Fairlane Road

by Cody Lakin

  So how could Knox’s version of the higher world be beautiful, like Edgar said?

  Images reeled through her mind, memories of the higher world, the golden sunlight, the emerald forests and glittering pools, stretching toward a horizon of towering mountains and the mythical realm of Faerie. Even the immortal Shadows, for all their imposing untouchability, were beautiful and awe-inspiring. And with these images and remembered sensations held in her mind, Jezebel tried to envision what Charlie Knox’s version of it would look like.

  (And you know something, Jezebel?)

  But, even as she tried, all she could picture was darkness.

  (It wasn’t so different, after all)

  (It was beautiful)

  She snapped back to alertness when she realized Edgar Forgael was weeping. She had seen him cry out of joy in the past, out of pure awe at something of breathless beauty, but never anything like this. This was a man driven to the end of his wits. This was a man whose whole world, as he knew it, had been shaken and pulled out from under him.

  Edgar began to regain a sense of composure by taking a few deep breaths. He wiped frustratingly at his swollen eyes. “You have to face him, Jezebel. Somehow. If… if you really are his opposite, then you might be the only one s-strong enough to… to resist him, and his darker truths.”

  Jezebel nodded although her heart felt heavy. “My father can, too, if he, you know, comes to him like he said he would.”

  Edgar shook his head. “I wouldn’t be so sure. Your father’s a good man, maybe the most intelligent, philosophical man I’ve ever met.” He sounded more like himself now. “And you’re very much his daughter. But… it takes more than that to… to face, and best, someone like Charlie Knox. I know that now.”

  “But you said he might even want to be stopped, like being debated and challenged is what he actually wants.”

  “Yes, but by that, I mean he wants to be truly stopped, if he can be. His wisdom is of the higher world, Jezebel. Your father is a philosopher of this world. Charlie Knox means to bring the truths of the higher world into ours, and just because he wants to be challenged doesn’t mean he wants to be stopped.”

  “My god.” Jezebel stood abruptly. “This doesn’t make any sense! It’s like he’s converted you or something! He’s a… a psychopath! A serial killer! I won’t let him be right—about anything, higher truths or not!” She stepped away from Edgar, who still remained sitting where the lawn met the road’s asphalt.

  “Jezebel—”

  “I know.” Her frustration, which was equal parts fear, had become a focused point, bordering rage. How it was she could hate a man she had never met with such present intensity was beyond her. “I shouldn’t underestimate him, I shouldn’t disregard him… I know those things. But I just want this to end. Whatever it takes.”

  Edgar looked at her, the tears on his eyes drying under the silent starlight. “You know it isn’t that simple, Jezebel, don’t you? The connection you have with him, the reason why he’s here, there’s more to all of it. It won’t just end.” He trembled. “It won’t just end.”

  She sighed, letting her eyes drop from him to the ground.

  Yes. She supposed she knew that, one way or another.

  * * *

  Jezebel was back in her house ten minutes later. Edgar had apologized again for showing up so late and then had gone, declining her offer to walk him home. There was something different about the way he walked, about the resignation in his posture, which troubled her, and the image of him slipping into the darkness stayed fresh behind her eyes when she slid back into bed and pulled the covers tight over her shoulders, shivering. She had never known actual emotional trauma before. She had known heartbreak, overwhelming sorrow, depression, even rage—rage at her mother for leaving when she had been so young, rage at the world for the apathetic way it was—but what she felt now was different from any of those emotions. Her lifelong friend, confidant, and fellow world-walker who she had never seen in a mood less than cheerful or, at the very least, composed, had come to her in such agony, such despair, unlike any state she had ever seen in him. The confusion she felt was second only to the fear. His message had been so overwhelming, so harrowing.

  It means Charlie Knox is coming here, she thought, and soon. To confront my father. And then me. Maybe I could get dad to tell James Goode about this, and set up some sort of… ambush. I can—I will—tell him that in the morning.

  She hugged the covers to her chest, feeling far from sleep.

  Charlie Knox isn’t right, she told herself, and the anger she’d felt out on the lawn returned. There’s no truth to him, there’s only illusions, and darkness. And we have to stop him, maybe even kill him. He isn’t right.

  Charlie Knox isn’t right. He can’t be.

  Can he?

  It was a long time before she fell asleep. But it was a troubled, restless sleep.

  * * *

  Deep in the forest down Fairlane Road, in the higher world, Charlie Knox sat meditating on a flat rock at the edge of one of the many glittering pools.

  It was night but the stars bathed everything in surreal, soft silver light, which was more illuminating and much fuller than the moonlight on Earth. The air between the trees was aglow with it, and the fireflies delighted in it. It felt serene on Charlie’s skin, feeding his cells, his blood, and filling the void he felt whenever he was on Earth, or as the fairies sometimes called it: the lower world. And from the stars as well as the distant mountains there were voices, whispering. They were the equivalent of the songs Jezebel heard in her version of the higher world, and they delighted Charlie’s soul, reassuring him, teaching him, feeding him and his desires.

