CHILDREN OF FIRE
BY
PETER ATKINS


...in the shadows of Babylon's ruin
We harvest the roses of Twilight...

Sundered, dishonored, the heirs of desire;
Orphans of ecstasy, children of fire

John William Adams (1879-1913)


CHAPTER 1

Richard Bloodstone was born in Hackney (a district of London, England)
in 1955.

His father's name was John Cooper. He was a visiting seaman from
Canada and he never knew that he had fathered a child on the nineteen
year old chorus girl that his exotic accent, new world glamour, and
bulging pay-packet had enticed into the bed of the unprepossessing
hotel room in which he was staying.

Cooper shipped home to Alberta four days after Richard's conception
and gave no more thought to England or chorus girls' kisses until a
late afternoon in 1987 when a man he had never seen before walked into
the dim light of a sports bar in Medicine Hat. Cooper, ten years
divorced and two unemployed, was sitting at a near booth nursing a
beer. The dark-haired and strangely familiar man approached the booth,
said "Hello, Dad", took out an automatic pistol, and shot him three
times through the left eye. The police were expecting a quiet day and
couldn't respond to the manager's call for nearly forty minutes.
Nobody in Medicine Hat ever saw the killer again.

Richard's mother was Flora Pender on her birth certificate, Natalie
Silver on her Equity card, and Ginger Rogers in her dreams. John
Cooper was not the first man in her life so her young heart was not
broken when he failed to return for the Saturday matinee at the
Picadilly theatre but 	she was disappointed. Six weeks later, when
she knew she'd missed her second period, she was furious; She'd been
offered a six-month extension on her contract and this little keepsake
from Canada meant the end of that - too much of her parents'
Catholicism was still in her blood for her to countenance an abortion
and too much West End propriety was in the minds of the producers for
them to countenance an overtly pregnant chorine. She left the show
behind, she left London behind, she left behind her dreams of
single-spotlight stardom.

Richard was born in the duchy of Cornwall in a small cottage near
Tintagel. The cottage belonged to Flora's maternal grandmother's
sister, Great-Aunt Sissy. Sissy, a lapsed bohemian, was the only
relative who had wholeheartedly supported Flora's choice of career.
She had spent an absinthe winter in London three years before the
Great War of 1914 as the favourite companion of an aging and minor
symbolist poet whose one slim volume of verse, SONGS OF METAL AND
FLESH, was dedicated to her. When the scandal about his involvement
with a radical off-shoot of the Order of The Golden Dawn broke in the
salons and the newspapers she was summoned home by her parents. Since
then, she had outlived two thoroughly respectable husbands and,
childless, had inherited the cottage from her second. She welcomed
Flora into her home and, seven months after, personally delivered
Richard into the world in the very early hours of a cold September
morning.

On a Tuesday in April 1961, Sissy came downstairs early to start the
fire and found a note from Flora. She read it through once and then
flung it onto the grate among the small logs and coal-nuggets. An hour
or so later, she woke the five-year old Richard with a cup of tea and
the news that his mother wouldn't be coming back.

Sissy lived until 1969. The cancer that killed her had begun its slow
internal feasting more than six years earlier but the fierce and
unexpected love for the child that fate and her family had given to
her kept her from surrender until just after his fourteenth birthday.

The authorities took forever to find Flora and it was only in early
1974, when Richard was legally an adult, that he saw his mother again.
Their meeting was in a railway station cafeteria and Flora, now
Natalie Edwards, was as delicate as she could be in framing her
request that Richard refrain from further contact with her. Her
husband was a young turk Member of Parliament who fully expected a
cabinet post in the next reshuffle, and the sudden emergence of a
long-lost and illegitimate son of his wife's could cost him dear:
Richard could always go and find his father in America, she said (her
grasp of geography being as reliable as her commitment to
motherhood). Richard shook her hand awkwardly and left. The News of
The World paid him ten thousand pounds for the story and he used it to
finance his trip across the Atlantic.

