An Immortal Flame in Appalachia

The trees surrounding her stretch skyward, an army of stoic giants ordered to stand sentinel for an invisible, even grander leader. Principal Investigator Nara Costas forces her hand to remain on her hip, close to the holster and badge resting there, so she doesn’t do something sentimental, like touch one’s rough bark or twist a sap-coated pine needle between forefinger and thumb.

Though she understands the woods are full of life—beneath her feet, in the air above, throughout every square inch to her right and left—she feels alone. The animals are quiet today; perhaps she is not the only one holding her breath to see what comes of her, perhaps ill-conceived, decision to come out here this evening.

She licks her lips and recounts her last conversation with Sirwa. She won’t feel guilty about how she spoke to the kid. Investigator Arvad Sirwa is a nice enough partner and a seemingly decent person, but he’s too green, too wet behind the ears for what the job demands. What a joke. Someone of her rank and experience shouldn’t have been saddled with a year-one investigator in the first place.

So, no, she won’t think about how his eyes had dimmed when she told him as much before dismissing him back to their hotel so she could take care of this on her own.

Two nights ago, Costas and Sirwa had arrived in Aristes, Pennsylvania, to investigate the mysterious deaths of a local shopkeeper, her husband, and their daughter.

The husband, discovered in a ditch thirty miles away from their home, had only been identifiable due to the serial code on his pacemaker. The autopsy report listed “extensive, third-degree thermal injuries to over ninety-five percent of the body.”

Less than nine percent of all fire-related deaths are homicidal in nature, Costas knows. They’re typically difficult to diagnose from an autopsy. However, the elevated carboxyhemoglobin in his lungs, which suggested prolonged suffering, not to mention the body’s disposal site, had made that clear. Horrifyingly (a descriptor used by the media and her Captain), the man’s liver had been removed postmortem but not before the flames were extinguished. Ninety-five percent included the abdominal cavity.

The shopkeeper and daughter were found in a similar state just outside Centralia, the mostly abandoned Pennsylvania town southeast of Aristes where Costas now stands. The yellow crime scene tape billows just out of the corner of her eye.

Since a mining explosion in 1962, Centralia has been resting precariously on top of a bed of flammable gases, which escape through mining vents and cracks in the pavement, threatening to split open the earth and swallow its remaining five residents whole. The red WARNING! sign Costas passed on her drive in flashes across the back of her eyelids when she blinks. Serious injury or death, it had heralded.

The fire still burns under the city to this day.

She turns away from phantom heat prodding her skin and brings the forensic photographs to the front of her mind.

The shopkeeper and daughter, twin chrysalises curved toward each other like parentheses.

The pristine, if not a bit brown, grass beneath them.

A boot print—size ten, men’s, positive for traces of soot—two feet away, toe pointing south.

She orients herself in that direction. The sun is waning, and dust motes and mosquitoes wink in the beams of sunlight that cut through the trees. It’s too beautiful a backdrop for an act so cruel.

Where could the perpetrator possibly have been walking toward? Costas tries to conjure the map of the underground mineshaft system, but the memories are fuzzy with uncertainty. Frustration is sour on her tongue; Sirwa is the direction-inclined one of them.

Forget this family, she commands herself. Think about the trail of victims that have led you here.

Twenty-five individuals have been found in similar states in the county since 1974—three before 1990, twenty-two by 2015. Spread out. Victims of all different backgrounds, genders, trades. Some couldn’t even be marked as homicide. Their deaths became urban legend rather than serious cases. And those are the ones they know about.

This family’s deaths were the first recorded in over ten years. Why?

The last victims over a decade ago were a brother and sister who had gone camping in the Pennsylvania woods to celebrate the girl’s graduating from high school, the only case in which only one body was recovered. Something had gone wrong. Or, at the very least, something had gone differently. But what, and why?

Steeling herself, she begins to walk. She is mostly sure an entrance to the mine is around here somewhere. Local officers have already swept the area, but no one has dared to go below the surface, go deeper.

Costas will be different. She won’t stop digging until she has her answers.

Regardless of her foolhardy assumption that she would eventually stumble upon something, Costas is still shocked when she sees it: the decaying maw of a mineshaft, its wooden beams moldering and overrun with spongy moss. The space it leads to is a sea of inky black, shadowed by an outcropping of rock and the dark, permeating disquiet.

She smells sulfur and something rotten. She has yet to see an animal, no rabbit or timid deer. Is that meant to be her role in all of this, the twitchy prey with wide eyes and trepidatious steps?

She pulls on her department-issued gas mask; it forces her vision forward, the protective seals on the sides like blinders. She hates it, but she won’t be good to anyone dead of asphyxiation. She can do little about the threats of combustion. Carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, methane, among others. Miners call these gases whitedamp, stinkdamp, firedamp—names for invisible things that could kill her or explode with little warning.

Costas, the canary.

