The Rising

by Temple Mathews

  The charges blew in rapid succession and the cabin collapsed with the sickening sound of timbers cracking, splitting, imploding. Will did his best to shield his mother but could not prevent one of the larger, thousand-pound crossbeams from clipping her—just a glancing blow, really, but one with such force that April’s world went to black. Her last thought was that for all of her sins, for her part in creating Will and damning him to being what he was, she deserved to be sucked down into the sunless void.

  Rising up from the rubble, his bloody, unconscious, and possibly mortally wounded mother in his arms, Will unleashed a holy howl of pain that echoed through the woods. Frightened birds took flight.

  As for April, she was far, far away in a very dark place.

  Chapter Seven : April’s Cosmos

  The moment she received Will’s text, Natalie loaded up the numbered cases he had requested from his lab and drove them to the Swedish Medical Center on First Hill. She met him in the ICU waiting room. She rushed to hug him—he’d been gone for more than two days, and she was so relieved to see him unharmed—but his body language made her rear up like a skittish horse. It was like he had a force field around him.

  “Are you . . . okay?” she asked.

  He wanted to tell her everything: that he was definitely not okay, that his mother was in a coma, that it was all his fault for not being 100 percent focused. But he remembered his promise to himself before he’d gone after April all too clearly. He had to cut his losses now. What happened to his mother only made keeping Natalie safe more important.

  “Thank you for bringing these. Now go back home and—”

  “But, Will, I—”

  “Natalie, for once, don’t argue with me. Just do it! Drive back home. Fast. And then go into lockdown mode.”

  The words stung but she saw the urgency in his eyes. Even as the tears welled, she nodded. He wiped a tear from her cheek and she thought he might soften a little and give her a hug, even just squeeze her hand, but if anything, he only hardened more.

  “Now, please.”

  She did as he requested and left.

  When she’d gone, Will picked up both cases and moved swiftly down the hallway. He reached a locked door made of heavy steel and used a key card to open it. He was now in a private wing of the hospital, a wing he’d paid for. He set up the wide-beam lasers and armed them, then checked on the surveillance cameras. They were functioning perfectly. Then he went into her room.

  He stood motionless before his mother’s body, watching the ventilator tube do its job, coaxing her chest to gently rise and fall with every mechanically forced breath. The doctors had said that since she’d been in a coma for nearly twenty-four hours, the chances of her regaining consciousness were very slim indeed and growing slimmer with each passing hour. After two days, the odds of her coming out of the coma without significant brain damage would be roughly the same as winning the state lottery. Medically, the doctors had said, there wasn’t anything keeping her from regaining consciousness. But she wouldn’t wake up.

  Will knew he only had one chance. He had to plant within his mother’s brain a powerful desire to reawaken. In essence, he would have to venture inside her mind and bring her out himself. He remembered being face to face with the Dark Lord, remembered how they’d been able to travel at lightning speed in and out of each other’s minds, in part because they’d been connected by blood. He now had to do the same thing with his mother. He placed his hand upon hers. Her skin was dry and cool. He closed his eyes and concentrated, and mentally bled his warmth into her through their touch.

  Creating an energy stream between their minds was the key. Because her own mind, nearly totally bereft of alpha waves, was so weak, the task at hand was for all practical purposes impossible. But Will would not give up hope. He kept on visualizing an energy stream, a glowing, flowing thing of shimmering beauty, beauty he could ride on as one would ride a wave in the ocean. Now. Again. Try again. But he got nothing. Nothing but darkness and the chilly gusts from the air conditioner.

  He gently pushed all competing thoughts from his consciousness until his mind was a ball of white energy. And there! He felt a tendril moving, snaking out from his mind, searching. Now! There! He’d caught a hold of something! The tendril grew thicker, brighter, the connection solidifying between them. He wasted no time, mentally getting on board and sailing on the stream.

