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Heat Source
Chapter One

By Laura, Maren, and Robin Smith
Copyright ©2010

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Flora stomped through the snow, carrying an armload of firewood up to the house.  She threw her shoulder against the kitchen door to swing it open and heat hit her face, inspiring a sigh of near orgasmic relief.  Kicking the door shut behind her, she leaned back against it.  She really hated the cold.  With a passion, one might even say.  When the temperatures outside dropped below zero, Flora wasted no time at all in cranking the heat up to eighty.  Whoever said Hell was hot had obviously never endured a winter in Colorado.  But this now – Flora breathed in the blessed kitchen heat – this was heaven.

Wishing she was back home in Arizona, Flora made her way through the unfamiliar kitchen to deposit her load of wood in the bin by the crackling hearth.  Shrugging out of her coat, she rubbed at her arms, the cold making even the softness of her sweater feel more like fine-grade sandpaper.  She stretched out her hands, letting the fire warm her fingers and chuckled a little as she thought about the night she’d moved in here, oh about a month ago now.  When the cold first hit, she’d have given her eyeteeth for a thermostat like normal houses had, but this place wasn’t equipped with one.

House?  Ha!  The massive, mansion-sized log cabin that she had been hired to house-sit was like something fresh off the pages of The Shining.  It was huge!  It was luxuriant.  It was smack dab in the middle of absolutely nowhere, with no sign of a neighbor for as far as the eye could discern.  She was alone here, and would be for the next eight months, until the snows melted again sometime around May.

“I hope you don’t mind the solitude,” Linda Austin had said with a laugh and then waved goodbye through the open car window as she and her husband drove away.

That had been back in August.  The first snowflakes had fallen near the end of October, and here she was, the first week of November had only just begun, and already she’d seen enough snow to last her the rest of her life.

Rubbing her hands together, she went to check the thermometer on the wall in the hallway.  Wow, it had gotten cold fast.  Outside, the wind was blowing softly and another flurry of flakes was rolling steadily towards her.  With weather conditions like that, there was only so much an old-fashioned, stone fireplace could do to heat a house this size, even with a fireplace in nearly every room.  In the short time it had taken her to walk out to the woodshed and back again, the house had cooled almost ten degrees!  She grudgingly admitted that a temperature of seventy was still moderately bearable, but this definitely was not the Arizona climate she was used to.  She dreaded it each time she had to venture outside for that long, half-mile walk down to the barn where the extra cords of wood were stacked, but really, what were her options?  She couldn’t exactly run outside and chop down a tree.  She was a house-sitter, not a lumberjack; she was much more likely to drop a tree on the house.  And she had been warned against trying to gather fallen wood from patches of old growth closer to the door.  Poison oak was very much a part of the local flora and, if burned, could take a very nasty revenge on a person’s lungs if the smoke were inhaled.

No, if Flora wanted to avoid making all those long trips to the woodshed and back again, she was just going to have to cut back on how hot she kept the house and learn to like sweaters.  Sweaters weren’t very big in Arizona.  Particularly not for a girl whose preferred standard of at-home leisurewear looked less like clothes and more like panties and camis.

With the inside woodbins restocked and the fire in the kitchen burning brightly, Flora mentally checked off her Chores List and punched the time card for play time.  In a house this size, that meant exploration time.  Finding a working flashlight in the cupboard, Flora headed for the basement door.  She made her way carefully down the narrow wood steps and once she reached the cement floor, moved carefully through more than one hundred years of boxes, rickety furniture and clutter to the way, way back where the antique boiler still stood.

This was the oldest part of the house, the least renovated part and the most exploration-worthy.  Here, the clutter of previous owners was built up in boxes and piles along the cement walls and spilled out into the loosely-formed aisles as much as chest high in places.  The boiler itself, above the chests and furniture and trunks of black and white photos and old clothes, was the crowning gem of all this antiquity.

It was unlike anything she had ever seen.  The outer shell looked to be of cast iron, although she knew enough about physics to know that was the worst material to make a boiler out of.  Steam had created cracks – although an obvious steam tube vented from the back – and yet she could find no firebox in which to put the fuel.  In fact, there was no opening of any kind all the way around.  And Flora had looked.  If she didn’t know better, she’d have guessed the thing to be decorative, rather than a working source of steam heat.  But who in their right mind would pay to haul an eight foot tall, six foot wide, black, heavy, cast iron, non-working, ugly as sin, steam boiler all the way out into the middle of nowhere and then install it for decoration?

