by Ariel Roma
LUCAS WARBUCK
The Prophet’s Call
By
Ariel Roma
LUCAS WARBUCK
The Prophet’s Call
Characters, names, places, incidents and events in this book are
fictitious. Any similarity to situations, or real persons, living or
dead, is coincidental and not intended by
the author or publisher.
Copyright © 2014 by Ariel Roma
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by information storage and retrieval system, without
written permission from the publisher at
moodymountainpublishing.com.
Cover design by R’tor John Maghuyop
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First Edition
ISBN: 978-0-9879358-4-7
Published by Moody Mountain Publishing, Port Moody, BC, Canada
www.moodymountainpublishing.com
For Richard, who always believes.
CONTENTS
1. Mind Twisting
2. The Spying Game
3. Jitters
4. A Wealthy and Important Mouse
5. A Dark Wish
6. It’s No Game!
7. What Did You Say?
8. The Book Frenzy
9. In Like a Storm
10. Running Wild
11. Gobsmacked!
12. A Trick of the Lights
13. Black and Light
14. The Disappearing Act
15. Chain Reaction
16. Between Split Seconds
“It was one flickering ember that was almost
smothered to death daily. But it just wouldn’t quit…
it was hope.”
1
MIND TWISTING
LUCAS WARBUCK SHOULD have had a very ordinary life. But he didn’t. His life was far from ordinary. This would seem strange to people who knew him from the start because he looked like a normal boy who lived with regular parents, in an average house, who went to a typical school, in an orderly town. But Lucas Warbuck was not at all who he seemed to be. He was not ordinary at all. In fact, he even surprised himself at just how un-ordinary he turned out to be.
He was a creamy-faced boy with an average build. The first just-about-twelve years of his life had been kind. Innocence danced on his face and played in his ocean blue eyes. The sun-bleached streaks in his hair spun like a halo on his head. Anyone caring to notice could tell at a glance that he wasn’t familiar with things of an unfortunate kind. In fact, quite the opposite was true. Up until now, his had been a life without drama or disaster.
In a nice sort of way he could almost be labeled a goody-two-shoes. He wasn’t a threat. In a crowd he went mostly unnoticed. And for that, he seemed likable by most. So when Darkotika spies with long nosed tele-scopic lenses started snooping around the town of Target for him… and an unsuspecting kid is snatched right out of his seat at the movie theater. Well, you can see where we’re headed!
Lucas Warbuck may have been the boy everyone expected him to be if it hadn’t been for his amazing imagination and his extraordinarily nosy nature. Much of the time he lived in a world of dreams. But, even though he was a dreamer he was not simple minded. He saw things that most others did not. Not that they couldn’t… they just didn’t. Today he had been playing outside for a couple of hours all by himself. Well… he wasn’t really by himself. There was a shiny black bird perched on a fence post the whole time, but he had been so busy dream-catching a ride to an exotic adventure that he hadn’t noticed.
He had already roved the Mojave Desert with his model dune buggy, transformed his gyroscope into a space-ship for a voyage around the moon, and went on a deep-sea expedition, fishing nails off the garage floor with a string-tied magnet from his science kit.
Untangling the rope-ladder vines dangling from the oak tree sent him on a dizzying tree top whirl through the jungle. He had even airdropped food-aid packages; pieces of his peanut butter and jelly sandwich, above a construction site of ants tower-craning a twig to build a high-rise complex over a crack in the sidewalk. He watched them carry away pieces twenty times their size. In his mind he saw himself strong and mighty, picking up his dad’s car.
But now he was bored. He flopped down on the grass to decide what lost thing needed to be found or what wild adventure needed taming. The sun was smiling at the marshmallow clouds tumbling and floating by. He stretched long and looked way, way up. The grass tickled an imprint into his back. Curling his fingers into binoculars, his vision zoomed as far as far can be, and then even farther than that.
His mind was looping with figure-8 kinds of thoughts. The ones that go round and round and end up back at the starting line again. He was trying to understand how he could have become the boy that he was. He wondered where he was, before he was. He knew enough to know that he couldn’t have been anywhere at all, before he was.
His mind twisted and whirled so long and so hard his stomach felt weird, like when he ate a whole bag of sour gummy worms in three minutes flat. He couldn’t figure it out. But this wasn’t such a bad thing really. In fact it would turn out to be one of the best things, because while his mind was mixing around, it was opening up to possibilities. And possibilities can lead to curiosity. And curiosity was nearly Lucas Warbuck’s middle name.
So while his mind was spinning ideas he started to wonder. He wondered about this and he wondered about that. His imagination was really revving up when suddenly, he caught a glimpse of something in his mind’s eye. And here’s where it starts to get interesting!
