Behind the Fire: A Dark Thriller (14 page)
Read Behind the Fire: A Dark Thriller Online
Authors: Susan May
The article carried a picture of the couple dubbed “Mr. and Mrs. Arson.” In the picture, they were shown walking down the court steps, heads bowed, and hands tightly entwined. They looked just like the couple-next-door who might stand behind you in the supermarket line, or stop to help if you were stranded on the roadside with a flat, or be flipping burgers at the school fundraiser.
Yet, Alan Sloane pleaded guilty to nineteen charges of damaging property by fire. After ten months of a firebug spree, the couple was finally caught. That’s when the story went from crazy to beyond bizarre.
Seems it all began when Mr. Sloane walked past a neighbor’s house late one night in South Kalgoorlie, an isolated gold mining town in Western Australia. Sloane noticed through the window, curtains flapping in the breeze. He told how the overwhelming urge to set them alight came upon him.
After that, he went on arson expeditions setting alight whatever took his fancy: caravans, an abandoned house, many cars, and an industrial dumpster among other things. He even threw Molotov cocktails through a home’s open window on several occasions.
After six months, his wife discovered his hobby. What did she do? Did she get him help? Report him to the police?
No, siree. She hired babysitters for their two-year-old twins and joined him, acting as a chauffeur as he looked for targets. Yes, I agree, it’s not your usual response to a crime perpetrated by a loved one.
When asked during their trial why they’d committed these crimes, their defense attorney, Carmel McKenzie, said her clients were unable to explain a motive for the fires, except Mr. Sloane had admitted to an alcohol problem.
“Mrs. Sloane has some difficulty explaining why she did it,” Ms. McKenzie said. “It became somewhat of an activity; a break from the children.”
They would sometimes have dinner out before moving on to a fiery nightcap.
The presiding Judge, Justice Jenkins, said the arsons were “without precedent” in Western Australia, and had significant potential to damage property and endanger lives.
The whole story of the case is funny and sad all-in-one.
It got my story mind thinking. When there seemed no plausible explanation to the behavior, could there be another reason for their crime spree that they simply couldn’t admit? What if instead of criminals they were, in fact, heroes?
Mrs. Sloane received fourteen months’ jail and Mr. Sloane nine years and nine months. You, my wonderful reader, receive this story.
Full news coverage is here:
Here’s a picture of the pair:
https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/wa/a/13074788/pair-lit-fires-on-bizarre-nights-out/
I kept this picture on the desktop of my computer and in my mind, while I wrote the story. Something about this photo really caught my imagination. How ordinary they looked. How they appeared, to be in their own world with their hands entwined as they walked down the courtroom steps. What were they thinking? These are the thoughts that lead a writer to wonder, question, and then to write.
Of course,
Behind the Fire
can’t be true, can it? Black things entering our world from somewhere unknown, certainly makes as little sense as an ordinary couple suddenly beginning an inexplicable arson spree. But, what if?
Behind the Fire was the first book published when I embarked on my independent publishing career in 2013.
Three years along, I’ve learned so much from the books and stories I’ve written, and feedback from wonderful readers, like yourself, that I thought I’d better revisit
Behind the Fire
and give it a re-edit. Once back in Emily and Bobby’s world, I realized I do love these characters.
It’s a love story as much as it’s a horror thriller, and I like that blending. A few readers have also written asking for more of Emily and Bobby and explanations about the
black things
, what they really are, and if Bobby and Emily succeed in finally fighting them off.
While Behind the Fire was written as a long, short story, where these kinds of answers aren’t necessarily as important as they are in a novel, it occurred to me that I, too, have a few questions. The big one being, who is Mr. Average, and why did he leave the note in the truck’s cabin, and where did he get the co-ordinates of the black things entrances into the world?
So I promise at some point in 2016 I’m going back in to answer these questions and write the sequel or the prequel or both to Behind the Fire. They might be novellas or they may turn into novels.
If you would like to be one of my early readers for the full novel and receive a FREE copy before its release, then please join my Wonderful Readers’ Club.
http://www.susanmaywriter.com/p/loading.html
On a rainy night, Crystal’s husband disappears while fetching their car. She waits outside the theater they’ve just left, wondering why he’s taking so long. Should she go in search of him or will they pass and miss each other on the way? Her mind races with the terrible possibilities that may have befallen him. The truth is far more terrible than she can imagine.
Where the hell was John?
Crystal checked her watch yet again. She’d waited now for over twenty minutes, and irritability was rapidly biting into her happy mood.
She’d spent the waiting time dodging exiting theatergoers wielding umbrellas like oversized shields and being shoved by manic pedestrians who had developed a wild herd mentality due to the sudden downpour.
Ignoring the rain, Crystal moved to the edge of the pavement, craning her neck to look up and down the bustling street to better spot John’s car when he finally made his way back. Red and orange taillights winked and flashed as cars stopped and started, slowly passing the entrance to the theater. Horns honked their owner’s objections as vehicles merged in the traffic like a herd of weary elephants embarking on a trek. Despite the fresh rain, the smell of the congestion still permeated the air in a steaming, toxic mist.
Every few minutes Crystal ducked her head beyond the cover of the theater awning, hoping she would see their car in the traffic, John motioning for her to run to him. The front of her dress was now soaked, and she kept pulling at the bodice that clung to her skin like an uncomfortable wet t-shirt. Her carefully straightened hair had curled to a feral frizz.