This thing had to have an opening; she was sure of it.  Flora pressed her hands to the metal and walked as far around the boiler as the corner walls would let her.  Her fingers traced over grooves, dull and misshapen from time.  Once they might have been engravings of some kind, back when the boiler was new, but they were just old scars now.  Peering as far as she could see behind the belly of the machine and along the flat of the wall all the way up to the ceiling, she stopped and shook her head again in amazement. She couldn’t find any hand-holds, either.

Flora reached out, feeling the metal, searching for where the water pipes had once attached but which now were missing.  She squeezed herself in between the wall and unyielding cast iron as tightly as she could, and felt nothing, not as high as she could reach and then again not as low.  It had to be a decoration.  There was no way this could ever have been a working boiler without rupturing.  No way at all.

Flora stepped back, one hand mashing against her hip as she shone the flashlight over the boiler again, roving it slowly from top to bottom, searching with her eyes for what her hands couldn’t find.  She shook her head, her eyes narrowing.  It was unfathomable that this could be a decorative item.  Shaking her head again, she crouched down on the floor and felt along the curve of the pot.  There had to be something here to give away the boiler’s past functionality.  Some sort of opening – a hole, a crack, anything.

Practically sitting on the cement floor to feel underneath the lip, Flora suddenly stopped when her fingers found a bump.  Checking the gap, she lay down on the floor and scooted back until her head was under the boiler.  After wiping away a century’s worth of grime, in the pale shine of the flashlight, she could just make out what looked to be the lick of a flame stamped into the cast iron.  She traced her fingers around it until she felt a line, and as her fingers wandered the length of its borders, that line became a door.

Flora hooked her fingernails into the lip, but naturally when she pulled, nothing moved but her fingernails.  That hurt, so scrambling back out into the openness of the basement, she rummaged through nearby boxes until she found an old toolbox.  She knew the Austins had a crowbar around here, but there wasn’t enough room at the boiler’s bottom to work one, so she settled for an ancient screwdriver.  Using its wide, flat head, she dug out the door’s outline a little more, then inserted it where the gap looked most promising, and heaved.  Rust trickled over her hand as the long-neglected door opened just a crack.  Gritting her teeth, flush with excitement, Flora put all her strength into her arms, and with a shriek of metal, the door finally gave way.

Tossing the screwdriver aside, Flora inched far enough under the boiler to bring one arm and the flashlight up for a look inside.  Bright, shiny copper and gold glittered back at her, and she stared, for a moment not believing what she was seeing.  Frowning, she tapped at the cast iron of the outer pot before stretching a finger inside to feel the difference in the metal.  Nope, it wasn’t her eyes; this really was copper.  But it should have been dark brown, like old pennies, or green from oxidation.  It shouldn’t still look brand new.

Should it?

She angled her head, shifting her flashlight to follow the curve of the boiler’s pot, angling all the way around until she stopped, both her eyes and the light caught by a small stamp of squiggles and lines.  Etched into one side of the copper was that same flaming insignia.  What was it?  The logo for this make and model of boilers?  Did they even do that for boilers?  Flora set the flashlight down and reached inside to touch the image.  The metal felt surprisingly warm, and she jerked her fingers back with a start.  There shouldn’t be heat, either.

Unbidden, her fingers reached out again, tracing once before pressing against the image.  Unlike the lower door, which had squealed in slow protest to opening, this second panel popped open easily.  Flora curled her fingers around the top edge and swung it open wide enough to glimpse the small ember that lay just within.

Flora blinked at it.  This boiler had to be almost a hundred years old.  There was no way that little ember could still be burning.  She scooted out from under the boiler and sat up.  She had a sudden, overwhelming urge to leave the basement, lock the door, and never come back down again.  The unnaturalness of this whole contraption had turned her curiosity into an uneasiness that was difficult to shake.

Pushing to her feet, she started walking towards the stairs, but it was the thought of leaving an unattended fire, even one as small as a single, ancient ember, that made her stop.  The last thing she wanted was to have to contact the owners and tell them she’d burned down their house because she was fiddling with their boiler.

Sighing, she glanced around until she found a small, metal shovel.  She scraped the ember out of the boiler and then scooped it up.  Covering the end of the shovel with her hand, protecting it from any stray breezes, she carried it back up to the kitchen, where she tossed it into the fireplace.  The ember was instantly lost among a gold and amber bed of wood coals that looked just like it.  Feeling instantly a little more comfortable, she locked up the basement and tried to put the oddities of the place out of her mind.

