Soul Thief (Blue Light Series) (28 page)

Even so, Doug’s body convulsed once then twice as he felt the bullets slam into Jimmy Johnson’s upper torso. But wait, were the bullets slamming into Jimmy Johnson’s upper torso or were they slamming into Doug’s? No matter. That was another place and time, a distant future that had no relevance
in this particular moment. Or so he told himself. In the next instant Doug saw two dark, little holes appear in Jimmy Johnson’s chest. With the still startled expression on his face Jimmy Johnson went to his knees before the crowd, his arms held out in supplication like some parody of a healing preacher, before keeling forward on the podium and slamming face down onto the deck like a sack of wet laundry.

At that moment it seemed the audience of onlookers all became simultaneously aware of what had just occurred. Screams went up in the
crowd and they began to move in a wave. A small group of quick-thinking, brave citizens subdued the gunman, disarming him.

As Doug regained consciousness
, his body continued to convulse with spasms. Then a distant voice rose up out of his consciousness saying:
hold on, Doug, I’m not going to let you die,
and Doug realized yet again that all of these experiences were occurring at one singular moment in time. His chest ached and his head felt like it had been struck by lightning. “Oh, God, no,” he said, his head nearly splitting with the effort of the words. “I saw it!”

“What did you see,
Douglas?” Mrs. Mathews asked, her voice dripping with suspicion. That’s when Doug realized he was back.

“Murder,” Doug said.

“Murder? That’s ridiculous. You were having some sort of spell and then you fell out of your chair—”

“It saw me,” Doug said, cutting Mrs. Mathews off. “It knows who I am! It wanted me to see.”

“What on earth are you babbling on about, Douglas?”

“The thing! The
Collector! It knows me. It knows that I can see it and the things that it does. It wants me to see.”

“
Douglas, stop this immediately! I’m warning you.”

Doug realized that he was lying on the floor beside his desk
amongst a spillage of papers with Mrs. Mathews kneeling over him, staring at him with a mixture of fear and abject loathing. His classmates had all gathered around, eyes wide with amazement. Doug noticed that his nose was bleeding, the warm wetness pouring out of it, running past his mouth and onto his chin. One of his classmates produced a wet paper towel—not surprisingly it was Nadia Zeigler—and when Mrs. Mathews tried to take it from her she petulantly pulled it away and applied it to Doug’s nose. “He’s
my
friend,” Nadia said, as if Mrs. Mathews might somehow further injure Doug with her assistance.

“It appears you’ve had some sort of seizure,” Mrs. Mathews said. “Can you sit up?”

“Someone’s killed Jimmy Johnson,” Doug said.

“What?” Mrs. Mathews’s eyes narrowed to fine slits, the expression conveying equal parts
incredulity and loathing.

“I saw—”

“You saw nothing of the kind, Douglas McArthur. You had an attack, that’s all.”

“No!”

“Yes! And stop it this instant. Now, I’ll ask you again, can you or can you not sit up?”

“Yeah, I think so.” Doug glanced around at all the gawking faces. He suddenly felt it best that he not say another word. Actually he was sorry he’d said anything
. But the genie was out of the bottle and Doug knew that nothing he could do or say now would ever put it back in. Doug lifted his head and began to rise, but the effort only exacerbated the headache. He groaned and sank back down.

Mrs. Mathews put her hand on his chest to stop the effort. “Don’t try,” she said. “I’ve asked Mr. Willis to call an ambulance.”

“Ambulance!” Doug said with horror. “I don’t need an ambulance.”

“I’m not so sure,
Douglas. I’m aware of your . . . problem, you know.”

“Problem?”

“Yes, of course, you know . . . the bone shard . . . and how it got there. And the . . . other things. The . . . stories.” Mrs. Mathews looked away in embarrassment as though what she’d just voiced was so blasphemous, so profane it might actually infect her.

“They’re not stories,” Nadia Zeigler
snapped, coming to Doug’s defense.

“And how would you know that, young lady?”

“Because I know Doug and I know he wouldn’t lie.”

Mrs. Mathews snorted. “Yes, so you say.” She gazed narrowly at Doug again. “Well if they’re not stories then perhaps there’s something more telling at work here.”

“Like what?” Nadia said with suspicion.

“I don’t like your attitude, young lady.”

