Pyrophobia Read online

  ‘What was that word again?’ Kayla asked.

  ‘Mapeetaa,’ Jason replied, in the same tone of voice he believed that Chris would have said it. ‘It starts with an M. Just like in the picture. And it also sounds like the word Mawkee.’

  ‘What you mean is, the M on the headstone could stand either for Mawkee or Mapeetaa? What is Mapeetaa?’

  ‘I don’t have a clue. At least not yet. It sounds enigmatic to me.’

  ‘Almost like an Indian god or something.’

  ‘I thought the same thing at first. But not according to Google. “Mapeetaa” doesn’t get a single hit. But it would be stranger still if it didn’t mean anything.’

  ‘Sure, it probably means something. But what?’

  He shrugged. ‘You want another roll?’

  When he offered her the bread basket, she took a croissant.

  ‘What, Jason? What does it mean?’

  He selected a roll for himself, cut it open and spread some jam on it. ‘Like I said, Kayla, I haven’t the faintest idea. That’s why I was Googling it. I have to start somewhere.’

  She gave him a questioning look.

  ‘And this word “Mapeetaa” simply occurred to you all of a sudden?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, it did.’

  Was he lying? On the one hand he wasn’t, because the word had spontaneously come to him, like a lost treasure washed up on a beach. On the other hand he could not deny that he himself had used the word a long time ago.

  ‘Although I’m starting to doubt the spelling now. I wonder why …’ He stared at her pensively. ‘Maybe it’s spelled a different way.’

  Kayla filled her glass with fresh orange juice. ‘To be honest, I had hoped we wouldn’t have to discuss this whole mess for a while.’

  He could tell she meant it. From the bottom of her heart. Kayla wanted to plan ahead. Have children, be happy, live a normal life.

  His face assumed a dogged expression. ‘I need to know, Kayla,’ he stated emphatically. ‘Otherwise I’ll never have peace of mind. That’s why I can’t let it go.’

  No, he thought to himself, he could not let it go, no matter how she felt about it.

  After breakfast, Kayla cleared the table. Jason returned to his study, probably, Kayla thought, to Google some more.

  She opened the sliding doors to the porch. There was no need to use the key, because, once again, Jason had forgotten to lock the doors. She put the dish towel out on a porch chair to dry and took a moment to gaze at the panorama before her in the light of the morning sun. She heard an excited voice coming from somewhere to the right and, curious, walked to the corner of the porch to inspect. The voice turned out to be that of their neighbor, Allan, who was fighting with a garden hose that stubbornly resisted his efforts to untangle it.

  Smiling, she turned around and went back inside. ‘Mapeetaa.’ She said the word out loud to herself. It had a menacing ring to it.

  She spotted the calendar on the wall and saw the note she had written to herself there. This morning she was scheduled to go jogging with her friend Simone. They had met when they were both waitresses at The Duchess, and had since become close.

  Kayla had forgotten all about their plans. She considered calling Simone and canceling. But that thought she quickly dismissed. Here in the house the worry mill would keep right on turning with the same concerns and questions. She needed a break from that worry. She needed some fresh air.

  It wasn’t just Jason. She also reflected on Ralph, who, in his own way, had been just as fascinated with death as Jason.

  Ralph had been obsessed with his body and health. He never touched anything but the healthiest products, refused to stay in the same room with people who were smoking, and was fixated with staying in shape. Skipping even one evening at the gym made him edgy. Sometimes he had spells of gloom that life was too short, much too short. She had always waved such thoughts away. Yeah, we only live for eighty years or so. So what?

  It had never been funny to him.

  ‘I’ll never get that old, Kayla,’ he had said to her during one of his solemn episodes. ‘I’ll be gone long before then. In fact, I’m not going to live much longer.’

  She had repeatedly told him to stop freaking her out with such gloom and doom. After Ralph’s cardiac arrest, she had often thought about his prophetic words and talked to people who had had similar experiences. In the process Kayla had heard some remarkable stories. The one that continued to stay with her involved Matthew Henson, a member of one of the self-help groups. He had told her about his girlfriend, Claire Simpson.

  It had been a classic case of love at first sight. Two soulmates, destined by fate to meet one day. He was deeply in love with her, and she with him, and nothing seemed to be standing in the way of their happiness. Within five months after they first met – he was twenty-five at the time, she three years younger – they had decided to get married.

  That should have been the blissful end of the story, but something changed. Claire started acting strangely. She needed Matthew to tell her how much he loved her, over and over again and at the oddest moments – when he was in a meeting, for example, or hanging out at a bar with friends. She would call him up, demanding confirmation of his love. The first few times it had seemed romantic, but soon it grew old. Whenever Matthew asked Claire why she was acting in this bizarre manner, she never gave him a satisfactory answer. The only thing she kept repeating was that she had to.

  When she fell ill and things didn’t improve, they called in a doctor. He couldn’t find anything wrong with her and suggested she get herself checked out at a hospital. Then things started spiraling downhill. Claire was diagnosed with a rapidly growing cancer mass inside her frail twenty-two-year-old body. The doctors couldn’t cure her and told her she had three to six weeks left to live. As it turned out, she only had five days.

