A Bright House
Chapter 48

The razor sharp tonality of that keening rip of a sound... Ray looks to the general direction of its source from within the green wall of conifers, suppressing a tremor that shakes at his knees. It is a sound both plaintive and hungry. Just once does it cry out across the rolling fields and densely packed trees. Instantly familiar, immediately warning, beckoning. You want answers? Here they come. Even if you turn and run back, it is too late. Of course he will proceed. This shows every indication of being the threshold of highest importance to Ray’s existence thus far. He must pass through it, or at the very least confront it, in order to continue on his enlightened walk.

He decides to leave the band of ties and gravel between parallel rails, to walk alongside in the dry grasses that are being inexorably replaced with Spring’s new green shoots. His eyes remain fixed hard upon the general direction from which that cry issued, though he sees no movement other than resumed wind to leaf interaction. Another glance at the frozen watch face coincides with his first very odd feeling, cranium based and akin to a sudden introduction of mild electrical current. It reminds him of those large bulky green hydro generator boxes, plastered with warnings, that used to hum and buzz with implied threat near his school. Ray stops to assess this sensation; such a beautiful morning on the weather unfold, at odds with what seems to lie in waiting up ahead.

What he next perceives inside his skull is similar to what he would imagine the feeling of carbonation must be, if it could attain an emotional human descriptive tag. His very blood, the rarest type on earth amongst his species, seems then to be affected by a new energy source, initially the beginnings of a simmer to arrive with each forward step. Ray continues to walk. He is two football field lengths away from the location where Kevin May and Will Pritchard were taken from this reality into another. Or were relocated to a place unknown by forces beyond scientific proving. Both.

A hundred yards more, and the blood buzz has increased to a degree that embroiders discomfort with a trillion tiny needles. He is committed to whatever may be, even with the knowledge of a suicidal recklessness as its kernel of truth. Ray steps abruptly down to his right, a hard forty five degrees and with large strides off of the rise that holds the old tracks. Into the thigh-high grass and weaving quickly through copses of bush that dot the field in clumps until the thickly packed forest swallows up this wide open acreage.

As he is striding toward those trees, the beehive in his cerebellum sends out soldiers into the rest of his cardiovascular network. They light him up with stingers from head to toe, though the cumulative discomfort has not yet reached the limit of what he can stand. Thoughts are not forming, at this point. He is breathing hard and watching his shoes move. Everything but his buzzing innards has been muted, pushed away. Ray feels like a man running toward a cliff edge. There is a sickly intoxicating freedom within this manner of illogical following. The same rush with a different name. That headlong pathreplaceer’s addiction. It that has shaped all of his years in coping with life as a mutant. A seer. What do you see now?

I see me enacting the psychic flash of earlier. The path is morphing and I am following blindly, adapting or else. He has to exert a monumental will to stop walking for a moment. The blood in his earthly body has reached a simmer, and now comes the initial drumming of eon tribes, distantly but approaching, encroaching, from the base of his skull and fast upward around in flickers of bass heavy stabbing. Ray looks to the map, his notations and the circled swath of forest where the Universe has mocked investigators and doubters both. A bright cherry drop of blood hits the paper, then another, without audible sound due to his rizzing head. Oh, so now I bleed. I went from a plan of caution to the frontier of self destruction, just like that.

Ray’s nose is bleeding from the right nostril. Steady heavy drips that land on the map in syncopation with the eon tribe’s ancient rhythms. Planet Earth is speaking through skins and mallets, disasters and miracles. He is a baby in a man’s illusion, and now it is payment time. Doesn’t make sense. I am losing it here. What was only moments before a lucid cognizant being, one with a survivalist notion, has within minutes been replaced by a dumbstruck mannequin that stands in an open field with a bleeding nose. He watches the red splotches fall, splat, spread out, seemingly stuck between decisions and lacking free will. It is his me-first rebellious impulse to look away from the bloodied map, but his eyeballs are pulsing and at first the pain is such that he cannot move them. Like I am drunk. Like the world’s worst acid trip.

Ray winces and forces his eyelids shut. He lifts the map to wipe it across his nostrils, blowing, then tosses it away. Reopening his eyes is an agony wave. They open to teary vision and he looks at the bloodied map, caught up in grass that wind-waves cheerily as only a mocking jokester Universe would have it. He wipes again at his nose, with the other hand, and Delsin’s braid becomes anointed with the blood of his son. Timing essence timing timing. This is what comes next; if a pilot were to be flying overhead at low altitude, in a Cessna or something small and similar, the sight of a man standing alone in a long band of open field would be nothing spectacular. If that pilot were to notice the alarming visual of a very large eagle-type raptor suddenly appearing from tree tops nearby, things would become infinitely more intriguing. The pilot might then understandably forget about the man with the long braided hair who stands still, looking down at his hands, in order to gasp and follow with disbelieving eyes a wingspan of some twelve to fourteen feet. Well in excess of a Harpy Eagle or any other known specimen for the region.

