Thalo Blue (59 page)

In her head, before she went all the way over with a silent scream, he saw only what was in her thoughts in that last second before she drowned. Her little boy. The names
Sebastion
and
William
were fuzzy and they sat on top of one another nearly unreadable. Built from a newspaper clipping kept in a drawer, there was an image of a young woman, nearly identical to herself and laying nude on a sagging hotel room bed of golds and oranges and browns. And there was an image of a little boy, the back of his head, disheveled hair in the heat of an August afternoon. He was looking out past a set of iron bars to the rippled water of a blue lake. There was a man on that lake and his arm grew hesitantly into the air while a boat carried him away.

With only those pieces, incomplete, and hunting for years in vain through a kind of hell he didn’t know existed, David came across the young man who thought of himself as
Zeb
and most assuredly not
Red
. They traded sight as well, just as David had done with the boy’s mother. He saw the same things in each.

And, as he had been doing since the beginning, he sought to trade her little boy’s life for those of his dead girls. She had taken his. He would take hers.

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How long does an epiphany take? For Zeb his started somewhere over the precipice the night a bullet entered his body...and it came to its completion during a second moment over the same straight-down drop.

He had laughed once, to himself, had laughed thinking how absurd it was that the combined wills—a group of commuters standing on a subway platform—should be able to
make
a train arrive from its segue of tardiness. No, it’s not the wills of many that can make magic; it’s the will of one. Zeb saw himself in a grain of sand. He saw the whole world in a grain of sand. They were the same, he and the world. And he understood.

The comprehension came tied to the train of David’s insides. He was himself again and the Druid was no longer a threat. Not here and not anywhere.

He saw divinity as a reflection in his own pupil.

In that made-up space between life and death, Zeb blinked. And in that blink, his will took control.

The ice, snow and cold were gone.

Zeb had taken the reigns, had taken
the strings
, had reinvented the world.

He felt warm beach sand under his heels. He looked past the man in the maroon shirt and there was a Thalo Sky of electric blue. It had a horizon line, dotted with a row of wooden shacks and gently waving trees. The sun dawned in an instant, and the two souls were bathed in glorious light.

Below them, the expanse of the drop from the precipice’s height was nearly gone. The waves settled only a short distance beneath them with an audible tingle-wash as waves should sound. From David Langtree’s mind there came terrible thoughts which Zeb could hear in his head. Sputtering and convoluted, pock-marked by echo, they came a bit like the sound of the waves.

—
We are our father’s sons. Ourfather’ssonsOurfather’s—

Then, like stop-motion, tricking the eye and betraying what should be expected, David’s hand, the one which constricted Zeb’s throat, was gone. Just gone, like it had not been a part of him ever before. And his other, the one which pressed at the boy’s jaw, felt like a lazy piece of plastic film.

—
They have given us only words. Onlywords. Givenonlywords.

Zeb hurled the body away from him with nearly no effort at all. David skidded in the sand with a look of shock.

—
And their eyes to see. ToseeToseeTosee—Toseeeeee...

Zeb stood in the sand, turned, looked over the edge and past the smooth rock overturn of this new boundary. The sound of the water was a patter like rain, broad and inviting, not loud and thunderous. He was not more than fifteen feet above the writhing top face, a glittering plate of polished metal. Light from the sun, as it moved visibly yet not swiftly in the sky, caught the spider web of foam which lolled on the skin of the sea. It sent a spangle of hazy dappled patterns across his face. He could not see them, but knew they were there. Below, close to him, there were no bodies on rocks, only color. The warm tans of sand, the reds of shale, the blues and greens and sea-foam whites of agitated ocean surf. The body’s extreme edge lay at an infinity.

The Druid, with panic in his face, scrambled up and towards Zeb with his maroon shirt sleeve flapping indolently where once there had been an arm to reach out. But his distance from Zeb had been exaggerated, stretched out like a telescope. He was impossibly far away in the hot sand.

