Nolan Reed

by Nate Johnson

  Marla looked down at her glass so her mom wouldn’t read just how right she had been.

  “Did daddy look at you like you were the most special person in the world? Was he the smartest person in the class, able to answer every question without ever seeming to have to take a note? Did his laugh send a warm wave of heaven through your bones every time you heard it? Did his smile melt your knees?” she asked, looking at her mother, waiting for an answer.

  Her mom looked at her like she was never going to smile again. “Yes honey, all that and much, much more. Your dad always lived on the edge, pushing the envelope in everything he did. It was oh so exciting, right up until it got him killed and I was left to raise a little girl all by myself.

  Marla winced, “Well I’m sorry I was such a burden, but I didn’t ask for it.”

  “Oh honey, you were never a burden, you were, - are - the best thing that ever happened in my life. I just want you to be older, wiser…”

  “Don’t worry Mom, I understand,” she said, bending over to give her a hug. Hiding a smile, she had gotten through the conversation and hadn’t had to say anything about Juvenile Hall, or fighting in alleys behind a bar. Some things a mother just didn’t need to know.

  .o0o.

  Nolan left Marla’s with a huge smile on his face. He started to hum a Pearl Jam oldie. He didn’t even like Pearl Jam, but the song just seemed to pop into his head. He laughed at himself and turned back towards the new home.

  He was pulling into the driveway when he felt a sick feeling start to crawl up his spine, his ears started ringing, and his vision began to blur.

  An image of the creature burst into his head. Again it was on a vertical plain, like a big screen TV set on its side. The picture was still up and down, just narrow in focus.

  The creature was moving through a field, its nose to the ground, sweeping back and forth like a hound on a scent trail. Nolan gasped at its ugliness, long front legs that ended in hand like claws, short, powerful back legs and a sloping back. Its pointed muzzle swept back and forth over the ground, with long sharp white fangs that glistened in the moonlight. Like daggers, they looked like they could tear out the insides of an elephant. Its stringy, sparse coat of gray hair reminded him of a dog with a bad case of mange. But no such dog had ever existed. At least not outside of nightmares.

  He was fascinated by the animal, but a gut-wrenching fear gripped him as the beast froze in place.

  Nolan’s hands gripped the steering wheel. He instinctively closed his eyes to block the vision, but it was useless. He tried to raise his barriers, but he couldn’t get them high enough. No matter what he did, the vision kept coming in.

  The creature looked back over its shoulder and Nolan realized what was going on. Someone was broadcasting his or her thoughts while they observed this beast, this thing.

  Like a guy out walking his pet. It wasn’t the creature’s thoughts, it was its owner. Upset at being interrupted, of being unable to clear his mind. He desperately tried to focus on Marla. She’d been so perfect. He took a deep breath and pushed back against the vision. Finally, it began to fade, began to shrink until he was able to get it out of his mind. Finally able to replace the picture with a picture of Marla laughing at one of his jokes.

  Nolan sat in the front of his truck and tried to gather himself. He consciously tried to slow his breathing back down to some kind of normal. He removed his hands from the wheel, feeling the blood rush back into his fingers.

  A thought occurred to him, and his head whipped around looking for the creature and its owner. He normally had to be within a dozen feet to pick up someone’s thoughts. They had to be close, but no one was in sight. Street lamps lit up the entire road, and not a soul was anywhere near.

  Sighing he got out of his truck, but kept looking around, expecting a monster to leap out at him at any moment.

  Later that night, as Nolan lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling with his hands behind his head, he analyzed the vision.

  It had seemed so out of place, more unusual than normal. It hadn’t been like anything he had ever experienced before. The orientation was all wrong, the creature out of this world, but there was more.

  The thought had lasted too long, the focus too intense. Usually, a person’s thoughts drifted, never staying on topic for more than a few seconds before a new idea, a new tangent took over.

