Episode 4: Tyger, Tyger

*Click, whirring*

Luca: So.  This one is… I don’t know where to start.  The briefing they gave me on this one was… a lot.

Ok, I guess, here: a criminal outfit was using an abandoned building, an old mill I believe, for a meth cooking operation.  

A fire broke out.

When they cleared the building, and this was days later, the fire was incredibly hot and from what I am hearing it would just not go out, everything was a melted slag heap.

Voncid:  Except him.

Investigator: Yeah.  They found him inside the rubble, unburned, unblemished, well mostly, (pause as he checks the notes) yeah, the report says… there (pointing) you can see his lower left abdomen looks swollen, maybe some kind of internal bleeding?

Voncid:  He started the fire.

Luca: Pardon?

Voncid:  the dead naked man on the slab there.  He started the fire in that building.  I can smell the hunger all over him.  He did it on purpose… How many people died?

Luca: Yeah, well that’s the thing, a lot.  This fire they think a dozen or so died in the building, hard to tell as hot as it ran, but sparks and cinders…

There was a high wind and this was southern California so…

Voncid:  my god,it was that fire?

Luca: The start of it.

Voncid:  Well… Something tells me this reclamation will need to be fully compelled.  I will learn what I can.  As the body is in fine shape there will be only minimal preparation required.  Let's see what he has to say for himself.

*We hear the sound of restraints.  Water being poured over the deceased to bind his powers.  Then the strike of a chime to call his spirit back.  The chime reverberates into a chorus of whispers and Tanner awakes.*

Tanner: *whispered hoarsely*  tyger… tyger… burning… mmmm. Wow.  What a rush.

Voncid:  State your name.

Tanner:  hmm?  I’m… Tanner Davies, oh, but here I’ll do you one better, I’ll state your name too.  You’re Owen Voncid.

Voncid:  You know me?

Tanner: They do.  They told me all about you.

Voncid:  I see.  *Uninterested in engaging this way*  Tell me about the fire.

Tanner:  Fire.  Firrrrre.  Oh my, fire is everything.  Fire is mankind’s best friend.  Its savior.  

Most primitive cultures worshiped the sun right?  

Well doctors say… doctors say… we should eat like cavemen, and exercise like cavemen, because we are basically them right?  Science and technologies have outpaced US right?  We haven’t kept up in the body, so you should eat like them, and if we use technology to avoid work you get fat right?  

Well I think maybe our soul is like that.  

*Increasingly excited*

I think society has gotten ahead of our souls…

Early man worshiped the sun, and I think they got that right too.

Voncid: I am not… at all… interested in your philosophies.  You are a murderer, I am not giving you air to speak to hear your ideas, I have dredged you from your journey towards realms of regret to learn the why, how and, what and then to send you back.

Tanner: I’m happy to talk to you, but I’m going to tell it my way.

Voncid: You’ll do as commanded, dead man.  I’ll have it out of you even if I need to squeeze it free.

We hear a light crackling, a buzz of angry hornets as Voncid applies pressure.

Tanner:  *blurting*

Fire saved me. *Through clenched teeth* It covered up for me after I killed her.

Voncid: There we are.  The beginning of the tale I’m after emerges… and withr only a light pressure.

Tanner: I had always been fascinated, maybe a little obsessed with fire… I liked to burn things as a kid, but after it saved me… after that I worshiped it.  

My first wife… she was difficult… but I liked her fine.

But then we had this bad week…

She found stuff on my computer, stuff she didn’t understand.  Crime scene pictures of fires.

She thought I was sick, screamed about it, that it was illegal to have some of it, or how it should be.  I tried to explain, but that just made it worse.

How could she get it?  I’d been studying the beauty of what fire does to flesh for decades, had seen it first hand when I sent the barn full of cows up that Christmas in ‘91.

I tried to explain, but she was just too dense…

*Earnestly*

 I tried explaining that all life comes from the sun , and all life came from heat and fire… metal, the combustion engine, fuck, cooked food?  Guns and hypersonic missiles and GRASS man, EVERYTHING comes from fire.

I just… I wanted to know it.  To know fire.

It just made her madder.  She didn’t get it… but in the end, I guess, she helped me.

