Chapter 2 – The Burning Woman

Sigooxgiya is the Blackfoot word for “black hole.” Sometimes I think that’s what the Red Man is. He is a black hole that feeds on our despair. He devours our hope.

When a child is attacked by a dog, and develops a fear of animals. It is the Red Man who visits the child at night and infects them with the nightmare of wolves devouring them. When a farmer tries to start a life in a new land, it is the Red Man who convinces him to give up, start drinking, and leave his crops to wither.

Before the first settler had arrived, the Native Americans knew about this creature before any of us. But where did he come from? If we can pinpoint the Red Man’s origin, can we find a way to stop him?

Emma shivered in the cold air. She rocked back and forth; each breath was a cloud of thin mist that hovered, before slowly dispersing.

“What are we doing here?” I was freezing and getting impatient. Emma had a savings account that we had been using for expenses. We travelled north to a small town most people have never heard of.

“You’ll see when we get there.” Emma was watching me carefully. “Has he visited you again?”

“Not yet.” I thought back to my first experience with the Red Man. He had been so close to me. Close enough to take me and there would have been nothing I could have done to stop him. “Why doesn’t he just kill us?”

“He feeds off our fears. If you’re dead, there’s nothing to eat.” Emma assured me. “He won’t kill you unless he thinks you’re a threat.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me.” I felt it, like a hunger pang. Something about her story was off. “What are you hiding?”

“There are some things I can’t tell you yet.” Emma looked away. “You’re not ready.”

We arrived at a small farmhouse just outside of town. When the door opened, we were greeted by a young woman wearing a coat. Rebecca stared, shyly. “I didn’t think you’d come.” And she led us in.

“Show us.” Emma insisted. And the young woman carefully removed her coat, to reveal three long scratches across her shoulder. There were other sets of scratches. One over her forearm. And one across her neck.

“Who did this to you?” I wondered.

“When I sleep, it comes in the night and it hurts me.” Rebecca replied.

I pulled Emma aside. “What is this? How is this going to lead us to him?”

Emma wasn’t sure. “I don’t know yet. But whatever’s happening here. It’s connected, I’m sure of it. Do you hear anything now? Any voices?”

“Not lately.” The voices had gone strangely quiet.

“Ok, then we watch her. And see what happens.” That night we stayed in the room where Rebecca slept. Hours passed. I was just about to fall asleep when the floorboards creaked. “What was that?” I felt a tremor. Something was moving across the room, but I couldn’t see it.

As I followed the noise, it stopped near the bed where Rebecca was fast asleep. Something I couldn’t see reached out with its claws. A line of three scratches began to crawl across Rebecca’s face, until finally the mark was complete. Then whatever was hurting that poor girl began to move away.

“C’mon.” Emma grabbed me. “Don’t let it escape.”

We left the home to find ourselves in a field of untended grass. I listened for the voices. And I could hear something very faint. “I think. I hear something.”

“What is it?”

I listened intently. “It sounds like… A fire?”

Emma searched. “Where is it coming from?”

I turned to locate the source. And I found it. There was an old barn, faded and abandoned. We approached the structure. As the door creaked open, I could hear the fire burning. “It’s in here. Right ther—”

And the entity that had been hidden revealed itself. It was a woman; she was wearing some kind of hospital outfit. She was burning. The woman was enveloped in a surging, raging, blistering fire. “Holy shit.” The heat was unbearable. “Do you see it?”

“You mean, do I see the woman burning alive, standing right in front of us?” Emma was being sarcastic. “Yeah, I see it.” Emma turned to the woman. “Who are you? Why are you hurting that girl?” But in her curiosity, she had taken a step too far. She had gotten too close.

The burning woman grabbed Emma and sent out a scream that was shocking. The entity threw Emma against the wall. And then it turned to me. The fires raged. The burning woman staggered towards me.

The door to the barn flew open. Rebecca yelled. “Stop!”

And the burning woman vanished.

The next morning we talked to Rebecca. “Who was the woman? Why was she on fire?” Rebecca didn’t have any answers. “Have you ever heard of the Red Man? Do you know who he is?” And again Rebecca was quiet. But she clearly knew something and was afraid to tell us.

