A Bright House
Chapter 46

It resembles a parrot. Floats down from behind and above him with only one wing on its body and a nub of a tail. He ducks involuntarily as it moves past his skull, giving him a close view of the feathery aquamarine-with-emerald tonality of that one wing, which doesn’t move during the glide to a hard landing on pine needles. There, it pushes forward with oddly bent legs and talons to a resting spot, its beak down and little chest heaving, beneath the lower boughs of a coniferous shrub. He sees in its eyes a stricken panic; the very fight for life itself, and in his heart rises a sickly compassion because he knows there is no saving it.

When he bends his knees to peer at the poor thing, something to his right crackles in the forest floor and he sees another fallen bird that is thrashing madly in the crook of a branch. It looks like some mutated form of raven, though its eyeballs are a most brilliant crimson with no pupils or retina, just shining rolling in its head orbs. It drops down from the branch to a thud, breaking its neck, head bent below chest, and the thrashing ceases. “By the unholy gods, man. They are everywhere.” This voice comes from a companion whose suddenly announced self is presented through a thick Irish tongue that arrives from several yards ahead, face turning as he speaks.

He doesn’t recognize this man, in his 17th century garb with a full red beard and wild hair to match his stare. “Look!” the man points to other tree trunks and low lying shrubs all around the two of them in this very dense forest. So shadow thickened that even the light of noon appears as early evening. There are dozens of dying birds, all of an unrecognizable species and in various states of mutation or deformity, moving along the pine bedded ground, attempting to crawl and hide below foliage. The man is then staring directly at him, eyes wider by the second, and he shouts through a syrupy fear -

“What are you doing here? What ARE you?”

Ray felt himself pulled back through whatever astral wormhole he had tripped into, by the sound of his watch alarm. It came to him at once annoying and as a great relief. The motel room was still in darkness. He sat up abruptly against the headboard, rubbing his eyelids with vigor, trying to shake free of the horrible deformed birds and that terror stricken stranger. Is this the kind of day I can expect?

As he showered and dressed, not bothering to shave, Ray wondered at the symbolism. It was all readily apparent, each component a dangling thread from his conscious concerns and subliminal fears. The thunderbird; a mutation, mystery, present as an archetype throughout historical records. A dream landscape that felt to be Ireland, where ley lines and folklore are as much a part of the societal fabric as the potato famine. Townes had seemingly visited a location along the infamous St. Michael’s axis, back into time by centuries, and it had felt so very “real”... the maddening thing was that Ray hadn’t had an opportunity to take note of his own body, of what he was wearing. It was another of the abrupt edits into a place completely free of three dimensional rules, and when he rewound and replayed the dream moments, he could not for the life of him recall where or what he had been, leading into that disturbingly blunt piece of otherworldly script writing.

The plan of the morning hours had been set : he would purchase a coffee and muffin at the Tim Horton’s nearby, then drive to the stretch of roadway where another Buick Skylark had met with a bizarre accident. Next, and most importantly, he would drive to the limits of town and foot it out to the perimeter of the site where people had gone missing and a huge raptor had been witnessed carrying off a young man’s dog. A dog that had returned long afterward, irrevocably changed. Ray had no intention of putting his life on the line. He had belief and respect for the unknown that waited out there in the forest beside a defunct rail line. At the very first sign of physical discomfort, he was going to stop and retreat far enough to remain “safe” yet be able to tune into the odd energy of the location. If he happened upon an Irish fellow, mission aborted. If he saw even one mutated bird, ditto. Suffice to say that Townes went into his Tuesday morning with both eyes forced wide open.

The Tim Horton’s was a small attachment to a larger filling station. Ray ordered a large cranberry muffin and an extra large black coffee. Aside from two burly lumber jacket wearing men who took open note of the stranger walking in, Townes was the only other customer. He received his order and left, glancing over at the men with equal openness, noncommittal in facial expression. It was less friendly here than in Saskatchewan, perhaps a longer thaw time before people would accept newcomers.