His only reading material on the QE2 was Sissy's treasured copy of her
long-dead lover's book of poems. Richard was particularly drawn to an
unrhymed sonnet entitled ORCHID FOR A DISHONOURED PRINCE and began a
lifelong habit of muttering under his breath the closing sextet:

The room is dimmer now. The thirteenth comes.
The philosophic stone is steeped to blood.
The petals of the black rose port like wounds.
And razor tongues within sing slow pavanes.
Now strikes the filial hand (unholy joy!)
And scarlet rivers ease the pain of years.

In the thirteen years between his arrival in New York and his
appointment with his father, Richard took various jobs across the
length and breadth of the North American continent. Many were
interesting, many were not. What emerged as his favourite form of
employment was bar-work. He was surprised at this. He'd always assumed
he'd eventually discover within himself avocation for something
significant - medicine, literature, politics, whatever - but no. It
was bar-work. He liked it. It was very straightforward. Very honest.
People stated their needs.

You satisfied them. They rewarded you. It was as simple as life should
be.

After his encounter in Medicine Hat, Rick (as he'd been calling
himself ever since first seeing CASABLANCA and realising he shared a
Christian name with the coolest bar-owner of all time) returned to New
York and found work in the main bar of The Boiler Room, a nightspot
owned and operated by JP Monroe, a man with whom he had little in
common save patricide and (eventually) transmutation.


CHAPTER 2

Daniel Erwin "Doc" Fisher had two formative experiences as a boy:
seeing SHANE at his local drive-in and being given an 8mm movie camera
by his uncle Mort.

In the absence of a father (Ray Fisher was killed in a drunk-driving
incident when Doc was three years old), he grew up with Alan Ladd's
mysterious mythopoeic gunfighter as his male role-model. He wanted to
be strong, silent, and sad. He wanted to save people. He wanted other
men's women to fall in love with him and he wanted to be too decent to
do anything about it.

In the absence of a stable life (his mother took him from school to
school as she moved from town to town, job to job, man to man), he
grew up obsessed with recording life. He pointed his camera at reality
and it became more manageable. He could frame it, compose it, give it
a beginning and an end. He could make it make sense.

By the time he was in his twenties, he had already combined these two
obsessions. He was a professional TV cameraman (he had wept for the
death of celluloid newsreel at the hands of television but had made
peace with the enemy, had come to terms with tape) who wore his hair
and clothes like a frontier ghost. Buffalo Bill with a Sony, he either
ignored or genuinely didn't notice his colleagues' sniggers at the
hip-holstered cell-phone, the monosyllabic slow-talk, the
fringe-sleeve buckskin coats.

By the time Doc came to take his job with Channel 8 and begin his
association with Joey Summerskill, his resume was very impressive and
very detailed but there was one curious three-month gap in late 1977.
The man who conducted the interview for Channel 8 asked what Doc had
been doing through that early winter. "I have no idea" was Doc's
answer and his perfectly blank stare discouraged his interviewer from
probing further. Doc got the job anyway. Speculation among his
colleagues about this three-month sabbatical ranged from covert
government work to ten weeks in de-tox. Nobody got it right.

In October 1977 Doc had just returned from an assignment in Europe
when he received a phone call from a contact in the industry asking if
he was up for some quick freelancing. Doc called the number his friend
gave him and found himself listening to an enthusiastic but elderly
voice.

***

Woodrow Penman III was the sixty-three year old inheritor of a vast
family fortune. That fortune, and the businesses that fed it, were now
administered totally by hired men. All Penman had to do to fill his
days was find interesting ways to spend money.

A lifelong bibliophile, Penman had for the last seven years
specialised in collecting obscure works of an occult nature. His
initial interest in rarity of text was slowly succeeded by an
obsession with depravity of content. He made contacts in the secret
world of magick and began to be involved in a small way in the staging
of occasional rituals. The drive to be top-dog that bad taken Woodrow
Penman I from copy-boy to press baron was still there in the blood of
his grandson. The aging billionaire yearned to win the respect of his
latest peer-group by an act of summoning that was both novel and
awe-inspiring. After much research, he believed he had found his
means. As with many great discoveries, it was via a happy accident of
coincidence in what he had believed to be two different avenues of
research that Penman came to his discovery.

