The Soul Hunter

by Melanie Wells

  David, lovely man that he is, was a sport. A true blue, all-American, homegrown sport. He offered to stay the night on my couch, but I sent him home. I locked the door behind him, tippietoed my way through the dried blood, which I absolutely could not deal with tonight, and took a long bath.

  The night called for bubbles. Lots of bubbles. I loaded up the bath water with my most expensive milky bubble bath and popped a can of Dr Pepper.

  I drank the soda while soaking in suds up to my ears, then toweled off and reached for my bathrobe. It wasn’t there, of course. The Jackson Five had confiscated it, standing in my foyer and folding it solemnly, like white-gloved marines folding the flag at a military funeral. They carted it away in a big brown paper grocery bag. To save for later. In case they needed it to incriminate me.

  I wrapped a towel around myself and dug in my closet for my oldest, softest flannel jammies, and then finally snuggled myself under the covers.

  I thought about doing something spiritual like praying, as any decent Christian would do. But though I am a Christian person, I can’t claim, much of the time, to be anywhere near decent at it. Sometimes I am downright terrible at it, in fact. I stared at my Bible from under my quilt. It just sat there, its covers firmly closed like lips withholding wisdom. Another mistake on my already teetering stack. As though shunning God would somehow be a productive, helpful idea.

  The clear day had left no warm blanket of clouds for the city, and I shivered through that bitter night. My quilt and my electric blanket—meager defense against an inadequate heating system in an old, drafty house—could not keep the cold at bay.

  So I slept in shallow dreams, whipped around by snow and howling wind. White, swirling cold bit at my extremities. My toes were icy, my nose a little sniffly block of ice.

  Somewhere around three thirty—a witching hour for me, for many terrible and frightening things have happened to me at three thirty in the morning—I heard another thump.

  My house is tiny. It’s just six rooms, arranged in sort of a strange jigsaw. Just inside the front porch is a living room with a small, adjacent dining room. Behind that is the kitchen, and beside the kitchen is the bedroom with an attached bath. The garage is attached to the bedroom, straight at the back of the house. To get to the garage from anywhere in the house, then, a person must go through my bedroom.

  The thump that woke me that night came from the door that leads from my bedroom to the kitchen. I’d closed that door, wanting to shut myself into the smallest corner of the house.

  After the thump, I swear I heard footsteps on my creaky wood floor, coming from the kitchen and striding through the bedroom. The footsteps stopped at the garage door.

  Careful not to move, I slowly opened my eyes, my heart in my throat, fully expecting to see an ax murderer standing at the foot of my bed.

  No one was there. I moved my eyes around the room. The bedroom door was still closed.

  I had just about convinced myself I’d dreamed the whole thing when the door to the garage burst open, letting in a silvery blast of icy air.

  I flew out of bed and slammed myself against the garage door. I bolted the door and reached for the bedside table, fumbling for the light, and then stared, panting, at the empty room.

  I did the requisite search—checked the bathroom, the closet, the garage, and under the bed—and then stalked to the kitchen and snatched the phone out of its cradle. To call whom? The police? David? Just exactly who did I think was going to rescue me? And from what? A draft?

  I replaced the phone slowly, feeling the cold settle in on me as I sat down, quiet and still, on a barstool.

  And then I remembered. I’d been dreaming when I’d heard the thump. About a lumberjack. A lumberjack standing in my bedroom doorway.

  He was tall and thin, clad in chinos and a plaid flannel shirt and boots. The one incongruous thing about him, other than the lumberjack part—we don’t have many of those in Dallas—and that he was standing in my bedroom at 3:30 a.m., was that he was sickly white and bone thin. Not a Paul Bunyan sort of lumberjack, all hearty and lively and powerful. He was more of a drug-addict-with-a-terminal-disease sort of lumberjack. Puny. Sickly. Weak. And he was bald. Bald as a naked mountain peak in the dead of winter. And just as white. I didn’t have to see him without his hat to know it.

