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The Fire Demons
by J. Fitzgerald McCurdy
Gripping the handle of his guitar case, Steele Miller ran along the deserted sidewalk, keeping close to the buildings where the streetlights didn't penetrate the shadows. It was only four-thirty, but already growing dark—a typical November day in Toronto. Four nights earlier, on the last Sunday in October, he and his father had turned the household clocks back one hour, marking the start of winter and shorter days.
As a rule, Steele preferred summer. He liked the long evenings when he could play outdoors until nine, or walk around Taddle Pond with his father and watch the setting sun stain the western sky purple, red, and orange, and bathe the CN Tower in an eerie golden glow.
But today he was thankful for the darkening streets. He didn't think they had spotted him, but he had glimpsed the familiar, dreaded figures of Dirk and his gang of bullies just as he was leaving his guitar teacher's studio in a high-rise residential building on Davenport Road, just west of Christie Street. They were hanging around the corner of Davenport and Christie, spitting on the sidewalk at old people shuffling past, and jumping out from doorways to scare little kids half to death. Steele's stomach ached. He knew they were waiting for him. Somehow they had found out about the guitar lessons.
Steele wished that he could go back in time and change the past. If he could, he'd go back exactly two years and change the day the school bully saw him leaving the bank where he had gone with his father to open his very own account. Bursting with pride, and clutching his new ATM card and passbook tightly in his hand, he had glanced at the group of boys hogging the sidewalk in front of the bank. He recognized Dirk, a tough kid in grade five, and some of the others, but because they weren't part of his immediate circle of friends, and because all he could think about was his new bank account, he promptly dismissed them.
But on his way home from school the next day, Steele walked straight into an ambush. Two boys jumped out at him from a gap in a tall, wooden fence, and dragged him through the opening, away from the busy street and the watchful eyes of parents collecting their kids from school. Dirk was waiting behind the fence.
Steele's face burned as he remembered his first run-in with the bullies. They held his arms while Dirk rifled through his jacket pockets, found the bankcard and passbook, and discovered the $500 he had deposited into his new account the previous afternoon.
The $500 was long gone. Dirk had taken it and more over the past two years. Worried that Steele's father might get the bank statements and grow suspicious if he saw large withdrawals, Dirk had demanded small amounts at first, five or ten dollars, but when Steele accidentally let it slip out that his father had stopped monitoring his account, Dirk's greed mushroomed and his demands escalated until he wanted twenty and even forty dollars at a time.
At first, Steele laughed in Dirk's face when the bully had demanded money. But his laughter had turned to fear when Dirk threatened to scare his grandmother so badly she'd have a heart attack and, perhaps, die. And when the bully said he'd go after Mac and Riley, Steel's best friends, and hurt them, too, Steele had finally caved in.
Now, as he ran along the sidewalk he wondered how Dirk and the Jerks had found out about the guitar lessons.
The guitar and money for lessons were a birthday gift from his father and grandmother. Steele had been attending lessons every Thursday afternoon for two months and had even managed to keep the bully from finding out about them. Since school began in September, he had handed Dirk the weekly allowance money his father gave him. The bully had seemed satisfied, at least he hadn't demanded Steele's passbook or made him produce a printout of his bank balance.
Steele remembered how he had tried to tell his father how afraid he was of the bigger boy. But after, he was ashamed, as if the bullying were his fault, as if he had asked for it. He couldn't understand why, if he were the victim, he felt so bad.
"You've got to stand up to him, son," his father had said with such finality there was little Steele could say without sounding like a wimp.
But Steele knew it wasn't that simple. Maybe adult bullies listened when another adult, like his father for instance, confronted them. But not Dirk! He and his gang would bust your face to pulp if you so much as looked at them without asking. Steele knew because he'd done it once—the day after his father had said standing up to Dirk was the only way to stop the bullying. His ribs still ached whenever he remembered how they had hurt him when they finally got him alone. They ached now, like phantom pain that keeps hurting in the place where a limb has been amputated.
As soon as he had spotted Dirk and the others, he ducked back into the lobby and pressed Mrs. Fret's bell, hopping nervously from foot to foot as he waited for the answering buzzer to unlock the door. As soon as he heard the buzz, he raced through the foyer and out the service entrance at the side of the building. Without pausing, he cut across the aboveground parking lot, and ran through Hillcrest Park, heading north until he reached Tyrrel Avenue. Stopping to catch his breath, he argued with himself over the wisest and safest route to his house.
It was awfully tempting to chance it and take the shortest way but, in the end, Steele decided to go an extra block north just to be on the safe side. At Benson Avenue he turned right, dashed across Christie Road and didn't stop running until he reached Wychwood Avenue.
