Fire Pattern

CHAPTER 2

The morgue was a low redbrick building discreetly positioned in the grounds at the rear of Whiteford Holy Cross Hospital. There were no windows in the outside walls and the sole entrance was an unmarked steel door. It was the kind of building one tended not to see, which could go unnoticed and unremembered in any urban setting, but its appearance produced a cold queasiness in Jerome’s stomach.

His first impulse on leaving the Starzynski house had been to return to the office and familiarize himself with the stored data on spontaneous human combustion, then he had rejected the idea for philosophical reasons. He would have been working with nothing more than words, other people’s words, at a remove from the phenomenon he proposed to investigate—which was hardly in accord with the scientific method. Also, if he wanted to prove himself to Anne Kruger it would help if he displayed drive and initiative. His call to the hospital had won him an immediate appointment with a Doctor McGrath, and while driving across town in the crystalline New Hampshire sunlight he had been buoyantly satisfied with himself.

Now, however, as he approached the morgue on foot, it was borne home to him that he was generally disinclined to enter a place where corpses were stored. In particular, he did not wish to look closely at a charred human hand, and his reasons for ever wanting to do so seemed to have evaporated. Reflected brightness from the metal door was warm on his face as he paused and looked for a bellpush. A few seconds later, although no scanner was visible, the door was opened by a tall greying man with the harrowed look of someone who had once been very fat and now was thin. His shirt and trousers bunched at the waist, reinforcing the impression that he had lost weight. He had a long, deeply-lined face, and he regarded Jerome with a kind of gloomy candour.

“Come inside,” he said. “It’s cooler in here.”

Jerome cleared his throat. “Doctor McGrath? I’m Rayner Jerome.”

“I guessed that.” A gleam of Karloffian humour appeared in McGrath’s eyes. “We don’t get many casual callers here.”

“I dare say.” Reassured by the doctor’s expert use of the common touch, Jerome followed him into a short corridor and waited while he closed the outer door. The air in the building smelled fresh, untainted by chemicals.

“So you’re a science correspondent,” McGrath said as they walked to a small, harshly-lit office. “I didn’t know the Examiner employed such an animal.”

“Well, they don’t really know it either. I’m trying to steer things in that direction.”

“I see. Are you qualified.”

Not scientifically,” Jerome said, wishing the question would not keep recurring. “But I used to be in engineering and the disciplines haven’t gone to waste.”

McGrath’s deep-set eyes glinted as he sat down at a desk. “That sounded slightly defensive.”

Did it?” For a moment Jerome was prepared to be offended by McGrath’s perception and unusual directness, then he realized he was being offered a rare opportunity to bridge the chasm that separates human beings. “I suppose that’s because I wasn’t too well qualified as an engineer, either. I was a draughtsman in a general engineering outfit and I handled what we referred to as day jobs—jobs that were too small to make it worth while putting them into the computer. I could have them sketched and checked and into the workshop while a programmer was still adjusting the angle of his chair.”

“What went wrong?”

“The old hands in the workshop retired and a computer took over their jobs—and it couldn’t read my drawings.”

McGrath nodded thoughtfully, indicating to Jerome that he should sit down. “And you didn’t want to work on the computer.”

“I was born with one of my own.”

“Something tells me,” McGrath said, with the hint of a smile, “that it was quite an experience for you to talk to Arthur Starzynski’s daughter.”

Jerome smiled back, glad of the change of subject, and took out his notebook and pen. “According to what Maeve Starzynski told me, her father’s remains looked as though they had been cremated. Is that correct?”

“No.”

Jerome was relieved and disappointed at the same time. “She seemed so…”

“A crematorium oven couldn’t produce anything like that result in just a few minutes,” McGrath cut in. “This isn’t the sort of thing people usually like to discuss, but I can tell you that when a cadaver is cremated it is subjected to 1,200 degrees Celsius for ninety minutes, and then to one thousand degrees for anything up to three more hours. Even then, what comes out of the oven is far from being fine ash or dust. You get a lot of bone fragments which have to be pulverized by machine, but in Starzynski’s case there was only fine ash. Except for the hand, of course.”

