In her office Anne questioned him closely about Maeve Starzynski’s reliability as a witness and about the circumstances surrounding the bizarre death. Jerome passed on what information he had, giving due prominence to the inexplicable features of the case.
“This could do the paper a lot of good,” she said when he had finished. “We seem to have this one to ourselves and there’s a good chance of getting it syndicated. I’m going to give you the rest of today and tomorrow to write a good strong feature, with that by-line you’ve been plaguing me for. Get some good pictures, especially of the hand, and tie Starzynski in with as many classic cases as you can…Doctor Bentley and so on…and we’ll give the story a full page in Friday’s paper…
“What’s the matter, Ray? You look as though you’re sitting on your keys.”
Jerome shifted unhappily. “I don’t see how the article could be squeezed on to one page.”
“Why not?”
“It’s too big! You could use several pages just to examine possible causes, and then there’s…
“You’re not going to write a book,” Anne snapped, then she gave him a patient smile. “There isn’t a scientific explanation for SHC. That’s the whole essence of it—it’s a supernatural event.”
“Do you realize what you just…?” Jerome gave an exaggerated sigh. “Anne, there has to be an explanation. For every effect there has to be a cause.”
“That’s 19th century thinking. Modern scientists take a different view.”
“I’ve never heard them say so. Name just one scientist who says that.”
“Well, they’re admitting there are things they can’t explain.”
“Yes, but admitting you haven’t found an answer isn’t the same as saying no answer exists.”
“Tell me just one thing,” Anne said, a tinge of pink appearing on her cheeks. “Has anybody come up with a scientific explanation for SHC?”
“Ah…not that I know of.”
“And are you going to find an answer this afternoon?”
“I shouldn’t think so.”
“Then why in the name of God should you waste my time and your time and the time of our readers with useless speculation? Are you going to write this story properly, or would you prefer that I hand it over to Cordwell?”
“I’m going to write the story properly,” Jerome said stiffly. “I appreciate the way you give a person scope for initiative in these things.”
He stood up and left the office, retaining as much dignity as he could, and returned to his desk, marvelling at the speed with which he had managed to win his editor over and then freshly antagonize her. Disguising the fact that the interview had gone badly, he hummed some Gilbert and Sullivan as he began to work through the computer files. For a few minutes his concentration was marred by lingering resentment towards Anne Kruger, but the sounds of the big office gradually faded from his consciousness as he was drawn into his subject.
He was again surprised by the antiquity of some of the records. The first detailed example to which he had access had occurred in Rheims in 1725, and by 1763 a Frenchman, Jonas Dupont, had already gathered enough case histories to enable him to publish a book called De lncendis Corporis Humani Spontaneis—the first full account of the phenomenon. Jerome had anticipated vagueness and an apocryphal quality to the reports, but from the start it was as if witnesses—anticipating scepticism—had gone out of their way to be precise and positive. The dates, names and exact addresses were there and were easily verifiable, with very little of the “Mr Green of New Jersey’ style of vague reporting which characterized most of the dubious research work Jerome had seen published in other fields. Time after time, varied only by circumstantial detail, there unfolded the same tale of horror, inexplicable and frightening, threatening to undermine his belief in the essential rationality of the universe.
One aspect of SHC he found particularly disturbing was its sheer randomness. Other investigators appeared to have been troubled by the same thing, because the literature was permeated with their attempts to find a pattern, any kind of a link between victims. In the 18th and 19th centuries it was thought that a precondition for the fire death was an addiction to alcohol—not beer or wine, but hard liquor. Jerome could sympathize with the desire to attribute SHC to the heavy consumption of “ardent spirits’, and it did seem to be a common factor in early cases, but he put that down to the fact that the vast majority of ordinary people in those times drank to relieve the miseries of existence. As the chronology advanced close to the present more and more instances were recorded of moderate drinkers and abstainers meeting the same gruesome death.
With his computerized overview of the centuries, Jerome saw other candidates for the elusive common factor come into favour and win acceptance, only to be ground down again by the mill of statistics. At one stage the preferential victim would tend to be an elderly female, or greatly obese, or a pipe smoker—but the accumulation of case histories eventually ironed out every peak in every graph. One factor in which Jerome took an intuitive interest was that the victims were of solitary habits, or had at least lived alone, but that too had to be discarded. There were many examples of men, women and even children suddenly bursting into flames while surrounded by others and within minutes being reduced to ash. It had happened in dance halls, in boats and cars, in sports stadiums. In Chicago in 1982, and again in Montreal in 1994—to select but two examples—people had spontaneously combusted and died while walking in busy streets.
At frequent intervals during the work Jerome experienced a reaction, a kind of personal rebellion against the nature of his subject matter. This just can’t be true, he would think. Somebody with a sick imagination invented this stuff.
But the pictures were there to prove him wrong.
The pictures were there in disturbing high resolution—a sickening parade, photographed with a clarity which simultaneously repelled the eye and seduced it into searching for fresh horrors. There was also a bludgeoning similarity to the images. Jerome became numbed by the heaps of white-flecked ash whose only discernible connection with humanity were the appendages, here a slippered foot, there a hand lying like a discarded glove.
By the time he had skimmed every page stored in the Examiner’s library he had satisfied himself of only one thing—the sole pattern was the complete lack of pattern. He was being asked to accept that anybody might suddenly be consumed by fire at any place and at any time. The evidence suggested that it was a purely random event, uninfluenced by anything in the victim’s circumstances or physical condition—and Jerome found the notion totally repugnant.
His thesis was that there had to be a logical explanation for SHC, no matter how deeply buried. But underlying rationality was supposed to reveal itself to the enquiring mind sooner or later. In the case of such a startling and well-documented phenomenon as SHC it should have been easy to detect a pattern or pinpoint a common factor, but that was precisely what had not happened. Many minds had grappled with the problem for many decades; the “explanations’ put forward ranged from divine retribution to poltergeists to new classes of subatomic particles; and nowhere was there even the beginning of an indication of why one person rather than another should be singled out to become a human torch. To make matters worse in Jerome’s eyes, the various theorists—some of whom had written massive books on the subject—had fallen at the preliminary hurdles. The curious localization of the heat was a classic feature of SHC, one which had excited wonder and comment down the centuries, and nobody had advanced anything resembling a reason…