My mental paralysis eased up long enough for me to do what she told me to.
I climbed into the passenger’s seat of her car, tossed my stuff in the back seat and then, without any further discussion, she slammed the car into gear and headed out. I think we went east but I really wasn’t sure. It didn’t really matter.
We drove for at least two hours before she said anything. “We’re going to a small town south of Erie. We have some work to do.”
I remember exactly what I was thinking as she said those words: That this trip was either going to remove any remaining doubts I had about being a sender (and trust me, there were still a ton of those), or that I would find out someone was pulling a very elaborate prank on me and I was about to find out who the mastermind behind the whole prank was. As we drove towards Erie, I started running through the list of people I knew who had the imagination and resources to pull off a prank like this. There was my brother, Keith. While he and I were pretty tight growing up, we took different paths after college. He stayed working with our dad in the construction industry and I set off to be a full-time musician, part-time substitute teacher. Keith was a few years older than me and was always pulling pranks on me when we were kids. He was a definite suspect.
Next there was a good friend of mine named Mark. Mark and I were tight since the second grade. His mom used to say he and I were as “thick as thieves” back then. Don’t misunderstand, Mark and I never got into any trouble with the law or did too much to cause our parents any heartache. We were just always palling around doing something. Whatever.
Mark was pretty smart, smart enough, I figured, to have arranged this whole thing with Rachel. But the more I thought about it, the less I liked him for this prank. Mark had gotten married a year or two before and his life was flooded with the sudden responsibilities that come along with being married and raising the kids his wife had from her previous marriage.
Mark was just too damn busy to be the mastermind behind this whole thing. I mentally crossed him off my list.
By the time I had added three more names and crossed off six suspects, Rachel pulled the car off the main road and onto a dirt road. Normally, a dirt road in the winter would be impassable, but this particular dirt road must have kept cleaned off by either the town or whoever owned the road. There was snow covering the road, but no more than an inch or two. She pulled over to the side of the road after a hundred yards or so.
“Okay,” she said, keeping her eyes fixed on some distant point down the road, “this is it. He’s up ahead. He’s weak and old and shouldn’t be much of a challenge for you. Which is good, considering this is your first.”
I can’t tell you what I was thinking or feeling at that point. I can say my mind was flipping between absolute terror and excitement faster than it had ever waffled between thoughts and emotions before. As Rachel put the car back into gear and slowly headed back down the dirt road, I felt every fiber of my being tense up. Something was going to happen soon, I could feel it. Something either horrible or hilarious, I couldn’t tell, but I was leaning towards the horrible thing.
As the car made its way towards our destination, I noticed the trees began to thin out and I was able to see farther ahead of us. When we first made the turn on to the dirt road, all I could see past the trees was more trees. But as we inched farther, it became obvious that there was a clearing in the trees up ahead, maybe only another hundred yards or so.
“There’s a pond up ahead,” Rachel said, her voice dripping with nerves. “I’ll stay in the car. You walk up behind him and shove him into the water. You may want to grab a rock or something hard and hit him in the head if you can. That will daze him for a moment. And Trevor?” she asked.
“What?” was all I could manage.
“Moments count. Every last one of them. Hit him in the head, shove him into the pond, then hold him under till his body goes slack. Keep holding him under for an extra minute or two, just to be sure.”
She pulled the car off the road and into a small clearing in the woods. The clearing was just big enough for her car to fit and offered plenty of cover in case whomever I was about to come across at the pond decided to glance over his shoulder to see if anyone was headed his way.
“Grab a rock,” she said as she shut off the engine. “Move up as quietly as you can. Get as close to him as you can, then, with everything you’ve got, crack him in the head with the rock. If he sees or hears you before you get close enough to hit him, throw the rock as hard as you can at him, then charge him. Don’t talk to him. Don’t let him say a word to you. When he sees you, he’ll know who you are and what you’re there to do.