Jerome paused in his note-taking, aware that his jaw had almost sagged while he was absorbing the figures just quoted. McGrath stared back at him in morose satisfaction, his face like hewn marble in the sterile glow from the tubes in the ceiling. From another part of the building there came the faint rumble of a sliding door, sounding like distant thunder.

“That makes it all the harder to accept,” Jerome finally said, wishing he could have produced a less obvious comment. “What sort of temperature would have been needed?”

“I don’t know—interesting field of experiment there—but the small change in Starzynski’s pants pocket was fused into a single lump.”

“May I see it?”

“The police took that and it’s my guess they sent it up to Concord for forensic examination.” McGrath stood up, took an overlong jacket from the back of his chair and shrugged it on. “Come and have a look at the real evidence.”

Jerome got to his feet, experiencing a sudden timidity, and closed his notebook. “Is it pretty gruesome?”

“Good God, no.” McGrath emitted a dry laugh. “A dish of chicken livers is ten times more unattractive than this little lot. I don’t know how my wife can bring herself to make pâté.” As he was leading the way out of the office and along the corridor he glanced down at Jerome’s notepad. “You must be the only reporter in the country who still writes shorthand.”

“I’ve always used it, even when I was doing part-time work with a trade journal.”

“Part of your one-man boycott of the electronics industry?” McGrath paused at a double door. “What’s wrong with a recorder?”

“A recorder is fine for dictation. It can even cope, after a fashion, with a multiple conversation—provided everybody is obliging enough to speak in turn and you keep telling it who they are. But when you get a bunch of people arguing and mumbling and talking over each other and using gestures and facial expressions to carry their meaning a good shorthand note is far superior.”

“And are you good at it?”

“Nearing three hundred words a minute.”

“I might have guessed,” McGrath said with an enigmatic expression. He opened the door and they went into a large room, clinically white, which had triple rows of square doors built into two walls. Jerome was surprised to hear bluegrass music, then he saw a chubby young man who was sitting at a desk and listening to a pocket radio while he ate pink-filled sandwiches. The air was noticeably cold, causing Jerome to give a single shiver as it touched his skin.

“Don’t be daunted by all this.” McGrath made a sweeping gesture which took in the serried doors. “They’re nearly all empty. The architect who designed the place must have thought we were a branch of CryoCare.”

Jerome hunched his shoulders. “It certainly feels that way.”

“Not another hothouse plant!” McGrath went to the desk and rapped it imperiously with his knuckles before speaking to the plump youngster. “Forgive me for interrupting your dedicated pursuit of obesity, Mervyn, but we want to view the Starzynski remains.”

“Number eight,” Mervyn said, handing him a set of keys.

“Thank you.” McGrath switched off the radio, drawing a startled glance from its owner, beckoned to Jerome and went to one of the lockers.

He opened the door and pulled at a drawer which rolled out easily on telescopic cantilevers. Wisps of vapour drifted down its sides. Jerome moved closer on reluctant legs and saw that the drawer held two plastic bags. One was full of grey-black ash and the other, already dewing over with condensation, contained Art Starzynski’s left hand. The wrist tapered to a black point and the fingers were straight and splayed out, as though Starzynski had experienced an electrifying pang of astonishment or terror in the instant before he was overtaken by death.

Jerome stared down at the grotesque object, prepared for revulsion, but found in himself a curious lack of emotion. The destruction and dehumanization of Art Starzynski had been too complete. The hand could have been a relic of Ancient Egypt, or a fossil, too divorced from the immediacy of life to have any significance for those who still breathed and could feel the warm cardiac tide in their veins.

“See what I mean about the consistency of the ash?” McGrath said, gently prodding the larger bag with one finger. just don’t know what temperature it took to do this. A lot of heat was involved.”

“But there was practically no fire damage in the rest of the room.”

“So they say.” McGrath gave a dismissive shrug. “I’m glad I don’t have to establish the root cause of what happened to this man.”

“Have you no theories at all?”