  Meditating was a necessary and productive activity in the lower world, of course. It stilled the mind, calmed the heart. But when he meditated here in the higher world, it brought to him a unique, uncommon clarity. Sometimes he was gripped with such strange and compulsive desires, especially when around so many people during the time he was spending in Lamplight, and coming here to meditate was the only way to fill up the holes in him where those strange desires took root. Desires for sex, for example: that compulsion to relieve himself of that irritating masculine need to orgasm inside a woman, which had its attraction—and he couldn’t deny the beauty of nature, of intimacy and vulnerability—but to him was, for now, a cumbersome distraction from his cause, and with such a high course of truth, to indulge his sexual desires was nothing more than a paltry, animalistic, base instinct. A distraction.

  Then there was the desire to kill. The lower world was so full of idiots: fools addicted to their possessions, so obsessed and attached to matters so far removed from their own lives—sports teams, celebrities—that they were blind to anything of actual depth or importance. People of such deafening ignorance that their political or personal views, even their strange clinging to blatantly false religions which resembled children’s fairytales more than real life, allowed them to deny actual facts about the world, scientific facts even, and these people did this proudly, without stopping to question themselves. So much banality, people so philosophically and mentally underdeveloped and devolved, all so certain of their own intelligence and correctness. And some did no thinking at all, Charlie had discovered. No real thinking, anyway. Some went about their days without so much as one higher, deeper, original thought. They operated by routine, by what was right in front of them, by the excitement of their next hedonist sexual encounter or need of their next bathroom break.

  They were everywhere in the lower world.

  They all thought they were so important.

  Their mere existences, the space they took up, was insulting.

  How he longed to kill, to kill, to kill them, to smell their blood, to
see their desperation and fear, the culmination of all they had feared all along without knowing it—their own mortality and inexorable death—as they cowered even when they knew it was too late, rather than rising and embracing their ends with grace. Death was as much a truth as life. That was what made it so beautiful, and so cleansing. That was why the desire to introduce it was so strong.

  They were all so shallow, so dull, so banal and certain, and death in comparison was a fierce, undeniable, sobering truth. It had shaken the robotic people of Lamplight so far, introduced true fear—truth itself—into their lives, and all they could do before it was cower and despair. And oh, how it made him want to kill again. To reduce them to stuttering, trembling shambles in their corners.

  But he needed restraint. He couldn’t kill at every whim he had, otherwise he would be indulging his own desires, and his overall cause was one of higher truths, not desires. His meditation helped. It cleansed him, calmed him, made his spirit still, even if only for a little while.

  But there was still a looming fact that hung over him even in his meditative state. The thought of it dampened his spirits. Soon, very soon now, in fact, he would have to face Jezebel. She who had been the spark behind nearly everything he had done in his life. She who was the balancing weight on the other end of the seesaw, the light that let his shadow exist. And although they had never actually met—not except once, when they had been thirteen, even though it had lasted just a few seconds—he liked to think of their opposing lives as a dance. And this dance, like the shadows which danced around a candle in a dark room, had been leading to this meeting, what could very well be a final confrontation. Jezebel was the only one who could stop him, he knew, and even though he had for so long been looking forward to their meeting, it was something he deeply dreaded. They would meet as enemies, when, deep down, he wished they could be like siblings. But as the opposing forces they were—two parts of a whole—their mutual existences extinguished all hope of their existing in harmony with one another.

  Even in his meditative state, emotions compromised the current stillness of his mind, and his hands started to tremble.

  Facing her would be the hardest part of this. The truths she lived for were just as powerful, just as important, just as right as the truths he lived for, so their final confrontation would be more about their individual wills and even inner power, and Charlie Knox knew perfectly well that he could lose. In fact, he didn’t even know if he wanted to win, not against her. After all, their individual purposes weren’t so separate. Jezebel deserved her shot as much as he did, but as he now sat, trying to meditate and still his thoughts, he wondered how much he cared about success at all. He wondered if his caring for Jezebel might not overcome his will to succeed.

  For a moment he opened his eyes, which had filled with tears, and looked up to the star-filled sky. Then he closed his eyes again and resumed meditating, realizing that, in many ways, this was as much a battle against himself as it was against the pretenses of the lower world and its countless untruths. All Jezebel needed to do was know. If he could just make her understand that her purpose in life, the essence of her existence, wasn’t different at all from his. Hers was bathed in light, his in darkness, yet their paths led inevitably to the same destinations, the same truth. He had his purpose, his cause, and she had hers, and they were, he would make her understand, exactly the same. But she was like family to him, the other half of his severed soul, and it was always so much harder to face one’s friends than enemies.

  May I find grace and beauty even in their failings and ugliness. May I know the weight of every taken life, every unfulfilled desire, every longing, and may I then be cleansed of it so that I am a pure harbinger of the higher truths.

  The whispering voices of the fairies filled him with serenity. He would be ready when the time came.

