I said, “He’s coming home. His leg’s injured, but he can walk. He’s on his way home.”
She furrowed her brows, tilted her head questioningly. Then with the slightest hint of an uncertain smile back at me, paid the driver as the door swiveled shut.
The bus disappeared, and I felt the beginnings of an invisible tide approaching me.
I laid around the apartment, going over the past three years in my mind. I looked for patterns in the events I had survived, tried to find a clear rationale for every unexpected twist in my travels and battles. What would I need to know to take a step purposefully, with foreknowledge that I was doing so, into the battle of the gods? Lacking an instruction manual, I listened to music, smoked some weed, and theorized on how to announce to the gods that I was my own player.
I kept coming back to the belief that if Shadow Creature wanted me to openly reveal my healing abilities, that it would be beside me, guiding me, and all would be fine. But I kept worrying about all the people killed by Sheoblask in the Ohio River bridge collapse and wondered how Shadow Creature related to the deaths of humans. Did it mourn for the dead like it sorrowed for the living?
I’d have to take a chance that it did.
I flirted with the idea of telling Sheoblask about Shadow Creature, in the hope that he’d stop tearing apart bystanders around me. But that would most likely be my death sentence. Plus, it would also be a betrayal. The ancient, unknown spirit who’d revealed healing to me was now my inspiration. I also had to put my faith in Pan, believing that he trusted me for good reason. And if Doctor Steel really had backed off, then he might well believe that by the time I found the enigmatic tunnel, I would be ready for a final showdown with Sheoblask or whatever awaited me.
The energies pulling me into learning magic to survive and heal had been steering me to reach this next phase.
Time to go public.
Do I just wait for a knock on my door or what?
I grew restless. After giving up on some lame attempts to pray, I tried to put tunnels and healings and demi-gods out of my mind and seek inspiration in my art. Large swatches of color proved painless for my hand, but I cramped up and couldn’t control the detailed line work in my large window drawing. Anxious and insecure, I decided to clean up some of my more mundane personal problems and went downstairs.
Through Mandrake’s contacts, I found an investigator who agreed to search for Sam Wilson and promised me it would be no problem to deliver my driver’s license, social security card, and draft card. The ID’s would be legit, but requiring an extra fee, of course.
When I arrived back at my apartment, the tire track slashed across the seven foot length of paper tacked to my plywood easel didn’t register at first as possible. How…? What happened to my drawing?
The pattern hadn’t been colored or inked in. Instead, the marks consisted of ash and tar and rubber and something else—smears of bile or an oily debris. The textures and smell reminded me of the fresh char mark of the blasted apart pigeon back when I first explored Monster Alley. With the white feathers still strewn on the floor in the other room, and now this vandalism, I suspected the forces battling over the tunnel had coalesced in my apartment.
Sheoblask. It’s my hand he’s speaking to. First the tail pipe burn, now one of my creations wrecked.
I spent an hour silently cursing Steel and Sheoblask and Pan and the portals, knowing I couldn’t run from them, wondering if my involvement with them was a lifelong commitment or whether I even had much longer to live. Then someone tapped their knuckles against my door.
Jackman came in, pushing a wheelchair in which Mother Abel sat. She immediately harangued me about my approach to healing. “How are the sick and crippled going to climb all those stairs? If Jackman hadn’t been with me, I’d be outside on that sidewalk with all those hippies and whores. And I hear after the sick finally climb up here, you send them away. You heartless or what? You tell me what’s going on.”
I didn’t like Mother Abel and took my mood out on her. “People stop leaving you flowers at your gateway to heaven?”
“You’re a rude child. I don’t know why the Lord would choose someone like you to work his miracles.”
“And on your doorstep. You wonder?”
Her bottom lip jutted out at me in defiance. She dove both her hands into her pocket book, pulled out a small purse. “What is it? The folks who showed up too poor to pay? Well I’ve got money. How much you charge for two ruined legs?”
