Fire Spirit by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page B

birthday, and I invited some of his old classmates from school, but what I didn’t realize was that he couldn’t stand the sight of them – any of them. What a disaster that was! Ten men with their arms folded, glaring at each other for four hours. They almost came to blows.’
    Amelia said nothing, but sat with her arms tightly folded and her lips pouting. Ruth reached across and stroked a stray lock of her hair, winding it around her finger.
    â€˜Ammy, you know you’re different. But that’s what makes you who you are, and I love who you are. I wouldn’t want you any other way.’
    â€˜Signal’s green,’ said Ammy. The car behind them blew its horn and Ruth lifted her hand in apology.
    While their meat feast pizzas were heating up in the oven, Ruth took her camera out of its case and looked through the photographs she had taken at the house on South McCann Street. She skipped quickly past the flash-lit images of the victim lying on the mattress, and the victim’s black-charred hand with its wedding-band, and the smoke-stained walls, until she reached the series of pictures she had taken of the crowd outside.
    The very last photograph should have shown the dark-haired boy in the faded T-shirt and the worn-out red jeans, standing in the middle of the sidewalk. But there was nobody there, only the empty street, lined with trees.
    She frowned, and went through the pictures again to see if she had missed one. She was sure that she had caught the boy in her viewfinder, but he simply wasn’t there. She switched off her camera and put it away.
    Amelia came into the kitchen. ‘ You look serious,’ she said, in a high-pitched voice. ‘Is everything all right?’
    â€˜Yes, of course. Supper’s going to be ready in a minute.’
    â€˜That fire you went to today . . .’
    â€˜Yes?’
    â€˜Did somebody die?’
    Ruth nodded. ‘Yes. We don’t know who yet. It was probably some down-and-out.’
    â€˜I had such a horrible feeling about it.’
    â€˜Yes. I was going to ask you about that. What kind of horrible feeling?’
    Ammy thought for a moment, and then she made a pulling gesture with her right hand as if she were opening an invisible door. ‘I don’t know. I felt like people were coming in. People who should have stayed where they were.’
    â€˜What people? I don’t really understand what you mean.’
    â€˜There’s lots of them. Some of them are very faint so you can hardly see them. But others have very white faces.’
    â€˜Was this a dream you had?’ Ruth asked her. She was used to Amelia describing her feelings in unusual ways. When she had a migraine, she said that somebody had smashed a mirror in her head.
    â€˜No, it wasn’t a dream. It was when Uncle Jack called you. I had a feeling that all these people had started to come in. That’s why I didn’t want you to go.’
    Ruth said, ‘Come here,’ and gave Amelia a hug. ‘It wasn’t very nice. I mean, whoever it was who died, they were very badly burned. But there were no faint people there, or people with white faces.’
    But then she thought about the dark-haired boy, who had been so faint that he hadn’t even appeared in her photograph.
    Craig didn’t arrive home until well past eight o’clock. He stood in the kitchen doorway with a frown on his face, as if he wasn’t at all sure that he was in the right house.
    Ruth was wiping the place mats. ‘You want pizza?’ she asked him. ‘Ammy and I, we’ve had ours. God knows what time Jeff’s going to be home.’
    â€˜I, ah – I’m not too hungry at the moment. I’ll wait for Jeff.’
    He dragged out a chair from under the kitchen table and sat down heavily.
    â€˜You’ve been drinking,’ said Ruth.
    â€˜You think? Oh – I forgot. You’re an arson investigator. You have a nose