He had been sifting through his manuscript collection and had been
flicking past some examples of the Arthur Machen - A E Waite
correspondence when a set of initials in one of Machen's postscripts
caught his eye. The PS read "I see MA's capers with our misguided
brethren have lost him Fleet street's favour. What flesh will sing his
songs now?". The oblique reference in the second sentence confirmed
for Penman that the man under discussion was the poet John William
Adams but what was exciting was that he had never before made an
association between the poet and the JWA whose initials appeared
regularly in the papers of The Brethren of The Sundered Body, an
obscure and short-lived occultist group of Edwardian England.

Three hours later Penman was trying to control the tremors of
incipient glory that coursed through his body: by careful
cross-referencing of clues, portents, and hidden instructions in the
Brethren papers with certain lines from certain poems in Adams' book,
he was convinced that he had unearthed a buried invocation to a Power.
The Power was unnamed in any of the texts except by circumlocutory
phrases like HE WHO DWELLS IN THE DEEP but Penman cared little for
names - he knew from his studies how one author's Astaroth is
another's Isis, how Beelzebub is sometimes Lucifer and sometimes not.
Names were human guesses and were unimportant. There were Powers. They
could be summoned. That was all.

***

"And you can leave the camera running? It'll record everything?"

Doc smiled at the eagerness and the naivete in the billionaire's
voice. Yes, he could leave it running. Yes, it would record
everything.

Three days later, on the stroke of midnight, he pressed the record
button on his camera and left the 30th floor apartment on Eighty-Sixth
street in Manhattan. He'd framed it, focused it, colour-compensated
for the candlelight, and knew he could leave the rest to technological
inevitability.

He didn't think much about it after his second pre-sleep bourbon
though he'd chuckled once or twice on his drive back to Queens. The
old guy in his faggy white robe. The other people sitting cross-legged
at each point of that five-pronged star painted on the floor of the
big empty room. The way Penman had had each of them say something
weird while Doc checked the audio-feed and had glanced nervously round
the place if two or more of them spoke at once. Lifestyles of the rich
and famous. Jesus.

Doc rose at 7:30 the next rooming. He'd offered to stay over but
Penman had said it wouldn't be appropriate. He exited the elevator
outside Penman's place a few minutes, before nine and let himself in
through the unlocked front door.

***

It was five hours before the Police arrived. Doc was sitting propped
against a wall, his eyes glassy, his mouth slack and drooling.
Naturally, the authorities took the camera away but the tape proved
worthless. It had fed through the camera alright but was completely
blank, leaving the investigative team with no clue as to what
precisely it was that had taken the six people who had passed the
night in the room and spread them over the walls and ceiling like
lumpy and steaming puree.

Doc was institutionalised for nearly three weeks. He took a long
holiday after that. When he returned his court-appointed psychiatrist,
a Dr. Phillip Channard, was disappointed, but not surprised, to
discover that Doc had completely forgotten the whole episode and had
no further light to shed. He took Doc off his books but kept the
police photographs of the catastrophe. He had several private files
among which such pictures might find an appropriate home.


CHAPTER 3

Jimmy "See-Dee" Hammerstein was born the year SGT. PEPPER came out.
His tenth birthday party was marred by the death of Elvis Presley. On
the day he graduated high school, Massive White Bias, his favourite
thrashers, went gold for the first time. He dropped out of college to
concentrate full-time on organising underground Rave parties on the
same day that Bobby Corvino, once retired fifties idol, began his
series of come-back collaborations with dancemeister Hophouse Jack.
Jimmy and music were in sync. He loved it. He lived it.

