Halloweeny story

It was supposed to have been clear and dry. It was also supposed to have been a night of fun, candy, silly costumes and general hi-jinks.

"This sucks." Randy grouched as he poked the smoldering lumps of what had been a fairly nice house with a pike pole. We were both going over the remains of the house, poking and prodding the various lumps and clumps of unknown and now unknowable objects trying to be sure they didn't have enough spark left in them to cause what is called a "re-kindle".

"Agreed." I grumped back. All that candy. Sitting there on my kitchen table. I glanced up at the clouds scudding past the crescent moon and began to feel the pounds adding themselves to my butt and thighs. I knew that if I didn't give that candy away somehow I would eat it myself. I've been poor to often to be able to force myself to throw anything labeled 'food' away. Even something that held that label as loosely as the high fat, high sugar goodies waiting inside the old plastic pumpkin.

"Have you heard anything about the family? The ones that lived here?" Randy rattled on. I wished he'd just shut the hell up. I was cold, I was wet, I was tired. All I wanted to do was go home, wash off the house fire stink and crawl into my nice warm bed. Something, I grimaced at the thought, that this family would be doing in a strange motel on the Red Cross's dime tonight. I mentioned as much to Randy.

He didn't answer.

I looked up from where I was carefully placing my fire boots to get ready to pull open the freezer of the fire blackened fridge where it lay on it's side. There was likely nothing in it but thawed out formally frozen meats and veggies and other assorted goodies. Possibly some melted chocolates that were to have been handed out tonight. "Randy?"

Randy was standing no more than five feet from me. He had left off his helmet and pulled his nomex hood down around his neck. His bunker jacket was laying over on the hood of the booster truck under his helmet so I could see how pale his face suddenly was in the harsh light of the lamps that'd been set up to light our way. "D-Did you see that?"

"See what?" I sighed standing up from where I had bent down by the toppled fridge.

"Over there, by what's left of the chimney! A-a mist of some kind."

"Rannndyyy." I sighed. "Cut out the Halloween crap, okay. I'd rather be at home handing out candy or telling ghost stories now too, but..."

I paused in my ill humored rant to look where he pointed.

Now, I know that many of you have never been involved in what firefighters refer to as 'overhaul'. It's where we go over the area that's burnt, whatever it is, and try to make double sure that the fire is totally, completely and permanently out. Plus we will rarely find a family treasure of some kind that will give some kind of comfort to folks who've lost a lot. Might be a photo album that something else fell on top of protecting it from the fire or one of those 'fire proof safes' that actually worked. Frankly that was one reason I was checking the fridge. Some folks stash their really important stuff in the freezer figuring that it being so cold and generally air tight it should survive a house fire. Anyway, there is almost always still some smoke and steam left at such a site for hours after all the flashing lights and firefighters have left.

Randy was staring, gap jawed, at something that I would have liked to think was just one more whiff of damp smoke and steam. It looked like just that. Except... except it was shaped like a man. A man who was moving purposely and steadily. As Randy and I watched the figure pantomimed starting a fire in the fireplace and then transferring something from it first to where a nearby window had been decorated with curtains and then to an area above the contorted springs and still smoldering wood of a couch before going on to where a second window had been.

I'm fairly sure we were both slack jawed as we watched the wispy form move toward what had been the kitchen...meaning that it had to pass between us on it's way to where the back porch still stood.

We both turned to watch the form go through the motions of opening and closing a door that was no longer there before walking down the steps and apparently getting into an invisible car before it just faded away.

"Y-yuh-" Randy gulped, "You saw that to?" he whispered.

"Don't wanna say so," I said after swallowing several times, " But, yeah, I did." We looked at each other for a few seconds more until Randy gulped again. Then he said, "I don't think this is gonna flare up again."

"Yeah," I shivered as I answered, "This is out, for sure. The storm that came through just before the fire wet everything down good so it definitely won't go anywhere even if it dose flare back up."

"Yeah, lets get out of here. Maybe we'll be in time to help the others finish cleaning the hoses from the engine, or at least help put them back on the truck. Huh."

"Yeah." I agreed as I frowned at the place where the specter had dissipated. "I'll just open this freezer and make sure there's nothing important in it, first. You go start taking down the lights."

In the freezer amongst the melted ice cream, still nearly raw meat and limp veggies was a gallon size plastic freezer bag with a thick brown legal size envelope in it. "Ah Hah!" I thought to myself.

Randy was strapping down the portable generator and I was stacking the last of the portable lights beside it when the tones came over the trucks radio.

"Report of a one car rollover on FM 2652 near county road 321," the radio told us.

"Well, hell," I groused. "That sounds like it's between here and the station."

"Yeah, There's a tight turn there. I came out with the tanker and we hadda slow down a lot before we could take it."

As we climbed into the booster we heard our med truck, engine and tanker call in route over the radio. We did the same as we pulled out. The ghostie that had chased us away from the burnt house was forgotten as we headed towards our fellows and the one car roll over.

