Behind the Fire: A Dark Thriller (8 page)

Was he the only spectator to this?

Bobby checked up and down the road. He was alone. Just him and the silence. And that wasn’t right. Something the quarter size of a house with winds of this speed should make noise. This made nothing.

Suddenly, the sound of curtains flapping violently entered his consciousness. Where silence had been, now the snapping of material fighting against the wind filled the air. Just as it had been wrongly silent before, now the horrific sounds were eerily amplified to the point where his ears began to ache.

The thing seemed to be solidifying. As it did, the house reemerged. The face now hung in front of the house and no longer appeared emerging from the structure, with the waving curtains resembling a veil at the back of the thing. Despite the movement before him, Bobby now felt only a slight breeze from where he stood.

What the hell was happening here?

Bobby was uncertain what action to take. Should he run and get help or sprint toward the house? If people were inside they may be trapped. Calling the police seemed the best plan.

He reached for his phone in his jeans’ pocket, wondering what the hell he would say. As he did, he realized clutched in his grip were his cigarettes and lighter. With everything happening, he had crushed the packet. The cigarettes were mangled beyond use. He shoved them and the lighter into his jacket pocket.

As he did, a thought stopped him from pulling out his phone. He retrieved the lighter, quizzically staring at it before looking back at the black thing. The arms or nubs, or whatever those things were, had thickened. They now resembled the trunk of a small tree and stretched almost fifteen feet—halfway to the curb.

He looked down at the lighter again, and re-evaluated the idea of calling the police. Swimming into his mind was the image of the torn slip of paper that had brought him here. The word on the back of the paper fixed itself in his mind.

Could it mean something?

He glanced up to see the knotted, stretched appendages pulling on the air as though grasping for handholds in the empty space. The thing heaved its head forward; the face now clear enough for him to see the definite outline of a nose, but a hollow, inverted, sickly looking thing. It looked vaguely human, but nothing about the eyes was human.

Like the hole from which it emerged, the eyes were dark pits; the difference being they were filled with flickers of a churning red glow. If the hole could suck all light and sound into its blackness, these eyes could devour all reason.

Later, when Bobby looked back on this moment, he never could understand why he did what he did next. In that instant, he did think of the kids and Em safely tucked up at home. He did remember feeling anger at this thing with no business entering their world. He wondered if it was indeed a latent instinct to act, to fight, even though he might be in terrible danger.

Whatever the reason, he was compelled forward when his next move should have been to get as far away as possible. Before he’d clearly thought it through, he left the safety of the curb and stood before the house, only mere feet from the thing.

Up close it looked like one of those fancy holograms, he’d seen at last summer’s traveling carnival. Parts of it, though, were almost solid. Somehow he understood if it became whole, it would be too late to stop it from coming through. It seemed oblivious to him, consumed with freeing itself into this world like a furious butterfly emerging from a hellish cocoon.

The curtains blew wildly, shredding themselves as the force of the wind beat them against the window frame. Surely any moment now they would fly off their rods. The wind whipped savagely about him, tearing at his clothes.

He didn’t know why he did it or, even more importantly, how he knew to do it, but Bobby grabbed hold of one of the curtains, just to the side of the thing. The material flailed in his grip like a trapped wild animal. His heart pounded at being so close to this alien thing even if it didn’t seem aware of him. He didn’t know how long it would ignore him and he didn’t want to find out.

Holding the curtain taut, he brought the lighter up to the bottom edge and flicked the starter. The flame faltered, and he wondered if the wind would extinguish his plans. His fears were correct. Each time he ignited a flame, the current of air snuffed it out.

Frantically he looked around, searching the yard, until he spotted a trashcan to the side of the house. Within three strides, he stood over it and whipped the lid away. Inside were several large plastic bags of litter. He heaved two bags up and out, pulling them open to peer inside to find a mixture of paper and scraps. It would have to do.

Flicking the lighter again, he placed the flame against some balled-up paper inside one bag. It caught immediately. He did the same with the other. Turning back, he rushed toward the window holding the two bags out from his body as the flames, fed by the combustible trash inside, caught and grew.

Back in front of the window, he placed one of the bags in the sill under the curtain and threw the other inside the house. Now, instead of working against him, the wind fanned the flames. Within seconds, yellow-white licks of fire began crawling up the curtains.

The black thing seemed oblivious to the small fires, while it only took moments for the flickering buds to bloom into larger flames. The wooden window frame quickly caught alight. Then the fire danced across to the curtains on the other side. In moments, the entire window was ablaze, the wood crackling and fizzing with the unexpected heat. With each second, the blaze grew stronger and more intense.

That was when the thing reacted.

To Bobby it gave the impression of backing away. Its black, bulky body, which had been desperately attempting to move through the dark hole, began to melt.

Bobby raced across the street, his footfalls echoing loudly up the silent street. Every few steps he glanced over his shoulder. In his haste, he tripped on the gutter, dividing the house’s front lawn from the road. He felt himself begin to topple over, but just managed to rebalance himself. He wasn’t certain how safe he was on this side either, but the distance gave him some sense of security.

His mind raced.

What if it was backing up into the hole only to launch itself through?

What if the fire transformed it into one big, ugly, unpredictable version of an angry hornet?

What if it realized he was the one who had scuttled its plans and it wasn’t happy?

Of course, the biggest question—
what the hell had he just seen?

