During the siege, the families of the archipelago came together on the main island. At first the families, all of whom had residences there, as well as homes strewn throughout the archipelago, lived in their own homes which were spread around the island on properties they owned. However, as the fighting became more intense and the darkness grew, the families of North Island congregated in the center of the island.

Main Lodge

A very large house was constructed, the size of a large hotel, where all the families could live together in relative peace and safety. No one was left out. The homes which were closest to the Main Lodge, as it became known, were connected to the Lodge and to each other by well, lit, warm and comfortable tunnels. Caverns were excavated that could hold the entire population in case the surface became too dangerous.

The fight brought to the people of the North Archipelago, a fight meant to weaken, separate, and destroy, did just the opposite. Bonds between family and friends that had become frayed and neglected were renewed.

Incidences that had come between members of this very special community were forgotten, dissolved in the acid of necessity and love for one another. The enemy, in attacking the people of the North Archipelago, had pulled a bowstring taut and at a time when the arrow created from the fortitude of these people would fly from the archer of a community bonded by fear, love and a cleansing terror, it would pierce the very heart of Satan, himself.

Post One: I Am But Mad North-North-West. When The Wind Is Southerly, I Know A Hawk From A Handsaw.

Collin McIntyre and Billy Driscoll were the best of friends. They had been best friends for years and years and years. At least in their minds, it had been that long. Billy and Collin were thirteen and so had been friends for years if you did not go back too far.

The boys were adventurers and amateur spelunkers and loved tramping about the island in places they ought not to be—places that were dangerous.

On this day, Billy and Collin were out adventuring in the deep woods of North Island when it began to snow. It was very early for snow and cold weather. Autumn was only a few weeks old, but their island, a dot fifty miles off the coast, was not a place where anything, especially weather, was predictable. The snow was welcome at first. Maybe there would be a snow day at school tomorrow. So the boys marched on, not noticing the flakes falling faster and harder.

About an hour into their hike, Collin looked up and said, “Hey, Bill, where are we? I don’t recognize any of the trees, and we’ve lost our trail.” This was very weird to Collin because they had been taught well by their fathers about tracking. They had been over every uninhabited inch of their island and could tell one trail from another, one nearly identical tree from another, just by looking at the lichens that grew on it. They could tell what part of the island they were on by the smells in the breeze.

Billy had been tracking a deer for some time, a large, heavy buck by the looks of its tracks, and was so engrossed that he did not hear Collin speaking to him.

Collin raised his voice. “Billy, stop tracking that stupid deer and listen to me. Do you recognize this part of the forest? Because I don’t.”

Billy, who was as good a woodsman as Collin, looked up at him and said, “C’mon, Coll, we could blindfold each other and find our way home. For Christ’s sake, we could smell our way home. Whaddya mean you don’t rec…” and then his voice trailed off because he realized with a nauseating pain in his gut that Collin was right.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In another part of the forest, not too far away from the boys, stood another tracker, confused and a little sick to his stomach.

Edgerton Alchurch, MD, island doctor, had been tracking a deer, a deer whose tracks told him that it was a big buck. For more than an hour he had followed it, never seeing it, and now he was more than a little frustrated. The newly falling snow was not helping as it covered the tracks he was following.

So when he decided that the buck would have to wait until tomorrow, he stopped and looked up for the first time in some twenty minutes. He propped his shotgun, a Belgian Browning that had been his father’s, against one of the trees and tried to get his bearings.

Dr. Alchurch, except his years spent in college, medical school and a stint in the USMC as a surgeon during Operation Desert Storm, had spent his entire life on North Island. Indeed, he’d been born in a cabin that had stood not too far from where he thought he was. The problem he had at that moment was that he did not know where he was. For a man who had spent many a day hunting in these very woodlands, that was a very disconcerting feeling.

Then Dr. Alchurch smelled burning oak and hickory. When he looked above the tree line, he saw, through the falling flakes, smoke rising in a column as if from a chimney.

This gave him a small sense of relief. The trees were still unrecognizable, and in his agitation, he did not stop to think that there shouldn’t be an inhabited cabin anywhere near here. He picked up his shotgun, walked forward in the direction of the smoke, and in a few minutes, came upon a cabin identical to the one in which he’d been raised.

Alchurch looked at the cabin, perfect in every detail, and felt a tightness in his chest. His family’s cabin had burned down many years ago, the victim of a forest fire started by lightning. Even the top layer of the foundation stones was eventually carted away for other uses.

He approached the cabin’s front porch, the supporting beams of which had been hewn from felled trees, stripped of their bark, and used in their natural shapes. Alchurch put his left hand on the front door and pushed it open. There never had been a doorknob or any lock on it. His family lived out in the woods, after all.

As the door opened, Dr. Alchurch saw the crackling fire, the table set for dinner with the enameled steel plates his mother had used for years.

In the center of the table was a fresh venison roast. In three bowls arranged about the roast were potatoes, carrots, and turnips, all grown by the family.

Dr. Alchurch put his shotgun up against the wall by the doorway, where it had stood for years when he was a child. He walked over to the chair that had been his when he was a boy and sat down.

The fire crackled and popped, the smell of venison wafted to his nose, and then he saw her. She stood in the space between the kitchen, with its woodstove cooker, and the room where Alchurch sat.

You Can’t Really Go Home

The figure of Edgerton Alchurch’s mother stood before him, looking as warm and loving as he had remembered her to be.

Alchurch sat in the chair, rigid and speechless, looking at his mother’s face. He did not know if he should be scared or happy. The figure of his mother made not a move toward him. She looked at him and smiled. Alchurch could feel the warmth of her smile, and he began to cry, letting out a pain that had been fermenting for some fifty years.

“Son, my son.” Alchurch heard words from the figure of his mother, though her mouth did not move. The loving gleam in her eyes never changed.

“My son, I have always been with you. Your father has always been with you.” With that, Alchurch’s father appeared behind his mother. His father was not smiling but rather had a look of absolute peace and understanding.

Alchurch heard the voice of his father the same way he had heard his mother. His mouth did not move. His tones were loving and gentle but also strong, solid, filled with purpose. “You came here not by accident, my dearest son. We brought you here, both of us, to give you our message.”

So far, Edgerton Alchurch had been silent, not knowing what to make of any of it. Now he spoke. “What message, Father?” was all he could manage.

His mother’s voice said, “Billy needs you. Do you understand?”

“No. No, I don’t. I don’t know a Billy. What do you mean? Wait—do you mean the Driscoll boy?”

Instead of answering, Mrs. Alchurch simply stood in the doorway, saying not a word.

Alchurch looked at his father. “Father, what does any of this mean?”

His father spoke without a muscle in his peaceful face moving a fraction of an inch.

“Soon you will understand.”

“Father, Mother…” He could not say another word.

The figures of his parents started to grow diaphanous. He stood and shouted, “No! Don’t go! I’ve waited so long. I’ve missed you both so much.”

“My son,” his mother said, “we will always be with you. We have never left your side.”

His father said, “Be strong, my son. Our departure was necessary for you to become the man you are now.” And they were gone.

The cold Darkness had taken note of what had just happened. This must not be, thought the Darkness.

Edgerton Alchurch stood in silence as the figures of his parents faded from his sight. From the fireplace, a flaming log rolled out onto the floor and across the small room, stopping just under the heavy curtains at the front of the house.

In seconds, the curtains were ablaze. Smoke filled the room. Alchurch made for the door, but as he got to it, the door slammed shut and would not open. He pulled with all of his strength. In a minute he was overcome by the smoke. He slumped to the floor as the cabin burned around him.

Alchurch opened his eyes. They stung as if irritated by smoke. He was on his back, his shotgun by his side, and could see snowflakes drifting lazily down through the branches onto his face. He should have been cold but wasn’t. He should have been sore but wasn’t. He should have been dead but wasn’t. He could not remember how he had gotten there.

Dr. Alchurch stood up feebly. Through his stinging eyes, he looked about him to see his familiar forest. This brought him an overwhelming sense of relief. He saw the trail that he knew so very well being quickly covered by the falling snow. That did not matter. He could see the trees, and they were familiar friends. He could get home from here.

Where It All Did Not Begin

North Island, 1550. Thirty-five years before Roanoke

In a stone house that sat on the spot where Caleb Michael Smith would one day build his home, a mother-to-be lay in a sweaty heap on her bed.  A midwife stood before her urging the mother to push.  The father knelt before the fireplace in fervent prayer, clutching his Rosary with a grip that had broken the skin on his fingers, allowing drops of blood to fall on the flagstones of the fireplace apron.

The man kneeling on the stones in front of his fireplace heard the screams of his wife and then the screams of a new-born child.  He stopped praying and stood, knowing what must be done.  The man walked over to the mother who was holding the babe to her breast and took it from her grasp.

“Edmund, no!” the mother yelled but to no avail.  The child needed to be dealt with immediately.  The mother, still under the spell of the only recently burned warlock, cried and begged for the child to be returned to her arms, though she knew well that the infant was nothing like what it appeared to be, but rather a demon.

“Martha, it gives me no joy to rip this babe from your bosom.  You are my beloved wife and I know that you’re, well, you’re…well, you’re acting out of character with this witch was an act not of your own doing but of his.  I will see that you and I have children, our children, but this creature must be removed from our home, now!”

Edmund Willoughby lay the child gently on the table in the kitchen by the hearth and put his cloak about his shoulders.  He picked the infant up carefully, ignoring the cries and protests of mother and midwife and walked out into the evening twilight. He set a course, due North, going by where the sun was on the horizon, and walked briskly and with purpose to a place in the forest that he thought would be a fitting place to leave the child.  It was a natural clearing surrounded by long-leaf pines.  The natives had used it as a burial ground for people they had deemed to be cursed.  There was never any game in the area and no songbirds could be heard within a hundred yards of the clearing.

As the man approached the clearing, his resolve weakened.  He was a strong man, but a very kind man.  In England, he had fought anti-Catholic forces and had nearly lost his life in the process. He had fought for and defended his then future wife, a delicate and beautiful girl, against a tyrannical, nearly psychopathic father and two brothers who wished to sell her off for a dowry to the highest bidder. The father had been very sorry he had ever heard the name, Edmund Willoughby. The two brothers had gone to meet their maker at the hands of Edmund Willoughby.  What their fate was after that was anyone’s terrible guess.

This man was not afraid of much, except for doing the wrong thing.  In England, he had heard of the great bravery of Sir Thomas More who had met his own end at the hands of the King, but whose ultimate fate was probably much different from that of his wife’s two brothers.

So, he stood on the spot where he was to lay down the child and he hesitated. She was only an infant, after all.  She was innocent and did not deserve this fate. When he had finished that thought, a man in glowing gold and silver armor appeared before him, some ten feet away and some ten feet above the ground.

The man in the armor spoke, “Edmund Willoughby, faithful servant of God, why do you hesitate to do the Lord’s bidding?”

Willoughby, too thunderstruck to speak stood there, holding the child, saying nothing.

“You may speak, Edmund Willoughby.  I am an Angel of the Lord, part of a mighty, Heavenly army set to do battle with the forces of rebellion in God’s house.”

“Sir, I see that you are mighty, indeed. This child, born of Evil, has herself done nothing evil. She is but an infant and is innocent.  I am loathed to cause her to come to harm.”

“You wish no harm to the child because you are a good man, Edmund Willoughby. I tell you now to trust your instincts, the messages sent by God through his holy Angels, and lay the child in the pit that I have prepared for her, for she is neither a child nor innocent, though she doth appear so to you.”

With that, another man, this one with a sickening smell and a frightening countenance, appeared next to the warrior angel and said, “Give the child to me. I will care for her and see that she is safe. This angel before you would have you murder a babe, a tiny sprout who has done no evil in this world.”

The warrior angel spoke up, “It is true that she has yet done no evil in this world. She has done great, terrible things since the beginning of time, since the Great fall.  Edmund Willoughby, this is your choice to make. I pray that you make the right one.” Then, the warrior angel was gone, leaving Willoughby alone with the demon.

Willoughby stepped forward toward the pit that he saw in the forest floor.  He carefully laid the baby in the hole and stepped back.  He kicked some of the dirt that was on the side of the pit onto the baby expecting it to cry, but it did not.  As the dirt hit the child in the face, it transformed into a snarling, spitting animal, much like a badger. The baby turned growling demon, tried desperately to get itself out of the pit, but could not. The pit had been dug by the warrior angel and had been blessed with a heavenly enchantment to hold the tiny demon prisoner.

The odoriferous devil that had tempted Willoughby to turn the child over to him roared with Hellish fury, picked Willoughby off the ground and hurtled him against a tree, killing him.

Willoughby awoke on a great plain. A man dressed in strange garb was sitting beside him smoking what looked like an Irish clay pipe because it was.

The Chief thought privately, “Brooklyn is not going to work on this guy. I can’t really do an English accent convincingly. Better stick with thoughts. He will hear the thoughts in his own accent.”

“So, I see you made the correct choice.”

“Sir, I know not who you are nor have any knowledge of where I am. Further, I am ignorant of this “choice” of which you speak.”

“The baby.  You put the baby in the hole.  You made the right choice.”

Willoughby, though still a confused, began to remember. “Yes, the child. I put the child in the hole. I don’t remember why. I feel as if I did behave rightly, but I do not know why.”

————————

Mrs. Willoughby had been spiritually assaulted by a man who practiced the Black Arts, a witch, a warlock if you will, and the child now being born was a product of her unwilling union with this man.  The biological father had been found and accused of the witchcraft he had used to lure the woman into unfaithfulness and the town of North Island had gathered up a group of men to find this warlock and burn him, not on the proverbial stake, but on a pyre, bound with chains and gagged at the mouth.

The head of the posse, as it were, was an elderly Roman Catholic priest by the name of Caleb Smith.  As he stood, praying, before the pile of dried wood upon which the accused warlock lay bound, the warlock turned his head as much as was physically possible and met the gaze of the elderly priest. In his younger days, Father Smith might have been able to stave off the unholy attack, but now he was old and feeble and had been feeling that his time on this Earth was coming to an end.  The old priest fought as hard as he could, but his heart, weakened by age and infirmity could beat no more. Though no one could have known it at the time, inside the doomed man’s body his blood thickened and then stopped flowing. Father Smith fell like a stone, his bible coming to rest some inches from his eyes. It was the last thing he saw before he died.

The warlock on the pyre, no longer bound, laughed in a maniacal, nauseating way and the men looking on ran toward both the priest and the screeching witch.  One of the group turned the priest on his back and found that he had bitten through his own tongue and was very dead.  The other thing that no one could have known was that Father Caleb Michael Smith, now part of a Heavenly Army, was now helping the forces of God and Good prepare for a battle that would take place in Heaven, Hell and Earth.

Suddenly, the pyre was alight and the warlock was standing on it consumed in flames.  He stood on the burning wood, pointing at the men while his flesh melted from his bones, though he was not dying.

“Blackness be upon your souls.  Darkness be upon your spirits.  Your descendants will be born in misery and will live in hopeless pain.  The protection that has been on this land will be no more.  You all will be tormented in eternity!”

With that, the bones fell and were soon turned to ash on the burning wood.

This was the curse that would haunt the male descendants of the Smith family. Caleb, the son of Arthur, would be hit hardest by this curse. The darkness would try to kill him from the moment of his birth.