She’s about to be swallowed whole by the mouth of the tunnel when she’s rendered frozen by the sound of twigs snapping nearby. After an hour of no sound outside of her own, it registers to her as violent, the cracking of bone or whip instead of wood.

She turns and places one hand on her hip, the other on the chin of her mask—the blinders instantly feel like a blindfold, debilitating. A chill sluices through her when she sees a figure standing there, about twenty large paces away.

It looks like a man, in a general sense, just one shrouded in shadow. Its edges undulate and blur, like a mirage upon asphalt in the blaring sun.

“Hello,” it speaks. A man’s voice, too. Thick with a regional accent. He whistles, low and thready through his bottom teeth. “Would ya look at this place. It wasn’t always so sigogglin’, you know.”

At first, the words sound like a random assortment of syllables to her; she has to parse their meaning consciously.

Costas grew up in rural West Virginia; she knows the legends of who live in these woods, these mountains, these haunted moments of silence. Her breath is too loud, heavy and echoey from the mask chambers. She forces her lungs to settle.

“Who are you?” she finally makes out.

“I might could ask you the same question, jasper.”

He steps closer, and Costas can now see the distressed denim of his jeans, the tan pelt of his jacket worn soft. The scuffed canvas of his hiking boots. He’s wearing a brown, long-billed cap that keeps his eyes hidden.

“I’m an investigator. Nara Costas.” She forces herself not to glance down once more at his boots. Are they the correct size? “I’m looking into the murders that occurred near here last week.”

The man purses his lips and tips his chin toward the fading golden light. Distractingly, he has a rather handsome face: stubbled square jaw, strong nose, angular cheekbones. He cannot be much older than Costas, but it’s impossible to tell without seeing his eyes.

“Over yander?” he asks, jutting his face in the direction of the cordoned-off scene. She only guesses it’s in that direction. She can’t see the tape anymore. Had she really walked that far to find this place?

“Yes.” Costas finally removes the mask, and it’s like coming up for air after being held underwater for ten minutes.

He takes her now-exposed face in—she can feel that itchy, heavy feeling of someone’s eyes raking over her—and then breaks into a jaw-cracking yawn. His canines glint with the sun’s flame.

The stranger, the predator.

“Well, I swan, I didn’t think it was worth all the trouble of getting fancy detectives like yerself out here.”

Costas rears back. “You don’t consider a triple homicide ‘worth the trouble’?”

The man just chuckles at her.

“Wasn’t the first, wasn’t the last,” he says with an apathetic shrug that turns Costas’s blood to slush. She can almost feel it slowing in her veins, slogging back to her heart and away again like an ice bath of fear.

She decides to take the leap. “You killed them.”

“Who?” The man sounds honestly perplexed, as if Costas had switched to discussing sports or the weather. “Oh. You mean that lady with the shop?”

Costas’s hand is clammy where it rests on the holster of her firearm. They haven’t released the identities to the press yet. Maybe this man has friends in local law enforcement, and that’s how he knows. Costas is intimately familiar with men who pretend to be menacing like this just for the thrill of making a woman squirm… but no. No, Costas has to be honest with herself.

“And her husband and child,” Costas confirms.

“Hmm.” He taps a finger to his chin. There’s a dark half-moon of dirt under his fingernail. Costas can’t understand how she can see that from here but not his entire face. After a moment, he shrugs. “If you say so, then yes. I might have done.”

“Are you denying it?”

“C’mon, now.” He sighs. “You cain’t expect me to keep track of every jasper who does or doesn’t die around here. Not when I’ve been doing this for so long.”

“‘This.’”

He looks amused at her cold, sniping repetition of his vague word choice. Then he tips his head back, and suddenly the forest is overwhelmed with a blaring noise.

It takes her a moment to realize it is her own frightened yelp that broke the forest’s unspoken rule of quiet. She chokes it down and drops her mask so she can put both hands on her gun, aimed true between the man’s eyes. Because the man’s eyes are not eyes at all, but sockets filled with roiling balls of flame that flicker red, orange, white, blue. Her hands don’t shake as she flicks off the safety.

“Do you know what you are?” she growls. His handsome face splits into a wide grin, and his fire eyes squint to accompany it. It’s unsettling in its organic nature.

He leaves perfect ovals of soot on the brim of his cap when he fiddles with it.

“Old,” he answers.

“Why are you killing these people?”

He has the gall to shrug. “Haveta. Wanna.”

Costas fumes. She wishes she could call Sirwa, but she’s not sure whether this thing would entertain such a blatant move or even if she has service all the way out here. She had one bar when she read the WARNING! sign.

“Has it been you this whole time?” she tries yet another question. “Last recorded death we can tie to this methodology was in 2015.”

He hums wistfully. “I did something that I wasn’t s’posed to.” He conjures a small blue flame in his hand. Impossibly, his fire eyes glint with the new flame’s reflection. “Had to be punished for a while.”