“The only one I would have given any credence to is that Maeve Starzynski either killed her father or found him dead, then dismembered him and spent a week or so reducing the pieces in a high-powered furnace.”

Jerome sniffed to signal his scepticism. “Why should she do that?”

“I’ve no idea—my only concern is with explaining the physical condition of the remains—but the theory is useless anyway, because neighbours were talking to Starzynski less than an hour before he died. Are you through in here? Are the eyes sufficiently feasted?”

“Yes, and I think I understand the problem better now. Thanks for giving me your time.”

“Glad to be of service.” McGrath slid the drawer and its macabre contents back into the wall, locked the door and returned the keys to the young man at the desk. Mervyn nodded silently, beginning to unwrap another sandwich, and before McGrath and Jerome had fully left the room it was again pervaded by the incongruous strains of bluegrass.

“Some people,” McGrath commented sadly, “have no respect for the dead.”

It was a little past noon when Jerome got back to the Examiner building. Most of the ten desks in the reporters’ room were occupied, but the noise level was low and the atmosphere was relaxed. The midday lull signified that all the major deadlines for that evening’s paper had been successfully met, that human brains could coast until quitting time while machine intelligences took over the job of getting the paper on to the streets. It was a period Jerome savoured for two reasons. As a latecomer to the profession, he felt it linked him to the historic days of journalism when stout shoes were an essential, the work could be physically demanding and there was a glow of personal achievement each time a paper was put to bed. Also, he liked the freedom from noise and interruptions which enabled him to make good progress with his work.

He collected a cup of iced tea from the dispenser, went straight to his own desk and sat down, swearing under his breath as his left knee produced a defiant stab of pain. The tea was cloyed with artificial sweetener, but cold enough to be refreshing. He opened his notebook and began to study his record of the morning’s two interviews, glad of the opportunity to think calmly about what he had learned. A few seconds later he became aware of somebody standing at his side. He looked up and saw Hugh Cordwell, who was in a jovial mood now that the pressure of work had eased, peering over his shoulder at the pages of shorthand.

“Squiggle, squiggle,” Cordwell said. “Squiggle, dot, squiggle.”

“That’s the most perceptive remark you’ve made in ages,” Jerome said. “What do you want, Hugh?”

“Randy Kruger is mad at you.”

“Why?”

“You’ll find out the reason why soon enough.”

“‘The reason why’ is a tautology,” Jerome pointed out, hoping to detract from the younger man’s evident pleasure. “And your utterances never merit repetition.”

A reporter at a nearby desk snorted in amusement, causing Cordwell’s eyes to shuttle angrily as he sought a reply. “Squiggle, squiggle,” he said finally, before returning to his seat.

“The spirit of the Algonquin lives on,” Jerome muttered. He tried to think of something he had done to earn Anne Kruger’s displeasure, but his mind was quickly drawn back to the infinitely greater problem represented by a human hand and a mound of ash. A man called Art Starzynski had died a strange and terrifying death, and nobody could explain why. Or could they? Jerome found that he now had an intense interest in the Examiner’s file on auto-incendiarism—if other people had died in similar circumstances the phenomenon was bound to have been investigated and the findings put on record.

Setting his tea aside, he activated his desk terminal and called up the related index pages, aiming to get a broad impression of the extent of the file. He had been prepared for a chronology going back a decade or two, and so it was with a distinct sense of shock that he picked out a listing of the year 1852 coupled with the name of Charles Dickens. More intrigued than ever, he screened further details and learned that Dickens had disposed of one character in Bleak House—Krook the money-lender›by having him undergo spontaneous incineration while alone in his room. Frowning, aware of an uncomfortable speeding up of his heart, he raced through an extract from the novel, his gaze skipping from phrase to key phrase…

The cat has retreated…and stands snarling…at something on the ground, before the fire…smouldering suffocating vapour in the room…small burnt patch of flooring…and here is—is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? O Horror, he is here! and this from which we run away, striking out the light and overturning one another into the street, is all that represents him.