“What are you talking about?” Doug asked, but he thought he knew. She was well aware of the Ricker kids and of what had happened on that terrible day two years before. And like everyone else she’d listened to the talk shows and the pundits and had heard a variety of theories concerning the events of that day. One popular theory said that Doug was an evil child who had some sort of connection with the devil and had perhaps had caused it to all happen. He suspected that Mrs. Mathews was of this latter ilk. Plain and simple, she thought he was evil.

“It doesn’t matter what you think!” Doug said.

“No, I don’t suppose it does,” Mrs. Mathews replied averting her eyes. “In any case I’m not about to take unnecessary chances with your well being.”

“Right,” Doug said brushing Mrs. Mathew’s hand off his chest and sitting up. His headache was starting to retreat in slow radiating waves. Nadia Zeigler handed him the wet paper towel. He took it and wiped his nose, handing it back to Nadia, who deposited it in a wastebasket. The nosebleed had stopped.

Mr. Willis, the school principal, suddenly appeared in the doorway. His large, round eyes looked scared behind his thick glasses. Doug saw that there was a film of sweat on his brow. “I’ve called an ambulance,” he said, “but the child looks like he’s doing fine to me.”

“He’s not fine,” Mrs. Mathews said crossly.

“Yes I am,” Doug said and began rising to his feet.

“Are you absolutely sure,”
Douglas?” Mrs. Mathews pressed. “This is not something to be fooled with.”

“Yes,” Doug insisted. “I said I’m fine.”

“If you think I should, Mrs. Mathews,” said the school principal. “I’ll call them back and cancel.”

She looked appraisingly at Doug.

“I’m really okay,” he said.

“All right, Mr. Willis,” Mrs. Mathews said resignedly. “But call
Douglas’s parents. I think they should be made aware of this and I further think he should go home for the rest of the day.”

“Mr. Willis! Mrs. Mathews!” A third teacher came running into the room, panting, out of breath.

“What is it, Mr. Trask?” Mr. Willis asked irritably.

“I just heard it on the news.”

“What did you hear?”

“Jimmy Johnson. He’s been killed down behind city hall. A gunman shot him dead in front of cameras and a whole crowd of people.
It’s on the news now.”

Mrs. Mathew’s head shot around
, her beady eyes landing on Doug and glaring wickedly at him. Her face had gone ashen and her hand went to her heart. Doug saw fear, perhaps even hate in her stare. Mrs. Mathews said no more. She struggled to her feet and stumbled to her desk, fell into her chair and put her head in her hands.

“What’s wrong, Mrs. Mathews?” Mr. Willis asked, staring at her in bewilderment. The entire class was eerily silent in that moment.

Later, as most of the city sat glued to the
ir television sets watching the tragedy unfold again and again, Doug and his parents among them, Doug came to believe that he
was
a cursed child. Something had given him the ability to see bad things, terrible things, caused by an evil that moved and swelled within him. And even then, in that long ago September when Doug was just eleven years old, he wondered if Mrs. Mathews could be right; if he, in some twisted and terrible way, might actually be the evil that caused all those tragic things to happen.

Doug went to bed that night but it was a very long time before he slept. He could think only of the shimmering bubble inside his skull and of that fleeting moment of recognition where he had once again come face to face with his tormentor, a supernatural creature that called itself
Collector. In his dream the presence spoke to him:

I know you
do not understand why things have to be the way they are, Doug. I know you do not understand this power that has given you such extraordinary sight. You wish it all to be illusion, and in a way it is, in a way that the rest of humanity cannot see. But I promise you that everything happens for a reason. Everything you have seen makes sense. You will not understand until years from now, but I promise that it is so. I promise that some day, when the time is right, I will come to you and explain to you why these things had to happen.

Doug woke in a cold sweat, tears wetting his face. “Please, God
.” he begged. “I’m not bad. I didn’t take Tommy and Savannah. And I didn’t kill Janet and her boyfriend. And I didn’t kill Jimmy Johnson. I saw it all happen but it wasn’t me that did it. Honest. Please tell me I didn’t do it. Please tell me that thing is not a part of me.” No reply was forthcoming, however, and Doug lay in tormented twilight for the remainder of that eternal night, half in and half out of some terrible place in which he had no hope of escaping, his visions filled with fever and phantoms and death.

Not long after the murder of Jimmy Johnson, Raymond Abernathy, his killer
and an upstanding member of church and community, said that his soul had been stolen by a thief on that morning in late September, a morning filled with so much hope and promise. The decision to shoot Johnson had come to him in the wink of an eye and it had been the devil himself who’d given him the inspiration. “He stole all the good things from me on that day,” Abernathy confessed to a jury of his peers. “Then he put a gun in my hand and told me what I had to do. I had no power to resist,” Abernathy said, “for my soul was gone.”

