Ten seconds later I regained the ability to speak.
“Oakley!”
“What?” she called back, distant, still moving away.
“You owe me three chapters. The Counte of Monte Christo. Same day and place, after school, next week!”
She laughed and continued running. I listened to the footsteps fade away and be replaced by sirens and stretched my fingers around my shoulder, where the car mirror had cut me. There, underneath the surface, was something hard.
I gritted my teeth, and with a prying motion, wrenched the foreign object out. It was bloody, but after rolling it around in my palm, I knew what it was. And I knew it belonged neither to me, nor Oakley, nor the man in the car.
It was a full fingernail, darker than night.
A promise to return.
Chapter 18 - Preacher Teacher
With the prospect of meeting Oakley again in the near future occupying my mind, classes crawled by at a rate slower than what should have been possible. But after what seemed like years, night arrived, and I packed my bag to meet the new tutor Liz had arranged for me.
Finding the coffee shop was no difficulty. Each morning, the scent of freshly ground beans wafted around to the back of the school, greeting me in place of the dawning sun. I had never actually been to the shop, nor had I ever actually tried coffee, but finding the shop meant simply following the scent.
As the cold of Thursday evening intensified into Thursday night, I shouldered my backpack and walked out into the street. The smell led me in a weaving pattern, crisscrossing the streets and sidewalks in a manner far from efficient.
Liz had been taking her time to meet with me again. Now I would be taking my time in meeting with her tutor.
I opened the door to the shop at 7:45, a full fifteen minutes after Liz’s note had instructed, my bones too cold to continue dawdling outside in the whipping winds. As I entered, I smelled more than the scent I had experienced each morning. I smelled freshly baked scones and not-so-freshly printed books. Fainter, I smelled a hint of mahogany, grudgingly released by the thick slabs of wood constituting a dozen circular tables. And fainter still, I smelled dust—the kind of dust that has traveled far, that only comes loose after a vigorous shaking.
Even without the voice that spoke next, I regretted not having come early.
“You’re late.”
The voice reverberated about the shop, drowning out all other sounds as if water had risen above my ears. It originated deep in the chest, pulling at my consciousness, as well as my memories. Memories that unearthed themselves from under years of accumulated clutter, clamoring to the front of my mind like the shotgun explosion that characterized them.
I pulled back a heavy chair, its legs stuttering across the hardwood floor as my backpack dropped, forgotten, and I folded my hands on the tabletop as I sat. I had no trouble finding the table—maybe it was my ears pinpointing his location, or maybe it was another sense, a knowing of where he was. A sense of his presence shadowing the others in the shop, as impossible to miss as a bonfire among candles.
“Caleb,” he began, “I have come here to instruct, to abolish your ignorance. To become a light in your darkness. But I can only teach you if you are willing. Do you believe me?”
“I believe,” I said, the only words I could utter in my current state.
“That is good. There is much for you to learn, and I do not know the day, nor the hour, that our last meeting will occur. Much about the world, the truth, and the light. And much, though may you be delivered from it, about the darkness. I believe you are familiar with the darkness?”
“Yes, I am.” My skin prickled, and I could not tell whether he was speaking about my blindness or the red figures.
“One soul saved is greater than many others retained. But small is the gate, and narrow is the road. This will not be easy for you, Caleb. Again, I say to you, this will not be easy. But seek, and you shall find, and I shall guide you along the way.”
“I’m ready,” I said, the words bold as they left my lips, though I did not fully understand at the time what I was agreeing to. After the death of my parents, the eradication of my past life, my newfound solitude, and the worthless monotony of my classes, I did not care. There was no purpose to my life at the boarding school, which placed it just below my life at the trailer park.
But of greater importance, he offered me the chance to learn about what had been happening to me.
There is much for you r to learn. About the darkness.
“Then let us begin,” said the preacher man, dropping a thick volume on the table. “My name is Matthew.”
Chapter 19 - Lessons
“I have been tasked,” said the preacher man, clearing his throat, “with building your knowledge and filling in the gaps that may exist in it, for the safety of yourself and others. Due to your upbringing, this may be harder for you to learn than most. But you do have an advantage—blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
I could tell he was smiling, and realized it was the closest he would come to a laugh.
“So what am I learning first? Are you going to teach me about the darkness?”
“The darkness? No, son. First you will learn about the light. About life, not death. Our starting lesson, the stepping stone to your future knowledge, is patience.”
“Patience? Do you know how many days I’ve been waiting in my room, alone, for any contact? It’s been weeks. And now you want me to wait more?”
“What are weeks in a lifetime? Yes, I expect you to wait more. All will come in good time. Now you learn patience. And with patience, virtue.” He opened the book, and the spine cracked with age. Each page he flipped was thick, rustling among its companions until he came to his intended position and spoke again.
“Matthew 5:1. Now when—”
I cut him off before he could finish his sentence, interjecting the word of God with words of my own.
“So that’s it? You’re going to read me the bible? Did Liz send you to be my Sunday school teacher?”