Jerome sat back and stared at the glowing words on his VDU, wondering where the dividing line between fact and fiction actually lay. He had always thought of Dickens as a chronicler of the social conditions of his day, not as a reporter of phenomena in the dark hinterland of science. The description of what had happened to Krook, apart from one reference to contamination of the ceiling, so closely paralleled the fate of Art Starzynski as to make it clear that Dickens was no stranger to the notion of spontaneous human combustion. Another fact which Jerome found striking for a different kind of reason was that he had read Bleak House at least twice in his youth, but had retained no memory of such an unusual episode. It was as though a highly conservative and sceptical censor in his mind had decreed against the storage of obvious heresies.

Having broached the subject of classic literary references to the fire death, Jerome went further on and was fascinated by the discovery that it had been touched upon by such writers as Mark Twain, Washington Irving, Balzac, Marryat, de Quincey and Zola. Several of the books mentioned were familiar to Jerome but, again, the relevant passages were gone from his memory. Marryat was among those who went into detail, in a novel entitled Jacob Faithful published in 1834, emphasizing the point that although the victim had died in her sleep—completely reduced to black ash—the curtains of the bed had not even been singed.

But that’s impossible, was Jerome’s instinctive protest; then he recalled the curious localization of the fire damage in the Starzynski house—paintwork only a single pace away from the site of combustion had not even discoloured. Feeling baffled, almost personally affronted by the screaming scientific anomaly, he took off his glasses—transforming his surroundings into a complex blur—and polished the lenses, something he did almost unconsciously when he needed time to think. It was difficult enough to accept that a sponge filled with salty water, which was how one might regard a human body, could spontaneously generate furnace-core heat, but to go a giant step further and envisage that awesome heat being contained…

“There you are!” Anne Kruger had appeared at his side as if by magic. “How was your vacation. Ray?”

Recognizing that she needed to vent some angry sarcasm, he gave the reply she wanted. “I haven’t been on vacation.”

“Really! I was under the impression that you had.”

Brilliant witticism, Anne, he thought, replacing his glasses and bringing her face into sharp focus. “Does this mean I’ve forgotten to do something?”

There was a white beacon-flash from her eyes. “Ray, I’ve just looked through the make-up of today’s paper and I didn’t see your fire story in it.”

“My fire st—!” Jerome was shocked and indignant. “You can’t expect a piece like that to be written in a couple of hours.”

“That’s true—I’d have said something in the region of ten minutes.”

“Anne, this isn’t one of your fry pan fires—four lines on page twenty—there’s an important story here. It looks as though a citizen of this town simply burst into flames and burned away to almost nothing.”

“I’m the one who mentioned SHC to you in the first place. Remember? You as good as said I was crazy.”

“I know, and I’m sorry about that,” Jerome said, genuinely apologetic, aware of Cordwell grinning at him from the neighbouring desk. “I prejudged the matter without looking at the evidence, but I’ve just come back from the morgue and what I saw there…”

“You went and actually looked at the body?”

“Remains is a better word.”

“I didn’t realize you’d gone that far into it.” Anne’s voice had become more amiable. “All right, come into the office and we’ll have a talk.”

“Gladly.” Jerome stood up and nodded pleasantly to Cordwell, who promptly turned away. As he followed Anne to her office, breathing an invisible wake of French perfume, Jerome was again impressed by her physical attractiveness. Only ten years separated them, yet she managed to personify freshness and vitality, whereas he seemed to have been precipitated from youth into middle age with no noticeable interval between. Perhaps, if he had persevered more with contact lenses—as Carla had always urged—and had kept himself in trim, and had learned to dress younger, and had acquired more money…The list, he suddenly realized, could grow for ever, and its compilation was an exercise in futility.

In her office Anne questioned him closely about Maeve Starzynski’s reliability as a witness and about the circumstances surrounding the bizarre death. Jerome passed on what information he had, giving due prominence to the inexplicable features of the case.

