His years pastoring, counselling and interceding for lost children and recovering parents had taught Roy the signs of a deeply wounded soul, an escaped prisoner. He learned about her history of suffered abuse only gradually, the way one discovers that grubs are eating at the roots of their lawn, one brown patch of dead grass at a time. What set Willow apart from the thousands of young women who lost their innocence to male authority, was the motivation. It wasn’t the allure of the nubile virgin that drew the local pagan worshippers into Willow’s life. It was her intense spiritual sensitivity, her ability to see and hear beyond the veil of molecules and atoms into the world of angels and demons.
The local undertaker, who led the coven, enlisted his lieutenant, the pastor of Willow’s church, to trap the pale and lonely girl into their pursuit of dark power. They won the compliance of her addicted and weak-willed mother by paying her bills and protecting her from the local police, with whom they also had inside influence. And thus, they acquired Willow as a sort of spiritual antenna and mystical lightning rod. The sexual aspects of this captivity served less for the ritual of their religion than for the satisfaction of some of the male occultists, and as a means of lashing a chain of guilt around the naïve girl. Raised without a father figure most of her life, Willow hesitated to challenge the respected male pillars of their little town.
It took her three years to develop her own awareness of what was happening to her, who she was and the power she had over the people who enslaved her. She also discovered the real threat of death and disappearance so easily accomplished with the cooperation of a doctor, an undertaker and the local sheriff. No one was going to call in the FBI to investigate one missing teenage girl, who most likely just ran off with some boy from out of town. She had seen this played out with another girl, who merely threatened to expose the good upstanding citizens who formed the core of that satanic group.
Willow never threatened anything. She simply waited for her chance to catch a ride out of town and then a bus to a big city, where she changed her name and disappeared from her captors.
Even at the age of forty-seven, Willow had not shared her birth name with any of her trusted friends. She thought of their safety as much as her own, knowing the depth of desperation the leaders of the coven would feel at her escape from their leash. She waited to sense from the spirit that the coast was clear, that all of the perpetrators of her slavery had died or repented of their crimes. That release had only come this past year, when she sent a birthday card to her mother, with her new name and current address on the envelope.
It was good to spend a couple of days with Roy, now that the darkest chapters of her life had finally closed.
A Morning Visit from Jesus
When you live by yourself, unexplained noises in the house or apartment have no ready reassurances behind which to hide. Since she did live alone, and owned no pets, Willow gasped at the feeling of the bed sinking under the weight of another body. But, just before her heart shifted into panic gear, a wave of calm, like a curtain of honey passing over her, prevented the scream that had gathered in her vocal cords.
In all of her years of meeting with God, or communing with the spirit, and resting with Jesus, she had seen a visible presence only half a dozen times. Never had that presence also had weight like a physical body. Now, back home in Palos Heights, at the end of her bed, in the first light of day, sat Jesus.
How did she know that it was Jesus? How would she have known it was the president? She recognized him. Jesus had appeared to her in dreams and visions far more times than Willow had seen the president on TV. She didn’t watch the news very often.
When she raised her head to check who was there, she froze in place. Some segment of her psyche warned her not to move, as if Jesus were a robin who would certainly flit away at any sudden movement. Another voice simply wondered why he was appearing here, now. And, of course, part of her doubted it was real, and not a dream.
She dug the heels of both hands into the sheets and pushed herself up to a half-sitting position. It helped that the man at the end of the bed was smiling expansively and not advancing toward her. On this latter point, Willow wasn’t clear why it mattered, but knew that it did.
Something in her waited for him to speak, as if she knew the rules, and the rules said that when he shows up, Jesus wants to say something, so you should just listen quietly. But Willow was used to ignoring certain voices in her mind, voices from the past.
“Am I really seeing you, or is this just a dream?”
He laughed. “Well, if it were a dream, don’t you think I might say in the dream that you are really seeing me?”
Willow scooted up a little higher, pausing to pull at her flannel night gown where the eyelet had flapped open and her movement pulled one of her shoulders nearly free of the loose collar. Jesus seemed to ignore the gesture of protective modesty, even as he bypassed the fact that Willow had not answered his somewhat rhetorical question.
“I am here to see you, my love. And I wanted you to see me as clearly as I see you.”
Willow knew he had stopped before saying all that he wanted on that point. How she knew, was less clear to her than how she knew this was Jesus sitting at the end of her bed. But she could see confirmation in his eyes. They knew each other so well that they could read each other’s faces like that. At least, that’s what Willow discovered in that unprecedented moment of clarity.
Here he confirmed that feeling of things left unsaid, as if he had waited for her to see his restraint just before he let go of it.
“I even wanted you to feel my weight on the end of your bed, when you thought you were alone in the house.”
Willow again sensed he had left something unsaid, but this time filled it in. “At least the only one in the house who could shake my bed.”
He nodded. “But you were already awake.”
He said that, as if the issue was whether he had awakened her, but this seemed something of a trick. For, as soon as he said it, Willow provided the disclaimer that he allowed her.
