Exodus (4 page)

             
She didn’t dare think about what that would mean. How could a God let a girl be injured by demons and yet be so good?

6

THE SHEEP BIRD

Aria stood before iron gates. A gravel path led away through a stand of tall, dark trees silhouetted against a stone-colored sky. She knew there were bears in this park, and that she needed to watch not only for them but for the bear traps the groundskeeper had set at the park’s four corners.

Aria stepped carefully down the narrow road, watching the trees for any movement. Her tennis shoes crunched on the gravel.

She rounded a corner, where the earth on either side of the path sloped up to the tree line. Above her towered tall black trunks with bare branches, a dead forest that looked as if it had been rained on for a hundred years. But there was no rain now. There wasn’t anything now—no birds, no flowers; the grass was yellowed and flattened to the earth.

Aria saw some movement, something gray against the gray sky. She caught her breath. It was hard to make out. She looked out of the corner of her eye at the bulky shape descending toward her.

It was a bird.

Almost.

It had black eyes and a curved black beak like a bird, but the animal’s large body was matted with curly sheep’s wool. It had no feet—only two very small wings.

The thing glided across the path in front of Aria and landed to her left, then snapped its beak shut. It blinked once with its abyss of an eye, which stayed trained on her.

Aria stepped carefully toward the right side of the path, never taking her eyes off the sheep bird. She began to back away.

She bumped into something.

Aria turned to find herself slightly off the path, standing next to a brass coat rack growing straight up out of the earth. A yellow suit jacket hung on one hook.

Aria pulled the coat off the hook and pushed her right arm into the sleeve.

Water gushed out of the sleeve and onto the ground. Wherever the sparkling water fell, the ground bloomed. The dead grass turned green under the drops of blue water.

Aria hefted the coat over her shoulders and put her left arm in the other sleeve. More water poured out onto the ground.

The sheep bird let out a slow hiss.

The weight of the cool, wet coat was soothing. Aria scrunched up her shoulders and squeezed some more water out of the golden cloth. A few pink wildflowers popped up out of the grass at her feet.

She saw the word “Revival” on the air, and rolled the sound of it over in her mind. Revival.

“For all of us?” she asked the cold sky.

There was no reply.

Aria continued to walk the path, careful to make sure the sheep bird wasn’t following her. It still sat on the dead grass, and she kept an eye on it until she rounded a corner and could no longer keep it in view. A trail of flowers silently sprouted behind her as she headed toward the park’s rear gate.

But when the gate came into view, Aria heard a new sound. A low growl sounded from somewhere on her left. She quickly scanned the hill.

On a high spot of ground next to the gate, pawing at the earth and drooling from an open mouth, was a huge, brown bear.

It growled again, and looked straight through her.

Aria’s feet froze to the ground.

“Breathe,” she told herself. “Breathe.” She clenched and unclenched her fists, but she couldn’t make her feet move.

The bear lifted its head, stood tall, and bellowed at the sky. The ground shook with the sound.

It came back down on all fours and tensed its powerful legs.

Aria’s mind was working quickly now. She made her calculations and shuffled her leaden feet on the rocks.

The bear took off, thundering down the hill.

Aria sprang off the gravel and raced toward the gate. She barely felt her feet beneath her. She only knew she had to get to the gate first.

She had to.

One, two. One, two. She pushed her feet off the path as quickly as she could.

Aria could see the bear’s snout out of the corner of her eye as she reached for the gate.

She got there just before the bear. Aria yanked the gate open and swung it shut on the bear’s massive head.

The bear snapped at her hands with gigantic jaws.

Aria braced her feet against the gate and pulled on the handle with all her strength to hold the gate shut. The whole structure swayed and moaned in protest.

Aria took a quick breath and shouted as loudly as she could into the bear’s face.

She held on while the bear thrashed forward and backward and tried to swipe at her through the bars with a huge paw.

Aria woke up with a gasp and sat straight up in bed.

At first all she could hear was the blood screaming through her ears.

What on earth?
she thought.
Bears? More evil birds?

Her mind tried to grasp at the details of the dream as it faded away.

A golden coat… revival.