“This could do the paper a lot of good,” she said when he had finished. “We seem to have this one to ourselves and there’s a good chance of getting it syndicated. I’m going to give you the rest of today and tomorrow to write a good strong feature, with that by-line you’ve been plaguing me for. Get some good pictures, especially of the hand, and tie Starzynski in with as many classic cases as you can…Doctor Bentley and so on…and we’ll give the story a full page in Friday’s paper…

“What’s the matter, Ray? You look as though you’re sitting on your keys.”

Jerome shifted unhappily. “I don’t see how the article could be squeezed on to one page.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too big! You could use several pages just to examine possible causes, and then there’s…

“You’re not going to write a book,” Anne snapped, then she gave him a patient smile. “There isn’t a scientific explanation for SHC. That’s the whole essence of it—it’s a supernatural event.”

“Do you realize what you just…?” Jerome gave an exaggerated sigh. “Anne, there has to be an explanation. For every effect there has to be a cause.”

“That’s 19th century thinking. Modern scientists take a different view.”

“I’ve never heard them say so. Name just one scientist who says that.”

“Well, they’re admitting there are things they can’t explain.”

“Yes, but admitting you haven’t found an answer isn’t the same as saying no answer exists.”

“Tell me just one thing,” Anne said, a tinge of pink appearing on her cheeks. “Has anybody come up with a scientific explanation for SHC?”

“Ah…not that I know of.”

“And are you going to find an answer this afternoon?”

“I shouldn’t think so.”

“Then why in the name of God should you waste my time and your time and the time of our readers with useless speculation? Are you going to write this story properly, or would you prefer that I hand it over to Cordwell?”

“I’m going to write the story properly,” Jerome said stiffly. “I appreciate the way you give a person scope for initiative in these things.”

He stood up and left the office, retaining as much dignity as he could, and returned to his desk, marvelling at the speed with which he had managed to win his editor over and then freshly antagonize her. Disguising the fact that the interview had gone badly, he hummed some Gilbert and Sullivan as he began to work through the computer files. For a few minutes his concentration was marred by lingering resentment towards Anne Kruger, but the sounds of the big office gradually faded from his consciousness as he was drawn into his subject.

He was again surprised by the antiquity of some of the records. The first detailed example to which he had access had occurred in Rheims in 1725, and by 1763 a Frenchman, Jonas Dupont, had already gathered enough case histories to enable him to publish a book called De lncendis Corporis Humani Spontaneis—the first full account of the phenomenon. Jerome had anticipated vagueness and an apocryphal quality to the reports, but from the start it was as if witnesses—anticipating scepticism—had gone out of their way to be precise and positive. The dates, names and exact addresses were there and were easily verifiable, with very little of the “Mr Green of New Jersey’ style of vague reporting which characterized most of the dubious research work Jerome had seen published in other fields. Time after time, varied only by circumstantial detail, there unfolded the same tale of horror, inexplicable and frightening, threatening to undermine his belief in the essential rationality of the universe.

One aspect of SHC he found particularly disturbing was its sheer randomness. Other investigators appeared to have been troubled by the same thing, because the literature was permeated with their attempts to find a pattern, any kind of a link between victims. In the 18th and 19th centuries it was thought that a precondition for the fire death was an addiction to alcohol—not beer or wine, but hard liquor. Jerome could sympathize with the desire to attribute SHC to the heavy consumption of “ardent spirits’, and it did seem to be a common factor in early cases, but he put that down to the fact that the vast majority of ordinary people in those times drank to relieve the miseries of existence. As the chronology advanced close to the present more and more instances were recorded of moderate drinkers and abstainers meeting the same gruesome death.

With his computerized overview of the centuries, Jerome saw other candidates for the elusive common factor come into favour and win acceptance, only to be ground down again by the mill of statistics. At one stage the preferential victim would tend to be an elderly female, or greatly obese, or a pipe smoker—but the accumulation of case histories eventually ironed out every peak in every graph. One factor in which Jerome took an intuitive interest was that the victims were of solitary habits, or had at least lived alone, but that too had to be discarded. There were many examples of men, women and even children suddenly bursting into flames while surrounded by others and within minutes being reduced to ash. It had happened in dance halls, in boats and cars, in sports stadiums. In Chicago in 1982, and again in Montreal in 1994—to select but two examples—people had spontaneously combusted and died while walking in busy streets.

