No matter. Everything is all mixed up anyway. He is colder than he has ever been. And as he lets the icy currents take him, the blue light fades and he dreams about the day his mother and father died.
It is very much like the day of the Jimmy Johnson incident, in that he is attending classes at Lowden Elementary School when the nearly unbearable pain once again slams into his frontal lobe like barbed needles of fire. It is second period algebra when the agony strikes him, followed by the convulsions, and finally, the all-encompassing blackness that feels very much like death. And in the darkness of that terrible place a small pinprick of light emerges, growing ever larger, opening like the iris of a camera lens, until it begins to form a picture.
Now Doug is no longer in class at Lowden Elementary School. Nor is he drowning in a cold river in northern Maine, or dying of two gunshot wounds in an airport restroom in Tampa, Florida. Now he is in the backseat of his parent’s car going with them to the bank so that they can sign the papers for the new house that they are buying. But no, this can’t be right. They’d insisted that he go to school that day instead of with them.
He realizes suddenly that he is seeing everything through a intensely magnified lens and that he isn’t really in any of those places. Not in the physical sense at least. But he is there nevertheless, in all of those places, past, present and future through some very strange and perhaps even magical way.
He sees the backs of his parent’s heads, and they are talking and moving animatedly, like actors in a sped-up silent movie. The day is drizzly and the world outside the car is heavy with fog. Drab scenery and ghost vehicles flash hypnotically past, water swishing from beneath tires and shooting rooster tails of it skyward.
The old familiar but dreaded bubble begins to swell suddenly inside of Doug again, wanting to burst his head open with gripping pain. Doug is not really surprised. He’d been hopeful that this vision would not be like all the rest, but down deep he’d known the real truth. He is surprised at the coolness of his observation. Has he accepted his fate or has he just learned to look at it in a clinical and detached way?
No matter, for soon the cold realization of why he is here in the backseat of his father’s car strikes him like a whiplash. Try as he might he can do nothing to change the inevitable; in these joyless journeys it seems that he is merely a spectator to events, with no apparent control over their outcome.
As this realization washes through him terror strikes his heart and swells within him like something alive and poisonous. He tries to move, to shake himself out of the grim reality of this terrible situation, hoping against hope that if he can come awake, nothing bad will happen. He realizes that physically, at least, he is in his classroom at Lowden Elementary School, and that his screams are being heard only by his teacher and classmates. Nevertheless, Doug cannot help but try. He screams at his father to stop the car. But his father does not hear him. That’s because he isn’t actually there, of course. He reaches out and touches his mother’s arm, and for only the shortest of moments he believes that she has felt his touch because he sees goose bumps rise on her bare flesh. She turns slightly toward him and he sees a quizzical expression form on her face. It’s me, mom, he says, I think something bad is going to happen. Please, you have to tell dad to stop the car. But of course she does not hear him. The moment passes and his parents continue gabbing in that animated silent-picture way, as if nothing has happened, as if nothing is wrong. Doug realizes with cold certainty that, in their world, nothing has happened, nothing is wrong.
Up ahead a tractor trailer shoots around a turn heading straight for them, its eighteen wheels shooting gigantic sprays of rainwater in all directions. The truck is moving way too fast for the road and visibility conditions. Doug screams in frustration, but the bubble keeps right on swelling, wanting to crack his skull like a newborn bird cracks the shell of his birth egg. And again Doug knows—although he doesn’t know how he knows—that there is something in the bubble, some force of intelligence that recognizes him.
It knows I’m here, Doug thinks. It knows I can feel it. I am some sort of conspirator in all of this, like it or not. Something happened back when I was nine years old that wasn’t supposed to happen. It began with that bone shard Tommy Ricker drove into my frontal lobe, and it allows me to see things I was never supposed to see. I wasn’t meant to know about him, the evil one. But I do know. Somehow, since that day, I have this connection with death. I’m part of it. I’m part of him. And he and it are part of me. He is death and I am death’s conspirator. Worse still, he knows that I am death’s conspirator.