She picked up a few logs.  When she tossed them onto the fire, she expected the shower of sparks that leapt up the chimney flue.  What she didn’t expect was the explosion of flames that suddenly filled the fireplace, licking up along the mantle stones and tumbling out across the hearthstone.

Flora fell backwards, her cry strangling into a shocked silence when the sprawling flames did something no natural fire ever should have.  It moved, swelling and growing into a massive ball-like form not two feet in front of her, compacting and condensing until the flame began to take shape.  It took the span of several gasping breaths before Flora realized what she was seeing: The fire was becoming a man, growing as he rose slowly to stand, smoldering as the brightness of the flames slowly ebbed along the muscular lines of his utterly nude form, darkening into a kind of charcoal black... well... skin.

“Oh, my god,” she whispered, not realizing she had backed up a step until she bumped into the coffee table behind her.  Something fell on the floor, but she barely heard the clatter as it landed, and there was no way she was about to turn around and look.

The fire... flame... man, however, heard it.  His dark head turned, and twin spots of brightness that she could only assume were eyes fixed on her.

“Oh,” she breathed again, her brain sending frantic signals down her legs to move, move, MOVE!  Unfortunately, her feet were rooted to the floor.  Even when he drew a deep billowy breath, his chest puffing, the twin embers of those lights, er... eyes narrowing, looking for all the world as if he were swelling with anger.  Seething with it.  She could practically see the churning, roiling fury surging out through his limbs as he closed that short space between them with a single step.  Before she could react, his arm shot out and latched onto hers.

That she wasn’t instantly and horribly burned was suddenly dropped a notch or two lower on her immediate list of concerns when he yanked her sideways, away from the fireplace and bent her, without word or preamble, over the kitchen counter island.  His palm flattened between her shoulder blades, holding her down as she felt fingers suddenly hook into the back of her pants, stripping them all the way down to her ankles.

Her eyes like saucers, her mouth gaping, she barely had time to suck air enough to scream before his hand clapped hard across her unprotected buttocks, knocking all the breath right back out of her again.

“Thee will pay dearly for starving me,” he said.  His palm slapped her bottom again and again, sparking the embers of a wholly different kind of fire directly under her skin.  One that Flora wasn’t at all prepared for and had never imagined herself ever experiencing.  That this couldn’t possibly be happening to her could be argued on so many levels, and yet it was.  Repeatedly.  Painfully, even.  Her arms flailed, her hands slipping and squeaking over the smooth granite countertop as she scrambled to reach something – anything – to hit back with as slap after furious slap ignited those sparks into a slow and deep burning bonfire.

“Ah!” she cried, trying in vain to escape.  If anything, his hand only grew harder.

“Hold thee still!” he chastened.

Like hell!  Flora kicked her legs, struggling to roll her body from one side to the other – anything to dislodge his bracing hand, but it remained planted against her back like a block of unyielding steel while he spanked and spanked and...

“Thy anger may have cooled, but I will scald thy flanks in fires that burn thee for days!”

“I’m not who you think I am!” Flora finally shrieked, throwing back her head and shouting it to the ceiling rafters when his punishing hand dropped to lay those scorching hot slaps all across the tops of her thighs.  “I’m not who you think I am!”

His palm continued to rise and fall for another few beats before he suddenly stopped.  Flora was scrambling with all limbs to get away even before the strength of his grip against the small of her back eased.  Her pants almost tripped her twice, but she didn’t stop running until she had the kitchen island safely between her and the charcoal black fire man... thing... whatever he was.  Hanging onto the counter for balance with one hand, her other darting back behind her to rub and rub at the fiery heat that had consumed the whole of her bottom, she stared at him in shock.

And he stared back at her, the blackened features where his eyes would have been smoldering.  His head angled slowly to one side, the smoking brows pulling together in a very close approximation of confusion.  At long last, he haltingly said, “Thee are not Amanda.”

“No,” she whimpered.  Daring to take her eyes from him for barely half a second, she dropped low enough to grab the tops of her pants and yanked them up again.  At least as far as her thighs, because that’s where they encountered raw and tender skin.  Her pants were instantly discarded again in favor of rubbing, this time with both hands.

His head turned, the ember eyes searching first one way and then the other.  “Where is Amanda?”

