"You understand human loss and suffering,"
the voice said at midnight. "We have need of you."
Forty-eight-year-old Cynthia Gatenburg gasped and
looked quickly around the darkened motel room. She had never heard voices
before in her entire life.
Still, it didn't strike her as improbable that she'd
hear them now. The constant pain was becoming intolerable since she had
run away from the hospital and abandoned her medication. It made it
difficult to focus on the task at hand. Maybe she was becoming delirious.
She tried again to concentrate on the circle of light
cast by the desk lamp. One empty prescription bottle rolled in a
semicircle and dropped off the edge of the table. She ignored it, opened
the second bottle and dumped its contents to the desktop. One by one, she
continued opening the capsules and tapping the white powder into a plastic cup containing six ounces of wine. She finished her task and
used both hands to steady the cup, then brought its rim quickly to her
lips.
"Please, don't."
There was a dark figure standing in the room to go
with the voice this time.
Cynthia started violently and spilled some of her
precious concoction. Only the fact that the intruder was a pleasant
looking young woman kept her from panicking altogether. The woman stood
in the shadows by the bed with her hands folded before her.
"We need you," the stranger said, and this time, her
voice sounded normal. "Come to us and you will leave the pain behind. We
can give you back everything you have ever lost."
Cynthia's hands trembled. She set the cup down and
stared in confusion at the apparition. The woman had to be a figment of
her imagination. There was nowhere in the small motel room for her to
have hidden. There were no windows through which she could have climbed,
and the door was still closed and locked.
"My name is Joyce Blair," the woman said. "I live
about forty miles from here, or at least I used to. You have been
reminiscing all evening, and we couldn't help but overhear. It's
something I've thought of doing myself in the past. I don't think my own
reasons were very admirable, though. I was in pain, but I wasn't ill."
Cynthia wasn't about to talk to the stranger, not
until she had eliminated the unsettling possibility that she was dealing
with a figment of her own tormented imagination.
"I know you're in pain," the ghostly figure said. "We can feel it as well. But if you come to us, the cancer and the pain
will be left behind."
"Who are you?" Cynthia managed to whisper through
chattering teeth.
The strange woman stepped into the light and held her
hand beneath the table lamp. Cynthia could see right through it.
Her reaction was a spontaneous cry. She tossed the
plastic cup into the air and dumped herself over backwards in her chair. She rolled onto her hands and knees, and crawled to the far corner of the
room.
"We can give you back your husband and child," the
transparent woman said, "in a manner of speaking. We can give you back
your health and a purpose for your life. Will you come?"
Her husband and child? Walter's sweet smile and
loving embrace? Three-year-old Gary's trusting brown eyes? They were
both dead. How could anyone undo the horror of Walter's heart failure at
age twenty-eight? No one had even known he had been ill. How could
anyone hope to reverse the horror of finding Gary dead in his crib six
months later, his neck caught between the bars of his crib and his face
turned livid blue? That had been five years ago. And now this, her cancer.
And madness to top it off.
Joyce crouched before her. "I can guide you to us. If you change your mind, you have two more bottles of pills in your
purse. We won't try to stop you again."
Cynthia brushed tears from her eyes. "Who are you? How do you know so much about me? Are you an angel?"
"An angel." The apparition held her hands out before
her. "We would have never thought of ourselves in that way. An angel." She laughed lightly. "We do have an angel with us. And an apparition
from heaven? We do, indeed, although it is not what anyone would expect.”
Joyce Blair suddenly emanated expansive feelings of
peacefulness and joy. Cynthia had the strangest feeling that she was a
bird flying above fog-enshrouded forests. Her joyful cries echoed out
over the landscape.
She could feel the presence of the other people as
well. Their lives and their consciousness blended together in strange
fashion. Where their beings overlapped existed a largely unfilled
emptiness, an awareness without an identity. It was this emptiness they
needed her to help fill.
Nearby, there was a man and a boy, just as Joyce
Blair had promised, and a pain in those two lives every bit as intense as
her own.
"You know nothing of human loss and suffering!"
John Hartman had cried, and Cynthia understood with startling clarity
exactly how she was needed and the role she would play in the unfolding
drama. She would be unique among them, one who could bring to their
circle the life experience of a wife and mother.
"You have nothing to lose," the apparition said. "You have everything to gain. Please come."
"But I'm dying!" Cynthia cried and clutched her
stomach to contain the sudden pain the excitement caused. Any violent
outburst hurt more than she could bear. The cancer was in the bone of her
pelvis, but it had spread to her entire abdominal area and up her spine to
her swollen glands in her armpits. Her only options in life boiled down
to a torturous death in a hospital, or the quicker and far less painful
ending offered by her concentrated dose of sleeping and pain medication.
