[For the previous entry on the Countdown, click here.]
#6. "Firedance"
With "Firedance" (1998; collected in Peaceable Kingdom), Jack Ketchum ventures straight into the heart of King Country. The story is set in Maine, and is populated with small-town, common-folk type characters, including protagonist Frisco Hans (an ex-merchant seaman who one morning had "jumped off a lifeboat made fast high over the leeward rail onto the deck of the Curfew, hit the deck too hard and lost his sense of taste") and his drinking buddy Homer Devins (whose wife "had run away with the Chinese dry-cleaner last winter while Devins was out hunting rabbits). Like Stephen King before him, Ketchum offsets the mundane and the incredible, as seen when the characters Ray Fogarty and Dot Hardcuff, amidst an adulterous tryst up on Zeigler's Notch, make a mind-boggling discovery: of a multi-species group of animals (mice, snakes, a cardinal, a wolf, and a lynx) sitting closely and calmly circled around a campfire.
The promptly-summoned townspeople of Dead River at first feel like they are viewing something "miraculous and awe-inspiring," but an intimation of the ominous quickly sets in: "It was as though the natural way of things had reversed itself. Humans in the shadows, wild things in the light." The humans tear off "running like kids from the bogeyman"; when curiosity returns them to the same woodland spot the next night, the inexplicably peaceful circle has grown, and now the animals are observed moving (dancing?) around the fire. Such bizarre choreography scares the watchers, and riddles them with existential angst: "a feeling passed through the crowd that felt like a kind of collective shame or guilt or something, as though the animals had made them smaller somehow, humbled, a damned sight less significant." So it's no surprise when the heavily-armed humans start grousing about how just "plain unnatural" the scene is. Frisco Hans, though, suddenly isn't quite so sure:
How do we know? he thought? Who in the hell knows what's natural in a world up to its butt in poisoned lakes and streams, with poisoned air for chrissake, with normal-looking guys not a lot different from Homer here walking into a K-Mart and shooting up the customers with some fancy thousand-dollar automatic weapon, guys who like to kidnap and murder little children, a world where you get a doll for Christmas and it eats your hair, a world so crazy and nonsensical that you can jump off a goddamn lifeboat and lose your sense of taste forever? Who says what's natural and what's not?By the third night, "the sheer size of the damn thing" has the folk of Dead River utterly spooked: it "looked like the entire forest was there," and "there were even plenty of farm animals this time." Only Hans seems filled with wonder, the sense that he is privy to some evolutionary leap, "the dawn of a whole new time, a whole new nature": "They're like us, he thought. Like what we must have been thousands and thousands of years ago. We must have crawled out of caves on nights like this and done just the same." Yet profound worry accompanies Hans's wonderment. As the dancers whirl
"around the flames in some bright joyous rapture of celebration that was impervious to danger, oblivious to harm," Hans stands
"frozen in a fundamental horror at what his species was capable of doing here tonight." Hearing "a shotgun pump a cartridge, triggers cocked all around," Hans knows "a goddamn bloodbath" is about to unfold.
Massacre is averted when little Patty Schilling breaks free from her mother's arms and runs and joins the dancing animals. Other children and women (man appears to have no place within this peaceable kingdom) soon follow the innocent's lead. At story's end, Hans sees "Dot Hardcuff dancing around with a big brown bear and not even her husband or Ray Fogarty was going to argue with that choice of partner." Nor can the reader argue with the choice of this atmospheric masterpiece of magic realism as one of Jack Ketchum's all-time-best works of short fiction.
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