A Bright House
Chapter 47

Wednesday and Ray doesn’t call. Wednesday and Ray doesn’t answer his phone. Wednesday and Ray doesn’t return Jenny’s messages.

Whatchya gonna do, Ray? He is parked on a wide residential street where lot frontages are generous. Here and there between the double-garage faced homes, big empty pockets of vacant land await a recession’s end. The drive from site one, where the ill-fated Buick skidded into oblivion, was a transitional mood shift into a heightened anticipation, then wariness, keyed up nerves. This amped up emotional state is counter-weighted by a full-body fatigue slam. It percolates within him as he leaves the Skylark, bringing only the map with his notations, and that which rests within a coat pocket.

Perhaps a portion of the new reticence is attributable to Jenny’s thoughts being received by Ray, but whatever the source, the feeling is muscular. He wants this whole episode over with. It has within its details some odd manner of meant, and contains answers, with this impeccable timing beyond his question... but Townes feels incapable of the challenge as he walks quietly between two split-level houses with unfenced yards. His legs have become shaky with an electrical current of new doubt. His A B negative blood type seems to have thickened and dropped temperature. Whatchya gonna do, Ray, when Thunderbird appears?

The retired railway track is a few hundred feet beyond the loosely drawn line of tended lawns and trimmed hedges. Ray’s pants are rasping through old and new grass shoots. There is an incline, not too steep but steady, rising up to the elevated rim of wilderness land that holds that old track like a bygone era barely recalled. Ray steps over the nearest rail and then begins to walk left, towards a not yet visible derelict paper mill that once employed the good people of Kincardine township, put food onto their tables and sent their children to school, adulthood, war, to whatever manner of future awaited.

Townes begins his walk of fate and decision, knowing that every step is gaining a power against his gut, which tells him to stop and turn around. It is paradoxical, however, for this is the answer's direction. Ray’s mother, his newly discovered Cree father, the meaning of Jenny’s arrival in crucial timing; all of it. How does one carry on against and with a pure duality of impulses that share equal intensity? Ray Townes knows truly that a common maddening dichotomy is the reality for countless others throughout time, and he keeps walking the walk. It is a pleasant morning but that does not matter. He is fighting a dizzy urge to return to the car and drive straight to Jenny as she is serving her customers. Footfall crunch on gravel between ties. Going to die a virgin; how much does that matter? Sᴇaʀch Thᴇ Find ɴøᴠel.nᴇt website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

Off into the unknown by his own lucid choosing; how much does that matter? Crunch, crunch, breeze in hair. Heavy breathing. It seems not his at times. Nobody around but him and the chirps of unseen birds that populate the woods, thick and dense, with blue tinged watcher-trees. His eyes are watering from new gusts of cold lady Huron air that have arisen to accommodate his building anxiety. Eventually a dipping in the horizon indicates a creek valley location that holds the old timber bones of that forlorn abandoned paper mill. He is approaching the place of vanishing. At this point a psychic flash ignites across his vision, left to right in a see-through scroll at first, then congealing into something he can feel more clearly when his footfalls cease on the tracks. Ray stops, concentrates, shuts his eyelids tight.

This visual has the hallmarks of dream liquidity. He “sees” himself, looking down his legs where he is walking on what appears to be a narrow cement sidewalk of sorts that is simply hanging in absolute darkness. Something strange is illuminating this walkway from within, a diffused grey tone unlike any he has seen. He walks for a few steps and then during the interval of his lifted right foot, this walkway bends suddenly in a smooth motion (an odd rippling undulation) twenty degrees of arc, left. Ray adjusts his mid-step, and then the left foot lifts off into another similar bending into the same direction.

Clearly this is symbolic in a most straightforward manner, he suspects, and wills his “body” in the vision forward. There are several more of these steps on the dimly self-lit walkway that hangs in utter ink black nothingness, until the bends have created a nearly complete circle, and he must look up from his feet. He then sees himself there, jolted rigid in up-lighting that casts him ghostly, staring agape with horrored eyeballs at the earthly Ray who is experiencing this clairvoyant flash as a guided entering into unknown space. The Ray who is mere feet away, mutely stricken in a facial mirror that must reflect the galvanizing shockwave of Townes on the rail track bed, topples backward into the engulfing void.

“Holy fuck” he hears of himself. Not one to swear casually, but holy fuck he must. It seems to jar him free of the vision and back to Terra firma beneath the soles of his shoes. Bird chirps and bracing gusts. He is on the railway ridge, newly freaked out. Whatchya gonna do, Ray? You going ahead with this? He takes a look at his watch and is blown away to see that it has frozen at 3:33 in the morning. It had been working perfectly as recently as when he parked the Buick. With that quick-fire brain of his, Townes is a nano second synapse from doubling the numerals to 666, a disbelieving dry as desert laugh elicited. “Bullshit” he speaks to the trees, looking ahead at the dual lines of rail as they poke into the horizon like a mocking beckon. The clairvoyant messenger has provoked him in two ways; he is freshly anxious and a little angry.

