alight

0:00Specter is in radio Hmph! Specter is in radio My name is Alfie Kemp. It was May the 4th Star Wars Day that Hollywood set my body on fire. Well, not quite Hollywood, but an indie production shot in British Columbia to save every penny. Got a call from a old college friend Taylor Markey. He was a Sundance Starling 22 years ago for a romantic drama, but he'd eventually bottomed out directing kind of a dumb sounding horror movie.

1:05He called from the set and asked if I was interested in a little work and a god that I ever say yes. I was living in a teardrop camper on the property of an elderly beaten-ick lady whose yard and pool had took care of an exchange for a break on the rent. I hadn't worked in movies or TV in six years when the phone rang. Good guy Taylor. Here was his situation. The producers of the mountain itself had decided to pay for a very demanding special effect, a full body burn, lasting a good 10 seconds on the screen and 15 or so total, which would put it into the more rare range of stunts at that modest budget level. Taylor had been given a last chance to come up with a different concept for the ending, hopefully a cheaper one, but he realized the movie was feeling tepid and probably needed the scene. Mark Ealing, the stuntman who lost two fingers to electrocution working on a kung fu movie in Thailand once said to me, you need to wake up the audience, burn something.

2:11And so this horror movie's villain, Turtle Neck, would walk out of the woods a flame, having discovered new incendiary powers gifted him by the grave and intent on bringing them to the mountain town that had cruelly ostracized him decades before or some nonsense like that. I'd done stunts on 12 movies, between a million other regular jobs, but I'd never actually been set on fire before. All the affected departments huddled for two days before Taylor called me. I got in my clunker with a jiggly steering wheel and drove six hours from Portland across the Canadian border to a place called Sumis Mountain. Even before the big scene, I got paid for four hours of simple walkthrough with a gear and training on breathing exercises. There would be no hidden oxygen source to help me through the burn, wasn't legally required.

3:14Here's what they did to me. Draped me in no-mex long johns, including gloves and socks, and then a creepy looking hood that kind of poked out around the ears. On one day, flame retardant gel that smelled a bit citrusy worked over every part of my exposed skin. All the seals were checked three times before a thinner flame-resistant fabric layer, kind of like a gown, went on over all that. Only then did they get a primitive version of the character's costume onto me and got my wig fitted. The risks burns, sure, because fire could snake beneath those layers and get me a real good, but more likely heat exhaustion and smoke inhalation. My eyes or lungs could get messed up. Fuel could pool in some scrunched area of the costume. That would be really bad.

4:14Way to do the shot before dawn to make sure the rising morning wind didn't get out of hand and to make things extra unpredictable. All I needed to do, movement wise, was stagger forward from a spot near the tree line across a field toward some cabins in the distance. Just had to keep on a relatively straight line and not panic. The camera woman would follow so close that she herself would have to have some fire protection. Handheld shot, pretty cool idea. When the time came, there were three people just out of frame ready to spray me down the second cut was yelled. All joking around ended. All talk ended. Taylor and the producer, who was his husband, were very tense. I think this was starting to feel to the people on the set like this was unnecessarily high stakes for a movie that probably wouldn't be reviewed in anything more sophisticated than Fangoria.

5:15As for me, I was experiencing something new in my on and off career in the stunt industry. Fear. I'm superstitious. I was thinking, why now, after all these years, when I have no business still trying to hang on in this insane industry, why now was I called to do something so unusual and called by people who were not completely seasoned in this stuff to do it? It felt like I was walking into an ironic epitaph. I was already sweating freely under the suit when I took my spot. I thought, walk away. Now, all their confidence is fake. But I couldn't walk away. See, the textbook was being followed to the tee. The safety advisor had gone through the checklist carefully, including giving me a thorough rundown the night before of what this was going to feel like. So what would I have been if I just walked away?

6:20Someone counted down to the camera rolling as they'd keep counting loudly throughout the shot to time it as tightly as they could. And then someone applied a propane torch to my right foot while someone else touched one to my shoulders. That guy then literally dropped and rolled out a frame as I heard Taylor yell, go! I was on fire. My visor was almost immediately clouded and then I literally saw flames rising in my narrow field of vision. A synthetic feeling of warmth flowed up my legs and down my back then scrolled over my arms which got truly hot way too fast, faster than I'd been prepped for. I walked forward as I'd been directed to. There was no need to fake the stagger effect Taylor was looking for. I didn't feel I had much control of my shaky legs. Smoke and flame swirled in my sight and made a gray and muddy swamp with foggy spectral bursts of yellow, like lightning seen through a cloud bank outside an airplane window.

