Spirit Wars

by Mon D Rea

  People called me the Spirit Sherlock with both approval and disapproval, but of all those people, no one ever suggested the need for moderation until the name began to weigh upon my small shoulders.

  At first, it was all a game or a hero’s blustering on TV. But while I could relate with the main character from a safe distance and experience the world without its actual consequences, I soon found myself the star of my own life and the stakes piled up too high for me to glimpse any hope of release.

  Chapter X: The Crow Man

  Day by day my abilities grew. Being one of a kind, I felt as though I was cast down a dried-up well where I was to spend the rest of my life in solitary confinement. Looking back, I can’t help but marvel at myself for surviving the isolation with a maturity and courage far beyond my years. On the other hand, it also feels as though most of my childhood had passed by while I was in some sort of trance.

  On my own, I learned how to control my talents and to avoid exerting myself. I became wary of very old items that had passed through too many hands as these could be damaging to both body and mind. During the couple of times I had to learn the hard way, I was invariably left drained.

  I also learned to keep away from objects that belonged to those who had already crossed over. In the same way I chose to keep silent about the balloons and their fatal implication, I knew there were things man wasn’t ready to know.

  Because of my extreme unconventionality, the supervisors at Blessed Children’s despaired of ever finding a family to take me in.

  But then the day came. A man came.

  This was to be the last reading I ever did. The last case of the Spirit Sherlock that would end in my taking off the mantle to the dismay of all my fans.

  The visitor was a man in a luxurious black trench coat and fedora whose brim he kept low over his eyes. He didn’t let the Sisters or any of the kids take his coat, which conveyed his intention of being there only for a quick visit, nothing unheard of in the orphanage. But his eccentric fashion sense, the combination of the hat, coat, and leather driving gloves inside the poorly-ventilated house in a tropical country, produced a sinister air around him. All the kids thought he was either a spy or a gangster.

  It was just my luck when the man expressed interest in me – me of all people, who was notorious for my weirdness and frequent misbehavior and unpopularly old at the age of fourteen – me in particular and no other. As though the man knew something about me that nobody else did; perhaps he had had his eyes set on me for a while or it wasn’t the first time we had met.

  Indeed a great tingle of precognition rushed through my brain the first time I locked eyes with him from under his hat’s brim. I thought I caught the glint of a monocle though I couldn’t begin to comprehend why anyone would be wearing one outside of the silver screen. It was like the crack of a door to a mystery. The question was, did I want to know what was behind the door? It could be a way out of the orphanage or, more likely, a chute into the waiting mouth of a lion.

  The visitor asked to have a private chat with me in the Mother Superior’s office like a handful of interested adopters. The Sisters, normally suspicious of such characters who appeared wifeless, consented. After all, what harm would thirty minutes of talk do? If this was a chance to send me out of the orphanage for good, then it was a risk everyone was willing to take. It was a good deal.

  If they only knew what could happen in thirty minutes.

  We didn’t stay in the office long. The visitor only waited for us to be alone but as soon as the door clicked shut behind him, he walked towards the window, lifted it open, and stepped right out onto the sill as nimbly as the world’s biggest and oldest kid. He smiled a youthful, naughty and mute smile under the constant brim and motioned with his index finger for me to follow.

  For a fleeting moment, with the tail of his black coat dragging under between his bent knees, he looked crow-like. He disappeared over the window in the blink of an eye, his hanging coat-tail the last and only evidence of his passing, and soon this too was gone.

  I was left gaping and had a few slowed moments to decide what to do. Should I accept this challenge or go back outside and tell the Sisters? It was after all suspicious of a prospective father to be climbing windows and daring the child. But something in what was happening mesmerized me. Hadn’t I wished something unusual would happen? For countless lonesome nights, hadn’t I prayed for a shocking event to pull me out of the bleakness of orphanage life, save me from an existence devoid of purpose? Now that the day had finally come, I wasn’t ready and my knees were all wobbly.

