Let me back up, tell the whole story. She would have wanted it that way.
After our querying at the Penhew Foundation, we looked into the case of one Mr. Hugh Tylesman, who had lost his family in a terrible fire. Apparently, the man snapped, and had been sent to the Malsbray Asylum for treatment. Of course, we asked our confidante, Mickey Mahoney, if he knew anything else - and he did.
"Och, the Tylesman bloke," He muttered between puffs on his cigar. "Ye, he was a right strange one, he was. Say after he snapped, he went an' tried to off Gavigan. Bloody fool he was, but poor lad, losin' his whole family like that. But there's clippings in the Morgue that'll tell ye more about it. Lemme find 'em for ye..."
The Scotsman sifted through the articles, and with help from us, we found three more. Apparently, Tylesman did indeed snap. After he lost his family in that tragic fire, he tried to attack the Bannicker Park Memorial for the war in the Sudan, and after that he got his gun and went after Gavigan. Fortunately, the bullet missed and nobody was hurt - he was a crap shot apparently - but the man was put under trial for attempted murder. Gavigan testified and pointed out that poor Tylesman wasn't in his right mind, instead explaining that Hugh should get treatment for his condition. And so, he was - carted screaming and protesting to Malsbray, still claiming that Gavigan murdered his family somehow. It was still a well-known, shocking case in London's social circle, even though it had been a few years since the incident.
And apparently, it hadn't been the only fire since the memorial was installed. A few minor ones were scattered around the area of Bannicker Park, and there had been an additional death when a man got caught in a barn fire near there. A little digging and thinking, and we all quickly realized something - the fires had all occurred in the fall and midwinter, and continued to happen every so often. It became clear what we had to do then - interview poor Hugh Tylesman, and get his side of the story... if the madman was even able to speak at all, and if he hadn't died insane.
Fortunately, he hadn't. When we paid a visit to the asylum, we found him in the courtyard, a thin and quiet shell of a man with a red, scruffy beard and hair. He was sitting by a little burbling fountain, not really paying attention and not even speaking as we approached, until Ralph broke the silence.
"Mr. Tylesman?" He asked gently, sitting beside him on the bench.
Tylesman looked up nervously, looking to each one of us in turn with paranoid and mistrusting eyes.
"I'm really sorry to bother you with this, but we need to ask you a few questions," Ralph continued. "I'm sure you don't want to talk about it, but... can you tell us about the fire?"
The madman's eyes grew wide, his face paling behind his scruffy beard and his eyes wet with tears of deep pain, and then the dam burst. He started babbling in grief about his lost daughters, his lost wife, the flames that haunted his nightmares. He insisted he was innocent, he loved his wife and children. No, Gavigan was to blame, he was the one who had done such an awful thing. It was his damn fault, everything was fine until he donated that monument to Bannicker Park...
Well, that of course piqued our interest, so we pressed him further. Tylesman explained that the large obelisk monument was evil, and needed to be destroyed. He'd tried to, but failed, and of course nobody believed his story. Then he went to take care of Gavigan, and the rest was history.
"Please, believe me," the madman begged in a moment of shocking lucidity. "That obelisk is evil. It has a weird glow at night... I know, I saw it across from my bedroom, each and every evening... Destroy it. Do this for me! My daughters... please... the stone emits fire..."
"Fire?" Ralph asked in confusion. "What do you mean fire?"
"Living embers, yes!" Tylesman nodded wildly, eyes carefully searching for the guards and voice hushed as if conspiratorial. "Living, flying embers, the size of your fist... like stars... I saw one, oh... It woke me that night, you know. I saw it glowing bloody red, I smelled its smoke and felt its heat coming from my dear, sweet daughters' room... and I went to investigate. And I watched, I watched it pause right over her bed... dear child, my poor child... It lit on her little forehead, and it melted her skin in a burst of flame, it did! The whole bed was ablaze, her tortured screams were so loud... I still hear them, in my dreams. And her flesh... I smelled her burning flesh!"