The Lighthouse Keeper’s Soul

Cal hoisted himself and the dogs up into the Jeep and started slowly down the tree-lined lane away from his parents’ house.

His route took him to a road that did not have a formal name, but everyone on North Island called it the Perimeter Road. He could have gone a more direct route and gotten to his destination in five minutes. However, he wanted to think this through. Not think, really, but feel, which he did not like doing. He needed to feel this through so that when he came to the house where he wanted to be, he would be ready.

In about twenty-five minutes of slow, careful driving, Cal came upon the island’s western lighthouse, known by islanders as West Light. He pulled up to the keeper’s quarters, let the dogs out to play and went in without knocking. There in the foyer of the little cedar house stood a wizened old man wearing a Greek sailor’s cap with a briarwood pipe sticking out of his mouth, he looked like a painting hanging in a gallery.

Cal stared directly into the old man’s eyes and said, “It’s time, isn’t it?”

The old man nodded and said, “Come this way, and don’t look so glum, my boy.”

The old man led Caleb through the house to the kitchen, which smelled of venison stew and spiced wine. This kitchen had seen much love and merriment. It had also served as the birthing room of many of Caleb’s relatives. It was a magical place.

The two men went out the back door, down ancient and crumbling stone steps, and across the back lawn of the property. Not one more word was spoken as they made their way to the cliffs that rose above the roiling waves some 250 feet below.

When they reached the edge, the older man turned to Caleb. A small tear hung in the corner of his eye.

Caleb asked, “Why do I have to do this, Jonas?”

“Because you do.”

“I’ve killed men before. I don’t want to do this.”

“I know. Your father called to tell me that you were on your way. He explained as much to you as he could. You must know that you are doing me a favor. I do not want to spend another five hundred years waiting around for the right Smith to be born so that I can go home. I’m too tired for that.”

“Five hundred years?” Caleb was incredulous. “I don’t believe it.”

“I didn’t ask you to believe it. You will someday see for yourself, and that’s all I am going to say on the matter. Send me home now. Fulfill the prophecy. Please.”

Caleb got very close to him and hugged the old man tight. The keeper hugged him in return. The embrace broke off, and the keeper stepped back just a few inches. He nodded to Caleb, and Caleb pushed the old man off the cliff with all his strength. Cal stepped right to the edge and watched as the old lighthouse keeper was dashed on the rocks below.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

At that moment Jude Dufaigh, “businessman”, bon vivant, lady-killer, ha!, Demon of among the highest orders, and amateur watchmaker, yes, watchmaker, was in his study working on a Swiss watch purchased in Zurich by Ora on her last trip there to check on their Northern European operations. She had, under instruction from her father, put the watch in a clean handkerchief and broken it with a hammer. The idea was to see if Jude could repair the watch to at least as good condition as new.

Being a Universe-class demon did not exempt him from the laws of life. Jude’s life was not all chocolate and stealing souls, no. Bullshit flows uphill and the river of BS that Jude had been dealing with lately had left him tired and frustrated with his path in life.

Demons in human form are fully human. The dichotomy of being your fully human-self and your fully demon-self drove most demons in human form mad before they were fifty. They feel the effect of physical laws with more sensitivity than a normal human. Christ, being both fully human and fully God, felt this dichotomy more deeply than any other human in history.

Jude wanted an outlet and given his temperament for perfection, he chose watching making and rebuilding. However, he never did anything that did not serve his greater purpose. Jude’s greater purpose in watch repair, as in everything else, was to do damage, cause destruction and pain, and increase the misery index on Planet Earth, and, ultimately, in Heaven, itself. Toward that end, each watch he repaired or made from scratch had placed upon it a small, but very pointed curse the purpose of which was to disrupt and eventually destroy the life of the wearer.

The curse, though small, would weave itself into the fabric of the wearer’s life so that the person’s entire existence would then be affected in subtle, and not-so-subtle, ways. Most of the time the owner of the watch would kill themselves, but not always. Sometimes the owner would go mad or would kill his or her family in some gruesome way.

The lovely part about it, as far as Jude was concerned, was that even he could not predict how the curse would play itself out. The outcome of the curse was like a powerful hand grenade disguised as a Faberge Easter egg; when it went off, and how much devastation it caused, was the beautifully ugly surprise inside.

As an aside for history buffs, and speaking of Faberge Eggs, Jude was the central, yet invisible, player in the downfall and murders of the Romanov family in Revolutionary Russia. Karl Faberge was not who the history books tell us he was; He was an agent of Jude’s, and though he hated the royal family, he had no connection to the communists. Rasputin, a friend of Jude’s and real, live demon himself, had been sent in as a distraction and general nuisance. Rasputin had done what he had out of pure malice and for no other reason than it made him happy to torture the royal family, especially the Tsar’s wife, Alexandra, with promises to help her son with his hemophilia. Faberge, before sending the now famous eggs to the royal family, sent them to Jude, who would place his special curses on them. The results of those curses are well known to history.

The watch Jude currently before Jude, a real beauty, tastefully crafted from rose gold with emeralds set where the numbers normally would be was destined to be the fifth anniversary present from a man in North Dakota to his wife. There where things that Jude could not know, such as how this watch would unwind its horological poison in this couple’s life, and there were things that he could not do, such as create a soul from absolutely nothing, but those were about his limitations and he could make this watch end up in a jewelry store in Minot where Mr. Thomas Seward would buy it and present it to his lovely wife.

Jude found a tool with a small suction cup at the end and used it to place a delicate sapphire crystal over the face of what he thought to be his most exquisite creation to date. The curse had already been spoken and prayed over the watch and, as Jude polished the crystal, he felt a sharp jolt in his chest. It was impossible for him to have a heart attack, but this was a pain that would have sent any human man to the emergency room.

His chest continued to burn as he sat, eyes fixed upon the shining crystal. As his eyes focused, he could see in the crystal an old man falling from some height, hands clasped in prayer, a sickeningly serene look on his worn face. As the old man fell, the image became clearer so that by the time Jonas Smith hit the rocks at the bottom of the cliff, his blood was spattered across the foam of the waves in high-definition.

“God Damn that boy!” Jude cursed aloud in a rage as he raised his fist and brought it down on the watch with demonic might, crushing the crystal, the face and the mechanism. In a few minutes, he stood to walk over the curtain-covered windows facing the road.

It seemed that Caleb had figured a few things out, sacked up, and had done his part to bring about The Prophecy. The slow torture of the Sewards would have to wait.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 “Jacob, Petunia let’s go,” Caleb shouted.

He walked around the little house, looked up at the brick tower, and remembered all the times that he, Joshua, and their father had spent here talking with the old lighthouse keeper.

Cal and Josh were rarely privy to those conversations, but when the boys were allowed to sit at the kitchen table while the men drank coffee, often fortified with Irish whiskey, it was so that the boys could listen carefully.

To Joshua and Caleb, what the men said to them and to each other always felt familiar, as if they had heard it all before in some misty past, so long ago that even the rocks had forgotten.

On one visit, the men were inside, and the boys were outside throwing a football back and forth. Josh threw a hard spiral to Cal, and while the ball was in mid-throw, Cal felt his father call him. Cal, distracted, let the ball hit him in his right eye, giving him a real shiner.

“You felt that, didn’t you?” Josh said, laughing.

“You’re darn right I felt that. It hit me right in the eye!”

“Not the football, dink,” Josh said. “You heard Dad calling you. I know you did, because I heard it, too.”

“I did not hear it. I felt it,” Caleb said, holding his hand up to his eye.

“Same thing. Soon enough, you’ll hear it, too. OK, let’s go inside.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Cal snapped out of his daydream and got into his car with the dogs, he thought, none-the-wiser for the events of the last half hour. He reached his parents’ home, and after hugging his mother and sister, he went in to see his father. He called—with his thought only—to his father, who responded that he was in the den.

When Cal reached the den, he said, “It’s done.”

“I know, son. Jonas told me already.”

“He told you? Look, Pops, I have never really gotten used to the idea that you and I and Josh can hear one another’s thoughts. I don’t want to hear about dead old men talking to you from beyond the grave.”

“OK, son. I’ll say no more about it, but you did the right thing.”

“Jonas said something about waiting another five hundred years. Someday I may have the stomach to listen to what that lunatic raving meant.”

“OK, Caleb, as you wish. Can you sit for a spell?”

“No, Pops. I’ll be back later, but for now, I have some other business. I’ll see you later, though.”

“Good enough. I look forward to it. Again, you did what had to be done, and you did it like a man.”

“Thanks, Pops. Jacob! Petunia! Time to go!”

Patty looked around the corner and said, “You’re taking them again?”

“Yeah.  I want them with me.  I’ll bring them back in the morning.”

“You promise?”, Patty asked with a genuine pout.

“I promise, little sister.”

As the trio was driving home, Jacob could sense his papa’s melancholy and licked Cal’s hand as it rested on the shifter. Cal put his hand under Jacob and lifted the little dog onto his lap. He drove like that, with Jacob’s rear paws on Cal’s thighs, while Jacob’s front paws were on the steering wheel. Petunia, keeping her custom, stuck her head out the window, barking at leaves, rabbits, and squirrels.

Going To See The Watchman

After Caleb deposited his pals at home in their crates so they wouldn’t cut themselves on the glass that hadn’t been swept up in round one of the clean-up, he went back to his car and drove off. Jude was not the only one to have felt things today, Today had made him a little harder than he was before if that was possible, and a little more determined to put things right.

He drove to a house that lived on a lonely road on the far south side of the island. He parked on the side of the lane opposite the house.

Cal marveled at the care with which the yard was maintained. The lawn was perfectly manicured. The shrubs were trimmed with a precision normally used by watchmakers. Little did Caleb know just how accurate that observation was. The place looked as if it had come off the cover of a magazine. It was beautiful—on the outside. On the inside lived a man of brooding darkness, a man quite the opposite of his great-uncle Jonas. This was the home of Jude Dufaigh.

The best part of his humanity had been rotted away from the inside eons ago. He had plunged himself into the service of a lightless, lifeless master those same eons before. He lived so that he might bring death. Death was his food, and human anguish was his drink.

The windows were covered with curtains so Caleb could not see into the house. He knew the man was inside. He could feel it in his gut; he could smell it; he could taste it.

Cal stared at the house intently, with an almost hateful purpose. Hate would focus Cal toward his purpose, and that purpose was the death of the man in the house. If he had to kill one of his best friends, send him “home,” as Jonas had put it, he would balance the books, somehow by sending this man back to hell.

As he watched, Cal saw the curtains part as if someone had pulled them back to look out the window, but no one was visible. A long time ago, Cal had stopped being shocked by such things, though he still did not like the supernatural.

However, he was beginning to see what his purpose was, what was inside of him. That knowledge scared and thrilled him. So, when the curtains dropped, Cal was not at all surprised to “know” that the man in the house was gone and would not be back again today.

He started his car and drove back to his parents’ house, but not before going to the local ice-cream shop and buying four-quart containers of hand-packed rocky road ice cream for Patty.

I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.

Angels, and ministers of grace, defend us!

Not mad, but bound more than a madman is…

The Saga of Neils and Susan

And all my mother came into mine eyes. And gave me up to tears.

Come Live With Me And Be My Love (So I Can Kill You)

The Summer passed happily enough. Happily enough for a Summer that had a pall cast over it by the killing of a boy thought of, universally, as a saint-in-the-making. The Joergensens had been devastated, of course, but the entire family had a bit of what had made Asgeir so special and they put on a brave face that was not a front. Their faith was a thing to behold. A month after Asgeir’s remains were burned on a barge, Viking style, the Joergensens held a large party in the main square of First Village, celebrating their son’s short, but very bright life, to which the entire archipelago’s population was invited.

Asgeir’s mother loved to think on the times she and her son had gone out playing in Winter. He loved to play in the snow making snow-forts and having snowball fights. Sometimes, he would make a snow angel and a few minutes later it would be gone. His mother, who always accompanied him on his wintry excursions, would ask him what happened to the snow angels that had disappeared. He told her that sometimes they were needed somewhere else, so they became real angels to help someone.

Around the time of the party, Caleb was having terrible dreams. He was also having visions. Not during the bad dreams, mind you, but full-blown visions during the day. The dreams and the visions were driving him a little crazy.

In his visions and sometimes his dreams, he saw a girl, but never her face, and he saw a man with his hands around Asgeir’s throat. Asgeir looked at peace, crazy as that sounds. It was a look that conveyed that Asgeir knew he was going to die and, also, that he was happy in that knowledge. Caleb was not happy in that knowledge. Asgeir was dead and there was nothing that Cal could do about that fact, but he could catch the killer.

For months the visions came. For months the bad dreams came and got worse. Sometimes Caleb saw only the girl from the neck down as she encouraged the man to choke the boy. Other times he saw he saw her from behind, as if through a mist or a veil. Sometimes she walked up to him wearing an actual veil and a white wedding dress, but a sexy, form-fitting wedding dress, too short to be terribly modest. Every single time, as she was about to turn to face him, or the mist cleared, or she was going to lift the veil, the vision or the dream just stopped.

Caleb was neither sleeping nor eating, until one day, the visions and dreams ended abruptly. He was sitting on his bed in his dorm room at Ashdown House at MIT throwing a tennis ball against the opposite wall wondering what he was going to do with the rest of his life. He still could not sleep, but at least he was eating a little. The visions and dreams, when he did sleep, were as bad as ever. To top it off, though others did not understand how this could be a problem, he had skipped his entire undergraduate career, gone straight to graduate school and was now the proud owner of a shiny, new Ph.D. in electrical and bioengineering. All before his nineteenth birthday.

In his spare time, he had taken some classes at Williams College “to break things up”, he told his friends and family. Without paying much attention to what was going on, he had managed, in that same space of time, to earn a BA in history and Latin. Frankly, Caleb thought that the Latin was a little more demanding than his doctorate had been.

The Latin instructor had been brilliant. He recognized Caleb’s own brilliance right away and so had constructed a special course of study just for Caleb. Caleb, absent-minded about certain things, anyway, or was it the dreams and visions of a girls strangling a boy, did not really notice. The Latin was all graduate-level stuff, with research on how the Etruscan language had influenced Latin. Caleb had made some very important discoveries about that relationship, and so was granted a BA in the time it takes most students to stop partying and settle down for some real work. This was all well-and-good, but he was bored. Research in bio-engineering was ok if you were happy being a Poindexter, but Caleb was not, at all. He had slept with about half the females in Cambridge and maybe all of them at Radcliffe, in particular. He had not thought about Ora for a while, but her sister, well, she was another story.

Why? She had a beautiful face, but she was fat. Not side-show-geek fat, but fat. He had always liked her, and Patty had told him that Gemma was in love with him, but those feelings had never been reciprocated. So, why now? Why did her weight not seem like an issue, any longer? In fact, he realized that he liked it, “after a fashion”, he told himself. But, it was more than that. He really liked her curves; the way her thighs touched; the way that she had a belly that she tried to hide under her jeans and over-large sweaters. Her boobs. Oh, man her boobs. Did the alphabet go up that high? Then, the thought crossed his mind, “I like her belly. I would sure like to put my hands and lips on it.” Then he erased that thought from his mind, but it came back, just like the dreams and the visions. It dawned on him, the eighteen-year-old Ph.D., that he had noticed Gemma right around the time the terrible dreams began. Then, another revelation; he was in love with Gemma Dufaigh. Oh, no. It couldn’t be. He was hot for Ora. Or was he? He had not really given her a second thought since beginning school. With that, Ora appeared before him, sitting on the bed opposite him.