  When I finally gathered the courage to bring myself out the window, I found the man standing on the edge of the roof and waiting for me. I swear to God, his eyes were as luminous as a cat’s in the dark – or those of the monster that haunted my room – and just as I guessed, one of them was artificial and would glint like glass.

  “You dream of becoming a spy,” the man stated rather than queried. “I’ve been watching you, Master Lachesis. This is what your heart has always wanted. Well, today is your lucky day because I’m here to welcome you to a grand conspiracy.” His voice was the deep rumble of thunder bastardized into the oily cadence of a street hustler.

  The whole thing was starting to feel like that scene in the Bible, the temptation in the desert, one of those stories the Sisters were fond of telling. The only difference was, the devil was the best a kid’s imagination could cook up, half-gangster and half-spy from an overload of pulp-fiction Hollywood flicks, whereas the Son of God was too young to make a responsible decision.

  What did he mean he had been watching me? With that glowing cat’s eye and bizarre scope that could probe past flesh and bone, straight into my soul? And why did he call me by a different name?

  All these things were flashing through my head like tunnel lights through the windows of a train, but they were all swept away and hushed into utter calmness by the thought of the drop below I had always gazed at but never really feared. A four-story fall, not enough to kill a grown man but for a kid thrown down by an adult male, it’d break more than a limb; probably even a neck.

  I actually squinted to get a clearer image of my strange father-candidate. It was impossible to tell the man’s age from his smooth face and his erratic movements that seemed to ceaselessly warp reality into a blur; in the end one was left with nothing but a vague impression. And it was as though his words were honeyed crystalline water from a magical fountain that erased every memory. He was the most intriguing man I had ever met and yet at the same time the most unremarkable. I doubted if any of the adults in the orphanage would manage to recall what the man was like – or that there was ever a man.

  Over the following years I would harbor a dim but nagging suspicion that if anyone checked the guest register for that day, they would find nothing but faded ink on a line. The man was like a mystical court jester who, through his jerky motions, cartwheels and somersaults, had everyone eating out of his hand. Every single person in the orphanage couldn’t for a moment look away and risk missing his illusions.

  Without a doubt, he was a being from another dimension.

  I was totally clueless as to his origin and intentions. A first for the Spirit Sherlock. I was frozen like a buck whose antlers had felled many a rival but who was now standing face to face with a carnivore for the first time, and the lord of all carnivores at that, a stately black panther that locked his hungry gaze at me.

  Still standing on the edge and a harmless distance from me, the man removed one of his gloves as though he intended to close a deal. Still he kept most of his face covered with the brim of his hat. Then the curve of a smile glued to either corner of his lips, he whispered across the space between us: “You long for answers, Master Lachesis. I have all the answers you seek.”

  He threw the glove down onto the roof tiles between us and there it lay with its sleek blackness bunched up and stiff like a sleeping tarantula.

  “Go ahead. Touch it and free yourself.” />
  A small warning in my head told me I was playing with forces people weren’t meant to meddle with, much less fourteen-year old kids. If I wasn’t careful, my curiosity would destroy me. And yet an even louder voice rebelled against my indecision, against my very existence. My soul cried out for an explanation as to why my parents didn’t want me. And my visitor made it sound like there was an answer to every question, like it was all within my grasp, just waiting for me to make up my own damn mind.

  I gingerly lowered my body into a crouch and my hand trembled a little as I reached.

  My fingertips grazed the black leather. It was enough.

  This was the reading I had: At some unknown point in the future, the whole sky would be covered by a flock of bat-like creatures as far as the eye could see. They would form an endless, waving parade of dark flags as if to call forth armies against a weakened ruler. This deluge swept and flowed ceaselessly with an ultrasonic entomo-mechanical roar and in its heart, a flame-wrapped titan, the culmination of all nightmares, laid waste to human cities. It was an infernal sight and sound. All sources of light were missing in the heavens and the days of darkness stretched on to eternity.

