felt that draw.
A sense of righteous anger…righteousness…that’s the draw. To be and act angry, to justify it through righteousness, because you’re doing it—at least in your mind—on the behalf of others. Anger is seductive. It gives the sense of immediate and palpable power, even though it’s an illusion, a semblance of power. Real power is settled and grounded. A filling in. Power-Full.
A knock on the door shook me out of my navel-gazing.
I peeked out the window. It was Maryka Owen, the woman I’d done a depossession with. That seemed a very long time ago.
I went to the door and opened it.
“Hi,” I said.
She tugged at her hair with one hand, wrapped a strand of hair around her finger. “I’m sorry for not calling. I needed to see you, and I came right by…”
“Sure,” I said. “It happens like that sometimes. C’mon in.”
I waved her into the front room and settled back into the couch. She sat in my armchair, leaned forward, knees pressed together, long fingers intertwined in a tight knot on her thighs.
“What is it?” I said.
“I’ve been feeling much better…”
“That’s good.”
“But this friend came to see me, from over in Decanter…”
…and I felt the knowing and the soft voice of my guides…“This is how it opens…”
I repressed my sigh. “Yes?”
“…and since then I’ve had this feeling that there’s some entity hanging around since he came over.”
“Your friend, is he staying with you?”
“Yes. He had some problems in Decanter. He’s going to stay with me till he figures out what to do.”
“How long have you known him?”
She thought on it. “Two years. We met at a meditation workshop in Indianapolis.”
I closed my eyes. As it often does, information came to me in a big packet, a ball of energy…
Tigre and Burt…Tigre curled beside a huge tree, Burt perched on a long-hanging branch, First In Front seated cross-legged with his back propped against the tree.
“Here’s the connection,” First In Front said. He held up his old scalping knife and gestured. “This is where it starts…”
Burt flapped his wings and rose into the air, gripped with his talons the fabric of the sky like a sheet on the wall and pulled it back…into the black…black, black, black. Far off in the black, two glowing spots of red that rushed forward and became enraged eyes in a sea of black…a flurry of images, one after another rolling into a steady stream…images from Atlantics, medieval images, figures twisting in flames, rolling forward.…long black ships hanging in the air, long threads running down from them to humans far below…the main streets of downtown Decanter as seen through a sepia filter…and below the streets, tormented souls pressing up against the concrete and the buildings…the disincarnate, human and otherwise, walking the streets, sitting in waiting rooms, in courthouses, in offices…and near the graveyard on Long Street, on the edge of Decanter, a pulsing invisible to the everyday eye, a pulsing against the fabric of reality, like the image of a sheet…the dark portal. And all around it the cast of characters…the possessed…lawyers, bankers, cops, deputies, school teachers, the everyday people of a seemingly everyday town…all of them looking down at the pulsing blackness beneath their feet and far above their head, a similar pulsing, a pulsing from the Light they ignored…and then the image of an old man, running, out of breath, and behind him, laughing, some of those same faces…
I opened my eyes and murmured “Thank you” to my guides.
Maryka cocked her head, puzzled.
“I think I should meet your friend, Maryka.”
“Now?”
“Yes,” I said, heavily. “Now.”
Chapter 12
Anthony Boardman was older than me, probably in his early fifties. He was big-framed but shrunken, as though he’d been ill and hadn’t filled out. His face was pained and I saw the energy around him that told me he dealt with some chronic
Kathi Mills-Macias
Echoes in the Mist
Annette Blair
J. L. White
Stephen Maher
Bill O’Reilly
Keith Donohue
James Axler
Liz Lee
Usman Ijaz