Chapter 3
“Fanaticism is the only kind of willpower the weak and insecure can actually muster.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
Rapp’s voice crackled from the hallway speakers late in the school day as the girls filed out of their classrooms: “Remember, you have no sixth period. Report directly to the gymnasium for the assembly. Those who miss it or show up late will face severe punishment. Additionally, if you have any information about the Theater Club’s missing pulleys und ropes … ”
“I hope he catches those thieves,” said Windi, the lowly Skipper who’d been bringing up the end of yesterday’s Butterfly Club procession. Gangly, a bit bug-eyed and limping, the girl had fallen in beside Phiale as the students made their way toward the academic building’s back doors. “Maybe Principal Rapp can use the rope they stole to han—”
Windi sprawled face down on the floor, tripped from behind by the girl with sparkly glasses — whose knee was now pressing hard against her back. “That was for yesterday, scum!” the fairy shrieked, and then just as suddenly helped her up. “Hi, my name is—,” she said and spat on Windi’s shoes.
“Eh … meet Belle,” Phiale said.
“Keep that freak away from me — I’ve never done anything to her!” she yelled, now limping even harder as she tried to keep up with the other two, who’d moved on. Windi had no other friends (even her fellow club members shunned her) and was tolerated in this instance only because Phiale herself didn’t have close companions, having transferred just a few months earlier.
“I’ve got my eye on you and your nasty cult,” Belle informed Windi. “And if you think you stand a chance against me with those nets … they’re the kind you give to little children,” she said, laughing.
“Oh, look, another nasty cult,” the fairy added as they emerged into the glare of the sun. Just outside the doors, members of the Climate Club were confronting their fellow students along the short path to the high school’s wooden gym. The girls held signs with messages like “Natural gas is silent but deadly” and, accompanied by a crude drawing of the Earth engulfed in flames: “THE END IS NEAR!!” Racing past them toward the gym, Rapp glanced at the latter image and gave it a thumbs up.
As Phiale passed them, she overheard a senior with a nose ring say into her phone: “I don’t care if you’re afraid of heights — this is more important than your own miserable existence, you weakling.”
Inside the gym, bathed in the heat and red glow of 10-foot flames blasting up from a pair of cardboard-facade sword hilts, the girls took their places in the bleachers. Black curtains hung from the rafters to the hardwood floor behind the methane-fed props. At a podium stood Rapp wearing a scarlet skullcap — grinning like a maniac and flanked by fiery ferns.
“Behold, our Avenging Angel!” the principal said with a wave of his arm. The curtains jerked back to reveal a large metal tank filled with water. From its two-foot depths, someone in a black Godzilla costume with a wire halo emerged brandishing a plastic flaming sword (its LED lights not flickering from the moisture). Prostrate before their new mascot, pompoms extended, the NHGA cheer squad encircled the pool. The gym fell silent, except for the torches whooshing fire … and a faint squeaking. Despite everything else going on, Phiale’s attention focused on the squeak … squeak. Where was it coming from? Was it getting louder? Her heart now racing, she felt disoriented by the whole hellish scene … and the squeaking … it now sounded like it was coming from two different places … somewhere overhead?
Then slowly, led by Rapp, a chant grew: “vengeance … vengeance … vengeance … ”
“Is that wet lizard the mascot?” Belle asked. “And it’s supposed to be an angel?” Windi glared at her, chanting louder. “My favorite part about cultists like Rapp is how distorted their perceptions get — like falling under an enchantment spell without magic. Hilarious.”
“… vengeance … vengeance … ”
“And what’s this?” the fairy said. Using a stick she’d just pulled from her pocket, Belle pointed out a girl descending on a rope from the darkness above. She was sobbing, gripping a bucket while bracing herself — an arm around the line and a foot through a loop — like a frightened acrobat.
“Stop swinging me! I’m going to miss!” she yelled.
Miss what? Phiale wondered. Whatever was going on, it didn’t seem like it was part of the program.
Then, from above: “How can I be swinging you — it’s on a pulley, you idiot! You better not miss!”
