Chapter 8

sorry for the delay, promise to have a few chapters done within the week. Honest

They stopped giving me morphine eventually and before I knew it I was awake and aware, sitting up and eating green jello. My chest was tightly wrapped with fresh linen and the doctors declared me hale and healthy. It was pretty funny watching a man of science stare at my chart and wonder how I was awake, let alone alive.

 

The bullet was stopped by my sternum and was an inch away from killing me, even so the impact should have crushed my ventricles or shattered every rib in my body. I shrugged and told the doctor I was just lucky, his hard intelligent face showed his astonishment. He just shrugged and put my chart back on the little hook at the end of my bed.

 

Charles walked in and nodded at me, with one hand he closed the door softly and looked out the rectangle of a window for a minute before turning around, his tan trenchcoat was still wet from the pounding rain that I could hear drumming the roof like a thousand marching soldiers. He held a book against his chest and I nearly jumped out of the bed in happiness, instead I did my best to smile.

 

"Where was it?"

 

My voice was coming back and I no longer talked in pained whispers.

 

Tossing the heavy leather tome on my legs he sat down on the plastic chair and looked at me in silence.

 

Ignoring his scrutiny I flipped the pages and smiled at the equations, tilted poetry and the indecipherable sigils that ran down the margins like binary code. It felt like reading a book in a dream, an impossible act under normal circumstances, the scratches and scribbles came into focus and I found myself reading a dis-jointed poem I had written three years ago.

 

 

 

 

Painted lines on a rotting body, carried over a raging flood / Howls and songs show him the way, a familiar beacon in a frghtening storm / A funeral pyre is a light-house for all the newly dead.

 

The words seemed new to me, the hidden meaning teasing me, almost mocking me. Or maybe there was no meaning and the words were as plain as the pain in my chest.

Charles coughed and I looked up at him, I noticed he was about to say something so I folded a corner of the page and sat it down.

 

"Doctor says you're fine, took that shot like a champ."

 

His overly enunciated words were thick with his Wisconsin accent, he ran his hand down his long face, colorful tattoos visible on the front of his hands.

 

"But we can't just stop, somebody isn't playing by the rules and seems like the rule keepers stopped caring. This is worse than someone taking a poke at you, it's about (a-boot) open war. What happened after that party?"

 

I looked at my empty jello cup and pushed the little red button next to my head rest, Charles looked like he was ready to put another bullet in me as I patiently waited for the nurse. Her radiant face and bobbed curls made me smile genuinly and I even said 'please' when I asked for more.

 

Little plastic spoon in my mouth I collected my thoughts and told Charles everything that happened up to finding him in my ransacked apartment. By the end I was looking at another empty plastic cup.

 

Charles was sitting forward, his hands in a steeple in front of his face as he thought about everything I told him, trying to find any detail I may have missed. Looking up over his index fingers he asked me about the men in the car, the ones that rolled by me while I sat at the second diner.

 

"Long car, looked like a Lincoln town car, no plates and four guys that looked like extras from a mobster movie. Couldn't catch their faces but they sure seemed out of place to me."

 

"It's odd that they knew where you were, even stranger is that the watcher was waiting for you when you came to earlier that day. Almost like he was waiting for you."

 

I shrugged and flipped through the book while still looking at Charles, my fingers feeling the pages as they fluttered and passed,

 

"Or maybe he was the reason I showed up there. I've never jumped to a place I hadn't known before, it must have been him."

 

Chewing on his thumbnail Charles looked off in the distance, I could tell his brain was moving, I could practically hear the gears turning. His intelligence always astounded me, without him I probably would have been locked up in some asylum, my reality shattered by years of seeing things that couldn't possibly exist. It was nearly twenty years ago that I met Charles, in Brazil of all places, he looked younger then and he was with a group of college students, observing a dig. I was doing alot of mescaline in those days and didn't have a real good idea what I was doing in the tropics.

 

We had both been there when the dirt fell away and those poor kids found that stone tablet. I don't know who was more suprised, me at seeing this college professor pull an ancient hebrew medallion from his pocket or him seeing the unshavenm drugged out, wanderer float in the air and somehow hold back the storm of power that erupted from the cracked tablet. We saved all those kids that day and we got to know each other over drinks at the little bar I was spending my nights at.

 

A lot of crazy s**t went down after that but we somehow figured it out, him with his analytical mind and access to huge storehouses of knowledge and me mainling LsD and doing magic. It took him a long time to accept what I did was magic and it wasn't until we came across a mad man wearing a goats skull for a hat and holding a giant black book of inverted words that he finally broke down and accepted that the magic of the world flowed through some individuals like a river cutting through a valley.

 

The one thing always got to him was the concept of the watchers, a group of beings that made it a point to observe magicians and wizards, keep them from burning reality down like a rotting woodshed, and always stay out of the affairs of normals. Normals, like Charles, so he never saw them in any form, only had me to believe and the testimony of other mentally unbalanced people to work with, Gods, or aliens, or advanced humans, or just the collective hallucination of a few ultra-powerful beings with already fragile minds, they were always a question mark and I could tell that always bothered him.

 

I looked at the cover of my book, the wrinkled leather that was pulled tight over the wooden binding, the yellowed pages that reminded me so much of my uncles library and the smell of old ink and dry paper.

 

"What about Karrey?" I felt mildly guilty that I hadn't asked about her right way but I was afraid of what I would hear.

 

"She's fine, scared, but okay."

 

I looked at the door expecting her to walk in the room as if on cue.

 

"Where is she?"

 

Charles pulled down the sleeve of his trenchcoat and frowned,

"I bought her a plane ticket back to Texas. Last thing we need is a girl following us and the last thing you need is distractions. Besides you know what happens to any groupies that start to take a liking to you."

 

That hurt but he was right, nodding in agreement I swung my legs over the bed. I wobbled and managed to stand. My chest still hurt but it was stitched up and nothing was broken so I was technically good to go. Charles stood and picked up my book, I still felt stoned from the painkillers and a stupid smile was plastered on my face.

 

"Where to, Capitan?"

 

Opening the door carefully Charles smiled,

"Holand, unless your invisible friend was lying, our best lead lies with whoever caught a giant one-eyed salmon."

 

I thought about Holand, I had never been there before,

"Cool."

 

The hospital hallway was empty at this time of night and me and Charles walked out, I looked at my paper dress and wondered if they'd let me on a plane wearing a hospital gown covered with little blue flowers.

Reviews

[shafa]

Good continuation, like the paragraph formatting, keeps the story from appearing jumpy. Did you ever give a good description of what Charles looks like? For some reason I picture him as morgan freeman in the dark knight? i dunno maybe just because its early and i'm tired.