If a heart could beat itself right out of a chest, his would be on the ground in two seconds. His breath came in short, painful pants, his throat so constricted from fear and smoke he could barely pull enough oxygen into his lungs. Bobby braced himself, ready to run if the thing came at him.

The face, which now rapidly expanded and contracted, shrank and merged back into the dark hole. With each second, it lost more definition and the face and body of the thing quickly faded into the dense darkness from which it had sprung.

A sudden roar, like a steam engine passing by at full speed, rushed toward Bobby. He could neither dodge the blast nor prepare for its impact. It knocked him backward onto the grass. He hit the ground hard. His first thought was the black thing or the house had exploded. His right arm flew up to cover his face and shield his head against an attack.

Nothing came. When he slowly pulled his arm down and looked toward the house, the face was gone. All that remained was a normal house and a normal window.

The only difference from before was the insatiable fire. Fueled by the house’s dry timber, the flames leaped wildly, quickly spreading to the roof.

A fire now out of control.

A fire Bobby had lit.

He watched as the flames consumed twenty-six Connolly Street—which only thirty minutes ago for him was a random address on a piece of paper. His heart pounded even more wildly than the advance of the fire.

Who would believe this story?

A swirling black hole. A giant face. Mr. Average and a mysterious scrap of paper. As he stared bug-eyed at the havoc caused so quickly by the fire, it even sounded crazy to him.

He needed to get away. Figure out what to do, and what to say if he’d been seen and the police should come knocking on his door. He jumped to his feet and began to run, faster than he’d ever run before in his life. Until he stood at his front door, bending and panting and clutching at the aching stitch in his side, he hadn’t realized blood dripped from his hand and red smears stained his shirt.

Unfurling his palm he saw he still clutched the lighter, now smeared with his blood. He’d gripped it so hard the metal cover had broken, leaving a sharp edge above the flint. The jagged edges of the metal had dug right into his skin, leaving a deep gash in his palm. As the adrenaline drained from his system, the wound began to throb.

The pain and blood didn’t bother him, and neither did the ache in his side from running a mile with barely a breath. What bothered him, what filled him with dread as he placed his key in the lock, was the list, which had led him to twenty-six Connolly Street.

Thirteen addresses were on the list and, including tonight, only four were dated in the past.

Chapter 10

Bobby stared at the sheet of paper. It had been over two weeks since he’d encountered the
black thing
, as he now thought of it. Two weeks of his brain replaying those moments outside that house. No matter which way he ran the events—backward, forward, and around again—none of it made sense.

He’d tried to contact Mr. Average—Scott Bennett was his name. He’d left a wrong number and a fake address. No surprises there.

So here he was again, at almost two-thirty in the morning—pretending to Em he was at a colleague’s send-off—outside an address written on that cursed piece of paper. If only he’d thrown it away like he usually did with customers’ trash, he’d be none the wiser. He certainly would not be sitting out here in the dead of night waiting to see if the black thing would show up.

This time he was at the end of West Road, which turned out to be a twenty-minute drive from town to the site of an abandoned mine.

He had climbed a ten-foot mesh fence to get to the exact co-ordinates from the paper. A notice board perched on a rusted, worn metal post near where he’d landed on the other side of the fence, warned of the dangers of entering the mine area. A hefty fine would be imposed if you were caught.

Yeah, right, who patrolled out here?

If not for the sign, nobody would even suspect it was a mine. Scattered about the area, dozens of weathered and eroded wood boards made it look more like a dump than anything else. This, he realized after a reconnaissance, was mostly due to the collapse of the mine entrance, blocked partially by rocks and debris. Now, little more than a hole in a small hill. The coordinates led him just a few yards shy of the opening.

After more than one hundred years of digging into the ground for the coal that ran in long seams below, these were reminders of the hard slog endured by men decades before. A couple of sites had become tourist attractions. What was attractive about walking around in an underground blast hole remained a mystery to him.

Mining, once a backbreaking operation performed by gangs of soot stained, weary men, had become mostly automated. The new underground work groups were small. As technology evolved, megacorporations found new ways to reach isolated pockets and recover minerals, which only a few years before had been unreachable.

Tonight the moon shone like a big bright torch, which was of great assistance in Bobby’s scouting mission. He checked the surrounding area thoroughly, but he wasn’t certain what he was actually looking for. Still it gave him something to do. Took his mind off the knot growing in his stomach every time he checked his watch.

What would happen here at 2.32:51 a.m.?

The same thing, which occurred at twenty-six Connolly Street?

He hoped not.

He dropped down on a large flat rock a short distance from the mine entrance and spent the remaining few minutes checking and rechecking his equipment.

His father—who had profound words for everything—would say, “Common sense, determination, and ‘Heaven’s Luck’ are all you need.”

Bobby wondered if “Heaven’s luck” stretched to alien, black things.

As he sat waiting, he compulsively patted his watch and wondered why the black thing picked these destinations. What did a house in the suburbs have in common with an abandoned coal mine? Why was middle-of-nowhere Karlgarin the perfect spot to touchdown or crossover or whatever that thing was trying to do?

Again he checked his bag. Wrenching the zipper open, he cringed as the sound of it seemed frighteningly like a siren in this empty, rock-strewn space where nature was slowly reclaiming its property, bush by bush, tree by tree.

Quietly as he could, he pulled out his weapons, nervously wondering if any of these items could be called a defense. Cigarette lighter times two. Box of matches. Box of Heat Beads. Old newspapers, rolled. Two-liter bottle of kerosene. Small fire extinguisher (which he really wished he’d had at Connolly Street).