But this time, he had blown it.
He now wondered why this had happened.
What was different now that would make him lose control like that? Not only had he lost control of his temper, he had failed to get the situation under control, as well. Not good.
So why had it happened?
There was only one explanation he could think of. Megan Kendall.
Somehow, the whole Megan Kendall thing had to some extent taken over him. And as he stood there and thought it through, he began to realize why this was so.
It was a combination of things, actually.
For starters, Megan lived out of town—she wasn’t a local girl. That made everything more difficult.
She was also very hard to manipulate—nearly impossible! It had taken him nearly six months just to get to where he was now.
And as certain as he was that she would eventually accept the job offer and come to Chicago, he still wouldn’t feel like he was out of the woods. She was a tough study.
All of these things were unsettling and unusual. But not nearly as much as the grand daddy of them all.
He had murdered her husband.
Now, that was a first!
And it was in the back of his mind constantly. It wasn’t guilt, or fear that he might get arrested some day that nagged at him. It was the simple fact that he had taken such a huge risk to his freedom just to score one solitary woman.
It had been a monstrous risk!
Something about Megan Kendall had prompted him to do something ridiculously extreme and irrational. What did she have that gave her that kind of control over him? Beyond the obvious things like her striking beauty and that “touch-me-not” demeanor, there had to be something else. Something he couldn’t put a finger on.
And not knowing what that was bothered him.
Some day soon, he intended to find out.
Chapter 20
-Now-
Before heading off for Columbus, Greshmere debated whether or not to check out his old digs in Smithtown while he was still there. The obituary had mentioned not only that he had surviving parents, but a sister and a nephew as well. Should he attempt to look up his family and see what he might discover about his former life?
About as quickly as the question came up, so did his answer. Seeing their names in the obit had meant absolutely nothing to him, so what good would it do trying to locate them? They would probably be little more than unfamiliar faces from his unrecalled past.
Megan’s earthly existence, on the other hand, struck a definite resounding chord. There was a direct correlation between his dreams of the Point and the fact that he and Megan had often gone there in his former life. Megan was the common denominator in this whole puzzle—the only one he knew of that had been at the same place at the same time with him in his former life. Megan was the key.
She had also been his wife.
Which meant that she no doubt had moved on with her life, now that he was gone. What was she doing now? How had her life changed? Had she found another man?
Suddenly scores of questions came to mind—most of them unsettling.
Was he really up to this? he wondered. For the first time since beginning his quest for rediscovery, Greshmere realized what he might be setting himself up for. Shnarker’s words rang in his ears like a dark cloud:
“You have the option to try to rediscover yourself—that is, to attempt to find out who you were in your former human life. I am not at liberty to say much more about it, other than to caution you that rediscovering yourself can be a negative experience. One may not be happy with what he discovers…”
Had he made a huge mistake ever taking on this venture? How could any of this be a good thing, doing what he was trying to do? What good would it do anybody?
What in the world was he doing?
He should have listened to Shnarker. The old bird had basically been warning him not to go the rediscovery route. And he had even agreed at the time that there seemed no sense in it. Why do something like that if you’re already happy? he had asked his Who-Key.
Yet, here he was. On a mission to do the very thing he had basically been advised not to do.
But he had been driven to do this! he thought. There hadn’t been a choice, really. Not long after arriving in heaven, he had started feeling an urge to rediscover himself from deep inside. And the dreams. They had been the kicker. He had felt no choice but to follow through with this. Why was that? Why had he felt like this while most of the others seemed perfectly content to simply enjoy their new lives here?
Apparently he was going to find out, for better or for worse. He tried to imagine simply quitting at this very moment. Flying back to Mitzy’s colony and living a simple, carefree life. A life where the most challenging decisions he’d have to make were which games to play in the sky or what new venues to explore. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing, would it? In fact, it would be wonderful!
Yet he knew he could not do it. He had to do this, like it or not. Just as Kloob had felt compelled to do it.
Greshmere focused on the traffic that was beginning to pick up in the small town below. The folks of Smithtown, Ohio were beginning another week, working their jobs, attending their schools, and living their human lives. He was no longer a part of this existence. And he never would be. He was a bird in heaven, and happy to be that.
Although the unknown nature of what he was embarking on left him feeling unsure about himself and leery of what he might discover, he was nevertheless still content being here. Somehow he knew that he would always be happy here, in spite of what he may find out in Columbus. It was a weird feeling knowing that, yet it seemed so true.
He considered these feelings with those of the humans and realized a major difference between life on earth and life in heaven. In heaven, there seemed to be a cap on one’s emotions—that is to say, the negative emotions. Like a built-in overload switch, something seemed to prevent him from getting overly depressed or downtrodden. This was yet another miracle about the place.
Yet there seemed to be no limit to how positive and enthralled one could be here. He had reached indescribable heights of euphoria in the brief time since arriving. That was something he had yet to see in the humans. Their negativity, on the other hand, was more than obvious.