At frequent intervals during the work Jerome experienced a reaction, a kind of personal rebellion against the nature of his subject matter. This just can’t be true, he would think. Somebody with a sick imagination invented this stuff.

But the pictures were there to prove him wrong.

The pictures were there in disturbing high resolution—a sickening parade, photographed with a clarity which simultaneously repelled the eye and seduced it into searching for fresh horrors. There was also a bludgeoning similarity to the images. Jerome became numbed by the heaps of white-flecked ash whose only discernible connection with humanity were the appendages, here a slippered foot, there a hand lying like a discarded glove.

By the time he had skimmed every page stored in the Examiner’s library he had satisfied himself of only one thing—the sole pattern was the complete lack of pattern. He was being asked to accept that anybody might suddenly be consumed by fire at any place and at any time. The evidence suggested that it was a purely random event, uninfluenced by anything in the victim’s circumstances or physical condition—and Jerome found the notion totally repugnant.

His thesis was that there had to be a logical explanation for SHC, no matter how deeply buried. But underlying rationality was supposed to reveal itself to the enquiring mind sooner or later. In the case of such a startling and well-documented phenomenon as SHC it should have been easy to detect a pattern or pinpoint a common factor, but that was precisely what had not happened. Many minds had grappled with the problem for many decades; the “explanations’ put forward ranged from divine retribution to poltergeists to new classes of subatomic particles; and nowhere was there even the beginning of an indication of why one person rather than another should be singled out to become a human torch. To make matters worse in Jerome’s eyes, the various theorists—some of whom had written massive books on the subject—had fallen at the preliminary hurdles. The curious localization of the heat was a classic feature of SHC, one which had excited wonder and comment down the centuries, and nobody had advanced anything resembling a reason…

“The job doesn’t pay overtime, you know.” Anne Kruger spoke from the doorway of her office, startling Jerome. He looked about him and saw that it was past seven in the evening. He had been distantly aware of the other reporters locking their desks and going home, but he had not noticed being on his own for three hours. His eyes were smarting from the protracted sessions with the VDU and there was an ominous pain in his lower back which suggested he had made himself overtired.

“I guess I got absorbed,” he said. “There’s no harm in knowing the background.”

“Don’t be defensive, Ray—I approve of my staff being thorough.” Anne came towards him, vivid and gleaming, freshly made up for going out, and he felt a pang of jealousy towards some unknown youngster in tennis shorts. “How are you getting on with it?”

“I know practically everything there is to know about spontaneous human combustion.”

“I’ll bet you do—I’d give anything for a memory like yours.” Her brown eyes were sympathetic. “Have you thought about stopping for a bite to eat?”

Jerome indulged a reckless impulse. “No. Where shall we go?”

“I know where I’m going,” Anne replied, at once resuming the boss–employee relationship. “And I suggest that you eat something soon before you win yourself an ulcer.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He smiled, concealing his self-disgust over making the gaffe, and watched her walk to the elevator. She looked youthful, self-sufficient and confident, the sort of person who would have achieved success even if her father had not owned a newspaper. Jerome imagined himself as her partner for an idealized evening…the excellent food and wine…the dancing…the return to a plushy apartment…the scented waxy taste of lipstick, which he was close to forgetting…

Swearing at himself for having opened mental doors which were best left closed, he surveyed the office with tired eyes. The red-gold sunlight slanting in from the windows made the desks and equipment seem irrelevant to anything, artifacts which people had long ago put into storage when they had gone off to attend to the real business of life. This was no place for him to be on a fine August evening, but what was the alternative? His home on the north side would be just as lonely, the more so because Carla had loved this time of year, and it was too late to consider driving out to the old chalet at Parson’s Lake.

