THE BRIGHT WHITE MOON glistened behind thin sheets of clouds. The air in the mountain valley was hot and damp. It smelled of rain, and small bursts of lightning bounced above the horizon. Low rumbling was muffled thunder in the distance. A storm was approaching, murmuring its warnings from miles away, while the citizens of Mount Cain slept.
Chase splashed through the stream and into the woods, his first steps on a new journey and toward a new life. He was at the same time fully steadfast and scared, as a young child might be when jumping into a pool of water for the first time. The embarking on this new adventure would alter everything, his entire world. The entire painting would be recolored yet again.
Leaving his home of so long was the most perilous decision he’d ever made, but he knew that staying muddled in the monotonous life at the cabin would kill his spirit. He could not hold a thought. They raced around and around his head until a great quagmire of darting, spinning images turned gray was the only picture in his mind. The whirlwind wearied him, forcing him to stop to rest. He weighed the ramifications of going, of staying. Of going. Of staying.
As he sat on the ground looking up to the treetops and beyond into the thick black sky, he realized how small he was. Looking back down and studying a snapped tree in front of him, he examined its curious shape, almost like the cross he’d left behind at the cabin.
Chase was unaware of the strange little grin on his face. He was soaking in a genuine joy he had not felt in a long time. A vision of Budduh hanging upside down on the tree limb in front of him made him grin. A scratching noise to his right averted his thoughts. He looked there and found a wounded little bird struggling through the damp mat of leaves and twigs. Its growing feathers were a spectacular shade of white with a reddish undertail. The bird chirped but it was weak, and Chase stuck out his finger. The bird hopped on.
***
There was little life in the woods. Hardly a sound disturbed it. Night creatures seemed to recognize the darkness sucking the woods of its color and gleam, making themselves deathly still. The thin fog curled among the trees, seeming to move with a soul of its own. The forest was a suffocating weight, a stagnant, insufferable heat box. The hungry squawking of a bird was the only sound.
The fog draped the grackle like a robe on a king, accenting its external sheen of excellence. With his head tilted and fixed, his yellow eyes glaring at the man before him, he governed the night with chilling stoicism. The bird was perched on a single limb, staring at Raphael with the cold eyes of a Roman Caesar bust, frozen and blank. The single golden rings circling his black pupils sliced the foggy veil like blades. He was hungry, and he was hungry for the eyes of the good man hanging before him.
Raphael hung upside down and motionless, mirroring the grackle’s stare. His arms were hanging straight down, his fingers nearly touching the ground. He felt a conflicting yet exhilarating rush of limpness and life as he dripped from the tree like a fleshy teardrop. For a long time he remained fixed, his body and eyes as frozen as the heat in the woods. There was a strange curl in his lips—one would have sworn he was smiling.
The storm’s leading edge fingered into the woods, shifting the air ever so lightly. The hint of wind did little to move the heat, but it did nudge Raphael, swaying him side to side like a hypnotist’s charm. As he moved back and forth, the silent, stoic grackle began to take on the hypnotist’s function, enchanting Raphael with the blues and greens in its feathers and the golden dance in its eyes. The colors became hazy from behind Raphael’s heavy eyes. Back and forth, back and forth went the charm. Back and forth went its colors.
“Why don’t you come down from your perch, Mr. Do Good?” a voice from the direction of the grackle said. “Why don’t you give up the heroics?”
Raphael grinned. He saw the face of Cain and his shimmering black hair.
“Don’t you hear me?” the voice said. “Do you know who I am? They all revere me. And I will get you.”
Raphael kept grinning.
“This is funny to you? Always the quiet boy. Always in control. In ten seconds I will be walking on your face eating your eyes out. Will you stop smiling then?”
“Do your thing, Birdie.”
***
In a rocker next to her room window, Puah sat, staring at the wooden cross outside, the abomination her father had built and erected so many years earlier. Once a shrine, the cross was now eroding to splinters and dust. Puah felt the weight of her own cross driving her elbow into the rocker’s arm. Her tears wet her cheeks and into the salty pool in the hand against her chin. It was exactly how she felt—a lost soul in the middle of the water fighting to keep her head above the surface. Puah’s head slipped from the slick hold of her hand, and she sat, folded awkwardly to the side.
Minutes passed. Finally, silence. The fog sent her adrift. Her eyes grew weary. The gray cloud seemed to groan toward her. It whispered into the streets and around the houses, its film edging to the center of the town like runoff to a river. Her instincts telling her that Raphael was in trouble, she wanted to stay awake out of some offhand devotion to him. She leaked prayers out at random, with no thought for the words, only doubt in their worth. The tattered cross became jerky behind her bouncing eyelids, and when the fog reached it, her muttered prayers turned into drivel. The groping, curling gray cloud was a tongue, reaching forward, licking the cross and enveloping it.
Every crawling second of the night was piling on top of the next, magnifying each new battle in her head. She had, to this point, overcome the pull to go into the woods, but the steely disquiet of solitude was testing her resolve. Her stomach twisted into a hundred knots and rolled, meeting the nerves in her throat, dripping her hairline with cold sweat.
