Greek Fire
I had written the following short with my brother and was grateful to see it selected for publication in the Fall 2023 issue of Silence & Starsong magazine. If you haven’t heard of S&S, its a fantastic resource for fringe tales, and its not afraid to get weird. Please give them a look. Now, with permission, Greek Fire has been reproduced below in its entirety, free for my own subscribers to enjoy.
Seraphim sat alone in an abandoned tavern. Thick smog hovered above the floorboards, and refuse was strewn about the dining hall. All but one of the chairs surrounding the filthy, old card tables had been knocked over, their former inhabitants denying the place any last respects. The tavern’s condemned appearance was indicative of a much larger fallout. It was as if the explosion from beneath the sod had caused a chain reaction of smaller explosions in the personal lives of Corinth’s miners.
Corinth had once been a mining town with some promise; it had been a frontier gateway, connecting the east to the west. From its tall church steeple, its general store, and its handsome inn / tavern, a passer-by could see it was doing well, but it had had its boom prematurely and was now in a sorry state of bust. It had been six months already since the fire had started, killing twenty of the miners. The inferno showed no signs of being quenched any time soon.
The wait had already proved insufferable for the hungry miners, especially those who had families to feed. They took with them their wives and the widows who had made life habitable in the settlement, along with the sounds of children who had once played in the town’s only begotten street.
The men who chose to stay did so in the hopes of gaining favour with management, trusting that their loyalty would secure them a promotion with Daedalus Mining Co. They had assumed that work eventually would resume.
The manager, a portly fellow named Gordias, had also fled the settlement in haste, leaving his hulking overseer to upkeep his mansion until his return. The swarthy Alexander was a great bull of a man with a large hunchback. He was a Cretan by birth, and a bastard by reputation. The miners hated working for him, and for good reason. They suffered greatly from his short fuse and white-hot temper, often losing a day’s wage for not complying to his unusual standards, or even being forced to work when ill or injured. Like a beast of burden, he was capable of great feats of strength, having once lifted a boulder of such a size that it had blocked a collapsed tunnel. But he was often tormented and bedridden by his deformity.
As the days passed and the miners left, Alexander became increasingly reclusive. Despite being one of the only two people to remain in Corinth, Seraphim rarely caught more than a passing glance of him. The once-bustling settlement had become a ghost town, and its buildings quickly fell into disrepair.
***
On the evening of the robbery, the miners had suspected that their own manager, or even the overseer himself, had conspired to steal the company’s gold. The robbery had seemed too perfectly timed with the chaos of the explosion. To the manager’s great dismay, he would suffer the shame of being bound and gagged by his employees as their wives and the weeping widows scoured every nook and cranny of his home for the stolen gold. Search as they might, they never found a trace of the missing booty.
As the days dragged on, Gordias suspected his overseer, enough that he had sent a pleading telegram out to the nearest outpost to that effect. But from the first lobbed accusation, Alexander had already sought to get ahead of that suspicion. He was the sole defender of the manager’s innocence. After the failed search of Gordias’ home, he placated the mob, “The mine was worth many times the stolen gold reserves.” Alexander said. “Why on earth would he, or I for that matter, sabotage our only source of income for so little gain? Why risk a mutiny, or our lives? Do not fret––please! You will be paid your worth. On the day of recompense, it is guaranteed. You have my word.” Though the miners agreed that he lacked sufficient motive to sabotage the business, they still didn’t trust him. His tongue was as twisted as his spine. Recompense was now long overdue. That night the miners went to bed angry.
But anger inflamed fury, and fury, madness. Robbed of their peace and solidarity, and left with insufficient warrant to hang a culprit, the miners quickly aimed their suspicions toward each other. Everyone looked over their shoulders, many remained silent, others skittish, and some even searched their neighbours’ homes in secret. So it was on the morrow that a great many of the feuding people packed their carts to leave, each heading for different destinations. This was to the great dismay of the management and to all those who would choose to remain behind. They worried that so great an exodus would allow the true thief to flee in plain sight. But the company was oddly ineffective in searching their wagons and encouraging men to stay.
“That missing gold would have been sufficient to float four month’s pay,” Gordias said to the remaining miners. “If you stay with me, we can make it back. I promise you. The sooner the fire subsides, the sooner we can all get back to work.” But the continued search efforts in the meantime would prove fruitless, and irrational gossip spread around the camp. Holes were dug up––seemingly at random––and talks of floorboards with fresh toolmarks were frequent. Though each of the remaining miner’s quietly knew the search was in vain, their gnashing teeth pacified their pending wrath.