Greshmere suddenly decided to let himself go. With an obligatory glance back over his shoulder, he soared upward in a huge loop, heading for the puffy white clouds. When he reached an altitude of several hundred feet, he continued following the Scioto River as it twisted and turned its way north to Columbus.
By the time he had reached the halfway point near Chillicothe, the sky was leaden gray and the wind had picked up appreciably. In another ten minutes, the sky opened up and torrents of rain threatened to pound him down to earth. He considered flying above the clouds to avoid the storm when something below suddenly caught his eye. There was a huge congregation of birds gathered in a dead tree not far from the bank of the river. What stood out was the vast variety of birds and the fact that they were not making a single sound.
Greshmere decided to fly down and check it out. When he reached the old tree, he chose a spot on a branch not far from a small pocket of birds. They stared over at him.
The silence prevailed until a voice suddenly broke it.
“Are you one of us?” he heard.
“Yes, I am,” Greshmere replied to whomever, pleased to discover that he was in the presence of human/birds.
“I told you!” exclaimed another voice.
“Okay, Brome, you win the prize,” said another voice.
“So what’s your name?” asked a nearby cardinal.
“Greshmere.”
“Welcome, Greshmere!” the cardinal said. “My name is Samden. We’ve been playing a game and I’m afraid that you were an unknowing participant. You see, we were all hanging out here chatting when Brome suddenly spotted you. He made a bet that you were a former human and I challenged him. I didn’t think you
could be one of us because of the way you handled the rain. Instead of flying above the storm, you flew down to earth. A former human would typically not have done that, I figured. Obviously, I was wrong.”
“And I was right!”
A mourning dove had suddenly alighted midway between Greshmere and the cardinal.
“I’m Brome, and I’m the winner!” the dove cried. “I can spot a human a mile away!”
“Er, don’t let his cocksureness fool you, Greshmere. Brome likes to think he has mastered this game when in fact, this was the first time he’s been right in over a week.”
“That’s better than your record, Sam! What’s it been—a month or so now?”
“Whatever. At any rate, where are you from?” Samden asked Greshmere.
“I arrived in New York last week. I’m just a newbie,” Greshmere confessed.
“New York, eh? So what brings you here of all places, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“It’s sort of a long story. Are all of you former humans?”
“Yes, every last one of us. There are sixty-seven souls in this tree.”
“That’s a lot. How did you all get together?”
“That too is a long story. What would you think of joining us for a while? We’re staying in an abandoned barn not far from here.”
Greshmere thought for a moment. Columbus would still be there later.
“Sure, thanks for asking.”
“Come on, everybody! Let’s show some hospitality!”
With that, the entire group fled the tree in one massive exodus. The noisy flutter of flapping wings was wondrous as Greshmere followed the flock across the Scioto River. A mile or so further, he spotted a barn in the distance. The thing looked as though it might collapse any minute.
But once inside, Greshmere saw that the structure was quite solid. There were stout rafters traversing the ceiling and a huge hayloft encompassed nearly the entire west wall of the barn. Greshmere wondered if the structure had once been used for hanging tobacco leaves when he saw all of the wooden beams spread out throughout the floor space. The birds had perched themselves on the rafters and awaited him to follow suit. He landed beside Samden.
“We’ve been staying here for a little over a week, Greshmere. It’s actually just a layover of sorts. Tomorrow morning we’re heading west.”
“All of you?” Greshmere said.
“Right. We’re all part of a united group—known as Travelers. The majority of us have been traveling the earth as a unit for over a couple hundred years now,” Samden said.
“That’s a long time,” Greshmere said. “And you’ve been moving all that time? I mean, surely you stop to catch your breath, right?”
Samden chuckled. “Of course! That’s what we’ve been doing here the past week. We typically head off into the sky and observe the scenery until we see a place that looks interesting. Let’s say that Bromley, or Tat, or Libsen sees something that tickles his or her fancy. The notion is proposed to the flock and we take a vote on it. If it gets okayed by a majority, down we go. Otherwise, we just keep on moving on.”
“Coming here was my idea,” a bluebird with a thick accent said. “The place resembles my Russian homeland. The rolling hills and cornfields. It has been very nice here.”
“Yeah, but we’re so ready to move on,” another voice said. “I want to see the ocean again. It’s been too long!”
“And we’ll be there soon enough, Gerst,” yet another voice piped in.
“Just don’t hold your breath,” Samden said. “We’ve got a lot of area to cover before we reach the Pacific.”
“He’s always so impatient!” one of the starlings said. “You’d never guess he lived by the sea in his former life, eh?”
Several birds laughed.
“Whatever,” was the reply.
“How did you all get together like this?” Greshmere inquired.
