“I’m sorry about disturbing you after hours, Mr Sladek,” Jerome began. “My name is Rayner Jerome, and…”
“You’re not a bill collector, are you?” Sladek cut in.
“No. I’m a reporter with the Whiteford Examiner, and I’d like to ask your help on a story because I was very much impressed by your book on the paranormal.”
“Thank you. It’s nice to hear from one of my readers…Wonder who the other one is?”
Jerome gave an obliging chuckle. “It’s about this weird business of spontaneous human combustion. I noticed you didn’t touch on it in the book, and I was wondering if you believe in it or not.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Sladek said. “Maybe people do burst and make ashes of themselves.”
“This is a serious enquiry,” Jerome said, beginning to be annoyed by the other man’s flippancy. “Have you any thoughts about SHC?”
“Well, it’s a whole new category of event that the insurance companies can refuse to pay off for.”
Jerome gave a sigh, making sure it was audible on the phone. “Thanks for your help, Mr Sladek—I’ll leave you to get on with whatever you were doing in peace.”
“No trouble at all, Mr Jerome,” came the reply. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you that spontaneous human combustion is done with mirrors.”
Jerome slammed the phone down, resolving to have no further dealings with writers, and sat frowning at the wall opposite. Aware that he was in danger of becoming obsessive, that it would be much more advisable to relax with a glass of wine before going to bed, he shelved the idea of trying to link SHC victims prior to their deaths. There had to be a common factor—of that he was convinced—but it had either been missed out of the data or concealed by irrelevancies. He took his notepad and wrote down the similarities which became evident after the subjects had met their bizarre deaths. The list was short, containing only three items:
Little damage is ever done to nearby combustible materials, even when they are very close to the body. Quite often the victim’s clothes or bedding are untouched, although a temperature of at least 3,000° must have been generated in the body. (This, above all else, sticks in my intellectual craw.)
There is almost total consumption of the torso, and yet—for no known reason—some of the extremities often escape serious burning. If combustion is triggered by some physical condition, why should hands and feet be spared?
There is quite often an absence of smell—quite incredible when one considers what has happened—or there are references to a sweet smell. (Starzynski is a perfect example.)
Jerome stared down at his words, baffled by their content, tantalized by the idea that the key to the mystery of SHC might be there if only he could see it. He knew that a multitude of others before him had wrestled in vain with the same problem, many of them better equipped and prepared to devote years to their research, so it was—to say the least—highly presumptuous of him to hope for a breakthrough after only one day’s work. But there is a discreet egotism which drives quiet men of the breed who get to attach their names to new stars or theorems; and in the stillness of midnight it seemed possible to Jerome that he could achieve that shift of perception, the one accompanied by the pre-orgasmic sensation in brain and gut, which suddenly cleaves opaque problems into diamond transparencies.
This is risky, he thought. I’m too tired to think properly, and if I let a fugue get going in my head there’ll be lots of nightmares and very little sleep before morning.
As he had expected, the warning was disregarded by that part of his mind which had never been able to relinquish its grip on a riddle. He spent an hour going back over his notes on the most significant case histories. At one point it crossed his mind that there seemed to be an unduly high representation of English-speaking countries, but he was able to dismiss the bias by putting it down to his working in the English language, plus poor reporting from other parts of the world. When his eyes became too weary to focus properly on words he stubbornly resorted to screening series of photographs.
Exhaustion had set in and was making him more vulnerable, preventing him from distancing himself from the succession of crematorium images, and gradually he drifted into a grim and sleazy universe, remorselessly detailed, which was largely composed of organic cinders. Human feet which terminated in nothing more than charred stumps of shin were pathetic and ludicrous objects, but entirely appropriate to the Dali landscapes in which he was wandering. They loomed like grotesque castles on ashy plains which were littered with the residue of past lives—reading glasses, coins, nail files, cigarette lighters, shattered cups, scraps of food. It was not great works for which SHC victims were remembered, but the trivia which the camera seemed to seek out and gloat over.
At 2.30 Jerome finally accepted that there was to be no visitation of Truth, that he was to remain in the ranks of ordinary men, and he went to bed. He dozed off almost immediately but, as he had feared, there were nightmares in wait and he awoke after a few minutes in the full, depressing knowledge that he would have no real sleep for the rest of the night. Names and dates and places seethed in his thoughts, and when accidental rhymes occurred they were seized upon and made into repetitious chants. He tried to relax and at least benefit from the physical inactivity, but each time he closed his eyes he was again looking at the pictures. In the past he had been grateful for his eidetic memory, but now it was a dreadful liability, causing him to flinch and squirm under the bombardment of images.
Perhaps an hour had dragged by when, unaccountably, one of the photographs steadied in his mind’s eye. In his trancelike state he was able to recall at once that it showed the remains of Betty Ramon, an elderly widow who in 1989 had burned to death in her apartment in Great Falls, Montana. The picture had all the standard elements, from the flame-severed feet in worn slippers to the black-rimmed hole in timber flooring. It was an unremarkable example of its kind, no more horrific in its sordid detail than a hundred others, and yet Jerome felt a strange sense of imminence which jolted him into alertness.
He sat up in the dark, wondering if he was the victim of a night-fevered mental prank, then decided he had nothing to lose by going back to the computer. When he got up and switched on lights the house and its furnishings had the slightly alien quality which is familiar to insomniacs, as though tenure belonged to others in the small hours and his waking presence at that time was an intrusion. He limped into the living room, perched uncomfortably on the front of his armchair and called up the Betty Ramon picture on his television screen.
The image, with its thousand-line definition, was so clear that he might have been looking through a window into a brightly-lit room. He studied it for a moment, baffled by the pounding of his heart, then his gaze was drawn to a single detail in the lower left-hand corner. There, camouflaged by the rosebud pattern of a bedroom carpet, was a tiny heart-shaped box. He stared at the object, realizing he must have subconsciously noted it during an earlier viewing, totally at a loss to explain his growing excitement. But something was happening in his head…neural switches were being thrown…memories were stirring…
He had seen a similar box that very morning in the room where Art Starzynski had died.
“So what?” he said aloud, further expressing disappointment by turning off the computer with unnecessary force. Muttering in self-disgust, he went into the kitchen, poured a glass of cold milk and sipped it while he analysed what had happened. He knew from past experience that in the condition between wakefulness and sleep the mind’s internal censor could cease to function. With the self-critical faculty lulled, the tritest idea could come as a world-shaking revelation. In this case his subconscious had got itself into a ferment by making a number of freewheeling assocations…cachou box…pillbox…medication…side effects…alteration in body chemistry…common factor in spontaneous human combustion…