He began his reign as DJ at the Boiler Room when he was twenty-four
years old. The kids loved him both for his impeccable sense of dance
floor zeitgeist and for the ease with which he could obtain whatever
their drug-of-choice might be. Ecstasy was the big hit of the moment
but, though Jimmy was happy to acquire it for anybody upon request, he
no longer indulged in the stuff himself. He always avoided the
question why.

About eight months before JP Monroe added a certain ornate and
grotesque pillar to his in-club collection of esoteric art, Jimmy, or
See-Dee (the sobriquet he had insisted on ever since staging his
ticket-only dance floor burning of his entire vinyl collection), had
been crashing at the apartment of Slither, his lead-guitarist friend
from Thanatos. They, along with Slither's girlfriend Lamia and any
passing guests, had been doing a lot of E. For the last few days
Slither himself hadn't shown his face much. He was hanging in his
bedroom working at his eight-track home studio. Unlike his usual
in-your-face self-trumpeting, Slither's manner about whatever he was
working on was secretive. His eyes began to project a kind of knowing
pride as if he was privy to some hidden wisdom that the rest of the
world was too blinkered to get. It was a look like the look of the
guys who REALLY knew who killed Kennedy, the look of the upbeat and
stupid side of paranoia.

See-Dee'd been there about a week when he brought The Fan back from
the club to meet Slither. The Fan had actually paid him a hundred
dollars for the privilege - Slither didn't let fans into his home so
See-Dee had agreed to introduce the guy as an old friend of his. It
had been cool at first but See-Dee began to worry when, after a little
drug-taking, The Fan began to show his true colours by pressing
Slither on his current project. See-Dee and Lamia had exchanged an
oh-shit look but, surprisingly, Slither went with the flow - which was
great for See-Dee because the cocktail of intoxicants he'd ingested
over the last three hours was shutting him down and he didn't think he
could keep his eyes open much longer, let alone throw the guy out if
Slither had freaked. He leant his head back against the wall and
drifted into sleep as their conversation washed over him.

"Has it got a name yet?"

"Sure; ORPHANS OF ECSTASY, CHILDREN OF FIRE"

"Way cool"

"Yeah. It's the title of this poem from way back. But, you know, I,
like, CHOSE it."

"Right."

"The whole thing is like based on this book. This English guy, man. He
knew. He was out there. And this is WAY back. Before rock n roll.
Before everything."

"And the fish that hides in stone."

"Three cycles back and the eye in your hand."

"Before the sky was blue."

"Babylon's cauldron and eighty to go."

See-Dee smiled in his dreams at the nonsense his mind

was making of what his ears were ceasing to hear.

***

He woke with a start at about four in the morning. He was alone in the
room. He assumed The Fan had left and that Slither and Lamia had gone
to bed and was about to pull out the sofa-cushions to crash himself
when he noticed that their bedroom door was slightly ajar. There was a
strange flickering light coming from the rain and he could hear a low
rhythmic pulse and the tinny high sound of cymbals through headphones.
He went over and pushed the door open.

Both naked, Slither and Lamia were fucking. Slither was standing up
and Lamia was bent over in front of him, her elbows resting on the
foot of the bed. They were both wearing headphones which were plugged
into Slither's eight-track portastudio.

The Fan was wearing headphones too. He was spread-eagled naked on the
bed, ankles and wrists tied to the posts. A score of deep and bloody
gashes had been opened all over his body and long thin candles had
been thrust into every wound. Each candle was burning and the light
from them threw crazy shadows on the wall of the room as The Fan's
body twitched in time to the music all three were hearing. Lamia still
had the knife in her hand and was making small delicate cuts in the
sole of The Fan's left foot as Slither moved in and out of her.

Slither caught sight of See-Dee in the doorway and gestured his hand
to a fourth set of headphones. See-Dee looked back at The Fan, at the
animal ecstasy in his idiot eyes, at his tongue licking at the air as
if servicing some unseen lover, and shook his head. Slither shrugged
and turned his attention back to the fun.

See-Dee closed the door carefully, collected his stuff from the main
room, let himself out into the New York night, and caught a cab to the
Club.