Phiale now saw there were actually two girls on ropes swaying in front of the flames. “I’m too low! And quit swinging us!” screamed the other. The pulley squeaking intensified as an unseen accomplice struggled to bring her more in line.
“This is too much fun,” said Belle, moving the stick in sync with their oscillations.
One of the protesters decided to go ahead and complete her act of resistance anyway: “As guardians of Gaia, we extinguish—” She slammed into the other girl.
Not only did they manage to splash only each other as opposed to the carbon-spewing torches, but one of them kicked out at a sword hilt to avoid being incinerated, and the prop fell over, setting the curtains ablaze.
Despite everybody’s shrieking and jostling, Phiale concentrated on the water tank as the mascot hopped over the rim and slithered around on the floor trying to stand but slipping on abandoned pompoms. The heat in the gym was now fierce as sweat beaded on Phiale’s forehead. She grasped the situation in a flash: The flames were spreading quickly, and they might not make it out alive. Watching the fire reflections dance chaotically and ephemerally in the rippling water, Phiale felt a bizarre mental tug that somehow pulled her underneath the cool weight of the tank’s 700 gallons. With explosive force, she sprayed it up onto the curtains, dousing the flames.
* * *
After everyone was accounted for, Phiale set off toward Main Street feeling a strange mix of elation and unease — The water in the tank just obeyed my will, like when I made it rain by the creek. It felt like I was doing it, but …
Phiale glanced over her shoulder while crossing the school lot and saw the fairy was following her. “Go find someone else to get in trouble,” she said. “I’ve got to go talk to people about one of the fires you started … our school has counselors, you know. Seek help.”
“That was impressive back there, you putting out the fire,” Belle replied. “You,” she repeated, making scare quotes around the word and grinning darkly.
“Hey, I did it as much as any nymph did,” Phiale snapped back, and she even tried to tell herself that all that talk of possession was total bunk anyway. Was it, though? How much control do I really have anymore? And was that awful fairy reading my mind just now? “Anyway, leave me alone. I’m going to have to start carrying a fire extinguisher if you keep following me around. You need to take things more seriously. You’re going to kill people.”
“Whatever, I’d just watch out when that firefighter lady starts taking things seriously.” Then, under her breath she added, “Talk about killing people.” Looking around to make sure nobody was watching, she turned back into Tinker Bell and fluttered into a flowerbed in front of the academy’s sign.
Phiale already knew a shortcut to the fire station, having seen the back of it while picnicking with classmates by a pond. She’d never been to New Harmony before her parents deposited her at the boarding school 130 miles from their Bloomington home. They were going on sabbaticals that spring to opposite ends of the globe — her mom, an art historian, to Nicaragua and her father to Naxos.
She walked up Main Street, past golf carts parked in front of quaint shops and eateries like Pie in the Sky, which smelled like something was burning. Right before the road ended, a large, brick-walled enclosure came up on her left. This was the Roofless Church that Mr. Owen had talked about in history class, how its “gilded gate was designed by … no one is to laugh or you’ll get detention … by the brilliant sculptor Jacques Lipchitz … silence!”
Then Phiale crossed the road into Paul Tillich Park, named after a German-American existentialist greatly influenced by the fundamental ontology of Martin Heidegger, a colleague of his at the University of Marburg in the 1920s. Tinker Bell had also been deeply affected by Heidegger; she’d sneak into the Working Men’s Institute library in the wee hours to ponder Being and Time by the light of pixie dust — which was why when a visiting scholar from Indiana University later said the section “Reality as an Ontological Problem” had “sparkled on the page,” he meant it literally.
After the commotion of the assembly, Phiale felt the park’s silence viscerally; all the dead needles on the ground seemed to muffle the sounds around her. The quiet amplified her sense of being alone, which she often valued over hanging around girls she didn’t know very well. But how long will I be able to feel any solitude with that … thing in my mind?
