The Story Begins (31 page)

As they approached the purlieus of Mannheim, Madison decreased the vehicle’s speed and did so further when they came off the highway. As the fog with them had done through the journey, it too lessened its rate of travel in synchronization with Jaden’s vehicle; it traveled with them as though it were a guide.

Once through the Coleman Barracks’ gate, the convoy made for the unit’s motor pool. It traveled at 30 kilometers per hour, with vehicles spaced at one-hundred-meter intervals. Jaden’s vehicle maneuvered into the motor pool then came to a halt, both the phenomenon and vehicle halting simultaneously. Jaden alighted with his focus still very much on the aberration. As he drew nigh, the form initially retracted before becoming ascensive. At the sight of the imminent metamorphosis, Jaden stopped, and before his eyes, the form assumed the semblance of a being, humanoid in likeness but without discernible features and hovered before the lieutenant. Suddenly, piercing turquoise-colored eyes flashed upon Jaden, startling him. He sought to retreat but fell back against the vehicle. Then the being simply dissipated, leaving naught of itself save traces of luminous particles, which were also soon no more.

Jaden then found himself further confounded by a rattling cacophony; he regained his footing then turned around. His senses seemed to be failing him. His mind struggled to acknowledge that which his eyes perceived to be real. The vehicle he was only too certain he had just disembarked from was set upon a collision course; a collision course with his person. “What the hell!” he said, addled and petrified, quite far from lucid and thereby devoid of any manner of cognition that might have afforded him but a thought to maneuver away from the vehicle bearing down upon him. Through the windshield he could read Private Madison’s lips. The private was repeatedly screaming, “What the fuck!”

Jaden’s mind struggled for clarity; again he was able to grasp intelligible thoughts. How could the vehicle not be parked? I just stepped out of it, he thought.

Madison slammed on the brakes; the vehicle’s bumper not even a hair’s breath away from the lieutenant.

Jaden darted to Madison’s window. “What the fuck just happened?” he shouted, looking every bit as shocked as anyone who had just narrowly missed a violent death might have appeared. Jaden wasn’t the only one in a stupor; Madison hadn’t even heard Jaden. He had fallen victim to hysteria.

“Hey!” Jaden shouted. “Snap out of it! If anyone should be in shock or freaked the hell out, it’s me. I mean I’m the one who almost got killed. It would have sucked for you too but at least you wouldn’t have been the one having people walk away after being lowered into the dirt.”

Madison came to his senses, somewhat. “Sir, what the hell just happened?” he asked, his body very near convulsing.

“I don’t know,” Jaden said agitatedly. “What did you see?”

“I don’t know what I saw, sir. I didn’t see anything, sir...I mean… I… I… what… I don’t know!” The private, indeed, was at a loss for words.

“Calm down!” the Lieutenant urged, even though Jaden himself found it hard to practice what he was preaching.

The private inhaled deeply that he may once again command his composure. “All I know is that we were in the Humvee one moment and then as soon as I drove through the motor pool gates, you were gone… just like that.”

Madison’s face was very much pale, Jaden noticed.

“What on God’s green earth just happened, sir… one second I’m freaking out in the vehicle, wondering just where the hell you went… and how, and then the next thing I know is I’m freaking out because I almost hit you… how in heaven’s name did you get out of the vehicle without me seeing or hearing anything?” Though somewhat calmer, the private was still quaking for fear. “It’s like you just vanished and materialized outside of the vehicle… Jesus Christ, sir! Please explain to me what in God’s name just happened!”

Madison’s mention of God resonated with Jaden. “If this is God’s doing then I am seriously fucked!” he gasped. “And if it isn’t then I am equally, if not more so, fucked because there’s no fucking way God is going to come to my rescue after all the blasphemous shit that has come out of my fucking accursed mouth. God damn it! Oh shit! I’m still doing it! God da-” then he caught himself. Calm down, calm down, he thought as he tried to pacify himself. Of all the singularities that had betided him, there hadn’t been one single instance that might have presaged his present befalling and better suited him to bear that which just occurred. He closed his eyes and breathed. He forced himself to become calm. A thought occurred to him; despite what had just happened, he believed that he may at least take comfort in the knowledge that he hadn’t become unhinged; after all, Madison did witness him simply vanishing out of the vehicle.