Raymond Abernathy, who had never done an illegal thing in his life, having no other choice, had pled insanity at his trial. But the jury had not believed him insane and he was sentenced to
two consecutive life terms in the state penitentiary.

And once again, much to his
dismay, Doug had become the center of an unwanted media blitz. The teachers and students at Lowden Elementary School had not been able to resist the urge to talk about what they had seen and heard on that fateful morning, and before long the inevitable press had picked up on the story and there ran another long series of articles on the cursed child with the terrible sight. The phone calls began afresh and reporters commenced camping out on their doorstep.

The only difference between this time and the last, however, was that
the government had taken notice. Not that they hadn’t after the first incident. They’d just stood back and quietly watched, wondering what exactly was going on; if it was a lie, a joke or just a fluke. So, when two years later the same kid had a similar experience of sight they decided to investigate. The office of the director of the NSA contacted Doug’s father asking permission to interview his son. Mr. McArthur flatly refused to allow it. When the NSA representative pulled the national security card, Doug’s father had warned him to stay away from his son or lawyers would soon become involved. And if that did no good then he would take his family out of the country and never return.

The
United States Government has a long reach,
the representative told him.

Don’t try me,
Doug’s father had answered.

He’d never heard another word from the NSA.

But once again Doug had become infamous. Much to his and his parent’s horror there were front page tabloid stories, book, television and talk show offers, propositions of prayers of repentance from Christian fanatics; exorcism rights from the Catholic faithful. Every weird cult in America tried to contact them. But all offers were declined and Doug and his family mostly hid inside their house, like vampires hiding from sunlight, only emerging when necessity beckoned. The hubbub did eventually die down, as all sensations must. But once again Doug’s life had been turned upside down. He did not want to accept the facts of the terrible sight he possessed. Surely there were others with similar vision. He could not be alone in his purgatory. But no one ever came forward with information on any other such person, and Doug finally resigned himself to the terrible truth of the matter; that only in the darkest aspects of a boy named for an American hero did these terrible things occur.

The rest of that school year following the murder of Jimmy Johnson had been awkward for Doug. The teachers and children alike treated him with a quiet sort of reverence, as if he was a house of cards that might collapse if anyone got too close or looked the wrong way at him. He made good grades that year but few friends.

The year that followed went pretty much the same. For the most part Doug was free of the crippling headaches, the blackouts and their accompanying horrific consequences. And he was grateful for that.

In September of that following year he went back to school with a renewed hope that he had outgrown the visions and the terrors of his past.

In November his life was
once again torn apart. Doug had just turned twelve. His parents had been on their way to the bank to sign papers for the new house they were buying. Everyone was so excited. His father had taken the day off for the occasion. They were all going out to dinner that night to celebrate. Doug had wanted to take the day off from school and join them in celebration but they hadn’t allowed it.

For years following the incident Doug tortured himself with what-ifs. What if they had let me skip school and go along with them to the bank? Would it have mattered? What if the bank had scheduled another day instead of that particular one to sign the papers? What if it had been the next day, a day that was sunny and warm instead of rainy and cold? What if? What if? What if?

Other than school Doug didn’t have much of a social life. Nadia Zeigler remained loyal, however, and Doug was grateful for that. Nadia was filling out and maturing into a lovely young lady and Doug would have been a fool not to have noticed. They began seeing each other after school, doing homework together, spending leisure time in one another’s company. They’d even taken to holding hands and had awkwardly kissed a few times. There was nothing spoken about the affair, but both Doug and Nadia knew that some sort of relationship was brewing.

Their friendship stayed strong in
to high school. In their junior year Doug gave Nadia a ring. She accepted and they were a couple until the two went their separate ways after high school, Nadia attending Bowdoin, and Doug, the University of Maine. While in college Doug met Annie and the rest was history. But every time Doug thought of Nadia he got a warm feeling. Not only had she been a good and loyal friend when he’d needed one most, she had also been Doug’s strongest defender and his first love. When he’d heard the news of her death in the World Trade Center tragedy he’d been devastated. There would always be a small place in his heart for Nadia Zeigler, the ‘almost’ love of his life.

