City On Fire

14

Ella shot upright and quickly shielded her eyes from the rising sun. She could tell it was early, and still impossibly cold, but the morning seemed impossibly bright. Looking around her she found everyone still asleep except for Alfred who sat with his back to a rusted bicycle stand. He sorted through his notes furiously looking for any clue he might have missed. Following his example Ella draped the blanked over her shoulders and opened her sketchbook on the drawing of the woman in green and her husband. It had definitely been him and it was the same dog as well.

She thought about them as she sat sketching. The dream of g******e, though she remembered it with unsettling and bloody detail, was hardly at the forefront of her mind. Instead the couple and their dog whose lives were thrown into such heart breaking turmoil constantly haunted her. Having seen the torture the man went through when he lost his lover was painful to think about, even the dog seemed to be grieving.

As she finished the drawing of the dog resting its head on its master’s lap a thought came burying into her mind. The man who had the gun in her face, the one she focused extra hard on to get every possible detail, had a large scar on his right arm and all the way up to his neck. Why exactly she thought about it she wasn’t sure but the man who had killed the woman in green was attacked and killed by the dog. More specifically, he had held the woman by her throat with his right hand and subsequently when the dog got hold of him it went for his right arm. Being attacked by a dog would leave a very nasty scar and the more she thought of it the more the murderer looked like size eleven. Their build, height, the sadistic smile plastered across their faces when they stomped out a life. All of this was starting to piece together and she didn’t like the picture it was forming in the slightest. There would be only one way to know for sure and that was finding out who these people were and what the man and his lover were trying to stop. She had this nagging feeling that their war may have landed on her lap and she would do just about anything to prove herself wrong.

This was not a responsibility she wanted. She wasn’t the kind of person to in trust something like this with. She possessed neither the resilience nor the endurance for it and quite frankly she didn’t want it any more than she wanted the nightmares. The thing was that she couldn’t simply leave it at that. Her inability to ignore her nightmares was what landed her in the position she was in which in turn meant she could not just run and deny all of it. If it came down to it she would still try, what she wanted would no longer matter.

All the pondering aside, she closed the sketchbook and got to her feet. She needed to find that house and had hardly anything to go on. Fortunately a new acquaintance might have an idea where she could get started. Before leaving she threw her blanket over Mellissa and Madeline who were still peacefully asleep.

Dragging her feet and just a little awkwardly Ella walked over to Alfred who didn’t notice her until she spoke.

“Good morning.”

He looked up at her but looked down again immediately.

“Good morning, sleep well?”

Though he was preoccupied with his work his words were sincere.

“Yes, thank you.”

She didn’t of course but felt her problems were not that of these people who had been so hospitable to a complete stranger.

“Good. It can be rough out here, especially if you’re new.”

Again he didn’t look up as he spoke.

“All of you have been so kind. I can’t possibly say how grateful I am.”

She twiddled her thumbs and this time he did look up at her.

“Hey, there’s no need for that. We’re all glad to help anyone who needs it. God hear me some of us never had it.”

Ella smiled and looked down at her feet.

“There’s something I wanted to ask you.”

This time he put down his notes and gave her his full attention.

“There is this place, this house, that I need to find but I have no idea where to start. I don’t have an address and now that I think of it, it might not even still be there. The only thing I really have is this memory and I think there is something important there that I have to find but I really don’t know where to begin or if I even have anything to begin with.” Alfred listened attentively and nodded every once in a while.

“You seemed to know what you were doing and I was wondering if you had any advice at all on what to do or where to begin?”

She was twiddling her thumbs again out of pure nervousness. It wasn’t as if she could just come out with the whole story and tell him everything. He would think her mad. “Well, sometimes the smallest thing can set you on the right track.”

He seemed to understand that she didn’t want to give too much information and didn’t ask. She sat down across from him and watched as he scratched his chin. It was something that reminded her of Benny.

“Is there any specific detail that stood out?”

Alfred took a clean piece of paper from the back of the pile and waited for her to speak. The problem was she couldn’t really think of any kind of detail that set the place apart and after a while she shook her hear.

“The only thing I can really think of was that the house has old, like not from this century.”