And suddenly I was reliving the moment my eyes had met Carlito’s as I held a grenade ready to blow him out of this world. I had made the choice not to kill him. I couldn’t look into Mother Abel’s eyes. Would Sheoblask rip open my door and fling her out the window the instant I mended her legs?
How would I stop him if he tried to harm her?
Jackman sensed my hesitation. “When I reached the hospital, the doctors didn’t know why I was in the emergency room. There wasn’t a scratch on me though my shirt was shredded. They picked a few pieces of tar from my face and chest. That’s all. The cops questioned me about my bloody clothes. They didn’t believe me when I told them it was my own blood. How could they? I didn’t have any injuries.” He laid a hand on Mother’s shoulder. “Please. I know you have a faith and a power that is wondrous.”
I went to my window, studied my hand in the sunlight, feeling like I was on the edge of a distant dream. My fingers tingled slightly. I heard a faint murmur in the air around me. It seemed to me the muted sound was tuning in and harmonizing with the sensations in my hand. I looked skywards, searching for the source of the tonal vibration.
I’ve heard that before. Somewhere. Thunder, but coming like a whisper from across the ages.
Pan had responded when I battled Beelzebub. Shadow Creature brought me constant revelations. Monkey Man had made sure I didn’t knock my brains out as my motorcycle crash-landed. Fish Man hauled me across that jungle mountain river.
Whatever course I took, the way wasn’t going to be easy. Maybe everybody wouldn’t survive.
I guess I can place my hand on her and trust it as my next step in the quest to heal the god tunnel.
“No money, Mother. If you want to leave a donation, I’ll make sure it helps feed some homeless street freak.”
Afterwards, as Mother Abel hallelujahed and hobbled from room to room, pushing Jackman’s helping hands away and even playfully kicking at her old wheelchair, I stared in exhaustion at a section of my large drawing. Part of the smear of Sheoblask’s black and dirty tire track had been replaced by a patch of golden color.
It hadn’t been there before I had laid my right hand on the old woman’s boney knees.
The energy that had surged through me and into her legs had left me drained. And it had been a golden light, not the blue I had always associated the magic with up until then. Neither Jackman or Mother had mentioned seeing any radiance projecting from my hand.
Jackman had practically prostrated himself in front of me, begging forgiveness for confessed crimes he thought I had the power to do something about and cried, “Thank you, thank you. Thank you for appearing in my life.”
“Hey, Jackman, it’s cool. Maybe I’m just a fluke of nature.” I shrugged. “Definitely nothing holy about me. Just happen to be this way.”
Mother Abel had commented on my large drawing and studied the street scene as if she couldn’t see the black scourge of tire tracks across the entire length. “Nice, very realistic. You are one blessed soul.” Then she gave me a peck on my cheek.
The tire tracks must be in a god tunnel, no wonder she can’t see them. I’m looking into the tunnels again.
That night I awoke from a dream in which Greg was yelling about an ambush and telling me my hand was glowing. But it wasn’t. The gleam of light came from the darkened outer room, where my drawing sat.
Chapter 33
Over the next few weeks, word spread about my healing abilities. People from Mother’s neighborhood and street toughs sent by Jackman—one with a bleeding knife wound—plus a Baptist minister who came to talk religion with me, appeared at my door. A small bus unloaded eight elderly women and were led upstairs by Mother on her renewed legs. They sat around smoking my Kools and drinking Pepsi while I walked the room touching them with my golden glowing hand. Soon the local prostitutes, runaways, and flower children were camping in my apartment and outside my door. There were too many people with ailments, and I spent days and nights administering to everyone the best I could, with gentle touches or dispensing band aids and ointments. The power in my hand came with a will of its own. There was no reason to call on it. It leapt from my hand with no direction from me to the truly sick with consistent and instant cures. The magic, on full load for hours, sapped my physical strength. Sometimes, if a person was extremely ill, I couldn’t pull my hand away, and afterwards I was finished for the day, collapsing into my bed.
There were two regretful incidents that I slept through.