“You’re a smart one. Took you fourteen months to figure out what should have taken fourteen minutes.”

Cal sat bolt upright, letting the tennis ball bounce on the floor and under the bed.

“Look, seeing you is a blast and all that, but I’ve been haunting you these many months and, well, I’m bored, too. I have things to do and people to kill so I will make this short and sweet, I killed Asgeir. Had him killed, actually. I had him strangled like the little bitch that he was. Left him on the beach. Walked away from his body and went to the barbecue after we all left the swimming hole. Ha! I killed a boy and I liked it!” Then, she was gone. So were the dreams and visions.

Welcome To The Badger State

He lived in a small town in Wisconsin. It was about as Americana as you could imagine. If Norman Rockwell had visited this town in the early nineteen-fifties, he might have thought that this town was too unbelievably prototypically American to appear on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. The Clevers would have been considered a little on-the-edge-avant-garde. Ok, maybe the author is taking a little literary license here, but you get the idea.

The town had, and has, a real Main Street with a barbershop, a general store, a “notions” shop, people sitting on benches solving the problems of the world, and the parking was diagonal to accommodate more of the sort of people who would come to Main Street to get a haircut and a “notion”.

Outside of town dairy farms, selling their own cheese and yogurt, dotted the countryside. Mixed in were even a few horse-farms and one or two crop-farms. The people drawn to this near-mythical place did not come here accidentally. Each town, each city, village, burg, and hamlet has an aura. Yes, each one has an aura; a real, honest-to-goodness aura. In fact, each family and household has an aura, and within each family, separate clusters of people and even individuals have their own aura. These auras are unique to each town, family, and person.

Before birth people are attracted to certain families because the auras of the people in that family produce a family aura that will allow for the most harmonious fit for the individuals in the family. Sometimes, though, sometimes things don’t always work out. Sometimes, the system is gamed by those with an agenda. When this happens, we find families with that one member who doesn’t quite fit in. This is not about those families where a musical prodigy is born to a tone-deaf couple who wouldn’t know a tune if it came up and kissed them square on the mouth. No, in those cases, mostly, the child comes to that family to care for them in some way or to pay back some great kindness from a previous existence. What we are talking about is when a perfectly nice family with genuine, child-like faith, that goes to church Sunday mornings, volunteers at the local food-pantry and tithes their income welcomes a baby who grows up to be an ax-murderer, a gang member or a Democrat.

One day, a young demon, not such a bad demon, but a demon who wanted to be bad, was sitting around waiting for a nice family to become available. This sounds kind of cute and maybe a little sweet. It was not. The young demon had been around a while without making much progress when he caught the attention of a much older demon whose job it was to move the slackers along.

“Why don’t you do it?” she said, as the young demon sat in the room with dirt on the walls, watching the family he had picked as his target. He was hesitating, not out of a sense of possibly doing the right thing, but, rather, because he was a slacker. He knew that, once he committed to a physical life, he was stuck with it until either he completed his given objective or died in the trying. If he did something stupid, such as kill himself, to get out of his assignment early, well, that was too scary to think about. What could be worse than being condemned to Hell for all Eternity? First, no one, human, angel or demon, is ever condemned forever. Not if they don’t want to be. Second, there are things worse than Hell. Marriage, for example.

“I can’t. I just can’t, is all.”

“You can.”

“I really can’t.  I don’t know why.”

“I know why. You’re a lazy shit.”

“I am not a lazy shit!”

“That’s right. You’re stupid, too. You’re a stupid, lazy shit who can’t commit to anything, even something that will ultimately do you some good. Or at least keep terribly bad things from happening to you.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“I just told you what’s wrong with you. You’re a stupid, lazy, shit. There are so many nice people in Wisconsin. Especially in the town, your intended family lives in. It’s time to mix things up a little down there. These people, especially your intended family, are nice. Too nice. The sick-making thing about it is that they are truly nice, decent people without the love of money or other things that most Christians love more than God, Himself. This town, this family, especially, is the Real McCoy. They’re not faking it.  They love the Lord and other people; puke. Other people love them. The Lord loves them. Puke, puke, puke. This has got to end. These people have got to be ended. You savvy?”

“I savvy. Ok, I’m going.” And he was gone, off to be born to the nice family.

The Birth of The Small Man

It all started out almost-innocently-enough. He didn’t do anything that was awful. He would pull the wings off flies just for the fun of it. If he had known that he was tormenting his cousins who would get their revenge at some point when it was least convenient for him, it wouldn’t have mattered to him. He lived in the now.

Then he would torment his little sister because it would make her cry and watching her cry filled him with a sort of warmth that he got only from watching his mother undress as he hid in her closet. He would watch her come out of the shower in the bathroom attached to his parents’ bedroom masturbating as she let her towel fall to the floor.  He could never finish, though. The only thing that brought release after watching his mother was torturing his sister. He would come up behind her and steal her dolls and break them in front of her while the toddler cried helplessly. Or, he would see her playing outside, walk up to her with a smile on his face and push her down in the dirt as hard as he could. Anything he had done up to this point might possibly be explained by a boy’s curiosity about the opposite sex or sibling jealousy. He had made sure of this. Things were about to change.

Caleb, All Grown Up

On the west wall of his house was the stereo system purchased by his grandfather and manufactured by a company named McIntosh in an era long before the geeks in Cupertino had stopped wetting their beds. The equipment had tubes that lit up with a fiery red glow and gave off a warmth that always made Cal nostalgic for a time that had all but ended before he was even conceived.

This marvelous example of mid-twentieth-century high technology was flanked on both sides by banks of real, honest-to-goodness, 33 1/3 rpm long-playing records sitting in mahogany racks fashioned by Caleb’s own hand.

On the uppermost rack were Duke Ellington and Art Tatum records. Just below were the Allman Brothers Band and Jean-Luc Ponty, and on the lowest rack, just about at waist level, were the Beatles albums, the first of which, Beatles for Sale, was given to Caleb by his brother.

Caleb’s record collection was a reflection, not only of his musical tastes but of who was inside of himself. Caleb was a man of few words. He preferred to let his work—and when needed, his fists—do his talking.

On his wrist, he wore a very expensive, self-winding Swiss watch with a blue dial and no numerals. On his face, titanium-framed eyeglasses, blue, to match his watch, partially hid piercing blue-green eyes.

This night, he had just returned from a “business trip” abroad. He wore black cashmere trousers and a dark-gray button-down shirt with a matching knit tie. His feet sported American-made black leather penny loafers with Mercury dimes, minted in the year of his father’s birth, inserted in each tongue. When Caleb traveled he did not feel comfortable unless he was properly dressed—proper yet not stuffy.

A pistol lay on the shelf next to his turntable. It was a custom-built .45 caliber. He favored forty-fives because of the round’s tremendous stopping power. Cal did not like the gun, but it had saved his life on several occasions.

It was late evening, and Caleb was tired. Flying always drained him. As he stood in front of the German-made turntable, he appreciated that it was crafted with all the precision that he demanded of his things.

His strong, masculine hands at the ends of tanned, muscular arms held his newly purchased LP pressing of The Beatles, popularly known as The White Album.

He carefully removed the pristine vinyl disc from the cover and inner sleeve, quietly taking in that beautiful new-record chemical smell.

He loved LP records because vinyl LPs had become almost as rare as rotary phones, which he also owned. The man used digital photography because it served his work. He was also a computer programmer, but he had decided years before that he would never brook digital music in any of its ghastly forms.

So, there he stood, balancing the record between his middle finger and the meaty part of his square hand, thinking, almost dreaming, silently sifting through the data in his head and the emotions in his heart.

He placed the disc on the spindle on the platter and carefully cleaned its grooves. He moved the tonearm over to the lead-in for the first track lowering the stylus. The beautiful, empty quiet of diamond needle on black vinyl played through the speakers; the reassuring ticks and pops were just about audible from the cool, dark surface of the record. The jet engines of “Back in the USSR” began to soar into the room, rattling stemware on either side of the speakers.

The sounds were old and familiar and soothed his tired brain. Cal had been listening to this record since he was a small boy, and he loved the sound of it.

He walked over to his sofa, sitting down in the space left him by his two dogs, and listened to the tight, well-rehearsed band.  The Fab Four had toyed with the idea of breaking up and had even taken a two-year hiatus from releasing any music.  During that two-year period, they had been very hard at work in the studio, changing their musical direction and, once again, changing music history forever.   Caleb was very glad that they had decided against breaking up.

His phone rang, jolting him out of his musical trance. Cal looked at the name of the caller. He knew the man well, as well as he knew his own father. “Hello, Jonas. I had hoped I would not hear from you.”

After a moment, Cal said, “I know. I know. After what I went through in Russia, I knew that the time was soon. I had hoped I was wrong.”

Cal listened to the old man’s reply. “I understand.” He switched off his phone. He did not want any more calls that night.

He again drifted into a reverie, as he always seemed to do when recovering from a case—whenever he had a free two minutes, even—thinking of this and that and nothing at all.

“You don’t know how lucky you are, boy, back in the US, back in the US, back in the USSR…” came from the speakers, bringing him back to himself.

Cal had just finished his job in Saint Petersburg. It had been the worst of his career: two dead priests, gruesomely murdered by what turned out to be an itinerant madman. Caleb was very glad to be out of Russia.

It was already getting toward daybreak, and as he listened, his exhausted eyelids began to close. He reached for the rosary brought to him from the Vatican by one of his best friends. In the Rosary, Caleb had always tried, usually without success, to find strength and peace. He would need some measure of strength, for he was not alone in the room.

As Caleb got closer to the sleep he so badly wanted, his left hand relaxed, and the rosary fell to the floor. Just before he finally drifted off, he heard the softly dreamy, chillingly seductive voice of someone calling his name—the gray figure present at his birth.

“Caleb Smith? Caleb?”

Cal stirred on the couch, and the two dogs growled in the low tones that dogs have when they sense danger.

A gray hand waved itself over the dogs, and they fell silent. “Tonight is your lucky night, filthy mongrels.” Then the voice said, in Russian, “Dirty scum. “Snuffing you now would be too easy. It would give me away too soon. You get to live your wretched lives for another day, so shut up now.”

The rotting gray hand reached down to the floor and picked up the beads Caleb had dropped earlier. The other hand moved to Caleb’s face and caressed it almost lovingly. A wave of nostalgia from experiences had over many centuries swept over the gray form standing beside the sofa. This feeling was instantly replaced with a homicidal anger. The hand was quickly withdrawn.

“I ought to kill you for that, dear Caleb. Those days were long ago and far away.”

The form’s empty eyes soaked in Caleb’s visage, while dark bile dripped slowly from toothless gaps in its jaw onto the floor. Festering lesions oozed pus from the creature’s cheeks and lips. Great empty spaces showed where flesh once was.

The gray hand returned to Cal’s face, and the creature spoke in a soft, soothing voice these words: “Caleb Michael Smith, what I am going to do to you would make the worst in history cringe.”

Then, with a sigh, it continued in gentle but deeper, more powerful tones. “I am going to kill your dogs. I am going to kill your parents and your brothers and sister. I am going to kill that fat cow, Gemma.

“However, today is not your day, either, dead man. When your hour comes, then, oh then, Cal, I am going to slowly drain the life out of you. I am going to suffocate your soul. You will die in such pain that you will beg for death. I will not give you death, not right away, but you will die, my old friend, Caleb.”

A loud boom echoed throughout the house, and every window in the little place imploded, scattering shards in all directions, and the creature was gone.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

He slept on the large Mission-style sofa, a dog behind him, a dog in front of him. He slept in fits and starts. The dogs had been restless all afternoon, as well.

Dark dreams clouded and racked his slumber, and he awoke before sunset to the sound of a boom and the hiss of a million scalpels of glass flying from the window frames into the house. Petunia and Jacob began to bark loudly and were yelping as if in pain.

He lay there, staring into the room, stunned, still trying to get his bearings. His ears were ringing. His head was pounding. Small bits of window were standing at attention on the exposed skin of his arms, legs, and face.

Caleb put a hand out in the dark and felt for Jacob’s head. Jake let out a yelp, and he knew that his dogs were hurt, too.

Caleb called out, feeling the sting from dozens of cuts on his face, “Lights on, one hundred percent.”

The lights illuminated sheer destruction. He was foggy and disoriented from the dream of the crazy gray woman. He wondered if he was still dreaming. Then he looked straight up and saw it: a cross, drawn upside down from his point of view, drawn in what looked like ash from a fireplace. He steeled himself to act. This would not go unanswered.

Caleb carefully put his hands around Jacob, brought the little dog to his chest, and slowly sat up. The sharp sting of literally a thousand cuts made him wince, and little Jacob cried out in his own pain. Petunia had been curled up in a tight ball when the glass flew and was at least spared shards in her nose and near her eyes. Cal reached for his phone, which lay on the end table behind his head.

He spoke into the phone: “Call Patty.” The phone responded in Gemma’s voice: “Calling Patty.” In his parents’ house, his sister saw her phone move across the kitchen table as it vibrated.

Cal had, as a joke to annoy his baby sister, programmed her phone to ring with the phrase “Patty, youah wicked cute!” and had “fixed” the phone so that Patty could not un-fix it herself. He refused to put it back the way it was because it annoyed her so. She caught the phone just as it was going to fall off the table.

“Caleb, when the hell are you going to put my phone back to the normal ringtone?”

Cal spoke in a normal voice. “Patty, I need you to come over.”

“What’s the matter, Cal?”

“Nothing big. Just come over, OK?”

Patty put her phone in her jeans pocket, walked into the living room, craned her neck around a corner, and called up to her parents, “Mom, Dad! I’m going to see Cal.”

Artie and Mary Smith had gone upstairs late in the afternoon this day to, in the words of Artie, “do their stamp collecting.” The couple had been very dedicated to stamps lately.

These two have got to have the best stamp collection in the continental United States by now, she thought. Come to think of it, I need my postage canceled, too.

Her father yelled down from his place next to his wife. “Why are you going to see Cal?”

“He called me and asked me to come over.”

“Is anything wrong?”

“No. He just wants me to mind the dogs while he goes out. You know how he is,” she lied.

Artie Smith rolled onto his side, pulled his wife’s back close to him, and said, “When is that girl going to learn that I know when she’s lying even before she opens her mouth?”

“She’s just trying to protect you or cover for her brother. You know that,” his wife replied through giggles.

“I do know that she’s a good girl. She’s been a good girl to a lot of men on this island. She also has a good heart. She was made that way. No matter how wild our child is, I know that she’s good underneath it all.”

Patty was in her car by then, racing toward her brother’s house. She was filled with anxiety, mostly because Cal was not answering his phone.

Cal had negotiated his way through broken glass to the bathroom. The sight of his face in the mirror was frightening; his face was cut in dozens of places. There is not enough toilet paper on North Island to stop this bleeding, he thought somberly. He tweezed the glass splinters and stood there, watching himself bleed.

Cal washed and dried his face, put a couple of small bandages on the larger cuts, and went back to the sofa to continue to pick points of glass out of his dogs, who steadfastly endured this torture.

Patty ran up to his door and burst through. What she saw stopped her cold. The inside of the house was strewn with shards of glass. She looked to her left to see her brother holding Jacob’s snout in his hands as he pulled glass from the little dog’s nose.

