Wraiths in Swelter

Prologue: Prithee Do Not Tarry

It will never leave her—seven hundred screams melting to a single cry above the roar of combustion. When you’ve been to hell as a child, you’ll always hold some brimstone.

What was little Winnie thinking that crisp Sunday morning, the last of 1903, as she slipped on her rose crinoline? She’d tried other dresses too, but always came back to the pinkish one. Seven times. Because it was beautiful— and because a numerical demon inside her craved that digit, compelling most everything to be done in sevens.

Her family had wealth, she was fairly certain. Perhaps an inordinate amount. There was a packing plant, a school, and two parks in Chicago named for the Gillespie family. The best steakhouse in ten states. So her clothes were of the finest silk from Siam.

Off to the matinee premiere of Bluebeard with her aunts, six cousins, and Robbie Temple, the regal nanny who’d raised Winnie since her father left to set up the mines in Bolivia after her mother perished from a bout of influenza (in truth—a long scourge of laudanum abuse). Robbie, of Cape Verdean Creole heritage, whalers from New Bedford, spoke nine tongues and taught Winnie how to use a slide rule from Uncle Isaac’s factory in Sheboygan, as well as all the standard dictums of “finishing” a proper young lady. Robbie, so proud of her new custom-built Crestomobile Runabout, third off the line and gaudy red as a baboon’s ass. As it pulled up, the crowd murmured, assuming she was some exotic potentate, layered in her multi-hued finery, hair a grand nimbus of intricate graying curls. Something to behold. The crowd parted as they made their way in through the rococo lobby, down the sloping aisle of the parquet level of this five-story cultural cathedral built to shame all others in the city. Winnie brought her best friend Sabatha, who’d been loved so dearly, stuffing poked from every seam.

Seventh row. Seventh seat from center. Seventh Heaven it would be, she thought, waiting with a tingle of anticipation for the rest of the relatives to arrive and the show to begin. As they all found the Gillespie row and settled in, the star of the play, Eddie Foy, squeezed his boyish face through the curtains, revealing a smear of hubbub behind him, and a little blur of smoke leaked out. He began to announce calmly that there would be a brief delay in the matinee schedule— then something cracked and fell somewhere and a red dragon of flame ate a hole in the billowing curtain in two bites. The audience, witness to utter chaos backstage, begat their own with a collective gasp and in an instant ferocious movement flowed towards the lobby.

Because the doors opened inward, they were doomed. Because the bascule locks of the exits were fixed tight from being painted over, they were doomed. Because the newfangled fireproof asbestos curtain failed to descend when its designated stagehand fled, because the Kilfyre containers were half empty (though it would not have mattered by then)—they were doomed. But fate was sealed most decidedly when the crowd, reacting to the most primal of stimuli, became a hive mind, limbic and merciless.

The room brightened orange with an explosion of flame from the stage, then just as quickly began to dim from obsidian smoke. Robbie poured tea from her thermos across a hankie telling Winnie to drop to her knees and breathe through it. Both were trampled—first by the cousins, then again by dancers leaping from the stage. The aisles jammed quickly; even those scrambling over seatbacks could not move another inch. The stampede stalled as suddenly as it began, squeezing itself into one cruel mass as leaping fire grew everywhere. With her last strength, Robbie was able to heft Winnie up above the cooked smash of bodies, which had begun to melt, flesh into flesh. Robbie gave a prayer and a push to usher her young charge on toward the transom above the lobby...