“Slave of the Flames” (Weird Tales, June 1938)

Bloch, Robert. “Slave of the Flames.” Weird Tales, June 1938, pp. 700-712.
https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v31n06_1938-06_sas/page/n61/mode/2up 

The story opens with Abe, a boy who has an unusual hobby: he is an artist whose medium is fire. Wherever he went, he imagined the whole place burning. He lost his job as a farm worker due to his hobby, and he moved to Chicago where his experiments continued. He set fire to a building to see what would happen: “It was creeping toward a second house now—no, it was holding out its arms on both sides to embrace two houses at once. It must keep feeding and growing if it would leap like that; leap swiftly as it now leapt at the other buildings. […] All red and glowing and alive against the black sky; beautiful beast eating ugly frame houses. It had put its fingers on the roof-tops now and tossed a shower of red-hot roses to the sky. Happy monster!” (702). He thrilled to the commotion that the fire caused and watched intently as his monsters did battle with the firefighters. When the fire was out, he was met by a man who brought him to a dark house where he met a man whose “great barrel-body was clothed in a long white robe” (704). The others called him “Divinity.” 

Abe admits to starting the fire and tells him his whole story. Divinity is pleased, and responds with a story of his own, how he ruled ancient Rome, how the people called him Nero, how his passions were misunderstood, how he receives guidance from Zarog, a priest of the god of evil, who commands him to burn Rome to the ground. And so he does. Zarog is pleased and offers him eternal life in exchange for regular fiery sacrifices. What follows are infernos that consume Paris, Prague, London, and a thousand other cities. In recent years, however, as firefighting has improved and the construction of cities has grown more robust. Zarog still demands his tribute, and Nero needs Abe’s help. The following night, October 8, 1871, Abe starts what would become The Great Chicago Fire. Nero summons the god of evil, Melek Toas, to ask for renewed youth, as he has been promised. Abe interjects that it was he who started the fire, not them. Melek Toas consumes Nero and the others and then Abe, himself. Days later, searchers were puzzled at the ancient Roman artifact—a lyre similar to the one that Emperor Nero used—in the ashes.    
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This is a very fun story, and it shows Bloch branching out, moving away from Lovecraft’s Mythos into something that mixes his love for cosmic horror, psychology, ancient empires, and a host of other influences. In my book, I make the argument that this is the beginning of his thinking about Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden, how many of his stories told of external force compelling human behavior. In the case of Jack the Ripper, it frequently was a body-hopping malevolent spirit that delighted in blood, fear, and chaos. Melok Taos (Bloch’s spelling) is conflated in this story with Moloch, Satan, and Ahriman (711). This was apparently a common misreading of Yazidi tradition. I don’t know really anything about this, and so I apologize in advance for reducing an important element of a faith tradition to a brief summary of a Wikipedia page (“Tawusi”), but Melek Taos, the peacock god, is the leader of the archangels, not one of the fallen. He is the eternal light of the universe whose rainbow of colors is embodied in the feathers of the peacock. I’ll stop now, except to say that it reminded me how easy I have it using the wonderful academic library I have access to, not to mention Wikipedia, which is arguably among humanity’s greatest achievements. Depression-era Bloch had no such access, and so learning about non-Western deities must have been a fragmented process for him at best.