The hotel no longer felt like neutral ground so I did enough cleaning to get the deposit back and checked out. The thought had occurred to me that I could complain to the front desk that the room had been broken into and vandalized and that I wanted to be compensated but two things prevented me from doing this.
First, although it was technically true in a sense, the thing that had done the vandalism to the room was my responsibility. I’m honest enough to recognize it wasn’t the hotel’s fault that something following me had done the damage. And nothing was really broken in the room to require being paid for except my book. I could always get another of those later.
Second, some hotels have security cameras which keep watch over their parking lots and the rooms facing them, as mine was. If a recording were reviewed and no one was seen entering after I left for my adventure at the bookstore I would look like someone trying to con the hotel out of some money. I was sure if that happened the police would become involved and that was attention I did not want to deal with.
The problem was now I was back to square one. I had nowhere to go but the apartment and no desire to go there. I thought about trying another hotel but quickly dismissed the idea. The same problem was going to be around wherever I went. Plus, I didn’t really have the money to be throwing at hotel rooms.
The only other option I could think of was finding a quiet parking lot somewhere and sleeping in my car. That, of course, presented its own dangers, ghosts or no ghosts.
“Maybe,” I reasoned, “If I just drive a round a while something will come to me. Yeah, that’s all I need, just a bit of inspiration.” That was the hope anyway. Soon after checking out of the hotel I was rolling down the road. I passed so many places and people that they all began to blur together and nothing would come. Inspiration was in short supply for me that night. What I got instead was another piece of the puzzle, a chain of connections scattered over the past two days.
One in the endless procession of buildings I passed was a fire station. That made me think of the shredded remains of the book I’d thrown away, the classic science fiction piece by Bradbury. It was about firemen of the future whose occupation was not to put out fires, but to start them. They hunted down collections of books because they were too dangerous and set them ablaze.
“It was a pleasure to burn,” I repeated absently. This sparked another connection.
Before I had left the hotel room to go to the bookstore I sat on the edge of the bed and flipped through TV channels. That’s when I had been compelled to go back to the movie with the fireman trapped inside the burning building. That’s when I had the panic attack I couldn’t explain.
“It’s not always a pleasure to burn, is it,” I said thinking about the fireman trapped, asphyxiating in the smoke and ash…smoke…ash. Smoke and Ash. There was another connection.
As I had waited for the interview—and even during the interview—I thought I had smelled something burning, thought I’d smelled smoke and ash. Like with the little girl who wasn’t really there and yet somehow was, I was the only one who had been able to detect the smell. I tried to alert Jan to it during the interview but she had denied smelling anything. Then there was the little girl herself.
When I had first seen her she was crossing the road by herself and she was wearing a little white dress that was smudged with something black. I had thought it was dirty probably from playing outside at first. But what if it was dirty from great streaks of ash instead? And when I had heard her giggling in my bathroom later that night and had burst in I recalled thinking it was unusually warm in there.
All of these things were like a spider web whose connective tissue was fire. As I began placing these separate parts together I began to hear something, a nagging sound demanding attention.
A horn was blaring and I could not imagine any reason why it would. Couldn’t these people allow me to drive and think in peace? I saw headlights rapidly drawing near. I snapped awake instantly. I thought then that I had become so lost in what I was doing that I had stopped channeling my will into driving the car. It occurred to me that maybe my leg had remained steadily operating the gas but my arms had failed to keep up with the curve of the road. I would learn later this was wrong, that what followed was in no way my fault, but it would have been little consolation to know the truth of it at that moment. What came next happened so fast I couldn’t put it together in anything resembling a correct order if I wanted to. We have witnesses to thank for that.
Instinctively I jerked the wheel in the direction of what I thought must have been my lane. That would have been too convenient, though, wouldn’t it? Occupying that space was another car traveling alongside of mine. The sound of metal colliding with and scraping on more metal filled the car. The passenger window showered glass everywhere. An instant later the corner of the front end of the car coming in my direction collided with the front corner of my car.
The oncoming vehicle rocketed up in the air turning forty-five degrees sideways beginning a fast, single midair flip journey. I was thrown against the steering wheel, my life saved by the seatbelt. Glass exploded everywhere and my eyes reflexively shut against the barrage while the rest of my senses went haywire. The car travelling next to mine was pushed off the road.
At that point the car which had once been oncoming was behind me landing and rolling sending sparks in every conceivable direction. In my car I had lost all sense of control and had begun to swerve. I crashed into the back of an SUV which was slowing down to accommodate the traffic ahead of itself. Cars were swerving and breaking to avoid becoming part of the show.
It was at that point that my mind went dark, shutting off and leaving the aftermath for the emergency people to deal with. I have isolated fragments of memory of awakening briefly in my car, hearing the sound of metal twisting, though knowing the vehicle was no longer moving. I couldn’t turn my head, only my eyes.
Out of the corner of my eyes I witnessed a firefighter operating the Jaws of Life, ripping away the roof of my car. A firefighter.
“Was it a pleasure to burn?” I heard myself croaking the question.
“We’ll have you out of there in minute sir. Please don’t move.” Blackness.
The next thing I recall is laying down on a gurney and staring into the night sky. A flashlight shone into one of my eyes and then the other as a paramedic checked my pupils.
“You still with us buddy?” one of the paramedics asked.
“I better be. I just got a new job and I just met a hot girl who gave me her phone number,” I responded, hoping to use the humor as a shield to block some of the pain I was feeling. It didn’t work very well. The muscles in my left leg felt as if they were on fire.
“I’ll make sure I try extra hard to keep you alive then,” he said as he and another paramedic lifted the gurney into the back of an ambulance.
“You better,” I said. “If I die before I get a first date I’m going to be super pissed. I may come back to haunt you.” Whatever response the paramedic might have given was lost as the blackness overtook me again.
The last thing I recall before waking up more lucidly in a hospital bed Monday morning is waking up in the speeding ambulance.
“Hey,” someone said, “He’s back again.”
“What the hell?” came the response, “That’s the third time he’s woken up. Are you sure you gave him enough to keep him out?”
“Yeah, man. After he woke up the second time I gave him another half dose.”
“Should I leave you two alone,” I asked groggily. I wasn’t able to raise my head to see what was going on. I could only turn my eyes Two guys in paramedic’s outfits were reading monitors and looking at me. I was a puzzle to them, one they couldn’t figure out.
My eyes drifted to the back of the ambulance where I saw something which had no business being there. Standing against the closed doors with her hands clasped and big eyes watching me carefully was a little girl with long curly brown h
air in a white dress. The dress was smudged black as was her face. Her face was also scarred by some kind of burn, I thought. She lifted one hand, extended her index finger and pressed it against her lips.
“Shush,” she said in the voice I remembered from the answering machine. “You’re safe for now. You can’t be touched where you’re going. But you can’t remember either. When you come out again…” She paused, clearly not wanting to finish what she was about to say. Then she picked up again, not where she left off but for her last words of comfort to me that night. “The doctors will make your ouches feel better. Go back to sleep.” My head dropped back to the gurney.
“Well,” I said to myself, “at least this takes care of finding a place to stay tonight.” I drifted off to sleep.