“What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know. I feel that something doesn’t want me to probe any deeper into things. I was asleep, really deeply asleep but having bad dreams, dreams of a being who is like a walking corpse. This same dream haunted my nights in Saint Petersburg. These dreams have haunted me since I was a boy.”

“I remember,” said Patty.

“I thought I was rid of the dreams. I was, for a long while.”

“I had hoped that you were rid of them.”

“Well, I can’t remember most of it, but it felt so real like she was here in the room. Then the glass exploded, just the way you see it. I’m still a little dazed.”

“I’m sure you are. What can I do?”

Cal, lost in his own thoughts, replied, “I’ve been chasing evil all over the world for ten years. Now it’s chasing me.”

Patty looked at her brother with bewilderment and concern in her eyes. “OK, well, this is no time to figure it out. Let’s start cleaning up.”

Cal stood up, again picked his way through the glass, and handed the tweezers to Patty. “Take this; tend to the dogs. Jacob is worse off than Petunia. I’ve got to get dressed and get these windows boarded up. Damn, first I need to clean up the glass, at least the bigger shards.”

He went to his bedroom and changed his clothes, making sure to put on his heaviest work boots. He went outside, grabbed a flat shovel and his shop vac from his workshop, and went back to the house to start the cleanup.

After the glass was mostly cleared away, Cal said, “I want you and the dogs to come with me, Patty. Got to take care of some business.”

“Where are we going?”

“I’ve got some work to do for some cases, and I do not want you and the pups here alone. Also, I don’t want to leave them in the car alone, so I want you to take them back to Mom and Pop’s place to look after them. I will bring back all the rocky-road ice cream you can eat. Deal?”

“Deal,” said Patty.

Dogs tended to and vet appointments made, windows and doors boarded over, Cal, Patty, and the dogs made their way outside and breathed in the cold November air. The frigid wind stung the cuts on Cal’s face and hands. Still, it was good to be outside. The cold air focused his mind.

Cal thought he knew what had been behind the events of the day. He felt—somewhere very deep in a place that gave him vertigo to look at—that he had been fighting the gray demon forever and ever and ever. Fatigue welled up from that place, so Caleb hardened himself against the fatigue; he beat the tiredness into a submission that would last for many hours.

The screeching of an eagle came diving out of the sky, and Caleb looked up but could not see it. He heard it again directly above him and still saw nothing. He did, however, feel better. He found that iron place within and set his jaw. A new energy took hold of him, and he leaped off the porch, skipping four steps, and ran for his Jeep, with Patty, carrying Jacob and Petunia beating everyone else to the car on her short, but very nimble legs.

When he and Patty and the pups were sitting in the car with the engine warming up, he felt a presence beside him. That is when he remembered his friend Father Konstantin Orlov and that Orlov means “eagle” in Russian.

Cal looked up. “Koni, you Ruski bastard, was that you?” He put the car in gear, drove to his parents’ house, and walked Patty and the dogs inside.

His father and mother took one look at him and the dogs, and his father asked, “Good Lord, son. What happened to you?”

Cal replied, “Pops, before I go, I want to talk to you about something.”

“What is it, Cal?” his mother asked.

“Something between Pops and me, Mom. Please try to understand.”

“I do, sweetheart, I do. There are some things that men must keep ‘men things.’ You two go and talk. Patty and I will make sure the dogs are all right.”

Caleb and his father walked into the backyard and sat down at a picnic table across from each other.

“I have a feeling I know what this is about, son,” Caleb’s father said.

“I bet you do, Dad.”

“‘Dad’ is it now? You are upset. You call me ‘Dad’ only when you’re really ’round the bend.”

“You’re goddamned right I’m upset! I hate this ridiculous Bible-faith-angel mumbo jumbo.”

“Now, son, I know how this sort of thing sticks in your craw, but this is who we are. You’re just going to have to accept it, for now, hold your nose, and do what you’re supposed to do according to prophecy.”

“Another word I hate. Whose prophecy, anyway?”

“God’s.”

“‘God’s,’ he says! I pray and pray and pray, and it feels like I’m pissing up a rope for all the good it does.”

“And still you pray.”

“Yes.”

“Why is that, do you suppose?”

“Because you and Mom and Gemma say that I ought to.”

“Cal, you’re a grown man. You don’t do anything that you don’t want to do. Never have. Not even when you were a child, really. So why do you pray?”

“This conversation is taking a wrong turn, Pops. I brought you out here to talk about Jonas.”

“I know, my boy. Believe it or not, we are talking about Jonas.”

“How’s that?”

“Because Jonas Smith is a praying man and your grandfather’s brother, my own uncle. He’s as close to you as any man alive, and he must have called you last night, or you wouldn’t be here. He would not have called you if he had not been praying and got a sign that now was the time.”

“I don’t want to do it, Dad.”

“I know, son, but you must. You’ve done much worse in your profession, haven’t you?”

“That’s different, Pops. Those guys deserved what they got.”

“Well, think of it that way, then. Jonas deserves this, too. Not because he’s a bad man, but because he’s a good man, a good and faithful servant of the Lord, and this is his reward.”

“Why isn’t he scared?” asked Caleb.

“Because when he was your age, longer ago than you think, he got the same call, though it wasn’t a phone call, and he’s been waiting for this his entire life.”

“What? That means that someday…” Caleb trailed off, everything becoming clear and his stoicism and sense of duty returning.

“Yes, son, I see that you understand. You always did. You simply did not want to acknowledge it.”

“Yeah, Pops. I have to go.”

“Go with my blessing and Jonas’ blessing, too.”

Cal and Arthur stood up from the picnic table. Cal hugged his father and left without going back into the house.

As Cal’s hand touched his car door, he spun around, went back to his parent’s front door, opened it and yelled for his doggy buddies to come with him.

The dogs came running with Patty not far behind them.  “I thought you wanted Jacob and Petunia with me?”

“I do”, said Caleb, “but I want them with me for just a little longer.  I need them.  I will bring them back very soon.”

Cal turned and left without further explanation.  He did not want to explain to the women where he was going, because they were not to be privy to this part of his life.

I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.

Angels, and ministers of grace, defend us!

Not mad, but bound more than a madman is…

The Saga of Neils and Susan

And all my mother came into mine eyes. And gave me up to tears.

It almost never happened during the Spring and Summer, this sitting in the rocker in front of the bay window watching the breeze carry the forms of beings and things on their journeys along a certain slice of time and space. North Island, the entire North Archipelago, really, was just too much fun during the warm months. There was too much to see and do. Trekking around the islands was always interesting, in part, because things, landmarks, trails, and the like, could change. At least that’s what it looked like to Asgeir. Not that the changes were profound, mind you, no. There would be a stand of trees that was several feet closer to or farther away from the road than it was last week. Trails could appear, not right in front of your face, but over the course of several days, then vanish again.

His best friends, Caleb, Joshua, and Harry liked to accompany him on these treks. The changes could be seen by any islander at any time, but they seemed a bit more pronounced when Asgeir was along, or when they went along with Asgeir. At the age of ten he had learned that, if he looked at a part of the landscape in a sort of sideways fashion with his mind, he could see what the changes might be in the next few days.

He had often wondered if he decided to walk down a certain dirt road or trail and that trail disappeared, would he disappear, too? Asgeir realized that that had probably happened countless times already in his life. He surmised that if a path he was on disappeared, then that probability disappeared, but not him. That was not right, either, he thought after a while. The probability always existed, it could never be destroyed. It’s just that he could no longer see it. It was as if it had become refracted out of his line of sight.

During one of these beautiful summer hikes, he met a girl, and what a girl she was. She was small. Four feet, ten and one-half inches in her flip-flops. Four-foot-ten in her bare feet. She had big, brown eyes, which on North Island made her different. Most people, after living on the island for more than ten years had their eye color change to a variation of blue-green. Their children were then born with blue-green eyes and their children after that. If these people moved from the island their eyes gradually changed back to what their genetics dictated their eye color ought to be. Not Glory Audel, no. Her mother and father had the blue-green eyes of everyone else, but she was born with coffee-brown eyes and coffee-brown they remained for the rest of her life.

Caleb, Josh, Harry, and Asgeir where out hiking around the Northern-most island in the Archipelago, nicknamed Nordkapp. They had brought their surf-casting rods and had been fishing, somewhat successfully, when they spotted two people walking toward them from some distance. This was not terribly odd to see, but since Nordkapp was more than one-hundred miles from North Island, it was no trivial thing, either. To make the journey usually meant bringing a tent and supplies because it would be difficult to travel to the outlying island, do what you wanted to do, and get back on the same day. Most people made a long weekend of it. This is what the boys had done.

When the figures got close Asgeir realized that it was George Audel and his daughter, Glory.

“Hello, there, fellas! Anything biting?”

Caleb held up a very large striper in his right hand.

“Wow! Yeah, when I was younger this is where the boys and I would come to fish and camp for the weekend.”

“Cal seems to be having more luck than the rest of us.”

“Harry Martin? Is that you? Weren’t you ten years old just last week?”

“Sure seems that way, Mr. Audel. I’m seventeen now.”

“Unbelievable. Some of my fondest memories are of camping out on this beach with your fathers, and sometimes, your mothers, too!”

Cal said, “I’ve heard the stories, Mr. Audel. You are a bit of a legend with both of my parents.”

“Thank you, Cal. No finer man lives on these islands than Arthur Smith.”

Asgeir, who had been silent until now, completely ignored George Audel and said a little sheepishly, “Hi, Glory.”

George Audel coughed a little and said, “Hey, fellas, is it ok with you if Glory hangs out here for a while? She won’t get in the way. I have to go back to our camp and get dinner started.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Audel,” Cal said and he thought he could hear Asgeir let out the breath he’d been holding.

An hour later we saw a small plane fly overhead, rocking its wings. Glory said “Hey! That’s my dad’s plane! What’s he doing?!”

A few seconds later she received a text from her dad which read “You’re welcome.”

She texted back, “Dad! What are you doing?! How am I going to get back home?!”

“Don’t you like Asgeir? He’s a special young man. Something about him. Can’t put my finger on it.”

“Dad! Really?!” She texted frantically.

“Glory, you’re fifteen now. You know how things work around here. It’s time you started at least thinking about marriage. I spoke to the Joergensens and they agree. I know you like him. The boys knew you were coming. We had that banter scripted in advance. You will go back with them. You’re safe. I know it. Love you, sweetheart.” and George Audel would reply no more.

That was how Asgeir Joergensen and Glory Audel fell in love. They began spending a lot of time together, especially at the Joergensen house in the over-stuffed chair in front of the bay window.

“Who are these “friends” you told me about? Are they real people?”

“Well, they’re real, but not really people.” Asgeir said giving Glory a devilish grin as she sat ensconced in his arms in the large chair.

“It is a beautiful day. I love blizzards. I love you. I never want to be without you.” said Glory.

Asgeir did his best to keep a poker face, but Glory saw a change in his eyes.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you want to be with me forever? Don’t you love me?”

Asgeir stared out to the blowing snow, not sure how to answer.

“Asgeir, don’t you love me?! I love you so much and you don’t love me?!” Glory said through tears beginning to fall down her cheeks.

Asgeir looked at her with an expression of deepest love, warmth, and affection. “Glory, I love you more than I can tell you. I have loved you since that day on the beach when your father played match-maker. I love you, I love you, I love you.” He then kissed her on the cheek and pulled her closer to him.

Glory looked visibly relieved but cried all the more. She put her arms around his neck and hugged him crying into him.

Asgeir directed her to look out the window to see the late-afternoon light saying good-evening to the storm raging outside that did not seem to care about the light.  He focused his mind then reached out to Glory’s mind allowing her to see through his lens, to see what he could see and, to some degree, feel what he could feel. When he did this, Glory nearly screamed. Asgeir quickly wrapped his mind around hers giving her an immediate sense of safety. He explained to her what was going on, told her to not be frightened and to see what he was seeing. What she saw was beyond her ability to describe.

The world of trees and snow and wind was replaced by random geometric shapes of different colors. Interspersed among the colorful shapes were voids, places empty of anything and everything. Asgeir could feel Glory’s mind recoil in fear.

“Glory, honey, shhhh. Let the scene settle a bit. It’s a little bit nauseating at first, I know.”

“Yes, it is. This is so scary! It’s beautiful, but it’s scary! Is this what you can see every day?”

“Well, yes, I can see this, but wait for things to even out and you will see what I normally see.”

“Asgeir, I don’t like this….wait! I can see things now! There are people out there!”

Asgeir gave Glory a little interior hug and a smile. He knew that Glory was special, he just knew it. “Ok, things are still jelling for you. It may take another five minutes or so, but it will be worth it.”

“Ok, sweetie, I love you so much!”

“I love you, too, baby.”

Five minutes later, Glory, looking through the mind-eyes of Asgeir said “My God, Asgeir. My God, Asgeir. My God.”

“I told you. Isn’t that the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

“Look at all the people! Not just people but people who aren’t people! Who, what are they?”

“They are many people and many things. Some of them are people who have lived here in the past. Some are people who will live here in the future. Some are, well, it’s very hard to describe what they are. Strains of consciousness, electromagnetic patterns that we normally perceive as visible light or hear as static on radios, old-style radios, anyway.”

“They’re all so wonderful! Can you talk to them?”

“Most of them are wonderful. Some are not. Some are so bad that you could not imagine it if you tried. Yeah, I can talk to them, if I want. Some of them talk to me.”

“What do they say?”

Asgeir did not respond.

“Asgeir? What do they say? Please tell me.”

“Sometimes they talk to me about what might happen in the future. Sometimes it pans out. Sometimes not. Mostly they talk about baseball. They’re obsessed with baseball.”

“Baseball? You’re pulling my leg and I know it. You’re not going to tell me what they speak to you about, are you?”

“No.”

“And nothing I do or say will change your mind? I bet I could find a way to loosen your tongue.”

“Not until you’re out of my mind. And my tongue is loose enough around you, as it is.”

“And how. Please tell me!”

“Nope. Not going to happen.”

“How does a girl pout when seeing the world through her boyfriend’s mind?”

“You can pout all you want. I’m not telling you and I will loosen you up later and you’ll forget all about it.”

“Ok. You’re the boss.”

“I am.”

“For such a sweet guy you can have a spine of steel when you have the mind to.”

“In my business, that’s a requirement.”

“And what is your business?”

“Nope.”

And that was that.

Copyright 2018 by Andrew Payne

I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.

Angels, and ministers of grace, defend us!

Not mad, but bound more than a madman is…

The Saga of Neils and Susan

Sue stood in the exam room before her husband, surprised that she was blushing. She looked up at Neils, cheeks red with nerves and desire, she felt that she and Neils were about to do something very special. She felt that the opening of her body to her husband was really the opening of a door, an invitation for a very special “something” to enter their lives.

Neils stood before his young, beautiful wife in that coldly clinical exam room feeling that this was the oddest place in the world to have sex with one’s wife. If he had only known how many couples had used this very room for this very purpose, he may have felt more at ease.

He fixed Sue’s perfectly blue eyes with his own green eyes, caressing her left cheek with his right hand. She looked exactly the way she had on their wedding night; small, frightened, eager, terrified and hungry all at once. Neils lifted the hem of his wife’s dress, without saying a word to her. He hooked his thumbs around her panties at her hips and slid them down just enough to get the access he needed.

