Written in Light

by Jeff Young

  Cole became so enthralled with the bizarre thing that he missed the point at which the man’s eyes lost their focus, and his breathing stopped. Suddenly, he realized he sat in the basement with a dead man. He pushed himself away from the body, sliding across the debris until he hit the far wall. In the shadows, he looked at the hole, the dust sifting downward from above. His lower lip trembled as the reaction set in.

  Cole heard his name being called. His parents, who were in the neighbor’s backyard, had arrived. He started forward and then glanced at the dimly visible object in his hand. This belonged to him. The dead man gave it to him. But they wouldn’t understand. The man asked if he could trust Cole, hadn’t he? Standing up, he ran his hand along the wall until he found the rusty lip of the old coal chute. He tipped the door up, slid his treasure within, and pulled the clinker over top until he couldn’t feel it. Dusting his hands off, he scrambled into the light, calling for his parents. As his father lowered the neighbor’s ladder to him, Cole glanced into the darkness, wondering again what he’d been given.

  After the endless progression of firemen, police, and ambulance personnel, tall men in black suits arrived. Their black sedan with its tinted windows sat at the curbside, idling as the three of them swiftly took control of the situation. One dispersed the various emergency services. Another began a swift conversation with the medics arriving at the front door with a stretcher. And the third, like an ominous black cloud, come to blot out the setting sun, stared down at Cole, firing questions repeatedly.

  “What happened? Did you see the man? Did he speak? What were you doing before? What did you do in the hole? What happened ... ?”

  Cole looked at those dark eyes under their trim brown hair as they tried to measure the truth in his responses. Finally, when his mother protested, he turned away and buried his face in her arm.

  After questioning the witnesses, the strangers in the suits went down to the basement and talked in lowered voices over the body until a large truck arrived. They briefly poked around in the broken wood but were much more interested in the dead man. Cole watched them furtively until his mother noticed and hurried him away. His father stood in the backyard having a heated conversation with another man in a suit. Cole could see his mouth working as he pointed at the roof, the sky and then threw up his hands. When he finally returned, his father said, “We’ll have to stay in a hotel until the repairs are done on the house.” By this time, the men in black suits were loading up their truck. Cole wondered why they hadn’t called a hearse, but so far today, nothing was normal. When the truck pulled out of the drive, the black-suited men’s sedan followed. For a moment, things were quiet, and then with a sigh, father ushered them back into the house to gather belongings for their hotel stay. Cole felt pleasantly surprised no one had found his treasure.

  Two weeks later, Cole and his parents returned to their home and tried to settle back into a life that no longer fit comfortably. The neighbors suddenly turned a cold shoulder to the family. Their uneasy glances and muttered replies left his father clenching his fists. No one wanted to talk. They were all scared, made fearful by repeated visits from black-suited men who canvassed the street in the family’s absence. Cole no longer sat in the living room to read. In fact, his entire family grew to avoid the room with its new white ceiling, now a blank expanse just like their understanding of what occurred. As soon as he could, under cover of darkness, Cole scrambled into the coal chute and found the amber object there.

  Wrapping it in the bottom of his shirt, he climbed up into his treehouse, stashing it there under an old wooden box he often sat on. He wanted to study it, but the lack of light and his mother calling him made him wait another day.

  The next morning, he turned the object over and over in his hands. Warm golden reflections danced on the rough floor of the treehouse. Cole tried to understand the shape capturing the sunlight and bouncing it about. The top had a round sphere with a grip that tilted backward, larger than his small hand. Two half-moons curved upward from the bottom of the grip, looking like they were meant to protect fingers. It felt wrong if he tipped it away from holding the grip upright, almost as if it weighed more when not held in the correct fashion. And despite whatever he did—poking, prodding, or anything else—the object did nothing but reflect the light.

  But it must be important if the man entrusted it to him. Suddenly, Cole imagined the man flying through the air with the device held in front of him. It would explain how he had fallen. Was that what this was? Something that would let him fly? That might explain the stranger’s desire to trust Cole as well as the thoroughness of the black-suited men’s search. Or could it do other miraculous things? Again, his fumbling produced no discernible result. Could he be too young to operate it? He spent the rest of the morning trying everything he could think of to no avail. It lay there mocking him. Finally, he scrambled down out of the tree, bringing it with him into the house.

  For weeks the words, “I can trust you, can’t I? To do the right thing,” echoed in Cole’s mind. What was the right thing? To find out how this worked? To fly? To continue to hide the secret from everyone he knew? Day by day, he fiddled with the object, manipulating it in different combinations, poking and prodding it with the same failed result. In time, his interest and patience waned.

  ~*~

  When Cole read his first comic book, a new thought came to mind. A superhero crashed into his house, a hero able to fly through the power of a strange talisman, probably able to do all sorts of other amazing things with the device. Pulling it out of its new hiding place in the rafters of the house, Cole dusted off the object. Again and again, he tried to provoke a reaction, speaking magic words of power he learned from various comics to awaken it, shaking it, gesturing with it. Nothing, just as inert as before, except still feeling wrong as if it weren’t held properly. The power to save the world right here in his hand, and he couldn’t figure it out. Frustrated, he threw it across the room and discovered that while it dented the plaster in the attic room, the object remained undamaged.