When he took a slow step towards the window, Flora took an equally cautious step in the opposite direction, keeping the island barrier fully between them  “I swear I have no idea who you’re talking about,” she said. “I was hired by Jed and Linda Austin to take care of the house over the winter.”

“I know not these names.” His frown deepened and the fire in his eyes brightened.  His features turned back to her for a second of silent, unreadable speculation before moving away again.  His gaze swept the whole kitchen, taking everything in.  “The house has grown.  There have been... changes.”

Though the urge to run prickled at her back, when he crossed over onto her side of the kitchen to poke at the microwave, Flora didn’t move.  She did, however, pull her pants the rest of the way up.

The microwave beeped as his fingertip tapped one of the numbers and then it switched on, the light brightening the interior and the glass plate slowly turning as it cooked nothing.  His head angled again, this time in the other direction, before he glanced back over his shoulder at her. “What Christian year is this?”

“Christian year?” she echoed.

“Aye, what year of thy Lord?”

Staring at him, Flora actually had to think about it before she could remember. “Uh... 2008.”

He muttered something in another language.

“Who’s Amanda?” she asked.

“My... former mistress.” He waved a hand as he circled the kitchen again. “The house now belongs to a Jed and Linda?  Thee is their servant?”

Ignoring the discomfort, Flora refastened her pants as she watched the smoking man warily. “I work for them, but I wouldn’t call myself a servant.”

He stopped before the fireplace and gazed into the flames. “Nay.  Nor did I ever call myself slave, though in truth I was.”

“Y-you were a slave?” Flora’s mind worked in overtime.  She was trying to think of all the unreal, yet still logical, possibilities.  Maybe his soul was trapped in the ember, or he was a ghost of some kind.  She blinked at him twice, creeping along the island until she reached the corner closest to him.  A deep breath helped her gather her courage.  “O-okay.  I can do this.  Do... do you see a... a bright Light?”

“Aye,” he said, staring into the fire.

Flora felt the surge of relief all the way through her.  “Oh, thank God!  Okay.  You... you have to go towards the Light.”

His head angled as he looked slowly back at her, his face unreadable.  She made shooing motions with her hands, but instead of Crossing Over, he reached down, picking up one of the logs she’d lugged up from the woodshed earlier and threw it onto the fire.

“Hey!” she yelled, then quickly slapped a hand over her mouth when his dark head snapped around, the burning embers of his eyes fixing on her.  She swallowed hard before she, in a much meeker tone, added, “Please don’t burn all my wood.  I need that to stay warm.”

He studied her only a moment, seeming to chew over her protest before disregarding it and facing the fire again.  “Thee has me to keep thee warm.”

Lord help her, she was trapped for the winter in a house with a frisky ghost.  She pointed at him in warning, cautiously putting the whole length of the kitchen island back between them again. “Let’s get one thing straight right here, buster.  I-I-I’m not that easy!”

“Thy ease figures not into the matter.” He gazed at the flame, the light of the dancing fire seeming to absorb into his skin until she could see streaks of yellowish-orange zigzagging over his flesh, like the smoldering coals of a fire banked for the night.  “After so long in famine, would thee deny me sustenance?  I have no choice.  I must feed now.  But once I am satiated, a twig every few days will keep me sated and thee quite warm for as long as thee requires.”

Flora frowned.  That wasn’t like any ghost she had ever heard of, which pretty much exhausted her knowledge of the paranormal.  “What...” she huffed, a little exasperated.  “What are you?”

“I am Nar.”

“What’s a nar?”

He gestured to the flames before him, his hands briefly flaring a hot orange in hue before once more fading back to black once they had returned to his sides.

“You’re the fire,” she said, a little incredulously.  Sure, ghosts she could accept, but a living fire was completely different.

“Aye, just so.”

“Uh-huh.” Flora leaned back against the counter and rubbed at her eyes with one hand.  This house really was like something out of The Shining.  Thank God, she hadn’t brought a friend up here, or she’d probably have whacked them upside the head with a mallet days ago.  “It’s got to be the solitude.  I’ve been alone too long.  My mind is snapping.  All work and no play makes Flora a dull girl, and all that.”

The flicker of what might have been a smile tugged at Nar’s mouth.  “Thy mind remains intact.”

She wasn’t relieved. “Exactly what I’d expect a figment of my imagination to say.”

“What is thee called?” he asked after a moment.