Just as I suspect we both feared Randy and I got there first. We both slid out and headed for the car that was off the road with it's headlights pointed toward a tangle of trees across the ditch.
"Are you alright, Sir?" I asked the man leaning against the front fender of the small sports car.

"I'm fine." The pale man gritted. "I'm in a hell of a lot better shape than the guy in there!" he waved toward where his headlights pointed. "I just went off the road a little cause I was going to damn fast for the wet road. That poor sum-bitch," he shook, his head. "God Almighty, I swear he breathed his last as I walked up on him."

"Here, why don't you just sit down in your car, Sir. Our med unit is on the way as well as an ambulance." I said opening his car door and gently trying to get him to sit. "We want you to move as little as possible now, just in case there have been injuries you don't realize you have yet."

Randy had left me with the first victim and gone on into the tangle of trees, to check out the vehicle we could see now only because of the headlights of the car.

When he came out he was pale and I knew it would be a bad one. He went directly to the truck and called in what we had found over the radio. Soon the members of our Volunteer Department who were far more medically inclined than I would ever be arrived and relieved me of holding c-spine on the first victim. A couple of them had gone into the short tunnel another vehicle had burrowed into the dense tree line and come out shaking their heads.

I was headed out to the highway to help with traffic control - there's never any traffic until you need a clear road- when Randy came up beside me. He was still pale and I began to wonder if maybe he'd gotten a little dehydrated while we were overhauling the fire scene. "Katy," his voice was a husky whisper, "Come with me. It's gruesome as all git out but I have to have you see this."

"Look, Randy," I told him, "There's a reason I avoid the medical stuff. The only time I can handle the gore and stuff is when it's on the T. V. and I know it's SPFX."

"Katy." His voice became a plea, "I just want you to look at his face. You have got to see his face!"

Something about Randy's grim demeanor pulled me along with him. We climbed over broken and shattered tree limbs. The scent of their fresh sap only slightly dimmed by the rain that had pelted them either just after or even, perhaps as, they had been shattered. I quickly noted another, metallic scent that overlay the earthy oders of torn trees and turned soil.

"Look." Randy urged, and fearing what I would see I did.

I was very glad that this had occurred either before or during the heavy rain storm, whose lightening we had blamed the house fire on. The smell remained but the blood was mostly gone. There would have been blood. Lots of it. Some how this victim had managed to go air born out of his convertible. He'd likely decided he didn't need a seat belt. His car had pushed up a wall of broken and splintered tree limbs and now it's driver hung above the carcass of his vehicle impaled on several of those broken limbs.

"Look at his face, Katy! Look at his face!" Randy urged and I managed to tear my horrified vision away from the pieces of wood that protruded from places they should never be to look at the surprised, bloodless face that was a twin to the grinning continence of the ethereal image that had frightened Randy and I from the fire scene.

"Katy," Randy asked, "Dose it look like him? Dose it look like the spook we saw at the house?"

When I was finely able to convince my self to breath the wind had changed slightly and flowed over the corps and toward us. We both caught the scent at the same time. A scent any fire fighter, paid or volunteer knows intimately. We volunteers ofter wear it home to wash it off in our own showers. It sometimes takes two soakings to get it out of your hair if you have a lot as I do. And forget your cloths. Even protected by bunker gear they get permeated with it. They have to be washed in hot soapy water before the stink of a house fire can be gotten out.

The man hanging dead against those busted up trees smelled like he'd been in a house fire.

"I asked, Eric." Randy mentioned our chief medic. "He said this guy couldn't have died instantly as none of those limbs look like they go through anything vital. He probably bled out and it likely took a couple of hours."

"That house was down in an hour and a half." I stated grimly. "A half hour after that we were overhauling it."

"Yeah, and the guy who found this fella. He said he thought he died just as he found him and that was maybe fifteen minutes or so before he was able to find his cell phone and call 911."

"You want me to admit that what we saw was this guy's spirit reliving setting fire to that house?"

"I don't know. Maybe, just maybe, the fella wanted to confess somehow, y'know. And this was the only way he could. We need to say something to the coroner, the chief or somebody so there will be an investigation."

"Yeah," I nodded slowly. "But what."

We finely figured a way. We told the chief we'd gone in to find a way to get the body out after the coroner got done and that we'd smelled house fire smoke on the guy. The chief told the coroner and included info about a house fire not more than a mile down the road.

Two weeks later it was all over the local newspapers about how some hot shot developer had been trying to buy out the folks who owned the house that had burned. The stories went on to point out that when the developer couldn't get the county officials to go along with his plan to pull 'eminate domain' out of a hat to snatch the property he'd hired an arsonist from a nearby big city. Hired him to make it look 'natural'.
Randy and I were congratulated briefly by the county fire marshal for noticing the fire reek on the body. And that was the end of that.

Except neither Randy or I volunteer to stay behind by ourselves to over haul a burned out house after dark anymore.