by S. L. Duncan
Inside his backpack was a mess of books, pens, and crumpled papers. Some were for school, but the rest belonged to the Official Bible Study Curriculum from Hell. Gabe checked his watch. Not much time, he thought.
The possibility of missing tonight’s Times Square celebration caused his back and neck to tense. He rubbed the muscles and tried to force them to relax. Advice from his doctor on how to prevent migraines popped into his mind: Avoid stressful situations whenever you can.
Tell that to my father.
On a worn scratch sheet was a list of dates and assignments. Beside each date was a check mark or nothing, indicating reading he’d done or reading he needed to do.
The first on the list without a check was Revelation.
Coren returned with his order and set it on the table. Her mouth dropped at the sight of the list. “No way. Are you serious? He’s making you do his Bible studies on New Year’s Eve?”
“Don’t rub it in.”
“That’s sadistic. What’s on the menu tonight? Paul’s letters? Genesis?”
“You’re going in the wrong direction, actually. I’m thinking Revelation. And by the way, your interest in this stuff is totally bizarre,” Gabe said.
“I’m going to major in philosophy. What can I say?” Coren glanced around the café, checked her tables, and then sat down. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever fully read Revelation.”
“Consider yourself lucky. It’s weird. Certifiably. Incoherent would be a nice way of describing it. The whole thing reads like the author took a bunch of drugs and then turned it out. Apparently, it was a bad trip. Multiheaded monsters, an evil woman standing on a crescent moon, horsemen, and wars between angels and demons—it’s wild.”
“Um, you know all this, and you’re calling me weird? What’s that saying about pots and kettles?”
“The difference is, I’m forced to learn it. For you, it’s like a pastime or something.”
“I prefer to think of it as an opportunity to become more cultured and learned. But whatever.” Coren looked across the room at someone trying to get her attention. “Hold your thought. We’ll continue this momentarily. Need anything else while I’m running around?”
Gabe shook his head. “I’m good.”
“Shout if you do.”
He thanked her and opened his study manual to begin the assignment.
“Can I get you anything else?” Coren asked again.
“No, sorry. I thought you heard me before.” He looked up and saw that she was across the room, talking to another table, yet he could hear her as though she stood right beside him.
Suddenly, all the voices in the café amplified. Ambient noises like cups on plates, spoons on tables, talking, chewing, and slurping collided in his head, and the migraine doubled. Every sound and syllable was like a gunshot, each one stabbing into his mind. A heat seared through the back of his head, radiating from the base of his skull. For a split second, Gabe thought someone had spilled hot coffee on him.
The pain spread through his whole body. His heart felt like it was going to beat through his chest. A dull impact hit his knee and then his face. When he heard the table flip over and the cup and plate shatter, he realized he’d fallen to the floor.
In the background of his mind, Coren’s scream faded, along with the rest of the world, into silence. As confusion spilled through Gabe’s remaining thoughts, darkness like a black shroud pulled over his eyes.
CHAPTER SIX
Gabe lay facedown on something hard and warm, his breath fogging the onyx surface of a polished floor. He pushed up to his knees, wiped the drool from his cheek, and tried to recall the last moments. Detached memories drifted loose through his mind; however, there was one clearer than the rest—something about the café.
This place was a cavernous room, like a warehouse, lit only by a single domed light fixture. It hung from a chain that reached into the darkened eternity above. Its light covered a small area around him, not much longer than he was tall, and the warmth from its intensity heated his skin to the point of sweating. Gabe shielded his eyes from the glare and looked into the ocean of black beyond the light’s reach.
Nothing.
Nearby, another light activated. The fixture buzzed and hummed to life, and in its illumination he could see a person kneeling alone. Gabe stood and so did the figure. A mirror.
He felt drawn to it, but leaving the light meant crossing the darkness. For a reason he could not explain, the idea provoked a sense of fear. Above, the fixture sputtered, its intensity fading, dying.
The warmth cooled around him. Gabe tested the floor beyond the luminance with his foot, yet nothing happened. The fixture seemed to have only seconds before it shut off completely. Building confidence as the space darkened, he stepped from the light.
The fixture behind him vanished.
A black void surrounded Gabe. His heart raced, and something inside him urged him to run toward the mirror and the remaining island of light.
A hissing sound filled the air as he ran. It was behind him, getting closer. Panic filled his veins, weighing him down, his legs sluggish with fear. He could feel a presence at the back of his head, nearly upon him, before he dove at the floor in front of the mirror.
There was silence and warmth once more.
Gabe’s body shook. He drew his knees to his chest and held them tightly. “Who’s out there? What do you want from me?” he screamed at the darkness. Questions continued to twist in his mind, but thinking was so difficult. His head throbbed as he tried to remember what got him here. It was as if he was in a lucid dream, and he wanted more than anything to wake.
In the mirror he studied his reflection, its familiarity comforting. The image seemed to shimmer and change, as if it were reflecting another scene. Gabe saw sky and stone, a bell. The cathedral, he remembered. He touched the glass, and a flash of white bloomed around him, blinding his sight.