  * * *

  Before the light of morning had yet touched the sky, Jezebel dreamed a dream from which she awoke deeply disturbed and almost sick to her stomach.

  In the dream she was being undressed by slow, gentle hands which ran up and down her body with tremulous passion. The hands were smooth, careful yet firm, and they slid her shirt over her head and off, then returned to touch the skin of her torso. They rubbed along her curves, then found her breasts, and massaged and caressed them with religious ecstasy. Jezebel had her eyes closed and thus didn’t know who was undressing her, but she could hear and feel his gradually quickening breaths, and somehow she knew—she felt—that this was okay, this was right. It was what she wanted. So she gave into the man’s touch and caress, feeling that longing in her chest, her lower stomach, and below.

  She reached out and pulled him closer so that their bodies were touching, and she could feel the firmness of his desire, and she loved that sensation against her through the thin material of her jeans. It had been so long.

  The man’s hands slid across her skin from her breasts through her bra, over her collarbone, then to her neck, and guided her toward him. She gave in fully, completely, into kissing him: the warm liveliness of his lips, the caress of his tongue on hers. It was like she had known this person her whole life, as though they had made love so many times that they knew perfectly the rhythms of each other’s bodies. Kissing him, whoever he was, feeling his hands now massaging her hair, awakened a fiery yearning deep inside her, and her already pounding heart beat even faster. This was somehow what she had wanted, what she had needed, for so long.

  His hands slid down her body and undid her jeans, and he helped her pull them off. Now she was dressed in her soft underwear, panting, and in the sweetness of the moment she didn’t question how it was that he was already undressed. She unhooked her bra as he pulled her panties off, and then she threw her arms around his neck and pulled him on top of her, kissing him as she felt the weight of his body and the racing of his aroused heart from in his chest.

  She gasped, and her fingers involuntarily clamped at the hair on the back of his head. Then he began to thrust and recede and thrust again, slowly but deeply, and her body seemed to be erupting with burning, showering pleasure so strong it was almost pain, almost too much, almost too good to be true. How could it feel so good when it never had, with anyone, before? How could it be this much?

  Jezebel started to moan and cry out with every thrust, doing her best to keep her voice low and close to a whisper but hardly able to. Her mind felt rewired, numbed, reduced to a singularity, to the abandonment of this moment and its every sensation. She could hardly tell the difference between her body and his. They seemed to be melding, becoming a single warmth. And god, it was so good.

  But then she opened her eyes, having all but forgotten that her eyes were closed and that she didn’t even know the man.

  Except she did know him, just like it felt. Who else could it have been? Who else was she fated for? Who else could ignite in her so deep a feeling, so unthinkable a pleasure, so forbidden a desire? She found no surprise, no shock or revulsion that it was Charlie Knox on top of her—in fact, it was as though she’d known all along—as he thrusted, panting, fucking, pouring out his passion and soul-deep love and belonging into her.

  Jezebel felt it coming, rising in her with all the abandoned intensity of a sun, and held him tightly against her and buried her face against him so that it wouldn’t be so loud when she—

  She cried out and bolted upright in her bed, and was just barely able to suppress an actual scream at the empty room, partly from sudden seizing terror, partly from the final fading sensation in her dream—that of pure, indescribable pleasure.

  Jezebel sat there, dressed in her underwear under a large t-shirt, panting and sweating, one hand crossed over her chest, and the fullness of the pleasure from her dream seeped away—a tub full of water with the plug pulled out—and that pleasure was swiftly being replaced with dread. And disgust.r />
  Her vision blotted and darkened, so she laid on her back and rubbed at her forehead and scalp, trying to take deeper, slower breaths. For a few moments she lost any sensations except for numb tingling in her hands and feet, and thought she might throw up, but then the world spun back to her and she felt okay and glad that the clarity of the dream was fading, leaving her exhausted, sweaty, and resigned to lie back and wait for her vitality to return.

  But every time she shut her eyes, the sensations of the dream were brought back. Every deep, slowing breath reminded her of his breaths, his quickening panting. And it was not disgust she felt when she closed her eyes, but desire, arousal, an implacable warmth. There had been a sense of very real, vividly sharp pleasure from that dream, and it frightened her. It had been Charlie Knox. How could she want him like that, even if only in a dream?

  Jezebel ran her hands over her face, which was sticky with drying perspiration, and wondered why she would have such a dream, and what it could mean. Then she turned on her side, hugged her arms tight against her chest, and tried to fall back asleep.

  * * *

  Because of her scattered and restless sleep throughout the night, Jezebel didn’t get out of bed until eleven o’clock—which was, for her, obscenely late—and by then, she was weak and hungry. Without bothering to shower first, she went straight to the kitchen, made herself an egg which she put on a piece of toast, and then went out onto the front porch where her father was sitting like usual. She saw that he was almost finished with the book he had been reading for the past two weeks—a book about the life and philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche—and smiled as she sat down by him.