by August Arrea
The figure was just about in his reach when suddenly Jacob felt a familiar tightening grip his ankles followed by a gradual tug slowing his fall. It was the Bungee rope he had discreetly tethered himself to before Gotham’s arrival at the bridge—an idea that popped into his mind when he caught sight of the duffel bag in which the cord was packed away on the floor of his closet before he bolted from his house. He braced himself and just as the winged figure was about to grab hold of him, Jacob’s body was suddenly yanked upward in the opposite direction leaving the pursuing figure to continue its downward dive right past him.
As he bobbed and swung about wildly in the air beneath the bridge like a flailing fish dangling from the end of a fisherman’s hook, Jacob desperately searched the darkness around him. Despite growing dizzy he finally spotted him: Gotham. Coatless and levitating in the air by a pair of massive wings. And from the look in his eyes which had become two pilot lights of rage, he appeared none too happy. For a moment, Jacob wished there was a way he could cut himself free from the Bungee cord and let the raging waters beneath him swallow him up, especially when Gotham came at him full speed and he felt the crushing grip that grabbed hold of him.
“You should know I don’t find the games mortals play to be amusing,” Gotham bellowed angrily once they returned to the bridge.
With an effortless heave, he sent Jacob skidding painfully across the wooden planks where the abandoned iron rails ran. Jacob, too filled with fear to find his tongue, or his legs, desperately scampered backwards across the rails trying to keep his distance from the winged man slowly making his way toward him with heavy determined steps. The Bungee rope to which Jacob was still anchored allowed him to go only so far; like a dog tugging uselessly to free itself from its own leash. Not that there was any place for him to escape.
“You seek proof of angels?” seethed Gotham. “Then look long and look hard at the one before you and try to deny what your own eyes witness.”
Indeed, Jacob’s eyes looked as if they might not ever blink again as they stared wide and fixed on what he couldn’t deny was an angel standing over him. Only this was unlike any angel he had ever envisioned, even as an imaginary myth. Between the bare torso which looked like a breastplate of impenetrable armor and glowing eyes that made one question if they could shoot flames of fire to incinerate the enemy caught in their glare, Gotham appeared nothing less than terrifying.
But the wings...
Nothing Jacob had ever before laid eyes on were as awesome as the massive pair of feathered appendages attached to Gotham’s back. Grayish in color, they were bird-like in every way, and yet like nothing ever seen to carry a bird across the sky. Fantastic as they were to behold, the one thought that somehow managed to push its way to the front of Jacob’s mind was the puzzlement of how Gotham had been able to conceal such sizable things beneath his overcoat. It was a pondering short-lived when Gotham suddenly began to furiously beat his wings, and in demonstrating their great power they produced a strong unrelenting gust of wind. It felt and sounded like a furious tornado, stirring up years of dust and dirt that had settled on the bridge to swirl around Gotham and Jacob. So strong was the wind brought about by the flapping wings that Jacob was glad to still be tethered to the Bungee cord for fear he might be swept off the bridge.
“Now do you see?” Gotham yelled.
The rusted light fixtures lining the bridge creaked and clanked as they swung about wildly. And then the lights themselves, both the bulbs that had long ago gone dead and those still pulsating with life before Jacob disabled them permanently with well-aimed rocks, suddenly began to flicker. Little by little they grew brighter until they were glowing with an intenseness far beyond what the filaments of any modern lightbulb were capable of producing. Jacob tried to shield his eyes with his hands from both the dust swirling around and the retina- searing brightness blazing down on him.
“DO YOU SEE?” Gotham cried out again louder.
“Yes…,” Jacob screamed back. “YES!”
There came a loud explosion when all at once the blinding lights suddenly extinguished themselves in a shower of sparks. The wind began to subside as Gotham gradually stilled his wings. And then there was a pronounced silence.
“Yes,” Jacob repeated quietly to himself.