Zeb, merely serene and solitary, hovering like a spirit on the edge of the sea, placed his palms together and extended his arms to the untarnished sheet before him. His reply to David came on a wisp of wind they both could hear in their heads:

—O
nly their eyes to see? Only their words?

—
Yes!

—
No. We have our own too.

He stood there for either an eternity or an eye-blink; time was funny on this other side
—sometimes a runaway train following a set of tracks into Niagara, sometimes an inchworm crawling on a wire stretched from the earth to the moon.

There was nothing on the horizon but color.

He imagined the water would be warm.

He saw no shadows.

He took a last look back at the Druid, left him, and on one final burst of titanium white, dove into the sea.

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The kiss of life came; a wish so powerful, a will so fervent, it could not be denied. It takes more than a heartbeat to claim life. A gift, particularly that one, has two parts; the offering and the reception.

There was an explosion in his head. Behind his eyes, nothingness. As the blast faded to a gurgle-churn of water in his ears, Zeb struggled free of a grip in the cold depths of Charlemagne Lake. David Langtree—
the Druid
—descended into the blackness, arms and fingers outstretched, without stirring, without protest. The last thought in his troubled mind was not of his two daughters, his princesses, but instead of his two boys. His two cherub boys with hair of gold.

There were sirens in the thick of Zeb’s dark head now.

He crawled through an eternity of time and cold water, his eyes still shut tight. He felt his way across the under belly ceiling of glassy ice, found a hole, and broke the surface for air. He spat ice water from his lungs, and the glass held like a salver as he eased out into the cold night air. The temperature blasted him and he thought for certain that he could not be alive.

Breathing, convulsing, choking, he turned on to his back, propping himself at his elbows, the freezing skin of his face crystallizing under a murky sky of blue velvet. There was a sliver of pine from the deck railing under the skin of his left palm. It was the radiant orange sting of a bumblebee. Under his taut eyelids, in a fog of worn thought, he pictured the world. The atmosphere and earth that contained him at that moment wore a drawn set of drapes which he had pulled shut with a pure desire...and he could paint them any color he wanted.

His arms gave way.

He collapsed.

He passed out.

At the edge of the lake, the
other
side of it, an Edan fire truck had pulled up to the Redfield summer home. Fire fighters would use sledge hammers to finally pry open the gates and send them snaking to the gravel- and ice-covered ground with a crash. The triplet pines would be saved but the house would be destroyed, along with all of its contents. It was to become a pile of cinders and colorless ash, with not even a foundation left. In spring, the space where it sat would be barren and new, even allowing sprigs of clover and blades of grass to shoot up and face a Thalo Blue sky among the skeletons of devastation. It was Cerulean too, that sky. It was both.

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Sebastion Redfield awoke to the squeak-crunch of footsteps approaching in snow. He lay unmoving, as before, and his mind came alive to this reality. He opened his eyes. For the rest of his time, ever after, he was wide awake.

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fin
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About The Author // Jason McIntyre

Born on the prairies, Jason McIntyre eventually lived and worked on Vancouver Island where the vibrant characters and vivid surroundings stayed with him and coalesced into what would become his debut novel,
On The Gathering Storm
. Before his time as an editor, writer and communications professional, he spent several years as a graphic designer and commercial artist.
THALO BLUE
is his second novel.

Learn more and connect with the author at

www.theFarthestReaches.com

An excerpt from

On The Gathering Storm

A Novel by

Jason McIntyre

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Copyright
©
2010 Jason McIntyre

www.theFarthestReaches.com

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One

Hannah Heads for Colwood

Hannah Garretty waits out a red light in her VW Rabbit when the world disappears.