Before continuing, Ray assesses himself physically. He stands very still between the rails, calming down, and “listens” to his physiology. There are no bizarre sensations there other than the emotional ones; why has my watch stopped? Am I crazy to continue? He has no other choice but to soldier on. His normal modus operandi rarely involved unaccompanied forays into the theater of a crime or disappearance; but of course this was no normal set of circumstances. Ray knows that there remains some distance to traverse before he nears the actual place of anomalous energies. He must first reach the trestle over that creek, and then it proceeds from there, increasingly into the potential for reality-altering harm. For a moment before the renewal of footfalls away from comparative safety, Townes examines his watch. The battery has died. He won’t waste any further thought on just how the time moved backward to those dark-witted numerals. There isn’t the luxury for that.

Yet another pat on the coat pocket. Yes. Then a realization that he has left his cell phone in the car. Again, fuck. This nonsense isn’t him. He just doesn’t do absent-minded things. He is a diligent, vigilant double-checker. He is a careful man with an unusual job, which makes him extra careful aside from days like this... this roller coaster with its symbolic resonance against these rusty old railway tracks. The feeling of being less than in control, something that has been increasing since he visited the first site of the morning, sits like nausea in his belly. Ray looks back at that from whence he came. Should I go and get my phone? A pregnant pause later, he has resumed the walking forward. It feels both fated and reckless, but he cannot stop for whatever logical illogical reason.

Things grow eerier at the trestle. He reaches its midpoint and stops to lean against the wide wood railing, overlooking what remains of an old dilapidated paper mill where children of various generations have built campfires, left their names and virginities etched into the aged planks or sloping creek banks. The birds have abruptly become dead silent. The wind has also abated entirely. Townes is aware of only a hushed gurgle of water far below, licking against eroded Canadian Shield boulders, and his own breathing. Here is the gateway to deeper fear. Right here in this field of changed energy, human-channeled through the oldest part of a brain.

It makes a person want to flee, desperately. To cower, to submit. Though he is yet to experience a bodily altered chemistry, Ray feels this shifted atmosphere with everything he is. To the left he peers, following the tracks into that last portion of landscape with its unruly grasses and weeds, forest flanked. There are missing people in that tangle. Their last known earthly moments linger in soil and shrub. A hush is to be expected in a place like this. Ray thinks of those freakish malformed beings, their featureless faces and gossamer white limbs, that found their way into the camera of a missing adolescent named Kevin. He thinks of the feather in a medicine pouch on a front seat of a rental car. The two portraits of two people, both mysteries to unravel. He thinks of Thunderbird legend-lore versus physical evidence and eyewitness testimony over centuries, passed along with reverential terror.

And now, feeling all that I feel, having dreamed all that I dreamt, I am still going to put myself into this place of horrible risk? Have I this much confidence that all is meant to be precisely this momentous choice? That it will be okay in the end that can never end?

The entire landscape is muted around him. Ray watches the greenish brown flow of a creek more like a river, looks at the collapsed buildings of a once flourishing company, its dead roadways grown over by a reclaiming forest. Jenny is light years away, and he is suddenly pang ridden for that light which seems taken back from his long overdue, reaching hands. He doesn’t feel like a tragedy about to happen, but this fear is realer than any real he has tasted, tested, bested.

If his feet can speak, the left is saying “return now”, the right is saying “go forth”... that psychic forewarning has already become usurped by Ray’s overriding lifelong penchant for following the purest information coursing through him. He will follow this thread directly to its source. Who is the masterful weaver? What insanely complex loom will he discover, just past the invisible doorway? He shakes his head at the quandary, the pause for fear, and looks again with utter habit and futility at his frozen half-of 666 watch face. Okay... onward.

Ray removes the map from his jacket and carries it, folded open to this expanded view of Kincardine township. He has encircled the section of rail and forest that swallowed up people and carried a dog away. Where a weird species of unknown type and origin dances amongst the trees and bushes. Where he expects that any moment now, a being of legend and fact, this some manner of portal traveler, will manifest before him in a menacing show of descending wingspan and nasty talon splay.

Townes isn’t, is ready. No real plan other than to halt if afflicted with a sudden foreign energy field, and beyond that... he removes the coiled braid of Delsin Shacapot from his coat pocket. That which he has been touching repeatedly, almost unconsciously in a son to pre-lost father reflex. A prayer of fingers that have been devoted to a kind-hearted life, now feeling the razor sharp edges of a new Unknowable. His feet have taken him close to the perimeter of theevent horizon, and he looks behind him briefly. No other sign of life; the entire landscape still and quiet beyond his breathing and simmering thoughts. He needs to hear a voice, some manner of comfort, and speaks to himself and to Delsin as his shoes continue along with their gravel crunch.

“Father. I hold your earthly hair. I walk to all that I cannot see or know.

I have been wondering who you are. What you really are. I need to find you, to ask you why you abandoned a woman who loved you as a great love and bore you a son. Why you abandoned ME. Father, are you here in these woods? Are you able to see me?”

And each asking word, each inflection of the Ray Townes heart made vocal, brings with it a chill born in the bloodstream half-Cree. It prickles his skin and the nape of his neck. Makes the hand which holds that long braid wound about its palm and overlapped through the thumb and first two fingers, icy cold. Of course Ray knows an answer is about to reveal itself. He isn’t certain of the manner of revelation, what form it may take, but certainty lies thick in the silence where he walks. Gravel and shoe sole crunch, breathing, a pulse rate drumming two ears, and the very first indication of imminent puzzle pieces tumbling into perception. A high-pitched cry unlike anything his ears have known.

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