  Matthew was devastated. He had spoken often with Claire in the final days and hours before she died, and they had said everything that needed to be said.

  Kayla had asked Matthew if Claire had had a premonition of her own death.

  Matthew had nodded his answer. In her last days, Matthew said, Claire had told him she loved him, but that ‘he’ had always been stronger. Matthew had asked Claire who she meant by ‘he’.

  Kayla would never forget what Claire said next, according to Matthew.

  I have to go back to God. He wants me to return.

  Those words confirmed that Claire had known she was not going to live much longer.

  Just like Ralph, dead before the age of thirty, not much older than Matthew Henson’s Claire.

  But what if Ralph’s heart condition had been diagnosed in time? Then what?

  Would everything have turned out all right, or would he have died of something else?

  The same questions applied to Claire’s cancer. Had it truly been inevitable that she ‘returned to God’ so soon? If her cancer had been cured, would some other disease have claimed her?

  Kayla had concluded that while we are all terminal, we will all die eventually, the concept of predetermined death was not one she could readily accept. Since then, every time someone close to her died, the old wound of Ralph’s death was torn open in her again. Every time that happened, it left her devastated.

  But she was also convinced of something else. People who sent death an open invitation were tempting fate.

  She felt that way in the first terrible months after Ralph died, and she still did.

  Had God called Claire Simpson to Him while she was in the prime of her life?

  Would God do such a thing?

  She refused to believe it. God simply did not micromanage to that extent.

  Ralph’s death could have been prevented if some doctor had found the problem with his heart valve in time. Claire would still be alive if her cancer had been diagnosed earlier. That was Kayla’s simple down-to-earth reasoning, and she believed it passionately. Anything else was nonsense – superstitious, occult nonsense.

  T
o make matters worse, Kayla thought she may be partly to blame for Ralph’s death. If only she had made him get regular check-ups. She could have made him go see a doctor, who could have referred him to a specialist, and then …

  And then Ralph would have lived and she would be married to him now. There would be no Jason in her life.

  She sighed at the thought, not for the first time. Whatever the future consequences of her non-action, she could not deny that she had never insisted that he get a medical check-up. Because he had always appeared to be in such excellent health, she had taken his somber words with a grain of salt. More accurately, a shaker of salt.

  She wasn’t to blame, that much she understood, but still she felt somehow guilty. She could have done more, pure and simple. And she hadn’t.

  And now Jason. The photographs were enigmatic. His nightmares were troubling. The burning figure was simply terrifying and added a flavor of the occult that she despised. Ever since she had discovered the three photographs, she had been trapped inside a nightmare of her own. All she wanted was to wake up to the start of a new day, a bright blue day, without any of the darkness that had settled over her life. Was that really too much to ask?

  She leaned against the kitchen counter, drained in body and soul.

  Perhaps the day would look brighter after her run with Simone. Right now Canyon View felt more like a tomb than a home.

  Kayla had gone out jogging with Simone, on a date that had been set some time ago. Getting her mind off things for a while would do her good, she had said, and Jason had agreed. After she left, he went back to researching what the mysterious words ‘Mapeetaa’ and ‘Mawkee’ could mean.

  Absently, he recalled when their friend Rose Salladay had died. After the funeral Kayla hadn’t left the house for weeks, and all his efforts to comfort her came to naught. One day, when he had tried to tell her that no matter how tragic Rose’s death might have been she shouldn’t let it get her down like this, Kayla had nearly gone berserk. ‘You can’t dictate how I should feel, Jason Evans!’ she had screamed at him, just before hurling two porcelain teacups against the wall, shattering them. Ever since, Jason had trod carefully around the subject of death, and gradually he had come to understand what lay at the core of Kayla’s angry reaction. Rose had only been thirty-three years old, and her death had been so unfair.

  Jason drummed his fingers on the thick desk. Outside, through a window, he saw the peaks of the canyons tinged with a pleasing bluish-gray hue. His gaze roamed around the room to the luscious house plant, the only thing livening up the confined space. It had a complicated Latin name Jason couldn’t remember, so he simply called it the reed plant.

  Then he looked at his screen.

  He typed: mawkee.

  Several thousand hits for that word came up. He leafed through the pages. Mawkee was a name of someone from New York, an Arabic name, a river, a song by some band. He clicked some of the links, but found nothing that had any direct meaning for him.

  He tried other spellings.

  Next, he typed: mapitaa.

  Google didn’t recognize that word. Then: mapita

  For that word he received 4,130 results, most of them on Spanish-language sites. He clicked through a few of them. Apparently Mapita was a mountainous area in Argentina and also a region in Spain. There was another Mapita in Guinea, and Google also found a pharmaceutical company by the same name.

  Jason heaved a heavy sigh. He wasn’t getting anywhere.

  Mawkee. Mapeetaa. Mapitaa. Mapita. M.

  What now?

  The photographs were on the desk beside him. He picked them up and studied them intently, paying special attention to the last one delivered. He peered at the letter M like a magician staring at a top hat just before the rabbits come jumping out.

