Don’t get me wrong. That was just the first thing that came to mind.
Ever seen how aircraft carriers look in the water? The way the sides of the thing slope up in big arcs if you’re looking at them front end on? Well, that’s what it was like, only this thing was pure white. And it was huge. And with the sides of it a lot higher than any battle ship I ever saw and the way those sides sloped up and stretched high in the same shape as a fluted Champaign glass.
The thing was just standing there in distance the middle of the road like it was balanced on the point of a pin. I had no idea how far away from me it was but it looked like miles from where I was standing.
It was so big I had to strain my head back just to look up at the thing. And as the sides of it sloped up there was this kind of flat bit like some kind of enormous platform, and up from that was what at first reminded me of a mast of a sailing ship. And that mast like thing stretched up higher than anything I’d ever seen before, a great big spire of white. And about half way up that spire there were these cross sections on it, the kind of things you might expect a sail to roll down from, or maybe a bit like a tightrope walker’s balancing pole. Only these didn’t bend like a tightrope walker’s balancing pole. These were straight. And all along these cross beams there were these great big white spheres, all up the spire and along the cross beams with each sphere getting smaller and smaller until the ones at the very ends.
I almost keeled over backwards trying to see how big this white thing was it was so huge.
So there I was, looking right up at it and then I started to look back down.
And that’s when I saw her.
She was standing on the road on the right side of the thing, though if she was in front of it, to the side of it or right next to it I have no idea.
But there she was, still in her white polo neck and black slacks, with her right arm raised and waving at me like she was saying Goodbye.
It was a punch in the gut of emotion.
I came to on that couch with a lurch and tears pumping out my eyes until I thought I could cry no more. And it’s as clear a vision to me today as it had been back then.
Religious or not, I saw it, and I saw her.
And it was only the beginning.
Three days after she had died my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. It was like mourning over mourning.
It took seven months, now shrunken to half his size, for my father to die in his sleep.
Then three weeks” after that, with me on my way to see if my mother was okay, I caught sight of him in the street.
There was no one else around except for me, the road and the field on the other side.
It seemed to me then that the period of three weeks from death was the key. Three weeks from my sister dying I saw her. Three weeks after my father dying I saw him.
I only saw the back of him at first, gained all his weight back on, him huffing and puffing, his head shaking, turning to the side like he was real confused (I didn’t even know until after he’d died that he was blind in his right eye and had been since he was a boy).
So there he was in that old suit of his, his back to me, him looking around like he was wondering what was going on.
I stopped and watched him, me too overcome to even say anything unless it broke the spell, and then when I looked beyond him I saw my sister. She was wearing the same white polo neck and black slacks and she had this big smile on her face with her hands on her knees like she might have been crouching down to greet a small child, and she was calling out to my father.
“Hi, Dad,” she said. And my father turned to her.
He turned around to the sound of her voice and called out her name in surprise, then looking relieved he was seeing someone he knew. All the confusion went out of his eyes and he smiled like the sun was coming out.
I turned away then, another punch in the gut, and when I looked back they were gone.
A couple of years after that my mother died too. I never seemed to be out of mourning (it’s funny how fast you grow up when you’re the only one left in the family even although, by then, I was in my early forties).
Their funerals were over and I didn’t want to talk to anyone.
I holed myself up, sought no counseling, and just mourned and mourned away. But then there were the legalities to deal with, my parents’ old house for one.
I snuck down there in the middle of the night, in the dark (didn’t want any of their neighbors to see me, didn’t want them to start commiserating with me and reminding me of things I didn’t want to be thinking about), and went into the old family home I’d been raised in all those years ago.
Father hadn’t been a great handyman, though he’d never admitted to it, and he’d do stuff he shouldn’t have, like replace old the wiring. It never really worked well after he did that, and even though mother would complain about it Dad was too proud to have some other guy come along and fix it, probably because he was too embarrassed by what that guy might say.
Well anyway I took a look around the old house and can honestly say there was nothing left of my childhood there, absolutely nothing. And there I was in the hallway by the front door, checking out the right keys from the wrong ones, the light streaming into the other end of the hall behind me from the light in the front room, and I couldn’t get the damn light to work. It was run on one of those twin gang switches where both had to be in the right position at both ends of the hallway before the light would go on.
So there I am near the front door and I’m getting madder and madder flicking the switch in the dark at my end of the hall when for some reason I looked over my shoulder.
Three days she had been dead and now there she was standing at the other end behind me.
I supposed I should have been surprised. After all it took my sister and my father three weeks for them to appear, but mom took only three days.
Maybe she was in too much of a hurry to get back and see how I was.
She was a woman in life who’d always wanted things to be done fast, never sat down for more than a few seconds – hyper active they call it these days.