Costas squares her feet. “Put it out,” she demands, incredibly aware of the rotten eggs’ smell assaulting her nostrils. He complies, but her shifting her weight seems to alter his mood. Gone is his rakish grin.

“What do you think that thing could do to me? You don’t get old as dirt without being as unshakable,” he sneers. “Lucky for you, I’m willing to let you on yer way.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I’m full.” A smirk returns to his lips. “Besides, I ain’t scared of one little peckerwood.”

“Maybe you should be.” She flicks the safety back on. “Or I could return with backup.”

He chuckles, a breathy sound that crackles at the edges like campfire logs. “No one will believe you.”

Costas almost lets the bubble of her own laughter escape her. Somehow, this always happens. They’re always so sure, so arrogant. Perhaps, one of these days, she’ll come across one who doesn’t immediately make her want to take him in on the simple charge of “being annoying as hell.”

But today is not that day. She lowers her gun, and the fire man tips his cap.

“That thing you did that you weren’t supposed to,” she says. “You tried to give someone else the fire. Didn’t you?”

His patronizing expression freezes. If he had visible eyebrows, they would surely be furrowed.

“July, 2015, about forty miles west.” It’s her turn to be condescending. “You killed a man and held his sister’s eyes open so she had to watch him go up in flames. You liked her. You thought she could take it. You made her swallow a coal from the mine to which you are eternally bound.”

The air around the fire man wavers even more now as its temperature steadily rises.

“But when she started bleeding from the inside out, you thought you were wrong. You left her there, coughing up red while her brother curled beside her, and you had to face your punishment for pulling yourself apart, all for nothing, alone.”

“I might should take back what I said. Maybe I ain’t as full as I thought.”

The voice is different now, guttural and low, meant to be heard directly through the entire human skeleton, not just the earbones. It’s the voice that Costas recognizes, and the air is thick and warm, just like it was back then. She releases her hold on her form, under her control thanks to her Investigator Implant, and lets her eyes become a mirror of his. He stumbles back one step.

“Why did you do it?” she can’t help asking. She is running out of time—she knows she only has moments once he fully understands his fate—but she has waited eleven years for this.

“My name is Principal Investigator Nara Costas,” she continues when he stays silent. “I work for OLIMPUS: the Organization for Locating Invasive Mythological Persons with the United States. I was scouted because when I was eighteen, an IMP killed my brother and gave me, a human, fire.”

She grins at the IMP, and it takes another step away from her. The leaves beneath his feet hiss and curl.

“I know I can’t kill you,” Costas simpers. “But I am going to take back what you stole from the shopkeeper’s husband. It will grow back—painfully, yes, but you won’t die. And now that I’ve found you, you will never escape me. If you hurt anyone ever again, I will come back, and I will rip out your fresh new liver again. You will beg for the eagle to return.”

The IMP snarls.

“And the truly sad part is, even if any powers that be come around to listen to your plight,” she makes her voice saccharine and cloying, like the pine sap in the trees around them, “no one will believe you.”

~*~

Hours later, in the dingy light of her hotel room, Costas finally finishes scrubbing the red from under her nails and begrudgingly makes her way to her pack to begin to tame the worst IMP of them all: bureaucracy.

She leafs through the case notes in the manila file titled “Case_#451_IMP_’Prometheus’_CLASSIFIED” and lets herself smile. Over a decade of patience and planning finally bearing fruit.

When her phone buzzes, her phone wallpaper of a brother’s and sister’s wide smiles flashes on the screen, before it’s overtaken by the contact screen of whoever is calling her.

She almost lets it go to voicemail, but her conscience wrings its hands around her stomach until the guilt is too nauseating to ignore.

“Costas here.”

“Nara!” Sirwa’s nasal voice pierces through the air with audible concern. There’s another burn of guilt. “Are you alright? Eff, man.” Why he self-censors, Costas has never understood. It makes him seem even younger than his true twenty-six years. “You really couldn’t give me a call this whole time? After running off like that? I know you said this was something you had to face alone, but we’re talking about a Rank Five IMP! What the heck happened?”

The concern is almost touching, especially knowing all of the curt things she said to convince him of her seriousness about going solo.

“I took care of it,” she says simply.

“In a way that the Captain will understand?”

“She knew what she was doing when she recruited me. She knows how long I’ve been waiting for this assignment,” Costas snaps.

Sirwa does not rise to her challenge. “Whatever you say, hothead.”

“Go to hell, Sirwa,” she barks again, though any ire seeps from her. Everyone in the Organization knows her origin. Sirwa himself had been recruited due to his own run-in with an IMP.

“Doesn’t sound like someone who wants her partner to do her paperwork for her.”

“Oh, would you?” she asks and finds herself unable to suppress a wide, grateful smile. She knows he can hear it, but for a moment, she does not care. “Get your rookie hide down the hall, then. I’ll put on tea.”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“All in a day’s work,” she signs off in their signature call-and-response, a secret code and inside joke wrapped into one.

She looks at her brother’s face for one more second, then stands to boil the water.