7:30Sweat slipped my body so intensely I felt I was swimming in all that protective gear and that made it all hotter. My fingers stood to tingle and itch crazily. I felt puffy and like my whole body was vibrating, even expanding. I forgot my breathing exercises and started gasp. Another step than another. The PA's voice counting down sounded like it was coming from a cellar far away. The sense of being consumed, of being eaten by an unforgiving force, and being trapped inside an inescapable shroud sent me into a panic. I started to lose my balance. Some little voice inside me kept seeming to cry out that this couldn't be and my body could not be on fire, could not be swimming in death like this, entirely at the mercy of others to pull me out.

8:32I fell to the ground just as the PA's count struck zero. I heard the hissing and squawking of extinguishers and my body temperature dropped drastically, that there was no sense of being wet. The swampy mass in my eyes went away and I saw faces again. I was only dimly aware of the cruise polite applause along movie-making tradition before I lost consciousness altogether. I woke up in the medical tent they had depraved, especially for this stunt. It was only five minutes later. I had an oxygen mask on me and immediately savored that stuff. Taylor and the producer were there and the PA who could have been more than 20. The nurse beside me also just happened to be the director of photography. He'd been licensed as an RN for seven years, another budgetary convenience. He'd stress, he told me. I was alright, I was physically fine. My vitals were all good but it was time to trundle me over to the hospital just in case. I agreed to that.

9:42There they confirmed what the DP had more or less guessed at and had gotten a couple of first degree burns on my wrists, nothing at all, severe. Taylor called me before I was discharged to thank me and asked me how I felt mentally. I lied and told him I was fine. By five in the afternoon I was back in my car and returning to the chain motel I was staying at courtesy of the production, 18 people in ten rooms. My mind was still not right, not by a long shot. And I got lost in the grey drizzle gently misting down on those back roads that wound through the mountains of British Columbia. To turn around in reverse direction I went a little ways down something that was only half paved looking for the first wide spot. The trees opened up some and I saw an old barn and a couple of slumping decrepit farm buildings and did it there.

10:43There was a man standing on the side of the road just staring down into a bucket of something sitting on the grass. He saw my car and started to walk over, favoring his right leg a little, a small but noticeable limp. I rolled my window down to be neighborly and pleaded for a little directional assistance. He braced himself with his hands on the roof and the driver's side door like a cop wanting to see a license and registration. He asked me very politely if I'd gotten lost like everyone else did around here and he very helpfully described the best way to get out onto the main road again. My mind truly was in a bad state because as simple as those directions were, I needed him to repeat them more slowly. He said I looked a little shaky and for some reason I found myself being unnecessarily explicit about why that was.

11:43That I had performed a stunt for a small indie movie shooting back up the mountain and it had gotten a little hairy. The man nodded knowingly. Yeah, he said. There's a clip of you on fire on Twitter. He'd been aware of the shoot for a couple of weeks now a lot of the locals were. I couldn't believe a clip of an unpublicized shoot would be online that fast after the stunt, why the hell would that be? Who would leak such a thing even though I knew it happened all the time? Seems from the caption, the man said. They might have been implying it was an unsafe stunt maybe trying to get someone to blow a whistle. But he did not produce his phone to point the video out to me. I told him that, yeah, I guess that had been me. I was the fire guy. I was ready to start driving away but he remained there at my window looking at me with pointed curiosity. What did that feel like? He asked me.

12:45And I found myself telling this stranger that it had been surreal and scary and weirdly powerful. I guess I was feeling the delayed need to speak about it to someone. He had dark eyes but kind eyes. He looked not much older than me but weathered from a life outdoors maybe, graying at his temples, dark red hair tussled. Feel kind of good almost? He asked. And I honestly had to admit that it had. But not in a way I would really recommend. They're gonna make you do it again, you know? He said to me. I asked him what he meant. Why would he think that? His subtle smile became a trifle toothy then. Not at all a big fan of the toothbrush was my impression. Try enjoying the experience. He concluded by way of ending the conversation.

