A Bright House

For the evening of the day that began with the dream “warning” from his mother, Ray Townes made another phone call to the O.P.P. investigator in charge of the connected cases. His request was to be faxed as much information as possible in advance of the flight to Toronto, car rental, then a drive three hours northwest later that morning. Everything about this mystery sat at odds to Ray’s normal confidence in his abilities. Echoes of his mother’s astral appearance had lingered with a sense of portent. The pit of his stomach bubbled, acidic. Where he had previously felt a warm tickling anticipation over so quickly being able to visit with Jenny again, though it was mitigated with nuanced shadow because of the circumstances of her life and that bizarre event with a massive bird, Ray was quite solidly planted into a new epicenter of uncertainty.

During the phone conversation regarding files being faxed in advance, Ray requested that he be allowed to first visit the “crime scene” unaccompanied. That he be given directions and driven to the closest residential point of access, and left to walk out there alone. This request was met with immediately voiced resistance, but Townes persisted. He worked better with uncluttered signal space; a reduced amount of human thought residue, on cases of this importance. “We’ll talk about it when you arrive” the officer stated flatly. Ray gladly accepted the middle ground and didn’t press on. He also spared the sharing of details about his deeply rooted worry that people with identical and quite rare blood types had just happened to be drawn to a very localized rural setting before disappearing from the face of this earth. What good would it do to reveal his own similar blood type? Or further admission that since his first laying eyes on the troubled and alluring Jenny of Bright street, Ray’s foundation upon 3D terra firma had been noticeably shifted?

Rather than get into bed with a book, Ray decided to sit for a long while in the old wicker chair nearby. He lit a tall pillar candle that often served for meditation light, settled into the comfort of the vintage chair with its high armrests, and closed his eyes into what would show itself. He was still fresh from the ache of his father’s funeral service, and for how it compounded itself by attachment to all memories of his mother. Melinda, the warm and loving. Melinda, the mystery lady whose episodic distant gazes and long silences so troubled her little boy. Ray leaned back into the chair, hearing it creak beneath him, and fell almost immediately into the peculiar vertigo of his visions. He wanted to concentrate on the face of his mother; the young woman who would stare off into invisible spaces as she washed the evening dishes, but relaxed his mind into an open channeling. There had always been strong intuition within Melinda’s young son that his mother lived another reality in tandem with the one embraced within the walls of their family home.

Sitting there given to the depths of memory but from the perspective of an aging man whose exit horizon lies within sight, Ray recalled periods of tension between his parents that had at the time eluded their young son’s cognition for understanding. Days of few words between them where his father seemed to purposely work the fields past the hour of supper, moving from the tractor directly to the barn or work shed. He briefly opened his eyelids to watch the candle flame contort. In his recollection, Ray could not link these episodes of parental friction to his mother’s occasional bouts of tenuous presence. It may be that in his childhood, already quite aware of his being “different”, the young Ray chose not to examine too closely those little rips in the fabric of his household world. Not long after closing his eyes again, the winds picked up as though to mimic the swirl of Ray’s thoughts, unable to affix themselves to anything solid or of use to his conflicted feelings about the rapidly approaching trip back to Ontario. He opened his eyes a second time at the sudden sound of thudding. Sounds that began at low volume and sporadically, then grew into a rapid collisional chaos all through the house.

From the front of the building he could hear panes of glass being pelted, and that was where he quickly strode, flicking a hall light, moving toward his mother’s bedroom. More accurately, the well preserved time capsule of her last earthly sleep. He opened the door to enter, leaving the room dark save for the spill of hallway rectangle across wide floorboards, and immediately saw that hail pellets were assaulting the house. He moved to the old double-hung frame as pea sized projectiles clattered Victorian panes, cupped his hands to his face to peer outside at the dance and bounce of them all over the front yard and for as far as he could see.

The timing was most definitely odd. Not seasonally so, but in terms of his meditation. For another loud minute it continued. Above his head a din of impact between frozen water and shingled roof. Then it gradually abated and Ray watched the pellet shower diminish into silence and stillness, save for the fast scud of pale clouds. He moved his hands down to rest upon the lower window frame, thumbs moving slowly back and forth across the well worn sill. How many times had his mother stood here? Gazing out at the implied forever line of Saskatchewan’s horizon. Feeling her duality of belonging and not fitting at all. How many nights, when the young Ray was drifting into sleep down the hallway, did his parents lay as strangers beside one another, lost to the lulls in their otherwise loving arrangement?

At what critical point do loving partners become loving strangers? Was Melinda Emma Townes an actress of vast skill who, but for those revealing moments of lost eyes, could convince the men under her roof that she was happy there? Ray breathed of the room, seeing her pretty smile in his best memories, and acknowledged that for all of his clairvoyant sight, he had not known the truth of his parents. He released a large heaving sigh, lowering his head to rest against the once again quiet window. This act transported him back to Jenny’s kitchen and he felt the warmth of her arms around him, the tears on his shirt. Sweetness there. It galvanized him to push away from the window, and in turning his foot found a section of flooring that had lifted ever so slightly; enough to catch the sock around his big toe.

Ray moved to the wall and flicked the ceiling fixture to life, then returned to the spot near his mother’s bed. It had been a while since Ray’s previous entrance of this space, and old homes continually shift, settle... he noted that two nails had popped free enough for their entire heads to be exposed. One corner of the wide plank was curling inward to its center, now that the twin anchoring nails were only partially biting wood. The kitchen had, as many do, a drawer that held assorted tools for around the house. Nails, screws, pliers, a flashlight, candles, and a claw hammer. Ray squinted at the lifted board and then made his way toward that drawer.

