SAILORS ON STRANGE SEAS_PART 2 OF 4_TWILIGHT'S CHILDREN

{For all of you out there who weren't quite ready for it to end for Wolf Howl,

here he is at the End of All Things in the year 2012.

Chained to the bed rail by a handcuff, Wolf Howl senses a dark, hungry presence at his hospital window.

He is quoting Thomas Wolfe on death

but stops in the middle of the passage as he spots the Mossad assassin, Shadow, standing in his doorway.

The remainder of her injuries from the Wendigo has been healed by the Turquoise Woman ....}



The door to my hospital room opened silent and quick. A chill filled the darkness within me.

Shadow, the Mossad assassin, stood in the doorway and looked at me with haunted green eyes. In her mid-thirties now, she had been a lost angel at twenty when I had spared her on the Isle of Skye.

Now she was just a fallen angel, no longer able to remember the scent of lost innocence.

She continued the Wolfe quote in a husking British accent,

"To lose the earth you know for greater knowing. To lose the life you have for greater life. To leave the friends you loved for greater loving.

To find a land more kind than home, more large than earth --"

She couldn't go on. Her jade green eyes seemed cold to most. But they were only a bold front to hide the fact that they had lost their way long ago. Maybe mine looked the same.

"I see the hours have been kind to your body but hard to your heart," I said.

Her smile was a raw wound. "It seems we only meet when death has you boxed in."

I glanced at the dark window, then back to her. "More than you know."

Green eyes flashed in sudden anger. "Oh, Wolf Howl, why did you have to bring a dead girl to a hospital? You knew what they would do to you."

"Abby died being true to her word to the Mossad. She deserved a decent burial. And I had to honor a worthy enemy."

She shook her living waterfall of black hair. "There will be no honor in how you will be treated."

"I am Lakota. We are used to that."

I cocked an eyebrow. "Last I checked you were Mossad. You with the Agency now?"

She made a face, gesturing gracefully with long fingers at her simple black business pant suit. "I still am. I have infiltrated the F.B.I. "

"Well, that must make you the most special Special Agent I've ever seen."

Her eyes became hollows. "I am their ... Expeditor."

She had spoken the last word as if it had been dipped in filth.

I looked away from the self-hate in her eyes up to the blank television mounted on the wall, a mute symbol of the wisdom of the White Man. No remote, of course.

Drew August, AKA Wolf Howl, was much too dangerous to be given something he could use as a weapon.

As if I needed a weapon. I was a weapon. GrandMother had seen to that.

And that was why, at first, all the intelligence agencies the world over had courted me. My face grew more sour.

As if I would be the bought dog of any government. I finally convinced each one of them I was not available.

That was when the fun began.

They all had come to the unofficial conclusion that if they could not have me, then no agency could.

The hunt had been on.

The F.B.I. sending their expeditor told me that they were tired of losing agents to me. But those who start the war have no right to complain of its cost.

I jerked lightly on the handcuff chaining me to the hospital bed railing.

Now they thought they had run me to ground. They couldn't imagine it was they, all the peoples of the world in fact, who were in danger.

I smiled like my namesake. What was it that an old friend had once told me ... God punishes us for what we can't imagine.

I looked up at the television. Its one great dark eye looked back down upon me. What was the latest craze in programing these days? Oh, yes, I remembered. Reality T.V.

Reality. I wanted to laugh. Or to cry. Maybe a little of both.

How like the White Man to smear himself in the blood and despair of strangers and call it entertainment.

To view desperate, talentless dreamers make fools of themselves and to laugh as they were fileted by smug judges. And the white doctors said I was insane.

Too much paranormal power had pushed me over the slippery cliff of reason their reports all read. I no longer saw reality as it was.

Maybe.

Or maybe I did see clear, and it was the white man who saw only what he expected ... what he needed to see.

It was in Man's nature to destroy himself, destroy the very world around him.

I kept looking up at the one eye of the television. A change crept into the room like chill, invisible fog. Life seemed to grow slow and terrible as when dream becomes nightmare.

Shadow, the very special Special Agent whispered, "Drew, are you doing this?"

I shook my head. "We are strangers now in the stars, sailors on strange seas."

Her full lips curled, "What the bloody hell are you going on about? They're the same stars."

"Yes, but the space we swim through has changed."

"Space is space."

"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. 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.
***

***

TWLIGHT'S CHILDREN_PART 1 of 4_TESSA'S OUTSIDE THE BOX BLOGFEST

http://tessasblurb.blogspot.com/2010/10/announcing-outside-of-my-box.html


Tessa wants us to write outside our comfort zone. Oddly enough, so did my best friend, Sandra.

