Desert Son Trilogy: Desert Son, Wayward Soul, Spiritual Intervention (Books 1-3)

by Glenn Maynard

  Carter was now standing before Billy, who was sitting up erect in his chair. “Martin… leave!”

  Brenda grabbed a cross off of her dresser and doused it with holy water, then rushed to Carter’s side, landing right in front of Billy. “Martin, you need to leave!” She struck her hand through the air as if she were making an X, and the holy water splattered Billy. Martin began to scream.

  Brenda was not ready to perform an exorcism because she was not right for the job, but she needed to try to release Martin from this poor child in an act of desperation. It was evident that the holy water wasn’t to Martin’s liking. She knew that the spirit of this little boy was still inside Billy, but Martin’s spirit was a bully. He was taking over Billy’s body as a vehicle to get back to Shirley, and Brenda was not having it. Martin needed to go.

  Carl was holding Wendy tight. She was crying hysterically while seeing one of her babies possessed. It was hard to see, even though the spirit was more menacing than evil. No child should have to go through that, and he had been suffering his whole life. Unfortunately, Martin had been fooling everybody into believing that he was part of Willy, when he was really part of Billy. He could go about his business while everybody thought that the problem had set up camp within Willy. Billy was just Martin’s puppet.

  “There may not be room for me here anymore,” said Martin, “but you haven’t seen the last of me. There’s room for me at that hospital you’ve been going to. Maybe there’s a patient in a coma.”

  “Don’t you dare!” said Brenda.

  Billy opened his mouth again, but this time his own voice returned. “I’m alone. It feels really good. I’m now the only one. It’s just me… hopefully forever.”

  “Where’s Martin? Where’s Marty? Where’s Maudie?” Carter was breaking a sweat.

  “Maudie’s gone,” said Billy.

  Brenda snapped her fingers and both boys opened their eyes. “This experiment is over,” Brenda exclaimed. “Martin’s gonna pay Angie a visit and take possession of her body. No wonder why she was so scared. We need to put an end to that. Carter, we have to get over there now!”

  Wendy wrapped her arms around Billy and squeezed him as tight as she could. Carl went over to the bed and picked up Willy and did the same to him. Both boys were safe for now, and both boys were now rid of the spirit of Martin. Carter and Brenda felt good about what they had done thus far, but there was more work to be done. They left the Blankenships behind and ran through the house, grabbing the car keys from the kitchen counter, before passing through the kitchen door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  As Carter and Brenda sped away from the old white house, they were panicking over whether they could beat Martin to the hospital or whether it would even matter. Angie was a sitting duck. Her capsule seemed to lie spiritless in the ICU, and Martin seemed to have the ability to invade any capsule he so chose, whether it be a spiritless capsule or a baby with a spirit that just needed to be pushed aside. He was a wayward soul.

  When they rushed into the ICU, Angie was still lying in bed with tubes running in and out of her body. She was lying on her back and had not even changed positions at all in the few weeks that she had been there. Even her hands, which Carter held, were positioned in the same place aside her body, palms to the bed. The aged lines of her face had actually eased some, as if those few weeks without an ounce of worry in the world were making a world of difference. Having no stress can do that to a person. It can relax a face.

  There was only one real difference in Angie, but it was one with an enormous impact. Her eyes were wide open. She wasn’t talking or noticing that she had company, but opened eyes were the last thing they were expecting to hit them in the face upon passage through the door. Carter and Brenda gasped at first, then just needed to figure out what it meant. Lights on, nobody home. They tried shaking her arm, shaking her leg, and speaking to her. Nothing. Carter even glanced up at the monitor to make sure the lines told him that she was still alive. She was alive, but there was a sparkplug missing.

  They didn’t know what to make of this, and were cautiously optimistic that Martin had not yet reached Angie, but her eyes were open. There were no changes in the leaping, squiggly lines of the monitor. There were no signs that Angie was processing anything. Carter walked up to the hospital bed and waved his hand over her eyes, and there was not so much as a blink. It was as if her eyes were stuck open. He tried maneuvering her facial muscles, but her face felt like rawhide. She actually looked dead, but the monitor begged to differ.

  “Hey kids.”

  Carter looked around the room to see where the voice was coming from. Brenda did likewise, but neither of them could find the source. They really knew the source deep down, but first wanted to eliminate all other options. Carter and Brenda walked back over to Angie. They examined her closely, but her eyes remained open and her face stoic. There was no change in the monitor.

  “Angie, are you there?” asked Carter, to which there was no reply.

  “Martin, are you there?” asked Brenda, and they finally saw Angie’s lips move.

  “Hi kids.” Angie’s lips were moving, but Martin’s voice came out from between them. “Did you really think you were going to beat me to the punch? Did you really think that you were going to beat me here? I’m not gonna leave my wife. I told you that. Why’d you bother making the trip?”

  Brenda was horrified as she watched Angie’s lips moving with a man’s voice coming out, and it was more bizarre than the message itself. It was hard to hear, and even worse to see. Carter was just as horrified, but he knew he could not crumble now. He needed to get Angie back, and the only way to do that would be to rid her body of Martin. However, Martin had other ideas, and it seemed that he wanted to toy with them a little bit.

