There’s a Fire in the House

[instrumental]

The Fire Coma Stories: There's A Fire In The House

It was getting close, tighter and tighter. His perception was getting sharper. There was no awareness of anything else, just the closeness all around and the sweet sound in the distance pulling at him. Just calmness and peace as he drifted toward the ground. But the second he touched the ground, it was as if a lightning bolt, complete with deafening thunder, exploded in his head

The crash was so brutal that he found himself springing completely off his bed as he awoke. He was totally at a loss as to were he was. Covered in sweat, he whipped his head around to try and identify his surroundings. It started to come to him, his own bedroom in his own house on his own block in his own town. A feeling of comfort came over him when he clearly saw the posters his teenage brother had put on the wall. It flashed through his mind that when he’d turn 8 years old next year, he will be allowed to put some of his favourite posters on the wall. This thought helped him relax even more and the cosmic trauma that he had just seconds ago experienced seemed like a distant memory. As he went to lay his body back down on the bed to fall back to sleep, he realised there was a curiously strange smell in the air. It was not an unknown odour. Then he heard the muted rumble of what sounded like a herd of buffalo in the distance

His ears were soon filled with the very real sound of a siren. Panic raced through his body as he realised, “there’s a fire in the house.”

He frantically jumped from the bed at the very moment that the flames burst through the window with a scowling howl. If it wasn’t for the rush of adrenaline that swept through his veins, he may have frozen in his spot and been engulfed in the raging fire. He found himself in the corner of the room feeling the panic grow

“Get out! Get out!” was all he could think. His body fumbled chaotically to the door as the flames moved toward him. He could see them like red demons dancing joyously as they consumed the air. He started to cough and choke

He burst into the hallway. The roaring herd of buffalo was now a full-on stampede eating its way up the stairs from the lower levels

He could feel his heart pounding against his ribs as he gasped for air. All exits were ablaze. He ran down the hall to the door that led upstairs to the 3rd and 4th floors. “No, I can’t go up, but I can’t go down.”

He reached for the door to go up. The panic grew as he desperately squeezed at the handle, only to find the door locked. He stared down the hallway at the rapidly approaching ball of orange and red dancing death

As his concentration focused directly into the flames, a feeling of slow motion seemed to come over his perceptions. A wicked face twisted with perverse delight, swirled out of the front of the rambling approaching flames. A harsh seductive voice growled from the churning onslaught

“I am your mind and I will roast your soul every day of your life. Fear child, for you stare into the face of your fate. I am consuming to all beings for I am the flames of their desires and ignorance and I hold captured your soul like a tortured nightingale in a cage made of flesh and bone, my tender beloved.”

An intense wave of fear and awe swept over him as he burst the door open and frantically ran up the stairs to the next level of the house

From the top of the stairs he looked back. As the flames hastily made their way up the stairwell, bouncing from wall to wall, they engulfed and consumed all they came in contact with

“You amuse me, the way you flee,” came the black voice from the oncoming heat

A bolt of fear shot through his body as he let out a shriek and slamed the door. He nervously walked backwards, aware of any movement in the room. The flames had not yet reached the floor he was on but the walls seemed to breathe with a curious anticipation. The door that he so desperately slammed slowly creeked open. A ghostly orange glow ominously lit the stairwell. It grew brighter as it started to pierce the darkness and cast a feverish haze of scarlet throughout the room

The walls started to radiate from the flames on the other side. He spied the other set of stairs leading up to the next floor, but he felt frozen in his place, unable to move

A thin line of flames led its way out of the glowing stairwell, across the room and up to his feet. It stopped a few feet in front of him and formed a twister-like funnel about one foot wide and 4 feet high. Out of the spinning depth came the hideous flamed face again

“Ah, you will never know the depth of my grasp on you. I am truly the beast, the demons and devils, the perversion of your purity” the voice hissed. “And I am within you, keeping you blind and numb to the truth. The light of sanctuary is dead to all men through me. I am the soul-eater and I am not outside. I am within, closer to you than your own hands and feet. The more I have, the more I devour.”

With that, the boy let out a scream and the walls burst into flames. The demon flame let out a deafening roar that drowned out the boy’s scream. He made a chaotic dash for the next stairway leading up. It burst into a raging ball of heat and blaze that chased him up the stairs to the next floor. This time he ran toward another set of smaller stairs that led to the attic and the roof

As he crossed the room, he could hear the fiendish laugh of the flames, and with his peripheral view he could see the roof falling in and the floor falling out leaving empty smoke filled air in it’s place

He fled up the stairs with the fiendish laughing flames hot on his feet

All he felt was fear. The fear itself was pervading through his body like a wild fire until he was completely overcome with anxiety. He felt like fear personified. Frantically he made his way to the attic on his hands and knees. Collapsing on the floor at the top of the stairs, he started to scream and cry, “No, help me, mother, father.” He covered his eyes with his arms as he lay on the floor sobbing