  The weakened lord was being swallowed by the wave of bats and he was crying out in an alien yet universal plea for help. Within earshot a figure, shadowy and contorted, turned its back on him. A sinking feeling told me I knew exactly who the figure was: It was me.

  Most psychic experiences I had ever had gave me reason to regret, whether it was a head-splitting migraine that reached all the way to the back of my skull or a fever that would go on for days. Yet at that time, although I was in shock, everything felt as smooth as silk; it was only later in my life that I would come to associate the episode with a very high-quality drug or wine after one had been used to the more common variety. It was like what the wine snobs said: liquid gold.

  “What did you see?” The trickster asked, his lips curling and for a second I almost expected a forked tongue to flick right between them.

  “I… uh…” I stammered.

  “Cat got your tongue?” He teased and laughed musical peals that overlapped and blended. The sound was a cross between glasses clinking and a cave filled with bats.

  “We are now and eternally brothers-in-arms, Master Lachesis. What you have glimpsed is the time in the future when your services must be rendered. You shall become a double agent, a devious master of the double cross.

  “There’s a war brewing between world and underworld. Think of this as an invitation to a private bunker. For such a privilege, any mortal would gladly give their right arm… or rip another’s.”

  Then, from an inside pocket of his coat the man took out a small crystal ball like those marbles that were the latest craze on the playground.

  “However, before the proper time, all your senses must mimic the slumber of the dead. You shall become blind and numb to our world, and your own memory shall cease to be of aid to you. Then, like all expired lives, you will be reawakened and reminded of the tribute you must make.

  “You will know when you are needed, Master Lachesis.”

  I was glued to the spot and my eyes nailed to the tiny ball of a universe the man held between his thumb and index finger, deeply bothered about its fate. Or as it was for a soldier who was hypnotized by the release of a grenade pin, the realization would come too late.

  The man smashed the tiny ball onto the roof. It scrunched against a tile and just as it did, its owner tumbled backwards like a black-clad assassin making an exit. I caught one last glimpse of him flying away as his coat vent ripped all the way up to become the wings of an enormous crow.

  Then the whole world was bathed in blinding, electrifying light.

  This flash of light raised all the hair on my body. It was the kind of energy psychic individuals could sense but was otherwise invisible and harmless to regular people. This went on for many seconds while I felt my eyes being scorched and melted from the inside and I craved to gouge them out. I was driven to my knees by the pain.

  I must’ve passed out because when I came to I was lying flat on my back on the yard below. I wondered what I was doing there. Did I finally act on the suicidal thoughts that had been preying on my mind for the longest time? Until that very moment I never thought I was the type.

  The Sisters loomed over me with panic in their eyes. They were screaming my name soundlessly. And right before I blacked out again, an ice-cold realization seeped into my consciousness, which was turning against itself and denying any knowledge of today’s events. The Spirit Sherlock would be the patsy in this diabolical case. I’d be held accountable for my shameful moment of weakness, for resorting to the most desperate act of suicide. The hero would become the coward.

  Even as I lay there watching the concern in everyone’s faces, I knew that certain things had been set in motion. The name on the guest register had already begun to fade and the memories of everyone in the orphanage were right that moment being altered. Soon no image of a crow-like man would remain, extinguished out of every weak and mortal mind.

  To top it off, my limbs still had feeling in them but my supernatural senses didn’t. My psychic talents were like a dismembered leg whose familiar weight I could no longer feel.

  I closed my eyes tight to trap the welling tears.

  ****

  All the other orphans stood crowding the second-floor balcony and looked down shyly, awkwardly; many of them confused how they should feel. This was what most farewells were like in that place, other than being a regular occurrence.

  But then Little Sophie who was the youngest of the batch uttered my name in her still unformed language. They were the first words she had ever spoken. She called out: “She-lak!” at the verge of tears, and suddenly all the others started chanting, “Sherlock! Sherlock! Sherlock! Sherlock!” as I was led away to a taxi.