Jerome took off his glasses and polished the lenses while he weighed the matter. He intended to keep on working until at least midnight, thus guaranteeing that sleep would come easily, and the research could be done almost as efficiently at home. The main difference, he decided abruptly, was that at home he could sit in a more comfortable chair and ease the tiredness in his lower back. And his own tea was marginally better than what came out of the office machine.

That’s it, he thought, gathering up his notebook and pencils. There’s nothing like having clearly defined goals in life.

A few minutes of bathing his eyes had such a soothing effect that he decided he could watch television for a short while before resuming work. He cleared away the remains of the Waldorf salad he had picked up at Harpo’s on the way home, and eased himself into his best armchair, carefully balancing a glass of iced tea. When he remotely activated the television set, the news channel he usually watched was preoccupied with the Argentine-Chile conflict and the breakdown of the chemical warfare talks in Paris.

Jerome, who had been seeking information about the Mercury shot, listened to the reports with growing unease. He had been born the year after World War II had ended, and had grown up through various phases of the Cold War with an instinctive belief in the race’s ability to muddle through any crisis. As was the case with most ordinary citizens, sheer practice had made him adept at preserving his natural optimism, at disregarding the prophets of doom, but lately he had begun to feel afraid. It might have been a psychological reaction to the death of his wife, but now it seemed entirely possible to him that the politicians and generals were on the verge of ending all human life.

Jerome had a theory that it was the prospect of racial extinction which on a subconscious level was fuelling the public’s interest in the Quicksilver’s mission to Mercury. Until the previous year the arid little planet, so uncomfortably close to the sun, had been a low-priority target for any kind of mission, let alone one carrying three men. Then a space-borne telescope had picked up a curious reflection. Studies of the enhanced images suggested that they showed a bus-sized area of highly machined metal lying on the surface of Mercury at the northern pole.

As soon as all members of the space club had denied knowledge of the object the speculations about a contact from Outside had begun, and within days there was a widespread semi-religious belief that an interstellar ship had landed or crashed on Mercury. At one end of the credulity spectrum this was proof that help was on the way, that a benign intervention was going to save humanity from itself; at the other, it was the thin consolation of knowing that Man had at least been noticed and his self-immolation would be an object lesson for others. Either way, the mysterious object lying on the pitted surface of Mercury represented a stake in eternity, and public interest in a space flight was higher than at any time since the first lunar landings.

Tiring of the news broadcast, Jerome switched over to computer mode, keyed in to the Examiner’s central processor and began a more careful reading of the pages which had suggested causes for SHC. He found portentous references to involuntary reorganization of muscle cells which changed people into million-volt batteries, to Elijah and the divine fire, to botulinus-poisoning patients developing bioluminescence, to neutron weapons, to da Vinci’s belief that the chief function of the heart was to develop heat, to the Earth’s magnetic field, to incendiary ghosts, to undetected atomic particles called pyrotons…

In Jerome’s opinion the wordage was nothing more than semantic floundering, and a two-hour exposure to it confirmed his original view that nobody had ever come near a reasonable explanation for the fire death. He tried a different approach and looked for statements on the subject by qualified scientists, only to find that all those listed flatly denied the existence of the phenomenon. He was not too disappointed, remembering that he had been equally dogmatic about it only twelve hours earlier, but at the same time it would have been useful from the point of view of the article to have some kind of authoritative comment. Get plenty of quotes, Anne was always urging him, apparently in the belief that a reporter’s unsupported word did not carry much weight. He considered the problem for a moment, then remembered having been impressed by the sound thinking and dry humour of one writer, John Sladek, who in 1994 had published a no-nonsense study of the paranormal in a book called Psychic Superstars.

Jerome had consulted the work in the afternoon and had found no references to SHC, but that did not necessarily mean that Sladek had no thoughts on the subject. On the spur of the moment Jerome used the computer to get an address and phone number for Sladek, and discovered he was living in New York. Without hesitating, in case he lost momentum, he picked up the extension phone from beside his chair and put a call through. It was answered immediately.

“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…

Nearly gave myself a heart attack over nothing, he thought as he rinsed his glass and dried it. He polished it with a soft cloth until long after it was dry, then he went reluctantly to bed.