He hoisted his wife on to the table, lay her on her back where she pulled her knees toward her chest. Sue had not felt this vulnerable during sex in quite some time, but it was that feeling of weakness and vulnerability that gave her butterflies in her stomach. Neils unzipped and, while pulling himself out of his boxer-briefs, looked down at his wife’s exposed vulva with a mixture of rapacity and worshipful awe. He then decided that she would not be needing her panties for the rest of the day and, so, removing them, put them into his back pocket. Neils had known many beautiful women in his life, though had slept with none of them, they were all moldy sink sponges compared to his wife. He entered her and was taken to another realm. He saw angels and fireworks, cloudy-blue skies and geometric shapes spread out before him. But what he was most aware of was the music. It was a music beautiful and intense; soft and melodic; music filled with a thumping bass-line while being, simultaneously, a barely audible drone. The music came, asked him to dance and would not take “no” for an answer. Sue, of course, knew none of this. She could only close her eyes, concentrate on, and enjoy, the feeling of her husband inside of her.

Neils had become very outwardly quiet as he entered his wife. This was not characteristic of him as he was given to spontaneous grunts and groans at the mere touch of his wife. At first, Sue thought that Neils was self-conscious, their being in a doctor’s office and all. Then she opened her eyes, just slightly, just enough to peep through her lashes to see her husband’s face. His face, which should have been screwed up in an expression of what might look like pain under any other circumstances, was calm, serene. He seemed to be grooving, yes, grooving to a tune only he could hear. His head, shoulders, torso, and, most important, his penis were following the groove of this silent song.

From what Sue could feel, this song had a very strong, insistent beat. It was voracious, hungry, clawing and possessive and it was sending Sue to places that Neils had not previously taken her. He was an expert and very enthusiastic lover at the worst of times, and at the best, he left Sue, and himself, a spent, sweaty mess on the sheets. Today, though, today Neils was alchemic in his transformative powers.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“You really ought not be looking, you know.”

“I know. But haven’t you ever been curious about how they do this thing?”

“What thing is that?”

“You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. Human sex. It’s how they open the door for some of us to go to their place.”

“Not all of us want to go.”

“I do. I am.”

“Well, it sounds dreadful. It’s messy and usually noisy and it’s not always as much fun as it looks. A great deal of the root of human misery can be found in the soil of “sex”. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.”

“That’s the way that He set it up, there must be some merit to it.”

“I am not questioning His wisdom. I am, however, hoping and praying that He never asks me to go through that particular door.”

“Yeah, His “asks” are not really asks, are they?”

“Not at all.”

“Ok, they’re getting down to it. Have you seen my headphones?” the Angel Asgeir asked.

His mentor extended his empty hand, gave the young angel a look of mock disapproval, and the headphones appeared in his palm. “You can do this, too, you know.”

“I know. I just like watching the look on your face when you do it.”

The Angel Asgeir, for that was his name as an angel, put on his headphones, plugged the other end into an invisible jack that was some twelve inches to his left, leaving the plug-end of the headphones hanging in mid-air. His favorite music played in his ears, a confluence of nineteen-sixties British Invasion rock, baroque and American-style Southern rock. There was quite a bit more to it, but the music this angel was listening to was much more than what came out of the headphones, which, strictly speaking, were not necessary. This strange combination of music came out of the tiny speakers, swirled around in his head, mixed with his thoughts, his experiences, his desires and fears to produce sounds that were unique to him. The Angel Asgeir then funneled these sounds through conduits built into God’s creation so that they ended up in the mind of Neils Joergensen, his soon-to-be-father, mixing with his own thoughts and experiences to create his own unique sounds.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Neils also opened his eyes just enough to see his wife’s face bathed in sweat, a look of passionate docility in her expression. Her hands had reached up to grab his forearms to pull herself as close to him as possible and hold herself there.

Some fifteen minutes into this scene, Neils’ thrusting was becoming more and more frenzied and his breathing was becoming very shallow. With a yell, he sent forth semen into his wife and collapsed forward, his head on Sue’s belly. Sue ran her fingers through his close-cropped hair. Unable to form coherent sounds, all she could do was laugh and sigh. She was a satisfied woman.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Back on the other side, Asgeir’s mentor said, “That’s your cue. Are you ready?”

“Is anyone ever ready?”

“No. But you have a bigger job than most. You will have friends, though. They will help you. They’re family. Besides, this assignment is for only sixteen of their years. Short, even by their own standards.”

“So, I guess I’ll see you soon, Gabe. Any last words of wisdom?”

“Yes. Be in their world but not of it.”

In that instant, the headphones that were not really necessary fell down to a floor that was not really there.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sue sat in an oak rocker facing a large, a very large, bay window in a large wood-paneled room, crackling fireplace to her left, peacefully nursing her son. Outside, on the sprawling grounds, trees dropped their leaves like confetti being thrown at a parade in honor of the new arrival. Sometimes the wind would kick up some leaves and dust and dance with them. When that happened, Sue could almost see the outline of a figure, a form, a person as if refracted through the lens of air and dirt and leaves. At these times Sue felt a warm comfort in what she saw and, for reasons she could not articulate, felt even closer to her infant son. The shapes that she thought she saw seemed to be bringing a message of safety and protection for her and her baby.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sue stood in the doorway of that same room watching her twelve-year-old son sitting in that same rocker, book in hand, ignored for the moment, staring into that same yard watching the wind dance with the leaves and the dust.

“What are you looking at, sweetheart?”

“Oh, nothing, really, mom. Just some friends who stop in to see me from time to time.”

“Really? Do they say anything to you?”

“Sometimes.”

“Are they saying anything today?”

“Yes.”

“Well, silly, what are they saying to you?”

“Read Genesis 3:19.”

“That’s odd, honey. Is that what you’re doing?”

“Yes.”

“Honey, please don’t drag this out for me. You know what I am asking for. What does it say?”

“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

“Asgeir, that’s not very pleasant reading on such a beautiful day as this.”

“Sorry, mom. It’s really ok. It’s not going to happen for a while and my friends come to tell me that they will be with me when it does. I’m really ok.”

“What’s going to happen? What are you saying?”

Asgeir looked up at his beautiful mother from his rocker and simply cocked a brow as if to ask, “Must I explain it again?”, but said nothing.

“Honey, I do not want you to speak of those things! You are my miracle-boy and I will not lose you! If anything were to happen to you, I would die, too!”

In Norwegian, Asgeir said, “I know mom, I’m sorry. My imagination goes crazy, sometimes. You wanna sit next to me for a while and read from the Arabian Nights? I’ll switch chairs.” Asgeir got up and sat in the over-stuffed chair next to the rocker, wrapping himself in his blankets as he did so.

In her chest, Sue’s heartfelt full to bursting. She and her miracle-boy had sat by this window throughout his young childhood reading the Tales of the Arabian Nights while Neils sat at a desk nearer the hearth, briar-wood pipe in his mouth, writing his sagas, occasionally looking up to listen to his perfect wife read to his perfect son. Today, Neils was out around the island or maybe even on another island in the archipelago, and Sue felt his absence.

Asgeir had told a little fib about his imagination getting the better of him, and his mother knew it. She knew that he was not telling her the truth to spare her feelings and Asgeir knew that his mother knew. They each played their part for the other. It was just easier this way. Asgeir’s conception and birth had been a miracle, but the miracles did not end there.

A few months after Asgeir had been born, Sue moved her parents from Norway to North Island. They were older than most parents of a young woman her age and her father was having several health problems. With their money, Sue knew she could take both her parents to the finest medical facilities in the world and she was much more at peace knowing that they were under her husband’s roof. Besides that, Stig Kristiansen and Neils were extremely close. Stig was just like Neils’ own father and Neils liked having them around.

One day, when Asgeir was about three, Sue came down from the bedroom she shared with her husband to sit with her father in front of one of the hearths so that they could chat and watch TV and eat a little something. When she got to the sofa where her father was sitting she screamed for her husband and mother who were in other parts of the house. Her father sitting in his usual spot was white as a sheet. When Sue touched his cheek, it was cool. She ran to find Neils passing her little son on the staircase going up as he was going down. She grabbed him in her arms while he squirmed to get free.

“I’ve got to go get Morfar! Let me go! I need to get Morfar! He needs me!” and with that, the child squiggled from his mother’s grasp and ran to where his mother’s father, or Morfar, was sitting. Sue let him go. She found Neils in one of their large showers standing under the hot water looking as if he might never come out.

“Neils! Neils! Papa is dead! My father is dead!”

“What?! This can’t be! We were just cutting wood this morning! He seemed fine then!” Neils said as he turned off the water, drying himself with a large towel then wrapping around himself. He ran from the shower down the stairs skipping three and four steps at a time with Sue not very far behind. When they got to the room where Sue’s father sat, Sue gasped then fainted. Little Asgeir sat in his Morfar’s lap, the older man as alive and warm as he had ever been, but looking a little surprised at his son-in-law standing in front of him in a towel and his daughter sprawled on the floor at her husband’s feet. Neils lifted his wife from the floor and laid her on the sofa with her feet just about in her father’s lap.

“Stig! Sue came screaming into the shower telling me that you were dead! What’s going on?!”

The older man was quiet, not knowing quite what had happened to him nor how to describe any of it.

Stig Kristiansen looked rattled. When he was upset in any way he went back to his Norwegian.

In Norwegian, very haltingly: “Neils, I was taken away by Skadi. I was sitting here waiting for Susanna to bring some food so we could watch TV and talk. Neils, my blood felt like it became molasses in my veins. Skadi was standing right there where you are now. Then, I was gone and she was dragging me away to where she lives. She was going to eat me, Neils, I know it. I’m sure you don’t believe me, but it’s true.”

Neils listened with genuine concern. Since marrying Sue, or Susanna, as her parents called her, he had become Christian, but the old beliefs were dying hard. Neils had had dreams where Christ had come to him and told him that interpreting the world and Christ, himself, through the lens of Norse religion was perfectly fine and that he should not worry about such things if it helped him navigate the world. Christ had also told him that the world of the Norse Gods was more real than Neils really knew and that Neils was going to be his man to enter those realms one day to do battle for the forces of the Heavenly Host. Neils had dismissed the message of the dream as just that, the nonsense of dreams. Now, however, as he listened to his father in law, Neils wondered if this was the beginning of that dream coming true.

“Stig,” Neils said in measured tones, as he moved to the sofa, lifted his wife, who had become conscious but was listening intently, and sat so that Sue could curl up into his arms, “I do believe you. Our Old Ways, our myths and legends are not so mythical,I believe. So, what happened after that?”

“I’m not sure I should even say what happened next, it’s so unbelievable, and I know how that sounds given the story I’m telling, but I will. I was resisting, but Skadi is so strong, a demon goddess and I could not stop her, when little Asgeir, here, shot up through the roof of this house and said, “Leave my morfar alone!”

“Neils, have you ever seen a Norse demoness shit her pants?”

This last remark made Neils laugh almost despite himself. “No, Stig. No. That’s something I have not seen.”

“Well, son, I have. Skadi took one look at my boy and the fear on her face was something to behold. She let go of me and fled to who knows where in a flash of light. Asgeir took my hand and said that it was time to go home and that I needed to stay around for a long time to come”

That exchange happened completely in Norwegian, so what happened next was the strange icing on a very weird cake.

Asgeir had been sitting on his grandfather’s lap, his head on the man’s shoulder, looking as if he was asleep when he piped up and said, “Morfar needed me so I saved him.”

This little quip made Sue sit up and Neils turn toward his son. “What did you say? Did you understand what we were saying?”

“Yes, papa. I understood. And I said that morfar needed me so I saved him. Did I make a mistake, daddy?”

Neils reached across his wife and lifted Asgeir onto his lap. “No, my beautiful boy, you did not make a mistake. You did a very brave thing. I just wish I understood it. When did you learn to speak in the old tongue?”

“I learned a long time ago, daddy, before you and mamma and even morfar was borned. I thought you knew that.”

“I guess I forgot. Daddys sometimes forget things. But I don’t think that I’ll be forgetting this again.”

“I want to know what was going on. I was dead, that I know, and that Susanna can confirm. The rest felt as real as any of this”, Stig said gesturing toward the room.

That was the second miracle of Asgeir’s young life, the first being his conception in the first place. So, as Sue read the tales of the Arabian Nights to her son, he fell into a deep sleep and dreamt of battling demons and fighting evil. His mother would have been terrified to know that in a few years, the very real battle would be brought to her doorstep.

Copyright 2018 by Andrew Payne

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

The Joergensen family was affluent. Most, Ok, all the families living in the North Archipelago were affluent by normal American standards, but the Joergensens were wealthy. About as wealthy as the Smiths, but no one knew that the Smiths were extremely well-to-do beyond what the Island had provided them, while everyone knew that Neils Joergensen was a best-selling writer of modern Scandinavian sagas.

The  Joergensen home was spectacular, with vaulted ceilings crisscrossed by huge oak beams and over-sized windows where windows ought not be. It had been built from local timber by the shipwrights of the North Archipelago, and so, without even trying to, the house had a very nautical feel to it. It is said that cabinet makers measure to the nearest sixty-fourth of an inch; house framers measure to the nearest thirty-second of an inch and boat builders measure to the nearest boat. That may be true, but wooden shipwrights get the job done and get it done well, and the Joergensen house was a beautiful example of the shipwrights’ skill. On the North side of the Great-room was a large hearth made from stones so large that a crane was used to get them on site and then placed. The stones had been mined from red sandstone deposits in upstate New York and carefully cut so that they fit together with no mortar in the joints. The chimney had hearths built into it on every floor of the four-floor house and when the stones warmed up from the fire, that side of the home could stay warm for forty-eight hours. The Joergensen house had been built with love and then lived in with love.

Sue Kristiansen had been born in Norway with a congenital birth defect that had made her infertile. When she hit puberty, she started getting a period that disposed of eggs she did not have. Every month as her period began she would silently cry alone in her bedroom. She had been born with the overwhelming desire to have children yet without the ability. She knelt at her bedside each night praying to God to open her womb and give her children when she found the man she would marry.

When Sue was fifteen her parents moved the family to North Island. Her father had “business” there, he said, but he would never say what that “business” was. After a while, it no longer mattered to Sue as she was happy and made friends easily.

Every now and then Sue would pester her mother to take her to Boston so that their gynecologist could see if her prayers had worked. In over a dozen visits to the doctor, nothing had changed. Susan Kristiansen remained unmoved and was rarely discouraged, but she did have her moments of doubt. “Dear Lord, why would you put this burning desire in my heart and then not allow me to fulfill it?”, she would pray at such times.

Neils Joergensen had been born in the North Archipelago on one of the outlying islands, furthest North. Most of the islands, other than the big island, did not have names, but the people who lived on them referred to the islands by commonly accepted names. Most of the people who lived on the island where Neils was born called it Nordkapp or Northcape. Even among the residents of the archipelago, the residents of Nordkapp were a tough bunch; happy, welcoming, genial, but hard as nails. In the early days of settlement, these people had fished the Grand Banks in dories. Tough as nails.

