Anyway he was gone, and Gabriel was used to that. But there was an absence in his life, an absence he could feel physically, at times. If Sean had lived, Gabriel would have had a sibling with, perhaps, the same feeling of being undefmedly different. Someone who could relate to feeling as if yows had only one foot in this world. But death had taken Sean before his brother had quite understood Sean was really there as an individual. Gabriel had accepted him as part of the world like the furniture, the sky, the ground underneath, his own left hand. And then he was gone.
Sure, Gabriel had some friends—a couple of others who seemed a little “off were drawn to him. Chester and Anna Lynn. Drawn to him, maybe, because he accepted them; maybe too because he sometimes protected them. And there were a couple of Indian brothers, off the Rez. Joel and Angelo, he'd see them at the rodeo, at the county fair, or on the street when Gabriel rode his bike into town. They hung out and talked, sometimes.
But he never felt there was anybody he could really open up to. How would he explain? 'See, there's something in me waiting to come out, it visits me in dreams, and it's always there, kinda invisible, looking over my shoulder, and I keep thinking someone is going to realize I'm not really part of this world. I have to work hard to feel part of it. It's like I'm supposed to be somewhere else wherever I go. But it's really hard to explain.”
People would think he was bipolar. Which is something he'd read up on, when he started to be afraid he might be crazy, himself. One time he started talking to a guy in town, a nineteen-year-old, Connor, outside the drugstore. Connor was a notorious local eccentric.
“Hey, Gabriel, what you doing, you gotta Hershey bar, huh? Can I have a bite?...Thanks. What's up? Hey, can you feel the vibes right now?”
Gabriel had looked at him with interest. “Feel...which exactly?”
“That feeling like the ray coming at you, that you can feel in your bones and...”
“Well. Sometimes.” Could this guy really feel what Gabriel felt? “Something kinda like that. Not exactly, it's more all over the place. I mean—”
“And it's from the agents, they're beaming them at us from orbit, it's in those satellites, and they put voices in your head that tell you to do things?”
“Uh...” From orbit? Voices?
“The beams come right through those faces in the clouds. The faces are from the rays.” Gabriel had winced at that. “Urn...no. I meant something else. You can keep that Hershey bar.” He left quickly, realizing that Connor was just plain mentally ill, really was bipolar, or paranoid schizophrenic. Gabriel Bleak never imagined conspiracies against him, never seemed to get “special
messages” from television, the way mentally ill people did—like Connor. The only message he got from TV was that he should buy something.
When he'd turned thirteen, Gabriel had written in his diary:
I must have some particular mental problem, that somebody could diagnose, not like Connor but something else. Something that lets me use my mind pretty reasonably, but the disease part is like I just have this feeling of knowing there's some kind of invisible world and being part of it and it's really a form of mental illness that I'll probably find in the books some day. That really sucks. Big-time.
I think my mom and dad know there's something wrong with me. Mom acts like she loves me but it's like she's scared of me too. My dad goes quiet when I'm around. He used to tell me things about the world and ranching, but a couple of years ago he just stopped talking to me unless I ask him a question, and then when he answers he only says what he has to.
Maybe I'm imagining all this stuff. But if lam, why? What does that mean?
***
GABRIEL TRIED TO READ a little more Edmund Spenser. But he was soon seized with a restlessness, laid the book down on the quilt, and stared up at the slanted, white ceiling of his room—he was in an attic room, converted to a bedroom. He had a larger bedroom downstairs but he liked the view out the window from up here. His father had seemed relieved to agree, had even painted the walls for him. Only later had it occurred to Gabriel that the move to the attic room put him farther away from his parents.
Once, when he'd got up to go to the bathroom, he'd heard them talking late at night, downstairs in the kitchen. He'd stood in the darkness at the top of the stairs, listening for a minute. Hearing his mom say, “I just think he's lonely.”
“You know what could happen. They could take him. And why? What's happening...happening right now, to...”