The winters were hard on lake Huron and as such there wasn’t much to differentiate between small towns in Ontario or in the region of Ray’s heritage, but prairie people were a whole lot warmer, quicker. He decided to eat the muffin and start his coffee before driving toward Allenford along Queen’s Highway 31. Pre-sunrise light of a gorgeous cobalt and purple had begun to finger trail into nighttime ink, flicking at the bellies of the type of cloud that would later present opportunities for shape replaceing. The oddity and clear symbolic heft of the last dream he had dreamt, did not hold him in its grip as he sipped hot black coffee and munched the cranberry muffin. In fact, he found that his emotional status had stabilized nicely. He had slept long and deeply; it was much needed.

With the muffin eaten and two thirds of a coffee remaining, Ray consulted his road map briefly and keyed the ignition. The scene of the strange accident would be almost an hour’s drive north from Kincardine, near a hamlet named Allenford. Before backing out of the parking lot, Ray did what he had been unconsciously doing since departing the Days Inn; he patted the interior left pocket of his jacket, perhaps in some deeply buried way deriving comfort from its contents.

Just past Kincardine’s civic limits, Townes could see the bright lights and dense building clusters of a massive four reactor Bruce Generating Station that looked, in this rural wilderness, like a big city skyline. This was the largest employer of the region, boasting Candu reactors and stringent safety measures that had not entirely prevented so-called “heavy water” spills from entering lake Huron on several occasions. Public watchdogs were not outspokenly emotive in these smaller towns where employment at a good wage was critical to the local economies.

Entire families and influxes of city cash had arrived during the construction and initial phases of “the Bruce”... Townes glanced from the pretty lavender sky to his right over at the sparkling lights of a hydro plant that had brought him a few phone clients back in the day. People who were considering job opportunities there, worried about long term safety. Did Ray “pick up” anything happening in the future? Driving past the site, only a few short miles from highway 31, Ray was surprised that the memories of psychic readings based around this region had not returned until just then...

Another loop completing itself into a new and improved loop? He drove away from the hydro station and settled into sounds and road feel from the peppy Skylark, which compared to his truck offered a much smoother ride. It was a pleasant stretch of two-lane, not very busy for the early Tuesday hour. Here and there a group of headlights would greet him, heading no doubt toward the power plant for morning shifts. A beaten half-ton truck would rattle past him, in a hurry not explainable to Ray’s way of thinking, as even when he worked the fields and had to make business trips into Regina, he never hurried the way they do in Ontario.

He checked his watch against the slowly unspooling morning’s light, and was pleased that northbound traffic was almost nonexistent. In these far scattered small towns and villages, linked together by farms based around Bruce County beef, pigs, chickens, even the occasional mink ranch, commuting wasn’t common. Aside from the main employer in Bruce Nuclear, each town had its smaller hubs of job sustenance and locals were the workers of choice.

Several towns later, with enough visibility to douse his headlights, Ray arrived upon the stretch of highway 31 that led into the Allenford area. According to his case files, the accident scene would be evident via long wavering tire marks where there were no guardrails, along a straight portion of road about five kilometers from the tiny farming community. Exactly as anticipated, there it was ahead. He eased up on the gas, checked for vehicles behind, and decelerated into a stopping point within that shoulder of road. No traffic along this stretch of route 31. Most of the activity was based around a parallel highway given the numeral 21, which ran directly through several towns that hugged the shores of Huron. Ray killed the motor and left the Buick. He walked back to the very start of dual tire tread marks. His clairvoyance was not an ability equipped with a faultlessly functioning on and off switch, but over the decades he had learned to focus into its indescribable energy, to allow himself to channel it.

He stared at the tire lines, pushed away every external sensory input aside from those long tragic markings. Pungent manure, still frigid wind gusts from a night before, distant barking; these were blocked out in order to go into the story of the event as it lay spread across a hundred and more feet of rural highway. At first the impressions were visceral and physiological; he felt fear coming on, spreading its chill from his belly upward. This was likely the driver’s energy imprint. It would reside along this portion of roadway for eternity, where the man’s entire future collapsed before his eyes as he fought to control the car. Ray walked slowly then, along the duration of that fatal skid, hearing it, almost smelling it. Only the driver was coming to him, and even that felt limited to the man’s final moments of realization. The twin marks veered sharply right, leaving the roadway for a steep incline down into a rolling field that appeared to be idle land, not farmed.