On one particularly difficult day for Sue Kristiansen, she went to the Catholic parish, who let the Lutherans attend Mass and pray, to pour her heart out to God. Neils Joergensen was on the big island to talk to some friends and have lunch at one of the unique cafes on North Island. He was sitting in a booth with his friends, when a young waitress, Mary, came over to them to take their order. The other young men placed their orders, but when she turned to Neils she said, acting as if she did not know him, “You’re not eating here today.”

He looked at her, puzzled. He had eaten at the establishment many times. He knew Mary pretty well, in a frequent-customer sort of way. What was wrong now? He asked the girl, “Why? Why am I not eating here today?”

Mary, who did not speak a word of anything other than English and, later in her life, Italian, said in perfect Norwegian, “She’s at the church waiting for you. You are not eating here today. She’s at the church waiting for you. In the Name of He who died for our sins, I tell you that you are not eating here today. Go find the mother of your children. Leave. Now.”

Neils looked at her and tried to come up with some witty retort, but managed to say in Norwegian, “I am here to eat with my friends. I’m not going anywhere.”

The girl’s expression got very serious and she said, again, in Norwegian, “I am done with you. Go.” Then she turned on her heels and walked to the kitchen to place the orders of the other men. The others did not speak Norwegian and did not know what was going on.

“What’s the deal, Neils? What was she saying?”, one of his friends asked.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me, in perfect Old Norse, no less, but she told me that I had to leave and go to the church. You don’t think she meant the Catholic church, do you?”

“That’s crazy stuff, Neils, but there isn’t any other church on the island.” said another man. “I tell ya what. For the hell of it, why don’t you go? We’ll go with you.” So the four men piled out of the booth, left a hundred dollar bill on the table and walked out with a very confused waitress staring at their backs as they walked out of the diner. When she found the hundred on the table, she decided that she didn’t care why they had left. It was the biggest tip she had ever gotten.

They walked around the corner of the lane on which the diner stood and there down a little way was the small Catholic church, Our Lady of Sorrows. Neils had never been inside any church before because he had always eschewed Christianity for the old religion of his people. Neils was a modern day pagan and saw no need to change that.

When the quartet reached the steps of the church, one of the other men said to Neils, “Hey, why don’t you go in by yourself?”

“By myself? I’ve never darkened the threshold of a Christian church. I’m not going in there alone!”

“You can do it, man. It’s just a church, not a slaughterhouse.”

“So say you. When was the last time any of you guys were in a church?” His question was met with sheepishly evasive looks. “I thought so.”

“Doesn’t matter to us”, said one of his friends, “but that really pretty girl didn’t speak to us in Norwegian and tell one of us to go into the church, she told you.”

“It wasn’t even modern Norwegian. It was the Old Talk. If I weren’t a fanatic headcase about my heritage, I wouldn’t know what she was talking about.”

“Well, that makes it all the more strange. You gotta follow this through, Neils.” said one of the group.

Ok, ok. I’ll go. But don’t go anywhere. If I come running out of there I want you to be here.”

“Deal”, the three said at once.

“Deal”, replied Neils.

He took the first step with a growing knot in his stomach. But as he ascended the few steps to the little church a peace came over him that he could not explain and had never experienced before. As Neils opened the door and stepped inside, he saw little dishes of water to his right and left. He had no idea what these were for and he wondered if he ought to wash his hands in the water, but thought better of it. Once inside, he could smell odd odors in the dark church, like that smelly stuff the hippie freaks burnt when they came to invade his island for the Summer.

He was sure he had made a mistake. He had heard some of the ridiculous stories that Christians told; rising from the dead; feeding five-thousand people with some bread and fish. It was all hogwash as far as Neils was concerned. He was just about to turn and leave when the most beautiful sound he had ever heard floated over the pews, not that he knew what the benches were called at that time.

“Hello? Is someone there?” It was a woman’s voice, but she sounded young and, if she looked anything like her voice, he knew that he had to meet her.

“Um, hi” he stammered. “Uh, I didn’t mean to disturb you. I should go” and he started to back out through the doors.

Susan Kristiansen knew a Norwegian accent when she heard it and so replied in Norwegian, “No. Don’t go, please” returned the voice. “Do you need to pray?

Neils was very surprised by this, but the waitress had spoken Old Norse, this girl was speaking Norwegian, not his Nordnorsk dialect, but Norwegian just the same. Maybe a squirrel would be asking him directions to Oslo next….in Sami.

The rest follows in Norwegian

He internally shrugged his shoulders, thinking that pressing on was easier than turning back at this point and said, in his mother tongue, “No. Not really. I, well, I have never been in a church before” he said as he walked toward the girl with the gorgeous voice.

In her own Vestandsk,  “So, why are you here” the girl asked. She could now see him clearly and she had to suppress a nervous giggle. He was the most handsome man she had ever seen. She checked her thoughts because they were not the sort of thoughts that a girl ought to be having in church.

“If I told you, you’d think me mad.”

Sue Kristiansen was a quiet and reserved girl-next-door type, but she had a wicked sense of humor that was kept almost entirely to herself, but she felt somehow at ease with this Norse god of a man and so replied, “Too late for that” she laughed. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re here and we’ll see just how mad you are.”

Neils was smitten. Norwegian. Angelic face. Blonde-haired. Funny. And apparently the future mother of his children. Given her beauty, Neils could not really come up with any good objections to that plan.

“Uh, uh, a waitress at the Black Hole told me, in our old tongue, and I know that she does not speak it, no one speaks it any longer, that I was to come here to meet the mother of my children. There. Are you happy? Now you think that I’m mad as a hatter.”

At this, Sue fell into her pew and began weeping softly. “Who sent you to mock me this way?! No! Get out! How could you say that to me! ”

“I, I don’t even know you. I am not mocking you. I am telling you the absolute truth. I was sitting in the Black Hole with three of my friends, they’re outside waiting for me right now, when the waitress got an odd look on her face and told me in perfect Old Norse that I was not eating there today, that I was to leave, come here, and find the mother of my children. Believe me, it makes no sense to me, either, but please believe me, please.”

Neils Joergensen was not a man to show emotion easily. When his older brother had been killed at sea, it had torn him to shreds internally, but no one would have known to look at him. Something about this girl was different and he found himself tearing up as he walked quickly to where she was sitting, sat next to her and embraced her as she cried into his rough-textured pea-coat.

What he did next shocked them both into complete silence. He pulled away from her a few inches, lifted her chin with his hand and kissed her softly on her mouth. From behind them, they heard the quiet flapping of wings which gave them both a start. When Neils turned to see what was there, the church was empty but for the young couple. Sue looked up at Neils, climbed from her seat into his lap, rested her head on his shoulder and wept and wept and wept the tears that had been held back for a thousand years while Neils held her and rocked her back and forth.

A month later on Nordkapp with every local member from both families and a fair number from both Norway and Iceland in attendance, Mary Kristiansen became Mrs. Neils Joergensen in a traditional Norwegian ceremony performed in Old Norse by a Lutheran minister from Alesund.

A year or so after that, Neils and Susan Joergensen were walking, hand-in-hand, down Newbury Street in Boston when Sue felt a strong pinch in the side of her abdomen. She knew what it was but when she told Neils he said “No. No. It can’t be, my sweetheart. You know what the doctors always say.” But Sue would have none of it, she was going to her doctor, appointment or no. Neils hailed a taxi and they were on their way to Sue’s gynecologist.

When they walked into the office, the receptionist looked at the couple with a sort of pity and greeted them with “Hello, Sue, Neils! So wonderful to see you!”

“Joan, please, I have a pain, a pinching right where my ovary is and I know that I am ovulating.”

“Sue, you’re breaking my heart! I love you, I really do! But every time you come and nothing has changed you are crushed! Please, please don’t do this to yourself!”

Neils stood next to his wife, his arm wrapped around her waist. He hugged her a little more tightly and kissed her on the top of her head.

“I know, Joan. Really I do, but this time is different.”

With a small tear in her eye, the receptionist pressed a button on her phone. “Doctor, Susan Joergensen is here to see you. She has an acute pain in her abdomen.”

“Thanks, Honey, please ask her to have a seat.”

Neils looked at Joan a little quizzically. He had known her for only six months, whereas Sue had known her since she was fourteen.

“Honey?” Sue asked.

Joan held up her ring finger. On it was a beautiful engagement ring that paled in comparison to the smile on her face.

Sue ran over to Joan on the other side of the desk, threw her arms around her friend, hugging her with all her strength.

“When did he pop the question?”

“Last month. I thought he would never ask. He’s always been afraid of the age difference.”

Neils cut in, “How big is the age difference?”

Joan looked a little sheepish, bit her lower lip and said “Thirty years.”

Neils smiled at her. “That’s no big deal. My parents are thirty-five years apart.”

“They are,” Sue said. “When I first heard that I could not believe it.  Dag looks no older than forty.”

“He saw forty a long time ago,” Neils said.

“Oh, I know. But it is amazing how young he looks. And he’s built” Sue said with a wink to Joan.

“I know! John is the same way! He looks like he just walked off a GQ cover.”

The intercom interrupted them. “Please send in Mrs. Joergensen.”

“Ok, Sue. You’re up. I will say a prayer for you. You are lucky today. I have never seen the office this empty on a Tuesday.”

Sue and her husband walked into the examining room. Sue undressed, put on the gown that was laid out for her and pulled herself up on the table, sitting with her short little legs dangling far off the step.

Doctor Ames walked in smiled at Sue and Neils and said, “Ok, Sue, what’s going on?”

“Well, Doctor Ames, I have a…” and before she could finish her sentence, she felt a sharp pinch on her right, lower abdomen.

“Ok, Sue. There’s definitely something going on. I just don’t want you to get your hopes up. It’s probably something you ate” he said with a smile, trying to preemptively defuse the tension he knew would come with a negative pregnancy test.

“You were born with Ovulatory Dysfunction. You have ovaries, you are making the proper amounts of estrogen and progesterone, but you simply do not have any eggs.”

“I know that doctor, but I have been praying and praying and praying and Neils is going to be the father of my children.”

“Sue, I pray every day. I do. But I’ve never seen prayer fix infertility.”

“A waitress told my husband that he was going to be the father of my children.”

“A waitress.”

“Yes.”

Neils said, “Doc, it’s a long story. Can we just see what’s causing that pain in my wife’s side?”

“Yeah. We’d better get on with this. But, Sue, please don’t get upset when I find nothing. Ok?”

“Ok.” Sue said with a perfect faith in her heart for she knew that she was going to get pregnant.

Sue lay back, put her legs in the stirrups and prayed. Her doctor did the pelvic exam and looked up at her with a puzzled smile.

“Sue, I can’t explain this, but your cervical mucus is clear and “stretchy” to use the vernacular. I have never seen this in your cervix before. I’m going to run some tests to check your luteinizing hormone levels. You have always been very low so we’ll see.”

After Sue urinated into a little, sterile cup for the test, Doctor Ames took the sample to his office lab to run the tests. Fifteen minutes later, he told his fiance, “Joanie? Please don’t send anyone to exam two until I give the ok.”

Copyright 2018 by Andrew Payne

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Part One Here

Part Two Here

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Hey, Hey What Can I Do?

            While Arthur and Mary made plans to go to see the Joergensens, Joshua tried to talk to Caleb.

“What’s going on little brother?” Joshua asked as if he did not know. Josh hid the pain in his heart from his brother. Asgeir was as close to him as anyone else ever had been. His loss was a horror.

Cal had returned to his bed feeling defeated down to his bones. He was always a maelstrom of emotions mixed with a painful sort of being numb. The level of discomfort was exquisite.

Joshua went to Caleb’s desk and sat down. He took out his phone and made a call. “Hey. I guess you’ve heard the news. Look, I really need you over here now. We’ve lost one little brother today. I think we’re on the verge of losing two. I know. I know. I’m having a hell of a time holding myself together, too. We need you. You need us. Cool. See you in fifteen.”

Caleb, speaking in monotones, said: “Who were you talking to and what is this about news?”

“Listen, little brother, I can see there are storms raging inside of you. I am sorry for that and I will never abandon you. I want you to know that because I also know that being abandoned is one of your greatest fears. There are reasons for that. Nothing happens by chance. Nothing. Now, there are these storms inside of you and there are storms raging outside, too.”

Caleb, whose tolerance for this sort of talk was thin on good days said to Josh, “What the Hell are you talking about. I hate talking in circular riddles when plain speaking would clear things up.”

“Ok, Cal. I am not home to discern my vocation. Harry called me because he knew that storms were brewing and he knew that we would need “all hands on deck. He will be here in twenty minutes. Then there will enough plain speaking. I promise that.”

After getting reassurances from Caleb that he would not do anything rash, Josh went downstairs to wait for Harry. A maelstrom roared inside Joshua, as well. How could this have happened? How could a boy, as close to him as Harry and Caleb be taken from them and in such a brutal manner?

Harry arrived sooner than Josh had expected. Harry did not look upset in the least while Josh was just about containing his tears.

“Harry, you know what’s happened. “Geir is dead and you look as if nothing has happened. How can you be so calm?”

“I think you know how I can look so calm.”

“Yeah. I know. I try not to think about it, though.”

“Why? I am one of you now. Have been for a very long time.”

“Too true. Harry, you know that I don’t give a tinker’s damn about who you were before, you’re my brother. But Asgeir was one of us, too. And after Caleb, he was the best of us.”

“Funny how Cal is the only one who does not know that. Speaking of not knowing, does he know about Asgeir?”

“Mom and Pops asked me not to tell him, yet. He’s in a very bad place.”

“I figured. He’s not in that bad place accidentally. I’ve known that this was coming for a while, now. So did ‘Geir.”

“You did?! He did?! Why the friggin’ hell didn’t anyone tell me?!”

In the calm, almost dead-pan voice that would become his hallmark as he grew older, Harry said, “I wanted to. He wanted to. It killed us, both, to not be able to tell you. We weren’t allowed to. Higher-ups and all that.”

“Still, either one or both, of you could have, should have told me!”

“Look, Joshua, I don’t own the joint. I just work here. Just like you. I may have “other origins”, but so do you, and we all have our job to do.”

“So do I? What is that supposed to mean?”

“You see? This is why I didn’t say anything about Geir, even though I wanted to. You weren’t ready for that, nor are you ready to hear other things.” The last sentence was spoken with a serious tone, but Harry had a bit of a teasing smile on his face. It was the sort of smile that reassured Josh of Harry’s humanity and that gave Patty tingles in all the right places.

“I’ve known you my entire life. I would lie down in traffic if you asked me to, and still, I wonder who you are sometimes. I say that even knowing who you were.”

Harry said, “yeah, well….” and would speak no more on the topic.

Harry continued, “’Look, the forces that took Asgeir from us are fighting a multi-front battle. They killed Asgeir. They are trying to destroy our other little brother.”

“You know this because you still know people from the other side?”

“Yeah. Not everyone over there is totally on board with the program.”

“I’m afraid the same thing is true for people on our side.”

The two very young men looked at each other in a sort of resignation and walked slowly up the staircase to Caleb’s bedroom. Harry reached the door first and opened it without knocking. He and Josh found Caleb lying on his bed, arm thrown again over his eyes, staring at the geometry of the Universe on the inside of his closed eyelids. His breathing was barely perceptible and Harry wondered if his brother-friend was sleeping but then Caleb spoke very softly, “Harry Harrison”. Cal said, using a nickname that Arthur Smith had called Harry since he was an infant. “Josh must be worried about me to call you.”