Because she wouldn’t stop screaming.

Screaming at me and asking all these questions that I did not want to answer. I… hit her.  I don’t know what I was thinking, I didn’t want to hurt her, just for her to be quiet, to stop.

But then, there she was, laying there, 

*Slowly*

The red just spreading and spreading.

I tried… I guess I was really loopy, but I tried like scooping it back in.  Crazy.

That’s what I’m saying, she made me crazy.

It was quiet, like I wanted, but it didn’t help, it was just worse now.  People were going to find out.  I was going to go away forever, nobody would believe I didn’t mean to do it.

I 

*he takes a long pause.  Makes sounds like he is thinking.  He is honestly trying to remember but is unable.*

I’, not really sure what happened next.  The next thing I can really remember the whole house smelled like gasoline, kerosene, oil, accelerants. I’m covered head to toe.  The whole house is soaked.  Honestly I sort of turned off, but it was the fire that kicked me back awake.  The little dancing fire at the end of the match at the end of my fingertips.

It was like an orange and yellow eye peering out at me.  It could see me.

I could see it.  

And I dropped the match.

*Speaking faster, almost manic*

The fire just streaked through the house.  It was so beautiful.  Like a flower that blooms and blooms, petal after petal, never stopping, always more petals.

The fire was all over me, all the fuel caught and eaten up, blue and white like waves, but, not me.  I could feel how hot it was, but I wouldn’t catch.  My skin should have curled and swirled and the muscle should have snapped and peeled, but I was… just… warm.

The house started to fall to pieces and a big crash from behind me scared me back into my body and I ran.  I stood on the lawn and just watched, dumfounded, as that little flame, my tiny little witness, grew and grew and reached for the sky.

*More pensive* 

It was a long time before I realized just how much the fire had done for me.  The coroner's report, of … shit what was her name?  My wife… don’t look at me like that, I’m not  insensitive as that, it's just it’s always hard to remember the sacrifices, that’s what she was, a sacrifice, I get that now.  Sandy, that’s it, Sandy’s autopsy actually helped get me off the hook.  I know for a fact that she was not alive when that fire started.  Not breathing, skull just…*Tanner makes a squishing sound* 

 I KNOW she wasn’t alive.

But the autopsy showed that she had been alive during the fire.  Cause of death was ruled as smoke inhalation.  Skull, totally intact.  All I could think was the fire had sealed it back shut somehow?

*Excited again*

And investigators didn’t find any evidence of foul play.  No accelerant residue.  Said the pattern of the burn was consistent with a lightning strike… and hadn’t there been a lotta rolling lightning that night?  Started quite a few fires all over the county.

My neighbors said they saw me pull up to the house after the fire had already started, I never even had to make anything up myself.

It was a miracle.

*his breathing picks up*

I didn’t get how it… how the fire had done it at first, but I think I have figured it out mostly now.

Lightning, smoke snakes crawling into lungs, heat mirages… You’d be shocked what the fire can do for you. 

*With reverence*

 If you stoke it properly.

*Catches his breath*

All my dreams after that were of fire.  The big one that’s everywhere and in everything and  its shadow that’s always just behind it.  The heat and the heat-death.  The bloom and the binding.  The glow and the gloam.

It’s nearly impossible to tell you.  Dreams were the right place for them to find me and show me.  Words won’t ever do it.

A grinding brightness with a well of night all around it… a searing blackness with a long burning bright shadow.

*Something shatters softly*

Voncid:  I don’t need any more of your proselytizing for the twins.  The facts of your actions. Now.

Tanner:  I dreamed of the two that are everything and more and more I could feel the fire in my bones.  

The dreams, they kindled in my mind the strangest notion…

When I was a boy, I went with my grandfather to a casino.  I was to be shoved off into the arcade, not with any money mind you, just to watch the other children play while he played his own sort of game in front of blinking lights.  On the way we stopped for gas.  He lit a cigarette on the lighter in the car and got out to pump.  I was curious so I picked up the lighter and looked into it, watching the thin coil in the center turn from orange to dull red and then back to coal black.  Being a child, I assumed the bright color retreating meant that it was no longer hot, and the coil had the most intriguing texture, and I had always had an obsession with textures, specifically in and around my mouth…

This early attempt at fire eating was not bad enough to need a hospital visit, but it surfaced again in my mind.

