A WHOLE NEW TWIST TO REALITY_PART 3 OF 4_TWILIGHT'S CHILDREN

{Wolf Howl, the last Lakota shaman, has apparently been captured. Or has he?

Or has the wolf merely cornered his hunters?

He is trying to tell Shadow, the Mossad assassin in his hospital room,

that world politics cease to mean anything at the end of the world ...}



Shadow said, "2012 is just another year.'

I shook my head. "The Aztecs thought different. It is October of the last year in their calendar. We have until ...."

"December twenty-first. I know, I read those phony tabloids, too."

The blank cyclop eye of the television blurred. The screen began to bubble and boil. And me without a remote to change channels.

This put a whole new twist to "Reality TV."

No longer shiny and black, its surface grew gray and smoky. Faint tendrils of mist breathed from it as if from Hell.

"Check out time," I whispered.

I blew upon the handcuff restraining me. It flared bright, then slowly faded as if only an after-image from a flash bulb. It made a low sputtering sound to disappear completely.

I rose from the bed with a grunt. Damn right knee. It would never heal completely. Good. The pain would help keep me centered.

Shadow pointed her gun at me. "Hold it right there, Wolf Howl."

I smiled grimly. She was trying to distance how she felt about me by using my Sioux name.

She kept on, "You know me. I won't hesitate."

The glass of the barred window began to splinter. I backed up. Not that way.

I turned to the door. A blackness seemed to breathe and grunt softly from beyond it. Not that way either.

Shadow muttered, "Ben Zonah (and no, you don’t want to know what that means in Yiddish.)"

I followed her eyes. Steaming, bubbling blood was seeping towards us from under the closed door. Above me the foam ceiling started bulging and creaking.

"Time to think sideways," I murmured.

I tapped my chest, and the hospital gown that had never truly been there wisped away to show my old flannel shirt, jeans, and hiking boots.

And yes, I had been in bed with my boots on.

John Wayne's ghost would be proud of me. I had wanted to die with my boots on. Wayne had had a good heart ... for a white man.

I walked to the closet door and opened it. I stopped in mid-stride. No clothes. No nothing. Just the deepest tar-pit of night. I shivered as a wave of icicles seemed to wash down my spine.

Shadow snapped, "A Broch (think of the Yiddish phrase as ‘Damn it!’ on steroids.) We're trapped."

My own throat was thick with fear. "It seems like sideways is the only way we've got."

The Spanish soldier Gil Perez in 1593 had lifted his right foot up from the dust in front of the Governor's Palace in Manila only to place it down on the cobblestones of Plaza Mayor in Mexico City.

In 1959 tourist Rick Stevens had stepped out of his car in Reno only to place both feet on the grass of Juarez, Mexico. Space can bend like fabric. It happens. Rarely. But it happens.

I had been born with the ability to do it on demand, along with other disturbing talents. Don't envy me. Because of that fact I have been hunted all my life.

Shadow thrust the muzzle of her automatic at me. "Make it stop!"

"Whites. You always think with your guns. Shoot the darkness, Shadow. See if that makes it go away."

"Stop it!, " cried Shadow in a husk.

"Fuck!," came a muffled voice from beyond the hospital door.

There had been terror, not anger, to that one word. The lights inside the room flickered, died, then the back-up light in the far corner came on.

My face became flint. It just kept getting better and better. Outside the door, the man tried for his one word epitaph again but was cut off midway.

I frowned. Fuck. That word had become the duct tape holding the White Man's conversations together. Without it, he would be helpless to communicate. Hell, even with it he was.

GrandMother was angry thunder above me.

She disapproved of profanity. Especially mine.

Man's language had acted as the prism to focus her awareness into clarity. And so she held words sacred as she did little else connected to Man.

How many times had she told me,

'Profanity is a weed that chokes the growth of words in your mind, GrandSon. What does that shrinks its grasp. Let the Whytes put chains on their thoughts. Let yours roam free to grow strong, for your mind is all that stands between you and the darkness that waits to devour you.'

Of course, the white doctors insisted I was only talking to myself when I heard GrandMother's voice. Maybe yes.

I chose to believe no. And in the end, what we choose to believe is up to us. Perhaps our first act of free will is to believe that free will exists at all.

The cheap wood of the door began to splinter, wisps of growling blackness squirming through the cracks.

Shadow looked at the gun in her hand. I hoped she wouldn't shoot through the door. It would only help the darkness get in quicker.

Her long black hair whipped about her face as she turned to me. "Do something, Drew!"

"Remember how to dance?"

"What? Are you insane?"

"You can have known me this long and ask that?"
***