  The lumberjack’s name is Peter Terry. At least that’s how he’d introduced himself to me the year before, though he probably had used dozens of names, maybe hundreds, over the centuries of his work. He’d been wearing bathing trunks that day last summer, his white, pasty skin taking on a surreal sheen in the Texas sunshine. I knew that the plaid lumberjack shirt he wore tonight concealed a horizontal slash on his back that ran between his shoulder blades. A slash representing, I believe, the confiscation of his wings at the moment of judgment, millennia before.

  Peter Terry is bad news. I hold both a healthy fear of him and a steely resolve toward him. I know him to be capricious, deceitful, and thoroughly malevolent. He is capable of both patient planning and violent fits of impulsive, pernicious rage. He is wildly immature and at the same time sagacious and shrewd. He is a raw nerve—petulant, churlish, childish, vengeful, dangerous.

  Peter Terry is evil. Evil as the viper of Eden.

  Had he just walked through my bedroom and into my garage? Or had I dreamed the whole thing?

  But the door. The door had burst open.

  I wasn’t sure which was worse. That Peter Terry had trespassed in my house or in my mind. Both possibilities terrified me.

  I sat there in my kitchen, shivering from cold, knowing somehow that he would not breach either barrier again tonight. It would be unlike him. He was more of a skulker than one to attack directly. He would content himself with the scare, with his twisted little lumberjack joke. And he’d spend his night—if time divides into days and nights for such beings—satisfied that he’d reminded me of his presence.

  I filled the teakettle and lit the gas stove, then padded back into the bedroom and slipped a sweatshirt over my head and found myself some warm socks. Naturally, I developed a sudden, desperate interest in God again, now that I felt threatened by the other side. I sat in my kitchen and thumbed through my Bible, drinking hot tea with milk and sugar, until the sun came up.

  I was looking for an obscure passage that I’d remembered finding a year before—something about God allowing one of those assorted kings or Old Testament characters, whose names I could never remember, to see the angels around him.

  I never found the passage, but I longed to see the angels. I’d seen the enemy. It seemed only fair to me that I should get to see the allies too.

  No angels appeared for me that morning. And I didn’t waste any time asking why this was happening to me, either. I could wonder all I wanted. There would be no answer forthcoming. God’s ways are not my ways. He’d made that little fact perfectly plain to me the year before.

  Somehow, I’d gotten caught up in the swirl of battle again. Like the citizens of those little French towns after D-Day, those unlucky natives who learned to duck, to run, to fight, to hide.

  They had watched their monuments shatter, their archives burn, their loved ones die. They endured the cacophony, the chaos, the carnage. All with the firm and undeniable certainty that the battle had nothing to do with them. It was a clash of ideologies, of powers exponentially larger and more powerful than they. A raging thunderclap of conflict between two mighty forces.

  They just happened to be in the way.

  The bravest among them had learned that it was possible, even necessary, to participate. To do their part. To join the resistance. Courage comes in the moment, it turns out. God has a way of doling it out at the very second we need it most.

  God would win this battle, I knew, with or without me. The war had raged, after all, since the beginning of time. Faithfulness to the task, for those of us who find ourselves in the crossfire, is utterly necessary. God has designed it that way. But I did not look forward to the wounds I knew I
was about to receive.

  My contribution to the war effort would be small. Miniscule. But I intended to gear up and show up anyway. I would never, ever go down without a fight. Peter Terry should know that about me by now.

  As the sun rose that morning, bringing with it the hope of a new day, my bones hurt, I was so cold. If I was going into battle, I wanted a hot shower first.

  I lit a match in the bathroom, turning on the little hiss of gas in the heater on the wall and enjoying the small whoosh as the blue flame leapt to life and did its job. I shut the door and the bathroom began to warm. I held my hands out and toasted them in front of the flame.

  After some of the circulation returned to my fingers, I turned around and twisted the faucet handle in the tub, letting the water run onto the icy porcelain, holding my hand under the stream, waiting for the heat.

  The water stayed cold, my fingers bluing as I held them there. I turned the faucet off. The H was right there, staring at me. H for hot. I turned the knob again and waited, thinking maybe the pipes were so cold the hot water would take longer to heat up. Still nothing.