The heat grew stronger and he knew that the floor would soon be in flames. He picked his head up only to notice the room starting to glow. The colours turned from a warm magenta glow to blood red, orange, then yellow

Out of the corners of the attic came little flame like people creeping out from the woodwork, dancing and laughing in a macabre fiasco

The heat at his feet was growing unbearable. The little dancing flames at the stair top broke away as the master demon flame made its way through the doorway

He rolled over onto his back and looked down through his feet. The fiendish flame came streaking toward him in a thin blue line. When it reached his feet, it split into two lines, shooting up each of his legs under his pyjamas

When the flame touched his flesh, he could feel the terrible sting. It then made its way quickly up his legs and infested his torso. The blueness burst into an orange glow as it ignited his pyjamas in a flash of fire

In a breath he could feel the flames singe every part of his lower body, boiling and peeling the skin in an instant. Then came his blood-curdling screams and violent spasms

He found himself frantically rolling on the floor trying to put out his legs and crotch, his piercing screams being dwarfed by the shrewd and sickening laughter of the flames

He jumped onto a cot in the corner and managed to smother the flames with a blanket

He lay motionless on the cot. As he drifted into shock, the pain seemed to be drowned by an endorphin rush that left his lower body numb. He slowly turned his head to see the whole attic burst into flames and start to collapse

He could feel the heat on his naked upper body as he fell off the cot and crawled out to the balcony, which was about the only area not yet engulfed in flames

He could barely move his legs as he desperately grasped a metal pole and pulled himself up. In a daze, he looked down to the cool grassy earth that lay 4 floors beneath him

The pain came back to him in waves. He looked down to his blackened and red burnt lower body. He started to cry as 90% of the house tumbled to the ground, leaving only the chimney and balcony that he was standing on

A streak of flames approached him and rose up into a familiar funnel in front of him

The fiendish vivid face once again appeared in an ethereal glowing orange-yellow-red blur. Out from its head sprung what looked like dancing dreadlocks of blue, black, purple and green Medusa flames

The voice spoke to him as the flames slowly engulfed the balcony, “You are truly helpless and I adore your weakness. Your consciousness will be plagued by my desires. I will roast you for an eternity and live within you and rot your purity, infesting your every thought and action, for you need me, my precious. You need the pain I bring you more than you need your own blood. Through me you shall learn. You shall learn the ways of men and this world. You will know lust and greed, anger and jealousy.”

The flames started to crawl up his legs onto his stomach and back. Unable to move, he could feel the unbearable pain as his flesh melted away. The blaze crawled up his chest, but he still could not move. He just stared into the dancing rage and the deafening roar. The voice now breathed a sultry whisper into his ear

“While my blood is running through the veins of mankind, he will suffer miserably. I am the bringer of torment. To fulfil my desires, man will lie and steel, murder and rape.” The flames crept up his neck and the hissing whisper filled his head. “In the core of your being is a precious, flawless, beautiful garden and I am the fire that burns within it. That garden is your soul and I am your mind, and I am the mind of all men and the ruler of this creation.”

The sting and burn of the flames had reached a harrowing peak. He stood there with his arms spread out like a flaming cross. Every cell in his body now exploding in absolute pain. The last thing he saw before he closed his eyes was his own eyelashes burning

There was no escape from the pain or smell of burning flesh, his own flesh. He felt the cool sensation of adrenaline burst from his chest and numb his limbs. He let himself fall back into the waiting arms of the cool air

It was at this point that he realised that his entire consciousness was being drawn into his own head. It started at the bottom of his feet and tips of his fingers. In an instant his whole being was focused at his eye centre and the whole idea of his body was alien. It was only the closeness of his consciousness he could identify with

He realised then that he was his consciousness and nothing else. He was not his body, but his body was a prison for his being. At that moment there was no pain, and there were no thoughts. The harsh roar of the flames melted into a much closer sound. What seemed to be a clean drone of a pure and constant bell. It wasn’t ringing, it was “toning.” He was in an extreme state of consciousness, an UltraZone

It was getting closer, tighter and tighter, and his perception was getting clearer. There was no awareness of anything else, just the closeness of all around and the sweet sound in the distance pulling at him

Calmness and peace pervaded as he drifted toward Earth but the second he touched the ground, it was as if a lightning bolt complete with thunder exploded in his head

The crash was so brutal that he found himself springing completely out of his bed when he awoke

Covered in sweat, he whipped his head around to see where he was. It started to come to him. His own bedroom in his own house on his own block in his own town. The feeling of comfort came over him and the lights in his room came up as his mother dashed to his bedside

“My dear one, are you okay?” She embraced him as he was still trembling. He looked up to see his father approaching. They both held him close with love and tenderness

“Did you have a bad dream my boy?”, his father asked with compassion

He started to feel calmer. He sniffled a bit and put his right hand on his heart. The only words that came from his mouth as he looked up into their eyes was “Fire Garden.”