13:47Out on the main road in two minutes. He straightened and offered a simple and kindly way of goodbye before turning to limp away toward those farm buildings, which looked ragged enough to be well-past hope. Taylor told me it was a pretty hard life for some of the mountain people. I rolled my window up again very confused. As I drove away and concentrated on the directions the stranger had given me, it occurred to me how quickly he jumped to the conclusion that the stunt I'd referred to was the burn and maybe not something else entirely. Unless my face had been shown at some point. The farm clearing fell behind me, vanishing my rear-view mirror around a curve. And I made it back to the motel, okay? By the time I temporary roommate, the movie's sound guy, returned from the shoot past dark. I was deeply asleep and unresponsive.

14:47Lost in a royal-ing sea of the worst nightmares I'd ever had. At one point the guy got out of his bed and crossed the room and forcibly woke me up, freaked out and worried at the way I kept saying weird phrase again and again. The hay will hide us good. I got a call at 6.30 in the morning. Taylor was hoping I hadn't left the motel to drive home yet. What do you know? There was more money headed my way if I could come back to the set. Nothing had been wrong with that first take of the full burn. Just the opposite. Now that the structure was in place, Taylor and the DP had had ideas about trying some different ambience lighting, maybe working the breaking of dawn into it. Probably just one more go. Same duration, same pay. Tomorrow. How about giving in another shot if you're feeling okay?

15:48No pressure. A little artificial breathing assistance this time and some cooling gel, FedExed in to go with the other precautions, calls had already been made about mitigating the effects of the walk more. I said, okay. I didn't mention the leaked video. I didn't want to cause trouble. Surely someone already knew about it. My mind wasn't firing on all cylinders anyway. The residual dread from my nightmares, of which I already remembered almost nothing, lingered. What remained was just this one image of someone, man, woman who knows, trying various ways to get into a house where I was trying to protect myself. Door knobs were twisted, windows pried. Outside of the dark, the intruder pressed their face to the glass all over the house, trying to see in, I got only shadowy, undefined glimpses of whoever that was.

16:53I remember thinking I wanted another burn to make it all seem less of an antagonistic force. I'd be used to it. No exactly what to expect. I reminded myself that this was a job and I'd passed out once when I was tearing a roof as a construction temp, lots of guys had come close. Heat was heat. It was just a matter of degree. Take one was traumatic, but take two could be more like purification. Still, Taylor and the others gave me every chance to back out. Even after we say action, he told me. Yeah, right. I'm sure my grandfather, who'd fought a German mech division in Palermo under George Patton, would be all right with that. At about 5.50 am on May the 6th, the black sky started to crack over the mountains with tingees of pre-don color.

17:55The DP was doing something clever using a ring of car headlights as what they call motivated lighting. They'd soaked the grass ahead of me too with some kind of almost glittering liquid. Everyone was in coats and hats. It was real cold out. It was time. Time for my body to burn again. I heard the countdown start. The safety adviser hadn't seemed to really grass how much cooling gel to apply to my skin, it felt nice and affectionate for a few moments anyway. I closed my eyes and drew in a little compressed air. I had to be sparing with it. It probably wouldn't even last through the whole burn. I clenched my teeth down on the plastic mouthpiece hard, closed my eyes, and surrendered. To an outside observer, I probably looked like a long dead diver come up from the bottom of the sea, dressed in rags,

18:58body-beloaded, head mysteriously hooded as if having been made to walk the plank for a moonlight execution. Action. Then... whoosh. How do I express to you just how different it was? That second time, how very different. From the moment I felt the heat rise from my feet into my ankles and down from my shoulders to my lower back, before my extremities were engulfed and smoke suffocated my vision. The sensations were much stronger, but in an emboldening, exhilarating way, every ounce of that heat felt clean and pure and electric like some of the better heroin I'd ever had, and I'd had some in my day. It thrummed and summer-salted inside my skin

20:00and seemed to lift my entire weight, making my footsteps feel like they were skating over that damp grass. The yellow light that swallowed my field of vision glimmered and snapped through the gray fog. A fireworks display for my eyes and my mind. I felt my lungs inflating beyond what the compressed air could meekly give. There was someone off to my right too close, way too close, and I involuntarily turned my head. I thought it was the camera woman taking a dangerous risk, but I saw a man through the firelight. The stranger from the empty farm, he was walking beside me. He said to me, his words crystal clear through the roar of the flames. He was barefoot. Time stretched out, strangely. We walked together for a while in the dark.