“We both knew I was awake, that wasn’t a problem,” she said.
He nodded again. “Of course, my dear.”
Those last two words erupted in Willow’s memory. Someone else had called her that, someone whose lips had no right to form those words. But she shoved that aside, assuming it was a distraction. Jesus just watched this process.
Then he turned slightly and stood up at the end of the bed. He walked up the side closest to where Willow now sat. He reached his right hand toward her and she reached up and took it, their thumbs linked and fingers wrapped over the back of each other’s hands. With that grip, Willow thought he was going to help her out of the bed. She envisioned dancing with him, as she had many times in her spirit.
His eyes shading toward sadness, he answered this expectation. “No, dear. You stay there. What I want you to see, you will see best from there.”
After a brief pause, during which nothing was said or done outside that mutual grip, hand to hand, he said one last thing.
“I’m looking forward to the new ways you will be able to receive my love.”
With that statement hanging in the air, he smiled, and then vanished. Willow’s hand fell to the side of her bed.
In the diminishing echoes of this encounter, over the course of a minute or two, her mind corralled a memory that arose from the feeling of Jesus sitting at the end of her bed. Like most of the deepest painful memories, this one started as a feeling, and it was that sinking feeling of the weight of another person on the bed.
An incident that existed in Willow’s conscious mind only as flashes, like the memory of a dream, or rather a nightmare, awoke to her that morning. Willow had thought the memory really was only about a nightmare. From no connected point to this recalled incident, she suddenly returned to something her mother had said more than thirty years ago.
After about four beers one night, Claudia told her daughter that she had kicked her boyfriend, Chuck, out
of the house because of the way he treated Willow. This unattached reference suddenly attached to Willow’s memory of her first sexual encounter, a night with her mother’s boyfriend, when she was just thirteen. That first encounter had all started with Chuck sitting on the end of the bed.
As clearly as she saw that memory now, she also saw the way in which Jesus’s visit had erased the terror of that night of lost innocence. Jesus had appeared in the light, in the morning, at the beginning of a new day. Chuck had snuck in at night, under cover of darkness.
When all those pieces spun together to recall something Willow had repressed all those years, she sank back under the covers and began to weep. This time the tears were for herself, mourning her own wounding, her own loss. But those tears gave way several times to joyful tears at Jesus’s appearing in her bedroom to lift away the hidden explosive concealed inside her heart, concealed from her, concealed for her protection. No one can face all of life’s wounds in one great heap.
Jesus just came that morning to whisk away the biggest one that remained hidden under the layers of Willow’s history.
A Vision of Evil
A week after she had helped her mother move into her new apartment, Willow sat in her wooden rocking chair, watching the fire and listening. As if leaping with the flames before her natural eyes, a picture flashed before her mind’s eye. A girl, about twelve or thirteen years old, sat in an old kitchen chair, her hands and legs duct-taped to the legs and seat of that chair.
Willow winced and jerked her head backward, as if avoiding the punch of that image. But as soon as she settled back to her relaxed posture, the image replayed. This time it moved, as if she were looking through a camera on wheels that was zooming back from the girl. Her mental camera rolled down a hallway, outside the low door where the girl was captive. Again Willow lurched away from the vivid vision. And again, as she settled back to look and listen, the moving picture resumed. Her perspective zoomed away from the basement room where the girl sat, up concrete stairs and through a gray wooden door that slammed shut after Willow backed through it. A brass padlock snapped shut as soon as the door came to rest.
Now that she was outside the building, Willow heard a voice calling for help. But it was very faint. She could only hear it if she pressed her face up against the new gray paint of that door. When her cheek touched that cold surface in the vision, she melted through the door and hurtled back down the stairs and through the basement to where the girl had slipped her chin free of the tape wrapped around her mouth. Willow saw her face very clearly. She would recognize the girl if ever she saw her again. Of that Willow was confident from past experience.
Though this was clearly a call to action, one that Willow certainly would follow, she had first to wriggle and then shake herself free of an old memory that gripped her like the arm of the school bully locked around her neck in mock friendship and tightening ominously by the moment.
“Ahhhh!” She shouted and rose from her chair so hastily that she narrowly missed banging her head on the mantelpiece.
She stood panting. She had suddenly connected with a memory of one of those sickening nights at the church when she was a teen. While Willow was hooked into that conspiratorial congregation of devil worshippers because of her spiritual sensitivity, she was not spared from the sexual demands that those middle-aged men made of a teenage girl. But other girls were only there for that purpose.
One evening, when Willow’s usual escort into the inner sanctum of the church basement was suddenly called away to attend to some shouting urgency, she wandered into the wrong room. There she found a girl, about fourteen or fifteen, tied to a chair. Instead of heroically rescuing her fellow victim, she closed the door quickly and retraced her steps so no one would know what she had witnessed. The shame of that self-serving escape from responsibility hung on her for decades. The vision of the girl taped to the kitchen chair momentarily resuscitated that guilt and pain.
This time, Willow would not ignore what she had discovered.