I complained to her a dozen times too many about Justin Cronin telling not showing his novel THE PASSAGE.

She challenged me to write a short story doing what did Justin did but better. Obviously, he was aiming at something he missed.

Could I do any better?

And so the short sequel to THE COLOR OF HER THOUGHTS {and my take on the end prophecised for 2012} was born. Here are the first three pages ....}


TWILIGHT'S CHILDREN

From the cliff of our birth we keep falling, falling. Our fingers reach out for something to hold on to.

Money. Power. Sex.

But they are lies, mirages without substance. We are in free fall. Despite the lie we tell ourselves, we all hit bottom. Yet somehow it always feels like a betrayal.

You would think that we would finally realize the truth. But what is it that the white historians say? The past is prologue.

We First People knew better. The past is only a footnote. As Man is but a footnote in the ancient history of GrandMother Earth.

She existed long before Man peered with bewildered eyes out of his cave. She would be here long after his useless monuments to himself had crumbled back into her soil.

Darkness was descending. And soon would end Man's strange history. Would he, like the dinosaur before him, stare fearful and uncomprehending into the storm that swallowed all his preconceptions into oblivion?

The lights to the room flickered. An odd coldness settled upon me. I had been sensing it for years. It had to begin sometime. And now it had.

Night pressed in on the window. Wings, large and leathery, beat my death song in the darkness. I looked at my wrist handcuffed to the railing of the hospital bed.

White Men. They had always made my life interesting. Why shouldn't they make my death the same?

I looked out through the locked window. Nothing. Not yet. But I sensed a straining from beyond the glass, from beyond what the White Man foolishly called reality.

Man sought to explore that imagined reality as he struggled to roam the stars in ships. I shook my head. He was already on one.

The living planet who gave him birth.

She sailed through a sea of stars at speeds Man could only dream of attaining in his fragile vessels of steel.

Like the most agile of ballerinas, GrandMother Earth spins on her toes at just over a thousand miles an hour.

With the Northern Lights in her wake, she swims through the icy void around her father, Sun, in strokes of over sixteen and a half miles a second.

While Sun holds his daughter in his mighty arms of gravity, he speeds towards a dark destination in a gait of some twelve miles a second.

It is a wonder our noses don't bleed and our heads fly from our very shoulders.

The White Man had become arrogant in his mastery of science as the dinosaur had become confident their rule would never end.

But I had seen the rules of science grow dark with the dawn of quantum mechanics. In the microverse, the same rules did not apply. In fact, often they were reversed.

Why did the White Man feel it would be otherwise in the macroverse?

In my bones I felt GrandMother Earth was just now at the edge of seas where different rules applied.

The freakish weather pointed to it. Energy blackouts were on the rise. Insanity's bloody crimes were daily shouted from the headlines.

GrandMother had taught the First People how to survive in such a realm. The White Man in his arrogance and greed had succeeded in nearly wiping us from her shores.

Most of her teaching to us had been lost.

Was I the last to know it as she had taught it? If so, it would be poetic justice, for the White Man wanted me dead. He would certainly get death.

Killing me would signal the end for him and the rest of Twilight's children.

I stared into the alien depths between familiar stars and whispered, "Weep not for the dead nor mourn him. Rather weep for him who goes away, for he shall return no more nor see his native country."

They were the words of Jeremiah, speaking of another enforced exodus. Jeremiah. I made a sour face. Though the White Man claimed him, he was mostly forgotten ...

or dismissed out of hand as a relic from the past. He was much like the Lakota in that.

The Something beyond the window laughed. The sound rose, spindled, and twisted like icy smoke from the funeral pyre of Man.

The straining stopped outside the window. The cold presence swept away into the night. It was gone.

For the moment.

Death was both patient and impatient. The presence would be back. After all, it had all the time in the world. And Man? He had squandered most of his.

And me? I could not win. But perhaps I could lose more slowly. A darkness within whispered I had best try for this was my last hand.

What had Thomas Wolfe written at his last?

I said the words low, "Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year. Something has spoken in the night, and told me I shall die. I know not where."

The door to my hospital room opened silent and quick. A chill filled the darkness within me.

The Mossad assassin, Shadow.

She stood in the doorway and looked at me with haunted green eyes. In her mid-thirties now, she had been a lost angel at twenty when I had spared her on the Isle of Skye. Now she was just a fallen angel, no longer able to remember the scent of lost innocence.

There was a solid finger-wide streak of moon-white at her right temple. GrandMother's Sign. Estanatlehi always marked those she chose to heal.
***