The bubble bursts suddenly inside Doug’s head, sending a lightning bolt of white-hot energy exploding outward in all directions, threatening to shatter his skull. Doug is certain in that hideous moment of searing pain and unbearable torment, that like it or not, he is in league with the dark. And in that moment of bursting energy, he sees the dark thing that calls itself Collector materialize on the seat beside him, its ebony cloak shimmering, its single red eye a burning beam of pure evil. The Collector moves—But it does not so much move as it ceases to exist in one place and appears in another— and pulls its cloak over Doug’s father’s head. Doug watches his father yank the car’s steering wheel hard to the left, right into the path of the oncoming tractor trailer truck. In that moment he hears his mother’s hoarse and desperate scream, even as his own futile scream bursts from his mouth.
In a heartbeat it is over. The car in which his mother and father are riding is suddenly shattered into exploding fragments. Sprays of glass and twisted metal rush through the car’s cabin like shrapnel from some colossal bomb-blast, blocking out everything in its destructive haste. Doug feels something in that moment that he will never be able to properly explain nor forget; it’s as if the very souls of his parents enter him, and live there for a few fleeting seconds.
‘It’s all right, Doug,’ they both seem to say in unison. ‘Everything happens for a reason. Some day you will understand why it had to be this way’.
The souls of his parents desert him just as swiftly as they entered, leaving within him a void that will never again be filled.
Doug awakens at his desk screaming, his classmates gawking. His wide-eyed teacher—a different one this time—but one who is keenly aware of Doug’s history, rushes from the room in search of assistance. The child with the terrible vision has come awake after a two-year hiatus and everyone knows that there will be hell to pay for it.
Doug bolts from his seat, oblivious of his paralyzing headache and his aching heart. He exits the school building and runs headlong into the driving torrents of rain. He squats, leaning his back against the cinder block building with the cold wetness pouring over him. He remains there for a long time, his mind a jumble of white noise, his body unable to move, unable to react in any meaningful way, so certain is he of what has occurred.
In time an unmarked police car pulls into the yard and comes to rest beside him. Rick Jennings and Aunt Tessa, his mother’s sister, both step out of the vehicle. By now his teacher has gotten the principal and they are all standing in the rain, trying to coax him inside, but he refuses. He sits cowering like a scared animal in the hollow where the two wings of the school come together. His mind is sick with the vision, with the empty feeling that his parents have left inside him on their way to wherever they’d gone, like two jagged holes at the center of his soul.
The dark bubble of expanding energy that takes the vague form of a human being is his enemy, stealing from him everything he has ever loved. He wants desperately to believe his parents are still alive, but all the sad, staring eyes tell him it isn’t so. If he’d had a scalpel and a surgeon’s skill he’d have cut out that area of the frontal lobe where the bone shard had pierced his brain like some macabre psychic lance.
He stands shakily and stares into the driving rain, seeing nothing, feeling nothing but numbness in his aching heart. Aunt Tessa begins to speak but Doug stops her with the simple raising of the hand.
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“I know,” he says, in a hollow voice that comes from somewhere beyond childhood, a voice that is edgy with some terrible and mature bitterness. “They’re both dead! They’re never coming back. I was there. I saw it happen. I felt it. Maybe I even caused it to happen.”
“No, Doug—”
He fixes his burning eyes on his aunt, silencing her without speaking, and she can only gasp at what she sees; a maturity that belies his years. The woman turns away from Doug’s dark stare. Her purse drops from her hand and the contents spill out onto the wet ground at her feet. As she stoops to gather up the scattered remnants, she steals a quick glance at Doug. Her eyes say: No! You cannot see such things. You cannot cause such things. You’re a child, not a devil. But Doug can see through her eyes all the way to her heart and he knows that her heart does not agree with her eyes.
Mr. Willis, the school principle, having had previous experience with one of Doug’s spells, says nothing. He turns and wanders back inside the school.