Gasping for air, Steele stopped and slipped behind a huge tree, dried fallen leaves crackling under his feet. After running such a long distance, it was like trying to breathe with an elephant standing on his chest. He set his guitar case on the ground and peered south along Wychwood Avenue, his heart racing as if it hadn't yet realized he had stopped running. Because he had never encountered the bullies in his park before, Steele reasoned that if anything bad was going to happen to him, it was going to happen here, before he reached Wychwood Park. He remained as still as the giant tree and watched, but nothing moved on the street. No Dirk! No grovelling on the ground, begging the bully not to hurt him.
The feeling of relief that washed over him was so intense, his legs buckled, and he almost collapsed. Instead, he took a deep breath, crossed Wychwood Avenue, and hurried south, his guitar case slapping awkwardly against his right leg. Slipping through the open gate, he followed the pedestrian pathway into Wychwood Park, pausing to check things out before making a run for his house on the opposite side of the pond.
It was always quiet and spooky in the park after dark, but today it seemed quieter and spookier than usual. There were no bright streetlights. The dim lighting on the winding, circular road came from small round lamps mounted halfway up the power poles. The white glass in the lamps was coated with decades of grime, and the light that managed to escape cast only faint patches on the pavement.
Steele scanned the dark places in the park that he knew as intimately as the nooks and recesses of his house. He stared into the shadows of a stand of birch and other trees that stood like sentinels guarding the west side of the pond. But nothing moved in the blackness there. Next, he focused on a copse of fat bushes near the tennis court by the side of the road just ahead. Nothing.
Finally, he shifted his eyes to Taddle Pond in the middle of the park at the bottom of the ravine. It was always the last place he checked out before crossing the park. His eyes followed the silvery water to the fountain occupying the north end of the pond. The fountain was a figure of a woman sitting on a stone bench in the middle of a round, shallow basin. The woman fascinated Steele. He couldn't remember ever passing through the park without stopping and staring at her.
She was sculpted from green-black marble or some other stone, and she was cold and beautiful. Her blank eyes seemed fixed on something in the sky, farther away than Steele's eyes could see. Coiled about her ankles were six green snakes. In her hands she held a seventh, and her arms were lifted and outstretched to show the snake's full length, the tail coiled about her arm almost to her elbow. Steele imagined that she was holding the snake up to show it to someone looking down at her from the sky. The water had been shut off for the winter, but in the summer it trickled from the serpent's open mouth, and washed over the woman's arms, filling the basin and spilling into Taddle Pond.
Steele didn't know the woman's real name or anything about her, but he had a feeling she preferred snakes to people. Everyone in the neighbourhood called her the Wytch.
She certainly looked like a witch now. The darkness hid her perfect chiseled features and turned her into a menacing black-shrouded presence. Steele blinked repeatedly to stop her from coalescing into a scary, writhing shape and reaching out to snatch him and drag him into the black place with her.
"She's not real, so get a grip," Steele said to himself out loud as he did whenever darkness settled over the park. He forced a devil-may-care chuckle from his throat to show any creatures that might be lurking about that he wasn't afraid. Then he tightened his hold on the handle of the guitar case and moved purposefully down the side of the ravine following the worn footpath that ran along the south bank of the pond.
He reached the pond and had taken only half a dozen steps when he heard a harsh, muffled voice.
He froze, his heart pounding like running footsteps. The voice was coming from just ahead, near the fountain. Steele gulped! The Wytch had come alive!
Afraid to breathe, he peered at the black shape, listening intently, until his vision blurred and his ears popped in protest. Everything looked the same as before. Still, he could have sworn he had heard a voice.
Go back through the gate, he urged himself. Go around the block.
Instead, he inched closer to the fountain, his eyes locked on the Wytch. He was almost close enough to step off the path into the basin when he heard the voice again—much closer this time.
"Aiii!" Instinctively, he jumped back, as if the Wytch suddenly leaped from her perch on the bench and sprung at him—a living darkness.
"Who's there?" he gasped, wishing he could see into the shadows behind the Wytch. She was certainly large enough for five or six people to hide behind, and the basin that in summer collected the water from the serpent's mouth was empty at this time of year.
Slowly, Steele walked forward, moving closer to the Wytch, his ears straining to pinpoint the location of the voice.
I am Darkness! Come to me! I'm waiting!
The hair on Steele's head stood on end. The voice was coming from under his feet. He stumbled backwards, eyes dropping to fix on the spot where he had been standing. Something was down there, in the ground. For one horrifying second he expected to see a fleshless clawed hand push through the frozen earth. When nothing happened, he dared himself to kneel on the hard surface and press his ear against the flattened reeds and grass where the basin of the fountain almost touched the bank.
I'm freaking scared, man! I'm not going in there!
(Copyright by J. Fitzgerald McCurdy)
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