  It finally dawned on me that the footsteps had come through the kitchen last night.

  The water heater was in the kitchen.

  Feeling the rage rise up inside me, I moved to the kitchen and yanked open the water heater closet and touched the skin of the water heater. It was ice cold. I knelt down, eye level now with the base of the unit and the little wads of dust and foul mysterious clumps of nastiness that accumulate in such places. I listened for the pilot light. Absolute dead silence.

  I found some matches, pried off the metal screen that obscured the pilot light (another invention of Satan, I’m certain), and spent half an hour trying unsuccessfully to light that stupid little blue flame. (Why can’t they make it easy to light these things?)

  The procedure involved a bizarre gymnastic twist in which my left index finger held the gas button down while, with my right hand, I reached up inside the belly of the water heater to a little nib that was impossible to see from any angle. The flame had to be held on that nib for several long, awkward, painful seconds while a weak little stream of gas snaked its way up the tube. Any interruption on any link of this delicate chain would ensure that the flame would not light. And that’s exactly what happened.

  I got it lit once and experienced a quick rush of ecstasy, only to hear the flame sputter and die as I held my ear to the water heater and prayed for success.

  I ended up taking an arctic shower, my skin purple and goose-bumped when I was done, and shampoo still tangled in my long, auburn hair.

  My mood at that point was beyond foul. And all nine of the fruits of the Spirit evaded me. I had no love, joy, or peace. And don’t even talk to me about patience and all that other nonsense.

  I was bitter. And angry. And cold. The fruits of a dead pilot light and a long, disastrous night.

  I dried my hair and got myself ready for the day, throwing on my oldest pair of jeans and my warmest sweater. I clicked the lock behind me as I stepped into the shivery chill of my garage. More cold air rushed into the garage as I pushed the button to raise the door.

  My truck started, to my great relief. I made it halfway down my street before I realized what day it was.

  Happy birthday to me.

  4

  I don’t know where I was planning on going at 7:45 in the morning. I’d really just wanted to get out of the house. I drove around aimlessly for a few minutes, then on impulse, I turned onto the SMU campus.

  The North American college student is a nocturnal creature. Daytime activities for this species are characterized by a dull, sloth-like sluggishness, which wears off slowly as the day progresses. Hunting, frolicking, and mating activities generally take place after sunset, on a seven-day cycle, peaking in activity sometime between Thursday afternoon happy hour and Saturday night when the bars close.

  Early Sunday morning, these creatures return to their dens and hibernate their hangovers away.

  Which meant the parking lots this morning were full. Completely.

  Southern Methodist University is a private university. An expensive private university. When I drive onto the campus, I’m always struck by the vast gap between my income level and those of my students. I work there, but I could not afford to attend my own classes. I have more in common financially with the janitors, in point of fact.

  The cars I was passing were late model BMWs, Land Rovers, Mercedes. I drive a pickup. A crummy 1972 Ford pickup that I bought for seven hundred dollars. It needs a new muffler, so it has all the delicate engine whir of a dump truck. The bench seat is cracked, patched with duct tape, and lets out a mighty squeak every time I hit a bump in the road. The paint is a nondescript shade that used to be brown, I think. And there is nothing automatic about it. Not the windows, the locks, or the transmission. It’s three-on-the-tree, stiff clutch and all.

  I love my truck. I have sort of a twisted sense of pride in that truck.

  I cruised the lot, circling several times before I finally found a spot as far away from the pool as it could possibly be, between a Mercedes convertible and a bright yellow Hummer, the largest street-legal passenger vehicle known to man. Why a college student would have need for such a behemoth, I could not imagine.

  I had about six inches on either side after I parked. I squeezed myself out the door and scooted out from between the cars, grabbing my swim bag from the back of the truck.

  My breath hung in the air as I walked, and I could see steam rising from the surface of the outdoor pool in big, white, cloudy puffs. Normally I’d swim inside on a day as cold as today, but the indoor pool was only twenty-five yards long and I needed the full fifty meters of the outdoor pool. I wanted to put some distance between myself and the wall behind me before I hit another one.

