by Brandt Legg
“How did you get to be one of the seven? And how did you manage to retain any soul powers when you’re such a jerk?”
“I keep trying to tell you, Nate. Your interpretation of things isn’t always right. In your case ‘hardly ever’ is probably closer to the mark.”
A dancer twirled within an inch of my face. I recognized him. Although he was white, I knew him as a slave in my lifetime as a slave trader. His presence shook me. This amused Dunaway who stepped back several feet and swept his arm out to the room. As each couple spun past, I realized they’d been with me in prior lives. And one way or another, I’d been responsible for their deaths or caused them great suffering. It was an overwhelming spectacle as hundreds of people danced around taunting me by their presence.
“Welcome, Nate, welcome to your Karmic Ball!” He laughed, then vanished into the throngs of haunting souls. My search for Dunaway was interrupted by a woman sweeping me into a Polka. We relived the horror of what I’d done to her in another life as the music dictated our movements. I begged forgiveness. She nodded and passed me to another partner. Hours later, after dancing with sixty or seventy people, I discovered the crowd was slowly diminishing. It seemed that once I’d completed a dance with one of them, my partner would leave. Sometime the next day, in complete physical and mental exhaustion, I came upon the last dancer. With all the irony flowing, it came as almost no surprise that it was my mother’s soul.
She curtseyed as the music began again. I bowed slightly. The lifetime of my crime swirled around as we gracefully glided around the glittering but now empty ballroom.
In the karmic exploration, I learned that she’d been raised on the streets and in various hard orphanages. At ten “he” began working eighteen-hour shifts in the mills, saving every penny, until finally around age thirty he had enough to homestead a patch of land in the wilderness. Two more years of hard work turned the desolate land into a thriving farm. He married and soon hired me, a drifter, to help harvest when his wife was pregnant. In a routine drunk, I caused a fire which killed his wife and unborn child. The fire also destroyed his crop and ruined him. The next day he found me and held a pistol inches from my head, his red, swollen eyes glaring in confused rage. Before I could react he turned the gun on himself. Parts of his face spattered on mine. Without water or cloth I smeared his blood off and walked until I found one of the stray horses and rode away never knowing, until the ballroom, that I had also been the one who killed his parents during a bank robbery.
“Can you forgive me?” I asked my mother’s soul, dry-mouthed and weak.
“You are asking for more than the farmer’s life.”
“Yes,” I nodded. “For much more.”
She touched my forehead softly like my mother always did when she wanted me to know everything was all right, then faded away.
It was some minutes before I realized I was sitting in the middle of the abandoned ballroom, now back in the dingy state I’d first seen, windows bricked over, musty smell, as if no one had been there for years. Only one door remained open, the one Dunaway had come through. It seemed the natural choice.
10
I walked out into Charles Square. Confused, I spun around to see the door slam and found the lock beyond the powers of Gogen, then discovered I was at the front entrance to the Faust House. It took a few minutes to find Linh and Spencer in the crowd.
“Oh my God, Nate, where were you?”
“I don’t know.”
It turned out that the “bomb” was just flash and smoke. I’d been gone less than ten minutes. The police had only just arrived.
“Time’s a funny thing,” Spencer said.
“Nothing seems very funny to me right now,” I said. “Tell me what you know about Dunaway.”
Spencer read me. “Oh no.”
“What?” Linh asked. No one answered as I stared at Spencer. She scanned the energy between Spencer and me. This was a power she’d developed over the past year. It was one that was still difficult for me. We don’t find our powers at the same time.
“Do you still have the Jadeo?” Spencer asked.
I felt my pocket, then the other, a sick feeling overtook me. “He’s got it.”
“Where’d he take you? He can’t be far.” Linh said.
“I came out of the Faust House but was somewhere else. The view from the windows was the countryside.” I crouched to the ground, closing my eyes. “I haven’t seen him for twenty-four hours.”
“Nate, I had no idea he was one of the seven.” Spencer kneeled on one knee next to me.
“How could you have missed that little detail? Seems pretty important.”
“He must have some extraordinary powers blocking parts of himself. I’m not a wizard, you know. I can’t see everything.”
“You’re a hard man to believe, but easy to trust.”
“What are we going to do about the Jadeo?” Linh interrupted.
“We have to get it back.”
“What if he’s already opened it?” I asked.
“We’d know.” Spencer’s look was desperate. “We do have one hope.”
“What?” Linh asked.
“It can only be opened by one of the original nine entrusted,” Spencer said.
“But there are still two names on the list that we don’t know.”
“Yes, he could be one of them. But it’s also possible he’s an incarnation of one of the names we already know.”
“What are the odds he’s one of the nine entrusted and one of the seven?” I asked.
“You tell me,” Spencer said.
“Maybe we can find him through an Outview. I could try to reach the lifetime with the original nine entrusted.”
“No, he has it now. The Jadeo needs to be dealt with in this time. We’ve handed him the power to destroy the Movement and end any hope for the awakening . . . possibly forever.”
Spencer waved his arms in a downward spiral above his head. Everything in the square stopped.