You see it was right here at this very moment, this millisecond, no wait, this zillisecond, that Lucas Warbuck was about to be transformed right out of the ordinary place he occupied as a Middling.
He had been born a Middling but he had never been destined to stay one. His parents were Middlings and quite content about it. He was not. He was not content at all. He knew there must be more. Something in him said so. The truth was that Middlings were never supposed to stay Middlings. No. Not even one of them. But most of them did.
The Middlings were simple minded people. Their lives were routine and they liked it that way. They weren’t all good, but they weren’t all bad either. They hardly ever wondered about anything more than they could see right straight in front of them and if they did they would stop and hurry back to what they knew. They knew without thinking that what was popular would be right. They firmly believed that the road to nowhere was the right road because it almost always leads to somewhere safe. Staying safe was very important to them. It was comfortable being a Middling.
The average Middling didn’t have the foggiest idea that there might be more to life than what they could see in their own little world. They wouldn’t even dare to dream about kingdoms and princes and kings in realms of darkness or light, or of dragons, or talking eagles, or spies… and possibilities. And even if they had an inkling of a thought about any of it they surely wouldn’t want to tell anyone.
Instead, they built their own little kingdoms between their ears and hid the tiny keys to their thoughts so deep inside their hearts that even they couldn’t find them themselves. Well, most of them did anyway. But there was always a chance… a slim one. But a slim one was better than none. There was an ever-so-slim chance that once in a while one would se
arch for the keys… and find them! Well that could spell disaster for one of those kingdoms now couldn’t it? I wonder which one?
Squawk! Squawk! A nosy blackbird going nuts on the fence screamed so hard his whole body did a jig.
Uh oh… interference… right on cue.
Swoosh! Something whirred past. A rush of wind tickled Lucas’s ear. The surprise ambush unplugged the superhero fantasy movie playing in his mind. He was just in the middle of an action scene. He was the mighty warrior… reaching for his falchion sword. The crush of battle was tight! Suddenly, it was over. The lights went out. The battle for truth was just turned into a cheap, dollar-store drama. One final freeze-frame and… gone.
It was really too bad. He was so close, so very close to being transformed from Middlinghood too.
His eyes boinged wide. His head side-flipped. Now his squashed thoughts were bursting. “Wow!” he exclaimed. “My boomerang’s back!” he cried. And there it was, cartwheeling a bright red pinwheel across the grass until it tipped to a stop and flat lined just a few feet away.
With the sunniest of looks on his face he hunted around. How did it just drop here right out of the blue, he wondered. Suddenly he heard a voice, and he knew.
If it wasn’t that it was such a stifling hot day and his wits were sizzling, he would have been startled. Well, maybe he was. It was the kind of day that melted the ice cubes in his soda faster than a snowball on a barbecue. He didn’t want to drink it now anyway. Especially after a desperate mosquito looking for a place to launch a dinghy confused it for pond-water. It was the kind of day that even the flowers were troubled by. It wilted everything. Suddenly he was light-headed.
“I wouldn’t have given it back to you except I wanted to nail you with it, you goof! Keep your stuff out of our yard,” Lenny De Villain yelled. He was saddled-up on top of the wood fence that separated the two properties.
Lucas was rattled by him, but he was glad. His boomerang was one of his favorite things and he was happy to have it back again. Ever since it sailed over the fence and landed in Lenny’s yard the day before, he was brainstorming for a way to get it back again without getting caught over there.
Lenny just sat there with his eyes glaring hotter than dual exhaust pipes on a dirt-bike.
The two boys were opposites in many ways. When he wasn’t being nasty, he was a plain, dull-faced boy with a tall, stocky build. The first twelve years of his life had not been kind. Sadness toughened his face and scattered shadows in his eyes that made them look even darker than they really were. His titian-red hair spun like a thorn nest on his naughty head.
Anyone caring to notice, and few if any did, could tell at a glance that he wasn’t familiar with things of a privileged-kind. In fact, quite the opposite was true. Already, his had been a life filled with drama and disaster.
In a not-so-nice sort of way he could almost be labeled a slime-ball. He was often a threat. In a crowd he made sure he was noticed. And for that he seemed offensive to most!
Lucas rolled over in a stiff, robotic motion and climbed to his feet. He scooped up his boomerang real smooth-like and shoved it deep into the back pocket of his jeans.
He didn’t look to the left and he didn’t look to the right. His eyes were on the prize, the back door. The old screen door hanging together with at least twenty coats of paint, the latest still tacky and smelly, looked more like a barricade.
If it wasn’t for the fact that he bolted like a scared dog into the house he might have even looked cool. He made a run for it, scampering over the patchy spots of uneven grass and bald dirt. With a bounce, the spring yanked the screen door closed behind him. It banged shut. He was safe but it still made him jump, so hard his hair flipped.