The first happened after I had wiped myself out after a session with a man with severe lung cancer. My hand had been glued to his chest by the golden light for one long afternoon. Afterwards, with my head buried in my pillow, I was oblivious while a heroin addict collapsed on my stairway. Someone finally shook me awake, telling me their baby couldn’t stop coughing and that there was a very sick man outside. I stumbled out the door, but by the time I got to the poor soul, his eyes were seeing into another world.
I touched his gray skin and said the only prayer that came to mind.
Tell Hank the adventure continues, and apologize for me to Johnny for bringing so much trouble onto him. If you see whoever’s in charge, tell them I need the whole mess I’m involved in to be resolved soon. Otherwise, rest easy now.
The other trauma I couldn’t react to was after a girl tripping on acid had almost bitten off her tongue, and my fingers were jammed inside her mouth pinching and glowing for an hour. Again, I collapsed, and the next morning Bubbly Hoo Hoo came to me, sobbing that she had been forced into gang-banging four guys on my living room couch.
“No one else was around. Didn’t you hear me? They were too rough. Why didn’t you help me?”
I touched my hand to her and said she could stay and rest on the extra mattress. She began feeling better, and a week later was doing another photo shoot, helping my guilt to lessen.
I wondered if the two incidents, being so physically close to me, were due to Sheoblask starting to stir up trouble.
After the heroin addict had died, I noticed two new guys hanging out in my living room. When they asked for help, I suspected they were lying about their maladies and told them jokingly to take an aspirin and call me in the morning. They both stuck around for a few days. During a lull after Bubbly’s trouble, one of them identified himself as a reporter for the Free Press and said he’d like to interview me. I told him he was welcome to watch and write what he observed, but I didn’t have much to say.
There were mutterings about the other man being a narc, and after a scuffle broke out between him and a Hell’s Angel biker, I ended up placing my hand on two nastily mangled faces that glared at each other.
People came and went, stayed and slept, ate my food, dipped into my donations jar, all praising love and miracles and looking to me for guidance. But what could I say to help them find their paradise? What holy words? What gods to pray to or how to live a virtuous life? Should I reveal myself as being hijacked by a family of immortals to find a broken portal? Or maybe tell them a shadow-being had been helping me to stay fairly sane by teaching me how to heal?
The neighborhood witch doctor.
I wondered about my purpose. Healing sick people was fulfilling, meaningful. Finding and clearing out a broken tunnel used by a privileged few that had plenty of other good things going for them, like being immortal or a god, seemed petty. Who cared if a demon or a god couldn’t jump back and forth in time? Did they really need me?
But after every golden healing, I turned to look at my drawing where another small patch of golden light had appeared, covering over bits and pieces of Sheoblask’s tire marks. With all the comments on my artwork by the daily flow of people coming and going, I knew that I was the only one to see the changes in the large rendering. Everyone else saw the original details obscured to my eyes by the scorched rubber treads. I could make out a new picture being formed within the golden patches. It seemed a map of some kind, made of moving images and smells and sounds. Most of it was unrecognizable, but I saw newly-formed animals and trees and fish and mountains shimmering alongside numerals and squiggly lines and rigid boxes. The scent that permeated the drawing I could only describe as the opposite of pine and brimstone. At times, deep moaning explosions reverberated from the paper. No one took notice. My hand pulsed with pain if I touched a section.
Sitting up half the night, staring at it, puffing on a joint or chain-smoking Kools, my mind would drift back, trying to remember details of the hieroglyphic scratchings in Monster Alley.
Then, Teresa came to me in another dream, helping me to understand the correlation between my drawing, the tunnels, and the sick crowding my apartment.
“Deets, get up from your dream. Come into mine.”
She was standing by my bed, nudging me gently.
“Teresa, aren’t I awake?”
“No, either am I. Listen to what I’m dreaming.”
“Why?”
“They’re not watching me. Slip up to them through my dream.”
