by Cody Lakin
Jezebel laughed, her cheeks turning red. “I said that?”
“You did. And if I hadn’t known better, I would’ve thought you were just another imaginative child. But no one, especially not children, willingly get so close to Fairlane Road. Not unless they’ve been there before, or belong there.”
“But, at the time, I’d never been there before.”
“Mmm.” Edgar’s eyes took on an unfocused, deeply thoughtful look. “Truth be told, I don’t know how to articulate my thoughts on this too well, but this is what I mean when I say that, although you and I share the ability to simply walk between the worlds, Jezebel, you and I still have fundamental differences. In this case, what I mean is that I was not born as a world-walker. I became one, when I was a child. You, on the other hand, did not become how you are.” A peculiar grin spread over Edgar’s mouth. “You were born like this—with your purple eyes, your deeper insights and compassion, even your ability to hear the songs of fairies. In simpler terms, you are unique.”
“Unique,” Jezebel echoed, and the word sent waves of bewilderment through the layers of her thoughts, and she found herself confused and amazed at the same time. She opened her mouth to say something, but no sound came out. There was too much going on in her head, and none of it was anything she had yet to make sense of. Edgar was implying something about her which she had marveled at many times over the course of her life: that, unlike Edgar himself, and unlike almost anyone else in the world, she had been drawn to the higher world beyond Fairlane Road—sometimes called Eden, the shining world, or even the Fairlane World—her whole life. Of course, she had only been brave enough to venture to it consciously for the first time at thirteen years of age, but her life, her every action, had always revolved somehow around Fairlane Road, and around how fundamentally different she was from anyone she had ever met.
She gaped at Edgar, who waited patiently for her to settle into everything she was beginning to learn about herself.
“You’re not saying I was born there, are you?”
Edgar adjusted his straw hat and scratched at his beard. “I wish I had concrete answers for you, but all I have to offer are my observations and intuitions. But if I were to guess, I would say that maybe yes… maybe, in some shape or form, you were born in the higher world. Or, if not born there, then you certainly belong there. In a spiritual sense, of course.”
Jezebel smiled from the pure thrill of discovery. This was something she had known—and felt—most of her life, but Edgar’s words confirmed it, validated it: she did not belong in this world. It explained so much.
“How does that work, though? Like… how could that be? My dad isn’t…” She placed a hand against the side of her head.
“I do not know, Jezebel. I don’t know how things like this happen, or why, but it happens nonetheless. It could be that your soul was born there, but your body was born here, if that is possible.”
“My soul was born there,” she echoed his words. “Have you ever met anyone else like me? Or anyone who can walk between the worlds like you or me?”
Edgar Forgael’s eyes darkened and he looked out toward the street. He didn’t speak.
“Edgar?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve never met another. Not personally. But I’ve heard of others.” He looked at her. “So have you, in fact, though I doubt you’ve thought much about it. You were only thirteen, after all. One of them may even be just like you: someone physically born in this world, but whose soul was born in the higher world, down Fairlane Road.”
Jezebel shook her head. She could barely think; her palms were sweating and her heart was pounding. Was there really someone else like her?
“Who?”
Edgar took a long, heavy breath.
* * *
(Who?)
Lamplight Park was empty except for Charlie Knox, who sat cross-legged, meditating, in the grass by the bandstand.
It was rare for more than a couple of people to be in the park at the same time unless an event was happening, like a festival or a small concert. Its only standout features were the small bandstand, the unimpressive playground equipment, and the creek running along the park’s eastern edge—the same creek which flowed past the Jeans’s house and Edgar Forgael’s house, and even ran parallel to Fairlane Road for a short time. Other than those features, Lamplight Park was bare and seldom visited, and Charlie Knox had taken advantage of its emptiness, having spent the entire night meditating in the grass by the rustic bandstand, still and silent and unnoticed.
In his mind he maintained a meditative blank state, void of activity or anything resembling consciousness. The night before, when he had first assumed his sitting position in the grass, he had expected not to be disturbed. But this morning, as the sun rose only to ascend into a mass of gray cloud-cover, he had achieved such a heightened state of mental white noise that he was entirely oblivious to his surroundings and to the arrival of a young teenage couple to the park.
The boy was sixteen years old, and it would have taken anyone little more than a glance to see that he wasn’t at all beyond his years either in the realms of wisdom or maturity. Dressed in a sports jersey, a hat worn with the bill turned sideways, and baggy jeans hanging low, his stride was one of hunched shoulders and dragging feet, as though he were trying to parody an exaggerated gangster in both appearance and demeanor, but he was succeeding only in making himself look silly, which he was blatantly unaware of. His girlfriend clung to his elbow with one arm, and held her phone in front of her face with her free hand, and she forced a laugh occasionally at something she was reading so that her boyfriend would ask what was so funny, so that she could explain.
They came to the park alone.