  He was in. Soaring. His mother’s mind, her brain, her consciousness, was a vast cosmos, with bubble planets floating in massive random jet streams, each planet a cluster of thoughts and emotions. He ventured into the brightest bubble planet. It was a fortuitous choice. He had come to the place where she held her most salient thoughts, the thoughts of the here and now. As he entered the bright space he could feel her thoughts, her regrets. Then he saw her face.

  “I’m sorry.” The voice of a bird, an angel, a saint.

  “Mother?” he said.

  “I’m ready to face my sins,” she said.

  “You haven’t sinned.”

  “We’ve all sinned,” she whispered. “But mine cannot be forgiven.”

  “I forgive you.”

  April closed her mouth and a tear curled down from her eye and crossed her cheek.

  “Mother, you have to come back. Please?”

  She shook her head. “You don’t know—you didn’t see what I did.” She was wracked with guilt for the Night of Evil—the night Will had been conceived.

  “We make choices,” she said. “They follow us like ghosts for our entire lives. Only most of us don’t see them. But they are always there. I am going where the ghosts are pulling me. Where I deserve to go.”

  Will tried to reach out to her—but he was suddenly outside the bubble planet he’d just entered. He knew he had to venture further within his mother’s mind to a memory of the night of her perceived transgression.

  He sailed on, entering another bubble planet. April was twelve years old, crying in her backyard, her dead kitten beside her in a shoebox, about to be buried in a solemn backyard ceremony. She was a beautiful girl.

  Will retreated. Searching. Searching. He found the violent jarring memories of her birth, the blissful memories of her wedding day—how handsome Edward looked in his tuxedo in the church in Honolulu!—and a half-dozen other gilded days. He searched memory after memory until he came upon the fateful night, the Night of Evil.

  After a brief argument with Edward, April was out the door and in the Mustang, cruising, her high-heeled Nine Wests jamming the accelerator to the floor, the window down, her hair whipping in the wind. She wasn’t leaving Edward; deep down inside she knew he was too good a man. She was, rather, trying to flee her own sense of self, to get out of her own skin, if only for a few brief moments. She and Edward had been unable to conceive. She wanted a baby. The thought of not having one made her so angry, it ate at her soul like a poison.

  In the Lazy J Tavern she sat on a black leatherette stool at the bar, nursing a whiskey, her eyes going soft as the jukebox pumped out heartbreak blues. Men checked her out and liked what they saw. Two of them tried to send drinks her way, but she declined them. She stared down at her wedding ring, a simple gold band with a proud little one-carat diamond. She twisted the ring on her finger, sliding it up past her knuckle then pushing it back down. She knew she wouldn’t take the ring off. It was there for a lifetime. She shook her head. What am I doing here? Edward must be worried sick. She made up her mind to leave the bar. She was about to pay when a crisp $100 bill floated onto the counter.

  She looked into the mirror. The reflection of the tall man suddenly next to her startled her. The man ordered her a drink, and instead of turning it down immediately the way she had the others, she hesitated. The drink arrived. She looked at the man again. He was handsome in a hazardous kind of way. The bad boy of all bad boys. And she’d let him buy her a drink.

  “I’d better go,” she managed, in a hoarse whisper.

  “It’s early,” he said.

  “Not for
me.”

  She didn’t notice his hand—large, with bulging veins that pulsed rhythmically—pass over her drink, changing the color from faint amber to deep saffron.

  “At least finish your drink first.” His voice was eerily resonant, as though emanating from an ancient cave.

  April wanted no more alcohol, was already distrusting her judgment, but something in the man’s voice was so commanding that she found herself sipping once again from her glass. Boom. The next thing she knew, she was behind the wheel of the Mustang, speeding recklessly through the unforgiving night, the tall stranger beside her.

  When they reached April’s house, she noticed that Edward’s car was gone. He was out looking for her. The thought calmed her. But that was the last feeling of tranquility she would experience for a long, long time. She opened her mouth to protest, but in an unholy flash the stranger was pulling her from the car. She went limp from the potion he’d slipped into her drink and fell headlong into unconsciousness.