Josh looked at Harry. These boys had been raised together. Their family’s houses were connected by tunnels under the ground and lit corridors above ground. No words need not have been said at all. All families on the island and throughout the archipelago were close. Most were related by blood. However, some people and some families were bound by something ineffable, or more so ineffable than was the usual.

Harry raised his eyebrows while he looked at Caleb. “Get up.”

Caleb ignored him.

“Get up.”

Caleb ignored him, again.

Harry considered his options. The loss of Asgeir had not had time to register. That would not happen for a while, but there was real work to do. Harry’s father and mother were with Caleb and Josh’s parents at the Joergensens. They were doing their bit and Harry’s father had impressed upon him that Harry must put grief aside for as long as possible so that the war that he feared might be coming could be dealt with. Part of dealing with it meant getting Caleb out of his frozen Hell and into the fight.

The three of them, Caleb, Josh and Harry were big. Asgeir had been small, even compared to the average. That was one reason the others felt so protective of him. Yes, they were big, but Caleb was more than big. He was bigger than Harry and Josh, but there was more. He was thick from top to bottom. Harry and Josh were heavily muscled. Their physiques were Davidian. They were sculpted. Caleb’s body looked as if the sculptor had gone to the quarry in search of granite with the quarryman asking the sculptor how much granite was needed and the sculptor answered, “How much do you have?”

Harry could more than see that Caleb was in pain. He could feel his pain. The depth of Caleb’s suffering shocked Harry and he had to stiffen his legs to keep himself from falling to the floor. Harry then knew that this attack, not only on Asgeir but on Caleb, too, went deeper than he had first thought.

Cal was lying on his bed with his feet toward the headboard. Harry walked to the foot of the bed and sat next to Cal’s head. Cal did not acknowledge him. Harry looked at Cal’s chest and his eyes went wide.

Josh saw this and asked “What is it? What do you see?”

Harry looked at Josh and shook his head to tell Josh that he could not tell him just yet.

Harry said “Caleb, I want you to sleep. I do not want you to move. For the next thirty minutes, you will sleep peacefully and your pain will dissolve into the Earth. He will take it for you for the next half an hour. Do you hear me? Do you understand me?”

“Yes” came the one word answer.

“Good. You are to sleep. You will not move. You cannot move. You got that?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing?” asked Josh.

“Our brother has been attacked. I’m trying to find out exactly how.”

“Yeah, but we already knew that he’d been attacked. What’s different now from five minutes ago?”

“What’s different is that I can see how he was attacked. What I don’t know, yet, are the circumstances under which he was attacked.”

“You can see how? I can’t see anything special.”

“No, you can’t. You will. All things in their proper time. Now shut the fuck up for a few minutes.”

This last sentence would have sounded harsh to an observer but wasn’t said that way and was not meant that way. It was one brother talking to another in a way only brothers can.

Josh thought about punching Harry, again, in a way only a brother could, but decided that Harry getting punched when he wasn’t expecting it would be much more satisfying. It’s the way Asgeir would have wanted it. Asgeir, fucking Asgeir. Josh was pulled down again.

At this point, Caleb was out for as long as Harry needed him to be. Caleb could feel neither physical nor mental pain. He was neither here nor there. Back in the circular clearing, Asgeir sat in the perpetual darkness next to his friend, though he could still not remember who the boy lying on the ground was, exactly, when the body vanished, then came back, more substantial than before, then vanished again.

Asgeir was beside himself. He could not remember how he had gotten to this place. He did not know where or what this place was. As he looked out into the circle of trees, he strained to see something, anything, that would give him a point of reference. There was nothing. In some B horror movie there would be glowing red eyes staring back at him, but here all he could see was the outline of the treetops against a completely black sky that, at the same time, did have a glow to it. The effect felt unbalancing to Asgeir. Below the tree-line, the trees disappeared and in their place was left a cutout of trees, a vacuum, a soul-sucking empty nothingness that made Asgeir feel as if his lungs were having the air pulled from them by raptorous claws.

He was in a place that he did not understand and now the only emotional landmark, tenuous as it had been, was gone. He wanted to cry, but he reminded himself that he was no longer a child. He reminded himself that he was sixteen years old. Then he asked himself how he knew that he was sixteen. He did not know the answer to that question. He then reminded himself that under similar circumstances, older, tougher men than he might be tempted to cry. Again, he could not fathom what those circumstances might be, because he did not know what these circumstances were.

For the first time since he became conscious in this place, he rose to his feet to look around. He was still sick with fear but also filled with a strange determination to figure out what the Hell was going on.

I’m Goin’ In

Harry balled up his right hand into a tight fist and placed it on the spot where the dagger point had been touched to Cal’s chest. Having done that, Harry could see through Caleb’s eyes on the other side. On the other side, the side where Caleb had lain and was now standing, having re-materialized there, he could see his other little brother from behind staring out into the darkness looking for something that he would never find there. Harry knew that Asgeir was bewildered and lost; he knew that Caleb had been the same, if slightly less so. Harry, though, Harry was right at home. The majority of his existence had been spent in realms such as this one. They were places built, mostly, for the physical and mental torture of Holy Prisoners of War. Sometimes they were meant just as holding pens, but very unpleasant holding pens. The horrors that had been the gulags in post-revolutionary Russia had been unconsciously modeled on just such places as this.

Harry, looking acting through the spirit form of Caleb cleared his throat. Asgeir yelled and swore as he spun around, assuming a fighting stance. Asgeir had not been a fighter while on the normal Earth-plane, but here, even in the last ten minutes, something had changed. Stripped of all the expectations that had enveloped him there, he was free to begin to be more of his true self. When he saw Caleb standing there, though, he did begin crying from happiness and relief.

Asgeir ran up to Caleb and hugged him then stepped back and, for the first time, spoke, “Holy shit, I can’t believe you’re back. Oh, man, sorry that I’m crying.”

“Harry, speaking through Caleb, said, “I know you can’t remember who I am and I’m not really who I appear to be. And you’re crying because you have been through more in the last few hours than you realize. Do you even remember your own name?”

“Uh, no.”

“Ok. I didn’t think you would. For now, it’s not important. What is important is that I get the two of you out of here.”

“Why isn’t knowing who I am important? Where are we? Why do you look so familiar, yet I can’t place you? What the hell is going on?”

“I will tell you what’s going on. I will not tell you who you are, yet. Telling you that it would be a real shock to your system after what has happened is almost telling you too much.”

Asgeir took an all-too-patient breath. His head was too much a-buzz to press this any further. “How are you going to get us out us out of here and who are “the two of you?” You are one of us.”

“Alright, I’ll tell you this much, I’m not really here. You’re correct that this body is the body of a friend, but it is not my body and I am merely speaking through it to try to help him and you.”

Hearing this, odd as it was, sounded somehow right. It was as if strings stretched too deep to be consciously felt were being plucked, playing a melody more ancient and more familiar than the sound of his own breath.  Back in Caleb’s bedroom Josh sat at the desk and was facing the bed where his brother lie, deep in a concentrated sleep experiencing the first real peace he had felt in months.

Harry’s head was tilted back, his eyes were closed, and he was speaking to the air, or so it appeared to  Joshua: “I know you can’t remember who I am and I’m not really who I appear to be. And you’re crying because you have been through more in the last few hours than you realize. Do you even remember your own name?”

            Josh was not really surprised by this behavior, he had been raised on North Island, a very strange place and he had been friends with Harry for his entire life. Things that were a yawn on the island would have main-landers checking themselves into some sort of institution. He did not really know what was going on or to whom Harry was speaking, but he just sat there listening to the one-way conversation.

At this point, Josh felt a very strong compulsion to go to the kitchen to get something to eat. Though he had eaten lunch with his father only a short time ago, both Joshua and Caleb were known for their prodigious appetites. Harry could be a trencherman with the best of them, but Josh had noted long ago that Harry almost never ate. When asked if he wanted to eat, Harry would almost always say that he had either just eaten or was about to eat when he went home. Josh knew Harry’s secret. Josh knew almost everything, so why Harry kept up this part of the charade around him Josh could not figure out. On the weird scale, not eating very often was very low on the list regarding Harry, so Josh never pursued it.

“I gotta go,” said Josh and left the room. Harry could not respond but a part of him heard and understood. He knew that Josh was a nervous eater and that soon the fridge would be much lighter.

In the kitchen, Josh was attacking the refrigerator. Several pounds of cold-cuts, sliced Swiss cheese, and mayo found themselves on the dyed concrete countertop. The last of the previous night’s pot roast was already heating in the microwave and slices of his mother’s home-baked bread were being arranged on two large plates, one for hot pot roast and noodles over bread and one for three large sandwiches. Bologna, ham, pastrami, lettuce, tomatoes, and sliced onions were piled on top of the bread, covered in mayonnaise and covered with another thick, unevenly sliced piece of bread. The two plates were moved to the kitchen table, a pitcher of lemonade retrieved from the refrigerator, no glass necessary, and Josh sat down before his feast opposite the sliding glass doors that opened up on to the stone patio.

The steam from the noodles, pot roast and gravy wafted to his nose and Joshua inhaled deeply. The smell was warm and savory, and the heat of the food brought the odor of his mother’s rosemary and thyme bread into his nostrils and Joshua was at peace. At first, he thought it might be a little overkill to put noodles on top of the bread, but he put that thought out of his mind quickly. Then, a tiny voice whispered to him; “How can you eat at a time like this? Your brother is hoping he dies and you lost Asgeir today?” The answer came back, much louder than a whisper; “My brother wants to die and I lost Asgeir today. How can I not eat?” and he dug into the noodles with great gusto taking large bites of his food while looking at the sandwiches he had made waiting for him to devour them, as well.

The tastes, flavors, smells, and textures were something that was mystically transcendent for Joshua. The beef and gravy on the noodles had particular sort of saltiness, a perfect savory quality that bordered on the too much, but never crossed that border. It all ended with the experience of that first bite; the essence of the flavors, soaking into him, drenching Josh in the juices of it all. The sprites of food were conceived in his mind, were born through his eyes, and died an ecstatic death on the pyre of his tongue.

This was Joshua’s way of coping. He never seemed to put on any weight, except for muscle weight and he truly enjoyed his food, though he ate like this only when under stress or when he needed to think deeply on some matter. Caleb liked his food, too, but the enthusiasm that Joshua had for eating was unmatched by anyone else in the family. In part, it was also a celebration of life and of God’s bounty. Food had been provided by God and in Joshua’s mind, it would have been a sin to not enjoy that bounty as often as possible. Oh, he knew of the Seven Deadly Sins. He knew that gluttony was one of the sins, but he did not care. He was not a glutton, but an aficionado. He also thought that people were more gluttons of other things than food most of the time.

As he ate Josh felt his nerves calm a little. He did not like to drink alcohol, not that he had anything against it. He just did not like the way it made him feel. His parents’ liquor cabinet was stocked with the best Napoleon brandies, Armagnacs, bourbons, scotches and vodkas. He had gotten drunk once when he was fifteen and he got so sick that he vowed to never drink again. He would not take that vow regarding food. Josh was sitting and eating feeling temporarily a little better when he saw Harry outside the sliding glass doors, “Hey! Save some for the rest of us! Get your ass upstairs, I need you!”

This was a new one on Josh. This was not a yawn for him. He had not heard Harry come downstairs. He had not heard the front door open and he knew that going from the front of the house to the back meant quite a walk for the house was large. Harry was gone, and Josh dismissed the apparition as his brain’s response to outrageous stress. He put down his fork, grabbed one of his sandwiches, felt the softness of the bread as the juices from the tomato bled through it and bit into it as if it were the last sandwich ever to be made.

He had not even swallowed that bite when he saw Harry sitting opposite him at the table, “I said that I need you upstairs”, yelled Harry while grabbing the pastrami sandwich off the plate. “Come on, we have work to do.” Then Harry vanished with the sandwich.

Josh put his sandwich down, stood up and made for the stairs, thought better about leaving his sandwiches, grabbed them and ran up the stairs. He got to Caleb’s room to see that Harry was sitting just where he had been before and still having his one-way conversation with whomever it was where ever it was. The sandwich was not in his hand, but he was talking and going through the motions of eating. Josh had seen a lot, enough to harden him to almost every weird thing, but not this.

Back at the clearing, the image of Caleb was now holding a pastrami sandwich and the juices were dripping down his arm as he ate. Asgeir said, “That smells good. What is that you’re eating?”

“It’s called a pastrami sandwich. It’s supposed to be on rye bread but Mary’s rosemary-thyme bread seems just as good and leave it to Josh to make a “bull-choking” sandwich.”

Asgeir, forgetting his circumstances for a second asked, “Can I have some? I have not eaten in, well, I don’t remember how long.”

“No way, little brother. This work of art is mine, but when the Chief comes for you, I’ll see to it that he brings you a basket-full.”

Asgeir was very disappointed and did not try to hide it. Harry saw the look on Asgeir’s and realized that he’d made a selfish mistake. “I’m sorry, little brother. I should not have been a dick.”

He walked over to his brother and gave him the rest of the sandwich which was most of it, really. Asgeir hugged Caleb and happily took the sandwich, eating with a lust he did not know he possessed.

While eating, Asgeir could feel some his of strength returning, some of his fear diminishing. Harry, continuing to speak through the body of Caleb, said, “I do not want you to remember who you were. Not yet. I want you to remember who you are” said Harry.

“Who am I?” Asgeir said wiping sandwich juice from his face.

“You are a powerful angel.”

“Oh, good. I thought you were going to say something crazy.” Asgeir said through a mouth full of pastrami.

“You haven’t begun to hear crazy, yet.”

Asgeir swallowed, took another bite, saying, “Great.”

As this exchange was taking place, a slow transformation was coming over Asgeir Joergensen. Subconsciously, the Angel Asgeir was bubbling to the surface. The bubbles were not tiny bubbles, either. They were harsh, raspy bubbles with knives on their edges, cutting to shreds the Asgeir of Earth. The Asgeir of Earth still existed in other probabilities and his existence would always be informed by the Angel Asgeir, but the Asgeir of Earth had bigger things to do and he was surfacing to do it.

“It is great”, Harry continued. “You don’t know who you were nor who you are, really, but you will.”

Harry surveyed the scene before him. His eyes being created to see in environments such as this could see that bad people were gathering on the edge of the clearing, waiting for Harry to leave so that they could attack. As powerful and bad as these people were, not one of them, nor the group as a whole, was dumb enough to step any further than the edge of the woods with Harry Martin anywhere near. He saw the people and he laughed a little to himself. He had converted long ago, yet his reputation seemed to be intact in Hellish realms like this. He looked through the eyes of Caleb yet, the creatures surrounding him and Asgeir saw with special eyes, too, and they knew well who was behind Caleb’s eyes.

Harry also knew that there was nothing that he could do about Caleb’s predicament at the moment. Powerful as he was, there were laws and rules, and even Harry Martin could not go against the laws that God had sewn into the garment of Creation. Caleb would be ok for the time being. The weirdos here would know enough to leave him alone, and besides, they needed a hostage, even if that hostage was a fragment of someone’s soul.

Harry could see the small changes in Asgeir were becoming more evident and he knew it was time to leave.

“Hello? Hello? Wake up, I’m still confused!” yelled Asgeir of Earth as he slowly transformed into Asgeir the Angel, stirring Harry from his thoughts.