  He was trying out all kinds of sounds even remotely similar to the word Mapeetaa. Suddenly he froze. Something was bubbling up from the depths of his subconscious mind.

  It was not Mapeetaa.

  Jason got up and paced around the study. Then he sat back down and typed out two words: mount peytha.

  He hit ‘enter’ and received 200,000 hits that informed him about Mount Peytha City, a town in the desert of Arizona, on the state line with Nevada. He knew this town; he and Kayla had been near there just last year, on the way to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon. It was halfway between Interstate 15 going toward Vegas and Interstate 40 going toward Flagstaff. They had skirted the town, deciding not to stop there. So Jason had never actually been there.

  He clicked the first link, mountpeythacity.com, and the official site appeared on his screen. Information from local authorities, a link for tourism, the airport, panoramic shots of the surrounding area. He clicked through the site wondering, Is this it?

  He felt a strong urge to go there, as if a voice inside his head was yelling at him that yes, this was the place.

  M. Mawkee. Mapeetaa. Mount Peytha. They were not very much alike, although each word had phonetic similarities to the others.

  He bit at his lower lip.

  Mount Peytha City. What about it? What happened there?

  Another part of his mind threw a bucket of ice water on his feverish thoughts.

  Hang on, you’ve never been to Mount Peytha City.

  No, he hadn’t. He had heard of it, but that was all … or maybe when he’d been eighteen, the time he and Bill Hallerman had been partying in Utah. He had done other things besides partying – a pair of full, cherry-red lips belonging to some girl named Sonja flashed beguilingly in his mind. What had been her last name?

  Jason tried to remember, to no avail. Probably just as well, she thought.

  Maybe the first time he had ever noticed the name Mount Peytha City on a map had been during his holiday in Utah with Bill, although he was convinced he had never actually been to the town.

  But now the name of the town was pulling at him, and he needed to go there. It took a conscious effort to not grab the car keys.

  He gripped the armrests of his chair.

  What’s with that place? What’s wrong with you?

  He covered his face with his hands and desperately tried to create some semblance of order in his churning thoughts.

  I need to go to Mount Peytha City.

  The feeling remained. But why?

  Because there’s something I need to find there.

  It seemed to make sense. He picked up his children’s drawing again. The burning graves. The word ‘Mapeetaa’ on one of the headstones.

  My God, is that where the cemetery is?

  It was almost like an explosion inside his head. Until this moment he had thought the graveyard could be anywhere in the world.

  But then a dose of common sense kicked in. Did he really think he knew? Or was he just hoping he knew? Or was he imagining things? He had no idea, just the feeling that he was a puppet whose strings were pulling him along in a maelstrom. Or maybe it was some kind of epiphany. What if …

  What if he found the graveyard in Mount Peytha City? And the headstone depicted in the third photograph? One thought inevitably linked to another. In the Photoshop-less reality there could be a stone without an M, but with the name of the deceased. What was that name?

  You are dead. You think you’re alive, but you don’t exist.

  And that could indicate …

  That my name is on that headstone.

  The belief that he had touched upon a wondrous revelation left him as quick as it had arisen. He was back where he had started, because this was ridiculous. He was alive. And if it were up to him, he would stay that way for many more years.

  Another explanation surfaced.

  Jason let it come, very slowly, until it formed a clearer picture.

  He took a deep breath, got up, crossed his arms and pressed them to his chest. He was experiencing terrible stomach cramps. He ran outside and leaned across the porch railing, retching. Slowly his nausea eased.

  He stared up into a clear azure sky. Sunlight glittered in
his eyes. He didn’t avert his gaze but let himself be dazzled by the white sphere in the sky.

  Suddenly Jason understood how he could have died.

  NINETEEN

  Plans

  Kayla walked in the front door at four thirty. After a pleasant run with Simone, she had decided to stop by and visit her parents. She looked calmer than she had earlier in the day, and seemed more like her old self.

  Jason had spent the last few hours in the kitchen, his favorite place indoors to think. Which is what he had been doing while grilling chicken, boiling potatoes and cutting up vegetables for a salad. When Kayla came in, he was just whipping up a chocolate surprise for dessert.

  Her eyes lit up when she noticed his culinary creations. Her smile turned into a laugh when he proposed having a bath together before sitting down at the dining table.

  ‘You’re on, sailor,’ she gushed.

  He drew the bath and opened a bottle of wine. Not a cheap one this time, but a good Chablis, imported from France. After they had settled themselves in the steaming water, he raised his glass to her.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘To what do I owe all this pampering?’

  ‘To the fact that I love you.’

  ‘I love you, too, Jason. But please tell me the real reason for this divine treat.’ She held her wine glass in one hand and as she rubbed some flowery soap on her apple-shaped breasts and her shoulders and neck with her other hand, she sighed the way she did during other, more intimate moments.

  ‘The real reason?’ he said. As he sat there watching her ministrations, he felt the familiar stirrings in his loins. ‘You think I have a hidden agenda?’

  Her gaze wandered down his body. ‘It’s not so hidden any more, is it?’ She looked up, smiling. ‘I don’t think anything, Jason. I know you have a hidden agenda. I know you that well.’