“If you let him talk to you, he’ll twist your mind up so fast he’ll have the jump on you and you won’t have a clue what happened till you wake up in Hell.”
I looked at Rachel, who was still glaring ahead, though now she was only looking at trees. I reached over, and pulled her face towards mine. “You have to tell me this isn’t some fucking joke and that, whomever it is you’re saying I’m going to see at the pond, is really a demon and not some innocent guy trying to catch a few fish for his dinner. Tell me!”
“Trevor,” she said, a sudden compassion flooding over her face, “this is real. It’s not a joke and the guy you’re about to confront is dangerous. He is a demon, do you understand that? A demon that, if it senses any doubts in you or sees you hesitate, will kill you. You have to do this. You’re a sender. This is your destiny.”
I opened the car door then shut it as quietly as I could. I didn’t look back at Rachel as I started walking towards the pond. As I walked, my heart thumping so hard I was convinced its beating was loud enough to reveal my position, I searched the ground for a good sized rock. Finding one, I picked it up and held it firmly in my right hand.
I was sweating like I was twenty miles deep into a marathon that I hadn’t trained for. My head was pounding and I could feel my heart pumping in every joint of my body. “This is happening,” I thought to myself.
I walked up another fifty yards or so till I could see the pond. I slowed my pace, making sure my steps were quiet and would not reveal my approach. I moved closer, keeping my body low and making sure to keep some cover between me and the pond. My breathing turned staccato and my jaw began to quiver.
Ten more feet and then I saw him.
I crouched down behind a bush, wishing it still held its leaves, and just watched him for a few minutes.
He was older, I’d say maybe in his mid-sixties but couldn’t be sure. He was sitting on the ground, most of his legs in the dirty looking pond. I imagined that if my visit was during the summer months, the pond’s water would be green with algae. Though the one acre pond was, as it should have been, frozen over solid, the area around where this old man was sitting wasn’t frozen over at all. Either the man had broken through the ice (which was certainly very thin where he was sitting, being so close to the shore) or something else was at work. Something I wasn’t ready to explain quite yet.
The thawed out area formed a near perfect half circle around him, stretching out no more than four or five feet from him. His body was swaying rhythmically from side to side. Slowly as if he was listening to an old slow jazz tune. His arms hung slack by his side, his fingers, curled back in on themselves, dangled in the dark, frigid water. I didn’t believe that I recognized him, though I still hadn’t seen a clear view of his face. I needed to be sure. I needed, at least some part of me needed, to know my whole “prank” idea was nothing more than wishful thinking. I needed to see this man’s face before I could even think about doing what Rachel told me I needed to do.
Now, you know where you found me and the position I’m in. I’m sure you’d agree I’m not in a good spot by any stretch of the imagination. And since you’re standing here listening to me, you’re probably not all that thrilled with your situation, either. I don’t know your story and how you ended up here beside me, but I do want to tell you how I ended up here. It was the result of three
mistakes I made. I’ll tell you about the last two of those mistakes later, but first, I need to tell you about my first mistake.
Once I decided I needed to see that man’s face before I hit him in the head with a rock and tried to drown him. I started to move up behind him, as quietly as I could. My plan was to get right behind him, say something so he’d turn around, then, after a split second, decide whether I knew the guy or not. If I didn’t recognize him, I would set my mind to doing what I believed I needed to do.
He was still sitting, half in, half out of the pond. Arms still slack by his side and his torso continuing its rocking from left to right, right to left. I figure I was ten feet behind him when I started inching towards him. After I removed about five feet of the distance between him and me, I saw him start to move his arms a little. Then, a few seconds later, he started splashing the dark greenish water onto his face and body. I thought that was either an award winning demonstration of method acting or that this guy really was someone that needed to be sent back. To where, I wasn’t sure.
I risked another step closer.
He cupped his right hand, dunked it in the water then raised it to his mouth. He was drinking water that was sure to be crowded with bacteria. And not just once, he repeated his hand cupping and drinking activities five or six more times.