  When she regained control of her mind, the first thing she became aware of was her throbbing head. Splayed on the bed, her body wracked with pain, April’s head turned and she saw first her naked finger, and then her wedding ring sitting lonesome on the nightstand. She rushed to self-hating judgment, concluding that she had taken off the ring herself.

  The die had been cast. She would hold this blame within her for years—held it still, in fact—allowing it to gnaw away at her insides, corroding her soul.

  Will came out of her mind and back into the hospital room. His mother was innocent, yet had tried and convicted herself. And her punishment would be a one-way ticket away from this life. Will couldn’t let that happen.

  “Mom? It wasn’t your fault. No one could have resisted him. You never took your wedding ring off your finger, he did! Listen to me, you can’t go. I won’t let you!”

  The ventilator kept up its steady rhythm. April’s chest continued to rise and fall. But her pallor was frightening, as though the light inside her had already been snuffed out.

  “Mom!”

  He touched her hands, stroked her face. She was growing colder as, outside, the sun was blocked out and the sky grew dark. He could feel it. She was letting herself fade away. He had to stop her!

  “Mom, please don’t go. I need you!” He was telling the truth. He did need her. With Edward gone, and his decision to let Natalie go, his mother was his anchor. “Please . . .”

  And then Will did something he hadn’t done in a very long time. He cried. Tears spilled from his eyes and onto April’s wrist. Their warmth spread up her arm until it reached her chest. Will had touched her heart, and it began beating rapidly.

  Will felt the energy in the room change. His tears ceased. He looked down at his mother. Her face had regained some color. He moved to the foot of her bed and raked his thumbnail up along the bottom of her foot. Reflexively, it jerked ever so slightly. And then she coughed. Will could hardly believe his eyes. She had heard him! She knew he needed her, and she was coming out. He was starting to feel joyful.

  But then he heard the Dark Lord’s voice.

  “We have unfinished business, my son.”

  Will looked around. The Dark Lord was, of course, not present in the room, only in Will’s mind. He closed his eyes as he realized what he’d done. While he had traveled into his mother’s mind, he had inadvertently brought the Dark Lord with him. And now the beast was in there. He had to get him out! Will wasted no time finding and riding a thought stream back into April’s mind. He found a throbbing orb the color of rust and entered. It was a hot, humid cave. The Dark Lord was grinning. But it was only his head, propped atop a stalagmite.

  “I knew you would come,” his weighty voice rumbled.

  “What have you done with her?” Will demanded.

  “I have only to let her do what she desires, to become what she wishes, deep inside.”

  April was wearing the same dress she had worn that fateful night. Her eyes were glazed and she danced as if in a trance.

  “Mom? Mom, come with me! Come with me now, please?”

  Will reached out his hand. As she twirled, April’s eyes swept around the room and she looked right through him, so deep was she under the Dark Lord’s control. Will knew he had to act fast. He leapt at the Dark Lord’s head with his right foot uplifted, preparing for a death kick. But Will was unable to time-bend here, unable to move with any velocity at all. It was as if he was moving in slow motion.

  The Dark Lord’s laughter rang off the walls of the cave. “You have no power here, boy!”

  Will turned to April and tried to grab her, to somehow shake her from the Dark Lord’s spell.

  “Mother!”

  But she was formless, there was nothing firm for him to grasp. For a deadly second, the Dark Lord became a menacing human shape, ghostly in form, except for his head, which appeared solid.

  “You have taken much from me,” said the Dark Lord. “More than you will ever know. And now, I will take from you that which is most precious.”

  The next two seconds stretched into an infinite agony as the Dark Lord swept over, grabbed April’s wrists, and, with a malevolent roar, ripped her gauzy being across the cave.

  A sword plunged from above and sank into the earth. The Dark Lord lifted it into his hand and smiled triumphantly at Will.

  “Take a good look at this sword.” The Dark Lord caressed it as though it were his lover. And then suddenly he swiped it threateningly through the air. It made a terrifying crackling, whooshing sound.

  “The next time you see it . . . it will be the last thing you ever see.”

  The Dark Lord once again swiped the sword, this time dangerously close to Will.