In those early days of the inferno, the mercantile had extended credit for the miners to buy groceries. This had been at the behest of the merchant’s goodly wife Phoebe, who everyone called Mrs. Mason, the only lady who stayed behind with the struggling town. The gesture was a considerable risk to their already substantial investment in the town, but since the Masons had already invested so much into Corinth it wouldn’t do to simply close shop. With nowhere else to turn, Mr. Mason agreed. But as time bitterly marched on, the shopkeeper’s difficulty in securing inventory quickly escalated. Shipments stopped arriving to the little frontier town, and as the grocery stock dried up, so too did his offer of credit. The mercantile was closed. Then came knowledge of the company’s bankruptcy, and a riot ensued. There was no food and no money.
For fear of being lynched, Gordias met the mob in front of his office steps and prostrated himself––his hands planted in the dust before him, his face pressed against the ashes of the street, and his pockets pulled out for effect. It was not difficult for anyone to see, even if enraged by just demands, that he, too, was a victim of the robbery. Against all odds the miners believed in the Gordias’ innocence. Mr. Mason was the first to walk home. Though they quickly turned to seek the blood of Alexander instead, they found him bedridden again, resting his twisted spine. Conscience-stricken, their madness subsided. His pitiable state was enough to send each of the miners home, one by one. A kindness Alexander rarely, if ever, reciprocated.
It was on that night that Seraphim first arrived, riding a pale horse through Corinth’s only street. Ash had caught wind and brushed her facades, painting Seraphim and his horse a dull, dappled grey. The anxious people emptied the street without a word or welcome; their nerves had stretched beyond their breaking point. Then a loud plaintive wail was heard from inside the shop.
The camp had suffered yet another human casualty––a cruel joke spawned in the pits of hades. Almost as if the angel of death took on a formless smog and snatched the best of them while she slept. Mrs. Mason had died in her bed when they were all out. A faint odourless gas had seeped into their home from the earth below. Those who came to wake the deceased were awestruck by her statuesque appearance and the eerily peaceful look she wore upon her face.
With the inferno beneath them proving even the sod unsafe, Corinth’s remaining few miners decided that it was time to pack it in for good. The death of Mrs. Mason sobered everyone. They would waste no time in burying her body. They dug out a shallow hole, the widowed merchant entrusted his wife’s body to the scorched earth as the undertaker carved the departed saint’s name and epitaph upon a pine board:
AND THOU SHALT BE BLESSED; FOR THEY CANNOT RECOMPENSE THEE: FOR THOU SHALT BE RECOMPENSED AT THE RESURRECTION OF THE JUST.
– LUKE 14:14
The undertaker then nailed the board to a pine stake and drove the cross shaped marker into the ground in the tiny cemetery. Mr. Mason wept.
Downing moonshine from old kettles and the leftover draughts from the tavern’s remaining kegs, the miners began to search for meaning in the whole tribulation. By evening, they had drained those last barrels to their dregs. Mr. Mason stood up. Fingernails still blackened from the parched earth, “Greed––” he rasped as he chugged his last. “Greed is what caused the inferno. Greed is what killed my wife.”
Standing to their feet in outbursts of indictments against Gordias, the miners knocked their chairs over as they slammed empty glasses on the card tables. “Theft be damned! It was that bast’rd Gord who made us to dig so deep!” the undertaker shouted in reply, alleviating them of any share in the guilt. “All he wanted was more.” Each of them in turn started to grumble about the cursed labyrinth they had excavated from the earth. From that point onward, it wasn’t much of a stretch for the miners to re-interpret the ignited methane leak to be the very flames of hell. Madness would burn again.
And so, with lit torches and pickaxes, Mr. Mason led a rabble of drunken miners to the manager’s mansion in the dead of night. Gordias saw the flames burning outside his bedroom window and all but dove down the stairs and out the backdoor. As he approached Alexander’s dark grey horse, his suspenders were ensnared by its saddle. A loud bang came from the front of the house, and the horse fled in terror, dragging the manager behind as it bolted down the street. Mr. Mason raised his pickaxe into the air to strike another blow to the manager’s portico when the hulking Alexander grabbed the handle. Mr. Mason looked up and trembled. Alexander’s eyes were hollow. He squeezed the wooden handle until the metal crumbled off. Mr. Mason dropped the broken handle and began to stumble backward. The miners lost their resolve for the last time.
The next morning, Mr. Mason exhumed his wife's casket and placed it on his carriage. He led the remaining miners in a final exodus down Corinth’s only street, cursing the town, and kicking the dust off his boots.