Back them they would unfairly label such people as neurotic.
It didn’t make living in the same house with her easy since everything had to be done yesterday, but neurotic the lady was not.
Anyway, I started laughing.
There she stood in the semi-dark, looking at me with a squint smile drawing up the one side of her face like she was trying to tell me, Shit happens, except mother never ever swore whilst she had been alive.
I didn’t know what to do.
Sis never talked. Father never even seen me that time outside and it seemed mother was no exception to the no talking rule.
She just tilted her head to the side with that squint looking smile on her face, and the next thing she was gone.
I remember once visiting dad in hospital when he was sick and dying and there was this other old guy in the same room. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, big jolly smile on his face, and he was naked, couldn’t care. He was laughing and talking to some dark corner of the room.
No no, he was laughing, You come over here.
I never heard the other side of the conversation, but I could imagine it.
The old guy was dying, dying laughing, and his old pals were telling to him to come over, just like in the old days, for a drink just like they did when they were younger. But the old guy was having none of it.
No no, he kept laughing, You come over here.
Maybe inside he knew what was up, him there, his old pals over there, maybe them having passed over years ago, and now them trying to cajole him, trying to tell him in as nice and gentle a way as they possibly could, It’s time, buddy, it’s time.
The nurses were flapping around him, but the old guy didn’t see them, just his old pals. And a little while later he climbed back into bed and fell asleep for the very last time.
It’s hard to describe how Mom disappeared fro
m the hallway like that, except to say it was like those three D pictures you used to be able to get, all patterns that don’t make sense, then all of a sudden, with your eyes going in the right places, there’s this thing popping out the page at you. It was just like that, except those three D picture things usually only show a colorless image. Mother was full color.
And just like with those pattered posters, once your eyes shift the wrong way, even ever so slightly, the illusion is broken and it disappears, as did mom, there then suddenly gone.
I had had to deal with the funerals, the pastors, the lawyers and the wills and probate all on my own, never mind the bank accounts and utility bills where they even tried to charge my mother after she was dead. She’d never been behind in a payment in her life, always paid forward, and I had to say to them that she was not here to use anything since she was no longer on this earth.
Then the days and weeks went by, no it was months, where everything was up in the air and I still wanted to talk to no one.
Life was going downhill.
I kept remembering how I’d become obsessed with my dad and my sis for about a month before they died, wondering would it be like if they weren’t here anymore. And there she went, straight down with a Berry aneurism with a ninety-five percent fatality rate, hers a one-hundred percent, right out of the blue.
Then three days after that my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Fine fit and healthy he had been too.
Made me feel rotten having thought of them that way, about what it would be like for them to not be here any longer when they had both been fit and healthy at that time, thinking to myself afterwards - did I see it happening? Could I have warned either of them, maybe even prevented it from happening to them they ways that it did?
Did I cause their deaths just by thinking about it.
That kind of thing stays with you, you know.
But I kept it to myself.
Then one night I had one of those woozy turns and had to sit down and let it happen and found myself in the street, one I used to walk around that was near my folks’ place when I was a kid.
It was dark, everything was fine, and then I saw my mother.
I’d ran over to her, started talking to her, terrified, telling her to please go home because it wasn’t good for her to be here. But she just kept walking along, in the dark, not seeing me, not like she was seeing anything at all.
After that I knew it was only a matter of time.
And there was nothing I could do to stop it.
I came to after that episode and three days later she died.
Same as when I got a call from an old friend of mine.
I was two years in the future, telephone ringing and I’d answered it.
“I’m all right now,” he’d said.
There I was two years in the future and he was as thin as a rake, his arms and legs like a stick insect, his face hollow like he was a prisoner of war or something, me of rushing into hospital, pulling out all of these tubes from him with his eyes staring at me, me picking him up, him weighing nothing at all, everyone running after me, trying to stop me, my friends his mouth foaming, drooling, his eyes staring up at me and me knowing that there was nothing I could do, saying over and over to him, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, because I’d left it too late.
And two years to the day, he died, in hospital, faded away to nothing.
Only I never rushed into hospital and picked him up like in the dream.
I knew it was already too late.
I’d dreamed it, and it was happening.
And after sister, father, mother had died I shut myself off I did, didn’t want anyone near me. I was dangerous, a jinx, killed them somehow, my fault.
And then all the other stuff started happening.
Didn’t have a clue what it was at first, all that banging and thumping through the floors and walls for no reason.
Then my bed started jumping. And if lost my temper over anything the lights I would be standing under would explode, pop just like that. Eight times in three weeks that happened. I got sick to death of replacing them.
Then there were the footsteps clumping in and out from nowhere.
