His Dark Ways (2 page)

Besides the girls, he’s my best friend. I can’t let something bad happen to him. The end of his tail whips around a corner on the second floor and before I can grab onto his collar, I’m swept off my feet by an unseen force.

My cheekbone slams against the splintered wood floor. I watch as my blood smears across boards filled with rot. Splinters penetrate my face and I try to twist away, but someone strong is holding onto me, tight. I can barely change positions. I lift myself up enough to flip on my flashlight, I want to look this psycho in the eye—but I see nothing, only my foot dangling in the air. Amy and Lucky’s screams radiate through the hotel and my nerves come undone. A faint fog inside my head blurs my vision and ability to think clearly. Whatever thing, or spirit, has my foot in its grip yanks onto me as if I’m a dead body already being dragged toward its place of rest. My arm flops down and cold metal spears my wrist. It pulls on me again. I scream out, trying to unhook my wrist from an old nail sticking out of the wall. It pulls again, and the sting of layers of flesh tearing loose unhinges my fogged brain. Whatever this thing is, I can’t let it drag me to where it wants to take me. I grab onto the door jam and kick my legs free.

Footsteps come toward me. It must be one of the girls.

It’s not, and I’m thrown into a room with my lungs being drained of air as my back slams into an old heater core.

The door slams shut.

White specks of paint dust the air as fingernail indentations etch their way down the door. A gush of air moves through the tiny specks and they burst like a small paper bomb into the streams of light. The door opens, slams shut, and the growl of a monster pierces my ears. A pounding from the other side of the door starts to crack the wood down the center and I pace my breath, trying to move toward a window to loosen it free. It doesn’t budge, and I’m reduced into a ball under the darkness of the window ledge. Deep inside, stupidity seems to corrode my insides and I question my desire of ever wanting a thrill again, if I survive.    

There’s silence, except for the sound of my pulse damaging my ear drums.

Steps. I count them. One, two, three, four, five…

They stop. I keep myself wrapped up tight in my arms.

Cool air enters the small tunnel of my right ear and causes a shiver to blanket my body. “It’s okay,” a voice whispers, “the monsters have gone.”

I look up. No one is there.

The voice is comforting, yet, leads me to doubt. I quickly scan the room. Empty.

I’m suddenly dizzy and use my wounded wrist to lift myself up off the floor. As I begin to fumble back, my hand comes into contact with something and I have no choice but to quickly face what it is.    

Intense black eyes with only the dim light of the moon bringing them to life look into mine. A boy about my age stares at me confused, startled, and out of breath. I pull away—he disappears.  

I’m about to run, but something inside, in the pit of my stomach, tells me to stay.

Warmth covers my bloodied wrist. His touch calms me. “Danger has passed,” he reassures me.  

Again, I reach out into the darkness. It’s him. My touch seems to give his spirit flesh. Dark hair, a face painted by death, and a beauty I’ve only read of in Bible stories. He reaches for my face and leans in as if he’s never seen a living breathing human being. Our energy radiating through each other making him real, assures me he’s not a lion after a lamb. I can’t move my hand from his face, nor can I move my eyes from his and I stare into the unknown Dad always said existed.            

Chapter 2

Breathe Deep

Large pebbles shake the window pane above my head. Our stare breaks. The girls are crying out for me. In what must have only been moments, feels longer, I don’t want to let go; I want him to stay. I keep my hand steady while moving my fingertips along his cheekbone and down his ivory neck lined with a uniform collar. One of my fingers stops on a metal star sewn onto the shoulder of his jacket. He must have been a soldier. My hand keeps going and stops at the end of his wrist. We lift our hands up palm to palm, fingertip to fingertip, and I admire everything about him. His lips hazed in purple, eyes filled with stories, and a physical beauty I’ve never seen on earth. Our hands interweave and we both hold on. I find it difficult to speak. I stutter, “What’s your name?”

“Daniel.” His voice is deep and resonant. A smile grows. He reaches for a strand of my hair and moves it around my ear.

Panic sets into the back of his eyes and a brush of cold air seeps into the room. “You need to leave. Take the fire escape.”

“But the window, it’s jammed—”

He lets go and disappears. On the farther side of the wall a window opens.

As I climb out, I see Red pacing below the fire escape. The old wood frame screeches shut as I pull out my last leg. The girls sound startled. “Damn it, Savanna, you freaked us out!”

