? But I persuaded them all to sit down together and recreate the accident in their minds, and it was only
then
that they remembered the girl who had suddenly fallen from an overpass, right in front of them.

‘One car had swerved to avoid her, but had hit her all the same, as well as the car that was traveling next to it. Both cars had collided with a third vehicle, a bus carrying seven Girl Scouts, and then an SUV, and all of the vehicles had caught fire. Most of the occupants of the vehicles had managed to get out unhurt, but five people had died.

‘The police had assumed that the body of the girl who had fallen from the overpass was a passenger in the SUV, but the Liébault session showed us where she had really come from, and that neither of the drivers were guilty of dangerous driving.'

Dora came into the room with the coffees and the soda, and set them down on the table, along with a plate of Oreos.

‘I shouldn't eat these goddamned things,' said Martin, taking three cookies at once. ‘Once I start, I can't stop. Pardon my French.'

Doctor Beech said, ‘If you agree to my using the Liébault Technique today, we can at least find out if these “people coming through from underneath” are really real. Or really
not
real.'

‘How can you do that?'

‘Because the Liébault Technique shows me in my mind's eye what all of my patients are seeing, simultaneously. It assembles all of their differing viewpoints into one picture – a picture which is much more objective than the memory of any individual patient on their own. It's as near as any therapist can get to the truth. It's as near as
anybody
can get to the truth.'

‘Is there any danger?' Ruth asked her. ‘You said that hypnotism can have serious after-effects.'

Doctor Beech said, ‘I know. But in this case – with Amelia and Martin here – I can't see that there's any substantive risk. They're not suffering from any psychological trauma like those road-accident survivors. They've been experiencing anxieties, for sure. They've been hearing things and seeing things. But in my professional opinion I think they'll both feel a whole lot better if we can find out once and for all whether the things that they've been seeing and hearing have any basis in reality.'

‘What if they do? I mean, what if they
are
real? How do we deal with that?'

Martin unexpectedly laid his hand on top of Ruth's hand, and gave it a reassuring squeeze. ‘If they are real, we'll just have to find ourselves a way of sending them back where they came from, won't we?'

‘Supposing they don't want to go?'

‘But they
do
want to go. That's the whole point. They want peace. They want oblivion. All we have to do is find out how to give it to them, but without losing any more innocent lives.'

Ruth exchanged glances with Doctor Beech, but Doctor Beech could only give her a resigned shrug which seemed to mean ‘we won't know for sure until we try it out.'

‘OK, then – how do you do this What's-his-name Technique?' asked Martin.

‘We have to sit in a circle facing each other,' said Doctor Beech. ‘Then I'll lightly press my fingertips against Martin's right temple on the one side and Amelia's right temple on the other. Amelia in turn will press her fingertips against Ruth's left temple, while Martin will raise his left hand and press his fingertips against Ruth's
right
temple. In that way, we will all be physically and psychologically connected to each other's thoughts, and the images in our minds will go round and around between us, faster and faster, like a fairground carousel.'

Martin dragged the coffee table to one side and they arranged their chairs so that they were facing each other. Doctor Beech went across to her desk, opened her drawer, and took out a multifaceted glass ball. It was mounted on a small plastic base, and when she switched it on, it lit up and began to rotate, refracting the light and splitting up its colors like a diamond. She set it down on the dark-green carpet at their feet.

‘This will help you to bring your remembered images back to life. Now, let's make ourselves comfortable, shall we, and make contact?'

They sat down and lifted their arms, pressing their fingertips to each other's foreheads. Amelia smiled at Ruth and then started to giggle.

Doctor Beech said, ‘Don't worry. I know it seems funny, but I promise you it's going to work. I want you all to stare at the glass ball down on the floor. Try to blink as little as you can, so that it gradually goes out of focus.'

Ruth couldn't help smiling, either. She had always had an irreverent streak, and when she was a young girl she had always found it impossible to keep a straight face when she was in chapel, or when a teacher had been scolding her. Even at her grandfather's funeral she had been forced to bite the inside of her cheek to stop herself from laughing. She had loved her grandfather dearly, and she had cried for hours when he died, but she had known that he was gone, and that there was nobody lying in that casket which her family were treating with such solemnity, only a dead body in a three-piece suit.

All the same, she stared unblinkingly down at the rotating glass ball, as Doctor Beech had asked them to do. Its facets sparkled red, and emerald green, and sapphire blue, and Ruth had been staring at it for less than half a minute before its reflections seemed to be dancing in the air, like tiny colored butterflies.

‘Each of those colors that you can see is part of a picture,' said Doctor Beech. ‘Keep on staring at them, and you will gradually see that picture come together. Keep on staring at them, look at the way they mix and mingle. Think of the people who are coming through from underneath. Think of what they look like. Take those colors as your palette and make them come alive.'

She repeated herself, over and over. ‘
Think of what they look like. Watch them come together. Think of the people who are coming through from underneath
.'

Ruth wanted to look up and see if Ammy was all right, but she found that she was unable to take her eyes away from the twinkling colored lights. Doctor Beech was right: they did seem to dance together in a particular rhythm, so that they formed a pointillistic picture. Orange flickered with yellow, and yellow flickered with scarlet, and then she suddenly realized that she was looking at
flames
.

With a huge effort she managed to turn her head a half-inch toward Amelia. Flames were flickering across Amelia's face, but they were more like a projection of flames from a movie rather than real flames. They were only a picture, after all, a picture that Amelia was seeing in her mind.