Joyce shrugged off her concern. "Doesn't matter." She held out her translucent hand to view one more time. "Look at what I
have become. I have no flesh and blood at all. Join us, and the cancer
is left behind."
Seductive feelings and images poured through her like
a waking dream. She was being given a taste of what it would be like to
join the strange group. She understood nothing of its nature or origin,
but she could see that it was alive and dynamic, and she sensed no
deception.
It did not try to hide the fact that it was no longer
entirely human. Obviously, it was something far greater. Not having a
body of its own didn't seem like such a great disadvantage, given it's
ability to see so clearly into the minds of people around it. To anyone
else, what she was being shown would have been a horror, but she did not
want to die, and this was her only way out.
Cynthia drew her arms over her head and wept
hysterically. Inwardly, she calmly weighed her options.
"Get your things," Joyce said, clearly aware of the
decision that had been made. "Leave this place. You will be driving
south along the coast to a town called Eagle Junction."
It was another hour before Cynthia struggled to her
feet. Sniffing back tears, she put her medication back in her purse. She
left the motel room key in the lock on her way out.
She let the engine of her car idle long enough for
the heater to take the chill of the night away, then studied her gas
gauge. She had enough gas to go forty miles. She had no money for more. If the apparition was the product of her own insanity and she ran out of
gas before reaching the destination Joyce Blair had promised, she would
simply add the remaining medication to the small bottle of wine in her
purse and put herself out of her misery alongside the highway. Joyce
Blair had no physical presence with which to stop her.
She drove at forty-five miles an hour to compensate
for the pain that robbed so much of her ability to concentrate on the road
ahead. Twice she dropped onto the shoulder of the highway. Once she
wandered across the center line and narrowly avoided a head-on collision
with a passing camper. The drive through the gloomy night would have been
torture except for a beautiful sliver of a crescent moon gleaming out over
the calm Pacific.
"Turn here," the voice of Joyce Blair said half hour
later.
Cynthia turned inland at the intersection, leaving
the moon and the ocean behind her. She reached Eagle Junction having
heard nothing more. She drove at twenty-five miles an hour through the
brightly lit gauntlet of service stations, motels and stores, then brought
her speed up to sixty along the darkened blacktop beyond. She clutched
the steering wheel fearing she had fallen for a foolish dream of a
deranged mind.
Wishful thinking, all of it.
"Stop here."
Cynthia took her foot from the accelerator, but she
saw nothing but wilderness beyond the glow of her headlights. Frightened
of the desolation, she drove on, not about to stop in the middle of
nowhere at the command of a disembodied voice.
Ahead, Joyce Blair appeared in the glare of her
headlights. Cynthia jammed on her brakes, reacting entirely by reflex. The car broad-slid through the apparition, and dropped off the shoulder of
the blacktop. The rear of the car fell into the shallow drainage ditch
and slid, giving her no ability to negotiate the sharp curve ahead.
The car rebounded up onto the road and impacted
against a dark wall of trees on the other side. Her seatbelt became a
steel band across her chest and stomach. The airbag in her steering wheel
exploded in her face at the same instant.
The soft whumping sound and a sudden glare and
searing heat of spreading flames galvanized her to further action. The
air became too hot to breathe in an instant. She fumbled for her seat
belt with one hand and the door latch with the other, and tumbled out into
the dew-ladened underbrush an instant before flames engulfed the driver's
seat.
She crawled on hands and knees away from the
inferno. The explosion behind her lifted the back end of the car off the
ground and sent a shockwave of superheated air to singe her exposed skin
and hair. Only then did she take a moment to climb to her feet and
stagger blindly into the merciful coolness and dark of the night.
Except that her purse had been left behind in the
flames and with it, her pills and wine and her only easy way out of the
world. She turned and cried out in despair.
Joyce Blair stood before her, blocking her retreat. "You won't need your pills, Cynthia. We are just a few steps away."
A swath of dim golden light appeared behind her,
crossing the highway and climbing a low slope of a hill not otherwise
visible in the darkness.
“Remember the Wizard of Oz?”
Cynthia giggled in subdued hysteria, oblivious to the
sound of men calling to one another in alarm from somewhere nearby.
“Follow the yellow brick road.”
She walked up the gentle slope and the lighted
staircase to heaven. When she reached a wall of trees, she went inside
and looked down at a starlit sky reflected from overhead. She paused at
the precipice, hoping she wasn't being asked to throw herself off.
"Do you have the courage?"
She relived the brief memories of others when they
had been tricked into falling into the mirror and understood that it was
important that her participation be of her own free will. More than any of
the others, she would have to answer to David Hartman and assure the boy
that she had joined the group voluntarily and for good reason.
Leaving behind nothing but a chronic sense of
hopelessness and the end of an unsatisfactory existence, she spread her
arms and leaped into the stars.
Novels by
William G. Tedford