Lightning flashed ominously, followed shortly by the cracking boom of thunder, while rain hurled down in sheets, as if the sky had something to prove. Now her hands were beginning to numb, and Crystal wished she had accompanied John to the car. She’d ended up soaked anyway, and at least she wouldn’t have been here, wondering where he’d gone.
She
had
wanted to go with him.
“I’ll be back in five minutes,” he’d insisted. “You can’t run in those shoes, and there’s no sense both of us getting wet.”
Kissing her gently, he’d turned away. After momentarily pausing to pull up the collar of his trench coat to shroud his ears, he’d taken off, leaning into the rain and wind, dodging and weaving between the traffic and crowd, until he was lost from Crystal’s view.
It was just like John to take care of her; he was such a thoughtful husband. They’d serendipitously met three years ago while in line at an A.T.M. From then on, it was as though they’d settled in their own special world.
He was her perfect man—darkly good-looking, even-tempered, and attentive to a fault. The only small niggle came courtesy of her nagging mother’s continual comments.
“It’s peculiar, his lack of friends, don’t you think, love?”
“What about his family? Where are they? Are we ever going to meet them?”
She knew her mother had her best interests at heart, but Crystal wished she would mind her own business. Everything was so perfect; she didn't need her mother’s seeds of doubt to take root.
“So, he’s private,” Crystal countered. “At least I don’t have to deal with a difficult mother-in-law… like he does.”
Even his work was fascinating. He was a climatologist, passionate about protecting the environment. His work focused on minimizing and even reversing man’s abuse of natural resources. Carbon emissions, the poor choices humanity made in energy production, and the warning signs of the breakdown of Earth’s ecological cycles were regular dinner-talk topics. He’d even written several well-received essays on the collusion of the G8 governments to misinform the world of the precarious position in which their policies had placed humanity.
When he wasn’t travelling to some far-flung country for study or research, he worked from their little study. If he wasn’t with her, then he was at his desk checking data, refining his research, and collaborating with other scientists across the globe, pooling their research.
At catch-ups, her girlfriends would regularly regale the group with stories of their husbands’ inadequacies, but Crystal never joined in. She had no complaints. As the girls gossiped, just occasionally Crystal’s mind would wander to the one slightly odd thing about John. It wasn’t a fault, but more a peculiar fixation. Certainly, it was nothing so serious she felt compelled to complain about it or share with the girls.
The alien thing
.
That’s what she’d labeled it. It was harmless enough. In fact, it was almost laughable. Her sensible, scientific-genius husband had formed an intense fascination with alien abductions.
At first, she was intrigued, but eventually her interest faded to a bewildered acceptance when she realized he honestly and passionately believed aliens came down and took people away. Their crammed bookshelves bore homage to his beliefs. She would so often find him reading and watching documentaries on the subject it crossed her mind, perhaps, he had been an abductee. That was, of course, if she believed in aliens—and she didn’t.
Sometimes at night, as they held each other, just before she fell asleep, she would gaze deep into his eyes, searching for an answer. Here was a brilliant technological mind, that had created ground-breaking mathematical equations capable of deciphering complex weather patterns, and yet this same mind believed steadfastly in aliens.
She would see something in his eyes—anguish—as if his mind were travelling somewhere distant to confront something wild and fearful. At these times she would jokingly ask if he was off with the aliens. His usual reply was to hug her tight, smile, and say, “It would take more than aliens to separate us.”
Tonight, though, it had only taken rain.
Random shivers shook Crystal’s body, as she pondered the irony of being married to a man who studied the climate, only to find herself in a storm without an umbrella.
She checked her watch again. 11:10.
Thirty minutes had elapsed, and that was too long. Reaching into her bag, she fumbled for her phone. It wasn’t there. She moved back toward the building, away from the street, and double-checked. Standing hunched over in the bright glare of the theater’s outside lights, she systematically checked each compartment, pulling and pushing the bag’s contents.
No phone.
Then, in her mind, she saw the damn thing sitting in its charger on the kitchen bench; she remembered she’d decided she wouldn’t need it. She cursed herself. Of all the nights.
While she pondered the irony of her situation, the thought
something was wrong
entered her head. It slipped in like a wisp of smoke sneaks under a door. Her mind conjured the image of two cars skidding on the wet, dark road, brakes screaming as they collided at an intersection. An ambulance, its siren heralding its mission, sped toward the injured drivers. In her imagination she saw John lifted onto a gurney, lifeless, bleeding, alone and dying, while she futilely waited for a man who would never arrive. Her throat tightened at the thought.
But she’d heard no sirens. Surely she would hear sirens with the car parked only a few blocks away. She scolded herself for allowing her imagination to get away from her. Then she cursed the rain. Then she cursed herself for forgetting the phone. Their wonderful evening at the theater was rapidly becoming an emotional roller coaster she did not want to ride.
A metal door slammed behind Crystal. Her body jumped and her heart kicked. A woman laughed loudly, the sound followed by several voices babbling excitedly. She swung around toward the sounds and saw several people emerge in a huddle of camaraderie from the side entrance of the theater. Recognizing one of the male actors, Crystal nodded as they passed by her. The actor smiled back, then continued his conversation with the other young woman while he opened an umbrella, attempting to shield the three of them as they crossed the street. Crystal watched them enviously. Even an
actor
had thought to bring an umbrella.