Jaden too found himself at a loss for words and thus had not even a word with which he might begin to answer the private’s question. Rather, again he requested that Madison recount that which he had seen. Madison’s reaction now, however, was one Jaden couldn’t begin to fathom, given the fact that Madison had just almost killed him, not to mention witnessed him simply vanishing out of the car.

“What are you talking about, sir?” a very calm Madison asked, seeming unsure of the lieutenant.

“What do you mean what am I talking about?” Jaden asked earnestly, trying to fend off frustration at Madison’s question. “I fracking vanished out of the vehicle and you just almost killed me! That’s what I’m talking about!”

Madison, however, still seemed not to have any inclination concerning that which Jaden was going on about. He thought perhaps the lieutenant meant to make a joke of sorts but was dreadfully awful in his delivery. “I don’t get it, sir. Vanish out of the vehicle and me almost killing you? You’re still in your seat, sir.”

Madison certainly was right; Jaden, in fact, was still seated in his seat. And yet another bizarre observation Jaden made was that Madison’s face was flush with life. What in two fucking hells? Maybe he
was
becoming unhinged, for surely if what he would have sworn upon his life he had witnessed with his own eyes was no more than a working of his mind, it did decidedly sound psychotic.

Madison laughed. “If that was a joke, sir, you’ve definitely got to work on your delivery.”

The lieutenant embraced the falsehood Madison had unwittingly afforded him. “Yeah, I’ve always messed up jokes I’ve tried to retell. I guess I’m just one of those folks who can listen to the funniest thing ever but then when I try to repeat it, I screw it up, royally.”

“Don’t worry about it, sir, you’re not the only one. I’m the exact same. I’m totally lame when it comes to telling jokes,” Madison said light-heartedly.

A
cursory inspection of the vehicles was followed by an even more posthaste personnel accountability formation, subsequent to which Captain Peterson dismissed the men. And whilst Jaden was driving home, his thoughts were singularly preoccupied by the entity that had manifested before him. And so did the raptness command his consciousness throughout the day and into the night.

Beset by the dark and still night, Jaden lay in bed recreating that which had transpired; dismayed and utterly confounded, he hadn’t the faintest of ideas what was happening to him. Alcohol was an indulgence of the past, and he was fairly certain that he suffered neither from delusions nor any other manner of psychosis. “I may want to go see a doctor because if I am having some kind of a breakdown, I don’t think I can diagnose myself of such a disorder. How can I possibly prove to myself that I am not mad when maybe everything that I am doing is madness? I’d be none the wiser,” he reasoned.

Jaden believed himself to be in a dilemma in which his options were of comparable evil; either he was mad, or he wasn’t. If he were, in fact, a man become unhinged then therein lay perils he’d rather not dwell upon. If, however, he wasn’t sick, and he hoped that he wasn’t, the implication was that all that had taken place was as real as the consciousness that made him self-aware. And if such haunts were real and absolute in their being, what outcome was expected of the endgame? And of the seven billion people that walked the earth, why him? “What a hell of a choice; psychosis or threatening entities? Is there really a lesser of two evils here?” he asked.

As he lay there contemplating, he drifted off for but a short while. When he awakened, his thoughts were no longer of the day’s events but rather of Lydia, Cassandra and Phil. He found himself eager to see Lydia. Reaching over to his nightstand, he picked up his phone; while searching through his contacts for Lydia’s number, thoughts of Melanie overcame him. He set the phone back down. “Getting together may not be such a great idea,” he whispered before sighing.

He reflected upon when first he had met Melanie. The furthest thing from his mind that fateful morning was the kindling of a spark destined to set his heart afire, created, he believed, from a chance encounter which, in turn, was the outcome of a prank gone awry. Perhaps he was not the master of his own fate, he thought, for he recalled how indignant he had been when he spied Melanie approaching him; he had been dismissive of her even before she had had a chance to merely greet him. Alas, years would pass and he would find his life so affected by an emotion he had once believed would always be inconsequential to his life. In bed, heartbroken and alone, he wished that life offered second chances always.

He decided that he couldn’t call Lydia for he was still too much in love with Melanie. Even though Jaden’s wasn’t the hope of anything that transcended a relationship platonic in nature with Lydia, seeing her again was taking a chance he decided he could do without. After all, it had never been even the remotest of thoughts when he had come upon Melanie, yet there he lay, unable to let her go. His predicament was a sad one, he realized. He acknowledged the great probability that he may find himself lonely all his days for to him no one but Melanie mattered. He drifted off to sleep.

