Dark Places of the Soul: Dark Soul Trilogy - Book 1 (8 page)

Even though they obviously walked different
roads in life, he was glad he’d been subjected to dreams about her.
Glad he’d listened to some inner voice he had only just begun to
hear clearly. Keri Jacobson, rebellious, radical, Baptist daughter
of two average people who couldn’t face the world without their
chosen mask.

Ahead, red tail lights signaled brakes being
applied. The squeal of vehicles forced to abrupt stops filled an
otherwise silent void before the first sounds of crunching metal
replaced it. Time froze in front of them as the early morning world
they knew came to a screeching halt.

***

It wasn’t until they were pulling out of the
rental car terminal that Candice realized the vehicle they’d been
given could easily have been Zak’s flaming casket in her dream. She
looked out over the hood of the Mercury Grand Marquis and made
every effort to suppress the rising panic in her chest. This car,
was it the same as the one in her dream, the one she witnessed
engulfed by a ball of flame?

“
Zak… I don’t like this
car,” she blurted out. A part of her wanted to unleash the actual
reason for her fear, but she held it inside, trapped along with the
pulsing blood in her arteries.

“
So… it’s a rental,” he
responded.

“
Let’s bring it back. I
want to bring it back… rent a red one.”

“
Don’t be silly,” he said
with a tinge of irritation in his voice. It had been a long trip
through the friendly skies. Zachary Wells wanted to simply reach
their destination and achieve a vegetative state for a few
hours.

“
I insist.” She childishly
pouted, “I don’t like gray cars. I think they’re ugly.”

“
And you have a reputation
to keep up,” he stated sarcastically, “one that clearly states that
Candice Goddard must only be seen in her red Porsche. Sometimes
darlin’ we must lower our standards in order to truly be
happy.”

“
It’s not
that…”

“
Then tell me,” he
interrupted.

“
It’s…” Pausing in her
quest to explain, Candice sought the right words. “I’ve had a
dream. One of those that returns… recurring, you know.”

“
Never had one,” he shot
back as he moved the vehicle into the left hand passing lane and
accelerated.

“
Maybe it’s just stupid,”
she responded doubtfully.

“
Maybe!”

His exclaimed agreement slapped her face
like a cold hand. If Zachary Wells wasn’t such a phenomenal
personality in the movie making business she would have left him
months ago. Candice needed him; in the same way a substance abuser
needs the cash that buys him the drug of his addiction. Zachary
Wells was her ticket to a level of stardom she knew deep down she
didn’t deserve.

***

Without thought James Lansing turned the
Winnebago sharply to the left. In one slow motion moment the camper
rocked on the fringe of disaster. The shoulder to the right side of
the road would have embraced his vehicle with a summersault. As
James decided against the fate of a gymnast, the left hand lane
opened as if Moses had raised his staff. Screeching tires and a few
angry blasts from horns announced to James that his lane change had
not been perfectly safe. In his side view mirror he saw one car
come to rest in the grassy median divider. James muttered a quick
prayer of thanksgiving for the driver’s safety.

Keri braced herself against the dashboard
when she was finally able to grip reality. She wasn’t buckled into
her seat and having her legs folded under her, as the amusement
park ride began, didn’t add to her ability to keep balanced.

Brake lights in the left lane glowed
momentarily as the traffic slowed but didn’t come to a complete
halt. James could see two vehicles on an off ramp, one having
driven up the bumper of the other. The rushing traffic, late for
all kinds of affairs, had taken time out to gawk.

“
Shit!” Keri exclaimed as
she gained her equilibrium again. “Didn’t think somethin’ this big
could maneuver like that.”

“
Neither did I,” he
commented back.

The Winnebago slowed to less than thirty
miles an hour. Necks of commuters bent in synchronization to view
the chaos to their right, never knowing how close they’d come to
having an oversized camper enter through their trunks.

