1408- Mike's Self-Immolation

He looked down at the matchbook in his hand, the one he had
plucked out of the bedroom ashtray. Funny old doorman, funny old
cars with their big chrome grilles . . . and words running across the
bottom that he hadn’t seen in a long time, because now the strip of
abrasive stuff was always on the back.

CLOSE COVER BEFORE STRIKING.

Without thinking about it—he no longer could think—Mike
Enslin tore out a single match, allowing the cigarette to drop out of
his mouth at the same time. He struck the match and immediately
touched it to the others in the book. There was a ffffhut! sound, a
strong whiff of burning sulfur that went into his head like a whiff of
smelling salts, and a bright flare of matchheads. And again, without
so much as a single thought, Mike held the flaring bouquet of fire
against the front of his shirt. It was a cheap thing made in Korea or
Cambodia or Borneo, old now; it caught fire at once. Before the flames
could blaze up in front of his eyes, rendering the room once more
unstable, Mike saw it clearly, like a man who has awakened from a
nightmare only to find the nightmare all around him.

His head was clear—the strong whiff of sulfur and the sudden ris-
ing heat from his shirt had done that much—but the room main-
tained its insanely Moorish aspect. Moorish was wrong, not even
very close, but it was the only word that seemed even to reach
toward what had happened here . . . what was still happening. He was
in a melting, rotting cave full of swoops and mad tilts. The door to the
bedroom had become the door to some sarcophagal inner chamber.
And to his left, where the picture of the fruit had been, the wall was
bulging outward toward him, splitting open in those long cracks that
gaped like mouths, opening on a world from which something was now
approaching. Mike Enslin could hear its slobbering, avid breath,
and smell something alive and dangerous. It smelled a little like the
lion-house in the—

Then flames scorched the undershelf of his chin, banishing thought.
The heat rising from his blazing shirt put that waver back into the
world, and as he began to smell the crispy aroma of his chest-hair
starting to fry, Mike again bolted across the sagging rug to the hall
door. An insectile buzzing sound had begun to sweat out of the
walls. The yellow-orange light was steadily brightening, as if a hand
were turning up an invisible rheostat. But this time when he reached
the door and turned the knob, the door opened. It was as if the thing
behind the bulging wall had no use for a burning man; did not, per-
haps, relish cooked meat.
...

Rufus Dearborn, who was staying that night in room 1414, up near the elevators,
was a salesman for the Singer Sewing Machine Company, in town
from Texas to talk about moving up to an executive position. And so
it happened that, ninety or so years after room 1408’s first occupant
jumped to his death, another sewing machine salesman saved the life
of the man who had come to write about the purportedly haunted
room. Or perhaps that is an exaggeration; Mike Enslin might have
lived even if no one—especially a fellow on his way back from a visit
to the ice machine—had been in the hallway at that moment. Hav-
ing your shirt catch fire is no joke, though, and he certainly would
have been burned much more severely and extensively if not for Dear-
born, who thought fast and moved even faster.

Not that Dearborn ever remembered exactly what happened. He
constructed a coherent enough story for the newspapers and TV
cameras (he liked the idea of being a hero very much, and it certainly
did no harm to his executive aspirations), and he clearly remembered
seeing the man on fire lunge out into the hall, but after that every
thing was a blur. Thinking about it was like trying to reconstruct the
things you had done during the vilest, deepest drunk of your life.

One thing he was sure of but didn’t tell any of the reporters,
because it made no sense: the burning man’s scream seemed to grow
in volume, as if he were a stereo that was being turned up. He was
right there in front of Dearborn, and the pitch of the scream never
changed, but the volume most certainly did. It was as if the man were
some incredibly loud object that was just arriving here.

Dearborn ran down the hall with the full ice-bucket in his hand.
The burning man—“It was just his shirt on fire, I saw that right
away,” he told the reporters—struck the door opposite the room he
had come out of, rebounded, staggered, and fell to his knees. That was
when Dearborn reached him. He put his foot on the burning shoul-
der of the screaming man’s shirt and pushed him over onto the hall
carpet. Then he dumped the contents of the ice-bucket onto him.

These things were blurred in his memory, but accessible. He was
aware that the burning shirt seemed to be casting far too much
light—a sweltering yellow-orange light that made him think of a
trip he and his brother had made to Australia two years before. They
had rented an all-wheel drive and had taken off across the Great Aus
tralian Desert (the few natives called it the Great Australian Bugger-
All, the Dearborn brothers discovered), a hell of a trip, great, but
spooky. Especially the big rock in the middle, Ayers Rock. They had
reached it right around sunset and the light on its man faces was like
this . . . hot and strange . . . not really what you thought of as earth
light at all . . .

He dropped beside the burning man who was now only the smol
dering man, the covered-with-ice-cubes man, and rolled him over
to stifle the flames reaching around to the back of the shirt. When
he did, he saw the skin on the left side of the man’s neck had gone a
smoky, bubbly red, and the lobe of his ear on that side had melted a
little, but otherwise . . . otherwise . . .

- 1408, chapters II and III