Outside Emma and I discussed our situation. “Tell me more about the voices.” I interrogated her. “Why do I hear these things?”

“It’s like you’ve got some kind of tracking device in your head for terrible things.” Emma had found her compass.

“Oh, great. That’s just what I always wanted. To be able to find monsters that can kill me.” I sat on a rock. “So what do we do now?”

“You saw what that thing did to Rebecca? Every night it comes into her bedroom and hurts her. How long do you think it’s going to be before it does something worse?”

“Ok, so we stop it.” I felt a hero’s impulse, although I’m not sure where it came from. To be honest, I had always looked out for my own interests first. But I felt like I might have a purpose now. This felt different.

“You think you can find it again? With that radar of yours?” Emma was starting to get on my nerves.

“Maybe… But I don’t know if we should.” I felt like we were missing a piece of the puzzle. “Before we can stop it, I think we need to find out what it is.”

We went to the library, where the locals regarded us suspiciously. Where did this burning woman come from? Was there anyone else who had witnessed her? We searched through news articles and found one that was promising. It told the story of a man who claimed he had seen a burning woman in the forest. Out where the old hospital used to be. But of course no one believed him, and it was written off as a delusion.

We visited the man from the article. Charles greeted us at the door with a rifle. “So you saw it.” I asked.

“Sure did.” Charles replied. “I saw her grab someone too. And burned her all up… I tried to tell people.” Charles was haunted by the memories of the young woman’s fate. “But nobody believed me. When she went missing, the whole town thought I had something to do with it.”

“Do you recognize this woman?” I showed Charles a photograph of Rebecca.

“Oh yeah, I know her.” Charles nodded. “That’s Rebecca. She’s the sister of the girl that got burned up. When that thing in the forest grabbed her, I hid. I heard such terrible screams. Took a long time to get over the nightmares.”

“Anywhere we could we get a gun around here?” I wanted protection.

“You can borrow one of mine.” He replied. “If you promise you’ll use it to kill that monster.” He shook his head. “I should’ve killed it when I had the chance. But I was too damn frightened. Can you believe that? I should’ve protected that girl. I could have…” He trailed off.

“It’s not your fault.” Emma reassured the man. “There was nothing you could have done.”

We left the house with a twelve-gauge shotgun Charles had agreed to lend us. “That won’t do you any good.” Emma didn’t like having it with us.

But it made me feel better, so I kept it. “We’ll see.” I felt the cold creeping over my shoulders. “Why would this thing want to kill his girl? And then hurt her sister?”

“What if Rebecca has family still in town?” Emma was becoming quite the sleuth. So we tracked the mother of Rebecca and the burned girl, to an abandoned motel where she had been hiding.

The crone let out a puff of smoke from her cigarette. “This is about my daughters isn’t it?” She turned, there was a scar above her eye. “You want to punish them for what I did?” She eyed us carefully. “No, probably not. But she does.”

“What exactly is going on?” I asked. “Why is the woman in the forest hurting your daughters?”

“Here.” The crone replied. “I want to show you something.” She handed me a photo frame. And on it was a faded picture of the crone, dressed as a nurse. She was standing next to several rows of patients. She pointed to one. “It’s her, isn’t it?”

I looked closer. The woman she had pointed to wasn’t on fire. But she looked familiar.

“What happened to her?” Emma asked. “Why does she want to hurt your family?”

The lights in the room flickered. The crone stared. She knew what was coming. “You can ask her yourself.”

I looked out into the hall. I could hear it again, in the distance. I could hear the flames. Lights began to switch off, one by one. Something was approaching. I returned to the room. “Hurry.” I shouted. “Tell us what you know, before it’s too late.”

The old crone scowled. “They were going to shut the place down. Let all of the patients out. And I couldn’t stop them. Those people were sick in the head.” She spit. “They didn’t deserve to be out here in the fresh air with the rest of us.”

The room shook with anger. The lights flickered furiously. I could feel the entity getting closer.

“What did you do?” I yelled.

The old crone glared. “I locked the doors. And then I burned it to the ground.” The expression on her face at this truth was frightening. She had killed all those patients. Their deaths must have been excruciating.