Eventually he lowered his hands from his face and saw the darkness of night had been returned and the dust was settling once again like a dirty snowfall around him. And then there was Gotham, still standing over him. His wings had retreated from sight, as did the anger that had so darkened his face. Yet there remained an ever-present cool sternness in his eyes, which no longer burned with fire but still gleamed ever so subtly with a golden hue that surprisingly was warming—comforting even—to look into.
“Now that that’s out of the way, the two of us can talk,” said Gotham before he held out his hand for the boy to take.
~~~
Later that same night found Jacob locked away at home in his bedroom. His mind was still sopped by a fog as it turned its way through everything that happened earlier at the bridge to pay any attention to the black-and-white image of the Creature from “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” slowly and menacingly making his way toward the camera flickering on a small television screen behind him. Instead, he was furiously combing the one thing he could think of in his search for answers: his computer. After all, when it came to UFOs, the paranormal, or in Jacob’s case angels, what better authority existed than a world-wide database made accessible with the click of button to help explain away events witnessed through one’s own eyes?
What he soon came to learn the more he read, however, was that the online accounts concerning Nephilim did not come close to matching what had been told to him by his grandmother, or Gotham, for that matter. In fact, the narrative which had been stitched together through a trail of dozens of web sites to tell the legend of Nephilim was something quite shocking. They were not described as normal teenaged boys afflicted with a few muted traits passed down through their angelic parentage. Instead, the reigning consensus was that Nephilim were monstrous, oversized beings. Creatures, really, like the Gill-man discovered in the Black Lagoon. Towering abnormalities of forbidden breeding gone hopelessly wrong marked by six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. As he read this, Jacob couldn’t keep his eyes from drifting downward to give his own hands a quick glance even though he knew his hands—not to mention his feet—had the appropriate number of digits.
“Jacob, I think you’re beginning to lose your mind,” he muttered to himself balling up both hands into fists and clenching them tightly.
Such things were easy to shake off. Then there were the photos, which were not as easily dismissed. They showed archeologists uncovering skeletons at various excavation sites around the world: Greece, Peru, Saudi Arabia and even Pennsylvania. Only the bones discovered in the dirt didn’t belong to dinosaurs but humans. Giant humans. Some measuring more than thirty feet in height.
Jacob leaned in to his computer screen to give the photos a closer look with his skeptical, unblinking eyes. He didn’t believe it. They had to be fake. After all, these would be world-changing discoveries. How had they not make the front page of every newspaper in the world at the time of being found?
It reminded Jacob of the time as a young boy when he was spellbound by a television show purporting to show the discovery and autopsy of an alien. For a long time afterward, he found himself unable to look up at the night sky without seeing the grainy image of that eerie, dark-eyed being squat and long-limbed stretched out motionless across a stainless-steel table as his own eyes searched the starry blackness. Then, years later, it was revealed to be all a hoax. The alien, nothing more than the result of an elaborate con to dupe gullible TV viewers, had never existed. And, immediately after, Jacob never felt the need to gaze up at the sky, and when he did it was never again with a glimmer of wonderment.
If the photos of the Nephilim skeletons were indeed faked, Jacob found them to be damn go
od fakes. Then again, he was well aware it was a Photoshop world in which he lived. Skeptically, his eyes studied the archeologists posing next to their unbelievable finds. The sheer difference in size between the flesh and blood men and the skeletal remains stretched out in their dirt beds was boggling to the mind. One photo showed an archeologist crouched down in a shallow pit carefully excavating around the exposed mammoth skull of an intact skeleton curled up in a fetal position, and it was clear the Nephilim when alive would have had the ability to swallow the man whole had he wanted. The skulls themselves were frightening to look at with their black, hallowed out eye sockets and large, gaping oversized mouths. The thought of what they may have looked like wrapped in skin blinking and breathing proved a far more unsettling thought to Jacob.
“They’re not real,” Jacob stated aloud in as convincing a manner as he could to himself. “They just can’t be.”