I stoked a roaring bonfire.

Stared into the embers and coals, watching them turn to rubies.

The fire had saved me, let me keep my freedom.

Wasn’t it worthy of my trust?

*Something shatters softly*

I picked a large coal out of the fire.  Ran my fingers over a texture unlike anything I had ever felt, smooth and powder and crackling… I could hear the water in my fingers sizzling and evaporating…

I opened my mouth…

I popped the ruby inside.

*Hissing*

It hissed like a snake against my tongue, filling my mouth with steam that poured out my nose…

I crunched the burning wood, now brittle as glass in between my teeth.

*Eerie music begins*

It hurt, but I felt no pain.

It burned but every taste bud remained.  I was not injured, I was not maimed.

I could feel warmth spreading out from my core as I swallowed.

I was not just then, thereafter, fire or heat never again harmed me.

I spent night after night holding my hand over a candle-flame, marveling at how no matter how the sensation of searing ate at my fingertips, it never burned them, never damaged the flesh.

How the fire danced with me.

Inside the heat I could feel a hunger.

I had been blessed.

Blessed by a god.  Man’s first god.  Fire.

And god’s…

God’s hunger.  For sacrifice. 

The first one was a warehouse.  I broke in, danced around the men working late, leaving my own special mixture of kerosene and gasoline all around as I went. Like a, like a burning slug.

I left chains on the doors at the front and back.

It felt like the inside of a furnace in minutes.

The rattling of the chains as the men…  *Corrects himself* the sacrifices shook them, trying to escape was the most thrilling of instruments. After awhile it had a percussion. 

*Chains rattle*

Do you hear it?  Listen close I could swear I hear it now.

I had often wondered, when a building burns down, how do they ever find the bodies among the char and the ash?  Now, well I don’t have enough case studies to be sure, but in my experience the victims are always in the same place, near an exit, just feet or inches from safety, on the other side of a locked door, or a sealed window…

But not me.  

*overwhelmed*

It was… thrilling.  Like seeing the sunrise for the first time.  The colors, you just wouldn’t believe.  The blaze twisted and writhed in such otherworldly shapes. A window above would burst and the new oxygen would send everything shifting and swaying, and the colors were more vivid by the second.  I stood at the heart of that scorching crucible and watched the walls turn red and orange and white hot.

There are so many things that humans never get to see, or feel.  But I was blessed, here I took in a sight no one had ever seen and lived to tell of.  

The next was a church.  This time I had to bring my own kindling.  I took the pastor as he headed for his car after an evening service, first in, last out.

He shouted to the fading lights of his flock as they disappeared down the road, but none of them looked back and saw me dragging him inside.

I had doused myself in accelerant.

I grappled and dragged him into the building.  He started to shout when he smelled the lighter fluid all over me.

The candles on the altar lit themselves as we approached, and when he saw that he started to pray.

A heathen prayer to his sleeping god.

I set us ablaze and taught him a new one.

I watched the stained glass windows melt from within the church and walked out a hole in the back when the fire department arrived.

I felt stronger and stronger the more I sacrificed.  The more I witnessed the fire from the inside.

I started to breathe flames into existence.  I don’t know how, but I knew I could.  I breathed a flame into a rundown home that was across the street from my family home growing up.

I willed it and breathed heat and flame into my memories of it and sure enough the next day I drove past it and it was a smoldering ruin.

I breathed fire into an image I watched on tv.  A reporter stood in front of a chemical factory discussing something about climate change, which she said as if  warming of the planet was a bad thing.  I watched her and was taken with a notion, a spark of thought.  I no longer fought these sparks, even for a moment.  I… I think in a way I am the accelerant now?  The fire is the substance, and the sacrifices are the fuel, I am the kindling…

I breathed onto the glass of my television, *loud exhale* breathed heat out into the image… and watched as the building behind her and all the toxic volatile chemicals within it erupted like a volcano.

It burst windows of houses nearly a mile away from the factory.

It pitched fragments into the clouds.