“What did you do?” Linh asked.
“It’s a Timefreeze, a variation of a Timefold. Follow me.”
We Skyclimbed across the square back to Faust House.
“Are you sure you’re not a wizard?” Linh asked Spencer as we landed.
In his concentration, I don’t even think he heard her. I was about to tell him that Gogen and nothing else I tried worked on the door, but then I saw it begin to disintegrate. It was as if the door was rapidly aging – hundreds of years in a matter of seconds. Spencer was sweating and turning pale. He pushed through the remaining splinters and dust. We followed.
“This isn’t how it looked before.”
Spencer scanned the hall. He tapped my chest. “Do you see that?”
“The shadow is wrong,” Linh said.
Then I saw it. There was a shadow cast by some unseen light source.
“It’s a dimensional crease. Come on.”
“How come you haven’t taught me all this yet?”
“It doesn’t all come from me.”
“It’s kind of frightening that Dunaway knows all this stuff that I don’t.”
“Clearly he’s a mystic; perhaps he’s supposed to teach you.”
“Why would he teach Nate when he wants him dead?” Linh asked, as we slipped through the shadow and were once again in the dilapidated ballroom.
Spencer scanned the massive space and Skyclimbed so fast we didn’t catch him until he was through a door on the far end. Heavy wrought iron hinges fell among wood shreds and sawdust as we went through. Incredible – he must have destroyed the door in the two seconds it took to cross the room. Once through that opening, we were as far away from Prague as was possible, as if we’d been on a spaceship for years. It reminded me of the ground at Outin, only it was 360 degrees. We were Skyclimbing through space. The scent of honeysuckle and citrus, along with the faint sound of children laughing, were also reminiscent of Outin.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“We’re in a dimens
ional void.”
“Where’s it lead?”
“No way to know. I’ve never been in one before.”
I looked back and there was no trace of the entrance back to Faust House.
“I can’t tell which direction is which,” Linh yelled.
“Nate, take Linh’s hand. Follow the energy of the Jadeo, it’s strong. He can conceal it only if he’s one of the original nine.”
“So we still have a chance?”
“Too soon to tell.”
In the apparent vacuum of “space” it was impossible to know how fast we were traveling but the pressure and weight against my body implied it was a crazy speed. Spencer told me later that time could be shifted within the external fringe of a dimensional crease which was what we were traveling through. He’d been hoping to cut into Dunaway’s lead but when we tumbled into a narrow alley in the middle of the night, all trace of the Jadeo’s energy was gone. All I knew for sure was that this was not the world we’d left.
11
Spencer was bleeding but it could have been worse based on how fast we crashed into the stone wall. He’d absorbed Linh’s and my impact.
“Do you feel it?” Spencer asked.
“The calmness?” It wasn’t the right word but the first that came.
“Yes. Yangchen told me this existed.”
“This is a good place, isn’t it?” Linh asked.
“Yes, a very good place.”
“Then why did Dunaway come here?”
“Dunaway isn’t bad because he wants to be. He’s bad because he’s confused,” Spencer said. “We need to keep moving. He may not intend on destroying all hope of the awakening but that doesn’t mean he won’t do it.” He began walking.
“How do you know where to go?”
“If we are indeed in the dimension that Yangchen described, then there is only one place to go . . . Ashland, Oregon.”
“Doesn’t Omnia have Ashland pretty well secured?” Linh asked.
“Omnia doesn’t even exist in this dimension. Can’t you feel their absence?”
It was the feeling of childhood. When everything was taken care of. When the pursuit of joy and play were the priorities. When we could eat whatever we liked and sing silly songs. It was all that and much more. The air itself carried a different vibration.
“It’s like floating,” Linh said.
“What’s in Ashland?” I asked.
“People we need to see.”
“Am I there?” I asked.
“It’s possible, but I don’t think so.”
We were lucky to be only a few blocks from a bus station; a baker on his way to work gave us directions. The bus to the airport was idling.
“How’d you pay?” I asked when Spencer returned from the ticket counter.
“You won’t believe me . . . there is no money here. Everyone works for the good of everyone.”
“Like communism is supposed to be?” I asked.
“No, more like soulism or maybe wholism.”
It was the same at the very modern airport.
“Free air travel. Wow. Let’s stay in this dimension,” Linh said.
Everything looked more modern, cleaner, sleeker but according to Spencer we were in the same time as our dimension.
“We were always taught that capitalism was the only way to drive innovation, that individuals needed the incentive of profits in order to work hard.”
“Well, whatever they’re doing here seems to be working fine, and there is no money, no airport security, no one has even asked for ID. There’s time before our flight, let’s eat.”
There was no meat on the menu. I didn’t know if this was true for the whole dimension or if this was just a vegan restaurant. It didn’t matter, we were hungry and the food was perfection.
In our dimension the trip would have taken seventeen hours, but in less than eight, we were in Medford choosing a car. The free “rental” car was a combination of solar-, wind- and hydro-powered.