  The worst case scenario would be that Martin really did want to be with Shirley for the rest of his life, and would haunt them until the end of time, wherever they ended up. Maybe this was part of the message Angie was trying to deliver, and the thought terrified them.

  The monitor went haywire, the beeps moved closer together, and Angie’s eyes began to flutter. Her belly began to move up and down as if she was hyperventilating. The strange part was that Angie had no belly. Her pasty white skin made her look like a corpse. She looked like she had just been removed from the morgue.

  “Thank you for opening up this opportunity,” Martin said.

  “Opportunity,” Carter said. “What opportunity?”

  “The opportunity of opening up my room to that family… for starters. I pushed mom hard to rent that house. It was a big job, especially since we were in Texas, but the stars were aligned. Everything worked out just fine, and my plan worked like a charm! Everybody thought Willy was the guy. Everybody had their eyes on Willy. I wasn’t sure how my plan with the twins was going to go off. I was pleasantly surprised, though. Then when you finally did find me, you left me this opening. I thank you both so very kindly. I wish I was welcomed back with more opened arms, kids.”

  Brenda reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out the cross, which had come in handy at their house. She didn’t have the holy water, but she had the cross, and it had been dipped in the holy water. That was close enough, she hoped, but still ran some tap water over it from the sink. “Martin, I ask that you leave Angie!” She yelled this out as she whipped the cross back and forth at his face. The holy and the water smacked him in the face. Angie put her hand up to block the holiness, and Martin hissed from within her. Again, Brenda whipped the cross at Angie in a slashing motion as Martin’s voice began bellowing out in agony as smoke escaped through her mouth. “In the name of Jesus Christ… leave Angie!” There was a pause, silence, and then Angie closed her eyes.

  Brenda put the cross down to her side, and Carter
ran around to the other side of Angie’s bed. Her eyes were now closed. The raging monitor returned to normal. The thick, cold air that had taken over the room had dissipated, and the tension in the room followed suit. Martin seemingly disappeared. The cross must have been too much for Martin to handle. He was too evil of a man to have such holiness sprinkled onto him. He was gone.

  As Carter and Brenda were busy moving around the room, there was a noise that made them both stop. They were preparing to settle in and try again to reach Angie. There was a spirit within Angie just minutes ago, so they felt that this would be a good time to lure Angie’s spirit back. The noise made them look up. Angie was back. Her eyes were open, but they needed her to speak. They thought that it might be Martin returning to her shell again, but probably not, because her mouth was shut. They looked and they waited, and they soon got their answer.

  “Oh, my God. Hello,” said Angie. “Where am I. What happened?”

  Brenda rushed to the right side of Angie, and Carter followed. “Angie, you’re in the hospital. You were hit by a car.” She said this calmly so as not to excite Angie.

  Angie looked at Brenda as if she didn’t believe her. She looked up at the monitor and then around the room, taking it all in and realizing that Brenda was telling her the truth. “Do you guys work here?”

  “No,” said Brenda. “We don’t work here.”

  “Then what are you doing in my room?”

  “Do we look familiar to you?” asked Brenda.

  She continued to look at Carter and Brenda strangely. “No.”

  Carter jumped in. “Angie, my name is Carter… and this is Brenda. You met us right before your accident… when we came in for a reading.”

  “What do you want? What do you want from me?”

  “Ahhh… ” Carter then cleared his throat. All that preparation, but he was still taken by surprise.

  “We were so worried about you,” said Brenda. “We were there when it happened.”

  “When what happened?” Angie asked.

  “The accident.”

  “What accident?”

  “You were in an accident,” said Carter.

  Angie looked surprised and said, “Did this accident happen this morning?”

  “No,” said Brenda. “The accident was almost a month ago.”

  Angie’s eyes opened wide and she stared at Brenda as if she was full of shit, and then slowly asked, “Really, when did the accident happen… this morning?”

  “It’s the honest to God truth,” said Carter. “You were giving us a reading weeks ago, when you suddenly got up and ran into the street and got hit by passing cars. We don’t know what happened or why you did it, but you had just started giving a reading to us when you got up and ran out the door.”

  Angie still didn’t believe what they were telling her, and she kept telling them that she didn’t remember ever meeting them. It was a wonder how a psychic would forget something like this, but then again, it was such a traumatic event that perhaps her memory of that last event prior to the accident was obliterated. They continued to tell Angie about the meeting they had, and every detail leading up to the accident, but she had no recollection of any of it.

  Carter and Brenda were the only ones who knew that Angie had opened up her eyes and returned to life as she knew it. They weren’t sure of what to do. Should they notify the nurses, doctors, or someone at the front desk? Not now, Carter determined. They needed to get something out of Angie in her purest form, before she fully came to or actually remembered why she ran out into the street and had another tragic response.

  Brenda moved closer to Angie and grabbed her hand. As soon as their hands touched each other, Angie’s eyes widened and she started to let out a scream. Brenda covered Angie’s mouth with her hand, muffling her screams before anybody noticed and any hope for an answer was ushered out of the room with them. “Angie… quiet!” she said.