  Turning over, he tried to forget it, replacing it with thoughts of Marla and the way she looked when she tucked her hair behind her ears. The anger that flashed through her eyes when she lost at air hockey and the pure joy he felt when she smiled after winning at skittle ball. They had been in their own little world, and all the outside drudgery had disappeared.

  Finally, he drifted to sleep, thinking of her.

  The next Monday, school seemed better than normal. It became fantastic when Marla walked into the class and immediately flashed him a smile that melted any and all dark clouds that might have been in the area. Nolan sat up straighter and answered with a weak smile of his own.

  The week flew by, after every class they would briefly meet in the hall for a quick word, a slight touch and then reluctantly separate for the next hour of boring instruction. They ate lunch with each other, their heads together, whispering and laughing. Marla’s friends, Jess, and Cindy, would occasionally join them, but more often than not they left them alone. Shooting jealous and covetous looks their way.

  Nolan would give her a ride home at the end of the day, and they would sit in his truck and talk about everything and nothing.

  Life was good. Even Billy Carp was keeping his distance from Marla. Nolan scanned him whenever they came close to each other, but Billy seemed to have learned his lesson and was on his best behavior. At least around Nolan.

  He and Marla were standing next to his truck outside her house getting ready to say goodbye when Nolan grabbed his head and growled in frustration. The vision had returned.

  The creature was looping around the side of a lake, its head up, testing the wind. The observer was casually running after it. Nolan held his breath as the owner approached the water and there in the shimmering mirror surface of the lake he saw him for the first time. A man, about forty with a big head and hollow cheeks. He looked like he’d just came out of a concentration camp, long skinny arms and big black soulless eyes. The man was wearing a navy blue blazer without a tie and looked like he had come home from work and decided to take the dog out for a run.

  Taking a deep breath, Nolan straightened up and nodded that he was all right. Marla looked concerned and held his arm.

  “Is there a lake around here?” he asked.

  The quick shift in topic came as a total shock. “Yeah, sure, there’s a big one about ten miles north, a couple of smaller ones closer in. Why?”

  “Oh, I was thinking about taking you on a picnic tomorrow. You up for it?” Nolan said while he focused entirely on the girl in front of him, pushing the vision to the side and strengthening his barriers.

  Marla’s face lit up like a lantern, “Really? That would be neat.”

  “Great, I’ll pick you up at noon,” Nolan said as he kissed her on the cheek and returned to his truck. His brow creased in concentration, he desperately needed to get out of there before the vision overwhelmed him. He waived at Marla as she entered her house.

  He’d only gone a few blocks when he had to pull over into a gas station and park as the vision pushed all awareness out of his mind. All he could see was what the observer saw. The man stopped looking at the lake and glanced off into the woods.

  Nolan was starting to get used to the vertical alignment of his thoughts. But they still felt creepy.

  Suddenly, the picture changed. Now it showed an unusual landscape bathed in a week blue light. Menacing storm clouds gathered on the horizon over a barren rocky plain. He realized that this was a memory thought, the details were fuzzy and not explicit enough to be a current observation.

  The memory played out as the observer glanced up at the st
arry night sky and a feeling of relaxed contentment washed through the thought.

  Nolan stared along with the observer. The stars were different, He couldn’t say why, but they didn’t line up correctly. It was like what he imagined the night sky in the southern hemisphere might look like, new and different. Had this person just come from South America? Maybe Australia.

  As the person turned, the night grew brighter as the moon came into view, and then brighter still when a second, smaller moon, appeared.

  Gasping for breath, Nolan pushed out of the strange mind, throwing up barrier after barrier to keep it out. What was that? Who was that?

  Had the guy been remembering, or imagining. He’d felt for sure it was a memory, there was always a different feel between the two types of thoughts. But who could tell?

  Nolan’s breath sped up as his heart raced. A sick feeling, deep in his gut, began to expand, spreading through him like a tropical disease on steroids.