21:01I could hear the PA counting down, counting down, but I couldn't make out the numbers he yelled out to the undersea reverberations that stifled them. They sounded like nonsense words, made up, smee, libit, yotes, pun. It only gets better the more you do it. The man from the farm told me with a comforting smile. I'll show you. And then he branched off toward the right, ambling away into the dark as if we'd been strolling in a park talking about baseball scores. I didn't want it to end. The longer I burned, the more I felt that the heat was cooking away all the bad things in my body, the impurities, and even bad memories my limbic system had been ceiling in for years and years.

22:02I wanted the heat to keep baking and cleansing my spine. I think I began to lift my arms to the sky when someone took my legs out from under me, alarmed that I continued to walk, even though the staticy spray of the extinguishers had been queued exactly as planned. Safety, the production company had noted on that day's call sheet, is our watchword. They took the fire away from me and helped me to my feet. Did the crew clap that time? Not a remember. I was guided into the Med Tent. I did a great job convincing them I was fine and even tried joking around a little, like in the old days when Taylor would make digital eight short films with me in the college gang with pizza slices as pay. I even made it clear that there was no need for a hospital trip this time, and the nurse slash DP concurred.

23:04I was the group gathered in that little space, only the camera woman seemed unconvinced, looking hard into my eyes, finding me a trifle manic. She'd been so physically close to me during the walk, but in the end, I judged that I'd fooled her too. I should have gone back to the motel for a long rest in a dark room, but of course there was some place else I felt I needed to go first. I relied on memory to get me back to that first wrong turn I'd made off the mountain road, the one that had pushed me deeper toward the clearing, but understandably on that day, my memory bank needed some of its circuits replaced. The afternoon sky was slate gray, and it was snowing lightly, not at all unexpected for me in that part of the world. The hemlocks were completely still, no wind.

24:04I just could not find that turn. Nothing I saw, no marker, no signifier aligned with where I'd first gone. The GPS was aggravatingly vague. It just showed me a tangled grid of light green blocks representing the forest, so I kept trying things. I found a narrow dirt road that I was just hoping would connect to something else. I'd give it one minute and then ditch it, there I was again, at the clearing. I was obviously coming from the other direction this time because now the farm buildings were on my left, but the road didn't progress past them toward where I'd originally stopped and chatted with my stranger. I didn't seem right. I pulled over and rolled my window down, and I heard frogs, frogs all around in the forest, and I heard a throaty bleeding. Dozens of them hundreds for all I knew.

25:05There must have been water nearby, but when I looked at my phone screen again, there was nothing indicating any on the GPS. I killed the engine and got out. My breath was visible before me. The snow was coming down a little harder. The vocalizations of those aggravated unseen frogs cut rudely through the pristine forest silence. I walked toward the low building closest to me, past a hooded tractor without tires. I ducked my head and entered the building through a doorless gap in the wood. The slats of the structure were rotting and had become uneven, letting more daylight in than was ever intended. Dirt floor, tarps, old crates, a catastrophically rusted bicycle with one wheel. My stranger was in there, standing by the far wall. Like before, he wore battered old jeans with paint spatters

26:09and a heavy black sweater that drooped on his bony frame. He greeted me by asking me if he'd been right about a second try at the fire stunt. I acknowledged that yes, he had been right. I told him something strange had happened to me. What did he meant when he said try enjoying the experience? Had he actually done it before? In a way, he said, not for movies or TV though. I've burned many, many times, metaphorically, at this he chuckled a little, but there was no real mirth in it. I asked him how he'd known I'd be made to do the stunt the second time. That's the way your business works, right? He replied, nothing's ever easy, nobody's word can ever quite be a guarantee. I stepped a little closer to him. It appeared another one of us said shaved since our first meeting.

27:13I asked him why, why had it felt so good the second time? I guess I put it into your mind that it was okay to let it, he said. It's a journey, you know, and what you're moving toward is I envy you. I saw you, I said to him. I saw you when I walked. He smiled. I'm flattered, he said congenially. You entered a different mental plane. You might have seen your first great teacher or Hank Aaron, it could be rather random. As he spoke, the cloud of his breath obscured my view of his face more and more as if the temperature kept dropping as we stood there. The frog said suddenly stopped bleeding outside the building. The man never seemed to take his eyes off me. Now this, he said, tilting his head to the ceiling.

28:17This is a place you can come and get even deeper into the experience, far from everyone in their technical worries. This room's not great for it, but there are unused spaces all around the farm, safe spaces. With enough burns, you start to feel everything about the old you has gone away in the smoke. And it is every layer, nothing left. This is not a life change the way some people use the phrase. This is a complete transformation into a new hole. The only pure cleanser in the universe is fire. He said, more to me than I'm sure, but though I don't remember what it was. I'm sure we spoke more and that I followed him somewhere outside, onto a grass path between the herding farm buildings, in which nothing seemed new or even usable.

