A Bright House
Chapter 31

He remembers hearing a sudden throaty hack, somewhat like the clearing of phlegm, near his right side and disturbingly dislocated from the room’s nighttime ambiance. This occurred in a matter of fact manner, so odd and impossible as to circumvent a fear trigger reaction. Later, as a morning’s routine progressed, Ray would consider that he had been in the peripheral energy shift that stitches disparate yet fused realities together. That hollow sounding wet cough had him immediately reaching for the pillow from which it seemed to originate, replaceing it of course as nothing but cold empty fabric.

This was the last conscious recollection before Thursday night became a disturbing descent into the otherness. He remembers hearing a sudden throaty hack that segued directly into his own as he sits behind the wheel of his old pick-up, stopped before a horizon filling expanse of rail track and the slow moving freight train heading west to east... as with so many of his astral visit placements there is no seamless insertion of the dream body into its location; a rapid and complete edit instead.

Ray’s mind is quickly focused upon the surrounding details even as a lingering pattern of worry-thought follows like a thinnest tendril from his perceptually distant bedroom. He had been chewing on negative energies as the week before his working trip progressed. Allowing his vision to accept all that was streaming past it had opened him up to places raw and normally protected, but such potent loss seemed to hover within this most recent missing persons investigation. Oddly, he didn’t feel it to be bereavement from the families specifically involved. It went deeper, powerfully so, into a frightening internal void that reminded him of his darkest childhood hours... and of his mother.

The thread connected to a pillow in a house in Saskatchewan dissipates from the fore of Ray’s consciousness, replaced by this detail packed tableaux : a very long CP Rail freight car caterpillar that rumbles and squeals slowly in its own cloud of prairie dust... the immediate awareness of an almost equally long line of vehicles behind Ray’s truck, all varieties and vintages, for as far back as he can see in the mirrors... he reacts against this cloying blanket of dirt and rolls up his side window; peers forward through the gaps between petroleum tanks to see one lone car on the opposite side of the double tracks. It tantalizes his attention, that quick glimpse of flashy tail-finned ’61 Cadillac in shiny ebony, gleaming chrome, now about to get a dust bath.

“Shame” he feels himself say, not hearing the words above the din of this lumbering train, then checks the dozens of vehicles behind him via the side mirror. This seems a vaguely familiar setting with its gentle rise where double tracks slice east-west over otherwise flat prairie, small pockets of tree stands here and there. At this vivid juncture of otherness locale, Ray is fully involved. The idea of a reality elsewhere has been usurped by a quintessential heightened energy that crackles around him.

Beneath the sturdy old flooring of his truck cabin, ground shakes in subsonic notes. He is aware of fatigue, gritty behind his eyelids, and a deeply implanted unfinished clairvoyant riddle. Through another gap in long rusty freight tanks carrying Alberta oil to the high-consumption markets of central-eastern Canada, he notes that the woman sitting alone in the flashy incongruous Caddy is looking directly back at him through dark sunglasses beneath a wide-brimmed hat. Just a briefest glimpse but it packs a wallop; an ill-defined wallop. As though scripted by dream-authors with a flair for timing, his mind begins to attach a name to the woman just as a jarring blare of horn shatters the space where synaptic identification occurs. From the truck behind his, and leaning on it for two long bursts, the driver appearing in Ray’s cabin mirror to be a hulking specimen dressed in coveralls.

Ray Townes is normally an even-tempered man, but the irrational rudeness of that horn ignites an equally inappropriate visceral response that will later be attributed to what he knows to be a grossly exaggerated volume of emotions that run intrinsic to the dynamics of nightmare experiences. Was it the direct overriding influence of Ray’s wide-awake world, where intuitive worry over the upcoming clairvoyant task had supplanted initial pleasant feelings over the prospect of seeing Jenny again so soon? Had the palpable ache of his father’s loss been heavy enough to insert itself into this dream?

For whatever “reason”, Townes unthinkingly goes for the door handle and is out on the hot dusty road before that last brutal note of horn can finish assailing his ear drums. The ground beneath his feet seems ultra real, the indignant wrath in his chest a thing beyond this moment’s reproach. Lost in the clatter and rumble of an eternal CP Rail freighter, Ray’s determined strides to the other man’s vehicle are rooted in immediate violent urgency. Red-faced and seemingly a match for this anger, the other man turns toward Ray through the open driver door window, a huge beefy hand reaching to open - - -

Ray cracks him, good. From the heel of his work boot through his leg muscles, torqued along the buttock, back, shoulder, fed by the heated insanity of absolutely needing to lash out at this luridly personified all-in-one target, Ray cracks him good on the lower edge of his jowl. It is a horrid impact of dream-amplified intensity. The bigger man jolts sideways with a motion blur of filthy GM ball cap flying off, shocked facial contortion, then eyes that roll upward before he topples across the bench seat, semi-conscious.