“We agreed not to talk about that—that boy is gone, sweetheart, and we...don't talk about that.” “Maybe they did something to him.... Maybe right now.” “Please. Don't. Just...talk to Gabe.”
“I try. But I feel like he's looking right through me...1 want to talk to Reverend Rowell about it, but I don't see how I can.” “Quiet, I think he's up.”
Had they really been talking about him? Had he heard them right? The next morning he'd awakened, remembering the overheard conversation, and wondered if he'd dreamed it.
Now, as he lay there looking at the ceiling, the wind pushed at the house, sighing, shivering the window glass. Something about its sighing reminded him of when Johnny Redbear had come over from the Rez, had called up softly to his window, late at night. Wanting him to come out and drink some liquor he'd stolen from his old man. Gabriel had refused, afraid of getting caught, but he'd been tempted. Not so much by the liquor. By the adventure. By a voice calling from outside his window.
Come on out, Gabe, come out.
He liked that. Someone out there wanting him to come out and push out the limits.
The room was warm, tonight; the wind whining at the house wasn't cold. Sometimes there was an electricity in the air before a storm, a charge that seemed to come with a warm wind. Kind of felt that way tonight. On a night like that sometimes you could see a white fire dancing along the lightning rod over the barn, a pulse of energy in the darkness. Maybe if he went to look, he would see it now.
The house faced west, and so did his bedroom window, under the highest peak of the roof. The barn was north and east. He could see the lightning rod if he climbed onto the lower roof under his window.
“North. North and east. Look to the north.
“ A voice, like a whisper. Barely audible, in the sigh of the wind.
He shook his head. Imagining stuff. From reading that book.
Maybe he shouldn't go look. Maybe he shouldn't go outside at all tonight.
“The way is opening. “
“Shut up,” he said aloud. Maybe he was turning into whatever Connor was, after all. Losing it.
But when the wind rose again, he thought he heard a distant singing, voices singing something
he.
couldn't make out, the sound rising and fading...like if you heard people singing a hymn in a church a ways off. Only this wasn't a hymn.
He snorted at himself, but he got up, went to the wood-framed window, opened it quietly as he could. A warm, searching, alfalfa-fragrant wind came in, rattling his posters: Green Day and Nirvana and the U.S. army recruiting poster. The alfalfa had been harvested but the scent lingered over the fields; and now, the window open, the perfume of reaped stalks of grain filled his room. Alfalfa and dust.
Don't fear the Reaper.
He started to climb out the window—then thought better of it and went to get shoes. He put on his Converse sneakers, went back to the window, climbed out onto the porch roof, feeling as if he were climbing right up among all those stars crowded overhead. He steadied himself with a hand on the eaves against the wind and looked toward the barn. Was that a ghostly glow on the barn's lightning rod? He could hear the Guernseys mooing in there. And a distant
thunk
as one of the two horses kicked at its stall. They were restless too.
The door to the barn was partly open. It seemed extra dark in there, as if the darkness had thickness and weight. But was that a pulse of light in the middle of the black? And then—the deep darkness again. Bits of hay swirled at the entrance in a little whirlwind.
He could just go downstairs, tell his dad he was going out to check on the stock. But he didn't want to see his parents right now. He felt that they'd find something out about him, see it in his face, if he went. Like he was ashamed.
What did he have to be ashamed of? Nothing. Still...
Chorused voices—unintelligible, all singing the same song but in a hundred different languages... discordant and concordant, disharmony and harmony. What
was
that?
He went to the corner of the porch roof, careful, aware of the pushing wind; he knelt and climbed down, hanging on to the gutter by his fingers so it bent a little. Letting go, dropping to the ground. Dropping far enough so it stung when he landed on his feet, tipping over at the impact.
But he was up immediately, dusting off his rump, trotting toward the barn. It seemed to him as if he were standing still and the barn was coming toward him, almost rushing at him.
He crossed to stand just outside the barn door, peering inside. Smelled hay and grain and manure; the animals shuffling their feet, lowing.
What was he here for, again? The lightning rod? Or was there something else?
