A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 20

This is the 9th year in a row I’ve run this series in April.

Today’s story: The Arsonist Was Like a Ghost.

By the time Lois and Miguel’s garage lit up, they already had friends whose properties had burned, in what was becoming a real fear for anyone who owned a structure that looked even slightly decrepit. People were filled with — well, “paranoia” wasn’t the right word for it, not exactly, because paranoia meant that the thing you feared wasn’t likely to actually happen. These fires could happen, did happen, every night, all the time.

It was hard to pinpoint one moment when people realized what a big deal the serial arsonist was. Was it fire number seventeen, a big rental house worth $95,000, a lot of money for the Eastern Shore? Was it fire number thirty-four, the house on Front Street? That one was abandoned, but it wasn’t isolated like the others. It was right in downtown Accomac, just a few blocks from the courthouse. If the wind had gone the wrong way, that fire could have taken out the whole town.

Maybe it was fire number fifteen, a little house directly across the street from state police investigators Rob Barnes’s and Glenn Neal’s offices. That fire wasn’t even called into 911 — Neal saw it himself as he was driving back from an interdepartmental meeting about the arsons. He was on his cell phone, talking to the director of the 911 Center about how the meeting had gone, and said, “Well, shit, man, the house is on fire. I gotta go.” It was so blatant. Fire fifteen had a message, and the message seemed like it was Screw you.

After a little while, watching the fires was akin to seeing a set of china stacked precariously on the edge of a table and knowing it would fall but not knowing when. Or watching someone squeeze and squeeze a balloon and trying to prepare for the inevitable pop. Every single place people shopped or worked or went for coffee or got the car repaired, they would wonder if the arsonist was standing next to them in line. Facebook pages developed: “Who is trying to burn down Accomack County?” and “Arson in Accomack” and “Who is setting these fires? And how will they be stopped?”

Chip Reid, a reporter with CBS This Morning, had come to Accomack with a camera crew. He interviewed the pizza maker at the Club Car Cafe and asked lunching locals how the fires had changed their lives. He visited the Parksley fire station with Phil Kelley, who had been dispatched as a local fireman representative. Before the cameras were even rolling, Reid and Kelley drove around together, Kelley in a carefully selected sweatshirt with the fire company’s logo, and Reid in an expensive-looking, tundra-ready parka. Kelley pointed out the locations of some fires and explained the equipment and terminology of firefighting, and Reid made Kelley feel comfortable by conducting a pre-interview, a casual conversation to ready Kelley with the kinds of questions he could expect to be asked when the camera was on.

“The arsonist is almost like a ghost,” Kelley offered, thinking of the way nobody had seen him slip into or out of any buildings yet. Reid’s eyes lit up, as Kelley remembered, and he told Kelley that the ghost metaphor was a really good one. Then the cameraman started to film.

“What’s your biggest worry?” Reid asked Kelley on air.

“My big worry is, of course, my people first,” Kelley said. “I mean, there’s no need to risk somebody’s life for an abandoned building. But then, how far is this going to escalate?”

“When you arrive on these scenes, what goes through your mind?” Reid asked.

“Total amazement,” Kelley said.

“Amazement?”

“Amazement. No one’s seen him. It’s like,” he paused, trying to pretend it had come to him just now, naturally. “It’s like a ghost.”

“Like a ghost?” Reid said.

“Like a ghost.”

The obvious angle here is the mystery: Who the hell is setting these fires? And why? The story has potential victims. Suspects. Cops. Firefighters. Local citizens. Possibly a fine story there.

But…

What if the culprit is an actual ghost? Or as it turns out… multiple ghosts? Some pissed off denizens of the dead… pyromaniac poltergeists.

You got your fires. You got your ghosts. Sorta like this:

You could go old school and have some official explanation for the phenomenon: Paranormal experts study the fires and determine it’s the ghosts of a sectarian group from the 1800s which lived on the land and committed mass suicide. Or you could veer in the direction of contemporary storytelling which seems to be taking the less exposition the better approach, resulting in more of a mystery (for example, we know nothing of the background of the monsters in A Quite Place).

In any event, the fires could start small, get bigger, claim some innocent lives, then move from houses to cars, stores, maybe start incinerating people just walking down the street.

Working Title: Ghosts Afire. It’s Poltergeist meets Firestarter.

There you go, my twentieth story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!

Here are links for all the previous posts in this year’s series:

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17
Day 18
Day 19

Each day this month, I invite you to click on RESPONSES and join me to do some further brainstorming. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when you play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in comments. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.