I caught a quick glimpse of the side of his face when he turned it a little to lap up whatever pond water his hand was still holding. I’d never seen that guy before in my life. He didn’t look like what I expected a demon to look like, however. He looked like a man down on his luck, maybe recovering from a long night of Boon’s Farm drinking and was too sick and hungover to realize he was sitting and drinking from a pretty disgusting looking (and smelling) pond.
Before I raised the rock over my head, I took a careful glance around the pond. Last thing I wanted was for someone to see me walking up to an old man, holding a rock above my head. Actually, that wasn’t the last thing I wanted. What ended up happening was actually the last thing I wanted.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I must have stood behind him, rock in the ready position for at least a full thirty-seconds. I stole a quick glance behind me to see if Rachel was standing close by or to see if anyone had come up behind me. I was alone. Just me and the pond drinking man, whom, I was eighty percent sure was a demon I had to send back.
But eighty percent isn’t a hundred percent.
I paused a bit too long and my mistake was set in stone.
When I turned back towards the man, he was staring up at me. His look was a mixed smile and sneer.
“Put that fucking rock down, Trevor. You have no idea what the fuck you’re doing here. Drop it.”
His voice was steely cold and gravelly. It sent a weakening chill across my entire body. The rock, which weighed no more than five or six pounds, suddenly grew too heavy for me to keep holding it above my head. My arm started shaking and my grip, jeopardized by all the sweat pouring out of my hand, lost all strength.
I dropped the rock harmlessly to the ground. It made an odd thunk when it hit the damp, moss covered ground and its weight caused it to sink into the ground a good inch or two. The ground should have been frozen and the thunk sound should have been more along the sharper sound rocks like to make when bouncing off something hard. That thunk, for whatever reason, stuck with me. I can still hear it clearly. I guess that sound became my life’s theme song. Just a thunk. A sound of a falling rock onto what should have been rock hard, frozen ground.
“That’s better, Trevor. That’s much better,” he said.
“How, how do you know my name?” I tried to sound commanding but my shaky, whisper-thin voice denied my intention.
“You and I,” he said as he began to stand up, “we’re on the same team.”
“You’re a freaking demon,” I charged, almost embarrassed by the accusation as soon as the words left my mouth.
The man stood straight up, maybe a foot and a half away from me, and smiled. “Mac, you aren’t really buying all that shit someone told you, are you? Tell me you don’t really believe in demons and in your role in the whole ‘good versus evil’ thing. Come on, tell me you don’t believe that shit.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what I believe.”
“Who put that crap into your head?”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. My surety percentage dropped from a high of eighty percent down to around fifty percent. After all, what Rachel had told me was so fantastic, who could blame me for not buying in? Sure, there were signs something was different about me my entire life, but making the jump from crows following me around to me being a demon sender, suddenly, at that moment, when I had to decide either to kill someone or not, the jump was way too much of a leap for me to take.
I also didn’t tell him Rachel had told me everything for two reasons: One, if things went badly, I didn’t want him to know I wasn’t alone. He might go looking for Rachel if he was able to take me out of the picture. And secondly, some tiny voice inside my head told me to never mention her name to anyone. Ever. I only tell you about her since, well, it doesn’t really matter anymore.
“Listen, Mac. You may not remember, but you and I have met before. Long time ago, when you were still a kid. Think back, you’ll remember.”
“I’ve never seen you before in my life,” I said, though entirely unconvinced of my statement’s accuracy.
“You were seven years old,” he continued. “You were having a spell with nightmares. Kept you awake most nights. Ring a bell?”
It sure did.
When I was seven, I had a two or three month stretch when I hardly got any sleep. There was this recurring nightmare that greeted me every time I did fall asleep. Same dream every time.