Ashland looked much the same except that many of the orchards north of town had been replaced by modern, gleaming buildings belonging to, according to the SOU signs, Southern Oregon University.
“Are my parents here?” Linh asked.
“I’m not sure, Linh, but I believe so.”
“And Kyle!” she added excitedly.
Spencer returned with a rare smile on his face. “Nate, let’s go see your dad.”
“He’s alive?” As a kid, part of me had always believed he was alive somewhere and would just walk in our front door one day. I knew this was another dimension but still, I’d been right.
Linh looked back at me. “Are you okay?”
I nodded but my quivering lip and sweating palms said otherwise.
“Will we meet the Linh and Nate from this dimension?” Linh asked Spencer.
“I hope so. Please remember that happy reunions aren’t our purpose here. We need to track Dunaway, retrieve the Jadeo and figure out how to return to our own dimension.”
“How are we going to do that?” I asked.
“I’m hoping your dad will have an idea,” Spencer said, eyeing me from the rearview mirror.
It wasn’t long before we reached the building where my father worked. It turned out he taught Dimensional Studies. SOU was one of the leading universities in the field. We found out later that universities were the largest employers in this dimension, and most specialized in one or another of the countless disciplines of the soul. The University of Virginia was the top U.S. school to study reincarnation; USC focused on Karma, UNM, time travel. ASU was another top reincarnation school, Duke was the lead psychic research school, Texas State University focused on soul powers, Penn State did portals, etc.
My dad, Professor Ryder, had finished classes and was in his office ready to leave for the day. He recognized Spencer immediately. I stood speechless at seeing him after so many years. It felt like an Outview, even some distorted old home movie.
“When did you get into town?” he asked Spencer, hardly glancing my way. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
Spencer shook his head. “Monte, I’m from a different plane.”
At first Dad laughed, but then turned serious. He looked from Spencer to me, then back to Spencer. “And who is this?” he asked Spencer, hesitantly, turning back to me. He stared at my face. I couldn’t figure out why he recognized Spencer but not me. “Spencer?” Dad repeated, pleading in an almost desperate tone.
“Monte,” Spencer said quietly, “this is Nate.”
My dad looked into my eyes a second longer, then flung his arms around me. His sobs were, at first, loud wails I’d never heard before. I was crying too. He kissed my forehead and cheeks. The smell of him, sharpened pencils, coffee and lime-scented speed stick, sent me back to my childhood. I wanted to be hiking in the woods with him, talking about all the craziness we’d been through, hoping he could explain it all to me. Did he know about the tin of matches? But the origins of our relationship took precedence – the Jadeo was in jeopardy. I didn’t know how much time we had.
Spencer’s hands were on Dad’s shoulders, coaxing him back. He felt the pressure more than I, for he knew how grave things would be if Dunaway was able to open the Jadeo.
“There’s so much to talk about. How did all this happen?” Dad sniffed.
“Why don’t you tell us when Nate died?” Spencer’s words shocked me but it quickly made sense. No wonder Dad had been so upset. I’d already died in this dimension.
“We lost you when you were just eight, I’m afraid.” He fought a new round of tears. “Dusty didn’t know what he was doing; it was an accident.”
Oh my God, I thought, Dustin had been responsible for my death. They might need a university just to study my relationship with my brother across all the lifetimes and dimensions we’d shared.
“He was trying to teach himself to drive, he was ten at the time, he never even saw you.”
I looked into the puffy eyes of my father an
d asked the question I already knew the answer to but wanted so badly not to hear. “What happened to Dustin?”
“He had a rough year in a psychiatric hospital, tried to kill himself, but he’s okay now. He didn’t go to college. Lives down in Shasta. He’s a writer. I think it would do him good to see you.”
“Monte, I’m sorry, I don’t wish to seem insensitive, but we have a matter of extreme urgency to address,” Spencer said.
My dad turned toward his old friend. “Of course. What is it? What could have brought you all this way?”
“The Jadeo . . . it’s been lost.”
“My God, how?”
“A powerful young man from our dimension named Frank Muller, but we call him Dunaway.”
“Is he one of the original nine entrusted?”
“We’re not sure but he is one of the seven.”
“You realize this could shatter our dimension.”
“I do.”
“We could open the Jadeo,” Dad said.
“You still have it in this dimension?” I asked.
“Yes. And if we open it we could possibly save this dimension.”
“It won’t help us in ours. We’re walking on a razor’s edge as it is.”
“Look, Spencer, I need to do what’s best for this dimension –”
“No, Monte,” Spencer said sharply. “It’s the Jadeo. You need to do what’s best for the Jadeo.”
“With all due respect, Spencer, I’ve got my Jadeo. I’ve fulfilled my oath.”
“Monte, you can’t isolate yourself in this perfect little dimension. You know it’s all connected. You don’t only exist here. The Jadeo is more than a gold box you’ve hidden somewhere. It’s a part of every dimension; you should know that.” Spencer slapped his hand down on the desk next to Dad.
It startled me. This was all stranger than an Outview, so immediate and intimate. Seeing my dad, as I remembered him but from my older perspective, left me in a fog.