by Evie Rhodes
He had begun to observe the people in the church, and he couldn’t help feeling that somehow the people were not totally connected to this deity. It was as if they praised, shouted, and Bible-studied, but they weren’t connected on the ethereal level.
Finally he had hit on the truth. There was no power in their worship. There was no power, because there was no real faith. There was no real belief, not at the gut-wrenching levels or the deep emotional crevices they would need to tap into.
If the sweeping, healing power of Christ had ever entered the church, a great majority of the people who were in regular attendance would have questioned the source.
How could you receive a miracle if you didn’t believe in its existence?
As a result, most churches he had been in were devoid of real spiritual gifts. The gifts of prophesying, faith that moved mountains, healing, and teaching were simply not in existence in the hallowed souls of a lot of people who attended church.
It was obvious in the lack of evidence of power in their everyday lives. It wasn’t there, because they were not audacious enough to activate it.
The shock of this revelation had spiraled Souljah Boy on a course in life that had birthed great knowledge, and with that knowledge had come great pain.
He’d dedicated himself in the coming years to constant and meditative prayer for mercy and an increase in faith, so he could be a living participant in a higher learning—a participant who could connect to that power.
The power that Jesus had both demonstrated and promised during the time he had spent on earth. Jesus Christ was the most legendary man ever to have lived. And Souljah Boy wanted to be part of his legend.
He hungered to connect spiritually to the Maker, the Creator of mankind. It occupied his thoughts most nights and most days.
He desired to be at one with the spirit who had blown the breath of life, his own spirit, into man. And then, to top it off, had allowed his son to be slaughtered for the sins of the world. In short, Souljah Boy had dreamed of climbing the highest pinnacles to be obtained in the flesh and on earth, in the spirit. On this night he was not to be disappointed.
The discipline, enlightenment, and teaching he had received were not learned of men. For that, he was truly humbled. The gift of his salvation was a daily source of joy for him.
Souljah Boy was a researcher at heart, a spiritual researcher and a black ghetto scribe. He had spent many a year between the dusty, yellowed pages of books that most people didn’t know existed.
He had been researching, seeking, studying, and yearning for a long time, and he had known that the Ancient Book of Prophecies existed. It contained the secrets, codes, and prophecies of things yet to be for the black people, ancient prophesies that were shrouded in the spirit and guarded by it as well.
Never in his wildest imaginations did he fathom his ever seeing or touching this book. Its rumored existence among prophets, scribes, spiritualists, African-American theologians, and religious scholars was pure legend and myth entwined into one.
Church leaders, ministers, bishops, archbishops, missionaries, priests, and laypersons alike were never blessed enough for the myth to reach their ears, nor would they have believed.
No, you had to be a very special person to hear the whisperings of its being. You had to be one who denied the flesh, the simple yearnings of man; one who was humble and honored the spirit, not the glory of men. You had to be one who was chosen.
That single book lent credence to many things to come and many things past concerning the spiritual roots of blacks the world over. In it were both good and evil.
The night Rashod Burlingame was murdered, Souljah Boy had been summoned as he slumbered, into a recess of the spirit that was one step away from death. He had been summoned because there were things he needed to see.
He received the same vision as Anita Lily Mae Young and Tracie Burlingame, only the wisdom of this was opened to him like petals on a flower blooming.
This vision was tied to the reason he had received the prophecy of Rashod’s death.
He saw the big bald-headed man and all that was in him. Souljah Boy bowed his head in horror.
Finally, the pages of the book had beckoned him: Come.
He had done so. When he reached out a hand to touch the parched, sandpapery pages, he had been sucked into a void. That void was the Unspoken, and now he beheld many things, just as they had beheld him.
Once he had felt, he had been dispatched back to his own bed, back to his own consciousness, back to the consciousness of men. And that was why he had sat in the light of day, illuminated from the inside out.
He had been given a mission, and only through the levels from whence he had come would he have ever believed it about Tracie Burlingame. Only the truth of where he had journeyed in the spirit kept him firmly anchored.
Suddenly, looming up before his very eyes, there emerged a spirit that announced itself, saying, “I am Reverence.”
Souljah Boy rebuked the evil, and the spirit immediately vanished. His spirit had been touched by the Unspoken. He was now one of the elect. As such he could not be deceived.
Curled up in a tight ball in the dark of his closet, he who called himself Me was deeply troubled.
Someone was treading very near his spirit.
Someone had been dispatched to follow his trail.
32
Me was spiraling again, totally out of control. The wind was whipping with the fierceness of a hurricane. He was twirling, twirling, caught up in the spirit of the storm, and there was nothing he could do about it.
He knew from past experience that it would take him where it would. When the hurricane stopped twirling, he found himself standing on dry desert land under the scorching brightness of the sun.
There was literally nothing he could see on the vast horizon. The earth had shaken under his feet. The wind roared in his ears like the voice of loud thunder. Then the world around him went pitch-black. It was just as if someone had come into a brightly lit room and turned off the light switch.