“Yeah. Yeah. Ok. I have to go now. Your name in every world is Asgeir. You are a Spear of God and you are a bad-ass. It is safe for me to leave you now. Don’t kill too many of them at once, it just makes them want revenge when they come back.”

“What are you talking about?! Don’t leave me! I still don’t understand anything you’re talking about!”

“Sorry, boyo. I’ve got to scram. You’ll be fine. See you at the next Council Meeting.” Caleb’s body slumped to the floor of the clearing and Harry was gone.

Asgeir, while wondering what had just happened and what anything the voice coming from the familiar body said really meant, did not have much time to contemplate his confusion. The bad people who had been gathering at the edge of the clearing wasted no time in charging Asgeir when they saw that Harry had left the scene.

The first of the bad people to reach Asgeir was a demon on two legs with small, sawed off arms and slimy skin. The thing got to within six feet of Asgeir, leaped toward him, grabbed the remains of Asgeir’s sandwich in its teeth, running off into the dark to devour its prize. This greatly upset Asgeir and, as he turned to face the direction in which the beast had run, wings, sheets of flame, unfurled from his back, slicing into three parts the next monster to attack him. Asgeir did not notice. He wanted to get the thing that had stolen his food. The smell of the bread had reminded him of home, though he did not know where or what home was.

He ran after the thieving beast and, when he saw that the food was gone, flew into a rage, killing the foul creature with one swipe of his now Angelic arm. Other beasts, demons, deformed human-like creatures and even beings who were formless blobs of hate and fear washed over the new Angel trying to tear pieces from him. Mistake. Very big mistake. Angel Asgeir turned, in his rage, to the hoard, a spear now in his hand, and cut them down as they poured at him. He stabbed the spear into the floor of the forest clearing and a pulse of light radiated out from it in a circular fashion, killing everything in its path, flattening the forest for as far as even angelic eyes could see. He remembered his friend’s words to not kill all of them, but one of them had stolen his sandwich and that could not be tolerated. They all had to go and so they went.

Asgeir, Angel though he was, was a little tired from the battle and his transformation and knew what he needed; food. Sandwiches like the one stolen would do the trick. As he finished the thought, a figure walked out of the gloom holding a picnic basket over-flowing with carefully wrapped sandwiches. The figure wore traditional Sioux clothing but something about his attire didn’t quite match. In a thick Brooklyn accent, the man, said, “Killed ’em all, heh? Well, that’s alright. These babies”, pointing to the contents of the basket, “are worth fighting and killing over. By the way, you left these went you went on your mission” said the Chief holding out his free hand. Asgeir looked at the Chief’s open palm and in it was a pair of black headphones.

Now that Asgeir’s transformation was completed all his memories came back in a great tide. He knew both who he had been and who he now was. He knew the man who stood before him and the man who was still lying on the forest floor a few feet away. Last, he knew what had happened to him, that he and his compatriots were in the middle of a war and that victory was far from assured.

“Ok, kiddo, time to put those things away. We have company coming” said the Chief with a genuinely happy smile.

Asgeir knew just what this meant and his sheet-of-fire wings disappeared into his back and he was transformed again, this time into a Plains Indian warrior. From the blackness that still enveloped this world more figures emerged, but this time they were not Hellish stinking demons, but rather members of Asgeir’s own band of men, fighters all. They did not come empty-handed, either. Some were carrying large coolers between themselves and another man. Some were carrying large baskets, like the one the Chief had now set on the ground. Some had large haunches of meat slung over their shoulders, impaled upon spits, ready to be roasted over the large, open fires that had just that second appeared from nowhere.

When the men were fully gathered in the firelight, the Chief put up his hand for quiet. This time there was no joking. “Gentlemen, we are almost complete!” and the band erupted in hollering and yelling. This was going to be a feast for the ages.

Good Lord, I Feel Like I’m Dying

            Harry pulled his fist away from Caleb’s chest. He was still looking up to the ceiling, eyes closed, breathing quietly, reeling himself back in on his own spool. Josh opened the door, saw what was going on and quietly walked over to the chair, sat down and observed the scene.

As Josh watched, Harry let his chin fall to his chest. He remained this way for a few seconds before taking a deep breath, gasping inwards. Harry stood, turned to look at Caleb’s still sleeping body and brought his fist down with tremendous force on the spot where it had just been resting. On the other side, at the clearing, the band of warriors had already taken Caleb to the center of the temporary camp where he lie with his head on a rolled-up buckskin. Caleb’s soul-form became enveloped in a translucent green light and began to float a few inches above the ground and stayed that way.

The Chief, seeing this, turned to Warrior Asgeir and said: “Looks like Harry is having some fun with us!”

“Indeed”, said Asgeir. “And seeing to it that our brother, here, remains safe, no matter what.”

Back in Caleb’s room, Joshua sat and Harry stood after punching Caleb in the chest, all was quiet. Caleb had a large bruise forming on his chest, yet he was breathing softly and looked peaceful in his induced slumber.

“Harry, before you go on, I need to know a few things,” Joshua said as Harry stood ready to wake Cal.

Harry smiled at his friend. He knew these questions would come one day and today was that day. Harry turned his chair toward Josh. “What is it that you want to know?”

“My questions, even after all I’ve seen with  you, Asgeir and Caleb, may seem a little crazy, but here goes.”

Harry just smiled at Josh. He knew that Josh may have seen a lot of things with him, but that he had not even begun to see crazy, yet.

“Ok. We’ve been friends since we were born, really. I’m weird, your weird, hell, the whole archipelago is weird. But even so, there’s something weirder about us, you, me, Cal and Asgeir, than other people around here. Look me in the eye and tell me you are who my parents, your parents and you say you really are, you know, under the hood.”

Harry chuckled a little, then got very serious and said to Josh, “Ok, look at me. I mean look me directly in my eyes.”

If the Invisible Man had been in that room he would have seen two very young men staring at each other, almost blankly. Harry’s eyes did not change in any way. He did not turn his head three-hundred-sixty degrees and vomit pea soup. Josh did not throw holy water on him. From the outside, it was very boring. On the inside, though, it was a different story. Josh was getting a small taste of what Harry was, what Caleb dealt with every day. Josh felt hot and as if might freeze to death at the same time. He could feel himself being pulled up into a black infinity while simultaneously falling forever, pulled apart and crushed. Oh, and the loneliness! He was surrounded by thousands, millions of “things” that would devour him and the worst was that hideous monster of loneliness. The loneliness could desiccate him and drown him at the same time. Then, it was over and Josh was back to himself.

Harry spoke first. “That’s just a little bit of me. I threw in a touch of what Cal feels all the time just for kicks so that you can understand him better.”

Josh was slow to respond, but when he did, he said “You’re doing that to Caleb? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I am not doing that to Caleb. Beings like me, like who I was, are doing that to him.”

“Well, you’ve got to stop them, man. This can’t go on! I thought I was going to die! I sure as hell wanted to!”

“I can’t stop them. If I could have I would have a long time ago. I can tell you why he goes through what he does and why you’re his brother here.”

“Ok. Tell me.”

“The Reader’s Digest version is this; Cal is suffering, needs to suffer because he is learning and growing. He is very special for reasons I can’t tell you right now.”

Josh looked at Harry for a moment, thought about responding to what he’d just said, decided to let it pass, then asked: “And why am I his brother…. here?”

“You’re his brother here because you’re special, too. Your job is different. You’re different. Special, but different.”

Josh was silent for a full minute, which is an eternity, before saying “Ok. Enough for today. What about Caleb? Can you wake him?”

Harry turned to look at Caleb then he spoke.

“Cal, old man, when I tell you to open your eyes, you will first do a few things. You are going to put this experience away. You are going to build a barrier around it, seal it off, and forget about it. You will forget about what happened here, today, you will forget, as best you can your sadness. You will remember one thing; our little brother was killed today, and you are the man who will find out who did this and why. You understand me?”

“I understand”, came the almost-too-quiet-to-hear reply.

“Ok, open your eyes.”

Cal’s gemstone-green eyes opened, and his face went from peaceful to a stony mask that he would wear for some years to come. He sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, looked at Josh and Harry.

“What are you fuckers still doing here?” Cal said with a little more nasty in his voice than he really intended.

Josh looked at Cal with one eyebrow raised and went back to assaulting his remaining sandwiches. Harry smiled at Cal and then his phone rang in his pocket. It was his father, still at the Jorgensen home. Harry stepped out of the room to speak to his father. He had no secrets regarding Caleb and Joshua, none that would not be revealed in time, anyway, but given Cal’s finely balanced state, thought better of saying anything upsetting in front of him.

“Son, we are going to be here all night. Cal and Josh’s parents will stay here with us; the Asgeir’s parents are too fragile to be left alone. Most of the parents on the island will be here soon. They’ll be spilling over into our house and the Smiths’ house, as well.”

“Ok, dad. What about the bonfire tonight? I assume that it’s been canceled or will be.”

“Yeah, that’s off, but we are going to have all the kids in the school, kindergarten to twelfth grade over to the three houses and there will be a bonfire in the backyards with food and prayers for the Joergensens. This is a time for coming together not isolating ourselves.”

“Ok, dad, Josh and I are still tending to Cal.”

“Have you told him, yet?”

“No. I will when I hang up.”

“Mary told me that he’s pretty bad. Please be careful with him. He’s been on the edge since he was a boy.”

“Yeah. I did a few things. I think he’ll come through this.”

“A few things, huh? Harrison, I don’t understand so much about you. There’s so much I want to tell you, but it all boils down to how proud I am of you and how much I love you.”

“I love you, too, dad. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

“Do that. Out.”

Harry returned to Cal’s room where Josh and Cal were talking about how Cal was feeling, “Josh, I am not all here. I can feel it. Something is off, missing, gone.”

Before Josh could answer Harry cut in, “There is a piece of you missing. I know that you don’t believe in anything that you can’t see or measure…”

Cal looked up at Harry, then over to Josh, “You are damn right I don’t. You put any stock in hocus-pocus, including, Christianity and you are going to get your head handed to you by a supposedly loving God. It is all bullshit. All of it.”

“All of it, I know. It’s all bullshit, from top to bottom, back to front. Except that it’s not. I was not always human. Neither were you two, for that matter, nor anyone else on this grain of sand, but that’s for another time.”

“My bullshit meter is going to explode.”

“BOOM!” Harry said, laughing and gesturing.

At this, Josh laughed, as well, and said, “Cal, I’ve seen some of it. I have seen some of what Harry is talking about. That’s also why I originally wanted to be a priest so I could be a part of the Mystery of Creation.”

“Yeah, making cookies that have God in them and all that crap.”

“No. Not making cookies that have God in them. Making cookies that are God, to put it as crassly as you did. Confecting the Eucharist is the proper term for it. And it’s not bullshit. Your meter is off.”

“My meter is gone “BOOM!” Cal said, looking at Harry with a faint smile which faded quickly.  “Skip it for now. So. Something is going on. What is it?” asked Cal.

Josh went to Cal’s bed, sat next to him, but looked straight ahead toward the desk he had been sitting at.  “Cal, Asgeir was found on the beach, near where the bonfire usually is. He was dead. He was more than dead, he had been mutilated as if he’d been torn apart by animals.”

Caleb did not respond. He put the heels of his hands to his eyes and rubbed them slowly.

With great effort Cal managed to get out, “But I saw him today at the swimming hole. He was having fun. He was with his girl. I don’t believe you.”

Harry said, “Look, no one knows how it happened, but it has happened. I saw the beach where it happened. Looked like someone dumped a gallon of red paint on the sand. Not pretty. Under normal circumstances, I would be able to “see through the veil” and know exactly what’s going on…”

“Bullshit” Caleb interrupted.

“Not bullshit. It’s who I am. Do you really know who I am, Cal?”

Caleb’s eyes glazed over, and, in a low voice, Cal said “Here, you are Harry Martin, my brother in more than just name. There, you are Lightning, Dean of Demons, second only to Satan himself, and sometimes more than Satan. You are a being shot through with evil who has turned towards the Light of He Who has saved us all. You are Harry Martin, my brother.”

Then, Cal came back to himself, saying, “I know who you are. You are full of shit. If you can usually see through this veil, why can’t  you see now?”

Harry and Josh pretended to ignore what they had just seen and heard but exchanged surprised glances, “I don’t know why I can’t see over there right now. There are some big things brewing. Bigger than I have ever experienced, and I have seen a few things.”

Josh said, “Look, Cal, as hard as it is to digest, Asgeir was killed today. Almost no one knows about it, yet. The only reason we know is because his parents called our parents and told them. That was only natural. Harry is “different”. You’ve known that since we were kids. Don’t go playing dumb now because you don’t like the implications of who he might be.”

“I am sorry, Old Man,” Cal said, using Harry’s nickname for Cal on Harry, himself. “I would say that I didn’t mean to be a dick, but I did mean it. I should not have meant it, though. I cannot tell you how the pain I am in now.”

Josh answered, “Look, Neither one of us can pretend to understand what you’re going through so I won’t insult you by pretending to. Same for Hellboy, here. But there is more to the world than you can know. Pops is always telling you the same..”

“Yeah. He just said that an hour, or so, ago.”

“Yeah. I bet. Pops is a good combination of being “here and there.””

Harry cut in, “Cal you can choose to believe this or not. I am “different”. You know that even if you don’t believe in the “whys” of my difference. I am what I am regardless of your belief.”

As he said this, a large pastrami on rye appeared in his right hand. Harry looked at Cal, then Josh. He stood and without a word, left the room to eat his sandwich.

On an island of anomalous people, Caleb Smith was an anomaly, even with Harry in the room. He lived in a town where sex was free and easy within certain constraints, yet he did not live that life. He lived in a town where supernatural events happened with all the natural inevitability of tomorrow’s sunrise, yet he walled those events off from himself. He lived in a town that often had its own weather; Winter days during Summer; Autumn days during Springtime; this he ignored, as well. But when one of his closest allies created a sandwich from seemingly nothing, this he could not ignore.

Cal rose to his feet. The floorboards creaked a little under his weight and he looked at Josh. “I’m really hungry. You?”

“Yeah. A bit peckish. Only had two sandwiches and some noodles and I need to do some thinking.”

“Looks like Harry’s Diner is closed. Anything left in the house?”
“Do you like left-over crumbs and dried gravy on a plate?”

“I thought so. Let’s go to the Black Hole and eat ourselves stupid.”

“I’m pretty dopey already”, Josh said.

“Amen, brother. Besides, I can’t stay here right now. I need air. I need to see where Asgeir was killed. God, that sounds weird to hear come out of my mouth.”

“I get that. How do you feel, Cal?”

“Like a bucket of warm piss. It’s either eat or end it all and right now I want some mashed with gravy.”

“Amen and Amen.”

As Caleb was pulling on his jeans, he said to Josh, “You’ll have to tell me if what I dreamt is real. And, is Asgeir really gone?”

“He is,” Josh said shaking his head in disbelief.

Cal said nothing to this not-so-new news, though snippets of what he had experienced in the clearing on the “other side” flashed in his mind.

“I’m going to kill the mother fucker and eat his heart for dinner.”

“Who?”

“Whoever it was killed our brother.”

“Yeah.”

Asgeir Joergensen had been a light to the world. Now that light had been snuffed out. At that moment, Cal knew. He knew what he was going to do with his life. He was going to find out who or what had killed Asgeir Joergensen.

Copyright 2018 by Andrew Payne