***
Seraphim stayed behind when everyone else had left. He had served in the monastery in his earlier years and had learned the secrets of contentment. Routine fasting had hardened his body against hunger pangs and had prepared him for a solitary and meagre frontier life. Without the common worries of groceries, Seraphim was much less reliant on civil amenities than the miners had been. Since leaving the sanctuary, he had spent much of his adult life moving west with the frontier, and his work always seemed to bring him beyond civility’s limits. Neither Gordias’ departure nor the closing of the mine was going to force his hand. He knew that he still had a job to do.
Upon the town’s final abandonment, Seraphim had moved into one of the vacant rooms above the tavern. His new quarters were much more spacious then his briefly inhabited bunkie, and they were certainly less drafty. The inn also boasted kerosene lamps mounted in each of its rooms, with reflective pans giving light those solitary evenings. That was reason enough to relocate. He did not permit himself to worry about the silent gas that had taken the shopkeeper's wife. He signed himself and slept with the windows cracked. Nor did he mind the lingering curses spoken against the town, those which had been uttered by the angry mob. He knew he was protected. The only haunting that would vex his soul was the silent rush of soot and ashes through the street––the eerie void of departed children. Though justified in his marksmanship, Seraphim knew that he could not spend the rest of his earthly days as a solitary man. Ultimately, it was not just ammunition that kept him returning to civilization. People need people. And people need saving.
Though the nights were always cold, the days had been hot and dry. But that morning was especially hot, and the smog exceptionally dark. Seraphim lifted the brim of his hat to dab his forehead. It was that kind of summer day when the dust and grit whipped up by the wind would stick to the sweat of your brow. He was leading his horse down the barren street to a laughing brook by the cemetery. There, they would be refreshed by cool water.
With impatient eyes, Alexander spied on the lingering latecomer, waiting for him to leave. He stubbornly clung to the mansion, insatiably hoarding the manager’s discarded assets from bandits and robbers. Seraphim knew he was being watched. He hummed Veni Veni Emmanuel as he walked by the way. But Alexander could not have known that it was his presence, and his alone, that kept Seraphim in the town. The overseer’s deformed figure and wicked sneer was anything but neighbourly, but an arms-length arrangement was exactly what Seraphim wanted.
He continued in this stalemate until his eye caught an unopened crate behind the tavern, shielded from the sun by the shadow of the adjacent water tower. He pried it open with his knife, revealing a treasure trove of untouched red wine and other spirits. Seraphim poured the red wine into his new wineskin, broke bread, and counted his blessings. Afterward, he continued to the brook. As he again passed the manager’s lonely mansion, he could see the overseer’s haughty eyes glaring at him through a rippled pane of glass. He had been watching him for some time. But Seraphim paid those blackened eyes no heed. He marched with purpose, humming bittersweet praise.
It was late afternoon when Seraphim returned from the brook, and the high noon sun was no longer at its peak. Hymns led his path, as his appearance slowly transfigured from out of the scolding heat. His eyes were drawn to that upper window in the manager’s mansion where Alexander was eyeing him earlier. Of course, the overseer was not in that window anymore. It had been many hours since Seraphim departed for the brook. Still, Seraphim sensed that he was being watched, only he knew not from where. He carefully fingered his shoulder sling and counted his cartridges, feeling the weight of his rifle.
As he approached the inn, he heard a shriek of terror. He spied a shadow moving across the glaze of his own room’s window. It moved as though it had been seen, and not long after came the hobbling sound of feet upon the wooden stairs, echoing through the silent street with the weight of authority. Seraphim straightened his stance as Alexander’s heavy frame emerged from the inn’s front door and onto the verandah. The sight of a crucifix hanging from Seraphim’s neck made Alexander grimace in disgust.
“It’s time you vacated this camp,” spoke the overseer anxiously. “You’re on company property.”
Seraphim ignored the order, reaching past his scabbard and into his back pocket. From it, he produced a rolled-up parchment. Stretching out its contents and stiffening the papers curl against his chest, he cast it to the ground between them. The poster revealed the crude sketch of the overseer’s likeness:
MISSING: ALEXANDER MIDASÉ
A matching description of a hunchback followed. Only the image on the paper was far less animalistic than the beast who stood before him now. Unbridled avarice had altered his appearance.
“What is your name?” Seraphim asked.
The beast made no reply.
“Alexander?” Seraphim asked skeptically. “Or Asterion?”
