'I read about it this morning,' I say, keeping perfect control of myself.' A terrible catastrophe.'
'Yes, sir. The whole place was gutted. Your Jacket was found nearby.' This is an attempt to shock me. A bluff. But I am ready for this policeman with his shallow cunning.
'My jacket!' I manage to seem astounded. 'But that is impossible!'
'Your name was on a tag fixed inside the jacket, sir. Most of the right side of the jacket was burned, but much of it was left when we found it. Perhaps you would like to come along to the station and identify the jacket, sir?'
I feel anger coursing inside me, but I control my emotion and smile again.' Very well, officer, but I am sure you are mistaken.' What can they do to me, anyway? I am invincible.
We reach the red-brick police-station and walk together along a cold marble passage, up a short flight of stairs and into a warm room. There is a gas-fire burning against one wall. A desk as before it and a coat-rack beside the entrance to the room. The desk has wire trays and papers on it - and a parcel. There is a small window which looks out on to the street. A grey street, with an occasional dull-coloured car flashing by, or a darklydressed man. These people should feel honoured that I bring such magnificent colour into their lives. But instead they resent me. It is wrong, but I must accept it.
The policeman walks over to the desk after shutting the door behind us. He unwraps the parcel and discloses the remains of the coat I wore last night.
I feel annoyed because I have been so careless. I had assumed that the jacket would have burned to ashes.
I feel another upsurge of power within me, just as a uniformed policeman enters. He begins to tidy up the desk.
'That is my coat,' I say, after having glanced at it.
'And,' I add grandly, ' I was responsible for all eleven fires you have been worrying about. I shall also be the cause of many more.'
'Pyro Jack, my God!' says the younger uniformed policeman. I bow slightly to him as he makes for the door with an armful of papers, bent on telling the news to his companions no doubt.. After all, I am a personality whose work has been very much in the public eye recently. They may ask me for my autograph. I shall refuse.
However, I am still angry, but manage to retain a mask of calm.
The policeman is visibly shocked by my statement, but he recovers his composure enough to say 'In which case, Mr Mennell, perhaps you'd like to make a statement.'
'I have made all the statement I wish to make,' I reply, ' Now I must leave.'
'Oh, no you don't!' He moves forward to stop me as I make for the door.
I wheel around and glare at him, if only he would burn too, it would be easier for me.
He shrieks horribly as the flames lick at his flesh. But he has stopped by the time I reach the entrance of the police station.
'Stop him!'
That's Pyro Jack!' The young policeman yells shrilly, excitedly. Another policeman, entering the front of the building, moves forward to stop me. I burn his uniform. He begins to beat frantically at the flames.
I walk calmly out of the place and stroll along the street.
A few minutes later, a police-car pulls up beside the pavement.
I melt it.
The men inside scream in terror.
I laugh out loud, glorying in my magnificent power. The instinct of self-preservation is a wonderful thing.
People rushing. People shouting. People pushing. People grasping, People burning brightly like giant skipping fireflies, a glorious dance of death.
I walk on down the long brick-lined avenues, I stride along burning and melting anyone or anything which comes in my way. I can conquer the world, and turn it into leaping flames, like a second sun. It shall burn in the heavens as it did millions of years ago.
I thrill jubilantly and my steps are light and buoyant. An hour passes, then manlike, mis-shapen things shuffle clumsily towards me. They have a single broad eye and carry guns in thick-fingered hands.
'Stop, Mennell! Stop, or we shoot!'
Asbestos! Of course, I see it now, I cannot burn asbestos.
And those guns can kill me. I shudder and wish that the guns would catch fire, too. They melt.
But the men in the asbestos suits draw nearer. They reach out their coarse, ungainly hands to grasp me.
I draw back, the indignity of it all appals me. I run away from them towards a tall building; a tall white building. The public library, A woman shrieks as I rush inside but I ignore her and run on. The clumping of my pursuers' boots echoes down the corridor towards me. I dash into a high-roofed room lined with bookshelves.
The men come nearer and nearer, I stare wildly around me, looking for a route of escape-but I have entered through the only door. Framed in it now are the three asbestos-clad monsters.
It is unfair. They should herald me as master of the world, not treat me as if I were an abnormal beast. I am a supernormal man!
They spread out their arms and move in a cautious semi-circle towards me. I feel enraged at myself and admit that my own blind folly has led me to this trap.
'Back! Get back!' I roar, my voice reverberating round the lofty room.' Back, or I will destroy you!' Still they come nearer, light glinting on their cyclops' eyes, their faceplates.
I scream at them, but the fools still advance. I deserve to bum myself, for my negligence. A flicker of flame appears on my trousers, runs sensuously up my leg, caresses my thigh. Frantically, I attempt to beat it out, but it is too late. I can start fires but cannot extinguish them -I have never wanted to.
I glare at the books. Voltaire, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Conrad, Hemingway surround me, glaring back, mocking me. Their work will last, they seem to say. Mine is finished.
My anger sets tongues of orange flame writhing around the books. Everywhere on the shelves the books begin to burn. I feel the heat of my flaming clothes, the pain of the fire. Softly, at first, I begin to laugh. I have achieved some small measure of triumph.
THE RUINS
MALDOON picked his way over the ruins, his sombre face speckled with gleaming drops of sweat as if he had covered it with jewels.
The ruins went away from him in all directions beneath the blue and glowing sky, spikes of masonry, jumbled concrete, pools of ash, so that the whole bleak landscape took on the aspect of sea-carved rocks at low tide. The sun shone and the ruins lay peacefully beneath; pale shadows having nothing ominous or mysterious about them. Maldoon felt safe in the ruins.
He took off his jacket and sat on a slab of concrete from which protruded rusted wires, curling back on themselves like a sculpture depicting space and time. In fact the ruins were that - a mighty sculpture, a monument created by the random and ambivalent machinations of mankind - a monument to time and space and to the sacrifices men had made to understand it.
Maldoon realized his thoughts were rambling. He lit a cigarette and drank some water from his flask.
He had been travelling over the ruins for a long time, searching for signs of life but finding nothing. He was regretting the notion that had sent him into the ruins. There were no signs of the previous explorers who had not returned; no mark scratched on stone, no note, no shred of cloth, no skeleton. The ruins were barren.
Maldoon stood up, putting his flask away and dropping his cigarette into a crevice. He stared ahead of him at the jagged horizon, turned his body round. The strange thing was that his view to the horizon was never interrupted. No crumpled building or collapsing wall ever blocked his vision. The horizon was on all sides, giving him the peculiar sensation of standing in the centre of a huge disc which drifted in an infinity of blue sky.
He frowned. The sun was directly overhead and he had no idea which direction he had come from. Now that he considered it, he couldn't remember the sun changing its position or, for that matter, night ever falling. Hadn't the light always been so? Yet he thought he had been travelling for several days.