It didn’t scare me, but my, the noises of it all made me mad.
I couldn’t get any decent sleep.
All imagination, of course I kept telling myself.
You’re under strain.
And wasn’t I?
But imagination or not it wouldn’t stop.
There was stuff flying out of cupboards, doors slamming on their own, telephone ringing at all hours with no one at the other end. Then me being dragged away from my desk in my desk chair, stuff disappearing and reappearing. I’d leave where I was to go looking for something, go back after not finding whatever it was, and there it would be, right there where I’d been thinking about going to find it in the first place. That happened a lot.
I used to have this picture of the planet Neptune on my wall, beautiful and blue it was, there inside a big glass frame. I’d had it for so many years I got to wondering how many.
So I stood there looking at it, talking to myself, saying stuff like, Everywhere I’ve lived these past twenty-five years you’ve been there with me. Maybe it’s time for a change.
So I said out loud, “I think it’s time I got shot of you.”
I turned my back on it and the next thing I’m on the floor, curled over with my arms over my head with glass flying all over the place.
Yeah, and it did sound like a gunshot.
And there was Neptune, glass and all, blasted to smithereens.
What I’d really meant was change the poster in the frame for something new.
They say you should be careful what you pray for.
In my case it was be careful what you think.
Then I couldn’t sleep in bed at all for it, whatever it was.
Three times I was thrown onto the floor.
And that’s when I decided that I was either mad or I had noisy ghosts.
Didn’t and still don’t believe in ghosts but disbelieving or not it didn’t change a thing.
So I took to sleeping on the couch with the lights on full blast every night.
And every time I’d try to fall asleep, THUMP. Right there under me.
The whole couch would jump with it. Sometimes the thump was under the couch, and sometimes at the back of it as if someone had given it a real big kick.
Other nights I would hear something through my ear as it was pressed against the pillow. Weird it was, like the wings of dove flapping away inside. Then if I put my hand under the pillow, palm up pressing the pillow to my ear, I would feel this ball like thing rolling around inside with the feathers.
If I opened my eyes the ball thing would vanish, couldn’t feel a thing, but the closer I got to sleep that ball thing inside the pillow would move around faster and fast then WHAM.
Whatever it was, real or not, it would shoot out and hit something in the room, the wall, the door, floor, window, ceiling even the TV set.
So now I knew what that thumping noise was and where it was coming from, only I didn’t know how to stop it.
Still, it was nothing I could prove. And I didn’t even want to prove it either. And I didn’t know what was worse, me hearing and feeling never mind seeing things and thinking I was mad, or that those things were real. Neither seemed like a good option to me.
But I needed some sleep.
I’d heard if you just stand up and tell them to all go away, if they are real, then they usually get the message.
Maybe I was the only one who wasn’t.
So one night, when the noise of them was driving me nuts, I stood up (this being two in the morning) and yelled at them to, Get lost.
I felt proud of myself at that moment for some reason.
I was taking charge.
I was in control.
So I lay back down on the couch with head resting back on the arm, and I closed my eyes.
It did
n’t take me long to jump back on my feet again when I was thumped by a fist to the top of my head.
It hurt.
And it got worse because after that I was tugged around, shoved around, thumped, slapped, night after night. I even felt this hand settle on the left side of my face one night and pull down, dragging the skin of my face with it.
I’d jerked my head away and told it to get lost and leave me alone, but then it just did it again, poking its fingers inside my mouth and pulling down my lip.
What could I do?
I aunt moving I said.
But then it kicked my feet straight off the end of the couch and I ended up on the floor.
Okay, I was at the end of whatever tether I had left.
I had to do something, anything.
So I bought myself a little recorder, one of those digital things.
I thought, switch it on, and if there really are any noises happening you’ll hear them on the recorder. If not then it’s just stress and imagination.
I wish I’d never bought it.
All kinds of thumps and bangs would show up in the recordings.
So that proved they were real.
The ball thing inside the pillow wouldn’t just shoot out of it now.
It would shoot right back and hit me in the neck.
My head would be jerked so violently to the side I thought it would be clean ripped off.
I would stagger around dazed only to be kicked in the back and knocked down to my hands and knees.
You have to tell someone, I thought.
But they’ll lock me up.
It gave me the creeps.
Then I listened to the recorder one night - HELLO!
Over and over again - HELLO.
So okay something was trying to get my attention.
There are easier ways.
But then again, when did I ever listen to anything, anyone, but my own advice?
And maybe I just wasn’t getting the message.
Then all kinds of things were coming through… can you tell them? Can you hear me? I’m lost… please… help me find home… can you help me?
They were all different people, all different ages by the sounds of them, young and old.
Dying to be Free Page 7
