Penult

Penult

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2015 by A. Sparrow,
All Rights Reserved

Jude 1:6
–
And the angels which kept not their
first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in
everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great
day.

Hebrews 13:2
–
Be not forgetful to
entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels
unawares.

Chapter 1:
Prison

Two cups of coffee and a crumpled wrapper sat
on the table between me and the two exhausted detectives. Every
time I pled ignorance to another one of their dumb-assed questions
they looked at each other with incredulity and
exasperation.

I almost felt sorry for them. Every eyewitness
account coming from the crime scene was wacky beyond belief. In the
world they thought they knew, bleachers don’t just get up and walk.
Hundred year old beech trees don’t suddenly sprout fully rooted in
the middle of a soccer field. They just don’t.

What was I supposed to tell them? The truth?
That it was all me? That the guy they found encased within its
heartwood was basically a ninja wizard assassin from one of hell’s
anterooms? Yeah, right.

That jerk Wendell actually survived the ordeal.
Go figure. A team of firemen and arborists cut him free with some
nifty chainsaw work. Back when Wendell had locked my friend Urszula
in a different tree, I hadn’t needed any stinking chainsaw to
spring her.

So I kept mum, feigning ignorance, reinforcing
their impression of me as some pimply, dumb kid from Florida. And
it worked. They ended up treating me more like a victim than a
perpetrator.

I was damned lucky the charges were limited to
the premature withdrawal of one pickup truck from a probate lot. In
the eyes of the law, I was a first offender—an orphan, no less.
Things could have turned out way worse for me,
considering.

***

FCI Coleman Medium. That’s my home these days.
Sounds more like a brand of moderately-sized ice chest than a bona
fide Federal Correctional Institution one hour north and east of
Tampa.

After the incident at the soccer field, the New
Hampshire cops tasked to sort things out found all kinds of
outstanding warrants in my name. Go figure. The only charge that
stuck was third degree auto theft. And that was for liberating a
Ford F150 from the probate lot in Fort Pierce and crossing state
borders with the allegedly stolen property. The truck had belonged
to my dad. He had willed it to me and I just happened to take
possession of it before all the t’s had been crossed and the i’s
dotted. Nevertheless, I pled guilty for a sentence of six months in
jail plus a year’s probation.

That was more than I expected for a first
offense, but I can’t complain. I was lucky they could not tie me to
any of the drug trafficking done by me, or subsequently by the
Pittsburgh dealers had I traded it to. Dad’s truck had been worked
hard for a month before the authorities managed to track down and
impound it.

There was plenty of other stuff they could have
charged me with, too. Homicide, for instance. People died in my
presence, whether or not my actions were directly involved. And I’m
not just talking about that old lady ex-assassin in Burlington,
Vermont whose departure from this existence I had
‘facilitated.’

I had pulled stuff that, to lay people, might
seem supernatural, but to me came as natural as blowing my nose.
Twice, monsters summoned and conjured by my will had slaughtered a
bunch of a drug trafficker’s enforcers.

In the old days they might have even hung me
for sorcery. Good thing the laws regulating that sort of thing were
long off the books.

So I can’t complain. Six months in Coleman
Medium was nothing compared to what could have been. Yeah. Things
could have turned out far worse. Considering.

***

A long time ago back in Fort Pierce, a girl I
knew once looked deep into my eyes and told me that I had an old
soul. She was one of those New Age, vegan, quinoa/granola types.
Hippy parents. High on life.

I took her seriously at the time, because it
was something that I had always suspected about myself. I had this
weird feeling that I had been through this ordeal we call life at
least once or twice before. This was not my first rodeo.

Fast forward a couple weeks and I caught her
giving the same spiel to some other guy at a party. It was a
throwaway pickup. She had no psychic ability. She had only been
flirting, but I had been too vain and too dense to realize it. I
was crushed.

I wonder what she would say if she could see me
now. These eyes have gazed on things most mortals could never
imagine exists. This soul has traveled to places from which most
never return. I’ve been there and back again more times than Bilbo
and Frodo and all the other Baggins and Tooks combined.

***

The day I got out of prison, I flew from
Orlando to Boston and then rode to Vermont on a used dirt bike I
bought with my last five hundred dollars. I stayed at the vacant
cabin that had belonged to Ellen’s grandmother before Wendell had
gotten ahold of it and turned it into an assassin’s lair. Poor
Ellen was the latest victim of a friendship with James
Moody.

My mission in Vermont was to retrieve an object
that had haunted my dreams since my first night in prison. I had no
intentions of dilly-dallying. I just wanted to find the thing and
leave.

I half expected to find Wendell’s vintage
Cadillac when I pulled up in the gravel drive, but the place was
vacant, the garden overgrown. Blackberry bushes crowded in from
either side and sent their runners reaching across the ruts like
tentacles.

I went around back to the steep walk leading
down to the lake. There was a big old tree there, some kind of
maple with sprawling branches that would have made for a great tree
house or at least a place to hang a rope for a tire
swing.

I climbed the knobby trunk using burls for
handholds. Halfway up was a tree hole, where a large limb had long
ago broken off, I thrust my hand deep into a slimy hole filled with
rot and rainwater, feeling amongst twigs and bits of dead bug till
my fingers contacted metal.