Tylesman quickly broke down and grew irrational after that, but who could blame the man? To see your child burned to death in front of your eyes, that destroys a person. It's enough to drive anyone mad with grief. The orderlies heard him sobbing and screaming, and unfortunately it's hard to get anything more out of a man dosed with tranquilizers. It's even harder once the staff asks you to leave. Besides, we all quickly agreed something needed to be done - we've seen and heard enough to know something suspicious when it's described, and Ralph even corroborated that the glowing ember seemed similar to the glowing eyes of that draconic creature that attacked us at Erica's safe-house, or even to the glow around Mukunga's hand in the Ju-Ju House. Had something similar happened to poor Hugh Tylesman? Ted added that the glowing embers sounded a lot like foxfire, and Ralph agreed. This bore more looking into, so off to the library we went.
Our research into weird foxfire-like creatures went well... except for Ted. He found some old back copies of the Page 3 Stunners and vanished on us. Far be it from me to tear a man away from some time alone, though... As for the rest of us, we discovered information on a very obscure Egyptian deity - Ptha-thu-gha-ra, supposedly the offspring of the sun god Ra. Apparently this being was a living flame that came from the stars above to wreak vengeance if its father was displeased, but worship of it was not widespread. Other information, uncovered by Clayton's hard work, found a tenuous passage in a supposed tome of magical creatures about something named Cthugha, a fiery monstrosity that spawned living embers which took great pleasure in lighting people on fire. If that didn't sound like what Tylesman had described, we didn't know what did... and our only thought was, perhaps, he'd read about these things and thought that they were to blame when the fire lit accidentally. Ralph, however, was convinced they existed. The man's starting to go nuts, I think... maybe it's high time he took a break before he snapped.
After our excursion to the library, we decided a closer look at Bannicker Park's memorial was in order, and hired a cabbie to get us there. Unfortunately, he was about as good a driver as Mr. Toad, and scared half our lives out of all of us before we even got there. We were all grateful to get away from his crazy antics, despite the long drive - it was nearly 5 in the evening when we got there. We tried our level best to enjoy the walk, drizzly and misty as it was from the London fog, over to the Bannicker Park Sudan war memorial.
Stranger still, when we looked across the street, we noticed the shell of Hugh Tylesman burnt-out former home, still standing unchecked and abandoned. No wonder he thought the obelisk did this, his insane mind must have connected it to the fire since it was nearby. Inside the ruined house itself, we found ash and little but, but Ralph's keen eye discovered something else... A disturbingly detailed, unscorched oil portrait by one Miles Shipley of Soho, buried under the ashes.
By this time, night had fallen and the first flickering stars had risen. It was one in particular that caught our eye - the one that was positioned, strangely, directly above the stone obelisk as seen from Tylesman's former bedroom window. And Clayton, expert navigator that he was, knew exactly what star it was, too.
"Wait, that's Fomalhaut, isn't it?" he queried to nobody in particular. "Brightest star in the northern sky, and the first to come out usually. Not really one people navigate by, but good for a way-marker for orienting your direction."
"Didn't those books we read say something about Fomalhaut and that Ptha-thu-ga-ra thing?" Dr. Baker asked, realizing the connection. "Something about those flaming things appearing when it was at its zenith?"
"You don't think that maybe... those fire things Tylesman saw were real, do you?" Ralph added. "Maybe it summons them... or maybe, they're attracted to it."
Before anyone could protest at how bizarre that sounded, we realized something about the obelisk as we looked at it, something odd... it was glowing. Glowing a soft, hazy red around it, and emitting what looked like waves of heat from its surface. Something was wrong, very wrong - and it was something wrong with that monument. Something that bore looking into.
"Oh, no way," Clayton said, staying behind, and I can't say I blamed him. I too realized that approaching the monument was asking for trouble, and I figured he'd do a better job with a second person around, anyway. The others went off in search of some way to comprehend what was going on.
Now, I'm not sure exactly how it happened from there, but what I do know is about fifteen minutes after they left and were at the obelisk, I heard Clayton cry out in shock and point out the window. There, surrounding the obelisk, we both saw three or so wisps of pure flame split from the statue's peak, hovering around like oversized fireflies. Horrified at our friends being quite literally in the crossfire, we ran to warn them, but we were too late. What we found will haunt me until my dying days.