He took a couple steps back, looked up at the vertical rod on the roof, a dull silver streak aimed at the stars above the open hayloft. Maybe there was a glimmer along it. Maybe not.
“Enter and turn to the north.... No one can hear us, but you. “
Maybe someone on the highway was playing a car radio. Only, the highway was almost a quarter mile away.
He should go back to bed. But he was drawn to step into the barn.
No, it wasn't that he was drawn, like, against his will; it was like he was
finding his will
for the first time. It felt like he was finally moving into the real world. Like one of those big jungle cats raised in a zoo—escaping into the woods for the first time.
Beyond the stalls, the barn had a smaller back door that led into a corral. A light shone from beyond that door. It wasn't a color he'd ever seen before—when he thought it was red, it was blue; when he thought it was blue, it was green. But it was none of those. It was more of a prism effect, like when he tried to see inside a little diamond his mom had on a necklace.
The cows were nervously mooing, stamping in their stalls; the horses were whinnying, goats bleating.
He walked toward the back door—and stopped, looked out on the corral. Stared in amazement. A tsunami of sullenly glowing liquid, looking like molten wax, was coming at him. It was coming from the north, swallowing up the horizon.
Fear spiked in his heart, but another feeling, of relieved belonging, of exotic enticement, was stronger. And that delicious sensation kept him rooted to the spot, listening to that multitudinous singing, louder and louder, roaring more dissonantly as the slow-motion tsunami approached.
The silvery molten sea was languidly pouring through a breach in a giant transparent wall, beyond the corral and the graveled private road; coming through the spillway in a see-through dam, thundering as it came. The wall went up high, its top hidden in mist. The wave coming through the breach was the expression of a living sea of force, in which figures took shape and collapsed, the way waves and currents surge up and diminish in the ocean. The figures were people—and were other creatures. Some of them seemed angelic and some diabolic, but more of them were without category. He was seeing the Hidden.
Gabriel knew that he was seeing the image symbolically—what was really coming was beyond the capacity of his senses. His mind had formulated this breached-dam image so he could come closer to comprehending it. A way to visualize the release of a worldwide sea of living energy.
He watched in horror and fascination as the slow-motion wave of mind-energy rushed toward him. Had just time to think,
I should run. I should hide from this!
But he wasn't going to run. On some deep level, he knew he belonged in it. He was like a fish in an aquarium, rejoicing as it sees a flood pour into the house, the flood that will set it free.
And the onrushing tidal wave of the Hidden reared over him, a glassy wall of liquid energy...and crashed down all about him.
He expected it to knock him about, sweep him off his feet...but he felt something in his nerves, his spirit, his mind, not so much with his outer body...except for that crackling that lifted his hair to wave about his head like electrified seaweed; that raised goose bumps on his skin.
The currents of energy surged around him and he waited to die from its intensity, but instead he felt energized, finally
completed by
this new, living medium. The singing he'd heard was the sound its collective surging made; it was its equivalent of the sound of breakers. The singing was shaking the world, all around him, a surging cacophony of half-formed thoughts, ideas, possibilities. It was always there, usually unheard.
He felt the presence of countless other beings, in this new medium—and something else, the
potential
for beings who weren't quite there yet. He saw spirits loom up, like ethereal otters in an etheric sea, felt them looking him over. He knew, somehow, that these visitors were kept back from ?' him by an emanation generated by his own body—generated without his having to try. His just being alive and conscious here was enough to keep them back. For these beings, anyway. Certain others, more powerful and brutish, might overwhelm that protective emanation, if they came upon him. Might engulf him, devour him.
But one being in particular spoke to him; an entity emanating no threat.
“Reach out, “
said the voice. A voice with sheer
trustworthiness
innate in its timbre.
He remembered Connor. “I'm hearing things,” Gabriel said. “This is hallucination stuff. Hearing voices.”
“Some hear voices generated from their own faulty thinking matter,
“ said the voice from the charged air about him.
“Most who suppose they hear the unseen only hear themselves. But you are not