  Angie struggled to remove Brenda’s hand, but her energy level was too weak to overpower her. Brenda continued to press her hand on Angie’s mouth, but took her hand away when she was confident the screaming had subsided. It did. Angie seemed aware that Brenda’s hand would return if she screamed again, and the coma had sapped what power she once had. The ICU was very busy and the noise level pretty high, and the room visits only came when scheduled unless monitor extremes deemed an unscheduled visit necessary. They needed to act quickly because the monitor was moving up and down.

  “It seems that you remember now,” said Brenda.

  “No,” said Angie. “I remember nothing.”

  “Then why did you scream when you touched Brenda,” Carter asked. His eyes were like lasers into hers.

  Angie had no answer. She wasn’t even prepared to make one up. She was cornered. There was nowhere for her to run now. Her latest scream when Brenda touched her confirmed that this psychic was picking up on something terrible. If something terrible was going to happen to Brenda or Carter, they needed to know what it was now. They needed to do everything they could to get that answer during Angie’s reunion tour with Earth. She may very well have forgotten about the accident, due to the trauma she had been through, but her latest grip of Brenda’s hand brought the memory to the forefront, so that it was now fresh on her mind.

  Brenda leaned over and stared into Angie’s eyes from about a foot away. They did not have a lot of time with which to work because medical personnel could walk into the room to check on this patient’s welfare at any moment. They didn’t know the last time Angie had been checked on, but they could only assume patients were checked on at least hourly, and maybe even more frequently than that.

  “Angie,” Brenda began her interrogation, “tell me what’s going on with you. Why do you react the way you do whenever you come into physical contact with me?”

  Angie only stared at Brenda, but she wasn’t given much of a choice, since Brenda’s face was very much a part of her grill. She was cornered. If she screamed out, then Brenda would cut off her oxygen. She was stuck in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of everywhere. It was also two against one. Angie continued to look into Brenda’s eyes. She suddenly realized that the truth had to be told before Brenda snuffed out her life. She had already experienced a dry run, but still darted her eyes from side to side, instinctively looking for an escape plan.

  “Brenda… this is just… so hard for me to talk about,” said Angie. “You scared me, and you continue to scare me.”

  “Why,” said Brenda. “What on earth did I ever do to scare you? I’ve never even met you before!”

  Angie again looked from side to side, and then over at Carter before returning her focus to Brenda. It seemed hard for her to lock eyes with Brenda even now, realizing that escape was no longer an option and she had to ante up. Carter had no idea that it would come to this, but they were also acting out of desperation. There was no spiritual connection, so this was it. They were not going to leave the hospital without a full understanding of Angie’s mindset.

  “It all began back in 1992,” said Angie, “when a couple asked me to come over and give them a reading on their daughter, who was having trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble,” asked Brenda. It all sounded like a line of bullshit by Angie just to get them off her back.

  “She was pretending to be someone she was not… according to her parents. The little girl was just a teenager, but her parents were so worried that they called me over to do a reading on her. What followed was a reading that I had never in all my years come across.”

  Angie paused to catch her breath and think about how the rest of the story should be told. Her voice trembled as she related the story. “Apparently, the girl was claiming to be a woman from right here in Colora
do, who had been strangled to death by the hands of her husband.”

  Carter and Brenda exchanged disbelieving glances. It sounded all too familiar, and Angie continued on. “The reading… well… it scared the shit outta me. When I got into this field, once I understood that I had a special gift, simply by touching people, I never imagined getting a reading like this. I actually didn’t even have to touch the girl to get it. I only touched an article of clothing of hers… I believe it was a shirt… yes… it was a shirt… pink blouse.”

  Only the sound from the monitors beeping could be heard, and still nobody had passed through the door. Carter looked at Brenda, but they didn’t want to say anything. They needed Angie to speak, and deposit her stories into their ears before their chance ended. Carter knew that medical personnel entering the room, or Angie slipping away again, could spell the end of any possible answers. They also didn’t know where Martin’s spirit was lurking. They were getting something up to this point, but the story was not complete, and apparently had a long way to go. They were still in the dark as to what motivated Angie’s actions on that fateful day. They were in a race against a handful of minutes.

  Angie collected her thoughts after a lengthy yawn. “Boy, they must’ve given me some good drugs. Anyway, I was just starting out at the time. When I hit the nail on the head regarding this girl, the parents were so angry about what I said… they harassed me to the point of driving me right out of town. I couldn’t take their daily assault of my character, and they were stalking my workplace. I decided to get out of town and reconnect with my sister here in Colorado.”

  “Oh,” said Brenda, “where did you come from?”

  “Iowa,” she said, “born and raised.”

  “No kidding,” said Brenda. “That’s where I’m from! Where abouts?”

  “Ames.”

  Brenda’s face turned ashen. Carter had already connected the dots. The teenager that Angie was referring to was Brenda, and the couple who destroyed Angie’s career was Brenda’s parents. It was also Brenda’s parents who had driven her out of town. Carter could see by the open-mouthed stare that Brenda was getting it now. Carter could also see from the look on Angie’s face that she was finally giving it up.