The blue Ford, beginning to speed up in
front of them, had two back seat riders. James hadn’t noticed them
before, two children, most likely sister and brother, looking out
the back window from a kneeling perch. James didn’t believe an
eyelash had been flicked by either of the two pre-teens.

“
Guess you should keep
your eyes on the road,” Keri teased once the moment had gained
stability, “If you weren’t busy checkin’ out this hot piece of
woman flesh, you wouldn’t have had to nearly break our necks to
keep this thing on four wheels.”

James checked out his passenger one last
time and received a firmly pointed finger guiding his eyes back to
the road. Keri was a ‘hot piece of woman flesh’. James Lansing
sensed her warm sexual passion at first touch, since then the heat
had only increased in temperature.

Warnings to slow for tollbooths decorated
the roadside like advertisements. The Adirondack Northway was
coming up. James lifted his bottom off the seat to retrieve his
wallet. One toll to cover the entire trek through New York state,
it was a better option than stopping every few miles.

He handed his wallet to Keri. “Pick out
enough t’ cover our freight,” he said.

He watched his passenger, through his
peripheral vision; dig into the billfold of a High School English
teacher’s secrets. Nothing would take her by surprise, a well used
credit card, a few crumpled bills, nothing larger than Alexander
Hamilton graced twenties and a driver’s license verifying his
identification.

Keri thumbed through the currency and
counted out enough to cover the cost of the toll. Wordlessly he
accepted the fanned greenbacks from her.

“
You’re more prone to
walking in God’s path than you think,” she stated.

James chose not to take his eyes off the
road this time.

“
Isn’t this the same
conversation that nearly got us involved in an accident?” He asked
before adding, “Notice how I haven’t taken my eyes off the road to
check you out in the last thirty seconds.”

“
Told you I was brought up
a church goin’ Baptist… remember, just because I haven’t walked the
straight and narrow for a while doesn’t mean I don’t recognize
someone who tries to. That minister… Noah Cote… he’s got the outer
shell of a man of God. There’s a demon inside him
though.”

“
We all have demons…
little things about our lives we wish to shield others from, as for
Noah Cote, the only person who saw the reverend as he clearly is
now resides in the morgue.”

“
What if his demons aren’t
just little things?”

“
Then I imagine there’d be
an extra burden to bear… being a man of God and all.”

“
Not that all ministers…
or priests for that matter, are men of God,” she added as the
Winnebago began to slow for the tollbooth ahead.

***

John Carver was gone from Noah Cote’s life.
The last being on earth who could link him to the photographs taken
during his years in college. The attractive blond woman from the
university’s administration office and the handsome playboy Johnny
Carver, as they called him then, subjects of photographs taken.
Frozen images of lingering embraces, kisses given where no one
should have seen. An unmoving pose still clear in Noah’s mind after
all these years, a single black and white glossy worth a jealous
husband’s reward, depicted Mister Carver with a full handed grip on
the cheating wife’s breast through her white sweater. An erotic
creation captured on film.

There had been times when Noah harbored
desires for this chain of events to unfold, but now that all was
unfurled his guilt seemed intensified. Fear of his past being
discovered was replaced with guilt for his sins.

“
Three deaths are your
responsibility,” he said out loud to himself, making an effort to
portray the role of God in his confession. “Three people who were
not ready to leave the world… taken by your actions.”

“
Forgive me Jesus. I am
worse in your sight than Judas… worse than Pilate… worse than the
Roman guard who pressed the crown of thorns onto your
head.”

He merged onto the Northern route as he
bypassed Albany. Traffic seemed to thin out for a moment as he
backed off his gas pedal and slowed to the Fifty-five miles an hour
speed limit.

A gray car pulled into the right lane in
front of him and slowed to a speed matching his own. Noah had
noticed the car hugging the left side of the hi-way. A non-descript
vehicle, typically the oversized and boxy method of travel used by
upper middle classed senior citizens. Noah signaled for the left
lane and accelerated to pass. He possessed no desire to follow
grandma and grandpa vacationer on their trip through northern New
York.

