Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
The real estate agent didn’t mention that there was a guy died in this house, a two bedroom bungalow on a quiet street. It was a good deal. About twenty thousand dollars under market value according to my research. I mean, it only has one bathroom so that’s an issue for some, but I’m single, now, and I intend to stay that way. The place is in good shape. New kitchen cupboards. Fresh drywall in the living room. But apparently everyone in town knew something that I didn’t. I was digging out the scraggly lilac bush in the front yard when a woman marched up the driveway with measured and deliberate steps.
“I’m Helen,” she said. “Welcome to the neighbourhood. I’ve always liked this little house.” And then she asked me if I knew a man had burnt to death in the living room.
“No,” I said. “I did not know.”
“Yes,” she told me. Her cheeks were pink with the adrenaline rush of being the first one to relay bad news, and the story spilled out of her a bit too fast. “It was a shock, living around the corner and the emergency vehicles pulling up in the middle of the afternoon. They had to cordon off the street so the school kids didn’t walk by and see the blackened remains when they carried him out. Horace Bell was his name.”
“What happened?” I asked her.
She got real close to me and lowered her voice.
“Oh,” she said. “Anger. He had this condition. You could see it. You could smell it, even. If he got mad, which happened a lot, like if somebody let their dog shit on his lawn? He would short circuit like a robot. And you could see steam rising off of him.”
I stepped on the shovel, trying to divide the root ball. “Seriously? No.”
“Seriously. Ask anybody. Ask Grace next door what happened when the wind blew some Hallowe’en decorations over to Horace’s side of the driveway. It was a crepe paper spider and a cardboard pumpkin and Horace grabbed them and crumpled them up and shoved them in Grace’s garbage can. Ask Grace what she found when she pulled them out. They were scorched. Just as if somebody had put a hot iron to ’em, in the shape of hands.”
I shake my head a bit and wait to find out if she’s pulling my leg. But I can see she’s not the kind of person to make something up. Especially a whopper like this. People named Helen are generally pragmatic rather than imaginative. Her orthopedic shoes lend evidence to my assessment.
“The TV was still on when the emergency vehicles arrived,” she said. “Something he was watching must have got his temperature rising. Could have been any number of things. He lost his job and his wife left him and his son married a man and he blames the government for all of it, so who knows what might have started him burning. He melted right into the upholstery. Fire retardant, the material is nowadays, but the black smoke poured out the window, and that’s how the next door neighbor, not Grace but Wilma on the other side… over there, see? With the blue lawn chairs on the porch? That’s Wilma’s place. She called 911. Wilma was shaken, I’ll tell you. She needed sleeping pills after that.”
“Well, thanks for the information,” I said. I stuffed the lilac branches in the compost bin and washed my hands under the hose and, I’m not going to lie, I was looking for excuses to stay outside but eventually the sun was setting and the mosquitoes started biting and I had to go in. There was no sign of smoke damage or anything. The flooring was new. A laminate that looked almost like real wood. I wondered if there was a burn mark underneath. Where the chair had been. So I went down to the basement and looked at the ceiling and, sure enough, there was a whole new piece of plywood and a couple of beams that were obviously replacements. I had skipped the home inspection. I figured I didn’t need a scam artist to tell me the roof needs re-shingling. But a fire? That might have been good to know about.
I tried not to let it bother me. People die in homes all the time. Usually they go quietly in their beds, but still.
Then one afternoon I smell smoke while I’m watching a documentary about homeless army vets. Some folks think refugees and illegal immigrants are taking money away from these poor guys that have served their country and now they are living on skid row. The stench gets more intense when the journalist interviews a guy with no legs on a skateboard who spends his days begging in front of City Hall. Maybe some neighbour has fired up the barbeque, I think. I go and stand on the front step and sniff the air. Nothing but honeysuckle.
About 7:15 the next evening, I smell something burning again. I put Fox News on mute and take a few deep breaths. Singed hair, acrid and harsh. Times like this, I wish I didn’t live alone. I could use a roommate to confirm or deny that I am going crazy.
Gradually, I pick up bits and pieces of information about Horace Bell from the neighbours. Grace is a single mom.
“I wouldn’t let my kids go nowhere near that man’s house,” she told me. “He had a business in town. A garage. He was a decent mechanic, but no social skills. His customer base was a bunch of grumpy old men who didn’t mind listening to his theories about the big car companies and the computers they install in every new vehicle. Designed to break down a hundred kilometers after the warranty expires.”
I have suspected this conspiracy myself when the little engine light comes on while I am hurtling down the highway at high speeds. Or the exclamation mark, which is alarming. But really? It just means you need some air in your tires.
“For a while after the station went bankrupt, he worked from home,” Grace says. “He always had a car jacked up in the driveway and two or three parked vehicles in front of the house. He did oil changes mostly. Cash only. But the bylaw officer put a stop to that. Then he got caught rolling back odometers. More charges and a suspended sentence. Then, last October, he threw a Molotov cocktail through the GM Dealership window.”
“Did anybody get hurt?”
“No. It was the middle of the night, and the wick fizzled out before it got to the gasoline. But the webcam was watching.”
Poor Horace. He reminds me of the boy I liked in high school whose misguided ethics led him to dump house paint all over the army tank in front of the Legion to protest the Vietnam War.