29:19I think I had become exhausted beyond my ability to retain certain things, certain images. In the end there was a house, a small house, in a field at the end of the path. We didn't go in. The stranger's leg was hurting him, and it pained him to walk. Next thing I knew I was back in a motel room in bed, different one though. I couldn't deal with having anyone around me just then. I could afford a better quarters after all. I'd made quite a nice score off this gig, and I knew deep down that the stranger had told me at some point that afternoon that one more firewalk was headed my way. This was elating news for me. I practically banged God for it. It was explained to me that my unusual movements during that second take

30:25were not the only minor flaw that emerged on the screen. There had been a focus-pulling problem caused by lack of care in balancing all the new visual elements, just not enough prep time. One more go was an order, but absolutely no more than one. They decided to cut an entire scene in order to free up money to pay for it. I'm a game, I told Taylor and the producer. They thought I really was a trooper. I heard that word three times, trooper. At 5.20am on May 7th, 15 minutes before I was to begin the process of donning my safety gear, the camera woman approached me and asked to talk to me about the blocking of the scene, but instead of talking there in the field at the base of Sumis Mountain, she took me into a trailer that Taylor and the editor split time with.

31:28The camera woman's name was Colleen. She had a partially shaved head and an enormous tattoo of a crouching panther on her neck. She came up to about my chest. She told me she was privately worried about me doing this stunt a third time. That she had spent the night before independently researching the effects of undergoing multiple full body burns in such a short burst of time. There wasn't much data about it out there, but a couple of experts seemed to think it was like going on a compressed series of bad acid trips, and that the human mind just wasn't built for that level of strange. I seemed to have changed a little from the time I'd first come on set, Colleen said, admirably blunt. Taylor and the producer had dismissed her concern, so she wanted to know from me directly if I was going to be all right.

32:31I assumed then that it was her who would leak the video of the firewalk, but she looked confused about that. No one hears mentioned any leaked video, she said. I would have heard about that. I told her that in 2002, I'd been 10 inches from a guy named Pip Mortimer when we both jumped from a high window in order to crash cinematically through an awning blowas. That movie was artfully called Secret of the Deathfist, and it was shot in Macedonia. On the way out the window, diving through breakaway glass, we bumped a little and Pip's shoulder had then connected with the sill, causing him to stumble out just a hair off balance. I saw his eyes bulged when his neck connected with the edge of the awning, I told Colleen. They literally tried to pop out of his head at me. When he hit the crash pad, somehow his hand was locked in mine.

33:37Like he was grasping for help when it was way too late. The PA had to pry it off me. She was screaming. So, I said, I'm not exactly concerned about the psychological effects of a 10-second shot on flat ground with three people pointing fire extinguishers right at me. I didn't mean that to sound cold. I tactfully left out the mention of Pip's eventual death. The sight and feeling of his hand clasped around mine lived in my mind as permanently as my mother's face. At about six, with dawn just about to break, the fire swallowed me up again. Hello, darkness, my old friend. One by one, all the bad layers of my life fell away in that gleaming, cleansing blaze that base roar within my ears, obliterating all sound and concern.

34:50I was squeezed tighter and tighter, nae loving blanket of godly heat. Goodbye to my stupid infidelity that broke up my marriage to my first and only wife. Goodbye to my dumb trust and a business partner who convinced me to buy into a pet cemetery in North Carolina. Both mistakes burned clean off me, unseen cinders popping with a snap and then dying on the grass. Goodbye to my first day at work at Cooper's Green, the care facility where I suddenly realized I didn't have what it took to work with the handicapped and mentally challenged, and left an apology note like a coward and act which had haunted me for 28 years. The heat and the flame devoured that too, leaving only the essential purity I'd first brought into the world intact. I felt it birthed inside me again, a perfect, sprouting skeleton of impermeable ice.

36:00Every moment I was a flame was another level of spiritual and physical high. I laughed as I walked. Then, from one step to the next, I was suddenly in a different place altogether and a different time. I burned now in a snow-choked field as clean powder fell from a blinding white sky above me. Through my sweaty polycarbonate visor, I watched as my flaming ankles cleared out circular orange pockets where the snow couldn't touch me. Burning out here in the open was even better. I took a moment to simply admire the flames as they danced and caressed my arms and my legs. Sweat ran so freely inside my safety gear that it was like when you first step out of a hot spring, Alfie Kemp, me, stood in nature completely free of everything and wanting it to go on forever.