In the night sky above Grand Valley, not too distant from the converging ley lines where unexplainable events had been occurring, thunderbird sees motion in a section of open land within a shallow cut in rolling hillside. Within minutes of each other, two large barn cats will perish inside the massive talons of that which swoops down silently. Dispatched quickly, efficiently, they are lifted and carried aloft before being dropped to finality from high up.

The second feline panics, freezing into a squat with its eyes tracking the fate of its counterpart as the body drops and flails to a thudding death, bouncing once, dead on contact. Turning with haunches low, ears flattened, the second cat dashes for its barn shelter only to be similarly scooped from the grasses in a brutal replay of what has just transpired; a copycat. These sacrifices are lifted then, one in each claw, to a flight up the hillside and a feeding perch within the canopy of a century old tree. This sustenance, a mere snack for the remaining miles of flight, will bring thunderbird to its destination for morning light. There, it will hunt, rest, and wait.

Ray Townes knew enough about the methods of a Universe to believe that all of the unfolding around him was beyond the scope of coincidence. His had been a lifetime of constant “taps on the shoulder”, of the alignments both whimsical and small, critical and of utmost import. The prairie climate is dynamic. A brief hail storm, however rare and localized, would not of itself flag the mind of a person looking for signs within the event. For a person used to following loosely defined but potent hunches, it became a timing with the heft of volumes spoken. First the vivid dream warning from his mother. Next, a confirmation that people who have completely vanished share the world’s rarest blood type with a clairvoyant who just happens to have been asked to assist with the investigation. (this thought reminding Townes to call Jenny regarding her own blood)

Within the span of a day, yet another metaphoric shoulder tap as an out-of-the-blue hail drop causes Ray to enter his mother’s room. A museum of family tragedy so heavy with its ambiance. He fished around in the large bottom drawer and came up with the hammer, all along aware of a growing cold pit within his gut. He had asked for an answer to ill formed questions, meditation only just begun. Climbing the staircase with a key to a floor lock metaphor, Ray recognized the fluid intent of events put in place far beyond the scope of a human to comprehend or predict.

By the time he crossed the floor to kneel before its lifted board, Ray knew he wasn’t going to tap the nails back into place. Pure intuitive impetus override guided his hand as he inserted the claw crevice and pulled up the first old nail. His heart rate accelerated. The second nail was more stubborn, possibly bent within the joist. He pulled and his mind stayed blank. He applied weight to the hammer handle and jerked back, finally prying up the nail with a protesting squeak. Dust plumed upward as the end section of flooring came loose, lifted slightly. He pulled the next two nails up, set the hammer down, and tugged on the board enough to see something beneath it catch and glint off the ceiling lamp. His pulse reached a new plateau as suddenly labored breathing followed suit. Ray would have to remove the entire nail set, for the wood was also tongue-in-groove and despite his urgency he was loathe to damage the floor.

How many Ray Townes heartbeats did it take? How many from the moment he leapt from the wicker chair at the sound of hail, until the instant that he lifted an old floorboard free of its place to see a small and very aged tin box sitting in a film of dust within the floor joist space? Were those heartbeats counted and divided by each step of the new journey placed before him, would Ray’s answer point toward a seamless equation that contained not only all of the day’s puzzle pieces, but Jenny?

What strange mathematical confoundment could explain his unsettled heart as each hour passed during the lengthening of that week? He lifted the rectangular tin from its decades long hiding spot. Gently, Ray placed the hammer off to one side and shifted into a cross legged posture, forcing his breath into a semblance of normality. He sat for a while, looking at the Victorian era font and artwork adorning the box. “Gay Nineties Tea Time Cookies” in an elegant script visible beneath the grey coating of silt... Ray removed a sock to wipe the tin, noting the lightness of its weight. “Atlas Biscuit Corp. New York, NY”...

He placed the tin down in front of him, put his dirtied sock beside the hammer, and stared for long minutes at what felt to be a major threshold. A Pandora box. He had no memory of his mother ever buying cookies. She had loved to bake, and money during Ray’s early years had always been tight. Perhaps, and he knew this not to be true even as he considered it, this predated his mother? A relic from the life of his grandma? With a deep breath he lifted the cookie box to his lap, held it in place with his left forearm, and pulled the lid open.

The first item to meet his eyes was a folded sheet of parchment colored paper, writing within its triple bend panels. He gently removed it to a place beside his bent knee, then stared incredulously at the only other thing inside. It took him a full minute to reach with fingers gone to trembling, for in this span of time he experienced one of the most potent psychic flashes of his adulthood. A visual that slid past in the depths of a telling that would link indelibly with what lay within the cookie box... Ray touched it first, carefully, with his right index finger. Thick, dense, somewhat oily against his sensitive nerve endings. It lay coiled like a rattler, waiting to strike at his world after he lifted it free of a hiding place meant to be found precisely the way it came to pass.

As Jenny of Bright street slept a deep untroubled sleep in her tilted bedroom, across hundreds of miles a man very much on her mind held his hand out to gaze with watering eyes upon a two foot length of braided black hair. Thus arrived the life chapter of no return. Its name was Delsin Chacapot.