Evidence clearly stated that this driver had a large avian passenger in the back seat. This man’s blood spatter wrote a partial chapter from where the vehicle had stopped rolling, so Ray left the shoulder to intuitively follow what he thought might be the Buick’s out of control trajectory. What an awful brevity, mortal lives can be. For those who worshiped, devoutly at the altar of an all-powerful God who “moves in mysterious ways”, what cold comfort could be found in these daily shortened life stories? Someone, a good person wanting to help another soul, had paid an ultimate human price for that. This much was clear to Townes as he sadly strode into the field, envisioning that tumbling crumpling vehicle, not able to tune in the more elusive details.

Only one human blood type was found in the vehicle. Despite that, it was clear to Townes that the driver had stopped to pick up another person in distress, rather than simply seeing a large injured bird on the road. This was pure gut-feel. The deceased had been in the Goderich area during the last day of his earthly life, and it was a short connection point between that fact and another man who had arrived from “nowhere” and subsequently vanished with absurd finality. Feathers of unknown origin, just like the one in Ray’s medicine pouch, tied it all together. ”But as what?" he asked of wind tossed distant tree tops. There were no answers there, only hunches for a clairvoyant mind. Ray returned to the road and suspected that the other man, the one who had been named Rich, had been the dead driver’s front seat passenger.

It wasn’t something that Ray would share with investigators, at least not until some solid manner of evidence would support what he felt to be true. The second part of his psychic feeling, and one far more disturbing for Ray and Jenny personally, involved the true identity of the come and go man who had named himself in part for the town of his abbreviated mysterious stay. Townes reentered the more fortunate of two Buick Skylarks, turned it around on that quiet morning’s two-lane, then headed back toward Kincardine and his next rendezvous with the unknowable. The vanishing point. A vortex. Ley line electromagnetic doorway. Indeed, as the occultists might have called it, Chapel Perilous.

Three hours drive to the southeast, Jenny awoke in her sloping master bedroom into a feeling that recalled distant hangovers of her youth, rare as they were. It took a shower, a cup of coffee, and two slices of whole wheat toast with butter and strawberry jam before Jenny realized that she felt beaten up, emotionally. Quick as a snap from magician fingers, or a hypnotist’s prearranged cue, her elation over Monday’s moments with Ray had been sucked away. Gone. She had slipped into worry after their brief phone exchange. Doorways had opened of their own volition, for certainly she did not want to be unhappy. The final waking hours of Monday evening had been of her attempted reading and infernal distraction.

She must have had dreams. Potent and not pleasant, but resistant to recall as she frowned in her kitchen. It made her feel ill to quell the concern for Ray, to not give it voice as every bit of her had wished to do with a follow-up phone call. It made little “sense”, the urgency of that panic for Ray’s safety, and it was so easy to attribute it to her well-tended prior history of loss... never mind that; this was intense and would not cease. Something was going to go wrong and she knew it. It was quite possible that her and Ray had crossed paths just so that she could save him from whatever was about to take place. The ways of “reality” were of no sound methodology; a fathomless eternal quantum bundle of anything goes and usually does.

Yet, even then, in such a gloomy certainty that the penny was about to land hope-side-down, Jenny could not act. She didn’t reach for the phone. She didn’t allow herself the freedom to express more passionately her concerns to Ray. Jenny slipped into the easier approach; the one where she could carry all of the strain so that he wouldn’t think her strident or pushy. She had become so tragically accustomed to her own emotional pain, this would be just another punch in the heart space, should something horrible happen and she have to continue on in the knowledge that she didn’t act upon her strongest impulses. To call and implore him - please Ray, turn around. Stop before it is forever too late.