  I was moved to the apartment of an unmarried social worker. It was ruled that I posed a threat to the healthy environment of the orphanage. I overheard them saying how I was a corruptor of impressionable young minds. But it mattered very little then because I knew I wasn’t anything anymore. I’ve become nothing.

  Chapter XI: Homeschool Hell

  “Good evening,” I greet as I shamble into Death’s office and Sephtimus utters a stream of obscenities in classical Latin and ancient Greek. If sentences could consist entirely of abuse, he was producing exactly those. I can tell even if the ubiquitous skeletons (My Helter-skeletals, as Sephtimus fondly calls them) hadn’t erupted in laughter.

  I feel like an exorcist about to face the biggest demon-possession case of his life, but then it’s probably no more than what inner-city school teachers face every day, I reassure myself. That’s when Sephtimus generates a ball of fire and flings it straight at me. I shriek and escape incineration by the skin of my teeth.

  Probably not.

  I’m panting like a fish out of water, making echoey, overlapping noises that are the hallmark of fershees, otherwise unscathed. Then I notice my normally slippery backside has been charred and there’s this small matter of a flame on my tail-fin.

  A hyperactive skeleton races to put the tremulous fire out. It runs screaming and dragging what looks like giant innards but turns out to be a fire hose. Like a demonstrator or an unwashed prisoner of war, I’m struck by a jet of foul swamp water.

  Sephtimus and his Helter-Skeletals howl with laughter. The sound the reaper makes is that of grinding tectonic plates transformed into a voice.

  “Stop it!” I shout, surprised to hear the thought automatically translated into ancient Greek even though I’ve never learned the language in my life. I regret the words as soon as they leave my mouth.

  Sephtimus abruptly stops laughing.

  Your unclean lips do not deserve the tongue of the Ancients, he communicates to me telepathically before spitting to the floor. His attendants jump on the chance to serve and polishes the floor back to a mirror-like shine with rugs of human skin, all spread-eagled and papery.
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  You are worse than a mendicant. They merely eke out an existence in places where mortals do not turn their gazes.

  Simultaneously the computer monitors flash pathetic images of street people: the self-exiled, the graying, and those who have been driven away by their families and forgotten.

  You, when you were borne by the Storks, the Crows were right on their tails. Life and Death hovered over you on the day of your birth. A most ambiguous existence, no auspicious event ushered your coming. No star marked your place in the universe and no angels trumpeted your entry onto their list.

  The monitors reveal the invisible battle of elemental forces. Giant prehistoric birds that glow in immaculate whiteness - the Storks - screech and snap at a volatile, writhing mass of blackness - the Crows - as the second attempts to spirit the newborn baby away.

  You are but the shadow of a man, a smudge or a blot that barely touched the page. The Grim Reaper smiles a crooked smile.

  I keep my head bowed. Viscous water oozes off my deformed exterior and sullies the immaculate floor. Muted videos cast shadows all over the room; all over Death, his henchmen, and me. I don’t need to look up at the monitors to see what images Sephtimus has chosen next to demolish my very being. They’re the slow and rhythmical movements of the umballici, an entire school of them bobbing above their owners; every balloon connected to a human like a vertical, translucent shadow.

  You… are… a mistake… Nataniel Cuervo. Death enunciates the words with pursing movements of his normally static lips and a mad twinkle through the eyeholes of his Dia de los Muertos mask, which he apparently never takes off.

  I’m shaking not out of anger at all the lies coming out of the reaper’s mouth but from fear of the words that I know deep down to be true. Every human owns an umballicus except me.

  I fall silent for a long time. But then I whisper, “You’re wrong.”

  Sephtimus explodes. What did you say? he roars as he leaps up from where he’s been sitting. The skeletons that make up his throne whimper and cringe back into the shadows.