Alfred wrote as she spoke nodding every now and again.

“There was a man and woman that lived there and the woman was murdered. Oh and the night the woman was killed there was this huge fire, I mean everything burned.” Ella tapped the hardcover of the sketchbook trying to remember something ells. Alfred on the other hand was tapping the page with his pencil.

“The woman’s murder might be a little tricky. Finding death records or rather finding the right one could proof very well near impossible, but what you said about the fire might just get you a relative timeline.”

Ella sat closer as he shared his notes.

“You said not from this century, would that century include electricity?”

Ella shook her heard.

“No, candlelight.”

“It might be finding a needle in a toothpick factory but I think you might want to look into the great fire.”

Ella tilted her head to the side. She had never heard of it but fortunately Alfred noticed and cleared his throat.

“There is a story for you. On September 2nd 1666 a fire broke out in a bakery and burned continuously until the Wednesday the 5th of September. The fire gutted the city and destroyed 13 200 houses and 87 perish churches but ultimately killed only six though the exact death toll is unknown.”

Ella sat speechless but Alfred wasn’t finished.

”I know what you’re thinking, how did they not mention this in high school history? Easy, its old news.”

Around them everyone was waking up. They greeted the morning and each other before they gathered their belongings.

“You ask any conspirator they will tell you a very different story, one that never made it to recorded history. Supposedly the fire did start in the bakery but it wasn’t any accident. There were rumours of ‘suspicious foreigners’ who started the fire and still more rumours that said these ‘suspicious foreigners’ were members of a cult that had been around for as long as civilisation existed.”

Alfred went quiet when someone walked past and greeted them. It was a good few minutes of him looking around for anyone who might have heard or might be listening in. He was so secretive about the whole thing that Ella ended up wondering if he wasn’t one of the conspirators. Eventually he did go on. “Supposedly they have been connected to the fall of Constantinople, Rome and some say even Athens.”

This was starting to sound just a little too fantastical for her taste and she wondered if he actually intended to help her or if he was just pulling her leg, maybe even just rebelling. The look on her face said exactly that but it didn’t seem to matter to him.

“This cult doesn’t have a name, just an M.O. They are led by the prophet, or so he calls himself, and he is on a mission from God to purify the corrupt civilisations who put greed above their dedication to God. They have done it before and they will do it again.”

His eyes were wild and he was talking faster and faster. He was getting a little carried away and she was starting to think that he may not be addressing her but rather ranting on about his own theories. This was reassured when he collected all his papers in one neat little pile and gently waved them in the air.

“That is where they come in. To run that kind of operation you need soldiers and I’m positive that is where all the children are disappearing to.” Ella had heard enough and was slowly getting to her feet, more than a little disappointed, but before she could leave Alfred held up one of his hands. “There is one other thing.”

Why she even bothered to listen was beyond her but she figure at the very least she might as well humour him.

“There was supposedly someone, a woman, who pieced all of this together and tried to evacuate everyone from ground zero. The strong belief was that she succeeded seeing as how only six people died in the fire but she was killed not long after, killed by the prophet for foiling his plot. She knew that he would be back and swore on her last breath that there would be more like her.”

Ella humoured him and when she got the chance excused herself. As for him, Alfred went right back to examining his notes as if the whole conversation had never happened. There went twenty minutes of her life that she would never get back.

“Good morning, your first night ok?”

She wished to God people would stop asking her that but what would be the point in saying anything. It wasn’t as if they could possibly understand. Mellissa and Madeline walked up to her and she smiled, all be it one that demonstrated her frustration. “Good, thank you.”

She looked over at Alfred.

“He does it to everyone.”

Ella looked at the woman puzzled.

“He manages to get people into conversations only to go on about complete nonsense. Poor man isn’t all there anymore.”

He looked encapsulated in his thought, as if he had never even spoken to her.

“Yeah, no kidding.”

He did offer some valuable advice and even more surprisingly he actually might have given her something to go on. She hadn’t mentioned the woman in green or her murder and when he spoke of it she remembered something ells. Before her untimely death the woman had mentioned how there would be someone ells that would stop ‘them’. Then there was the fire which did look to slowly be engulfing everything. Conspiracies aside it was a start.