Me ran his hands along his biceps, hoping to feel the comfort of his spirits, but his biceps were smooth; there was nary a ripple. He could not even feel the rims of Ms. Virginia’s bifocals. He could not feel them, because they were not there.
She was someone he had come to rely on. Without her he felt coldness deep within him, not in his soul, for he didn’t possess a soul in that sense, but in the inner parts of his being. Once he had possessed a soul, many eons ago. The price of having one, well, he couldn’t allow himself to dwell on that right now. He knew the price. He knew it all too well.
Sometimes some of the spirits he collected writhed in anger and agony. But even that was better than not being there at all. Panic welled up inside him. He took deep breaths, psyching himself into controlling the wind flow of his body.
Then he heard it: a sound like a zillion scabs being picked at the same time. It rumbled from the pit of his stomach. It exploded inside him.
“Now!” came the rumble from inside him.
He was being pummeled, pummeled with spittle. It rained down on him, turning into baseball-size hail. As soon as the hail hit the ground, it turned into balls of fire that rose up, searing his feet, moving, moving and scorching his skin along the way, but he did not burn.
He was one livid motion of burning, searing pain. The Quest—that was it. He must move faster in order to claim the ultimate prize. There was a new spirit that had been added to the dimension. It was fast on his trail.
“Okay,” came the echo of his acquiescence. “Okay.” And the searing flames released him. The ground opened under his feet and bounced him through the realms, back into his own closet.
Once again he rubbed his biceps. Someone sneezed, and he burrowed his body into a tighter ball. The sound of the sneezing gave him great comfort. As he rubbed, he felt the rims of Ms. Virginia’s bifocals. Things were back to normal for the time being.
But he could not lose that which he was.
33
Michael Burlingame had stood rooted to the spot, fighting off waves of nausea as he stared at the corpse that used to be his brother, Rashod Burlingame.
The coroner, knowing who he was, had obliged his request to visit with his brother alone.
“The Burlingame family is one troubled lot,” the coroner had mused aloud to himself after receiving Michael’s call.
He had already dealt with the mother. Now here was Michael Burlingame. He wondered briefly if the other son would show up. Actually, there really weren’t too many of them left.
The medical examiner had retreated to his office, allowing Michael some privacy, although he could see him through the glass partition. He would rather have skipped being party to the boy’s sorrow if he could have.
He knew that the boy’s street name was Rebound, a namesake of his basketball skills. But in his opinion he didn’t seem to be rebounding too well from the well-placed blows to his family. Despite the detectives, the medical examiner knew that something dark and sinister had been unleashed in Harlem.
Something nameless.
Hubert knew they were not just chasing a psychopath. They were chasing an entity, an entity that was quite possibly foreign to them—or to any police force, for that matter.
Some of it he couldn’t explain, but examining Rashod’s body gave him the heebie-jeebies, for lack of a good solid medical term. There just was no term for what he was seeing and feeling.
And it was a good thing he had decided against mentioning it, because he would definitely have been at a lost to find precise words with which to explain it.
For instance, he hadn’t highlighted in his report that part of Rashod’s brain was missing. It was basically his memory bank. It was similar to what you saw in advanced Alzheimer’s patients. Parts of the brain just disappeared—evaporated as though they had been absorbed.
But this was a young, healthy boy in his prime, with no previous medical or personal history of any memory loss. It was, well, bizarre, to say the least. It was like missing pieces of a patchwork quilt. Some of the pieces seemed to have been, well, somehow hollowed out. And, it wasn’t only the brain—there were literally hollowed-out parts throughout different organs of the body.
He’d had an uneasy feeling about Randi Burlingame’s death, too, when he examined him. Only the symptoms in his brother Rashod were not found in Randi, although the same feeling persisted surrounding both their deaths, if that made any sense.
The circumstances of both their deaths were the same. Both had been asphyxiated. Both had sunflower seeds stuffed down their throats. Both had their footwear missing. Both bodies were drained of blood. But here was where the similarities ended. Internally Randi Burlingame possessed the whole of his brain and innards.
Rashod Burlingame did not.
The ME glanced over at Michael. Michael’s face had taken on a skeletal quality. There were dark-rimmed circles under his eyes, and his cheekbones stood out starkly against his skin, like sharp-pointed bones. His eyes had taken on the quality of a startled deer caught off guard in the bright headlights of a car. And he moved as though he had suddenly been afflicted with arthritis. His motions were stiff and awkward. He was barely a shell of the lithe, swift young man the coroner had met such a short time ago.
Michael simply stared at Rashod, unable to believe he had predicted his own death and had in fact actually sketched out the details in advance. It was too fantastic a thing even to contemplate. So were the events that led to his learning of Rashod’s death in the first place.
Michael had been taking in a new high-action adventure flick at the Chelsea Theater on Twenty-third Street. He had arrived early, just as he always did, so he was comfortably ensconced in his seat with hot buttered popcorn, a box of Milk Duds, and a Coke while the previews were running.
He had no plans for cruising the streets or of ever suiting up in black and chains again—not after what had happened to him. His heart beat like a trip-hammer whenever he thought about the incident.