I was walking, alone, in a harvested corn field that ran alongside a very dark and very long forest. In my dream, the forest was always on my right hand side and my head was cocked towards it. Not sure if I was keeping my eye out for anything that might come charging out towards me or if I was looking for something I had lost. It didn’t matter because nothing ever came charging out of the trees and I never found anything I had lost.
In the dream, I kept walking until the path I was on turned rocky. As I kept walking, the rocks turned into boulders I had to climb over. At one point, the forest still on my right, the path turned into a stream. I followed the stream for a stretch. After a dream-minute, I saw my mom sitting on a boulder, looking down at a very small, very narrow pool of water. I started to walk up to her when she turned towards me, looked me in the eyes, then smiled. She stood up and jumped straight down into that little pool of water. I rushed over and only saw her left hand sticking up out of the water. I knew it was her left hand because of the wedding ring I clearly saw on her ring finger.
Her fingers were splayed open, as if reaching for something. I fell to the ground and grabbed her hand and started pulling with all the strength a seven-year-old could muster. I remember all I could see of my mom was from her elbow up. Deeper than that, the water was a murky gray that prevented any light or vision.
I grabbed her hand and pulled, only to have her hand slip from my grip, like she was being pulled down by some force deep in the dark water. She reached up her hand again, I grabbed it and pulled with everything I had. As she was pulled down again, her wedding ring slipped off her finger and into my hand. I pulled my hand out of the water and just stared at her ring sitting in the palm of my hand.
Her hand never came back up again.
That dream kept me from even wanting to go to sleep for several weeks before my parents took me to a doctor. In keeping with the secret agreement doctors must have, he referred us to another doctor who, in keeping with the code, sent us to yet another doctor. It was the last doctor who suggested my parents bring me to a therapist. A head-shrinker was in my immediate future.
I have no recollection of what the head shrinker said to me or how he made the nightmares end as quickly as they did, but I did rememb
er his face. And I remembered it when the guy at the pond told me he’d seen me before.
“You were the doctor who got rid of my nightmares,” I said. “But how…”
“I remember every one of my patients, Mac. Every one. And I remember I helped you out. Stopped those haunting dreams from coming, didn’t I?” He didn’t pause for an answer. “They were about your mother drowning, weren’t they? Those dreams you kept having.”
Something smacked me into awareness all of a sudden. “What did you do to make those nightmares stop?” I asked.
The man looked a bit nervous with my question. As if he was hoping I wouldn’t have asked that question. “Mac, all that matters is that I helped you out. Now, if I was whatever someone told you I was, why would I have helped you?”
That smack of awareness brought something else to my forefront. People age in all different ways. Some people’s bodies and looks fall apart as they get older and some hold it together remarkably well. But this man, whom I hadn’t seen in around twenty years, hadn’t aged a day. He looked exactly the same as he did when I sat in a brown leather chair in his office, all those years ago.
“What did you do to make my nightmares stop?” I asked again. This time my voice was chock filled with confidence and certainty. He must have sensed my sudden change and realization because his face changed in a flash. The half smile half sneer he had on when I first saw him, dropped the smile part and turned into a hundred percent sneer.
Then, what I needed to push me closer to a hundred percent certainty happened. The man’s face went all sorts of hazy right in front of me. Not so dramatic that he started to morph into another person, but enough for me to know. It went hazy in a flash then the haze sort of swirled like what you’d expect to see if someone’s face turned to liquid and a hurricane was passing over.
I didn’t hear the noise like I heard the thunk when I dropped the rock, but there was a click that sounded somewhere in my brain. Like the sound an old fashioned wall switch makes when the circuit it controls is opened. Everything instantly made sense. From the crow following me around and starving itself to death, right up to Rachel telling me I was a sender and a part of the never-ending battle between good and evil. I was different. Special, and I was the last one to see it. That creepy old guy I picked up that night knew it right away. I knew, as soon as that click sounded, that both creepy old man and the hazy-faced bully in the bar, they hated me almost as much as they feared me. And this guy, this doctor, he was terrified of me as well.
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