As usual, it seemed to make some sort of strange sense, but she just couldn’t wrap her mind around it. She sighed.

Her breathing slowed finally, and Aria heard something else in the quiet of the night.

A voice was coming from the end of the hall. It didn’t belong to either of her parents.

As quietly as she could, Aria crept out of her room and down the hall. Her parents’ bedroom door was ajar. The voice was coming from inside.

Aria peeked around the door and saw her parents watching a program on TV.

“Because God
wants
to communicate with us,” the man on the TV said, “he speaks to us when there are no distractions to keep us from hearing him—when we are asleep. And he speaks in pictures, in symbolic parables, just like he did when he walked the earth.”

The man on the TV made an unintelligible joke, and the audience chuckled politely. Aria crept to the edge of the door to listen in.

“Dreams can be subjective, but God does use certain symbols again and again in the Bible, and I’m going to give you a few of those keys today.”

“I know this already,” Aria’s mom mumbled to the TV. “Can you help us understand Aria’s dream?” She cleared her throat and leaned toward the TV. The man began to list common dream symbols.

Aria’s dad rubbed his wife’s back. “I thought we already did,” he said.

Aria’s mom shook his hands off her shoulders.

“Colors are highly symbolic,” the man said. “Purple can mean royalty or gold honor or anointing, because purple cloth was reserved for royalty, and gold is valuable. Blue is the color of water and sky, and in the Bible God often describes his spirit as being like the wind or like a rushing river.”

Aria’s head was spinning. She dreamed of water and wind all the time! Her dream replayed in her mind, and she saw the gold coat again, with life-giving water dripping from its sleeves.

“If you dream of blue or water or wind, pay attention to how it is falling or blowing, and where it is going. Is it getting deeper as you move forward? That could mean you’re moving into deeper realms of revelation, just like in Ezekiel’s vision of the temple.”

As Aria recalled her dream it seemed to take on a certain shape, but the interpretation was still just beyond her reach.

“Birds,” the man was saying.

Aria stiffened and gripped the doorframe.

“Birds often represent spirits in a dream, because they both fly, in a manner of speaking.”

Aria groaned.
I knew it,
she thought.
Demons.

“People with prophetic giftings will often dream of birds, because God is warning them of plans of the Evil One,” the man explained.

Aria and her mother gasped in unison.

“It’s strategic!” Aria’s mom exclaimed.

Aria’s dad shook his head in disbelief.

“So we’re supposed to believe we’re the parents of a child prophet?” he said. “This is all a bit much.”

“You said yourself that Aria’s dream is already coming true,” her mom replied, whirling around to face her husband.

Aria ducked back to avoid being seen.

“Yes, but how do you parent a prophet? What do we even begin to do with this?”

Birds. Demons. And the Spirit of God. Could it really be true?

Aria couldn’t take in any more. She crept back to her room and flopped down on her bed.

She tried to think back through her dreams and pick out symbols, but it was all a blur of crows and wind and darkness.

If you want to speak to me, why are you being so confusing?
she prayed.
What if I miss something important? Why can’t you just speak like a normal person?

A normal person. God. The ridiculousness of her statement instantly hit Aria.

“Still,” she said, “if you’re good—I hope you’re good—then I need to speak to you. I
need
to know you—whoever you really are.”

7

RED STATIC

Aria didn’t sleep well for the next few nights. Every time she closed her eyes, new visions of crows descended on her. For the third night in a row she woke up shaking and sweating.

Why?
she asked God.
How can this be you? I don’t understand!

She sat awake again, long after she should have been asleep. Her eyes were puffy from exhaustion.

Outside, the night was quiet. A gentle breeze nudged the lace curtains in her windows. The street lamp across the road cast a glow into the room, dimly illuminating the white vanity and animal calendar tacked to the wall over her collection of pressed wildflowers. Aria considered anything that bloomed a flower, including dandelions, much to her mother’s embarrassment.

Aria heard the clink of china downstairs. She slid into her fuzzy white slippers and hurried down the hall, peering wide-eyed into every shadow on the curving staircase that led down to the foyer.

              “Oh, what’s up, sweetie?” Her mom looked up when she entered the dining room. She was sitting at the cherry-wood table with a mug of coffee and was rifling through a stack of papers.