“Would you like to learn or not, Caleb?”
“Yes. But I don’t want to learn rules. Or stories.”
“It’s not rules, it’s character. It’s purpose. I’m not here to tell stories, I’m here to teach. Until you accept the lessons I give to you,” he said, thumping the book, “I cannot teach you anything more. So Caleb, you can walk out the door of this coffee shop, and you can lose all hope of finding out anything I can share with you. Or you can knock on the door of truth, and I can open it for you. And only then can I teach you about the darkness, because in this book is where it all began. Light and darkness.”
He waited, and the rest of the coffee shop seemed to peel away. The smells departed, the sounds silenced, and even the vibrating from the blender behind the bar stopped. The temperature was neither hot nor cold. All sensations were gone, except for his and my presence. His stare, full of vision, meeting my stare, blind to the world.
In that moment I knew I could leave, and I knew he would not stop me. I sensed that leaving now would be far simpler and easier. Now that I had escaped the figures, I could hide. I could forget everything that had happened.
But I also knew that they, whoever they were, had killed my mother. I knew they would do the same to me, if they ever could. I could never live in hiding—even at the cost of being beat to within an inch of death, I would rather stand up to bullies than cower below them.
Kingston Elementary had taught me that.
“Teach me.”
In that sentence, I sensed a change.
The preacher man started reading, interjecting the passages with words of his own. We covered the beatitudes. The virtues. A verbal confirmation of what I knew in my heart was right.
I remembered the preacher man’s last words to me at the trailer park, and I felt them wrap around me.
That you may resist evil.
Chapter 20 - Whispers
I left the coffee shop with a
frown and returned to Elm’s Ridge, pondering the words of the preacher man. Wondering whether I had made the right decision or if he was going to continue reading me stories that were made up long ago.
That night I slept well, Shankey curled by my feet, and the whispers of the wind around my window lulling me to drowsiness. Or at least it sounded like wind.
I woke up before the rest of the city, when the car horns sleep and even the stray cats have quit their yowling. But there was something that disturbed the silence I had grown so accustomed to at this early hour, something that made the hairs on my neck stand on edge.
Whispers.
They were the same tendrils of sound that had reached out to me before sleep, inducing relaxation like the pitter patter of raindrops against a window sill or ocean waves rhythmically crashing against a soft beach. But now, after identifying them, I shifted underneath my covers and sat upward in bed, listening.
The whispers came flooding into my head, though some were stronger than others. Some came from the window, where they wafted into my room after being partially muted by the glass pane, such that all the voices morphed into a singular, continuous buzz. Others came from a second direction, where each voice was strong enough to be equally distinguished.
That direction was down.
A few of the voices were harsh, cutting through the air like physical whips against my ears and making me wince with each lash. Others were thick, sweet and dripping like molasses, giving me a feeling that I would later compare to the after effects of a late night glass of wine. And there were others, too, each with their own personality and flavor, and each from directly beneath my feet. From the corner of my eye, I could just barely see a dull, red glow that emanated up through the cracks in the floor boards.
Chapter 21 - Colors
Ignoring the glow beneath me, I walked to my window, where the first set of whispers originated.
Outside, instead of darkness, I was met with a display of color I had not experienced since the loss of my sight.
Over the years I had grown used to seeing red. Sometimes, flickering at the edge of my vision, there was some blue, though that was more rare.
But now, outside my window, there was far more.
Reds and blues were most prominent, but there were other colors as well. There were yellows and greens, purples, oranges, and every other color that I had nearly forgotten about since the loss of my sight. There was even black, a black deeper than traditional darkness, that was surrounded by a void of the rest of the spectrum.
I remembered what it was like to shut my eyes before I was blind and see the dancing streaks of color soaring across my vision if I rubbed my knuckles across my eyes. The sensation was similar to that, but more bright and vivid, and whenever I tried to separate one streak from the rest, it flitted away into darkness. I stared for several minutes, trying to discern a pattern among the chaos, but it was like trying to make sense of the movements of a beehive or an ant mound—together, the streaks appeared coordinated, but alone their actions were random.
Behind me, Shankey pressed his leash up against the soft spot behind my kneecap, and the metal clasp chilled my skin, causing me to jump.
“I know, I know,” I said, fastening his collar while keeping my face to the window. “Morning walk. We might have to make this walk a quick one, though. Stay on full alert, ok?”
Shankey strained against his leash to pull me downstairs, and I resisted as the whispers grew louder with each passing step. As we reached the main floor, he slowed and started sniffing around the base of the stairs. The dull red glow came from under us, and after a snort he pulled back from the stone, uttering a low growl, scratching at the ground.
“Nothing’s there,” I lied, tugging his collar. “Come on, let’s get some fresh air.”
Shankey followed me, treading lightly so that his nails did not click against the floor. The whispers from below grew as I neared the door leading outside, rustling against the hairs on the back of my head until they vibrated like violin strings.