Yet mindful as he was that the photos could be nothing more than an enterprising use of photo-enhancing software and an imaginative mind, Jacob couldn’t help but keep a small seed planted in the back of his head forcing him to ask himself, “What if?” After all, it wasn’t too long ago he was certain angels were about as real as leprechauns and pixies. Even he couldn’t cast away what he saw just a short while ago at the bridge, and that’s what made the photos that much more disturbing.
~~~
Just then he heard the hinge of his door give out its familiar creak whenever it swung open and he knew his grandmother had come into his room.
“I thought I heard noises coming from up here,” she remarked softly.
Jacob had found her dozed off in front of the television downstairs when he finally returned home and left her to sleep while he went to his room to sort through his jumbled thoughts.
“So are we all supposed to be hideous giants? Or am I one of the slow- growing variety of Nephilim?” asked Jacob.
“Giants?” Ava’s shoes clicked across the floor as she came up close behind Jacob and peered down over his shoulder at the computer on the desk in front of him. She immediately let out a gasp of disgust and quickly lowered the screen dousing from Jacob’s face the white light which had radiated brightly the monstrous images from the laptop.
“You would do yourself well to ignore such made-up nonsense?” she warned sharply.
“Is it? Made-up nonsense, I mean?” asked Jacob. “Cause I’m finding it a little difficult to tell what’s real anymore and what’s not.”
The heavy sigh that came from Ava as she sat herself on the edge of Jacob’s unmade bed seemed to share the same exasperation heard in her grandson’s voice.
“I take it you’ve seen Gotham.”
“That would be the understatement of the year,” said Jacob, getting up from his seat and shutting off his TV as he crossed the room to stare out from the window into the waiting darkness of the night. “I went to Darren’s Creek Bridge.”
“And?”
“You were right,” said Jacob, staring blankly through one of the small panes of glass. “He’s an angel And how!”
Ava could hear the struggle it took for Jacob to make such a statement out loud.
“He showed you.”
Jacob shook his head. “Not at first. He said it was my problem not his if I needed to see proof in order to believe in the existence of something. But I forced him.”
Ava cocked her head slightly and her brow furrowed with curiosity. “Forced him?”
“I threatened to kill myself by jumping off the bridge.”
Ava’s eyes widened in alarm and she clutched her chest. “You did what?”
“I don’t believe he thought I was serious, that is until I actually jumped.”
The look on Ava’s face grew more horrified at the thought of Jacob’s body tumbling from such a high structure.
“And of course he saved you,” she said. And as she imagined the rescue a glow came to her face. “Then it stands to reason some part of you must have believed he was who I said he was and that he would save you, otherwise you never would have risked your life in such a careless manner.”
“I didn’t risk anything,” Jacob replied. “I was tethered to my Bungee cord to break my fall.”
Knowing Gotham as only she did, her look once more darkened when she imagined how such a prank would stoke his wrath and she buried her face in her hands knowingly.
“Oh Jacob, tell me you didn’t.” Yet she knew he had, Of course he did. It was exactly the sort of thing Jacob would do to prove something true or false, no matter how outlandish. And maybe, just maybe, it was for the better that he did.
“Well...I suspect now that it’s over you must feel somewhat relieved,” she said.
Jacob turned away abruptly from the window. “Relieved? What makes you think any of this is a relief to me?” he spat.
Never before had he raised his voice to his grandmother. It took her aback.
“Now you know the truth.”
“I didn’t want this to be the truth, don’t you see that?” argued Jacob angrily. “I wanted to prove this to be nothing but a dirty lie. A big April Fool’s joke.”
“I would think knowing the existence of angels would be a comforting thing,” said Ava. “It certainly was for me growing up.”
“Well, it isn’t comforting. Not by a long shot,” barked Jacob, his increased frustration becoming more apparent. “Don’t you see? If everything about Gotham is true, then it means everything you’ve said about me is true as well.”