Absently tapping her finger to the song on the radio—all grown up now, not like before—she’s stopped in the left-hand turning lane of Craigflower Road, ready to head down island toward Metchosin. The light standards, the cracked floor of the intersection, the concrete curbs, the shrubs and tall grasses, the windshield itself, just dissolve away. Her camera, her lenses, her tripod and spare canisters of film, all her gear, was in the hatch behind the back seat. But now it’s gone. Everything is gone.

Hannah Garretty sees things. She’s always seen things. She’s a photographer and a good one too, so she sees regular, everyday things in a different way than most. But this is different. Tiny stolen moments like these are more than creative vision, more than simple daydreams. What Hannah sees are glossy postcards of the Yet to Come, held before her mind’s eye for a fraction of a second, then yanked from view without reason and never seen again. But they stay with her, these fraction-grasps of second sight, like the bloody spot burned on a retina after staring right at the sun: not a perfect reproduction, but a blurry and pale recording of the original.

She’s first in a long line of commuters and summer vacationers, some heading home after a long work day and fuming at the traffic, others hoping to make good time and be at the campgrounds or the motel before sundown. Held taut as the outside world dismantles piece by piece, she tries to sit stolid in the driver’s seat, tries not to let herself panic. It’s hot. Drought conditions, the end of a second full week without rain. It’s stifling inside the Rabbit. Hannah has all the windows down, and a breeze hotter than it should be, even for August on Vancouver Island, plays with her fine strands of hair. She keeps her neck stiff and strained. Beads of sweat form on her forehead and between her eyebrows and she worries about her makeup running. That’s all she needs right now, she thinks, willing herself not to wipe at her face with the dirty heel of a hand. She’s wishing her housemate, Beta, is here to slap a cool bottle of water into her hand and say with that know-it-all tone of hers, “You need to hydrate, Han.” She contemplates when next she can wash her face as the brutal glimpse comes on like a burn. It’s the second-to-last she’ll ever see. She hasn’t had a Grasp in a long, long time, and tries to blink it away. Like all the other spoiled negatives she’s seen in her life, it stays.

Hannah doesn’t realize she’s holding her breath.

The vista beyond her rabbit’s dashboard peels away, and the inside of the fraction-grasp replaces it. She sees skin. An up-close view of a pale cheekbone. There is an eye, the whites of it filled with blood, the rest looking black and sick. Puffiness begins to overtake the cheek bone and the outward corner of the bloodied eye. Her view inside the Grasp pulls back, like zooming out to the original breadth of a negative before it was cropped in close: an aging bruise, hit again before healing; a line of blood from a nostril, running towards the corner of a mouth.

And just as this half-face becomes fully clear to her, the head turns. It is a taut and jerky movement, sudden. Shock or fear. A swathe of gold hair flies across the vision, flies like the face has been hit again, and that hair bounces into sight. It is straggled and dirty, but its color is unmistakable. Under its film of grime, there is a healthy sheen to it, maybe from an overhead light—or a window.

It’s not entirely new for Hannah to be sitting at a crossroads like this, to be planted out in the world, under pressure. It can’t exactly be called déjà vu because she’s never straddled this precise patch of asphalt, no, but just the same, she
has
been here before.

A burst of a horn, short and stiff, pulls her out of the Grasp. She is yanked away from it, back inside her old white Rabbit, rusted and sputtering at the now green light. How long had the Grasp held her? Only a moment, but long enough for the light to change; long enough to make a row of enemies in the line of cars behind her.

Startled, Hannah pops the car into first gear, and pitches forward. But the Grasp has shaken her. It feels like she’s thirteen again and that leaves her foot emptied of blood, her shoe now just a tied-off bag filled with air and floating above the clutch. Her older brother, Richard, taught her to drive standard, used to come by and pick her up at Mom’s on Saturday and spend the entire day with her. Rich never failed to point out that it took her far longer to get a handle on how to shift than it had taken her brother Nic, whom he had also taught. She rode the clutch, practically slept on it, Rich would say, would grind away at it until that awful burning stink of it would stay in the cab with them for blocks.