Creation Ranch 19

The complicated problem of dead characters coming to life in my world had to be dealt with and that begins in this chapter

Chapter 19:  Deag

 

 

That was it. 

Three times people had died in my story, novel or not, and then appeared real in my reality.  Something had to be done.  These people had been real enough to be a problem for the police, to say the least, and myself, and had even in their leaving not left the world I lived and wrote in unaffected in at least some previously described manner.  I could not leave Eric and Lora, and the mule too, in a position wherein their spirits were forced to abide in bodies with mortal wounds, perhaps, even in excruciating pain.

Maybe they were actually less than someone’s smoke rising in the air as they exhaled a puff off a cigarette, or the frozen vapors of one’s breath on a very cold day, but they were real in the extent they existed between the lines of the words I wrote on my laptop.  It was true that they were a part of my work here in our reality, and it is possibly true that we are a part of our creator’s works here in that reality which was afforded me and you, all of you.  I think that what I see, is not really me but something beyond who I am between the lines of the sophisticated material our creator used to tell the many coinciding stories he produced in our reality, a fact by the way that renders reading the bible and taking it literally only silly, surely even the Christian God means to say something far more profound than that he is purported to have said in his lines alone, for to say the bible doesn’t mention death until a certain part in the bible is ridiculous for instance, in that it discusses life it assumes you know of death or you would not be able to comprehend what is going on until Cain kills Abel, a fact that was never so to the storyteller who wrote the bible be it Moses or some other author.

Therefore I took Deag and placed him in the literary world I had created, I gave him only the name, I, and let him run with it.

He surprised me and went to a place on the planet I had never been and wrote his name in the sand.  The sand parted as if his finger wrote that name I gave him there. 

“I ,” it said there as he walked about it and looked at it, and I realized my entire story was being re-created by Deag whom the literal me, myself and I had created before in that he existed when I said to Zola what I said in the beginning about not allowing him to be a king.  And between the lines he was saying everything else was not what it had been, and now is not what it was at all, but what I shall make it.  Therefore I breathed a sigh of relief.  Then he went about re-creating the reality I had created the story in to resemble, as much as I could manage, the reality I live and write in, and that you read in.

Finally the one I called, “I,” stood in the midst of the battle in front of the fort in Creation Ranch and said, “Do not do this thing!” as he grabbed Lora by the hand, and raised her up out of the wagon fully healed and in no pain.  Then he reached over and touched the finger of Eric and he immediately was healed and joined Lora there next to Deag, who glanced at the mule which rose to its feet and ran off for its harness disappeared.

The Ghalbans slowed their horses to a stop and when those on foot caught up they all stood in awe of what had happened. 

Eric and Lora began to walk slowly to the fort’s open doors.

However, Sheriff Fom soon stood at the front of the Ghalbans and bravely asked, “Are you Deag?”

“It is as you say.”

Then the sheriff took up  a rifle he requested with a mere gesture from a nearby soldier, and aiming shot it at Deag, who stood his ground, took the high caliber bullet in the heart, and seemed to fall to the ground mortally injured if not already dead.

Everyone stood in awe of what Sheriff Fom had done for quite some time.

When the sheriff recovered he walked to the body of Deag and kicking it in the side said, “Some God!  He is dead, like any other man.”

But as Fom stood there shielding his eyes from the sun he couldn’t help but notice a single line marked his hand as if it had been permanently branded by some straight iron or a molten rod of some kind.

Fom reached in his pocket brought out a rag and attempted to rub the line off the back of his hand.  It would not even begin to spread out let alone disappear.  Therefore he felt of it with his right hand, but found it had no scar he could touch, or feel, and when he looked around he realized there was no odor of burning anything, especially the stench of burning flesh.  So he tried to lick it off, but it never even smeared and he merely tasted the salt of his sweating hand.

He set the rifle on the ground next to the body, looked out into the crowd expecting to see Deag somewhere among the throng, and then mumbled, “I hear you, Lord Deag,” not long before he knelt and kissed the corpse on the lips and began to cry uncontrollably. 

Minutes later he stopped crying and put his own revolver to his head and pulled the trigger, leaving only a portion of his skull still attached to his own corpse as it fell next to the corpse he had made of the Deag.

I asked him, “Deag?  Is he dead?” wondering if he would appear in my apartment.

Deag said, “You must know,” and nothing more at that time.

But I must admit there are many things I do not know about Deag. 

This is only the beginning.