The beast clenched its teeth. Its beady eyes darted for the door as it quickly measured its distance. As Seraphim’s arm motioned for his rifle, the beast hurled its hulking body through the door for cover.
“You can’t stay in their forever,” Seraphim hollered from the street. “He will eventually die. I want him alive.”
With that came two shots of a colt revolver from the tavern’s open window. Seraphim moved for cover.
“The manager pleaded that I protect his assets. That means Alex, too.” Seraphim said as he cocked his rifle. “I gotta hand it to you, though. You spun a good yarn this time, taking a cripple. But you’ve never had that much luck with yarn, now, have you?”
Quick breaths marked the moments.
“If you’re here for the gold,” it finally shouted back in a savage voice, “You can’t have it!” It made no arguments about its discovered identity; it knew that it was much too late for that. The beast’s thoughts were on keeping its ill-gotten gain, and saving its own hide.
Seraphim made no reply. He knew time was running out. The demon was contorting Alexander’s flesh to its perverse image. But he could not track where the beast disappeared to in the tavern, or if he had fled out the back door. But just then, a flash of light caught Seraphim’s eye where he was taking cover. From behind a decommissioned ox cart, he squinted at the source of the light. It was coming from his bedroom window. He saw that it was the declining sun reflecting off the wall lantern’s pan. Suddenly the beam broke as a darkened mass moved across the plan, absorbing the light as it moved. From that vantage point, Seraphim spied a freshly removed plank in the ceiling.
Asterion had been waiting on the lone holdout to leave town so that he could retrieve the hidden gold from the tavern rafters. It had not anticipated the arrival of another man, much less that a man of God would take refuge in one of the vacant rooms.
Lining up the blackened mass with his iron sights, Seraphim squeezed the trigger, firing off a true shot. The bullet pierced the beast’s hand, forcing Asterion to drop his revolver. Only the bullet didn’t stop there, but went clean through the beast’s mangled flesh. The bullet’s spark against the pan caused the upper floor to quickly ignite. The splash of oil accelerated the roaring flame. Asterion watched as the flames quickly climbed up the timber frame structure. It was only moments before the entire upper level seemed completely engulfed in a fireball, and smoke was billowing out of the roofline as if it was smitten by fire and brimstone.
That ancient abomination was a millenia beyond rebuke. Though Seraphim sought to purge Asterion and purify Alexander, judgment was not his to give. If Alexander were to survive, he would suffer loss, though he himself would be saved, but only as through fire. He set his sights on the water reservoir beside the tavern, “In the name of the Father, in the name of the Son, and in the name of the Holy Ghost” he whispered as he shot off the spigot arm leaving a gaping hole in the tower’s side. Mighty waters poured forth upon the tavern, dousing the flames and the beast within. But the water only enraged the fire. Seraphim marvelled.
A sudden roar of unbridled avarice led the beast’s ascent up a rickety ladder, into the blackened smoke to save the gold from the flames. Seraphim watched as a being in the form of a man, but with the head of a bull, stomped up to the window to tear the rafters down by brute force. Even over the popping of burning wood, Seraphim could hear the building’s frame creak and whine from the minotaur’s incredible power. Although his body suffered the burns of the flames, the minotaur showed supernatural resilience to the burns, giving only a grunt of relief as the rafters burst apart. If the man Alexander was once alive, he was certainly deceased now––his soul entrusted to the Lord in a baptism by Greek fire. The stolen gold changed from a solid to a liquified state and poured out onto the bull-headed demon, cooking its fleshy and contorted host inside a golden sarcophagus.
The fire in the mine would eventually extinguish itself. When that day came, a fresh wave of workers was called to the frontier to find the rumoured ghost town of Corinth razed to the ground. Not a single structure had survived, save for the tiny graveyard on the town’s outskirts and a mysterious golden minotaur where the old tavern once stood; its image smeared with ash and other impurities. Though the graven statue would be seized and smelted by the new company’s manager, laying claim to Gordias’ losses, strange rumours persisted about the origins of the golden calf-man, an idle warning of some unspoken moral.
I sincerely hope that you enjoyed Greek Fire. If you did, please check out Silence and Starsong magazine to discover more fringe tales. And while your at it, give my brother and co-author a follow — his Meet Me at The Oak substack is a great community for theological thinking. Matlock was the illustrator for my book Frog of Arcadia, and is currently assisting me with future publications.
Finally, if you wish to support my writing directly, please consider reading and reviewing Frog of Arcadia. Independent authors like myself rely on reviews on major platforms like Amazon and Good Reads. So help get the word out.
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