The whirling mists seemed almost diabolical, sending more cold chills through her body. The sound of a child chuckling whispered in her mind, and she could not shake it; he was laughing from a deep dark hole inside her that couldn’t be reached. Another raking scream tore at her mind, escaping from the same dark hole. After some silence, there was another sound, this one barely audible, but still as blood curdling as the single scream. Like an echo reversing its track, the subtle whimper of the chuckling child recommenced. It was the sound of something terrible, a child laughing at pain. Puah was in pain but was in no mood to giggle. And if any child, no matter how trapped he was, was able to sound so enamored with his own wickedness, she didn’t want anything to do with him.
Her dreaming took her to her father. He was dressed in black, and walking up the front steps of a family’s home. He had a blade in his hand.
She was startled awake by a snap and crash outside. Or was it the screams and slamming screen door in her dream? After coming to, she looked outside. Puah thought she saw something, something brown and straight resting on the ground, but the dust was heavy and congealing with the fog. The thickness of the dust told the story: the cross beam had fallen.
Before she had fallen asleep, Puah imagined the entire monstrosity might collapse, but she knew the variant of its fall was just as appropriate. Like when a family loses a son or daughter, the family remains standing, but a limb—an elemental chunk of its spirit—is gorged away forever. A tiny weed not plucked soon enough had emerged as a huge and hideous tree, festering, rotting in the very heart of the town. She stood before its hollow, armless trunk now, rummaging through her mind and the contents of the nightmare just passed. Her father was a monster, albeit a repentant one, and now she knew it. He was no longer her hero, and the cross in front of her was no longer the golden-brown shrine he’d raised long ago.
***
Chase’s face was dusty and scratched, but he knew it could have been worse. The trunk of the branch, full of prickly sticks and twigs, had come mere inches from falling directly on him. As it was, the sticks were enough to scratch his face. His left cheek burned and he couldn’t blink out the piece of dust in his eye.
Chase raised the branch to see if the little bird had survived. It hadn’t. He knelt on the ground and cupped the dead body in his hands. It was so fragile, as if it might crumble in his hands like a sand cake. He held it for a long time and found himself unusually sad.
“Over a bird,” he said, disgusted with himself.
It seemed as if the little shot of pain had sprung from a well of endurance far repressed and far removed from this specific incident. No visible thoughts of the past came to mind, but the distant recollection of pain branded in his bones was there, had always been there. The tears burned his scraped face. It had been a long time since he’d cried, and the sting of tears and blood made it worse.
To move on now was more difficult. The fondness in this new adventure was fading already. Death was again dictating his feelings. It had positioned its claws in his world yet again. Yes, it was just a bird, the kind he’d eaten time and time again in the past. But there was a new guilt inside him that he couldn’t handle, guilt in what exactly, he couldn’t discern. This little bird was different from the others, it seemed, somehow sacred. More tears wet his eyes, reminding him of the tenacity of his troubles.
“I don’t want to go on,” he said to the bird, “but I’m going to do it for you. You died instead of me.”
Chase dug a hole in the dirt, buried his friend, and closed his eyes to sleep. He’d move on in the morning.
***
Morning arrived and Cain had Charles summoned to his abode. Puah was missing. And Cain was not happy about it.
“Where is your daughter, Charles?” Cain said, not looking at Charles, stuffing a sliver of roasted bird into his mouth.
“I don’t know, Cain.”
“Charles, Charles. I leave to take care of an obstacle, and you cannot even stay awake with me for an hour?”
The wry reference to these words of Jesus tore at Charles, a Christian man, and a traitor.
“Did I not handle my task?” pressed Cain. “Did I not handle my part of the deal?”
Charles, once big and tall and prominent in the community, curled over like four-year-old child. He was defeated.
“I can’t do this anymore!” Charles whined.
“I see,” said Cain, a wry grin on his face. “Very well. You will go out and find her now. You will bring her back before she finds the boy. You will do this or your wife will pay the price.”
Charles regarded him, a mix of wild rage and sadness in his eyes. But he could do nothing. He was paralyzed. Ignore his order and die at his hands. Kill him and die at the hands of the people. Either way his wife would die as well.
In his mind he decided on which choice he’d make.
“Good,” Cain said, his mouth full of food. “Now leave me alone. I’m enjoying my kill.”
The cool, crisp bite of the wind chewed on Charles’s skin. The fog was still in the air, a hovering cloud that made the morning menacing. He walked through it like a zombie, watching the bugs feasting on the scraps of food in the street. He knew that he would not find her, that he wouldn’t even try, that this would be his last day alive, that Emperor Cain would probably let those bugs eat his eyes out before the sunset tonight.
He prayed to God for strength. And that this one final good deed could expunge the terrible things he’d done.
***Dream Chase is the wholly reimagined version of The Final Chase (out of print, but used ones still circulating) and the author’s preferred version of the story. It is better, and frankly, more readable. Please consider this as you make your purchasing decision.
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