37:12Would you like one more burn beyond this one? I strange your said nearby. The ultimate experience of purity, the end of the epic road. He stood in the snow by the tree line and watched me in appreciation. I'm not sure how we could hear my voice gasping out words through the roar of the fire, but he acknowledged me with a nod when I said, yes, God, yes. Let me show you where it will happen, he said. And he turned and his boots crunched through the snow, which began to come down so heavily that his image through the visor was becoming distorted. His head and hands looked misshapen. I realized the farm buildings were off to our left and some distance away. I followed him burning merrily and merrily burning, comfortable and calm, my brilliant colors standing out and stark contrast to the landscape.

38:20You've seen a few times how they ignite things, my stranger said to me. You know how to do it by now, yes. If you just took some propellant from the set, here he pointed. I recognized the sleepy little house he'd shown me before, silent and slumped in a clearing. It's roof sagged a little, having seen too many winters in its long life, moss and lichens clung stubbornly to the chimney. The screen door on the front was hanging a little loose. Imagine this going up in flames all around you, he whispered. You in the center of it, a blazing stage, an arena of fire all your own burning there would be a true finale, whatever you were transformed into something immense.

39:21I would help you myself, but I'm a bit limited in physical things. I saw it in my mind, yes, to be consumed and liberated as all the things around me were at the same time. My God, the heat that would be generated, the heat. You'll go in tonight, the stranger said, while there was sleep. He was smiling. His teeth were yellowed and sick. And then there was a sense of brute impact on my lower body. I coughed out a great gout of air and looked down to see both my ankles twisted hard, buckling in the snow. On the set of the mountain itself, someone had tackled me to get me to stop fighting their attempts to extinguish me. I went down onto the wet grass and my beloved flames were going away, going away, going away.

40:3136 hours of observation and rehydration at the hospital. Then physically unfazed by my third full burn, I was released. I told them that yes, I had a panic attack. It had happened before I apologized. I said, yeah, I need to go home. There was a visit from the producer, obviously worried about a lawsuit. Some of the cast even came and the entire crew bringing balloons. Colleen was there, one of the faces in the group. She didn't say anything. Taylor came, of course. We got the shot. You should be proud, he said. Now get far away from us before you get as corrupt as I am. He looked sad and a little older than his years. I was finally able to get into my car and drive away. The roads were completely clear. There hadn't actually been any snow in that part of the area for a couple of weeks.

41:41I was sure I'd be able to find the farm this time without thinking much about it. The landscape out that way once again didn't seem to quite cohere with my memory of the turns as I made them. And very little felt familiar when I got off the main road. I blamed it on the fact that it was for the first time dark as I made my way toward the stranger. Almost 10 p.m. But then there it was the skinny bumpy dirt road that would take me where I wanted to go, emerging in my headlights. I guided my car onto it, feeling slightly intoxicated, but kind of nervous now. Something didn't feel right. Maybe I was uneasy about having to explain there had been no way to sneak any flame propellant from the film set. High beams appeared glowing in my rearview mirror. No one had ever been behind or in front of me before.

42:49It was an SUV and it came up very close on my tail and then the driver began flashing their lights to get my attention. I pulled over hoping it was just some idiot in a hurry to cut across the road that went in the direction of town. But they stopped right behind me. I kept the engine running afraid. The driver got out of the car and shut the door. Walked toward my window, leaned down so I could see them. It was Colleen bundled up against the cold. I rolled my window down. He didn't see my text, she said. I apologized. I hadn't been paying any attention to that sort of thing. No. Turned out she'd been trying to keep me near the hospital until she could get me alone again and inquire about my state of mind. She asked that I shut off my car and I did so. Steped out. The woods around us were murky and secretive.

43:58She asked where I was going, wondered if it was where she thought it might be. I told her I had a friend out here. That claim intrigued her this area being so far away from everything and me never having been to this part of Canada. To placate her in the hopes she would just go away. I invented a few simple details. I'd met some guy on a countryside ramble who'd offered me a cheap place to stay if I wanted to delay going back home to the States. Here she asked. You've seen it. She shivered just a little. The temperature seemed to be dropping fast. Maybe there'd be snow overnight. Just up ahead I told her. You know where you are with this place is. I told her I was nowhere. She revealed that this little notch in the hills had actually been scouted by the producers before they came up here. They thought its history might generate a little buzz and be an interesting add on to the film.