He could not get the image of red, bloody teardrops—falling from the ceiling, landing on top of his head, and dripping down the sides of his face—out of his mind. Blood had actually rained down on him.
Nor could he forget the piercing wail of his plea for mercy. He had lived an out-of-body experience, and it had shaken him to his very core. Hell, he had thought that only happened to freaks, like people who participated in those weird psychology experiments.
He hadn’t known it was real.
So he had gone to the movie, trying to take imaginary flight from the stress levels that were building up in his head. A mind-blowing, fantasy-oriented, high-action beat-’em-down flick was just what he needed, or so he thought.
Just before the main feature was scheduled to run at about seven p.m., Michael had found Rashod, hovering in front of him in a dreamlike state, blocking his view of the screen. He looked mangled, almost like a balloon someone had sucked all the air out of. He was wheezing, and something was streaming from his open mouth.
He had reached out for Michael. When he did, Michael felt as though he were being wrapped in a soft, silky cocoon. It was a feathery-like feeling.
Rashod had leaned over and whispered, his voice rasping in Michael’s ear, agony tingeing his every word, “This is it, little brother. Checking out. Time’s up, just like I showed you.”
Michael had sat frozen in his seat, not believing his own eyes. Rashod had begun to flicker like a lightbulb that was not screwed in tight. Then pieces of him began to disappear, as though he were being absorbed.
It was the same type of aura Michael had witnessed on him when they were kicking it in his room.
The last thing Michael felt was a blast of frigid air, directly in the spot where Rashod had stood in front of him. He heard a sucking sound. Then he literally felt the spirit of Rashod evaporate, like mist into thin air.
And then he couldn’t feel him at all.
He saw his brother lying broken on the concrete. Michael couldn’t feel a thing. The theater faded from around him; it ceased to exist.
Michael witnessed the broken and shattered shell of Rashod Burlingame, lying dead against the hard sidewalk. The landscape of his death visually affected him as though he’d been hit with a sledgehammer.
Reality returned. Michael clutched the back of the seat in front of him. His heart thundered so loud in his ears that he couldn’t hear the sound track on the movie.
He leaned over as he noticed what looked like a white sheet of paper that had been left on the empty seat.
If Michael had any doubt about what he had witnessed, that single sheet of paper told a story more powerful than any words. It was the sketch Rashod had shown him of his pending death at his apartment.
His brother had left him a legacy.
Suddenly Rashod’s words reverberated through the recesses of Michael’s mind: “Tracie’s door has the shadow of death on it, man.”
It wasn’t possible. Yet as he stood staring at Rashod, the evidence was hard to deny. Rashod was in fact dead. Michael had felt him die. Then somehow Michael had been transported to St. Nicolas Avenue, where Rashod had drawn a final breath. He had seen his body sprawled on the street.
Rashod had left him something to be remembered. He had left him a message just as sure as Michael was standing there. Rashod had sketched a gruesome scenario, and in it he had been the key player. Or was he?
Michael reached inside the body bag. He ran five fingers down Rashod’s bloodless face, as though Rashod might feel the tender gesture.
Inside his new home next to Ms. Virginia, Rashod felt Michael’s pain. He shivered at the touch from the world he was no longer apart of.
34
Me wasn’t sure he liked his newest resident. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more certain he was that he did not. Yeah, he had a few minor gifts: sketching and a strong sense of telepathic communication, for sure.
Rashod had managed to reach his brother
Michael just before Me sucked out his spirit.
That alone was unusual. Me had never once had it happen before. Usually he was in total dominance. Rashod Burlingame had been an exception. But still, he wasn’t of the caliber of the other residents in state.
Over time, Me had collected extraordinary gifts. In him resided artists, painters, sculptors, musicians, authors, singers, politicians, sports figures, and even some ministers of the clergy known the world over.
Rashod Burlingame was not of this breeding, and yet he had been stamped and profiled to be in residence. The boy was a junkie, plain and simple. To Me that fact alone had overridden Rashod’s gifts. He had no discipline, no stamina. He had been corrupting and polluting his mind and his body while he lived.
He was a sack of nothing, despite his minor-league gifts.
In fact, Me had been watching Rashod all along. He had been absorbing pieces of him before his comrade killed him, and immediately afterward he had stolen his spirit.
Even though Me had absorbed parts of his brain and other organs in his body, Rashod’s gift had still been strong. Pieces of his brain were physically missing, but his ability to perform was not.
The drugs had weakened Rashod and made him transparent, while he still possessed the spirit of life. But his gift and insight had been intact; he had grown in direct opposition to Me’s absorbing him.
And it had not escaped Me’s notice that the boy had extraordinary will. His strength was phenomenal. He had reached his brother, before the final execution as well as before the absorption of his spirit by Me.
That in itself was exceptional.
Me looked at him and saw the same sullen attitude and insolence the boy had possessed while alive.
“Don’t get on my nerves, Mr. Burlingame. You are a guest—a temporary one, to be sure.”
Me was almost exhausted from the stream of words he had spoken; generally he used as few words as possible. But this Rashod, he disturbed his spirit.