  “I look forward to that moment. Come find me!”

  And then he swept April away into the ink of nothingness as Will screamed until his throat bled and the cave plunged into darkness.

  Will was back in the hospital room, his eyes clenched shut in pain. The night nurse came thundering in and immediately misunderstood the situation when she saw the brainwave monitors. It appeared as though April had finally taken her leave and was gone forever. And for all practical, medical purposes, she was. The Dark Lord had taken what was left of April’s mind: her last thoughts, her will to live, her soul. The night nurse and now the two orderlies that had come running all concluded that the screaming young man was at long last letting go of his comatose mother. They reached to console him but immediately drew back as he stood up and opened his mismatched blue eyes, which were filled with resolve and fire. He was not letting go. He was making a pledge to himself. He would find the Dark Lord and free his beloved mother from the beast’s grasp.

  Will swore that she would live again.

  The doctors, with their long faces and grave expressions, came and went like drones in their white coats. They counseled Will as best they could, again and again advising him that the most humane thing to do would be to terminate her. How he loathed that word! No, there would be no termination. As surely as Will’s heart beat in his chest, he knew his mother would open her eyes and smile at him again.

  This was his vow, this was his promise. This was his destiny.

  THOMPSON FALLS, MONTANA

  Edwin Baily and Mary Weiss were at the head of the group, the parade of pious souls who had come to cast rose petals over the Thompson Falls Dam in honor of the teenage lovers who had taken their lives in the roiling waters here exactly one year prior. Edwin’s son, Terry Baily, was only seventeen but locked forever in love with Cynthia Weiss, Mary’s sixteen-year-old daughter. That was what the suicide page they left on Terry’s MacBook had said, that they were now “forever locked in love.”

  Behind Edwin and Mary were other Baily and Weiss family members and a smattering of brave schoolmates from Thompson Falls High. One of them had brought a CD player. The rose petals had been donated by Emerson’s Florist Shoppe.

  As the group reached their destination, gathering on the overlook, Edwin cleared his thro
at and spoke first. He said this wasn’t to be a mournful day, but a day of celebration. Yes, what had transpired one year ago was a tragedy, but they’d all forgive and forget on this, the anniversary of their death. With the casting of the rose petals into the water, they would be releasing one year’s worth of pent-up sorrow.

  “The young lovers are free now,” said Edwin, “and we should all pray that they are somehow, somewhere, in each other’s arms.”

  And so the rose petals were disbursed as “Here Comes the Sun” was played on the CD player. When the last ruby red petal had fluttered down and landed gently in the water, the air became cool as a great shadow descended upon the whole of Thompson Falls. Everyone in the group gazed skyward and chattered with amazement at the sudden eclipse. Edwin, an amateur astronomer, was the most shocked and surprised, because he knew there was no eclipse scheduled to occur for another seven months. What in the world is going on? he wondered. Some of the kids joked about how they shouldn’t be looking at the eclipse because doing so could make you blind.

  And then Mary Weiss screamed. Six seconds after gazing up at the eclipse, she had gone blind.

  Edwin assured her that it was only temporary, even as his own world was growing dark. A teenage girl cried out that she too had just lost her sight, and she began wailing hysterically. The wailing was contagious as the entire group realized in a harrowing moment that they had all been spontaneously struck blind. They could not see, but they all heard a sound that chilled them to the bone. When asked about the sound in the hospital, each and every one of them identified the sound as the Devil laughing.

  Chapter Eight: The Cure

  Natalie was peering out the turret window and watched as Will pulled his car into the mansion driveway. She’d been waiting for him, unable to sleep. She was worried about him, worried about his mom, worried about Emily, whose nightmares had been worse while Will was away. Despite the way their last conversation had gone, she was convinced that if Will gave her just one good long hug, a feeling of wholeness would sweep through her body like a magic potion and she would be able to lie down and sleep. And now here he was, her knight in shining armor (his bulletproof Mitsubishi EVO was definitely armor). She turned and bounded down the long staircase and met him as he came through the security garage doors.