I look back into the empty room. I know they’re worried, but now I’m more concerned about Daniel. His touch was addicting, like a drug. I place my hand on the glass. Warmth covers my palm and fogs the window pane. Amy calls out to me. “Are you okay?”

The glass grows cold and the shape of his hand fades, I slide my hand away and climb down.

Dust kicks up as my feet hit sturdy ground and I’m greeted with Red jumping up at me, whimpering. I reach down and hug him, tight. “I was so worried about you. Don’t ever take off like that again,” Amy says. Her voice is shaky.

The girls look like crap. They both have mangled hair, skinned elbows, and dirt covered clothes, but they’re staring at me like I’m the one with problems. Lucky points out my wrist, apparently I do have problems. “Damn, Savanna, are you okay?”

The pulsing pain penetrating through my nerve endings worsens as I’m reminded of my wound. I refuse to assess the damage until I’m home. “Yeah. The two of you kind of look like crap. You okay?”

Amy seems concerned. “We look like crap? Jesus, Savanna. Should we take you to the hospital?”

Amy’s a tough chick and it seems weird that she’s asking me that question. “I’m okay, really, what happened to you guys?”

Lucky has already piled our stuff into the truck and tosses me the keys with trembling hands. “Wait, maybe you shouldn’t be driving.”

“I’m fine, really.”

I grab Red by the collar so I don’t lose him again and get inside. The engine growls to a start and I peer back up toward the room. Am I losing my mind? Red rests his head on my lap and from the corner of my eye the girls can’t take their eyes off me, staring has never been a problem for the both of them. They’re starting to freak me out like they’re possessed or something. “What, you guys? Seriously, what’s wrong?”

Amy pushes a couple of bundled up napkins against my face. “You’re bleeding, a lot. You don’t feel that?”

“Damn, really?” I try to liven up the mood. “How does my complexion look? I decided to try out a new floor board technique.”

Clearly, I’m not very funny. Amy just sits there putting pressure on my face with a blood stained napkin and has a difficult time talking. “Seriously, I’m so freaked out right now you guys. We could’ve died in there.”

The thought dangles a moment in my mind, but after seeing Daniel, I’m questioning everything. “Honestly, death doesn’t scare me.” Secretly, I’m lying. It scares me now, especially for them; they are my family in a way. I love them like sisters. But I’m trying to help take down everyone’s blood pressure.

The napkin is peeled from my face and the air coming out of Amy’s mouth brushing over it makes it burn. “I used to feel the same way, until tonight.” She tucks her hands away in between her thighs. Both of their faces have grown long and still.

“Come on, it’s not like the two of you saw Lucifer himself.”

Lucky picks up His Dark Ways off the floor, starts flipping through the pages, and pauses on a picture toward the end. “That’s what we saw, Savanna, maybe that opening doors shit is real.”

I try to catch a glimpse—it’s too dark. A car passes and headlights illuminate the page, definitely not Satan, but close. One carved horn hammered through a skull and a skinless body on its knees yelling at the blackened sky. “You guys saw that? Come on, he looks like a unicorn gone wrong.”

There’s silence. It’s like I can hear the both of them thinking out loud or maybe it’s just me filling in the blanks of what I think is going on in their heads. The reality of a spiritual world sinks in. Should I tell them about Daniel? How I touched him, how he was beautiful—real, and the very opposite of everything we’ve read of ghosts or have seen on printed paper or on computer screens. Lucky loops her arm around Amy’s and rests her head on her shoulder. The peace feels right for this moment so I keep quiet about the things I saw until the girls grow curious.

Chapter 3

One Touch

I clutch my chest with the tips of my fingers, pull myself up off my pillow, and breathe in as if I’ve been only seconds away from drowning in a deep sea filled with monsters. The beat of my heart is off, like a major artery’s been torn out making it weak, heavy, and bleeding out into all the places it shouldn’t be. For a moment I’m disoriented, until I gain steady breaths—I can’t believe it’s already morning.

 The light from the window stings my eyes and I lay back down pulling white sheets over my head. I want to be back where I was last night, reaching my hand out to Daniel, touching his face, feeling our energy radiating through each other making him real. The pain of not knowing what he is or who he is, is killing me.

I close my eyes again and try to take myself back to that moment under the window ledge, but Dad’s hollering my name from the back room. “Savanna? Sweetie, are you up? We’ve got to go in early. Mrs. Bullard has another casserole to drop off for us before service begins.”