Not noticing the meditating man on the opposite side of the bandstand who was concealed from view by the plastic railing that encircled the stage, the couple walked to the bandstand, chatting and laughing in obnoxious grunts, the boy offering halfhearted comments on how incomparably hilarious he thought the girl’s explanations of the things she was reading were, and her laugh was a partly artificial, high-pitched chittering that echoed out from the bandstand’s roof. They went silent, relatively, when they started to kiss, but even then, not for long. Their breaths became faster and heavier, and they shuffled before dropping onto the bandstand’s raised flooring. As they began to remove each other’s clothes, the girl moaned, and her boyfriend hushed her.
“What?”
“Don’t want someone hearing us, right?”
“Shut up, Dwayne. There’s nobody here.”
They both paused for a moment, Dwayne with his pants pulled down to his ankles, the girl still with her bra and shorts on. They were both shivering slightly in the morning’s cold. Dwayne made one quick sweeping glance over the park in order to make sure no one was in sight—and equally certain that this would be over before anyone could arrive—but it was then that he saw Charlie Knox meditating on the grass, his back to them, body completely still.
“Oh shit!” the boy cried out, standing up in a hurry.
“What?” His girlfriend started to rise now, too.
“What the hell’s he doing there? Jesus. Hey! What the hell are you doing here, man?” the boy named Dwayne yelled, hoping that the sitting man would simply take off. Dwayne had no notion that his ability to intimidate was diminished by the erection in his tight white underwear. “Hey! I said: What the hell are you doing here, man?”
Now disturbed from his trance, Charlie Knox opened his eyes.
* * *
“No.” Jezebel felt involuntary shudders rippling through her body, chilling her blood and her bones. She stood up and took a step away from Edgar, who remained seated in his plastic chair. “It can’t be him. It i
sn’t him.”
“I’m afraid it is him though, Jezebel. And you know this, too.”
“No.”
“You met him—and his parents—the first time you went wandering down Fairlane Road, when you were thirteen years old,” said Edgar, his voice heavy with regret. “Then I came and rescued you from them.”
She continued to shake her head but knew, in her heart, that Edgar was right. It was seared too deeply in her memory: her first time down Fairlane Road. The Knox family had been there. She had remembered that only this morning. Not only Thomas and Susan, who her father had been hunting as a detective, but their thirteen-year-old son, Charlie, had been there with them. More than anything, she could remember his eyes. He had been just thirteen, the same age as her, and she hadn’t known who he or his parents were at the time, but she could remember how he had looked at her, and she had been more afraid of him than of his threatening and imposing parents—
* * *
(—because she had known, when she had looked in his eyes, that he was evil)
Charlie Knox wasted no time rising to his feet and turning around to face the clumsy teenage couple who were standing in the center of the bandstand, undressed except for their undergarments and the girl’s unbuttoned shorts. The goosebumps were visible on their skin in the morning’s crisp air, and the girl had her arms crossed over her chest. Charlie didn’t have his goggles on, and the sheer intensity of his emerald-eyed gaze made the couple physically recoil, as though they had both been struck by something at the exact same instant. The girl almost screamed.
Charlie took this moment of delay, caused by their momentary speechlessness, to reassess the situation. He had meant to yell at them, perhaps scare them away with threats, but now, with his eyes on them, a new option occurred to him, and it swept away any hint of anger at having his meditation interrupted.
He smiled inside, remained emotionless on the outside, as he began to circle around to the bandstand’s entrance, eyes never leaving the couple.
“Pardon me,” he said with a feral grin. If he’d been wearing a hat, he would have tipped it to them.
“Wha—what the hell are you doing, man?” the boy demanded. “You some kinda creep? Think this is funny?”
“Actually yes,” Knox barked at the boy as he came to block the bandstand’s single entrance and exit. “I find it funny that, while I was here before you, you are the one blaming me for interrupting your juvenile romantic escapade. I also find it funny that your tone of voice and body language seem to imply that you’re trying to intimidate me, as you stand there in your underwear, indecent and vulnerable.” His eyes flared wide, and as he stepped onto the bandstand, barring their exit unless they chose to jump the plastic railing, he eyed the girl up and down, but not out of desire like she thought when she reacted by hiding behind her boyfriend, clutching his arm. He looked at her analytically, assessing her with as much platonic indifference as he did the boy.
“Hey! Stop looking at her like that and just… just leave us alone, all right?”
“We don’t want any trouble!” the girl said.
“Always the same.” Charlie Knox shook his head as he withdrew from his coat a knife with a six-inch blade. The blade was the shape of a fat triangle, ending at an elegant point which brought to mind images of a shark’s tooth. A ritualistic, old weapon. It gleamed in the dim morning air, drawing attention to itself with its fatal extravagance.