After the first incident Doug had made a new friend in police lieutenant Rick Jennings. Jennings was a kind and understanding man and while Doug’s real father was busy working twelve hours a day, six days a week building the plumbing supply company he’d co-founded with a friend, Doug was mostly left to his own devices. When he
was
home, dad wasn’t really there at all, Doug knew. Since Doug’s first psychic incident it seemed his father had been on a fast track to distancing himself from Doug and his concerns. All the negative publicity had been very bad for business.

I
ncreasingly, Rick Jennings was taking up the slack for an absent father. He took Doug to his little league games and the skateboard park, drove him around in his police car when he was off duty, bought him ice cream down at the Dairy Delight, and they did a lot of talking. Jennings had managed to get Doug to open up about the two incidents. He spoke of what he’d seen in vivid detail, and in time Rick Jennings knew more about Doug’s psychic occurrences than anyone else on earth. Even so, the particulars of the two incidents were as elusive as quicksilver and Doug could offer nothing concrete that might help solve the mysteries.

He claimed that Tommy and
Savannah talked to him sometimes, but to Jennings it was vague as to how two children missing for years and presumed dead could accomplish such a feat.

“They talk to me in my head,” Doug had told
Jennings on a number of occasions. “They say they’re in a dark place they call the House of Bones. It’s cold and lonely there but they don’t have to eat or sleep.”

“Do they say anything about the place other than it’s dark, cold and lonely?”
Jennings asked. “Where it might be, for example?”

Doug shook his head.

“Do they know why they’re there?”

Doug thought about this for a long moment before saying,
“Something’s going to happen in the future. It’s something they don’t understand but it’s important.”

“How do they know this?”
Jennings asked.

“They didn’t say,”
Doug replied. And that had been that. Doug could not offer more and Jennings had seen no point in dwelling on it. Jennings was satisfied that Doug had told him all he knew and he felt that pushing the boy for details he obviously didn’t have would be non-productive, perhaps even damaging.

Jennings was an avid fly fisherman and he began taking Doug to some of his favorite spots in the northern Maine wilderness on weekend fishing trips. Jennings was a private pilot and he owned a Cessna 180 float plane. He had a cabin on a small pond just large enough to get the plane safely in and out of. Jennings’s was the only cabin on the pond, inherited from his father who himself had been a pilot, a sportsman and an intensely private person. Jennings told Doug that he was the first person he’d ever taken to the cabin, other than his late wife, who had not been particularly fond of roughing it.

“Doesn’t anyone come here?” Doug asked
Jennings.

“Why would they?”
Jennings replied. “This is the only cabin on the pond and I own all the property that surrounds it. My father had connections in Augusta and made some sort of deal with the paper company allowing him to purchase the land and build the cabin in the 1930s. There was never a road into the place but he’d built a rudimentary trail system that lead to some of the finest trout and salmon fishing in the east.”

A
s far as Jennings knew he had never known anyone else who’d chanced landing a plane on Parker Pond. There was no law against it. No single human being could own a body of water—only the land around it—but an inexperienced pilot would have been crazy to risk such a stunt. What would be the point? There was nothing here that would warrant such a risk.

In all the times Doug had gone t
o the cabin on Parker Pond with Jennings he’d never seen another living soul. “Doesn’t anyone else know about the place?” Doug had asked on his first trip in with Jennings.

“Nope,”
Jennings replied. “And I’d like to keep it that way. I trust you to keep my secret safe.”

“You can count on me,” Doug said
, and Jennings knew that he could.

Sandy
Stream was nearly a three hour hike from Jennings’s cabin on Parker Pond. The word ‘stream’ was sort of a misnomer in that Sandy was much more than a simple stream. It was a fast-rushing river with strong currents, miles of rapids and long stretches of deep, quiet water that held land-locked salmon and trophy brook trout. Above the stream in places, there were tall cliffs of solid rock that reminded Doug of a miniature version of the Grand Canyon. Jennings taught the boy the rudiments of fly casting, and before long Doug was as good as, or perhaps better than his teacher. Doug loved wading the river’s gravel bars and pulling trophy trout from its waters. It was mostly a private place for the two of them, so isolated that they rarely met other humans along the way. These were times that Doug would always hold dear in his heart for they were some of the best of his young life.

As memories converge, the world spins suddenly out of control. Doug remembers an incident from that long ago time and place that he has never been able to fully articulate. He is remembering lots of things he shouldn’t be remembering, considering he’s dead, dreaming or both. But what the hell, it seems he has lost all control over his fate so he might just as well go with the flow.