For Ray-not-Ray, this isn’t nearly enough; he rips at the handle and jerks open the door, breath hissing. With the same hand that has hurled the vicious blow, knuckles afire, he reaches for denim and yanks the stricken man out of his truck. This violent action is accompanied by two perceptions at once : that he is no longer himself and feels a loathing begin to rise, and a bluntly audible imprint of his name being shouted above the metallic clatter of train wheels. Right there, cutting through the self-nausea blossoming in his skull even as he pulls the knocked-out man to a thudding splay on the road, a female’s piercing “Ray!” He peers through the moving gaps ahead, between freight cars catching sight of her as she stands beside the Cadillac, driver door open wide, in a brilliant white sundress, both hands cupped around her mouth for the second shout : “Ray! Stop!”

By gods, if it isn’t someone he least expects to see. By all that is sentient and in control of the unknown forces which shape all perceptive realities, if it isn’t a blood-known face below that wide-brimmed hat, beneath those impenetrable glasses, flitting at his eyeballs between passing petroleum cars like a vintage movie frame-chain... and horror, the brittle shock when he sees a length of rope sway-dangling from the noose around her throat.

Thursday’s sleep time hours were much kinder to Jenny of Bright street. She had awakened on that morning with lips benumbed and tingling in a very pleasant dimly recalled way; the passion of long hours spent kissing. Try as she might over coffee, during the ritualistic dressing for work, no other dream details were forthcoming. She knew, however, whose lips she had been tasting. This fed a delicious warmth of anticipation for his next-week arrival, and for the second opportunity in short order, to open herself up and assess what seemed to be unfurling from within. More importantly, to feel for a truth between them and the timing of their sudden connection. As the weekdays flowed forward, Jenny seemed to replace a comfort zone existing between anxious over-analysis and placid acceptance that what would be was going to develop without her influence, worry, hope, or elation.

Thursday for Jenny was a fluid day of routine at work; regular customers bringing their brand of colorful ingredients to a life that had been for so many years washed in shades of grey, and as she did her job... moments of stunning clarity showed themselves to her thoughts, in gentle reminding waves that said “savor how you feel right now”. Who better to know just what life can take away? She’d had a front seat view of the turmoil for far too long, and so it would be her duty to savor this feeling happy, at peace, even hopeful.

A woman of her years and intellect who had been brought into this world by parents unknown, monstrous people who cared nothing about their newborn daughter, and who had survived a harrowing ride through the foster home program... this older wiser version of Jenny was determined to read the tea leaves, as it were, and would act from her heart. In her lucid consciousness during the daylight hours of that week, she accepted that Ray Townes held no guarantee. He had uttered something tender and promising, yes, but carrying emotional strain from attending his father’s funeral, and perhaps lugging more within him than she could ever know.

She would act from a direct intuitive path, with everything to gain; if Ray was to be only a catalyst for the rebirth of active participation in her own life, Jenny would walk away so much stronger. These were her gilded thoughts as she sailed through the same Thursday that had gnawed at Townes during the afternoon, gaining mass and strength over his normally balanced mood, working toward the bed sheet clenching reveal that would haunt his days to departure, back to Toronto and that curiously magnetic mystery woman in her crooked old house.

“Train of thought”... “train wreck”... a strident warning from the otherness, sent via the vessel most attached to his soul, a mother always keenly missed, always a puzzle without solution. Ray woke up sweating, sickened, polluted from the remnant of a dream message that he knew to be laden with meaning. No residual worry ride. A straight up, blunt force warning. He kicked away the sheets to swing his legs out of bed, pushing up to a sitting position. Earliest dawn was pixelating the bedroom. Ray wiped at his face, that awful final visual just behind the eyelids. For the many nights when his mother had appeared in some form or another, be it metaphoric or “sighted”, this was etched in bold italics across the interior of his skull.

He felt a guilt in attaching the timing of meeting Jenny to the puzzle, but there it was, determined to be acknowledged. That oversized bird of prey, origin and species “inconclusive”... the overpowering urge to deviate from plan in order to enter the Logan street diner... the high strangeness of Jenny’s situation coupled with the bizarre tenderness that announced itself to him in her presence, in her kitchen... and finally but probably not finally, this unsettling new case in northwestern Ontario. The most potent vehicle to carry warning to Ray, his tragically lost mother, had been quite clear : “Ray! Stop!” Departure day was on the rapidly approaching Monday. He didn’t have much time to sort out this conflicted mental imbroglio.

Elsewhere. Else time. Queen’s highway number 31. A Buick Skylark of late 80s vintage. “Far from home” he hears the passenger say in a strangled throat. One of the feather quills sails up into the driver’s face with a small spiral motion, catching his eye before he can react. This coincides with a right front tire that replaces soft gravel shoulder adjacent to the blacktop. A mad cackle leaves the crying passenger who whips around to stare at new and sudden movement from the large avian cadaver in the back seat as it bounces to the rhythm of a vehicle losing control.

Over-compensation by the panic-stricken driver leads to a chain reaction of brutal chaotic efficiency. The vehicle is a container for souls in a rendezvous with death unlike any commonly known, for it is a death given to renewed life for that which bounces in the back of the Buick before it enters the final phase of a grotesque orchestration far beyond the scope of mortal human comprehension.