A Bright House

An alignment of energies and events under critical shared time and perspective influences. A fulcrum one way or another that would require a unified willingness field, for Jenny to find herself precisely where she most needed to be at four in the morning during a life altering weekend. She would not sleep, could not. Each passing awareness to be savored and stored away for future sustenance should this never happen again. A soft glow from numerals on her clock radio bathed Ray’s profile in diffused blue. He had fallen asleep, deeply so, seconds after laying his head down. Jenny, on her left side, drank in the peaceful image of the quietly breathing man beside her. Scott had been a snorer, a real lumberjack, and was a restless sleeper who moved from side to side, back to stomach. Ray seemed to melt into the bed and away from the harsh waking world completely. He was atop the blankets, fully clothed but for the removal of his shoes.

His hands were clasped with the fingers interlocked across his lower stomach. She lost track of time in the watching of his sleep, the admiration of his beauty in her room, so improbable and yet actual. Three days removed from her previous life which she viewed as a metaphoric desert, then a mirage on the Friday of his appearing, then a fully realized oasis on the Saturday into Sunday... how would she face the new week when he boarded that flight home? For how many nights would her pillow case dampen from tears? Even in that most vulnerable state on a night of determined sleeplessness, Jenny would not lie to herself; he had burst something open within her. An instantly connected feeling of home, memory, history.

A feeling so true and rich that reached effortlessly past her own lifetime, beyond the painful years of wondering who her parents had been and why they hadn’t wanted her. It was an irrational illogical wild type of knowing; he had been sent to her. It could only have been Ray Townes and only at this pivotal juncture. Was she loving him with her eyes, loving what he represented in myriad symbols, through delusional thinking? Was this sudden blooming trust and its companion, courage, another self sabotaging plot on the unfold? She watched him sleep and couldn’t believe it so. She slowly lowered her face to his fanned out locks and inhaled gently. It took everything in her willpower not to touch his lips.

Kevin May feels a haunted awareness in the aftermath of his third astral visit to horror farm. That the dog next door has been found dead in his yard after a short burst of frantic barking and yelping would have sufficed to rattle Kevin, but he experiences a creeping sensation that he is being watched; has been followed back through the dream portal. Later that day he hands his startled sister the undeveloped roll of blackmail film.

Without a word he trudges the staircase past his mother who is vacuuming its carpeted runner, dons a worn pair of sneakers then slips through the front door. His 35mm automatic camera dangles from a short strap around his thin wrist. Anyone passing him on their street would have noted the blankness in his red-rimmed gaze, but Kevin leaves the neighborhood without encountering anyone. An hour after handing the roll of film to Susie, he is crossing the trestle above Mill Creek.

To the place he had heard about through passed along tales that concerned Bradley and Whisky first, and most troubling, the disappearing policeman from Allenford. The presence that he has been aware of seems to increase its radiant power once he crosses the bridge. He stops several times to look at the stretch of rail track behind him. At one point, just as the headache and nausea introduce a two pronged assault, Kevin is certain that she will manifest visually. He begins to photograph the scenery around him, should something appear on the film later as is often the case with UFO images.

Nearing the spot (and of course not knowing it) where constable Will Pritchard began to experience disorientation, Kevin’s temples puncture and reflect outward pain echoes that come in pulses. It feels as though a gigantic hydroelectric transformer, acres across, has been buried within the earth. His molars buzz with it. He attempts to fight through the pain as it mounts, stopping between the rails to scan the perimeter of forest to the west of where he is standing.

Before he sees movement there, a feeling of urgent recollection arises, not unlike a memory on the tip of a tongue, but focus is becoming impossible. He aims a shaking camera to snap a frame of the tree line. Were it not for the solid ground beneath him, the all too real knifing discomfort, Kevin could almost believe that he had returned to a dream state. From his reading, he knows that exposure to heightened levels of electromagnetic energy results in a wide array of effects; nausea, headaches, feelings of paranoia and anxiety, hallucinations, the sense of being watched... many case studies of hauntings involve high EMF output, but here in this unpopulated expanse of rural land, Kevin feels there is much more to this location.

With wincing eyes he leaves the track line to move toward an area that beckons to his instincts. He wants to drop after a dozen paces. Wants to empty his guts and curl into a fetal position. Instead he continues, almost covering to within inches a line taken by the missing Will Pritchard. The buzz in his teeth and skull is such that Kevin is no longer thinking of the alleged massive bird of prey, or of poor Whisky. He questions the why of his being here at all but keeps his feet moving through tall wild grass and prickly weeds.

