LIFE NARRATED BY ANOTHER'S THOUGHTS

 

For Misky and others who have enjoyed my last novel ...

I am working on the sequel:

ACROSS THE RIVER

and

THROUGH THE WORLDS

“Time is free, yet priceless. You cannot own it, but you can use it. You cannot keep it, but you can spend it. The trouble with Man is that he thinks he has time when It has him.”

– Sentient        

 

As far back as I could remember my life had been narrated by a voice other than my own.

It had nearly driven me crazy until I discovered the voice came from an orbiting sentient dimensional craft.

Now, all was silent inside my head except for my own bewildered thoughts. I had always wanted to be alone in my head, I had it now, and I was devastated thinking I had lost my oldest friend.

Our desires are always fickle. Foolish is the man who trusts in them.

I sat by the inert body of Sister Ameal. I watched strange insects scurry away from it as if she were aflame.

And maybe to their senses, she was. As far as I could tell my friends and I were in the Cretaceous time period, the last portion of the Age of the Dinosaurs. I knew less than nothing about the insect life here.

I wagered it would be a safe bet to think any life form here would want us for lunch, insect or otherwise. That they feared Sister Ameal’s body was unsettling.

Of course, everything about her was unnerving … including the fact that she was the living, now dead, avatar of Sentient.

Sentient? She was the living intra-dimensional craft, ensnared in Earth’s initial gravitational field, who waited millennia to find a human mind with whom she could communicate.

And as soon as she discovered me, I was drafted to be cannon fodder in the madness spawned by Hitler’s insane ambitions.

Taking control of me to keep me safe, Sentient made me anything but safe. Still, I was a Major … in two ways: 

in rank and a major pain to any superior officer, chief of whom was General Eisenhower … currently on psychiatric leave … and yes, I, or rather Sentient, was to blame.

I absently toyed with Sister Ameal’s brilliantly white habit. Sentient, through the nun or directly through mental words, had always been there for me.

Now, here in the Cretaceous Age, she was death silent. Why were we here? Only Elohim knew. 

He had cast us here from the cursed village of Oradour-sur-Glane to keep me and my Spartan 300 safe from being crushed by the falling body of a dying Old One.

As you might be suspecting, Omaha Beach was a picnic compared to out-of-control Gestapo science garnering the attention of the Dark Ones.

It seemed I only learned the truth long after it could do me any good. To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and so many others, "I wish I had known this some time ago.”

For the thousandth time, I had acted impulsively. I doubt I would ever act otherwise. I've always been impulsive. 

My thinking is usually pretty good, but I always seem to do it after I do my acting and talking — like now. By which time I've generally destroyed all basis for further conversation.

Rabbi Lt. Amos Stein sat gingerly by my right side. “Rick, snap out of it. The Spartans need ….”

A crackling sword of living flame sliced between us, and the eerie voice of the fledgling seraph with the all too human name, Helen Mayfair, murmured, 

“You will give Richard all the time he requires to gather his wits. This is not a request, Rabbi.”

From the sound of her ghost-bell voice, I could tell she was in her fighting form of fourteen feet. 

Needless to say, when I fell in love with her in the orphanage library, she was in her human-appearing body.