In fact, this pilot is there. He is flying low due to an imminent landing at Kincardine’s small airport, some distance away but it is habit for this flier to enjoy spotting deer and black bear, foxes, wolves, coyotes, during his flights. He has made it a point to take this path, a little out of his normal route, since the bizarre events that occurred at this location. Seeing the huge bird lift off has him wheeling about in a wide arc to come back, left wing banked as far as he dares. His turning brings hard sunlight into the cockpit, diamonds exploding through the glass, and he sees how few flaps of those terrifying wings it takes for the bird to cover distance from roosting place to that rooted-in-place man. From three hundred feet as he banks left for a return pass, morning sun highlights the fluid motion of the raptor’s giant wings below him. It swoops over the man and slices into a dive as the Cessna’s shadow spills across the unfolding melodrama.

The pilot throttles back and continues his prescribed left circle, dropping altitude in order to get a very good view this time around. There is something else, now. Through the left side pane of glass he sees that the man has dropped to a kneeling position, hands flat on his thighs. The bird has both wings fully extended with the tips splaying in a final landing posture that will set it down a dozen feet from the kneeling man. “What the holy hell is happening here?” The pilot is held so rapt by the strangeness below that he doesn’t at first notice the unusual light emanating from within the trees beneath his arcing aircraft. It is a peripheral attention grabber, but with a steeper left bank he peers through his window and can see what looks strangely like shimmering sparkling snow cover. A glittering from the forest floor in brilliant star bursts. “Fuck?” His voice coincides with a sudden cutting out of engine noise as the motor goes dead.

He must act immediately. She won’t restart despite his practiced hands. Wind noise assails the cockpit and he is losing altitude rapidly, though the Cessna will coast long enough for him to land if he can replace a spot that won’t destroy her frame and kill him along with it. The man and giant “eagle” are instantly forgotten as his mind goes into a spiral of what now what now? He straightens her out and clears the perimeter of forest to the west of the rail tracks, heading south and fighting to stay calm as he scours the rolling ground for a place to set her down. Directly below and visible suddenly as movement past his right shoulder, a rolling mist has appeared from within the tree trunks. It spills outward like self-lit vapor, obliterating the blend of brown and green hues from grass blades either dead or reborn. The pilot, whose morning began comfortably and ritualistically, enters a new phase of terror. It replaces his professional calm, sucks away the thousands of amassed flight hours. Airborne experience is snatched up by this huge expanding cloud of a type of localized unexplainable fog that he has never before encountered.

At this point it is behind him, rising quickly as he is losing altitude to the tune of oh my god a hundred feet. He must rip his eyes away from the pursuing fog bank to replace a landing spot, which of course doesn’t exist. It will have to be a plane wrecking impact. He braces himself and levels her out, sits high up in the seat with staring eyes through stilled prop blades. As luck would not have it, this section of field is filled with steep dips and thick stands of shrub and scattered saplings. The Cessna’s nose drops and he closes his eyes, gnashes his front teeth together, bracing...

Hundreds of yards to the north, Ray Townes is on his knees. What was once his brain has become a heartbeat fed detonation. Wooom, ooomm, oooom. His conscious self swims for dear life within that deafening blood sickness rhythm, admonishing him for this utmost in stupidity; to willingly place himself here, alone. He is as far from making love to Jenny, or from holding a grandchild on his knee, as any mocking turn of events would have it. From behind him a chain reaction of sounds to splinter away this internal halo of agony; an approaching small plane and something else, closer and more directly above. There is no clairvoyance available through this caterwaul that was once a mind. He sees its shadow whipping across the grass before him, prescribing a tight turn, growing larger. A second shadow, that of the airplane, crisscrosses through this tableaux at a higher rate of speed. Ray fights the distraction of his affected body to see what is landing gracefully, horribly, only a room’s width away.

It is beautiful. So beautiful. Each wing tip has a savage primordial design, splayed for maximum drag as the massive bird sets down into the grasses which collapse beneath the weight of its legs and torso. Ray wipes with the bloody braid-wrapped hand at his tearing eyes, utters a moan that many souls may have released upon viewing this creature at close range. He cannot swallow. Thunderbird squares up, pivots in the grass to face the man directly. The wings fold into its body, that sound drowning in aircraft noise that suddenly cuts out, leaving only Ray’s gasping breath within the lake Huron driven winds. A man’s eyes. A creature’s eyes. They lock up then, forming a tunnel of shared acuity that seems astride two worlds. An impenetrable new reality, right here now. Townes is in agony, but he feels it as his body and not the mind created for him. If, he, can, only, separate... this creature resembles an eagle in facial construction, though the feathers are an incredible coppery bronze around the skull and neck that flows into a chest of butterscotch and gold flecks, all of this resolved into extremities that are a rich chestnut red on the exterior.

