Soul Thief (Blue Light Series)

by Mark Edward Hall

  Chapter 42

  Two years after the terrible incident at the home of Tommy and Savannah Ricker, Doug’s life hadn’t exactly returned to normal. They had not been easy years for him or for his family. It took months for the media circus following the incident to die down, and even then he was uncomfortable going outside alone, afraid of being accosted by tabloid reporters pointing cameras at him and shoving microphones in his face. For months following the incident, radio and television talk shows were inundated with pseudo-scientists, conspiracy theorists, psychics, all willing to offer learned opinions about the boy with the strange sight. Doug had had his fill of them, and he no longer watched television.

  But that was the least of Doug’s worries. There were other things brewing with his life and his family that he didn’t much care for. His mother’s attitude toward him had changed since the incident. Now she looked at him differently and treated him differently; with politeness and a cautious sort of reverence. She had always been a caring person, now she was beyond that. She was so sweet and kind that butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Doug thought he knew why this was so. He sensed that she was afraid of him and it freaked him out. He wanted her to just be mom again, even if it meant he might get punished once in a while for being bad, for just being the boy that he was. That hadn’t changed, had it? He was still just an ordinary boy. But nothing was the same and the truth was, Doug felt like a stranger in his own home. He just wanted to be a normal kid again.

  Dad was sort of the same way with him except he knew that his father wasn’t afraid of him exactly. Now when his dad spoke to him his voice was all bluff and hearty, man-to-man, as if Doug was now a member of the big guy club rather than just a frightened kid. He could not believe the incident had changed his parents more than it had him. He just wanted things to be normal again.

  But it looked like that wasn’t going to happen any time soon. It seemed the experience at the Ricker residence had altered them all in some incontrovertible way. But it hadn’t just changed his family. It had changed the lives of everyone around him. The parents of Tommy and Savannah were different, as well as the parents of both Janet, the dead babysitter and Lance, her overly rambunctious teenage boyfriend. For some reason they all blamed Doug for what had happened on that fateful morning. Considering he was the sole survivor of the incident and had later claimed to have seen the whole thing happen in some sort of trance, big mistake, Doug supposed this was a normal reaction. After all, who else were they going to blame it on? Doug, even at a young age, was keenly aware of the innate human need to blame everything on someone else. It was one of the weaknesses of the spirit. He didn’t like it but he understood it.

  The kids and teachers at Lowden Elementary School where he attended classes also treated him differently; the teachers with a tense kind of caution, and most of the children with a subdued sense of awe. Doug understood that the majority of his classmates were under orders from their parents to stay away from the boy with the cursed sight. Some kids obliged, most didn’t. There were a few with minds of their own who thought the whole thing quite cool and didn’t see any logical reason to avoid Doug. Nadia Ziegler was one of those kids. She was an outstanding student who wore owlish glasses, had a penchant for numbers and an IQ in the stratosphere. And she was very pretty. She’d been Doug’s friend since their first day of school together and, as she’d put it, was not about to let small minds and stupid superstition interfere with that friendship. She knew Doug well enough to know that he hadn’t done anything wrong. If he said he’d been a mere witness to events on that day, then that’s exactly what he’d been. Doug didn’t lie. She wasn’t sure how she knew this, she just did. Nadia sensed something good in Doug that totally belied all the idiotic things that had been, and were still being said, about him. She did believe that the incident had matured Doug in ways that her eleven year old mind could not quite grasp. It had made him wiser, older and more mature. And there was something else that hadn’t been there before. Some sort of aura that made him stand above the rest of the students in some incomprehensible way. But in truth none of that mattered. Even if the incident and all of the accompanying publicity hadn’t occurred she would still be Doug’s best friend. She liked being around him. He made her feel good, caused her flesh to tingle and her heart to flutter wickedly. And Nadia came to the conclusion that she quite liked those feelings.

  Doug wasn’t so sure that he’d become more mature or wiser by the incident, as Nadia liked to say. But he did know that he had changed. Perhaps he had hardened, become more in tune with the realities of the real world, which was probably a good thing.