The fingers of one hand stroking slowly up and down one tender bottom cheek, temporarily distracted by the conundrum of how a figment of her imagination could so thoroughly blister her backside, Flora didn’t answer him at first.  It wasn’t until she realized he was pointedly staring at her, that she came sharply back to herself.  “Oh, uh... Flora.  Flora Burns.”

His black lips twitched.

It didn’t take a genius to get the joke.

“Yeah, I know.  Go ahead and laugh.  I took you out of the boiler and I can put you back in it.”

All traces of a smile vanished from his features, and Flora was instantly ashamed of herself for saying such a thoughtless thing, even if it was only to an imaginary figment of her overactive mind. Shaking her head at herself, suddenly needing something to do with her hands (other than rub her aching bottom), she turned to make a pot of coffee. “This is crazy.  What I need to do is just go about my day as if you’re not really here.  Don’t be offended if I ignore you, but if you are just a hallucination, then it’s really better for everybody if I not acknowledge your presence by cooking for you or...” she slipped him a sideways, uncomfortable glance, “...stuff.”

“I do not require food.  I need only to burn.”

She nodded, keeping her eyes on the coffee pot. “Which brings us back to the wood.  I only have what the Austins left for me.  I’ve got enough gas to keep the generator going if the power goes out, but I need to keep the house above sixty degrees to keep the pipes from freezing.”

Hearing the words out loud briefly derailed her.  Sixty degrees.  Six-oh.

She sighed. “I don’t know how I’m going to survive in a house that cold.  There aren’t enough sweaters in the world to keep me warm.  There’s not enough wood out in the woodshed, either.  I need to cut back.  I went through a lot of wood when it first got really cold, but if I don’t want to get hypothermia before the snows melt, then I need to ration it.”

“Thee cannot exhaust thy resources while I am with thee,” he said and tossed another log onto the fire.

“You keep doing that and I will,” she snapped.

He considered her for a moment and then gestured towards the rest of the house. “Take me to thy coldest room.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Why?”

He didn’t say anything, but kept his hand out.

Shrugging, she led the way to the far end of the house.  The coldest room was the breakfast nook.  Three walls of glass that did nothing to keep the freezing temperatures out and it couldn’t hold the heat.  There weren’t any pipes in the room, so Flora didn’t bother to keep it warm.

She shivered as she stepped inside and rubbed her arms. “Here we are.  The coldest room.”

Nar went into the center and stood, facing her.  She bounced on her toes as she looked at him.  Seconds passed.  She looked around and then back at him.  She gave him a humoring smile.  He didn’t move.

“Well?” she said.

“Does thee not feel it?” he asked.

“Feel what?”

“My warmth.”

“Your – ”  Flora stopped as her eyes focused over his shoulder.  The glass was fogging.  Slowly but surely, each small leaded pane fogged over until the windows were no longer transparent.

She dropped her arms and only then noticed that she wasn’t shivering.  She hadn’t been shivering for a while.  In fact, she was beginning to sweat.

“It wasn’t like this in the kitchen,” she said dumbly.

“My spark was yet cold.”

She didn’t even try to reason that out. “You’re still going through a lot of wood.”

“As I must at every rekindling.  I will not require much once I am fed.”

Flora looked at the glass.  The cloudiness was going away, but the room continued to be pleasantly warm.  She felt like she could take her sweater off and still be comfortable.  That would be nice.  She really hated being fully clothed while indoors.

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, running her finger speculatively over her clothes.  “So... if I cut back on the wood, keeping the house just warm enough to prevent the pipes from freezing, you’ll keep me and whatever room I’m in warm?”

“Aye.”

“Warm enough that I can take this off?” she asked, picking at her sweater.

He looked at the sweater and the embers in his eyes glowed bright as he slowly said, “Aye.”

She fingered her clothes again, studying him as she considered whether or not she actually could take off her clothes with a stranger in the same room.  He wasn’t human, after all.  What were the chances that he’d actually be interested in anything she did, anyway?  Judging from the way his eyes had looked there for a minute, those chances might actually be pretty high.  Flora pursed her lips, then folded her arms across her chest and asked, “What do you get out of this?”

He was quiet a moment. “Would thee endeavor to discover for me what happened to Amanda?”

She thought about the boxes and boxes of paperwork in the basement.  With eight months of housebound boredom stretching out before her, it wasn’t as though she wouldn’t have time to poke around a bit.  “Sure, I think.  But what if I don’t find anything?”

He spread his hands. “Search thee for me, and whatever the result, I will be satisfied.”

To Be Continued...

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