After a long moment, Rick Jennings says, “Doug, come along with me in the patrol car and we’ll talk.” He puts his hand out tentatively, as if he is afraid that Doug will snap it off.
“I don’t want to talk.”
“But you must, son. It’s the only way you’ll get through this.”
“I’ll never get through it,” Doug says.
“Yes you will, Doug. You must.”
Aunt Tessa makes no attempt to comfort him. It’s okay. He doesn’t want it. He pushes roughly between her and Jennings, running out of the school yard and down Hawthorn Street. He runs nearly five miles before exhaustion overtakes him and he huddles, soaking and numb, at the base of an ancient tree, hugging his knees and staring at his feet.
It isn’t until after the funeral that he actually cries. And it isn’t Aunt Tessa’s arms he goes to in those bitter moments, but Rick’s, the only person in the world who truly understands his pain and the terrible things he has been forced to witness.
In all the years after that, up until the time of her death from breast cancer in 1996, Aunt Tessa never asked about his sight. It was as if the answer to such a question would have been more than her simple, fundamental circuitry could have borne.
She raised Doug to manhood, however, in spite of her misgivings, and she was always a kind and gentle guardian. But in all those years between the death of his parents and her own death from cancer when Doug was in college, she’d hardly laid a physical hand on him.
The vision suddenly fragments, but Doug is still dreaming. Impossible because he’s dead, and dead men don’t dream. Or so he has always believed. Nevertheless he cannot stop the endless procession of thoughts that have somehow invaded his being. He is no longer at Lowden Elementary School rehashing the terrible moments of precognition that changed his life forever. And he is no longer drowning in a cold mountain stream in northern Maine. And it seems he is no longer in an airport restroom dead or dying from two gunshot wounds to the upper torso. Somehow he is on an airplane and they are in flight. He knows this because he recognizes the distinct high-pitched whine of the engines and feels the pressure of altitude in his ears. A wave of nearly desperate trepidation washes through him. He’s so damned cold. Colder than he remembers ever being. His breath puffs from his mouth in big white clouds and he has to hug his arms around himself to stay warm.
Doug looks to his left and sees that the old priest from the churchyard is there, sitting in the seat across the aisle. Doug closes his eyes and opens them again. The old man does not go away. Nevertheless, Doug understands that this must be a dream, a dead man’s dream, because the old priest is dead. No doubt about that. He had literally died in Doug’s arms, which reinforces again in Doug’s mind that he too must be dead.
Even so, the old guy seems quite real. He picks his hand out of his lap and thrusts an object toward Doug which looks to him like an ancient arrowhead encrusted with verdigris. But Doug knows this is not the case. He remembers very clearly what the old priest had told him about the object. It is the broken-off tip of an ancient weapon. Doug suspects that it has something to do with Christ, but finds this patently absurd. Why would he be given an artifact that had anything to do with Christ? He’d never been a religious man, hardly ever stepped inside a church. If it was true, then the priest must have gotten the wrong guy. But now that he thinks about it, he realizes it couldn’t be the same object, because that object is still in his jacket pocket wrapped in a soft piece of cloth. Doug reaches into his pocket but the object is not there. Fear settles over him like a shroud. Stupid man. How did he manage to lose it so quickly and carelessly?
A gold chain dangles beneath the fisted artifact in the old man’s hand, and Doug realizes that it might actually be the same object. How he got it back, Doug cannot say. The priest’s arm is skeletal; loose sacks of liver-spotted flesh hang off it. The hand is a twisted claw with long yellow nails, not unlike that of a talon, and it grasps the object arthritically.
“Here,” the old man says, thrusting the artifact at Doug. “Take it.” His voice is a rasp. “I never wanted it to begin with. I did not ask for it. I have carried it nearly my entire life waiting for this moment to pass it on. You are the chosen one, not me. I am old, too far gone. Take it!” he insists, thrusting the object ever closer to Doug’s face. The claw of a hand with the thick yellow fingernails is shaking very badly, insistent, thrusting, thrusting, so urgent. “Do not have much time,” he sputters. “Taaaake iiiit!”
