CHILDREN of FIRE Children of Fire

CHILDREN OF FIRE Children of Fire By Chapter 1 Peter Atkins ichard Bloodstone was born in Hackney (a district of RLondon, England) in 1955. His father’s name was John Cooper. He was a visiting seaman from Canada and he never knew that he had fathered a child on the nineteen year old chorus girl that his exotic accent, new world glamour, and bulging pay-packet had enticed into the bed of the unprepossessing hotel room in which he was staying. Cooper shipped home to Alberta four days after Richard’s conception and gave no more thought to England or chorus girls’ kisses until a late afternoon in 1987 when a man he had never seen before walked into the dim light of a sports bar in Medicine Hat. Cooper, ten years divorced and two unemployed, was sitting at a near booth nursing a beer. The dark-haired and strangely familiar man approached the booth, said “Hello, Dad”, took out an automatic pistol, and shot him three times through the left eye. The police were expecting a quiet day and couldn’t respond to the manager’s call for nearly forty minutes. Nobody in Medicine Hat ever saw the killer again. ...in the shadows of Babylon’s ruin Richard’s mother was Flora Pender on her birth We harvest the roses of Twilight... certificate, Natalie Silver on her Equity card, and Ginger Rogers in her dreams. John Cooper was not the first man in Sundered, dishonored, the heirs of desire; her life so her young heart was not broken when he failed Orphans of ecstasy, children of fire to return for the Saturday matinee at the Picadilly theatre but she was disappointed. Six weeks later, when she knew John William Adams (1879-1913) she’d missed her second period, she was furious; She’d been offered a six-month extension on her contract and this little keepsake from Canada meant the end of that - too much of her parents’ Catholicism was still in her House of Dread Inc. MCMXCI Children of Fire © Peter Atkins 1992 blood for her to countenance an abortion and too much station cafeteria and Flora, now Natalie Edwards, was as West End propriety was in the minds of the producers for delicate as she could be in framing her request that Richard them to countenance an overtly pregnant chorine. She left refrain from further contact with her. Her husband was a the show behind, she left London behind, she left behind young turk Member of Parliament who fully expected a her dreams of single-spotlight stardom. cabinet post in the next reshuffle, and the sudden Richard was born in the duchy of Cornwall in a small emergence of a long-lost and illegitimate son of his wife’s cottage near Tintagel. The cottage belonged to Flora’s could cost him dear: Richard could always go and find his maternal grandmother’s sister, Great-Aunt Sissy. Sissy, a father in America, she said (her grasp of geography being lapsed bohemian, was the only relative who had whole- as reliable as her commitment to motherhood). Richard heartedly supported Flora’s choice of career. She had spent shook her hand awkwardly and left. The News of The an absinthe winter in London three years before the Great World paid him ten thousand pounds for the story and he War of 1914 as the favourite companion of an aging and used it to finance his trip across the Atlantic. minor symbolist poet whose one slim volume of verse, His only reading material on the QE2 was Sissy’s Songs of Metal and Flesh, was dedicated to her. When the treasured copy of her long-dead lover’s book of poems. scandal about his involvement with a radical off-shoot of Richard was particularly drawn to an unrhymed sonnet the Order of The Golden Dawn broke in the salons and the entitled Orchid For a Dishonoured Prince and began a newspapers she was summoned home by her parents. Since lifelong habit of muttering under his breath the closing then, she had outlived two thoroughly respectable sextet: husbands and, childless, had inherited the cottage from her second. She welcomed Flora into her home and, seven The room is dimmer now. The thirteenth comes. months after, personally delivered Richard into the world The philosophic stone is steeped to blood. in the very early hours of a cold September morning. The petals of the black rose port like wounds. On a Tuesday in April 1961, Sissy came downstairs And razor tongues within sing slow pavanes. early to start the fire and found a note from Flora. She read Now strikes the filial hand (unholy joy!) it through once and then flung it onto the grate among the And scarlet rivers ease the pain of years. small logs and coal-nuggets. An hour or so later, she woke the five-year old Richard with a cup of tea and the news In the thirteen years between his arrival in New York that his mother wouldn’t be coming back. and his appointment with his father, Richard took various Sissy lived until 1969. The cancer that killed her had jobs across the length and breadth of the North American begun its slow internal feasting more than six years earlier continent. Many were interesting, many were not. What but the fierce and unexpected love for the child that fate emerged as his favourite form of employment was bar- and her family had given to her kept her from surrender work. He was surprised at this. He’d always assumed he’d until just after his fourteenth birthday. eventually discover within himself avocation for The authorities took forever to find Flora and it was only something significant - medicine, literature, politics, in early 1974, when Richard was legally an adult, that he whatever - but no. It was bar-work. He liked it. It was very saw his mother again. Their meeting was in a railway straightforward. Very honest. People stated their needs. You satisfied them. They rewarded you. It was as simple as colleagues’ sniggers at the hip-holstered cell-phone, the life should be. monosyllabic slow-talk, the fringe-sleeve buckskin coats. After his encounter in Medicine Hat, Rick (as he’d been By the time Doc came to take his job with Channel 8 calling himself ever since first seeing Casablanca and and begin his association with Joey Summerskill, his realising he shared a Christian name with the coolest bar- resume was very impressive and very detailed but there owner of all time) returned to New York and found work in was one curious three-month gap in late 1977. The man the main bar of The Boiler Room, a nightspot owned and who conducted the interview for Channel 8 asked what operated by JP Monroe, a man with whom he had little in Doc had been doing through that early winter. “I have no common save patricide and (eventually) transmutation. idea” was Doc’s answer and his perfectly blank stare discouraged his interviewer from probing further. Doc got Chapter 2 the job anyway. Speculation among his colleagues about this three-month sabbatical ranged from covert government Daniel Erwin “Doc” Fisher had two formative work to ten weeks in de-tox. Nobody got it right. experiences as a boy: seeing Shane at his local In October 1977 Doc had just returned from an drive-in and being given an 8mm movie camera by assignment in Europe when he received a phone call from his uncle Mort. a contact in the industry asking if he was up for some quick In the absence of a father (Ray Fisher was killed in a freelancing. Doc called the number his friend gave him and drunk-driving incident when Doc was three years old), he found himself listening to an enthusiastic but elderly voice. grew up with Alan Ladd’s mysterious mythopoeic *** gunfighter as his male role-model. He wanted to be strong, Woodrow Penman III was the sixty-three year old silent, and sad. He wanted to save people. He wanted other inheritor of a vast family fortune. That fortune, and the men’s women to fall in love with him and he wanted to be businesses that fed it, were now administered totally by too decent to do anything about it. hired men. All Penman had to do to fill his days was find In the absence of a stable life (his mother took him from interesting ways to spend money. school to school as she moved from town to town, job to A lifelong bibliophile, Penman had for the last seven job, man to man), he grew up obsessed with recording life. years specialised in collecting obscure works of an occult He pointed his camera at reality and it became more nature. His initial interest in rarity of text was slowly manageable. He could frame it, compose it, give it a succeeded by an obsession with depravity of content. He beginning and an end. He could make it make sense. made contacts in the secret world of magick and began to By the time he was in his twenties, he had already be involved in a small way in the staging of occasional combined these two obsessions. He was a professional TV rituals. The drive to be top-dog that bad taken Woodrow cameraman (he had wept for the death of celluloid Penman I from copy-boy to press baron was still there in newsreel at the hands of television but had made peace the blood of his grandson.

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