The thing is very tall, made more imposing by a wickedly curved black and amber beak and eyes beyond linguistic telling. Ray has seen many raptor eyes, though nothing like these. Nearing the reptilian, they are intricate and impossibly backlit, even with morning sunshine flowering the bird’s head in a diffused photon bath. Colors run riot within the eyeballs, first impression a sparkling copper but sharing with undertones of every shade of green, rivulets of crimson edged fissures within the retinae, and pupils blacker than deep space.

It is here then, staring across the dozen feet of anything is about to happen, where Ray’s perception of time itself undergoes subjective radical surgery. He wipes again at his eyes, then the bleeding nostril, and hears a harsh sound from behind him. Metal buckling, metal bouncing, buckling, folding, wood snapping. It isn’t enough to make him turn around, not that he can even if he wants to... he is lost inside those hard staring orbs. The thing sits immaculately still now, with wind ruffling at its majestic feathered form, and it is in the expression of those eyes that time becomes a slurry of nanosecond altering syrup.

The first expression is nothing short of menace. Ray sees the ageless hunger of all things living in mortal housing. It must feed. There is a viciously simple wanting in that stare. The human inventions, the arts and philosophical trimmings of soul searches over centuries of “enlightened growth”, all mean nothing here. That is artifice against the purity of this type of hunger and brutal efficiency. He would be torn apart and dying right this second, if this was what the gigantic avian wanted... but for whatever reason there is this pause. Townes is half-there, afflicted from within by the anomalous energies of the locale; his vaunted clairvoyance is extinguished by brain stem override. He cannot know what his own eyes are sending, but in his heart of hearts it is not the will to live that defines this two-species eye exchange. Ray can feel through the hot tears of pain and exploding emotion, his soul-deep question. It must be clearly evident, for the hard eyes of Thunderbird begin to change complexity.

Do they soften? There is a predominant brow above the eyes of many birds of prey, one which gives them an appearance of anger, menace. This ridge shifts position from an angled slant into a more horizontal plane. Ray sees the pupils, easily the circumference of a man’s two thumbs pressed together, open into a larger less black aperture. He winces anew, a huge throbbing skull bomb imploding briefly from within its foundation of pain, and musters the energy and focus needed to extend his hand straight out, palm facing up. Delsin Shacapot’s long braid, now bloodied in places, is wrapped around and around, a short length hanging free of Ray’s unconscious gesture. He sees his arm is shaking badly. For a moment he takes his eyes away from the unreadable stare of Thunderbird to watch Delsin’s Cree hair sway from a gust of wind that has traveled across miles of open water to wish upon the landscape, so many dreams and ancient memories that recycle endlessly during the abbreviated span of a human’s lifetime. Do they soften, then?

It is “human nature” to affix humanity’s subjective overlay to the ingredients of so-called reality. Ray Townes cannot help but to perceive a new expression within the beautiful terrifying eyes of that which stands twelve short feet away. The head tilts ever so slightly, a stare seeming to move from Ray’s own to the hand-wrapped braid, and there is what he wants to define as “confusion” therein. Perhaps, recognition? A briefest clearing of agony arrives, a distraction from behind them again when a long hoarse bellow disguised inside a man’s vocal cords speaks for the billions of lives that transform from one energy type into another, daily... the pilot, Ray realizes.

Thunderbird shifts position suddenly. It seems to stand taller. Its wings unfold slowly into a half open splay that is held in place. Ray looks deep into the eyes, trying to replace something there. Thunderbird rears up its regal head, looking skyward for a moment, then back to the kneeling bleeding man with his shaking arm extended across unseeable thresholds.

Ray cannot replace his voice. Too much pain. He fights with all that he can muster, a need to buckle and vomit. His arm has begun to feel like stone, trembling between choices and fates. Thunderbird’s eyes harden again, the blackness of its pupils enriched by a narrowing of them, and it opens its horrid beak very slowly, a mere inch but as if to speak. Townes will be surprised by nothing, not even the voice of Delsin Shacapot which he half expects to hear, but when the raptor leaps forward in lightning quick inertia it is Ray who surprises himself by lunging to his feet into a mindless pivot that breaks forth as a survive-or-die sprint in the direction of a thick bank of cloying fog that has manifested from nowhere just south of them.

Townes runs to it. He runs like the wind. Like a dreaming runner with untold speed, an antithesis to most dreams of flee-to-live. He hears the awful flap of giant wings so close behind him. The thunderbird tattoo on his back burns like a devil’s laughter.