“Horace was sentenced to sweep the floors at the arena, but what kind of community service is it when a guy scares little kids who track in a bit of mud on their boots? His toque would stink like woolen mittens on a heat register whenever a hockey mom got careless tossing her cardboard coffee cup at the garbage can. Then some money went missing from the cash box in the skate sharpener’s booth, and Horace was blamed. He swore it was a set up, but the judge was tired of seeing him and put him on house arrest. He was wearing one of those ankle bracelets when he died.”
I launched an investigation into home confinement products, thinking maybe they were fire hazards. Could they short out if you tampered with them? I even called the fire chief and asked if there was any indication of a burn around Horace Bell’s ankle. He couldn’t release that information to the public, but when I told him I was living with Horace’s ghost, he was sympathetic.
“He just combusted, Ma’am. There’s nothing to indicate foul play or a defective tracking device. My advice to you is to get out of that house. Pronto. I been chief here for twenty-one years and you know what? There are some places that never recover from a fire where a death occurs. I don’t know why. Same thing happens sometimes in a place where there’s been violence. Murder. Or a fatal accident. You can expect unexplained disturbances for years to come. Once it’s been opened up, the gate to hell is hard to close.”
Now that I’m divorced, I figure I should be able to watch whatever I like on TV. For years I sat through hockey games when I would have preferred The Bachelor. “What are you watching that crap for?” my husband would ask if he came home and caught me sneaking a peek at a rose ceremony. But it turns out Horace Bell is sensitive to my program choices, too.
Women arguing on talk shows brings on a reek like fat sizzling in a deep fryer. Anything about unemployment or debt or politics can cause a chemical smell, like plastic melting. If I stick to game shows and home renovations, Horace stays happy. But I can’t always control the media. One afternoon, right in the middle of Family Feud, the survey asks, “What are some bad jobs for people who are accident-prone?”
“Driver,” one contestant shouts.
“Construction worker,” is another guess.
All of a sudden, the program is interrupted to announce a terrorist attack in the nation’s capital. The gunman has a foreign name.
And, what the hell! My ass is on fire. I jump off the couch and run outside and grab the hose and start spraying my butt. It’s smoking. Helen’s head pops over the back fence. She’s always on Neighbourhood Watch duty, that woman. “Hot day,” I call out to her as pleasantly as possible considering my bum is scorched. The last thing I need is a rumour going around that there is paranormal activity in my house.
That night, I lie in bed and worry about immolation. I suspect that Horace Bell could burn me in my bed if he decided that was what he wanted to do. But I have never believed a person to be totally good, or totally evil. When All-Star Wrestling comes to the local arena, I root for the bad guy. The evil dude who gets all the boos. There’s something vulnerable about a villain. Not that I want the job of curator for a dead man’s reputation, but I hold out hope for the discovery of one redeeming quality in Horace Bell.
In answer to these ruminations comes a cry outside my window, like a baby left on the doorstep. I crawl out of bed and open the patio door to find a ginger tomcat who insists on coming in. Now, I’m not really a cat person, but this guy has some manners. He sits on the mat, still and cautious, giving us both a chance to look the other one over. He sees a sour-faced woman in a faded flannel nightgown with a long grey braid running halfway down her back. I see a scruffy old stray with one ear split in half, a sore eye and some mange eating away his hind end.
The next day, Helen affirms my suspicions that the cat belonged to Horace Bell. “Yes,” she says. “That cat was a stray around here for a long time, and Horace hated him. Sprayed him with the hose, threw tools at him. But Charlie stood his ground. He sat just out of range and watched Horace as he worked on cars. Eventually they adopted each other.”
“Charlie?”
“He also called him you goddamned orange bastard .”
“Well,” I say. “If I intended to keep him, I’d call him Charlie. That suits him. But unfortunately I’m not fond of cats.”
“You can drop him off at the S.P.C.A.,” Helen suggests. “Otherwise he’ll likely keep turning up. He’s a stubborn creature.”
So that is what I decide to do. Take him to the shelter. But when I go inside to get him, he has disappeared. I look everywhere, under beds, in cupboards, behind the furnace. I even open a can of tuna to tempt him. Nothing. He must have sneaked out the door when I wasn’t looking. Good. Problem solved.
After supper, two things happen. First, I smell something burning. “For crying out loud, Horace!” I say. Then Charlie propels himself from his hiding place behind the buffet and, shrieking like a banshee from the haunted swamp, he pounces on the exact place where Horace’s chair went up in flames. Then he lies down, licks his paws and looks at me for a little acknowledgment.
“Good boy, Charlie,” I tell him. “Well done.”
It costs me three hundred dollars to pay for his shots, ointment for the mange, a litter box, a scratching post and a big bag of the good kind of cat food that veterinarians recommend. If I am going to have a cat guarding the gates of hell, I do not intend to be cheap about it.
We get along fine. And whenever Horace tries to escape from his eternal furnace, Charlie arches his back, dances around the perimeter of the living room, and launches himself at his nemesis. When it’s all clear, Charlie hops up in my lap and emits a deeply satisfying victory purr. He lifts his chin and I stroke him on the throat.
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” I tell Charlie. And then we turn on the TV
and watch whatever we like.