The things we initially thought of as fireballs or embers were more like flaming jellyfish with tendrils of flickering flame, hovering through the air like wasps and far faster than anyone could track. There were many of them swarming the stele like bees and they, upon seeing the others there, instantly attacked the closest one - Dr. Baker. Two latched onto her, lighting her ablaze like a candle... and she screamed. Oh God, how she screamed in agony and pain, her flesh scorching and melting as she frantically rolled on the ground, trying to put the flames out. I don't know how she lived long enough to murmur for help before passing out from pain, the burns covered almost her entire body. She barely had any flesh left, and her face was like raw scorched meat. I can't even begin to imagine her pain...
From there, everything happened so fast. Ralph took off his hat and managed to swat one of the creatures from the air, then stomped it out with his boot. He's damn lucky it didn't catch on fire. The rest of us wisely ran for it, realizing how outnumbered we were by the flickering things, with Ralph grabbing poor Dr. Baker and running for it as well.
That was when Clayton had an idea, a brilliant one. He'd previously confided in me his little secret about the mist, and I have to admit it was ingenious what he did next. He ducked behind a tree and, drawing upon his willpower, focused. The first attempt at the spell fizzled unfortunately, and by that point the creatures had caught up. His second attempt, however, hit home, and dew sprinkled several of the things. Did you know that flying, flaming jellyfish apparently scream when they die? Neither did I, until last night, but regardless... we had a water source and a ready one at that, one that we could hide in for protection and that could destroy these things before they burned down half the city. Sure enough, the remaining living fireballs didn't come anywhere near the mist, and we were safe as long as we stood within it. As for the stele, Ralph had an idea for that, too.
"Guys, you smell how that jellyfish smells?" He mentioned, pointing to the residue from the stomped one on his shoe. "Smells like kerosene. Maybe it's flammable... If we can light the obelisk on fire, then call the fire department, we can kill two birds with one stone!"
"Ralph, that's brilliant, my man!" Ted exclaimed. "Everyone help him scoop that critter up, we'll use it to light a fire by the stele... but we're gonna need to run for it."
And run for it we did, remains of the pulped creature in tow, about seven flickering balls of flame behind us as we did so. To this day I still don't know how we made it, but I guess when you're literally running for your life, things are just a bit different. Smearing the gooey remains onto the obelisk, Clayton managed to get out of the way in time for the flaming creature chasing him to miss its attack, colliding with the stele and lighting it ablaze. Soon the creatures flocked to it, dancing around it and lighting even the surrounding foliage on fire, and we booked it to the nearest police call box we could find. Thank God for that, and for the emergency number being so easily listed.
The fire brigade wasted no time in arriving and taking care of the fire in the park. We even heard the things scream as the water gushed over them from the fire hose, dousing them and the stele. The obelisk's weird glow also ended, and as far as we know no more fires have occurred since it was doused. It's our sincere hope that maybe, just maybe, the water drove the creatures off, and the horror of the burning within it was finally over.
I wish I could say the same for Dr. Baker. She was in critical condition and needed a hospital, badly - I've never seen such burns on any human being. I wish I could say we only got out with a few burns and a good scare, but... it wasn't to be. Days she spent in the hospital, touch and go the entire time, hooked up to a morphine drip for the pain. She almost recovered, but the doctors told us that with the amount of full-body third degree burning she had, it was unlikely she would survive the week. Sadly, they were right. Dr. Morgan Baker caught a terrible infection due to her lack of skin, and died in the hospital from her injuries. There was nothing the doctors could do to save her, not for lack of trying but because she was so severely burned. The funeral was meager, and we were the only attendants... we can only hope more people were in attendance back home, when they shipped her body overseas.
We've been sick with grief for the loss of our friend for the past few days, all of us wondering what more we could possibly have done to save her. What if it had been one of us? What if someone had pushed her out of the way in time? None of us have slept well since, least of all Ralph. His guilt ate at him, and the worst part is he couldn't even drink his troubles away. I hope to God he doesn't snap from all this. The last thing we need is another one of us dead.
What haunts me the most, though, is the plaque on that memorial. Edward Gavigan donated that monument. Edward Gavigan really did do this, Tylesman was right all along. But the question is, did he know? What was the man hiding? And furthermore... how much could we really trust him?