  It had been two years since the incident at the Ricker residence. And other than the headaches and the social issues, everything seemed okay. In all that time there had not been even a whisper of a recurring incident. If he was some sort of seer, as some people liked to say, then why didn’t he continue to see? Doug was happy to leave it alone, of course. He certainly wasn’t anxious to revisit the trauma of that first incident and he was glad that the fervor had died down some. Of course there those who would not let the issue die completely. He’d been accused of hiding his prophesies so that he and his family could be left alone. And there were some who said he was selling his prophetic secrets to the government. Yeah, right. Like the government would pay money to see a monster kill innocent people. In truth, his mind was quiet and he was grateful for it.

  Then, the inevitable prelude to the event that would alter his life forever occurred. It was late September and Doug was in class at Lowden Elementary School. On that morning they were in social studies class with Mrs. Mathews. One of their recent subjects was a local political issue, a hotly contested mayoral race between the incumbent, Ronald Cheney, who was a white conservative, and his liberal opponent, a black man named Jimmy Johnson. Johnson was slightly ahead in the poles and there were a lot of people in city politics who were very nervous about it. Special interest was busy blitzing the airways with anti-Jimmy Johnson ads and the students were tossing around theories about why this was so. Until this issue came up, most of the students in Doug’s class had no grasp of the differences between liberal and conservative politics. All were somewhat aware of racial issues, however, for even in a school with a minimal black student population, there were the inevitable tensions.

  On the morning they were discussing the ins and outs of the mayoral race and its possible ramifications, Doug began to feel a strange pressure inside his head. He was used to the headaches. Ever since Tommy Ricker had punched his lights out and sent a small bone shard into his frontal lobe, Doug had been subject to sudden and intense attacks, sometimes to the point of making his nose bleed. He had never experienced an attack while at school, however, and Doug had never been terribly concerned that he might. His teachers had been briefed on what to do if one should occur. First call his mother at home, and if that failed, call his father at work, and if that failed call his doctor’s office for further instructions. Although severe, the headaches weren’t usually debilitating. From the onset, Doug sensed that this one would be different.

  As he tried to concentrate on his studies, the pain came on him with an intensity that took his breath away, and within a few short moments it was threatening to crack his skull like an egg. Waiting for it to pass he put his head down on his desk, resting it in the cradle of his arms. But the pain did not pass. Instead it strengthened, tearing a rent in his brain’s frontal lobe big enough to drive a car through. It was the first time since the day of Tommy and Savannah’s disappearances that Doug thought he might be experiencing another vision.

  “Douglas McArthur!” Mrs. Mathews said sternly. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Unable to answer her, Doug could only groan in agony.

  “Douglas! I’m talking to you!”

  Without warning the rent in Doug’s brain widened until it seemed he could see every star in the universe through it. The classroom expanded into a giant hollow place as Mrs. Mathews’ ste
rn voice faded, and the children seated at their desks around him sped away like fleeing galaxies. The only sound in the great hollow of Doug’s new and expanding universe was the distant but soothing voice of his best friend Nadia Zeigler. It’s okay, Doug, Nadia was saying. Just hang on, we’ve got you. We’re not going to let you die.

  In that moment Doug was keenly aware of the fact that he was not a child anymore and that he was not really here in this distant place and time reliving a terrible moment in his life, and that it was not Nadia Zeigler’s voice he was hearing. Somehow past and present had become strangely intertwined. Nadia Zeigler was long gone from this world. Following high school she’d gone to Bowdoin College, then on to Harvard University where she’d graduated with a master’s degree in economics. From there she had gone to work as an analyst for a prestigious Wall Street brokerage firm. On the morning of September 11, 2001 she had been at work at her desk in the south tower of the World Trade Center when the first jetliner struck. Being that she was fifty-six floors above the streets of Manhattan it is not surprising that nothing of Nadia Zeigler had ever been recovered from the wreckage of the twin towers; not so much as a tiny strand of her DNA. It was as if she’d never existed at all. Doug’s best friend and childhood sweetheart had become a footnote in history. So, this was not the voice of his long lost friend Nadia Zeigler. What Doug was hearing was the voice of Lucy Ferguson soothing him as he lay dying in an airport restroom from two gunshot wounds to his upper torso. Strangely, Lucy and Nadia’s voices had melded as one.