  Every day for about a month, he spent some time with it, then it went back into its hiding place, forgotten again. Cole gave himself over to more commonplace things, like learning how to ride a bike instead of trying to fly. He watched for the strangers in the suits, but they never returned. His life turned toward the ordinary once again. Every now and then, though, he would find himself looking up at the ceiling, remembering the amber-colored device in its hiding place.

  ~*~

  In high school, during chemistry class, he found himself thinking about the object while the teacher discussed the basics of matter. Maybe he had a totally new kind of matter in his possession all these years? One day after school, he picked the chemistry lab’s aging lock to experiment on the device. Acids, bases, highly reactive solutions slid off it without a mark. A Bunsen burner flame only made it hot to the touch—again, nothing. The microscope in the biology lab showed him nothing special. It remained impervious to his investigations. Cole asked himself again, “Am I doing the right thing?” How could he understand what the right thing was? His thoughts felt as maddening as not understanding the object. Eventually, he decided the right thing was to return the object to its hiding place among the rafters once again.

  ~*~

  Leaning on his cane, Cole stared at the little door leading to the rafters. After his tour in Nam, cut short by a pair of bullets tearing up his leg, he came back home. He had nowhere else to go. The house still showed small signs of the event that warped his life out of true years ago, a dip in the floor and a darker shade to certain shingles. And the inexplicable object still mocked him behind the plaster in the little space in the rafters. He knew it remained there. He couldn’t help wondering that if he took it into those steaming jungles, perhaps some measure of its power would have saved him from the bullets that had lamed him for life. Perhaps completely impervious, he could have trampled Charlie like a berserker of old. More likely, he would have been a damn fool wit
h something he couldn’t understand weighing down his hands. Perhaps some things would never change—or maybe he still wasn’t doing the right thing. Had he betrayed the visitor’s trust? Things like his circumstances changed, but the strange device, well, it still resisted his every effort. Finally, he stumbled away downstairs, resisting the temptation.

  ~*~

  Seventy years felt a long time to be mocked by an inanimate object. Cole simply reached some undefined limit, passed over that line without realization. He finally gave in to the thought that he had done the right thing. Maybe humanity wasn’t ready. Maybe he wasn’t ready, and never would be. Now, as he sat in the chair and watching the flames dancing over the amber-colored object, he felt something loosening in his chest. A tension so familiar, he’d forgotten it existed. With a sigh, his head tipped back to look up at the ceiling with its pattern of cracks all emanating from a single spot still echoing the past despite numerous repairs. As for the object, it sat in amongst the burning logs all day, still doing nothing other than reflecting the firelight. I can’t even get you out of my life, he thought.

  Eventually, Cole reached in with the tongs to pull it out. He felt his left hand tingle slightly as it steadied his right. The tongs and the object together were a little heavy for him, but he managed to pull it out and drop it onto the brick apron around the fireplace. Putting away the tongs, he realized no heat came from the amber enigma. He gingerly put his hand onto it. Cold, like touching glass. That’s when the pain suddenly shot up his arm, and the cold crept inside him. It felt like a rush of water cascading into his chest. The room spun, and he realized he no longer sat in the chair but lay on the floor. His mind moving slowly, he recognized the feeling— a heart attack. When he forced his eyes open, he recognized the brass-colored boots in front of him.

  He felt a hand reach down to gently turn him. Someone helped him up from the floor. Looking around, Cole realized he no longer stood in the house. Amber illumination spilled in from all sides to light the long corridor he stood in. He looked dazedly at the hand grasping his arm and then up at the face of the stranger who so long ago altered his childhood, his life. The more he looked, the more Cole realized this wasn’t really a human being. There were subtle differences; the brown material on his head appeared like hair, but in reality, the texture seemed like exceptionally fine feathers. The features were sized differently than a human, and there were subtle differences like the absence of the small depression above the lips under an elongated nose, making the whole visage unusual. Not a superhero, then, but an alien.

  Glancing around, Cole realized they stood in a hallway, its ends disappearing into the distance. But how could he be standing? Hadn’t he just had a heart attack?

  “You have a great many questions, I suspect,” the being before him said in a raspy tone. “Let us walk; there are so many who will want to meet you.”

  “Where are we going?” Cole asked, surprised to find the first step no longer awkward, the ills of age and the limp from his old wounds no longer bothering him.

  The other turned to him and, with a disturbing approximation of a smile, said, “That is the beauty of this method of travel. We are going to the future; we are going everywhere. But we are going with style, is how you might say it. We are going so that we can enjoy the long moment.”

  Reaching out, Cole caught the stranger’s arm. He had to ask, “Did I do the right thing?”

  The being looked at the floor, considering, golden highlights playing across its face. “If you are here, you did the right thing. I did not understand any more than you did when I held the Traveler in my hand. But all that really matters is that you are here now. Your adventure has only just begun.”