She revealed to me easily recognizable voices coming from the main room of my apartment. Both Doctor Steel’s metallic rasp and Sheoblask’s garbled utterances were angry and threatening.
Steel was speaking. “If you kill him, Pan will appeal for an alliance with some fearsome friends. This skirmish will go back to a full blown war. Your lords started this mess by overstocking humans in my father’s realm. His mischievous mushroom prank is a legitimate response. Plus, Deets is here for a reason, no matter if you and I don’t fully fathom his appearance. Let Pan have human population adjusted when the tunnel is repaired, and we can negotiate on the retaliatory dispersion of the knowledge of the Gods.”
I lowered my blankets slowly and climbed from the bed. Bubbly was sleeping on the floor mattress, snoring softly. Stepping into Teresa’s dream was like pushing a shroud of thin gauze aside.
I could smell fuel and smoke from Sheoblask and the tin and scrapyard metals of Doctor Steel. The two of them stood in front of my large golden illustration.
“Listen, nephew. Parker’s getting closer to Pan’s goal of discovering the destroyed section. I’d like to know where it’s located, but I can’t allow him to repair it. And look at this drawing. It appears he’s gained the ability to track tunnel events somehow, even though he lacks the skills of a proficient jumper.” Sheoblask’s voice was low and menacing, alien, like it emanated from some other star’s life form or a dimension a thousand times removed from human comprehension. “If I kill Parker, my lords have one less distraction in their plan to imprison Pan. They’ll bypass this damned invisible blockage with a complete new rebuild and then find a way to send your father back forty million years or further to trap him there. Wouldn’t Pan be happy playing his flute, cell-splitting with amoebas, and fucking dinosaurs back in the good old days? It’s before these accursed humans existed. If they ruined his world, well, why not retire back to before they became a bother?”
“A bypass? Ha. Your lords don’t want to chance leaving the tunnel broken. The denizens of Chaos would eventually discover it and invade time. They already prey with their hunting parties on our universe. That foul Beelzebub is aware of Deets. So let’s agree we all need the tunnels to work properly, no matter when or where we exist. As far as I comprehend this drawing, Deets is attaching his healing and a variety of destructive
energies together to help map his way to the destroyed tunnel. But I agree, he’s not cognizant of what he’s doing.”
“Well, my bet is someone is. Parker becomes more dangerous as his magic grows. Where is his power coming from? He’s not feigning innocence. To me, it’s obvious there’s a new god born that none of us know about, and it’s using Parker.”
“And this frightens your lords. What if you can’t kill Parker? What if he’s not on Earth to help Pan, like we believed? What if he, himself, is a strange new god?”
I stepped up behind them without either noticing me, discovering my truth as I spoke it. “The tunnel is hurt. I am the healer of the injured god.”
They turned, startled by my pronouncement, but I was gone, asleep in my bed, safe in a place where whispers and dreams hid within their own shadows; where time didn’t exist as ticking seconds or minutes or eons, but as thoughts that melded and appeared in impossible sequence. There, I finally understood the secret of who Shadow Creature was.
Chapter 34
The next morning one of my patients read bits of an article in the Free Press while I hovered my hand over his swollen foot.
...observed this miracle worker for a week and saw no evidence of trickery. With a slight touch, wounds closed, coughing and sneezing cleared, a man’s tremor ceased, and most remarkably, he reattached a nearly severed tongue back onto a young woman…
...does not claim to be a medical clinic or religious temple. He’ll pop open a beer or take a toke off a joint while talking with the ill. He is known to share his bedroom with a local prostitute…
Ray hung out with his movie camera and told me he was making a documentary of the healings.
Christ, so many people were crowding the apartment that the toilet stopped up three times in one day. I tried waving my winged-dog power symbol at the frightful mess to unclog it, but no, between clearing a boil on a teenager’s butt and dealing with a hysterical parent screeching in some Asian dialect about her daughter’s disabling neck spasms, I had to clear the bowl with a plunger.
Miracles (The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker Book 3) Page 20