  The expanding galaxy began to slow, as if it were made of a rubber band that was reaching the end of its flexibility. It snapped back suddenly and Doug was irrevocably hauled back into the world of his youth, reliving a moment that he never wanted to think about again. He recognized the parking lot behind City Hall. A rather large crowd of people stood facing a man on a podium who was talking into a microphone. Doug knew who the man was. It was Jimmy Johnson, the city’s mayoral candidate.

  Doug watched in horror as a man with a raised gun moved through the crowd toward the podium. Deep in his psyche Doug was aware of the same dreaded presence he had first encountered on the day Tommy Ricker had broken his nose.

  Get out of my head! Doug railed to the presence, to no avail, for some twisted logic told him that the demon was as much in the world of Jimmy Johnson and the lone gunman as it was in Doug’s head. In his vision he saw the impossibly tall figure of the man in the leathery black robe with the attached cowl, and somewhere beneath the cowl in a whole other universe of terrible possibilities, a single blood-ruby eye burned into Doug’s brain with the intensity of a laser beam.

  Doug was keenly aware that the people in the crowd could not sense the demon’s presence. But what he could not understand was why they were willingly moving aside as the gunman passed through their ranks. Couldn’t they see that the man held a gun? Couldn’t they see the man? In a moment of horrifying clarity Doug realized that they probably couldn’t. Somehow the demon had blocked the gunman’s presence from them. These thoughts came to Doug as if in a dream. Actually the entire episode felt very much like a dream, but Doug had the sinking feeling that it was not a dream at all, that it was happening at this very moment in some past, present or future universe that did not even remotely resemble life on planet earth.

  The gunman stepped up his pace, moving quickly toward the stage. He stopped directly in front of Jimmy Johnson and raised the weapon. “Look Out!” Doug screamed from within the confines of his dream, and only later would he be told that he had screamed those actual words aloud for his entire class to hear as he sat with his head cradled in his arms at his desk, as intense spasms racked his adolescent body. So of course his cry fell on deaf ears, because Doug wasn’t actually there in the parking lot behind City Hall on that morning, he was in class at Lowden Elementary School, dreaming the entire episode in some sort of twisted time warp just moments before it happened. Or perhaps he was in an airport restroom at some point in the distant future dying of two gunshot wounds to the upper torso.

  No matter, the shit was about to hit the fan regardless of whether Doug was seeing it in past, present or future. And there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. Good ole’ mayoral candidate Jimmy Johnson was going to die. This was indisputable. So, oblivious, Jimmy Johnson went right on preaching his message of tolerance, liberation and change as if nothing at all was out of place. And nothing was, other than the fact that a lone gunman was standing directly in front of him. A lone gunman that nobody saw until it was far too late.

  As a matter of fact, mayoral candidate Jimmy Johnson became aware of the lone gunman and his intentions at just about the same moment that the gunman squeezed off the first round. The last thing Doug saw in his dream trance before the weapon coughed once, then twice, was the startled gas-cramp expression on Jimmy Johnson’s face. Doug felt the cold, dead dread of an inconceivable loss swell in his soul to the bursting point. He tried to move closer to the podium but his legs would not cooperate. That was because he wasn’t there, of course. He was sitting at his desk with his head resting in the cradle of his arms, his legs twitching like the legs of a dream runner, weak and useless.

  Even so, Doug’s body convulsed once then twice as he felt the bullets slam into Jimmy Johnson’s upper torso. But wait, were the bullets slamming into Jimmy Johnson’s upper torso or were they slamming into Doug’s? No matter. That was another place and time, a distant future that had no relevance in this particular moment. Or so he told himself. In the next instant Doug saw two dark, little holes appear in Jimmy Johnson’s chest. With the still startled expression on his face Jimmy Johnson went to his knees before the crowd, his arms held out in supplication like some parody of a healing preacher, before keeling forward on the podium and slamming face down onto the deck like a sack of wet laundry.