  The vertical view, the weird landscape, now the two moons, No thoughts, just visions. All of it was pointing to a scary end.

  Tentatively he reached out and accessed the observer again. Nolan’s curiosity ate at his stomach, pushing him. Now the guy was looking at a trail that meandered through weeds and tall grass. He was walking up a hill towards a big gray house, the old Victorian kind, with peaked gables and windows crisscrossed with wooden muttons.

  Nolan narrowed his forehead and concentrated as hard as he had ever done before, trying to pick of the faintest whisper, something more than just visions.

  Deep in the background, he started to hear a voice, high pitched and garbled. The man was speaking to himself in his mind. The sound sent a shiver down Nolan’s spine. The language sounded clipped and like nothing he had ever heard. In fact, he was pretty sure that the human voice couldn’t make some of those sounds, long trills that seemed to vibrate at two different frequencies at the same time.

  While he couldn’t understand the words, the emotion was evident enough. A sad resignation slowly growing into a fierce determination. But without words, it was all meaningless. The guy could be resigned to a wart on his big toe or worried about the exchange rate of the Euro. There was no telling.

  Chapter Five

  Marla looked as pretty as ever, her long brown hair back in a ponytail. She was wearing a red windbreaker over a black T-shirt and her usual jeans, they highlighted her curves and sent a shiver to his core.

  She was already waiting outside for him and jumped into the truck immediately sliding over to the middle of the bench seat. She reached up and kissed him on the cheek before snapping into her seat belt. Nolan pulled away, being careful not to hit her with the gear shift. His heart raced when he went into second gear, his hands brushing her knee.

  A soft scent of lavender and roses washed over him. It was a smell that soothed his very soul.

  What would he do if she ever learned the truth? It would kill him. The sense of betrayal she would feel. He could easily imagine her eyes looking at him like he’d killed her kitten. The thought was enough to make him sick to his stomach.

  She smiled up at him and then back out the window as if she was a cat who had just invented cream.

  “Any problems with your mom?” he asked.

  “No, not really, as long as I’m back by curfew, get my chores done, and homework finished, she doesn’t really have a complaint. She did mention that my chores seem to be getting done earlier than normal,” Marla said with a huge smile.

  Nolan laughed. That was one of the many things he liked about Marla. She said what she wanted to.

  The lake was bigger than he expected, the park was on the far shore. Nolan drove around slowly keeping an eye out for an old Victorian home. Pulling into the park, they grabbed a blanket and Marla’s small cooler and walked out into a grass covered field. Laying out the blanket, Marla kneeled down and started breaking out the food.

  “I was up half the night trying to figure out what to bring,” she said. “I finally settled on tuna sandwiches, boiled eggs, and carrot sticks. Not very fancy but I was limited without asking my mom to go to the store.”

  “What, no cake?” he asked jokingly.

  He took a bite of his sandwich then began staring off into the distance. Her lips pouted a little when he didn’t compliment her cooking.

  He shook his head and returned to the land of here and now.

  “Have you ever had those headaches checked out by a Doctor?” she asked.

  “No, why? They’re not a big deal, they don’t last,” he said taking another bite.

  “It's just …” she said, then stopped, unable to go on.

  “What,” he asked with a little exasperation.

  She looked up, peering into his eyes. “It’s just, is there something you’re not telling me?”

  He blanched, and sputtered around his mouthful of food, “No! What do you mean?” He fought to keep the guilt from showing on his face.

  Marla looked at him strangely for a moment, then said, “Well, it’s usually at this point in the story when the wickedly handsome bad boy tells the shy mousy girl that he’s dying of some exotic, extremely rare, but yet, interesting disease. You know, like beery beery, or a brain tumor that will make him forget all about her as he drifts away into insanity.”

  Nolan laughed, a deep belly laugh, that rumbled out of him like a waterfall over a cliff. He smiled and shook his head.