He was unable to see, and the skin on his face tingled with the feeling of a passing breeze, cooling and welcome. When he opened his eyes, the dark room was gone. Now he was back at the tower floor of the cathedral’s observation deck, and memories of New York came streaming back.
Sunshine beat down, hot like the summer. Wisps of cloud drifted through the clear sky.
Home, Gabe thought. He stood and stomped on the floor. It was solid, real. The view of Central Park looked familiar, but instead of the bare trees and browned grass of winter, greenery and foliage covered the city.
His heavy clothes and jacket felt stifling in the heat. The sleeves and back of the shirt stuck to his skin, soaked in sweat. It occurred to him that he had yet to live in New York during the summer months.
This is all wrong.
As he tried to understand, the buildings on the horizon darkened. A storm gathered over the skyline. Clouds grew tall, an ominous gray eating away at the blue horizon. Their blanket of shadow slid over the city toward the cathedral. It reminded Gabe of a storm formation shot with trick photography used to speed up time.
Winds shifted, gathering momentum. Thunder clapped in the distance, and the church bell groaned in protest.
In the back of his mind a woman spoke. You are in danger, she said.
Gabe decided to seek shelter inside the cathedral below. He had to lean into the wind in a struggle to get to the hatch under the belfry. Once there, he threw his weight into pulling it open, but the door wouldn’t budge.
The storm strengthened, its crack of thunder louder, closer.
What looked like snow fell to the tower floor, blown in on the winds. Gabe touched one of the delicate gray flakes sticking to his coat. He felt a slight heat as it disintegrated into a chalky streak.
Ash?
He looked to the sky. Flashes of orange and red flickered from one cloud peak to the next.
The clouds. They’re burning.
The city beyond the outer edge of the park caught in an inferno. Flames carried through the smoke rising above the buildings.
; Dusk fell over the cathedral as the approaching storm blotted out the sun. Nearby, trees in the park burned as a wall of flame sped toward the tower, like an avalanche of fire.
Screams from the streets below lifted to the tower.
The surface of the observation deck became an oven. Gabe tried to shield his face from the heat with his hands as the storm crashed against the cathedral. Flames licked at the sides, climbing higher with each passing second.
His clothes smoldered. Exposed flesh blistered and flaked away. He could no longer breathe. Pain from the heat engulfed his body, dropping him to his knees.
A familiar hissing sound filled his ears, so loud he thought they might burst. Writhing from the pain, Gabe turned toward the far end of the tower. There stood a man he recognized, his business suit billowing in the wind. Blood stained his white shirt in a pattern, the material turning a wet crimson. His eyes, calculating and the coldest of blue, locked with Gabe’s.
“You will be undone, Fortitudo Dei. As will it all,” he said. Black smoke then flowed from his clothes and body. In an instant he became dust and disintegrated into the winds.
Gabe felt tears stream down his face, his emotions seized by the fear of dying. The full power and ferocity of the storm hit the top of the tower. Rock and stone sheared away. The belfry crumbled and fell, cutting through the cathedral’s structure. Gabe tumbled behind the bell as everything he knew was destroyed.
In that moment, his world ended.
CHAPTER SEVEN
In the endless darkness of Gabe’s mind, a small ray of light pierced through. The light at the end of the tunnel, he guessed, his thoughts awash in uncertainty. It cut through, expanding to create a ray of shining brilliance.
From it, muffled voices spoke.
Gabe felt the longing for his mother, who had died giving him life. He wondered what she might look like, who she might be. Since he was a child, he had wished to know her, and now the excitement of their first words lifted his spirits.
He heard a repetitious chirp, like the sound of birds calling to each other. Somewhere a male finch courted a female. Gabe recalled being in a cathedral’s bell tower, listening to their songs in a park.
Concentrating, he made every effort to isolate the sound. The finch sang louder, its tempo quick.
Too quick. Too precise. He realized the noise was something else, not a bird. The more he thought about the sound, the clearer and more recognizable it became.
Electronic, a heart monitor.
He couldn’t remember ever seeing one in person, but he knew their beat from any one of a hundred doctor shows he’d seen on TV. This one sounded like it was going crazy—furious and fast.
The sensation of circulating blood returned to his body. A hollow wind, like air filling lungs. Nerves connected, coming alive like a million hot needles on his skin.
Fluorescent light at the end of the tunnel neared, bringing with it new and familiar thoughts.
Cold. The frozen subway. Hot. The burning cathedral. Memories of what felt like another life crashed against the shores of his mind as clear as if they were happening in that moment.
The storm. The bleeding man.
Once more, the pain from the final moment hit him as it had in the tower. It felt real. He struggled against it, resisting its inevitable end.
“He’s coming around,” someone said.
The tunnel’s light expanded, blanketing Gabe’s vision, consuming what was left of the darkness. For a moment, he could make out ceiling tiles above him. He opened his eyes wider and then rolled them back into his head only to close them again at the harsh brightness. Something soft lay beneath his body. Fingers found a cotton fabric. A bed.
I’m alive, he realized.
“Rate?” a woman asked.
“Pressure one twenty over ninety and falling,” a man said. “Rate one ten. He’s leveling out, Doctor.”
“Gabriel?” his father asked.