It was dark outside, the early night of December seizing the day and settling it down under a thick cover of snow. Willow knew she had to start with a phone call, to determine where she should go and whom she should see. Even as she looked up the number of the local police station in an old-fashioned, pulp phone book, she wondered how she would explain how she knew about the imprisoned girl. But she had discovered years ago that thinking too much tended to render her timid whenever she was called to take a risk. This risk had been calculated and added to her account against her will, but she followed its demand without deliberation.
“Hello,” she said, when she finally reached a human being, the long wait on hold testifying to a busy day with the heavy snowfall. “I believe I may have some information about an abducted child, a girl about thirteen years old.”
The phone service which answered the call was equipped only to take her name and patch her through to the police. Then a man’s voice broke through another season of waiting on hold.
“Yeah, this is Sergeant Wakeman,” he said.
“Hello, my name is Willow Pierce, and I believe I have some information about a girl that has been abducted and is being held against her will.” Though her pulse raced, Willow had learned to manage her voice even when her veins became saturated with adrenalin.
Sergeant Wakeman elicited more information about Willow, typing her phone number and address into a computer as she answered his questions. Willow could hear the dull impact of the computer keys, including the arrhythmic interruption of frequent backspacing and corrections. Apparently, the sergeant typed fast but not accurately.
“So how did you come by this information?” the officer said.
Willow had hoped she could get him to listen to her before having to admit that she acquired her information through supernatural means. She took a deep breath and tried to sound convincing.
“I have a gift that allows me to see things in visions. I saw a girl duct-taped to a chair. She wriggled free of the tape around her mouth, and I got a good look at her face. I also got a look at the building she’s in, so I know what part of town it is. And I would recognize the gray. . .”
Though she was surprised and thankful to be able to spew that much of what she knew, the sergeant cut her off.
“Wait, so this is like some psychic calling to give me crime information?” To say he sounded skeptical was as unnecessary as saying it was best to stay inside because of the snow.
“Well, I don’t know whether it matters to you, but I don’t consider myself a psychic. I’m a Christian, part of the Oak Tree Church on Fremont Street. I have a proven track record there. You can call anyone there to confirm that I can see things, things like psychics see. But I guess you don’t believe in all that.”
Sergeant Wakeman made a noise that sounded like a combination laugh and cough. “Uh, yeah. But, it doesn’t matter what I believe. I’m obligated to take your information either way. It’s department policy. You wanna come in tomorrow some time?”
Willow was thinking about that girl. “Tomorrow? Why not tonight? Don’t you want to find her as soon as possible?”
“Umhmm,” said the sergeant.
Willow started to formulate a rational argument to convince him, but a thought interrupted her.
“If I tell you what you were doing before you picked up my call, will you take me seriously?” she said.
“Uhhhh,” he said, searching for a lost reply. Clearly this was not covered by department policy.
“Just before you picked up the phone,” Willow said, not waiting for that answer, “you cursed your girlfriend for trying to get you to come and pick her up where she’s stranded at the hairdresser’s. Her car’s plowed into the parking place out front.” Willow released that revelation like a hot potato, barely holding it long enough to even think about the sergeant’s relationship issues.
Sergeant Wakeman swore over the phone. He breathed heavily for a few seconds. Then he returned to public relations prop
riety and said, “I can’t think of any way you could know that unless you had bugged my phone.” He spoke at a measured pace. “But that sounds crazier than what you’re saying, so I’ll try to take you seriously.”
It didn’t sound like a full conversion, but Willow was in survival mode on behalf of the unnamed girl in her vision. She would take what she could get.
“Where should I go and who should I talk to?”
The sergeant paused. He was trying to imagine telling one of his superiors, or the detectives that handled this sort of case, about Willow’s method of evidence gathering. Still, he wanted to take her seriously, so he suggested she come and see him.
“I’ll be here for another couple o’ hours,” he said, giving her the address of the station.
“Not going to give your girlfriend a ride?” she said. “Amanda is it?”
This time Wakeman snickered, the hissing sound communicating well enough over the phone.
“I’ll get there as quickly as possible,” Willow said.
She prayed all the way through her house and down to her garage. She drove an old Toyota SUV, but it didn’t have all-wheel drive. It had been a compromise: big tires and high clearance, but better gas mileage with front-wheel drive. She hoped her prayers would make up the difference in twenty inches of snow.
A seasoned Colorado resident, Willow knew to dress for the worst, including the prospect that she might have to abandon her vehicle on an unplowed street or behind other abandoned cars. She wore her calf-high boots with rugged tread, jeans, two sweatshirts, and her long down coat. Her hair would suffer under both hat and scarf, though she could set those aside as long as her car held out in the elements.
Outside, the city felt like a movie set, no one visible on most streets, with the snow illuminating the air, reflecting the light from the street lamps, porch lights and occasional holiday lights. Besides those tinted reflections, the snow seemed to exude a light of its own.
The Words I Speak (Anyone Who Believes Book 2) Page 4