My hand fell on the doorknob, and the voices rose, sounding like an argument that shook the floor beneath my feet. I stepped forward and they crescendoed, screaming as I moved across the door frame with Shankey nipping at my heels to prod me on. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of them, each trying to be heard, each too disjointed for me to make out any words.
Then, as soon as I crossed the barrier between the school and cold outside air, the voices fell away into an immediate silence, as if I had yanked the cord of my radio loose from the wall. All that remained was the static of whispers on the streets that I had heard from my window, reaching out from behind alleyways and carried by the wisps of the chilly wind.
I could still see the color streaks around me, but now that I was at street level I could tell that they were much farther apart than I had thought from my vantage point above the city, and they were sparse enough that most were hidden. As I walked, only two appeared close, a dot of blue far to my right, and a flash of red to my left. A flash of red that steadily grew larger as my grandmother’s necklace grew cold against my skin. The light took the familiar shape of a red figure, its voice hushed to a whisper and repeating words I could not understand.
It walked toward us, its head sweeping the area where we stood, and stopping just inches in front of Shankey. I could smell it burning now—not a clean burn like a fire of leaves on a fall day, but something closer to the smell the trash barrels at the trailer park gave off as they spewed thick, dark smoke into the atmosphere.
For a second it paused, focusing on Shankey, its neck craned forward, its fist unfurling to reveal something that resembled more of a claw than a hand. Then it bent forward, reaching down an ember tipped finger toward Shankey’s muzzle, the razor sharp nail extending forward. The growl in Shankey’s throat turned to a full bark as he lunged forward and snapped at the finger, wrenching his head to the left and right as his jaws took hold and the figure shrieked.
The noise was similar to tearing metal, sounding more like a garbage disposal filled with aluminum cans than anything alive. And Shankey shook his head again as the screeching grew louder, severing the tip of the finger, which fell to sizzle in the snow below.
The figure hissed, drawing back its hand, and I saw the fingers forming a fist that was readied for a punch.
“Get!” I shouted, stepping in front of Shankey who was barking again, spittle flying as he tried to charge. “Get! Go on!”
I had expected the figure to rear against me when the yell left my throat. I thought that it would land the punch it had prepared for Shankey across my face, searing my skin and gauging deep into me with its claws, and though I planned to fight back, the odds would be more against my favor than any parking lot skirmish I had experienced. At the very least, I expected another hiss or screech.
Instead, it ran.
It streaked along the alleyway and slammed through a garbage can in its way, making the lid ring like a gong as it fell to the ground. Though I could not see its face, I knew it never looked back. Nor could I read its expression, but I knew the emotion it felt as it scurried away.
An emotion that chilled my heart from the inside while my grandmother’s necklace burned on the outside, a burning hole smoldering through my shirt and jacket.
Fear. It had felt fear.
Chapter 22 - History
I stared after the creature, reaching down to pick up the fingertip that Shankey had severed at the joint. Still warm, it disintegrated as I held it, covering my hands in an ashy substance that reminded me of exhausted charcoal.
I frowned, the figure’s response troubling me.
Never before had one run from me. It would be as if my childhood bullies had awoken one school day and found me much bigger than them and thought I would return their torments. None of the other figures bothered us as we walked the streets, but I could see them twisting behind corners before I could inspect them. And after a while I gave up trying to glimpse them.
>
Ignoring them so long as they kept their distance, Shankey and I patrolled our usual rounds, and as I felt the first rays of sun on my skin, they fell away along with the whispers. The sounds of the awakening city replaced them as Shankey and I returned to the school, and I glimpsed the last glow of red underneath the floor dull into blackness as I crossed the threshold.
I climbed the stairs to my room, planning some reading before the start of the school day. My hand fell upon the knob to open the door, but it swung open at my touch. I was sure I had closed it, I could still remember the sound of it clicking shut when I left.
My window was open and wind billowed about the room, lifting the bed sheets and flinging them over my face. I jumped as the fabric met skin, and Shankey rushed past me, circling around the room’s interior, his nose scraping against the ground as he sniffed.
Then I heard a set of footsteps—slow, shuffling, and deliberate—rise from the kneeling bench and depart. I would have thought it was someone waiting for me to return, except that I was standing in the doorway, and I felt nobody pass by me as footsteps continued out through the door.
“I don’t like this, boy,” I said, my ears attentive as I sat on my bed. The blankets were wet from the rain that had passed through the window, though I had felt no shower when I walked Shankey.
Beside me, Shankey yawned and curled up, his tail thwacking against the side of my bed. I sighed.
“You're here all day when I'm not. Are you just used to this now?"
Shankey yawned again, and I took it for a yes.
Soon I was preparing for second period, donning my clothes in my usual fashion: without a care of how they looked, and if I should have cared, with no way to tell if they were satisfactory. At Kingston Elementary, Liz’s new clothes would have ensured me at least one beating. Back there, anytime someone boasted too nice of a new shirt, the upper classmen would send them through the wash, spin, and dry cycle, which was a push through the mud, swirlie, and a hanging wedgie from the hook on the flag pole.
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