Page 11 of Into the Fire

Simon finished his sub, crumpled the wrapper, and tossed the garbage into the trash.

“The hotel was built on land that the early settlers believed to be haunted. I found mentions in one supernatural history of the area that magical practitioners carried out a lot of blessings, dispelled curses, and sold plenty of good luck charms around where the hotel is now. Fires happened suspiciously often, both at the hotel and in smaller blazes in a cluster around the same time. I could see how being built on land that already had some kind of darker presence could be a slow drag on prosperity and need to have the protections renewed fairly often. Hollywood doesn’t get everything wrong in the movies.”

“Did someone miss a payment or skip an installment?” Pete asked. “You make it sound like they didn’t pay their exterminator bill and the roaches came back.”

Simon shrugged. “In a way. If whatever is causing the haunting came with the land, then it probably wasn’t created. Hard to destroy a natural force, so my theory is that someone along the way found out how to bind it. That might have been the best anyone could do. But that magic had limits. Reading between the lines, something forced the family into some devil’s bargains with partners like the Mob that had powerful witches and knew how to deal with dark magic and arsonists, in order to stay in business.”

“I can see that,” Pete mused. “Although the family must have been really obsessed not to just give up, move away, and start over.”

“Or they were afraid the darkness would follow them,” Simon suggested. “The last slump was sixty years ago, right before Sanderson’s great-grandfather took over. The hotel was rebuilt after a fire but nearly got repossessed by the bank.”

He paused, pulling his thoughts together. “There are pieces that don’t add up to be just a fire spirit. The small fires elsewhere that coincide with each big fire at the hotel, the reports of a flaming lizard spirit, weird accidents, and the abrupt changes in luck,” Simon told him.

“Like what?” Pete asked.

“Ocean Visions had safety violations, badly needed repairs, and had been sued by some visitors who got injured on the property,” Simon replied.

“Then, all of a sudden, their luck turned. They paid off the bank and made repairs. The lawsuit got dropped. Ocean Visions has been on top of its game since then, until recently. Which begs the question: are we dealing with more than one type of entity? Maybe the fire spirit starts the cycle, and then whatever causes the small fires and grants favors follows it? Might even be some malicious spirits involved, dark presences that might not have even been human. Like supernatural parasites feeding off the fire energy?”

“If you know the date the hotel’s fortunes picked up sixty years ago, could people who know the area’s supernatural history link that to having gotten rid of a big, bad, nasty spirit?” Pete asked. “I’d think someone would notice.”

“That’s the next step.” Simon finished his chips and drink. “I’m not sure if there’s been one spirit gaining strength over the years behind the misfortune, or garden-variety bad luck made worse when a powerful ghost locked onto all that tasty angst.”

“In the movies, it’s always the ghost of someone who got murdered in the hotel,” Pete said. “That’s a lot easier to figure out than this idea that a location can be so stained by the past that it becomes an evil nexus.”

“Great way of putting it,” Simon told him. “I imagine it would take a mini-series and not just one movie to solve that kind of thing.”

“I’ll let you know if Hollywood calls,” Pete joked.

Simon leaned back and looked at his screen as if he could will it to reveal secrets. “I’ll be interested to see what Sanderson comes up with from the family papers. He might find things that don’t seem related to him but to us supply some of the missing pieces.”

“If he had illusions about his ancestors being pillars of the community, he might find out they had some grungy business partners,” Pete warned.

“I don’t think Sanderson is a fool,” Simon replied. “He seems like a good guy, no matter what choices his ancestors made. He’s probably heard gossip, in the family or the community, that not all of the hotel’s former owners were squeaky clean.”

“Doing a bargain with some kind of demonic spirit goes farther than most shady deals,” Pete noted. “Here’s hoping that Sanderson doesn’t decide to sacrifice a chance to trap the spirit in order to cover up old family dirt.”

“I suspect that sixty years ago, his family double-crossed the fire spirit and found a way to lock it up,” Simon ventured. “They might have felt so sure it would be a permanent fix that they didn’t record how they did it, because they didn’t think it would have to be done again.”

Simon shrugged. “We’ll have to wait and see. But if we don’t find a way to stop the ghost again, it’s going to be everyone’s problem.”

3

Vic

Vic had his favorite Springsteen album playing while he chased a hunch online. Ross waved at him to take out his earbuds.

“Find anything?” Ross asked.

Several days had passed since the fire at the Ocean Visions Hotel, and Vic had spent a lot of that time, like Simon, looking into the location’s checkered history and searching for leads.

“The Ocean Visions has had a very interesting life.” Vic paused his music and leaned back in his chair. “During World War II, it was a military lookout with a great view. After that, in the 1950s and 60s, there was an illegal gambling racket that would have given Atlantic City a run for its money, although the casinos kept a much lower profile.”

“Something about the beach makes people want to gamble,” Ross replied. “Go figure.”

“The stuff that happened back then certainly added to the ghost stories, true or not.” Vic gulped his coffee and rubbed his eyes, realizing he had been internet surfing longer than he thought.

“During World War II, a sniper tried to shoot the lookouts and got killed. People said they saw him wandering the beach in a German uniform,” Vic told him. “Doesn’t sound like a great way to blend in if that’s what he really wore, but that’s the legend. There are other stories about weapons malfunctions, a bomb that went off accidentally, and someone falling from an upper story, more deaths and ghosts.”