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38.

Disco Inferno

“When the fire started, we rang the alarms, but no one listened. It wasn’t their fire, they said. They watched us burn and laughed.”

—Disco Witch Manifesto #201

Less than a week after Joe and Fergal broke up, Howie was awakened by the siren blasting from the Pines Volunteer Fire Department. The smell of smoke indicated disaster was within a hundred feet of the house.

“Lenny! Joe! Fire!” he yelled, leaping out of bed and into his vintage lavender satin pajamas. He bounded into the living room and out the front door. When he looked down Picketty Ruff, his heart dropped into his stomach. A moment later, Lenny and Joe, half dressed, stood next to him, their terror-filled eyes watching the smoke and flames pour out the little windows of Asylum Harbor. The motley group of volunteer firefighters, having only gotten there minutes before, hoisted a hose up the steps. It appeared the fire was contained to the interior of the little bar. They had to be careful to drench the place, since the island’s structures were mostly made of wood and built so closely together.

It took just forty minutes for the deluge of water to vanquish the conflagration, but not before it destroyed the entire inside of Asylum Harbor. Seeing how devastated Joe looked, Howie grew even more concerned. For Chrissakes, First he loses Fergal, and now the bar? What the hell is going on? Chills of foreboding swept up and down Howie’s neck. Could this all be related to Lenny having seen the egregore in the Meat Rack? Even though Joe couldn’t be the chosen one, it certainly appeared as if the Great Darkness or some other enemy of the light wanted to break the boy.

In the days that followed, the insurance investigators cleared Joe, who had gone to bed at least thirty minutes before the fire started. They determined it was most likely faulty wiring that had ignited some trash in the liquor closet. However, other rumors started to spread. This one saw a Graveyard Girl running down the boardwalk that night; that one swore there’d been a man in a polo shirt who pulled the alarm; another said it was a drunken day-tripper, without a place to stay, who’d wandered in from the cold. None of the rumors led anywhere. The only certainty was that Asylum Harbor, as the island had known it for so many years, was gone.

Once the bar was cleared for safety, Joe, Dory, and Vince stepped into its charred remains, searching for anything salvageable. The oak bar top that Joe had spent so much of the previous two months polishing was one long piece of debris-covered wet charcoal. The storage room of beer and alcohol had combusted, leaving brown, green, and clear shards of glass. All of Elena’s decorations were obliterated.

“Damn it!” Joe choked back tears when he saw the cindered remains of the old kitschy merman clock that hung over the bar. “I really loved that clock.” The merman’s bearded face, the one that had reminded him of Fergal, was blackened with soot. His trident was completely gone, and his plastic green tail had melted into something yellowish resembling a dried animal dropping.

Vince shook his head and punched the scorched wall. “That they can get away with this makes me want to scream!”

The light had vanished from Dory’s eyes. “Is there any way we can possibly …?” She was unable to say the words go on .

“It would take months,” Vince said, calming himself. “And we might as well face facts, even if the fire didn’t happen, we weren’t likely to make the margins we needed to keep Scotty from exercising his right to kick us out. It’s his property, and even if that old bucket of snot does use the insurance money to rebuild, there’s no way he’ll allow Asylum Harbor back in business. This is exactly what he wanted.”

Joe kept recalling the rumors about the Disco Witches and the club fire in Rehoboth, but seeing Howie and Lenny’s distraught faces now, he at least was certain they’d had nothing to do with this fire. “I just know Scotty Black did this,” Joe said. “Think about it—the fire alarm gets rung by an unknown person at the exact right time, so it only destroys the interior of our bar but leaves the rest of Scotty’s nearby properties unharmed. Isn’t that suspicious to you? Why isn’t he being investigated?”

“It wasn’t Scotty,” Dory said with that strange sense of mystery in her voice that reminded Joe of how Howie sounded sometimes. “At least not directly. There’s some other darkness at play.” Dory’s eyes engaged again with the space around her. “It’s my fault anyway. I’ve been too distracted. I was foolish to think …” She swallowed hard, stopping herself from crying. In his three months on the island, Joe had never seen Dory look so frail and old. He tended to forget she was eighty, but that morning she looked as if she were a hundred. She had told Joe the revived bar had been her dream of inserting some life back into the Pines after eight years of AIDS. Now it was all gone.

“Come now, Dory, darlin’, let’s go,” Vince said, gently offering his arm to Dory. “I’ll get some fellas to do the cleanup. That’ll be my last job as manager I suppose. Joe, you come on too. You’ve had a hard week of it, lad.”

“Just one more minute, and I’ll be right there,” Joe said.

As Dory and Vince stepped out of the charred doorway, Joe looked once more at the cindered refuse. He thought about how so much of what he had allowed himself to love in the world got destroyed one way or another—Elliot, Fergal, the bar. He pulled Howie’s good luck charm from his pocket and tossed it into the ashes. Then he reached for the merman clock, snapped off the little partially burned head, and clenched it in his fist. This would be his reminder of a summer that would not stop breaking his already broken heart.