The calming sound of his voice pulled Gabe into the world, eyes fluttering open and beginning to focus.
Beside the bed, his father sat in a chair and held his hand.
Gabe looked around the room. A hospital. On the other side of the bed stood a doctor with a chart in her hand. She monitored a computer screen next to a young man in nursing scrubs.
“What’s happened?” Gabe asked.
“You’re in the emergency room. Had a bit of an episode, I’m afraid,” his dad said.
Gabe tried to remember the last place he’d been before blacking out, but his thoughts were preoccupied by images from the nightmare.
“Episode?” He rubbed his eyes and recalled a woman on a train. She had used the same word.
“You were at The Study Habit and just . . .” His father seemed unable to find the words. “The doctors think you might have experienced a seizure.” He smiled, a poor attempt to mask his concern.
“I’m fine.” Gabe sat up a bit and felt a sharp pain. An intravenous line connected to a needle in his arm. He reached to pull it out.
“Leave that in, please, Mr. Adam,” the nurse warned.
“A seizure?” It all came back. Coren. The café, he remembered and imagined the embarrassing scene left behind.
“The doctors say that evidently most of your symptoms are consistent with epilepsy. They want to keep you under observation and run some neurological and psychological tests when you’re up for it.”
“I thought I’d died.”
“Well, I’m happy to report you didn’t.”
Gabe looked to his hands and rubbed them as if to make certain of the reality. “I thought I was going to meet her.”
“Meet who?”
“My mother.”
His father squeezed Gabe’s hands. “I’m sure wherever she is, she’s thankful that your introduction will be postponed. Your mother, God rest her soul, would want nothing more than for her son to live a full and fruitful life.”
Gabe felt the sadness again and pushed thoughts of his mother from his mind.
Soon the nurse finished making his notes and followed the doctor out of the room, leaving Gabe alone with his father.
His dad watched them go and seemed to make certain they weren’t coming back before leaning closer to the bed. “I’m curious. Do you remember anything during your episode? Images? Hallucinations, perhaps? Doctors mentioned that sometimes epileptic seizures can cause vivid experiences, which the victims believe to be quite real. Do you recall anything like that?”
Of course he could remember. Everything. He considered telling him but knew how insane it would sound. He’d committed himself to getting into NYU. Telling anyone about the things he’d seen might earn him a commitment to an entirely different sort of institution.
“No. I had a migraine. After that, it’s all just blank.” Gabe wanted to forget the whole thing. He rubbed the back of his head. The tingling there had not gone away.
His father’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t pursue any more questions.
Gabe felt caught in a lie.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Despite the stop-and-go traffic and the irritating crunch the tires made in the icy slush, Gabe felt his spirits rise just from getting out of the hospital. Being that it was New Year’s Eve, the staff seemed eager to free up beds for the inevitable flood of those determined to overexert themselves throughout the night, and his father had been helpful in persuading the doctors for a quick discharge. Somewhere in that transaction had been a loose promise to see a specialist on a later date, but that was another day’s problem.
Gabe and his father drove along in the cathedral’s car with a radio show broadcasting from Times Square playing over the speakers. The host acted as though there was no other place in the world to celebrate. In the background, cheers and laughter nearly drowned out the man’s voice, the excitement permeating through the airwaves as everyone enjoyed the festivities.
Everyone, it seemed, except Gabe. He turned the volume down to a whisper and stared out the window.
Despite the bitter cold and the falling snow, no one seemed discouraged from being out on the town. The sidewalks overflowed with pedestrians. Many of them looked about his age. Gabe couldn’t help but envy their lives. Their freedom.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the traffic here. It’s bloody ridiculous,” his dad said, breaking the silence.
“London’s not this bad?” Gabe said, welcoming the distraction of some small talk.
“No. It’s not great, say compared to Manchester, but it’s not this bad, either. One million cars in the city and finding a parking space is akin to winning the lottery.” He laughed. “We’ll have to go to England someday. I think you’d enjoy it.”
A moment passed, the only sound from the radio and the intermittent swish of the windshield wipers.
“Do you miss it?” Gabe finally asked, uncomfortable with the silence between them.
“What? England? Occasionally, I suppose. Oddly enough, it’s proper English breakfasts that I miss most of all. You haven’t started a day right until you’ve had a morning fry-up. Mushrooms, tomatoes, baked beans, along with the usual eggs, toast, and bacon. Make that real bacon. Even after all these years, I’ve yet to become accustomed to the crispy sort they serve here in the States. But I don’t miss the weather there, so I suppose it all evens out. Although . . .” His dad looked up through the windshield at the large flakes falling outside.
Gabe looked out into the night as somber thoughts pressed at the walls of his mind. “I feel lost,” he said, almost an afterthought, and then turned to his father. “Like my life is out of my control.”
The lines on his father’s face contorted, and his brow scrunched together as if his seat had become uncomfortable. “Our lives are never truly beyond our control, Son. Certainly, circumstances may dictate what our choices are, but we make those decisions, and they carry us forward. You aren’t lost. You’re just a teenager with a big, wide world in front of you. It can be scary. I remember feeling the same when I was your age, stumbling through life, with no direction.