He used to love living here in his big old red brick house on Covert Street. He had a really cool back yard and he even liked his school most of the time. But that was before. It was before Lenny moved in next door. Well, it was really before that.
The more things never changed the more they stayed the same, at least that’s the way it always was, that is until Lenny’s aunt Clair moved into the neighbourhood. Oh, everything looked the same alright; you would really need to be on-the-ball to notice that something was different, but it was. Lucas was sure of it.
It was weird. Even the bright sunny days sometimes seemed dark after she arrived. If it hadn’t been that things continually appeared to have been running-on so well for so long, it might have taken a few more knocks to realise that ever since Lenny had come to live with her things were going from bad to worse.
If Lenny wasn’t so mean Lucas would have felt sorry for him. Well, deep down he really did feel sorry for him, but he hardly knew it because most of the time he was dead scared of him.
Leonardo De Villain senior didn’t only pass on his name to his son Lenny; he downloaded other pathetic qualities running through his family line that Lenny, and everyone else would have been better off without. Leonardo De Villain senior was bad to the bone.
No one knows how, because it sure wouldn’t have been from Lenny, but somehow rumours got out that Lenny’s lousy dad was rotten to him and beat-the-heck out of him all the time. So, he had been placed in a foster home in Chicago before moving in with his aunt Clair.
Anyone with the misfortune to meet Aunt Clair would be baffled by this one. She wasn’t exactly the mothering type. No one knew what happened to his real mother, but judging from Lenny’s past it was hard to imagine anything good.
“Oh there you are Lucas,” his mother said. Thanks to the slap-happy screen door, every board and nail, and spider and mouse in the house knew he was there. Mrs. Warbuck barely glanced his way.
“I wish your father would fix that door,” she huffed to herself. If it wasn’t that she was in one of her fussing and dithering moods, she wouldn’t have even noticed. The door always banged like that.
She was extra-busy scurrying around the kitchen tidying things up. Finally, she stopped to look at him.
“Good heavens, you have dirt on your face and just look at your pants! What on earth have you been doing?” she didn’t wait for him to answer. “Hurry up and wash your face and change your clothes,” she told him, “and put on something nice. Your Uncle Henry will be here any minute!”
So that’s what this is about, Lucas thought. He had forgotten all about Uncle Henry’s visit.
“Aw… do I have to?” he whined, but didn’t push it. He was just glad she hadn’t noticed the white paint freshly lifted off the screen door. The sizzling, sticky day might partly explain her mood, and why the paint was still tacky enough that he could twiggle and roll it around between his fingers into tiny balls.
“Yes, you do, and hurry up about it! For goodness’ sake!” his mother snapped back.
When Lucas shuffled down the hallway twirling his boomerang he had already forgotten about Lenny. He dilly-dallied and stopped to rub at a finger-paint smudge on one of the wings. It only smeared more. Who cares, he shrugged. He was just glad his boomerang came home on its own without having to arrange an undercover operation to get it back. He gave it a fling. It sailed high, up, up, and over the upstairs bannister.
A clatter thundered from the kitchen where Mrs. Warbuck was anxiously clearing up the dishes from the chocolate cake she had just baked to serve their guest. The fuss surprised Felix who only a moment ago was sprawled out and relaxed, amused by every detail. Instantly, he hit the ground running.
He was already at top speed racing down the hallway when Lucas saw his streak of orange shoot past and bolt up the stairs. If the vacuum cleaner hadn’t already stalked and chased him earlier, he might have been more tolerant of the clanging, banging kitchen racket. Now it was too much.
Clues were stacking up. He was a clever cat with super-duper senses. Such a kerfuffle on an ordinary day and a stifling one too, would likely mean an invasion on his cat napping schedule and even worse; it may delay his dinner.
Lucas rescued Felix the jungle-cat as a kitten. It was just
after he made an old swashbuckler bullfrog walk-the-plank. Felix was the lost pirate treasure, discovered under the bridge in the forest.
You can’t tell with some cats by looking at them if they’re a boy or a girl. It wasn’t like that with Felix. He was a striking boy cat, strong and handsome, orange everywhere except for the white star-patch in the middle of his forehead. His voice was low and rumbly. It was so much lower than most cats and when he meowed Lucas thought he sounded like a growling lion.
With the kitchen scare slipping from his mind, Felix’s coon-striped tail slow-flicked to a stop. He was lounging comfortably on Lucas’s bed. The lion-like ruff around his neck made him look regal and right now he felt that way too. He winked a series of slow blinks at Lucas through slanted eyes. Suddenly his charming routine was rudely interrupted.
His golden eyes rounded. His noble face was stern.