  “I still don’t understand. I spent my life trying to make sure that I earned your trust, and now you tell me that it didn’t matter?”

  “I did not say that. I said the important thing is you are here now.” The alien looked at him, suddenly cocking its head to one side in an avian fashion. Then it continued walking. “Just a little farther. Come. Then we can answer your questions.”

  Cole hesitated but chose to continue walking with his guide. The floor of the corridor, ridged in an odd fashion, made it appear that they were always descending slightly. Eventually, they came to a spot where the being stepped off to one side. Maybe a trick of the light misled Cole’s eye, but suddenly a fold came into sight. Walking around the fold, they kept turning until a vast space opened before them. Only after walking out into the open, taking in the sound of trickling water in a brook, the wind in the limbs of the trees on either side, and golden sunlight of the end of a day, did Cole realize that their footsteps should have brought them back to the long corridor. The rolling hills disappeared into the distance. All the smells, sounds, and feel were exactly what he would have expected standing outside on Earth. He could hear voices in the distance.

  “We are traveling,” his guide said, settling in the grass and picking up stems, rolling them between its fingers. “I did not understand it at first either. But we, and the others you will soon meet, are on a voyage of discovery. Inside here,” the alien gestured upward at the sky and in a circle. “This is a stabilized piece of space and time. It is written into the very fabric of reality and cannot be erased. Its inhabitants exist here as information added to the Traveler.” Cole’s guide stood up and walked over him. The being pushed a finger into his chest, “When you die with the Traveler in your hands, all of the information that was you is written inside.”

  “How can that be traveling?” Cole asked. “At least when you fell through my house, you were going somewhere. You traveled—even if it didn’t end well.”

  The being gave him that odd smile again. Only something in the being’s facial structure did not quite work the same way as a human’s.

  “We are traveling now. We are taking, how would you say it?—’the scenic route.’ Come on.”

  Grasping Cole’s hand, his companion led him further inward. He could hear voices growing louder.

  “Inside the Traveler, time is irrelevant. The only important thing is when someone new arrives. There are so many waiting to meet you. You see, a long time ago, someone built this, call it a ship for lack of a better word. We gain passage as we pass from life into death, and it does not matter if the Traveler is buried or lost. Someone always finds it again. Even when, over time, the world ends with this solar system’s decay, the Traveler will fall through space again until someone finds it. It is always found. It was made that way. Come, the others are waiting.”

  Cole stopped and stood his ground for a moment. “But, I did the right thing?”

  Again, the odd smile. “If you did not, as I have said, you would not be here, and I would be leading another. It takes someone with persistence to be a part of our society. I may not have known when I met you, but the Traveler tends to come into the right hands on its own. I hope I did not mislead you.”

  Cole thought for a moment. Did you change my entire life with your words, or did the artifact change my life? Or did it really matter what I did? Suddenly, like a burden he never realized he carried, the onus vanished. No, what mattered was embarking on a voyage he could not even begin to imagine. What other proof did he have that he made the right choice? This time he reached out to his guide, laying a hand on its shoulder. “I may not be ready. But perhaps we should begin.”

  Believe Me, I Know Happy

  Ray had no idea exactly what he looked at, but it made him feel good. He’d wandered around the snow-covered rocks near the dam with his camera set on black and white. He shot a quick picture. Daylight fading, the red light indicating a low battery had been flashing for a while, and now he couldn’t exactly feel his feet anymore. In the car, he flipped through the pictures on the digital camera until he found it again. He sat there staring at it for a little while. He felt warm, fuzzy, safe, and his heartbeat raced more than usual. Mostly, it looked like a ghostly shape made of several pieces of ice, the shades formed from the light passi
ng through them, and some dirt causing darker colors. After looking down at his watch, he realized that fifteen minutes had passed. Now he found it difficult to see the trees surrounding his car. He resisted the urge to pick up the camera again and instead started the car.

  He downloaded the pictures to his computer the following day. At that point, his recently loaded graphics program and the software that came with the camera caused a conflict that took him an hour to resolve. The resulting frustration killed any immediate desire to work on the seventy-odd pictures he’d downloaded. Only after the sun went down again did he review the images. He found himself once again entranced by the picture of light, shadow, and shades of gray. What exactly about it fascinated him so? He really couldn’t say, but once again, he felt good. When he pulled himself away from the screen, he looked with a little more objectivity at what he saw. There seemed to be more than one pattern here. In fact, there seemed to be perhaps four to five patterns overlapping.

  Ray saved the original as ‘happy daze’ and started playing with the image. He broke down the patterns into separate components. He pulled apart five separate pieces. Alone, they were nothing. Together? Well, he couldn’t come up with anything other than that just by looking at them, the whole made him happy. That sounded mildly insane, but he really couldn’t explain it any other way.

  Happy Daze37 turned out the best. Through a series of edits—smoothing some things, deleting others, and increasing the size of certain portions of each of the patterns, the effect intensified. He almost felt better than he ever had before. Only when the sun came up did he realize how long he had sat in front of the computer screen.