Doug feels something painful grip his right arm, so he turns toward the window. There sits Annie beside him and she has his arm in a death-lock. She looks frightened out of her wits. He understands now that he is most definitely dreaming this because Annie is back in Stone Harbor with her father, not here in this wretched airplane beside him. He wants the dream to end; he has a very bad feeling about it. But the dream refuses to go away, and so, not having much of a choice, Doug rides with it.
Annie shrinks in closer to him. “Who is that awful man?” she asks.
“Somebody I met at your mother’s funeral,” Doug replies. “He’s the one who killed your father.”
“Dad’s not dead!” Annie says with incredulity.
“Oh he’s dead all right, Annie. I saw him die. The old bastard’s some sort of magician. He might even be immortal. He knows how to con the reaper. He wants to reshape the world in his own image, create a new race of obedient, genetically engineered humans and colonize the galaxy with them. You should know that. Christ, you’re his daughter. And you agreed with him. You said he was a man of vision.”
Annie’s brow is covered with large beads of sweat and her eyes are huge. She is moving her head slowly from side to side now, and her tongue, which looks as dry as desert sand, licks out between parched lips reminding Doug of a serpent. Her skin has turned the color of spoiled milk.
“He’s not really a bad man, Doug,” Annie says and her lower lip is trembling. “He’s just very ambitious.”
“Ambitious?” Doug says grunting out a laugh. “Get a clue, Annie. I’m on my way to hell right now to see if I can save the world from his wrath. But I suppose it’s too late for you, isn’t it, girl? You’ve already succumbed to his wrath. It happened long before I met you.”
“You bastard!” Annie slaps Doug across the face. Not surprisingly Doug feels no pain at all. “Who’s going to save the world from your wrath, Doug?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about, sweetheart,” Doug says in his best Humphrey Bogart voice. And as he speaks a great cloud of cold steam exits his mouth.
“Don’t give me that,” Annie replies. “You have things inside you too. I know you do. You think you’ve been fooling me all these years but you haven’t. I hear you sometimes in the night.” The grip she has on Doug’s arm tightens, and he can feel the cold lizard-like touch of her fingers kneading the flesh there. He shudders in revulsion and pulls away. “Are you really that much different than my father?”
“Maybe not,” he says, knowing
that he and her father are both linked somehow to the Collector.
Doug is sweating profusely now, even as he hugs his frigid arms to his body. He’s so cold. Jesus, can somebody turn up the freaking heat? He doesn’t like this dream at all. A pall of impending doom suddenly washes over him. He wants to jump up and rush forward to the cockpit. He wants to tell the pilot to turn the plane around because something terrible is surely about to happen. Claustrophobia is closing in on him and he feels so utterly helpless. Annie’s eyes are huge now, larger than her pallid face. They are two enormous whirling pin-wheels that seem to have swallowed her face entirely.
The person in the seat ahead of him turns around and Doug sees with no real surprise that it is Jeff Dean, the hippy with the mean surveillance machine. Jeff smiles his huge infectious smile and says, “You didn’t really think you were gonna get away so easily did you, amigo? I knew it was there in your pocket all along.”
“What are you talking about?” Doug asks.
“Jesus Christ, amigo, are you thick, or what? Listen, do I have to spell it out for you? I’m talking about the artifact. They all think it’s some sort of path to God. They might be right and they might be wrong. Either way they all want it. But it belongs to the kid. Without the kid it means nothing.”
“What kid?”
“Christ, Amigo, you are thick. The kid! Your kid! It belongs to your kid. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”
“Listen to him, for he speaks the truth,” the old priest says. “The history of human civilization depends on it.” He’s still dangling the object in front of Doug.
Soul Thief (Blue Light Series) Page 28