I snatched it by its lanyard and yanked it out,
a tarnished key with a string and the remnants of a paper tag,
mostly disintegrated. Wendell’s friend, the old lady in Burlington,
had given it to me. I had supposedly assassinated her though it was
probably one of the most bloodless and effortless murders ever
committed.

Assisted suicide was a better description of my
deed. She was finished with this world, and wanted nothing more
than to free her soul and enter the Sanctuary at the heart of
Frelsi. She had been a Hemisoul like me, oscillating between life
and the afterworld some called ‘the Liminality’ and others simply
called ‘Root’. Only Freesouls could enter the Sanctuary, but
Hemisouls could not be freed by a death from one’s own hand.
Suicide was a ticket to a nastier place called ‘the Deeps.’ Hired
assassins like Wendell had to end their lives.

I was Wendell’s apprentice at the time. The key
was my payment. I was told it opened a safe deposit box at the
Rutland Savings Bank. First thing in the morning, I would head down
to Rutland to reap my reward.

***

I got plastered that night on warm whiskey and
zinfandel. The fridge was empty and unplugged, but I found some
crackers and canned beans and Vienna sausages in the cupboard and
made myself a meal.

The woods around the lake were dark and creepy,
but the liquor numbed me enough that I wasn’t so spooked by every
bump in the night, and there were a lot of bumps that night.
Raccoons, I hoped, but they made enough noise to be
bears.

I conked out under a reading light with a
Vonnegut paperback in my lap, eking out a few hours of restless
unconsciousness that would have to pass for sleep. When I roused,
the first smudges of dawn light were sketching out the details of
the surrounding forest. I didn’t even wait for the sun to rise over
the hills before I was back on the motorbike heading south to
Rutland.

The Rutland Savings Bank and its staff looked
like something out of a Jimmy Stewart movie—a little too quaint to
believe. An old lady with chained glasses led me into the vault to
retrieve the box. I was expecting one of those flat and skinny
bento-sized things but safe deposit box #3234 was big enough to
hold a pair of construction workers’ lunch pails with room enough
for a loaf of bread. The dang thing felt like it was packed full of
rocks.

The lady left me all alone in a cold, dim room
sitting on a wooden chair before a Spartan desk. Opening that box
felt like a mix of Pandora and Christmas. No demons swarmed out,
but as it turned out, what made it so heavy were the weapons. Not
just handguns and ammo but weird, exotic stuff. A foot long knife
with a wavy blade and a jeweled hilt. A nasty stiletto, slender
enough to roast marshmallows. Some kind of compact dart blower
complete with leather case packed with poison darts.

There were all kinds of keys in the box, too.
One had a keychain bearing the distinctive three bladed propeller
logo of that famous car company. It was for a car, obviously, but
where was it parked? Back in Burlington, maybe? In the lot of the
old folks home? Not very helpful.

One key, a big, brass Baldwin, had a tag that
read: “If found, please call +44 20 7660 7660.” I knew that country
code. I was about to toss it back in the box. What use was a key
from a country I was no longer welcome after my deportation? But
then I found the fake passports. Four of them! Canada. Australia.
USA. New Zealand. Each bore my mug but with different fake names,
none of them anything close to James Moody.

I pocketed the keys and documents and went
after the valuables. I avoided anything that looked like assassin’s
gear. There was gold—rings and chains—among stacks of Euros and Yen
and dollars both Canadian and American. I mainly went after the
Euros but I took a few hundred USD for pocket money. I grabbed one
incredibly pretty chain with a four leaf clover charm as a gift for
Karla.

Inside an envelope of crinkly, brown crepe was
a card all matte black and carbon fiber. It was totally
non-reflective apart from a nine-pointed star made of three
superimposed and overlapping triangles, the numbers and my real
name, James B. Moody, in raised glossy lettering.

It looked like a credit card, so I snatched it
and tucked it into my back pocket. I left the box on the desk for
the old lady to put away and burst out of that bank in a cold
sweat. The first thing I did was to bop into a nearby CVS and use
the automated checkout to buy some iced tea and a box of Tylenol. I
swiped the black card in the reader, expecting alarms to go off or
something but it worked like any old credit card. Instead of VISA
or MasterCard the receipt read ‘Frelsi.’

The very next thing I did was find the nearest
travel agency and book a flight from New York to Rome. Turned out,
they also accepted Frelsi cards. Freaking awesome!

Chapter Two:
Belinda

An oak leaf rests on my dinner tray,
thick and leathery, glossy and brown like the last leaves to fall
in November. It had been a maple leaf a little while ago and before
that a chestnut. But it had begun the evening as a simple white
cocktail napkin.

I’m on Alitalia Flight 611 nonstop to
Rome. Seat 7A. I upgraded to business class at the terminal. The
seats are sweet. One press of a button and they unfold into beds.
The ones in the front of the cabin are even nicer. Now I wonder why
I didn’t upgrade to first class.

That little black credit card works
like magic. With each swipe, a whole new world opens up to me. I
bought myself an iPad mini from an Apple vending machine. I picked
up Karla some earrings from the Duty Free. Now I’m thinking of
getting myself a brand new wrist watch from the SkyMall catalog. A
guy could get used to this kind of living.

I’ve downed two Heinekens so far and am
ready for something harder. The flight attendant didn’t even bother
to card me. Maybe it’s all the grit and gravitas I acquired in
prison. Or maybe all that warring with denizens of the afterlife is
starting to age me.