45:11To this I had no response. I'd begun to feel cornered paranoid. Can you show me please? Colleen requested. I began to protest but ever assertive she insisted she walk with me just a little ways and we'd see if maybe we were both talking about the same place. Without waiting for an affirmative answer from me she went around her passenger side door opened it popped her glove box and took out a long heavy flashlight. Around the bend we went her boots gripping the frosty mud. I had fallen silent not understanding what this woman wanted of me. That was growing resentful angry yet walking beside her. I felt inexplicably safer as though I had been getting close to danger and it was better now not to be alone. We came to the crooked storage building where I had talked to the stranger that second time. She queued the flashlight beam as we got closer to it.

46:25He lives here I told her not this building I mean but this is his land I guess. We went inside and she trained the flashlight on the stray neglected refuse within. What was his name she asked. I was about to tell her I didn't know but I guess maybe he had told me his name after all because it floated up into my consciousness unbidden and clear. In a rico I said. She turned to me looking very afraid. Taylor thought maybe it'd be creepy to shoot the camp scenes here she said to me but it got told off hard exploitative a bunch of us looked up the case after that. Her flashlight picked out a rotted wood block I hadn't remembered. Do you hear frogs I asked her. Do you hear that?

47:30Is that what those are. I don't hear anything she said staring at me intently where would they find water. She moved the flashlight beam over a few scattered bales of hay so old they turned gray and moldy. This man and his wife lived in the house with their little boy she informed me the runnygans. Some guy who claimed to be an astronomer fired from everywhere moved over the hill and they started talking to the police but what they saw and heard over there. About ten scary dogs running around free and two women living with a guy sisters from Japan looked kind of strange and starved lots of yelling late at night fights. Enrico was the guy's name. I followed her as she ducked her head carefully under the doorframe again to exit. She seemed to want to see it all the whole property.

48:38Once he knew the family was watching him real close it got real hostile back and forth she told me over her shoulder as she walked along the narrow grass path between buildings breath billowing. This Enrico guy got some bad infection in his leg and instead of going to a doctor he sent the women creeping into the family's house when they were gone to steal whatever medicine they had. Left a note shot up or suffer. So the cops went over the hill they wound up being charged. Colleen stopped briefly to turn and gesture vaguely to the north to indicate this geographic detail. There these pictures she added the women had died their hair red to match his no one ever found out why. No one understood how crazy they really were. Colleen stopped walking and now we were looking through the dark at the house in the distance small and slumped in need of many little repairs.

49:43It was too far away for the beam of a flashlight to show much at all but the shape of the sagging roof stood out in relief against the dark blue sky. An old pickup truck was parked around the side in the grass. Right after that Colleen said sniffling the three of them came over here in the middle of the night. Hidden a big block tower of hay bales lifted one out at the top and hidden the empty space known in the family could see him. Stayed that way for about four days fasting the coroner said. Enrico's leg was on the verge of killing him. At some point they snuck up to the house with a gas can and tried to set it on fire. Murder the whole family as they slept. Colleen turned to me then so small compared to me and looked up her eyes unpiddy and.

50:46But Rhinegan came out with a gun she said. Shopped them all dead. I stared at her feeling disconnected faint. I was 1983 Alfie she finished they still live here. We left before our presence could be detected Colleen took me back down the path and I followed her back to town with my hands trembling on the wheel. There would be no final great burning for me. The late script rewrite on the set of the mountain itself invented a different fate for the spooky woods killer turtle neck. And apparently my fire walk was reduced to three quick seconds on the screen as part of a dream sequence just 10 minutes into the movie which was eventually released on a couple of those low end subscription streaming services.

51:48I never watched it. I work in events set up for a hotel in Missoula now. I get a church once in a while even the Unitarians. I dream about fire sometimes but there are never any people in those dreams. It's just me in a field somewhere under the stars and I hear the rumbling and cracking that means the hemlocks are ablaze very close. But turning around and around I don't see anything but patches of black smoke leaking out of them like separated ghosts and I think why why won't you go completely a light. Show me come for me burn me. But then the sounds of the fire fade and there's only the base bleeding of frogs who are hiding to either mock me or comfort me.

52:51I have never known which.