* * *
“Maybe… so maybe he can travel between the worlds, like us,” said Jezebel, her voice increasingly desperate, “but… but that doesn’t mean he’s like me. He’s… evil. It doesn’t make—”
“Do not make the mistake of categorizing him as evil, Jezebel,” Edgar cut her off, which was something he so rarely did. “The moment that you make a distinction between good and evil, you project yourself onto whatever it is you’re making the distinction between. You know as well as I do, my dear, that in the real world, good and evil are—how shall I put this—fairytales. They’re fairytales we tell ourselves so that we can go about our lives more simply; they’re a way of rationalizing what we see. But if you discount something as evil, you disregard it, you ignore its power, its reality, and its importance. Worst of all, when you call something evil, you make the mistake of not only thinking that you are good, but that you have any right to say that anything is one or the other. And in fairytales, good always wins. So don’t go about this with any of these illusions, Jezebel. Knox is too complex, and too dangerous.”
Jezebel, whose cheeks now burned red and whose heart was beginning to race, nodded, feeling as though she were moving in slow motion. Edgar, who she viewed as a most lighthearted and delightful old man, had never sounded so serious or looked so intense.
“Okay,” she said. “But I still don’t understand. I mean… how could someone like him belong in the higher world? He’s… he’s dark, and that place is so full of light. It’s beautiful.”
“It is full of light to you, and to me as well, but not to him. The higher world has many faces, many different planes, each one different to whoever lays eyes upon it.” Edgar sighed. “In fact, it’s the same here in this world. You see the world how you choose to see it.” The old man’s eyes skirted the sky above, between the trees that lined Forest Street. “Over there, it is like that, but to the furthest extreme. You see the higher world as you are, whether that means seeing the good and the light in the world, or the darkness. I, for one, do not wish to imagine what Charlie Knox’s version of the higher world must look like.”
* * *
(…a place like that would be covered in shadow)
The girl gasped, and she clapped both hands over her mouth, her eyes stricken on the gleaming blade of Charlie Knox’s knife.
“Shit, man!” the boy yelled, backing away. He surprised Knox with a shred of youthful nobility by stepping directly in front of his terrified girlfriend, shielding her. Knox remained where he was, knife in hand, blocking the couple’s exit from the bandstand.
“Please don’t hurt us,” the girl said. She began to sob. “We’ll leave. We won’t tell anybody. We… we…”
“I’ve got a few bucks in my… in my jeans. You can have it all if you let us go. It’s a win-win.”
His burning expression never changing, never relenting, Charlie said simply, “No,” in a tone void of remorse, and stepped forward, his hand tightening around the hilt of the knife.
In the eyes of the boy, he saw the slowly dawning realization of his own coming doom.
* * *
For a long time Jezebel didn’t say anything, she just stood there on the edge of Edgar’s porch, shivering from both the chill in the air and from her inability to comprehend everything she was being told.
Tears swam in her eyes as she looked up at the sky. “So you’re saying that… that Fairlane Road isn’t always how I see it.” This wasn’t a question, but a statement. “It can be just as bad, and dark—“ and evil she thought, but didn’t say, “—as Charlie Knox and his family.”
“Yes,” said Edgar. “It is the rule of all things, Jezebel. Nothing is all darkness, and nothing is all light. I’m certain your father would have something clever to say about how that invalidates most religious thinking, but as I was saying, that rule applies to Fairlane Road. You inhabit the lighter side of it. And there’s Charlie Knox, who inhabits a much darker side.”
“Right.” She let out a long, slow breath. She felt strange. She felt dull, empty, disenchanted somehow. There was a sourceless weight setting in her stomach. “I should go.”
“Are you all right? I understand how much this is to take in—in fact, I’m still ruminating over it myself—”
“I’ll be okay,” she said, and flashed h
im an artificial smile. He watched her walk from the porch, an intense look of concern on his face. And he wasn’t surprised when Jezebel turned left at the street, and headed for Fairlane Road instead of home.
Chapter 5:
Those Little Details
Detective James Goode awoke too early that morning, but instead of feeling distressed the way he normally did when insomnia infected his routine, he decided that the comfort of his bed plus the warmth of his fiancé beside him were enough to make up for not getting enough sleep.
The light in the room was dim and gray, and the ceiling fan’s airy whooping coupled with his fiancé’s steady breathing were all he could hear. Goode yawned, scratched at the stiff stubble along his jawline, then snuggled up to his fiancé, resting an arm over her as if he meant to shield her. She stirred but did not wake.
He had met Rebecca five years ago at a friend’s dinner party, and he had been impressed with her from the very beginning. She had never been squeamish, not even when it came to the stories of his most gruesome cases, and had been forthcoming and upfront. She wasn’t a woman interested in formality for the sake of formality, nor was she someone to play games, which was something she often had to remind him of. They had slept together the same evening they had met, then had moved in together two months after that, and hadn’t had any serious problems in their relationship, nor could James Goode see them ever having any of the caliber that could endanger their commitment. She had supported him from private investigator to county detective, and he had done his best to be there for her as she climbed the low-opportunity ladder that Lamplight offered in the way of a career for a real estate agent.