He and
Jennings are at Sandy Stream. The two of them have split up. Jennings has gone down stream and Doug has gone up. Doug sees a likely spot across the stream where an eddy has formed above a deep pool. Doug has waded out into the middle of the stream in order to get closer to the eddy. The water is nearly up to the top of his waders here and the current is powerful. On his very first cast he hooks a large brook trout and plays it for a time, trying to tire it out before bringing it in close enough to scoop into his net. He knows from what Rick Jennings has taught him that if you try to haul the fish in too quickly, before it is fatigued, it will make a run for it and snap the leader. Doug plans to release the trophy trout anyway but the challenge is to do so properly so that the big fish is not injured and doesn’t have to spend the rest of its life with a hook in its mouth trailing a nine foot leader behind it.

But in that moment
something totally unexpected happens. The loose gravel beneath Doug’s feet is suddenly washed away by the stream’s strong currents. Doug loses his footing and begins to slide. The rocks just beneath the surface are slippery and when he puts his foot out to regain his balance he steps on one of those slippery stones. Now he is past the point of no return and he starts to topple. He drops the rod so that he can use both his hands to break his fall. But it is too late. In an instant he is dragged beneath the surface by the rushing river and carried downstream. The water is freezing cold, numbing. He struggles, trying to claw his way up out of the icy depths but his waders have filled with water and only seem to be dragging him deeper as he rolls with the current. He cannot breathe.

Finally his limbs and his lungs give out and he stops struggling. He realizes he is drowning and in that moment of complete resignation he
experiences something he has never been able to adequately articulate. He has heard that when people are close to death (some claim they have actually died) and are then revived, they often speak of seeing a bright white light. Doug sees a light in that moment, but it is not white, instead it is blue and it is the most intense and beautiful light Doug has ever seen. To Doug the blue light seems to have been borne out of one of the stream’s whirlpools for it swirls like an eddy, but it also seems to be burning, as though it is made of blue fire as it grows into a pylon that protrudes heavenward out of the stream’s fast running waters. Doug is strangely drawn to the blue shaft of light. However, when he reaches out to touch it he becomes vaguely aware of Lucy Ferguson’s voice telling him that she has him and that he is not going to die. She is telling him that it is not his time to die. Then he realizes that he cannot be hearing the voice of Lucy Ferguson because this is more than twenty years before he will meet her in an airport cafe. More than twenty years before he is murdered in an airport men’s room. But how on earth could he have been murdered in an airport men’s room if he drowned in the icy waters of Sandy Stream twenty years earlier?

No matter. Everything is all mixed up anyway. He is colder than he has ever been. And as
he lets the icy currents take him, the blue light fades and he dreams about the day his mother and father died.

It is very much like the day of the Jimmy Johnson incident, in that he is attending classes at Lowden Elementary School when the nearly unbearable pain once again slams into his frontal lobe like barbed needles of fire. It is second period algebra when the agony strikes him, followed by the convulsions, and finally, the all-encompassing blackness that feels very much like death. And in the darkness of that terrible place a small pinprick of light emerges, growing ever larger, opening like the iris of a camera lens, until it begins to form a picture.

Now Doug is no longer in class at
Lowden Elementary School. Nor is he drowning in a cold river in northern Maine, or dying of two gunshot wounds in an airport restroom in Tampa, Florida. Now he is in the backseat of his parent’s car going with them to the bank so that they can sign the papers for the new house that they are buying. But no, this can’t be right. They’d insisted that he go to school that day instead of with them.

He realizes suddenly that he is seeing everything through a
intensely magnified lens and that he isn’t really in any of those places. Not in the physical sense at least. But he is there nevertheless, in all of those places, past, present and future through some very strange and perhaps even magical way.

He sees the backs of his parent’s heads, and they are talking and moving animatedly, like actors in a sped-up silent movie. The day is drizzly and the
world outside the car is heavy with fog. Drab scenery and ghost vehicles flash hypnotically past, water swishing from beneath tires and shooting rooster tails of it skyward.

The old familiar but dreaded bubble begins to swell suddenly inside of Doug again, wanting to burst his head open with gripping pain. Doug is not really surprised. He’d been hopeful that this vision would not be like all the rest, but down deep he’d known the real truth. He is surprised at the coolness of his observation. Has he accepted his fate or has he just learned to look at it in a clinical and detached way?

No matter, for soon the cold realization of why he is here in the backseat of his father’s car strikes him like a whiplash. Try as he might he can do nothing to change the inevitable; in these joyless journeys it seems that he is merely a spectator to events, with no apparent control over their outcome.