Aria had seen her dad going through and marking the same papers earlier that evening. He had sighed after reviewing the stack, cleared his calculator, and started again with the top sheet. Again and again he made little marks on the papers, then came to the last sheet and stared at it. Aria’s mom was looking at the last paper in the stack the same way now.

She had turned on only the lamp on the china cabinet, so Aria flipped on the overhead chandelier. Her mom flinched and flipped the papers face down on the table.

“You’re up,” she said, tightening the belt that held her floral robe around her waist.

              “I had a bad dream,” Aria answered. She plopped herself down on the edge of her mom’s lap. She was getting too big to sit there.

Aria’s mom hugged her and sighed. “Yeah, you and me both, sweet pea.” She mussed her short, glossy hair with her hand and wiped her face, which was bare of makeup. Her pale blue eyes, the same color as Aria’s, looked sunken and tired.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she finally asked.

             
“You had a bad dream, too?”

             
“Well,” her mom bit her lip, letting out a hiss of breath between her teeth. “I’ve always had vivid dreams. Sometimes they’re just bizarre, but lately all I dream about is sand. Sand sifting through my fingers, sand floors that drain into the basement like an hourglass.”

             
“Why sand?” Aria asked, thinking of the cryptic symbols from her own dreams.

Her mom stared at the cabinet. “I think God is speaking to me about losing the things I love,” she said.

“If God only has bad things to say, maybe I don’t want him to speak to me,” Aria replied.

             
“Oh, honey,” her mom answered, “God isn’t like that. He’s good and loving and wise.”

             
“How do you know?” Aria turned to face her. “I mean, how do you really know? Not just from what Pastor Ted says about him, but for real?”

             
“I know because he visits me in my dreams,” her mom said. She looked at the china in the cabinet. “It’s not always sad. Sometimes God has amazing secrets to share with us, blessings to speak over us, gifts to give us…. If he’s not real, then I’m really crazy!”

She laughed, but Aria didn’t join in.

              “Look,” she said, getting serious again. “I’ve been studying dream symbols, and I think God is trying to warn you about bad things that are about to happen—that are happening—at church. I don’t know why he’s warning you, but I think you have a gift, a sensitivity to hear his voice.”

             
“But I don’t understand him!” Aria cried. “Why does he say things in a language I don’t know?”

             
“I think it’s an invitation to learn how to understand him,” her mom said softly. “He’s inviting you—all of us who watch for him—to understand not only his language of symbols but to understand
him
.”

             
Stunned, Aria said nothing.

             
Her arms and legs were covered in goose bumps.

God wants me to know him?

She took a deep breath.

Maybe. We’ll see.

Her attention was arrested by something then—something wrong in the house. She tasted iron on her tongue and felt the blood swishing through her ears.

A presence had entered the house.

A bad one.

In her mind’s eye, Aria saw a slouching human shape that glowed like red TV static shuffling through the living room. When she focused on it, it stopped and leered at her with deep, black holes where eyes should be.

“Aria, you’re trembling!”

She snapped her attention back to her mom.

“I don’t know what’s going on, mom,” she whimpered. How could she possibly see through walls? How could a demon enter her house?

             
Her mother hugged her head to her chest. “It will all be okay,” she said. She kissed the top of her head. “Somehow.” She rocked Aria on her lap gently, just as she had when she was a little girl.

The grandfather clock in the corner chimed eleven.

“The eleventh hour,” Aria’s mom said quietly.

             
“This is all my fault, isn’t it?” Aria said.

             
“No,” her mom replied emphatically. She buried her face in Aria’s hair and hugged her tightly.

Then her face softened. “Would you like some milk before you go back to bed?”

              “No thanks,” Aria said. She craned her neck around her mom’s shoulder. The presence had walked into the family room and was circling back toward her through the hall to the kitchen.

Don’t go in the kitchen, Mom! Please don’t go in the kitchen!

“Mom, what if I am crazy?” Aria’s voice broke. She burrowed her head into her mom’s chest.

“If you’re the crazy one in all this then we all belong in the nuthouse,” her mom replied.

              Aria swallowed hard and glared at the kitchen doorway.