“Why would you do something like that? How could you?”

“I saw the Red Man. I looked into his eyes.” The crone trembled, a pale flicker of her former self. “He’ll make you do terrible things. Never look at him. Never see him…” The nurse tapped on the photograph again. There was man in a lab coat. One of the doctors. But his eyes had been scratched out. “Talk to him. He knows.”

“Who is he?” But before the nurse could answer I felt a furnace on the back of my neck. So I turned. And the burning woman was at the door.

“No, stop!” As if I could stop vengeance itself. But the burning woman simply vanished and re-appeared in front of the trembling nurse. The fire burned and raged in her hate. The crone trembled before her.

“He made me do it!” The nurse cried. “I didn’t want to!” But her excuses were not enough to save her.

A scream erupted from the entity. And with that furious outburst, the crone began to burn. The fire spread through her flesh, through her muscles. She became ash, in a painful, agonizing death.

Emma and I ran. We turned back to find the motel burning. “Rebecca is in trouble.” Emma panted. “She’ll be next.”

“But how do we stop this thing?” I had no experience in hunting monsters.

“I have an idea.” Emma was good at that. “But to make it work, we need bait.”

I arrived with Rebecca and Emma, as the moon cast a pale light over the ruins of the old hospital where the nurse had burned her patients alive. I kept the shotgun close.

“We shouldn’t be here… She’s going to come for me.” Rebecca was scared out of her mind.

“I know.” Emma seemed to have a knack for this sort of thing. If I was the antenna, she was the axe. She told me she had escaped the Red Man’s grasp. But how could anyone escape something so terrible? There were clearly aspects of her story she was hiding from me. “When she comes, we’ll be ready.”

“She’s here.” I could feel the heat. “Rebecca, stay back.”

The pine trees began to bend and twist. Embers fell, raining down into the forest. Each ember sparked a tree that started a fire. Walls of flame rose up that quickly surrounded us.

The burning woman stalked forward. Carefully, slowly. Her prize was just ahead. The last remaining daughter of the woman who had burned her alive was awaiting her punishment. I emptied the shotgun into the apparition, but it had no effect. The burning woman crept closer to Rebecca, ready to enact her vengeance.

“Stay back!” Emma yelled. The walls of fire were pressing in. “Stay away from her!” She screamed. And then she revealed what she had been hiding from me. Emma removed her jacket to reveal a secret.

On her arm was a trail of markings that had been inked into her flesh. It was some kind of protection ward I think, something deeply mystic. Each tattoo was a name with a date. I had no understanding of their meaning. But they seemed to give Emma strength.

“You don’t belong here!” Emma shouted. “Go back to the darkness.”

The burning woman grabbed Emma. The wall of fire roared. Emma placed her hand on the woman’s forehead and concentrated, surrounded by fire, fearless. There was something about it that seemed so strange. Emma wasn’t afraid. Somehow, Emma was smothering the burning woman’s flame. Extinguishing her hate.

The burning woman stopped. The fire had gone out. What was left was a being whose flesh was the color of a campfire log after you threw a bucket of water over it. The walls of fire vanished, as quickly as they had started. The apparition stumbled awkwardly in the snow. And she faded, as if she had been a dream all along.

“Who in the hell are you? Really?” I stared at the markings on Emma’s arm. “How did you escape the Red Man? How is that possible?”

“I wasn’t the only one he took.” Emma put her jacket on again. “Someone gave their life for me so I could get out, ok? It’s not something I like to talk about.”

“Is that what’s going to happen to me?” I felt a rage burning. “You’ll take me to him, then I end up sacrificed and you keep on going? You keep hunting him and keep getting people killed? Is that how this works?”

“I really hope not.” Emma was on the verge of tears. I had wounded her.

That night I dreamed of a place so dark that the concept of light did not exist. And I knew, that somewhere in the darkness the Red Man was waiting.

The Red Man is a virus. When he gets in someone’s head, he infects them with doubt and distrust. Maybe he hasn’t gotten to you yet. But he might have visited a co-worker, or a relative. From now on, watch your friends and loved ones carefully. Because they might be changing into something you don’t like.