“It’s been an evolutionary process, really. When I first arrived here, my Who-Key had a profound effect on me. Would you believe he was nearly one thousand years old? He had originally come from China, back when it was the largest empire on earth. When I first arrived here, I’d been flying aimlessly in the rain forest of South America when Changsi—that was my Who-Key’s name—suddenly appeared out of nowhere and spoke to me in broken, nearly unintelligible English. At first, I was terrified of him, not so much because he was speaking to me in such an odd-sounding tongue, but because he was such a huge creature! I seriously thought he was going to eat me alive at first!”
“What kind of bird was he?” Greshmere asked.
“He wasn’t a bird.”
“What? But I thought—”
“That we are all birds, right?” Samden finished the sentence.
“Well, yes. That’s what I was more or less told.”
“As everyone else in this barn was told as well. But I’m here to tell you, Greshmere, it isn’t so. There are others besides us.”
Greshmere said, “But when I asked my Who-Key about that, he seemed convinced that former humans were birds and only birds. And he’s been around nearly seven hundred years.”
“What did he base his belief on? Did he say?”
Greshmere thought back to that first day. “He said that he had never been able to communicate with any of the other animals, so he assumed that they were nothing more than simply animals.”
“And communication, my new friend, is the key. Changsi had discovered how to bridge the gap. To be able to speak to former humans inhabiting Aves animal classes.”
“Amazing!” Greshmere exclaimed as the implications of what this meant soaked in. “So what you’re saying is that any animal we see could possibly be a former human?”
“Precisely. Changsi was in fact a python, of all things. Can you imagine how frightening it was having this huge snake staring me in the face? I thought I was a goner.”
“Tell him what you said to him, Sam!” one of the birds cried excitedly.
Samden held Greshmere’s anxious stare. “I said, ‘please tell me I’m not going to be your next meal.’”
A barrage of chuckles from the throng of birds filled Greshmere’s head.
“What did he reply?” he asked the cardinal.
“‘No worries, I don’t do food.’”
This cracked everybody up.
“Once I’d recovered from this good news, Changsi proceeded to give me his spiel about heaven and how I had come to be here. He explained that since I had come back as a bird, that I would only be able to communicate with other birds. I told him I was fine with that. I had no idea that early on how phenomenal it would be to have the ability to speak to other animal classes as well.
“In fact, when I told other birds about Changsi’s unique power, they never believed me. This started bugging me after a while. I eventually became obsessed with trying to find a way to communicate with other human/animals as Changsi had done—if for no other reason than to prove to the others that it was possible. But that has never happened. At least, it hasn’t yet.”
“So you think you may actually be able to do it some day?”
“Oh yes, most certainly. As a matter of fact, that is one of the goals of our flock. To find a way to communicate with the others. But in order to do that, we must first be able to identify them. Like us, they have no need to eat or drink nor can they perish here. This much we are sure of. So identifying the animals is much like the way in which we discern our own kind. We begin by looking for the ones that aren’t searching for food. Then we take it from there. Since we can’t communicate with them, we watch them closely to see how they behave. They are just like us, often congregating in large numbers and observing the world. But beyond casual observation, we have gotten nowhere. However, some day I think we’ll succeed.”
“What are your other goals? Besides that?”
“To see the world. Simple as that. Greshmere, I know you are new here but try to imagine yourself circling the globe at your leisure and seeing what al
l is out there. Because we are such a diverse group from all over, it is a sensation that is impossible to describe! The stories we share are so rich and wonderful. We have learned much from one another. With so much knowledge woven into such a tight unit, the rewards are limitless.
“Although we know nothing of our former lives per se, our unique, individual knowledge bases give us clues to our respective former lives and so much more. As we share this knowledge among ourselves during our travels, we have come to realize not only how incredibly different we are from one another, but how incredibly alike we are as well. And even more importantly, that peaceful coexistence among all is attainable.
“You must realize that these individuals represent several diverse racial, spiritual, social, political and cultural entities of our world. We symbolize what could happen if humans were to do the same thing. In fact we often discuss this, trying to determine what it is about being human that prevents mankind to peacefully coexist. We have a lot of theories, but I won’t go into that now. The important thing to realize is that there are scores of other Travelers out there like us, too many to even estimate. One day, we are hoping to assemble each and every one of us together, in one spot, and share all we have observed in our travels throughout time. Can you imagine how much could be learned at such a gathering?”
“That would be a wonderful thing, no doubt. Do you really think it could happen?”
“Who knows? But we think it’s worth striving for. And it’s not like we don’t have a lot of time on our hands.”
Several birds laughed.
“So tomorrow morning at daybreak, we’re heading out. Our plan is to head west to San Francisco, go north along the Pacific coast through Canada to Alaska, fly across the Bering Strait to Russia. From there we will traverse Russia until we reach Western Europe. This is a route we haven’t taken since the early 1950s, so it should be a rewarding experience. You are more than welcome to join us, Greshmere.”
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