She tapped her finger on a small glass disk set into the door, no bigger than the security peephole in the front door of my house. “You can watch through there if you want,” she said, “but you won’t be able to see much. Mostly just flame.” She reached for a glowing green button labeled PRE-IGNITION, and I put one eye to the little window. A jet of yellow flame, roughly the size of the Olympic torch, blossomed from the hole in the roof of the furnace and flickered downward, flaring outward when it hit the lid of the box. Within moments the cardboard began to burn and the flame spread. “Okay,” I heard Helen say, “now I’m going to switch on the combustion burner.” The bloom of yellow flame suddenly turned blue and filled the entire upper portion of the chamber. I watched, mesmerized, as the cardboard collapsed, revealing the contours of the frail body. And then, for a brief moment before flame and smoke obscured my view altogether, I saw the withered flesh catch fire, and somehow it struck me as a cleansing, even a holy thing. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” I heard myself whisper. It was an impromptu benediction from an unlikely source—me, a doubt-filled scientist who dealt daily in death—given to a total stranger, a man I had never seen before, and whom no one would ever see again.
After a moment I stepped back and turned to Helen. She was watching me closely, I noticed, and she seemed slightly embarrassed when I caught her looking. It was as if she knew she’d intruded on some private exchange. “Funny thing,” I said. “I see bodies all the time—I actually burned a couple of corpses last week as a research experiment—but this was different. This was a person.” She nodded. I could see that she understood what I meant and that I’d eased her embarrassment by what I’d said.
“Do you want to see the ‘after’ version now?” She pointed at the other furnace, and I stepped four feet to the right. She opened the door, and I felt a blast of heat as the door slid down. A human skeleton was laid out in perfect anatomical order on the concrete floor. The bones were grayish white and brittle-looking, completely calcined. Except for the skull, which had rolled to one side and cracked into several large pieces, and the rib cage, which had caved in like the timbers of a shipwreck, the bones remained intact and in their original positions. “I couldn’t have laid it out better myself,” I said.
She smiled. “Most people think that when a body’s cremated, it comes out of the furnace as cremains,” she said. “They have no idea that it’s still a recognizable skeleton.” She reached in with a gloved hand, pulled out a humerus from the upper arm, and gestured with it. “I always find it fascinating to look at the skeletons,” she said. “Every one is different. This one, for example, was a very large woman. About three hundred pounds. I had to really watch the oven temperature on her.”
I thought for a moment. “Because of the fat?”
“Right. I learned my lesson on that a long time ago. About six months after I started working here, I had a huge guy come through—he weighed five hundred pounds at least and barely fit in the furnace. This was late one afternoon in December, a few days before Christmas, and it was getting dark around five o’clock. Well, about thirty minutes after I got him going, one of the guys from the place across the street came knocking on the door, asked me if I knew my exhaust stack was red hot. I went out to look, and it was glowing cherry red.”
“A five-hundred-pound body’s going to have two or three hundred pounds of fat on it,” I said. “That’s gonna make one heck of a grease fire once it melts and ignites.”
“You can say that again,” she said. “I came running back in and checked the temperature gauge. Normally these furnaces run at sixteen to eighteen hundred degrees. That guy pushed it up to nearly three thousand. I’m just lucky the roof didn’t catch fire. I sure learned my lesson from that.”
“So how do you keep that from happening again?”
“The really obese ones, I get ’em going, then throttle the gas back. Once the fat’s burning, that pretty much keeps them going for a while. Then, after about forty-five minutes—once I see the temperature drop below sixteen hundred—I relight the combustion burner for another fifteen or twenty minutes. That’s enough to bring ’em on home.”
“Speaking of obese bodies burning,” I said, “you’ll be interested in this.” There weren’t many people I could say something like that to in all seriousness. “We had a master’s student a few years ago who did a thesis on spontaneous combustion.”
She guffawed. “What did she read for research,” she hooted, “the Weekly World News?”
“Actually, it was a really good thesis,” I said. “One of the best I’ve ever read. It’s not just supermarket tabloid readers who believe in spontaneous combustion. I’ve talked to several police officers and firefighters who swear they’ve seen cases of spontaneous combustion—bodies that were thoroughly incinerated but with very little damage to the surrounding structure, or even the furniture.” Helen nodded brightly, and I could tell she was intrigued. “Anyhow, Angi—the graduate student—found that in all these cases where someone appeared to have burst into flame, the individuals were overweight, and what had occurred was a low-temperature fire. The bodies smoldered for a day or two, without ever burning hot enough to cause the fire to spread.”
“So what caused them to burn?”
“Many of them were smokers, so they probably dropped a lit cigarette onto their clothes,” I said. “One woman got her sleeve too close to the burner of a gas stove. The combustion wasn’t spontaneous; there had to be an ignition source. Alcohol was another common factor—some of them were drunk, others were asleep, so they didn’t notice or react fast enough when their clothes or their bed caught fire. They probably died of smoke inhalation pretty quickly, but the fire kept going. As their fat melted, the clothing soaked up the grease, just like the wick of a candle or a lamp.”
“You’re right,” she said, “that is interesting.”