Early? Oh fuck, I really don’t want to sing hymns this morning. I’ve always envied people who get to sleep in on the weekends. With only two hours of rest, my body’s running on fumes. My throat aches as I holler out. “Sure, Dad, be there in a sec.”

As I sit on the edge of my bed, I clench the raw area of my throat and have a flashback of being dragged across the floor. I pull my wrist up toward the morning light and examine the damage—bloodied, bruised, and raw like my throat. Figures. It looks how it feels. Dad’s footsteps pace back to his room and I rush to the bathroom to clean up before he suspects I snuck out last night. I feel stupid for not washing my wounds when I got home, but I didn’t want to wake him. As I take my shirt off, a large area of my hair feels like there’s glue on it, I glance into the mirror. It’s a large patch of dried blood. I flip on the shower without bothering to look at my face and drench myself in cool water to quickly expose any damage I didn’t think I had. Carefully, I inch my hand toward the bloodied area on my scalp. It’s weird because the only pain I’m experiencing is in my wrist and right cheek bone. Flakes of old blood flow down my chest inside delicate streams of red water and I don’t find any cuts. My face must have bled into my hair through the night. Dad knocks. “Can you be ready in ten?”

“Yep,” I say as I grab the soap, slather it on, and attempt to clean parts of me that look like rust.

Of course the water finally gets warm when I have to turn it off. I start brushing my mangled black auburn locks and as the fog clears from the mirror, I notice my face is covered in splinters. No wonder I feel like a stitched up Frankenstein. I grab some nearby tweezers and bite my lip firm as I remove two large pieces of wood that feel like planks.

As I start to cover my face in Band-Aids, I notice my eyes. The dark circle lining my blue irises is thicker. I pull my eyelid open and stare. “Why, hello, crack head. Geez, I really did hit my head hard.”

Dad’s waiting for me out in the car and seems irritated. When I get in, I frame my face with long strands of hair and pull my sweater down past my palm to cover up any evidence of last night—it doesn’t work. Brown Band-Aids rat me out. “What happened to your face? Let me see.”

With one hand on the wheel he holds onto my chin and observes me like I’m still his five-year-old little girl who’s fallen off her blue bike. It’s sweet really, but I smile and lie. “I fell off Amy’s horse yesterday.”

He raises an eyebrow. “That’s weird; I didn’t see it there yesterday.”

“That’s because you were already asleep when I got home from Amy’s.”

His face gets long as he rubs his beard. “I’m sorry,” he says with curled lip and long sigh. “I’ve been working too much. It’s just hard trying to play catch up with your mom gone. It’s like days are starting to blend together in to one.”

I nod and feel bad for lying, but with the same token, feel lucky that I’m getting away with last night.

Stern eyes scan my face. “Promise me you’ll be more careful.”

“I promise.”

“Gosh, it looks awful. You’re really bruised up.”

I try to divert our conversation. “So what’s your sermon about today?”

“Love.” He takes in a deep breath. “I’ve been thinking about your mom a lot. I miss her. You know she called last night, I wish you’d been home to talk with her.”

In a way I feel like an ass for not being home because she hasn’t been able to call a lot during this trip. I guess being secluded to a small village surrounded with rebels who want to kill has made it tough to get any phone time. “Me too, Dad, I’m worried about her.”

“Just keep praying honey.”

He knows I don’t pray, but I don’t want to bring up my lack of faith for the umpteenth time. It would just make him depressed. The last time we “talked” about it, he moped around the house for days and gained five pounds from eating too many frozen meatballs.

We pull into one of the few parking spaces at the church and before Dad and I part ways, he hugs me. “Your singing always cheers me up, good luck in choir.”

This is the only reason I continue to sing about a God I don’t believe in—it cheers Dad up. “Thanks, and hey, good luck on your talk.”

He plants a kiss on my forehead. “Thanks, baby.”

As I sit in a front pew waiting for service to begin, I look up at Jesus. The plaster under his blue robe is slowly becoming floor dust, and the once red blood that used to encircle his crown made of thorns is now a faded brown. His head hangs low while tears trickle down his face as he stares down at the nail piercing his feet together. It’s the saddest statue I’ve ever seen, not that I’ve seen many, but still. Why would a God so great and powerful make himself a mortal man? All the years I’ve sat here listening to Dad talk about God—the trinity, I was positive it was all a pile of crap, but after last night, I’m starting to wonder. Maybe I’m wrong. Under my breath, I look up and whisper. “Am I wrong?” Air channels through one ear and out the other. Silence is the only thing that feels real.