  At that moment it seemed the audience of onlookers all became simultaneously aware of what had just occurred. Screams went up in the crowd and they began to move in a wave. A small group of quick-thinking, brave citizens subdued the gunman, disarming him.

  As Doug regained consciousness, his body continued to convulse with spasms. Then a distant voice rose up out of his consciousness saying: hold on, Doug, I’m not going to let you die, and Doug realized yet again that all of these experiences were occurring at one singular moment in time. His chest ached and his head felt like it had been struck by lightning. “Oh, God, no,” he said, his head nearly splitting with the effort of the words. “I saw it!”

  “What did you see, Douglas?” Mrs. Mathews asked, her voice dripping with suspicion. That’s when Doug realized he was back.

  “Murder,” Doug said.

  “Murder? That’s ridiculous. You were having some sort of spell and then you fell out of your chair—”

  “It saw me,” Doug said, cutting Mrs. Mathews off. “It knows who I am! It wanted me to see.”

  “What on earth are you babbling on about, Douglas?”

  “The thing! The Collector! It knows me. It knows that I can see it and the things that it does. It wants me to see.”

  “Douglas, stop this immediately! I’m warning you.”

  Doug realized that he was lying on the floor beside his desk amongst a spillage of papers with Mrs. Mathews kneeling over him, staring at him with a mixture of fear and abject loathing. His classmates had all gathered around, eyes wide with amazement. Doug noticed that his nose was bleeding, the warm wetness pouring out of it, running past his mouth and onto his chin. One of his classmates produced a wet paper towel—not surprisingly it was Nadia Zeigler—and when Mrs. Mathews tried to take it from her she petulantly pulled it away and applied it to Doug’s nose. “He’s my friend,” Nadia said, as if Mrs. Mathews might somehow further injure Doug with her assistance.

  “It appears you’ve had some sort of seizure,” Mrs. Mathews said. “Can you sit up?”

  “Someone’s killed Jimmy Johnson,” Doug said.

  “What?” Mrs. Mathews’s eyes narrowed to fine sl
its, the expression conveying equal parts incredulity and loathing.

  “I saw—”

  “You saw nothing of the kind, Douglas McArthur. You had an attack, that’s all.”

  “No!”

  “Yes! And stop it this instant. Now, I’ll ask you again, can you or can you not sit up?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” Doug glanced around at all the gawking faces. He suddenly felt it best that he not say another word. Actually he was sorry he’d said anything. But the genie was out of the bottle and Doug knew that nothing he could do or say now would ever put it back in. Doug lifted his head and began to rise, but the effort only exacerbated the headache. He groaned and sank back down.

  Mrs. Mathews put her hand on his chest to stop the effort. “Don’t try,” she said. “I’ve asked Mr. Willis to call an ambulance.”

  “Ambulance!” Doug said with horror. “I don’t need an ambulance.”

  “I’m not so sure, Douglas. I’m aware of your . . . problem, you know.”

  “Problem?”

  “Yes, of course, you know . . . the bone shard . . . and how it got there. And the . . . other things. The . . . stories.” Mrs. Mathews looked away in embarrassment as though what she’d just voiced was so blasphemous, so profane it might actually infect her.

  “They’re not stories,” Nadia Zeigler snapped, coming to Doug’s defense.

  “And how would you know that, young lady?”

  “Because I know Doug and I know he wouldn’t lie.”

  Mrs. Mathews snorted. “Yes, so you say.” She gazed narrowly at Doug again. “Well if they’re not stories then perhaps there’s something more telling at work here.”

  “Like what?” Nadia said with suspicion.

  “I don’t like your attitude, young lady.”

  “What are you talking about?” Doug asked, but he thought he knew. She was well aware of the Ricker kids and of what had happened on that terrible day two years before. And like everyone else she’d listened to the talk shows and the pundits and had heard a variety of theories concerning the events of that day. One popular theory said that Doug was an evil child who had some sort of connection with the devil and had perhaps had caused it to all happen. He suspected that Mrs. Mathews was of this latter ilk. Plain and simple, she thought he was evil.