As his vehicle pulled parallel to the gray
car, Noah sought a quick peek into the world of those he passed.
The man behind the wheel wore more years on his frame than the
minister, but he wasn’t what Noah would have considered elderly.
The passenger was young, maybe the daughter of the driver. Noah
took note of the passenger’s bleached blond hair and Hollywood
features. He wondered how much of the woman in the neighboring car
was real.

He turned his eyes back to the road. His
inattentive moment had consisted of nothing more than a glance. An
instant too long when a vehicle is moving at hi-way speed. Before
his eyes unglued from the interior of the gray car the passenger
sat upright and pointed a finger of recognition from her world to
his.

Out in front of their rented vehicle Candice
witnessed pure chaos, a poorly choreographed dance on blacktop. A
pick-up truck with a blown tire inflicted at highway speed, the
loss of control by a driver on the verge of boredom. All this led
to the crunching metal and screaming rubber of a collision. Zachary
did his best to avoid the four-wheeled catastrophe, as did the
vehicle passing them in the left hand lane. Candice had recognized
the male driver of the vehicle moving past them. She’d witnessed
his face in the many nightmares of Zachary’s death.

Their gray rental car spun. Candice was forced to
watch the panoramic view spin through the passenger side window.
Her body whipped. Her momentum stopped abruptly due to the
collision of her head with the window on her side of the vehicle.
Zachary held the steering wheel in a white knuckled grip. Candice
realized her consciousness was vacating her mind. She floated on a
cloud, her body giving way to the centrifugal motion of the
surrounding world.

No sound, no squealing tires, no angry cries of
steel chewing steel. Candice’s world became silent. She caught
Zachary’s expression, a grimace, pain and ecstasy mixed in one
moment of awareness. Zachary Wells, the old man who could take her
to new heights of popularity, wore the combined look of struggle
and gratification, similar to the expression gracing his face when
they made love. She often thought he could die of a heart attack in
her arms after sowing his oats inside her.

He grabbed at his chest and all that had once been
Zachary Wells, the wealthy man of enviable power, vanished from his
face. As Candice faded into darkness, she knew her future was going
to change drastically.

***

The front wheels of Noah Cote’s Ranchero
caught the median as he tried in vain to turn away the whipping
tail of the Chevy pick-up. The passenger side of the vehicle had
lifted off the ground before Noah was aware of the impending roll.
His equilibrium merged into a world without a central point of
gravity. Once onto his car’s roof, he slid to a complete stop while
the windshield imploded, leaving tiny fragments of glass
through-out his vehicle’s interior. He feared being struck from
behind by another out-of-control vehicle, an eighteen wheeler
barreling along on the grassy divider, crunching the same pastor
who had just been given reprieve from his sins.

When his inverted car remained un-victimized
by another vehicle he struggled with the latch of his seat belt and
lowered himself onto the interior of the roof. The passenger window
was shattered, but remained within its frame. A contorted spider
web offered a warped view of the outside world. He pushed out the
broken fragments of glass with his feet and crawled through the
empty frame. Noah caught sight of his haggard appearance in the
cracked side view mirror and paused to inspect a bruise on the left
side of his forehead. During the roll he must have hit his head
against the window on the driver’s side. Keeping his grip on
consciousness had been a fortunate outcome of the disaster.

He stood, surveying the damage on the
northbound lane of the highway. The small truck, which seemed to
have caused the whole bout with tragedy, was parked a few hundred
feet further down the highway. The large gray car Noah had been in
the process of passing, at the worse possible time, set in the
breakdown lane, parallel to his position on the median divider.
There was obvious damage to the gray car’s front fender. A woman in
hysterics came out to the road from the passenger’s side of the
vehicle. He’d seen her in the passenger seat when passing, an
attractive woman in the company of an older man. In Noah’s mind he
began to seek reasons why she couldn’t possibly be the driver’s
daughter.