I can see you don’t believe me.  Or maybe that you hate me, I’ve admittedly never been very good at reading faces, even less so now.

Voncid:  Tell me how it ended.

Tanner:  *Nearly a whisper* Who says it's over?

Voncid:  I do.  Tell me how you died.

Tanner: *Matter of fact*   Oh that.  I wish it were a more epic story.  I wish it was more like fireworks.

I heard a story, I can’t remember where exactly.  It was about meth labs, or more specifically, how flammable they are.

“You’ve never seen fire like that,” the someone said.

Well.  I mean.  They were singing my song.

It wasn’t difficult to find one, but getting in was trickier.  I had some luck making people burst into flames by wanting it, but it was pretty hit or miss still.  People had a sort of… density.  Maybe it's all the water?

Voncid: You’re wanting the fire, is combated by their not wanting to burn.

Tanner: ah, that makes sense.  It was always easier to get drunks to pop. *Laughs*  it's because the booze dulled their will.  HAHAHa, I can’t believe it, I thought it was because of the blood alcohol level makes them more flammable.

Ahh, *Clears his throat* anyways, I didn’t want to rely on that to save me if I got caught, this place I wanted to go in to pray, it was very much a working facility for these biker types.  The building looked hollowed out and abandoned during the day, but these guys on motorcycles escorted a big van or two out of there every night, moving the product.

I watched the place for days trying to think of how I’d get in without getting shot.

It wasn’t enough to just burn the place, I wanted to be inside when it went up, to see this new kind of flame.  I wanted to sacrifice and pray in the fire.

It was my dreams. They showed me how.

Across from this old seemingly abandoned building was a dry field.  I stood in the field and began my prayer.  Stripped off my clothes and watched the moon rise, red, orange, and big.  The fire started in the wet brush, and a plume of smoke began to rise.  The wind changed direction and the smoke, thicker and thicker began to blow across the road…

The woman I used for kindling spent her life into the smoke and heat and… then it happened… a miracle, a miracle I had willed to be.

I came apart within the smoke.

I drifted and billowed across the road and down the hill and into the cracks and crevices of the building and then I pulled back into myself in an agonizing creak of bone and a splash of blood on the floor.  You see, not all of me was together when I came back out of the smoke… some of my organs I think were still smoke and were out of place…

I had been so excited, I think I lost my focus.

Still.

They were right about the very special nature of those chemical flames.  They were beautiful.  Liquid, quicksilver, sticky hot… like how I imagine napalm is, *longingly* oh, I wish I could stand in napalm…

The building roared in moments, starting the fire was shockingly easy and accelerants weren’t even needed.

The sacrifices came running in of their own accord, trying to save the product, *laughs* save the cash!

I danced with the fire, made sure it cut off any escape.  It was quite a feast…

But I had over done it.  I felt something in my stomach… wet and heavy, blotting out the fire.  I got dizzy and I fell down… *Resigned* I guess I never got back up.

I feel like I should say I had regrets… but I have none. 

I am not a violent person, not really…

*sees Voncid’d disapproval of that statement*

I don’t revel in hurting people, it’s… it’s… feeding it, it’s holy.

*pauses to think*

Say one day you came across a tiger.  The tiger is old, but impossibly beautiful and regal and has always known man, there have always been tigers, tigers and man, and you could not have one without the other, man would be a totally different shape without them.  

And this beautiful tiger.

It’s hungry.

So, you let the goat into the pen, and the tiger does what the tiger does.  

Someone could say you killed the goat.

But they would be just as right to say you fed your tiger.  

Well that’s, that’s what I did.  I fed my tiger.

Tyger.  Tyger.  Burning bright.

In the forests of the night; 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies? 

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

 *Laughing* 

Voncid:  *Angrily* That’s enough.

Luca:  I… what was that.  Was he crazy?  *pauses, realizing the alternative is far worse*

Was he telling the truth?

Voncid:  He was quite mad.  So truth will be a moving target, however… the evil is undeniable.

Luca: What the hell do we do with him?

Voncid: I think cremation to be the most fitting end.  I will see if I can remove his body's unnatural protection from flame, and then we will see how excited he is to feed that beautiful tiger of his.

*Click*