  “No Marla, nothing like that,” he said, reaching out to cup the back of her neck and bring her in for a deep soul searching kiss. “And by the way, you are as far from mousy as it is possible to be.” He said as he broke contact.

  She blushed at the compliment.

  .o0o.

  Tucking her hair behind her ears Marla lay down, resting her head on his thigh and stared up at the sky. Life was so perfect. What would Cindy and Jean think if they could see her now? What would her mom say if she knew her daughter was laying with her head on a boy’s leg?

  The high sun soaked her skin in a warmth that soothed her soul.

  “Do you want to go for a walk by the lake?” Nolan asked.

  What? Why ruin this perfect moment? she wanted to say, but of course she didn’t. Instead, she said, “Yeah, sure if you want to.”

  They left their stuff in the field, planning to pick it up on their way back. They walked hand in hand along the lake shore. He gently caressed her hand sending shivers up and down her spine.

  The young couple had only gone a hundred yards or so when Nolan pulled Marla to a stop as his eyes searched the bushes to their right.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Stay here,” he said, all fun and lightness having left his voice as he slowly walked into the bushes.

  Marla froze in place for a second and then said, “Hey, don’t tell me what to do,” as she ran to catch up.

  She’d just reached his side when a whiff of a foul odor caught her nose. It reminded her of the time she’d found a dead cat in the woods behind her house. A faint buzzing reached her ears. Her gaze followed his eyes to see what he was looking at. She saw what he saw and without thinking she let out a scream from the depth of her guts.

  A mangled body lay in the bushes. The white skin clashed with the red blood and torn clothes. An arm and a leg had been separated and lay a short distance further on. Nolan seemed to realize that she was there and stepped in front of her.

  “Go back, come on Marla, I need you to step back and call nine one one,” he said calmly, continuing to block her view.

  .o0o.

  Nolan couldn’t get the picture of the creature from last night’s vision out of his mind. Then he thought of Billy Carp. This was the kind of thing he would do if he thought he could get away with it.

  But, it wasn’t Billy Carp. This was the creature. That was why he walked this way. He had seen this part of the lake before.

  The police arrived within minutes and hustled them away from the crime scene and back to a police car, their picnic things left in
the field. Both of them stood next to the car lost in their own thoughts.

  “What happened?” Marla asked, looking up at him as if she was desperate for him to have the answers.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he died, and some wild dogs got to him,” he said as the vision of the weird creature danced into his head. A plain gray car pulled in behind the police cruiser. A man dressed in a charcoal suit and black tie got out, hanging a police badge on his front pocket.

  Nolan groaned when he recognized the man. Detective Washington was an old acquaintance, never easy to scan. The man had seen too much over the years and had a habit of thinking about really grisly things with no warning.

  “Well, Mr. Reed, you do seem to show up at unusual times,” the detective said as he approached them.

  Nolan’s quick scan confirmed that the detective didn’t think they were responsible, but for some reason he thought Nolan was hiding something. As soon as he saw him standing next to Marla, the detective had become doubtful.

  “You two stay here, I’ll be right back,” he said as he joined the other police officers and walked around the scene looking at it from all angles.

  “He knows you?” Marla asked in surprise.

  “Yeah, he was the detective who handled my case the night I got jumped. He also busted me a few years ago for shoplifting, that’s why I ended up in Juvie.”

  Marla frowned at the new information, obviously upset.

  “What did you steal?” she asked, obviously upset and not liking the fact that she was standing next to a thief only a few yards from a mangled dead body. Ms. Jackson world was expanding, Nolan thought.

  “I thought we weren’t going to tell past secrets to each other?” Nolan asked with a hopeful look.

  Marla raised an eyebrow and folded her arms over her chest while she tapped her foot waiting for an explanation.

  He sighed and said, “I tried to steal some stuff from a grocery store, I hadn’t eaten in a couple of days, and needless to say ...” He looked down, but her expression hadn’t changed.