  I changed clothes quickly. The locker rooms were chilly, but not nearly as bad as my house had been this morning. The pool, at eighty-two degrees, would feel positively balmy after the shower I’d just had. I shouldn’t have even taken that stupid shower. I should have just come straight to the pool. Even if I hadn’t decided to swim, I could have taken a hot shower here.

  Moron, my brain said to me.

  Wearing my favorite tank suit with the peace sign on it, groovy purple goggles, and my swim cap—I always feel like a Q-Tip in that thing—I ran the distance between the locker room and the pool. I threw my towel onto the starting block and dove into the middle lane, knifed cleanly into the water, holding a long streamline and taking my first stroke about a quarter of the way down the pool.

  The rhythm of swimming calms me, steadies my mind. I took long, slow strokes, getting used to the water, enjoying the way it felt on my skin, watching the billows of steam move around me as I looked to my right for each breath. Stroke, stroke, breathe. Stroke, stroke, breathe.

  I had the pool to myself. No one else was foolish enough to be swimming in the outdoor pool at 7:45 in the morning when it was twenty-five degrees out. I let my mind go.

  Peter Terry’s reappearance confused me. I’d had one direct encounter with him a year before, a few distant glimpses, and lots of indirect warfare. He’d trashed my house and my life. At least I blamed it on him. I’d never quite figured out how much of it had been his doing.

  But I hadn’t seen hide nor hair—or scalp, I should say—since then. Not in a year. A year and a half, nearly.

  I’d started to wonder if I’d imagined him somehow.

  I thought of that thing in Hebrews. About being hospitable to strangers because you never knew when one might be an angel. It stood to reason, I figured, that demons wandered around like that too. In the flesh, so to speak. Posing as people.

  Interesting that the arrival of Peter Terry in a dream bothered me more than finding a bloody ax in my entryway. The ax was a problem, mind you. I wasn’t diminishing that disaster for one slim second. But that problem seemed more solvable to me. I was innocent. I hadn’t done anything except open my door and pick up the
ax. And in spite of all I’d been through recently, I maintained an optimistic, if naive, view of the American justice system. I was certain I wouldn’t be held responsible for something I didn’t do.

  Peter Terry, on the other hand, was not a solvable problem.

  I hadn’t imagined the door slamming open, the burst of cold wind from a closed garage, the blown pilot light. I wasn’t positive about the footsteps, but I was as sure as I could be without a recording or something. Peter Terry was coming around again. And something important was happening that I did not want to be a part of.

  I took a breath, glided into the wall and did a flip turn, pushing off the wall, feeling the stiffness in my legs from my thigh workout the day before. How many laps was that? Five or so, I thought. Five hundred meters. Fifteen hundred was a mile, give or take. I wanted to get in at least that today. Maybe a little more. I was a third of the way there.

  I felt someone dive in behind me. Maybe in the next lane. I felt a little resentful about sharing my pool. I had been downright serene swimming alone, despite the tumble of thoughts churning around in my head.

  Another wall. Breathe, duck, flip, push, glide…stroke, stroke, breathe. My arms slapped against the water in rhythm.

  The other swimmer must have been only a few yards behind me, because by the time I took my first stroke, I was alone in front again. I hadn’t caught sight of anyone at the turn. Whoever it was, he was swimming in my blind spot.

  I glanced back over my shoulder, but couldn’t see anyone behind me through the steam. The turbulence of two swimmers was roiling the air and the water, producing a thick layer of steam. I could only see a few feet around me, lane ropes on either side and still water in front.

  I forgot about the other swimmer and settled back into my rhythm, my thoughts returning quickly to the night before. The ax. Who had left the ax? Was Peter Terry responsible for that? He had to be. It was too much of a coincidence that he’d shown up the same night. He had a history, with me anyway, of leaving tantalizing little trails for me to follow. Which I tended to do, just as blind and oblivious as a puppy running into traffic after a ball.