He was barely able to finish the last few words he uttered when the anger with which he spoke quickly dissolved and an almost childlike uncertainty could be readily seen sweeping over him, so much so that he turned away again toward the window in hopes of hiding from his grandmother the embarrassment of revealing such vulnerability he felt beginning to well up in his eyes. It was then Ava understood the fear that had suddenly gripped her grandson, a fear she had no idea how to assuage.
“Why didn’t she tell me?” asked Jacob, after a moment, in a quiet breath which matched the silence that had settled itself upon the room.
Ava knew rightly Jacob was referring to his mother, but he could well have been wondering aloud the same thing about herself.
“Oh, Jacob, if you only knew how much she struggled to do just that,” answered Ava with an exhaustive sigh. “But I ask you, how does one decide when the appropriate time is to reveal to a child such a thing? And would you ever have believed her if she had managed to tell you?”
Jacob didn’t answer, but his thoughts at that moment drifted to the night his mother passed away when he came into her room in the wee hours. She had tried that night to tell him then but he shrugged off her words as nothing more than the delirious ramblings stirred by her illness, just as Gotham described in the school gymnasium. And instead of listening to her, he tucked her into bed not knowing the moment she would close her eyes and drift off to sleep they would never again open.
“I know all of this is a shock to you,” said Ava, trying to lend some comfort to the boy. “In less time that it took for the sun to rise and set you have been given a life-changing jolt. But you must see what a glorious, special gift it is you’ve been given.”
Jacob’s eyes turned to his grandmother but instead of being aflame with anger they mirrored a lingering sadness.
“Gift? How can you say this is a gift? I’m a freak!”
An almost offended look came over Ava.
“I don’t ever want to hear you refer to yourself in such a way again,” she scolded him in a sharp yet loving voice. “You are not a freak. But you are different, different in a good way. Different in a way that only being touched by something so incredibly special can make someone like you.”
When he looked away in disregard she knew it would take more than just her words to convince him otherwise. That and time.
Lots of time.
“He...he wants to take me away,” Jacob said hesitantly. “Just like you said.”
The sudden
change in subject made Ava sit up a little straighter.
“The place I told you about earlier…Gotham told you this?”
Jacob nodded his head and Ava closed her eyes in silent gratitude while at the same time exhaling a breath of relief.
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
Ava’s eyes opened wide revealing the unexpected surprise of the answer.
Tomorrow?
“So soon.”
“He said we would already be pushing against time to make it there in time, whatever that means,” said Jacob. “It’s just...I’m just not exactly sure I want go.”
“Not go,” Ava replied with alarm. “But why? I would think a school for Nephilim, not to mention meeting others like you, would be an exciting prospect to you.”
“I already go to school,” argued Jacob. “In a few more years I’ll be graduating. Not to mention all my friends are here.”
“You’ll not be gone forever. You’ll be back here, and living more comfortably in your skin because you’ll know better who you are. How can you even think of denying yourself that?”
“I understand that, but...”
“But...” Ava’s attention honed itself to the way her grandson’s voice wavered, and as her steely blue eyes narrowed themselves as they carefully searched her grandson’s face, a light of clarity was illuminated inside them. “But you’re afraid of going off and leaving me behind, is that it?”
When Jacob didn’t answer, her back straightened and she folded her arms across her chest defiantly.
“You think I can’t manage being on my own without you watching out for me?”
She pointed a finger, made slightly crooked by arthritis, and motioned for him to come sit beside her. Once he did, she proceeded to do something she rarely did before—she pulled back her dress sleeve to reveal a part of her forearm she always kept covered.
“Do I need to explain to you what this is and what it means?” she asked pointedly. After hearing Ava’s telling of her childhood earlier that night, Jacob shook his head while cringing slightly at the sight of the six grayish numbers crudely tattooed into her alabaster white skin—a lasting reminder of the horror his grandmother was forced to visit in a Nazi concentration camp during the war.