Phiale’s uncanny feelings intensified when she came upon a bronze of Tillich’s oversized head stuck PEZ-like on a pedestal, framed by the park’s glittering pond behind it. A little farther along the trail, she passed a granite marker for his ashes, which were buried in New Harmony because he’d been so taken with the town’s Christian and socialist roots. “Why stop at being a slave to just one victimization cult when you can have two?” Belle actually said to his face when he visited town in 1963.
Now on a short path to the station’s back lawn, Phiale saw the firefighter from the other day in a T-shirt and camo pants shooting arrows at a hay target shaped like a deer, her movements graceful and flowing. When the girl got closer, she noticed all the arrows were clustered in the center of the bullseye (a rare sign of perfection in New Harmony).
“Come over here,” the woman said, holding out a three-fingered glove. After Phiale put it on, she positioned the girl’s left hand on the bow’s grip, nocked the arrow on the string and stepped away. Phiale drew it back without thinking and sent the shaft flying into the bullseye 30 yards away.
“You’ve done this before,” the firefighter said.
“Never.”
“That right? You know, I used to shoot at a scarecrow out here, but Chief made me change it after some crybaby complained about seeing arrows sticking out of its heart.” She drew the string back … “A crybaby who might just turn into a deer himself and learn the sweet release of my bow.” Thump.
Another firefighter, in uniform, emerged from the back of the station and shouted, “Die!”
Di grinned and turned to Larry. “Hi, chief. This is … what’s your name?”
Phiale told them, side-eyeing him.
“Seems like I knew a Phiale a long time ago,” she said and spit out tobacco. “I’m Di.”
“Oh, that’s what he meant,” the girl said, relieved.
The chief, middle-aged, short of breath and coughing, looked at Phiale and slowly shook his head. “It didn’t sound like much on the scanner … I only expected to set up some fans to air out the gym and be done with it. All of you girls were saying how the water leapt up by itself and put out the fire. What kind of hogwash is that?”
Phiale looked away and twisted the sole of a white tennis shoe back and forth in the grass. “It was chaos … I can’t remember anything really … had something to do with global warming, I think.”
“Hey, ain’t you the one who was at the labyrinth the other day? Why are you here? What do you know about all this?” An arrow whizzed by his ear and stuck into the station behind him.
“You’re the one who called Rapp yesterday about the labyrinth incident and made Phiale come here,” Di said. “And sorry … I missed,” she added, pointing to the target in the opposite direction.
“Ah! Now I remember. Weird fellow, that Rapp.”
“I’d say!” said a man who’d just wandered through the back door wearing a frock coat and ascot. “Hi, Phiale.”
“Hi, Mr. Owen.”
He glowered at the chief. “I demand a full investigation into that madman. When my family ran the academy, our girls lived and learned under optimal conditions … well, somewhat — but not the ninth circle of Hell it is now.”
“The fire was an accident, the way I understand,” the chief said. “He feels bad about it … promised to keep indoor flames to under eight feet and get the sprinkler system fixed. I scheduled a Fire Safety Goddess demonstration for the students.”
Mr. Owen sniffed. “We need more than gimmicks at this point, but what would one expect from a town in such utter decline — you just wait, though, things will change around here one way or another,” he said and stormed off.
“Come to think of it,” the chief said, walking closer to the other two. “I didn’t tell anybody because it’s not my business how people choose to worship the Lord, but I was fishing on the Wabash the other night just before dark and saw Rapp standing in the river with both his hands in the air, palms up. He had his head bent down … I couldn’t make out what he was chanting, but he was pretty intense.”
“Where’d you see him?” Di asked.
“Downstream from the academy, near where the creek comes out.”
“That’s funny. I was tracking wild turkeys around there and saw a swath of trees knocked down. I couldn’t think of what could’ve done it. There were these indentations, too … I figured I was just being stupid, but when I stood back, it looked like a big lizard print.”
“How big?” asked the chief.
“Well … if you parked your pickup over it, you’d still see toes sticking out.”
Phiale’s face turned ghostly pale. There’s no way she said “lizard print.”
Check out Chapter 4 of The Flame of Heraclitus. And catch up with the Prologue. (Originally shared on X)
Rob Robill 