His camera is knocking into a kneecap, this ignored as the pulse of energy all around him increases with an almost audible character; wohmm wohhmm wohmm. Within ten feet of the trees he sees them. They flit and dart and slink. Low in the shrub and weed tangles, behind wide trunks. Opaque and pale greyish white things, humanoid featureless hints of beings that either don’t wish to be seen or want to inflict insanity. Like the dreams, they elude his focusing eyes. He stops to raise the camera, takes three frames through the viewfinder though his vision is tear blurred ... and there is a new sound of running water, over stones. Bubbling through the pulses of sickness.

What the fuck is he doing here? Is this what seventeen years will look like at the ending? Like Pritchard, now fully disengaged from lucidity, Kevin May totters into the trees filled with electromagnetic aberration influence, his sensory inputs mashed. Being younger than Pritchard, perhaps a touch more desperate to live despite his affected patina of disgust and world weariness, Kevin makes it past the spot where the missing policeman’s watch was found. He falls to his knees before a split brook that cleaves east and west around a median of boulders and massive Spruce. A brook that suddenly vanishes into a wide hole in the forest floor.

Kevin wants to stand up, walk to that opening, and cannot. He has been overcome at last. Panting now, saliva hanging in a long syrupy thread from his open mouth, he falls to one side. His cheek presses into jagged cones and fallen twigs. The soil begins to morph from the familiar scent of his homeland into what he remembers from nightmare farm. Throbbing eyes see rapid darting blurs of ghostly white shapes, still leaping and flying throughout the trees, and he finds enough energy to stretch out the camera holding hand; presses the shutter button.

His last knowing moments are ones of awe. The pain no longer matters. The young unhappy outcast, who had never truly experienced true peace or feelings of belonging to his reality, falls into a prolonged swoon of visual auditory full body immersion into what could only be a dimensional gateway. He has the thought, “confluence of ley lines”... he instinctively recognizes the elementals somehow made visible to him, and his mind even then despises how humanity had to force its own imagery upon that which was misunderstood and little known. The sprites and fairies, gremlins, ogres, gnomes, sylphs, undines, imps, dark elves.

The sheer arrogance of the human mind to affix a control model, a hierarchy, a tidy compartmentalized order upon that which it could never comprehend; Earth, Air, Fire, Water. The Devic Realm has existed free of the third dimensional restraints, for time immeasurable, because time itself was a human invention. A coping mechanism. What would science do with Akashic records and the ethers? As Kevin tastes the brine of his tears and pungent forest dirt, his hammering heart keeps rhythm with a flooding of information that seems to be coming at him from the forms all around his fallen body. It doesn’t arrive as spoken, but rather an overlapping liquid visual flow at the back of his skull, forward into his vision where everything combines into a weave of what he can see and almost see.

Kevin’s seventeen years dissolve into the plain of infinite potential, out of which all possibilities are created. He had created this moment upon birth into mortal form, through the choices made during his abbreviated life. This crossroads had always existed just for him, just this way, made for his catalyzing and enabling mental processes. He wants to say it aloud - “I was my own key” but has no voice, just as in one of the dreams. With that awareness comes the marrow chilling knowledge that he is about to pass through a portal of no return; that the forces of all creation were stern ones. There could be little tolerance for the ungrateful. This all existed free of random event, which was of itself as natural as life and death in cycle; this knowing that there are karmic forces, balances and checks, structures and impositions of rigid order within the ineffably complex matrix.

Kevin’s fading eyesight catches the movement of an exquisite salamander. It has appeared from nowhere directly in front of him, glistening in coppery skin flecked with yellow rectangular rows along each side, and it moves to his face unthreateningly, deliberately. He notes how the small green shoots in front of his nostrils stop moving as his breathing halts. He feels, hears, almost tastes the sound of an ultra high pitched eeeeeeeeeeaaeeeee climbing through his auditory register, and “knows” that when he can no longer perceive the note, he will be gone from this place.

Kevin May’s last willful act is to curl his right wrist, point the small automatic camera toward his face, and to press the shutter button several times into the upswell of horrid bottomless writhing visionless black spread that envelopes him.

At five in the morning, an hour before the alarm would sound, Jenny drifted into a light sleep that placed her in two realities; one of the bed and the sleeping man inches away, and one of recall as they entered the house with some of Scott’s belongings to spread them out on the kitchen table. Ray had asked for a freezer bag with which to seal the massive feather. He knew someone back home who could analyze it for him. Those hours in the kitchen had been emotionally draining and yet equally magical for Jenny. Doorways had been flung wide. A future of enforced half-life routine had been usurped by something tantalizing. Some vague but intoxicating promise had passed between them. The interim between Ray’s first visitation upon her life and the fervent wish for another soon after, would be filled with memories of that breakthrough Sunday evening. At five fifteen of that Monday morning, Jenny fell asleep with her face pressed into his hair and a heart fully offered.