Chapter Thirty-Seven

The Blinding

I parted ways with Jean and Light and returned home. A foreclosure sign was taped to the front door, and a new plank of plywood had been nailed over a second broken window. The front door was padlocked but the back door was unlocked. I entered. The house was cold and had a stale, mousy smell. My furniture remained in place, and, for now, the house was still my house.

I began to prepare for a campout in the wine cellar but thought better of it. I had apparently been away for months. My pursuers would have relaxed their vigilance by now. I was tired of being a fugitive. I got undressed and took a well-deserved shower. I adorned myself in warm, comfortable clothing.

I laid my weary body upon the couch, wrapped myself in a thick comforter, and tried to clear my mind. My eyes were drawn toward the fireplace where a picture of a family of three sat upon the mantle. I remembered the day that photo was taken. It seemed like an ordinary day at the time, but I now recognized no day spent with a child could ever be counted as ordinary.

Looking away from the photo, I thought about a phrase I once read. Life’s real search is something everyone would undertake if they were not stuck in the everydayness of their own lives. I laughed out loud as I confirmed I was no longer in the midst of the everyday.

Isabel once warned me about big decisions such as those I had recently made. She said, “One cannot leave one road for another without losing something along the way.” I returned my gaze out the large picture windows to observe a brief clearing in the storm. The sky was lit by the brilliance of a thousand stars. I was supposed to help Isaac after I learned to “walk the razor’s edge.” Where did Isabel come up with that shit? I yawned audibly. Eventually I fell asleep.

“Hey, Doc,” a child’s voice called urgently.

I was jolted awake and moved quickly to the window, scanning my backyard for the source of the eerie call. I saw nothing. The voice sounded like Isabel’s, and I wondered if I were dreaming.

After throwing on a warm coat and boots, I headed down to the boardwalk. The night was dark, and I struggled to make out a silhouette. The voice called again, guiding me down toward the high water mark on the beach. “Doc, down here.”

Another man might have recoiled at the familiar sound of a deceased girl, but my life was already on a different track. I jumped from the cedar planks down to the shore, past a tall clump of bay grass. I beheld her sitting on the beach.

“Izzy,” I stammered. I had not seen her on this side of the path since her death. She laughed, her laugh less hoarse and considerably drier than it was in the ICU. She sat cross-legged on the rocky shore, the absence of her wheelchair and oxygen tank notable despite the continued presence of features that identified this apparition as the deformed girl I once knew. She stared out toward the dark island, uninterested in my look of disbelief.

“Come on over here and sit next to me.” A haunted feeling came over me, but I did not protest as I sat down by Isabel’s side and shared her view of the island. From the corner of my eye I could see Isabel still had her tracheotomy. Her eyes and cheekbones...gargoyle. Her hair was longer and blacker, but she retained the disfiguring attributes of her illness.

“Doc,” she began, absentmindedly referring to me by my former title, “I found Isaac today.” Something odd rang in her tone of voice and her appearance. I thought she left behind her disease when she crossed the path.

“How can I help him reach home?”

Her answer was short and characteristically Izzy. “You’re a man staring at the Center when he should be moving toward the periphery.” This response confused me and on second thought did not sound like something Isabel would say. I wondered again if I were stuck in a dream.

I lifted my eyes toward the sky to search for some sign of reality. A thin slice of waning moon shone yellow.

“The October moon will rise in three days,” she warned.

A rapidly moving fog bank obscured the autumn constellations, but I caught the glimmer of a lone star high above Coucher Island. Something was off about it. Something predatory or foreboding. As I watched the glitter of that one lone star, Isabel reminded me of a little-known secret. “Voices of the soul,” she whispered, “speak with poetry. We can rape your mind, and that is where we find meaning.”

My hair now stood on end, and the metallic and foul smell of danger filled the air. This was not Isabel. Dense swirls of fog rolled with oceanic force and made opaque the night sky. All light abandoned the beach. I moved blindly away from the demon, struggling to regain some sense of direction. I tried in vain to find the edge of the boardwalk.

I stumbled upon the rocky beach but felt lost. The patter of rain upon stone surrounded me, yet I felt no drops. I struggled to find a beacon in the gray haze but found none.

The fog receded as quickly as it had arrived. It was sucked toward the bay as though by an unseen vacuum, leaving me at the water line, several hundred yards from my boardwalk. The scent of rotting vegetation permeated the shoreline, weak but unmistakable. I knew what evil lurked behind that olfactory curtain. I needed to reach the safety of my home, but the creature reappeared from out of the gloom.

“Fire Walker!” it hissed. It retained Isabel’s gargoyle facial features, but it had the skin of an aging corpse. Besides, the shape shifter’s eyes always give it away. Black and soulless, forever seeking separation and death. The shape shifter spoke with the voice of the damned.

“We will take care of the boy for you, don’t you worry. We will treat him the way Jack treated you. Would you like that, Paul?”

“You won’t touch him!” I could erase this creature from the Book of Life using my tie to the fire that connects all life. I reached toward my front pocket as the thing approached me. It floated effortlessly above the shore and stopped in front of me. It grabbed my throat with its right hand before I could find my Kesemanetow.

Its bony fingers felt slimy. Cold and dead. With one hand it produced a short dagger and held it menacingly a half-inch from my right eye. My front pocket was empty! In a panic I reached inside my rear pocket but was horrified to realize I had changed clothing. All three cards were somewhere in the house. My heart was beating so fast I feared it might stop.

“I want to remind you,” it said, “of what Isabel once told you.”

I tried not to look into its lightless eyes even as I forced my mind again to conjure an image of the sun setting over the bay. If the Fire Walker had defeated a Binder before, I reassured myself, he could surely do it again.

I placed my thumb over the rotting gray flesh of its throat as I contemplated the image. No smoke plumed from the mark of the Broken Path. The creature laughed at me, its laugh the sound of a thousand screaming infants. It seemed to cause the very world to shake.

It sucked in a large breath with eyes closed and began to exhale slowly, speaking with Isabel’s gargoyle voice, replete with a wet cough and respiratory insufficiency. “One cannot leave one road for another,” it wheezed, “without losing something along the way.” The demon opened wide its desiccated lids and thrust the dagger deep into my right eye, filling me with poison and blinding me. I remember no more from that dark night.