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It was late afternoon. Feeling impossibly bored and not in the mood for another girl’s session with her roommate, Felicia had packed her bag once again and left the house.
She wandered aimlessly, hands stuffed into the pockets of her short red lace skirt, her black ballerinas hitting the pavement at a neither fast nor slow, steady pace. There were some couples and families strolling around, but it became less and less crowded the more she wound her way toward the border of the city.
Before she knew it, she found herself at a crossing. To the left lay the road to the cemetery, to the right a road looking strangely familiar to her, although she was sure she had never been there. A mysterious force pulled at her from this direction, as if at the end of the road she would find something of interest. With a frown and foreboding bringing the fire core inside her to coil and bubble uneasily like some fateful soup boiling, she turned right and continued to walk. From where she was, she couldn’t see the end of the road yet. When she lifted her eyes from the pavement and looked about her, her feet slowed down. The houses looked posh and grand, as did the occasional car parked in front of them. There was not a sound to be heard, nor a single person to be seen. Tall, old trees stood like sentinels in the primly trimmed, neatly organized garden plots, regal-looking and watchful.
This was an area of Fairview much too fine for her. Felicia had never much liked rich people, high society and the important and powerful who ruled or thought they did. It sparked her contempt. Walking along the deserted road amid buildings painted in shades of pastel and often sporting elaborate gates and walls, she felt ill at ease. Part of her wanted to turn back, maybe pay the cemetery a visit. Yet, there was another part tied to the end of the road, pulling her along relentlessly. Once in a while, a house looked oddly familiar to her, although she remembered it in a context of darkness.
The road turned a wide, round corner. What lay at the end of it, had her stop in her tracks and gasp.
In front of her, several feet away, stood the burnt-out remains of what must have once been the grandest of all the buildings on this road.
There was nothing more left than a blackened skeleton with here and there beams and wall pieces sticking obscenely upward like the bones of a smashed-in ribcage. The ground was strewn with debris, although most of the ashes had long since been blown away, some of it covering the massive, partly unhinged iron gate in a fine layer of grey dust.
The sight itself might have been spooky and dangerous to others, but to her it was simply fascinating. Proof of the power of fire, of how destruction could be the cause for an eerie, stark, mysterious kind of beauty that defied all the feats of human architecture.
Her feet automatically took her closer until she had walked through the huge black gate with its intricate cast-iron embellishments and was coming closer and closer to the ruins. It was when she turned her head slightly from side to side to take in the mess on the wide, forlorn grounds and saw the edge of a forest bordering the back of the garden that she froze again.
Terror filled her for a moment and her heart beat raced with a feeling akin to excitement.
This wasn’t any burned down building.
This was the place where she had all but thrown herself into the fire some nights ago and been saved by a handsome, icy stranger.
With recognition came an understanding of why she had felt a magnetic pull bringing her here.
Felicia closed her eyes for a moment and tried to recall that night and why she had come here. No matter how hard she concentrated, she came up blank. Everything before her arrival and the fire was an indistinct blur. There was the towering, intimidating hulk of the mansion in nightly glory, not lighted like all the other houses, the ground full of weeds, the gate already in the lamentable state it was in now. There was the fire itself, burning so full of life and strength, and warming her.
She opened her eyes and stared at the black remnants of where a house full of furniture had stood less than a week ago.
How shocking the contrast. How strange that she should prefer the present state to the former glory.
As if she had no choice, she wandered closer, winding her way through stones, charred chunks of wood and the odd piece of dismembered furniture. She took in the details, the different degrees of burns and bizarre shapes. Inhaling deeply, she reveled in the smell of ashes, toasted wood and scorched earth. It called to her. In a different way from how the actual flames had, but undeniably powerful and appealing.
She wanted to be back in that night. For a fierce moment, she wished Joshua had never pulled her out. She had been so close to accept fire’s embrace! What would happened? Would she never know now?
Felicia continued her walk through the ruin, stopping here and there to touch, to run her hands over the sometimes rough, sometimes astonishingly smooth surfaces shaped by the flames.
If she was fire, she could surely form things like this too, couldn’t she? Exert power which might be fatal.
Pictures of the X-men movie she had watched some hours ago popped into her head. Mutants attracting and shaping metal, soaring through the air, wreaking havoc, performing their personal kind of magic.
She had to stand still for a moment to stop herself from trembling and bursting with heat. It would surely make her skin glow and attract attention if anybody happened to stumble upon this place.
The fire inside her leapt up and down like an eager puppy, like a child demanding attention and knowing it had reached its goal. She swallowed, took deep breaths to calm herself down, and put her hands back into her pockets. It didn’t help.
When she fixed her eyes resolutely on the ground again and took step after deliberate step to distract herself from her longing to test her power and control her inner fire, a speck of color caught her attention.
A few feet away from her lay a small, soot-blackened head, its eyes staring dully right at her.
She jumped, and scolded herself for being such a coward. This was clearly the head of a plastic doll.
Stepping closer, she squatted down next to the head, not bigger than both of her hands cupped together. The doll was lying under a fallen beam of wood, propped up by another piece of debris and providing protection instead of crushing it. The majority of its hair was missing, apart from a few ghastly yellow strands glued to the ground. The side of her body not covered by the beam had melted in the heat of the fire and was no more than a brownish, pinkish puddle of plastic sticking to the earth. The doll was missing an arm and a leg, and one side of its torso had a gaping hole in it that revealed gaping emptiness.
There was something so hideous and yet so frighteningly attractive about the way the doll spoke of the power of the fire that she reached out and picked it up. She stood up and held the damaged doll with its listless blue stare and bald head in both her hands, gingerly as though her touch might finish what the disaster hadn’t.
Before she knew what was happening to her, she felt a bout of dizziness. Her head swam for a moment, the sight of the doll in her hands growing blurry and being overlaid by scenes of the raging fire she had almost united with.
The heat inside her grew and grew, her palms shaking. There was a clear picture of a doll—this damaged one—burning brightly like a miniature witch at the stake.
A whoosh. A great hiss of air. Heat. More heat. A bright light.
Felicia was thrown backward by an invisible fist punching her in the gut and taking the wind out of her.
She landed on her back, narrowly managing to brace herself with her arms before her head hit the ground. Even half lying and short of breath, she couldn’t tear her eyes from the sight in front of her.
The doll lay on the earth.
It was burning.
No, it wasn’t simply burning, it was a ball of yellow-white fire with a blue middle, like a bright supernova fallen down from the sky. The flames shot high but were content feasting only on the little plastic shape. The fire didn’t spread to the side to crawl along the dry stubs o
f blackened grass or leap onto the beam nearby. When there was nothing left to burn, the flames vanished, as abruptly as they had appeared from out of nowhere.
Remembering how to breathe again, Felicia raised herself to a sitting position and stared. Nothing was left of the doll apart from a tiny, insignificant pile of whitish ashes. There was a disgusting stench in the air like burning flesh and rubber tires skidding over an asphalt road when a heavy vehicle tried to brake.
She imagined she could hear a scream, as though the doll had protested against being killed by fire at last.
The flames inside her cheered and swelled in pride and licked their lips and wanted more.
Scrambling to her feet, she picked up her bag, threw a last shocked glance at the ash pile, and bolted.
Felicia ran as fast as she could down the lonely street where the street lights were slowly blinking on in the dusk, never once looking back.
What had she done?
Chapter 8