It started as a child. I grew up in a musical household, and my father was always singing, singing a bit of everything. There was one song I remember most, a song about a girl who killed her enemies by lighting them on fire, and played her fiddle while they burned. My father only sang it when he thought no one was listening, so of course it was always permanently embedded in my mind. I had always wondered why she did that, and why she played the fiddle. I struggled to forget all through my teen years, until finally both my heart and my brain gave in to some more primal feeling inside. A feeling that urged me to burn.

I had it all planned out. The girl had been given a little something to keep her quiet, and then I dragged her deep inside the darkest part of London, the kind where even hardened criminals didn't talk to others, and everyone minded their own business. It was in this section of town that I dragged her, into a secluded courtyard. Then I doused her and the surrounding ground with gasoline, pulled out the matches, and readied my fiddle. I struck a match, which went out as soon as it was lit. The second one caught, and slowly, solemnly, I touched it to the body of the girl, and began to play. I wasn't expecting any reaction, and yet, as I began to fiddle, her screams began, and suddenly I understood why the girl in the song had fiddled. The screams added a new depth and meaning to the song. No longer was it simply Beethoven's Opus 76. It was a new kind of music, one that completed me. I played until her eyeballs melted out of her head, and her teeth bared in Death's grin. Then I bowed to my accompaniment, and left.

I heard about it in the newspapers the next morning. Apparently someone had heard a snatch of fiddle playing, seen a shadow of someone playing behind the flames. I discussed it alongside my coworkers at my perfectly suburban job, sympathized alongside my oblivious parents for the family of the victim, and laughed inside at their cluelessness.

It's like a craving now. An addiction. I'm addicted to lighting people on fire. Always, after I light someone and fiddle them to their death, I swear to never do it again, but the craving always comes back to make my kind of music: fiddling and screaming, harmonizing in a deadly duo. They call me the Arsonist now, and set me on level with Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel murders, but no one understands. No one understands the music.

This is not the end. There are other stories, other songs. Have you ever heard of the story of the Irish chieftain who nailed horseshoes to the feet of rebels in his lands? He made them dance themselves to death. Sometimes I wonder what their screams sound like. Would they complement the sound of a fiddle?