DURING
THE COURSE OF THE NIGHT: Jaden’s eyes suddenly opened wide as unfathomable fear and dread coursed through his being. Something, not someone, was in his bedroom. With his heart palpitating wildly, he leapt out of bed but no sooner had he done so than he found himself violently thrust back upon his bed. He was being suffocated. Despairing, he earnestly made every effort to rise from where he lay but found himself steadfast, as though a statue within a stone not yet discovered by a sculptor. He felt a being unseen hover above him. Though petrified, perhaps to even the individual cells that made the whole, still he struggled that he might break free from the unseen grip that ensnared his being. He wriggled with all his might; the grasp loosened. Again he leapt out of his bed and sought flight through the window but alas, the window failed him. And though he threw himself against it time and again, each and every effort proved vain. He couldn’t understand why the glass failed to shatter.

He dared venture a look behind him that he may see what manner specter haunted him. Whereas his eyes failed to discern anything, the very essence of his being felt an overwhelmingly powerful presence which propelled his intellect into utter discord. His eyes rolled over his bed then stopped. His focus rested on what lay therein. His mouth then fell agape, and his face horror-stricken. Scarcely commanding his senses, he realized that he neither felt his heartbeat nor struggled for breath. “No!” he screamed, for upon his bed, severed from his essence, lay his listless body. He thought back to the comment he had made to Phil,
“Yeah, I think I’ll pass on sleeping, too. There’s no way of knowing if you’re dying when you’re asleep and the last thing I need right now is to wake up dead only to discover that there is a God and that hell is very real.”

Again, and with even greater effort, he threw his ethereal form against the window to no avail. Jaden was much too befuddled and replete with fear to grasp the futility of his efforts. As he struggled, a dearth of logic emerged from an intellect nearly devoid of reason; the thoughts, however, weren’t his own, but rather a message telepathically seeded by that which besieged him. “The entirety of thy efforts is of naught. Ye perceived thyself broken free of my grasp only because it was I that let thee go. Thy struggles are without meaning for verily the sum of all thy labor is of less toil to me than is the fly’s might against the behemoth, o’ offspring of the fallen.” Though the words weren’t lost upon Jaden, he, still spurred by fear, desisted not from his futile efforts.

Quite suddenly he felt himself violently jolted back, with a might he could not even begin to fathom, and thrust back into the shell that lay upon the bed – in the instant that it had taken him to travel back to the lifeless vessel upon the bed, he heard the sound of glass breaking. Once within his body, he felt it reverberate as though given to violent convulsions. Vainly he tried to scream but alas his mouth was stopped. He wished to open his mouth that he may speak but his lips failed to part and his tongue had grown unnaturally heavy. Desperately fearful he found an appeal in hypocrisy; focusing all his might, he forced his mouth open and began to pray. “Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name-”

His prayer was abruptly and violently ended for the entity had become enraged by his supplication. The being turned him onto his front in a manner most horrific; effortlessly it rearranged Jaden’s person, causing the rear and front of his form to retract then reemerge, his front now to the bed and his back facing the ceiling; his face was then forced into the mattress as though it were Death come to lay claim to Jaden’s breath. Jaden still breathed, albeit laboriously.

Jaden perspired dreadfully. He hoped his end would fall upon him soon that he may be spared the torment he suffered. And again in prayer he sought refuge, “God Almighty-” he started and twice was he thwarted, for a portion of the blanket beneath which he had found comfort and warmth when he had gone to his rest that night, now asphyxiated him; whereas he had struggled to breathe moments earlier, now he simply lay there gasping. It was only now that Jaden understood that perhaps prayer was not an option. Once he silenced his tongue, the might that had been brought to bear upon him was alleviated. Jaden was unsure if he were being punished for his hypocrisy, or might it have been a hellion descended upon him from a hell unknown, a hell far more nightmarish than any image portrayed by all the sacred writ he had ever studied. Flame eternal is a comfort, a blessing of infinite mercy if my only other option is death in your presence for even the briefest of moments, he thought of the suffering the entity had brought to bear upon him.