WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) (36 page)

Confrontation

Maw Sue, my mystic great grandmother had her own thoughts as to what
occurred the night of my birth. 
Her reality of the situation was met with much skepticism
.  It didn’t detour her from doing what she had to do. 
She knew the outcome could mean life or death. The dreadful shadows were alert and feeding o
ff the energy of a new subject.  Me,
the new newborn rook
ie, to test, to torture, to try. 
Shadow Amodgians grow bored with the same lackluster humans, day in and day out, so the challenge of a newborn makes them crazy festive, almost cheery because it
allows them to test their skills and try new things.  They even bet with other Amodgians on what test will win, or fail as if humans were just pawns in their games. 

Maw Sue knew this all too well, which meant I was in imminent danger and time was of the essence.  She left the hospital under
duress.  On her way out of the hospital, she started to feel the pressure of the resistance, an invisible presence, a knife hedged before her, behind her, all around her.  A stifling oppression almost unbearable.  She had ran from it many times, if not all the time.  But this time—she could not.  She would not.  She knew she had to push through for my sake.  It did not want Maw Sue to succeed at her thoughts, her plans.  Everything came against her, man and machine, nature and animals.  She could hear her rapid heart beating through her chest as she walked the fast pace of the hospital floor towards the elevators.  Every click of her feet a demon stepped in front, behind, around.  She could feel them grow and multiply by the seconds. 
She
stopped at the elevator and pressed the down button.  Her eyes flitted and her body felt panicky, on the verge of breaking.  She wondered if she had brought her pills with her.  Her mind a mess, she couldn’t think straight.  “
I must get home, I must get home
”, she whispered to the air. Ding!  The elevator doors began to open, so she impatiently stepped forward to squeeze inside impulsively.   Her thoughts rushing ahead of her steps.  Move, rush, go,
get
home.   Startled, she was unable to step in.  She was met with a sea of white coats, and a patient on a rolling bed cart.  There was not an inch of space to get in.  She noticed the odd looks on their faces, as if they had no human emotions and she could see the dark in their eyes, as if they were simply mannequins, put there to thwart her from getting inside. 
She fe
ll back a few steps, startled and flinched when the patient sat up spontaneously, like a loaded spring.  The bandaged bloody woman was her mother.  “Going somewhere Susannah?”  She said viciously with blackened eyes. 

Maw Sue flipped out and ran down the hall towards the staircase, and down the steps and into the night.  She didn’t bother to pull out her umbrella, she just wanted to get out of there and get home.  But it wasn’t over, it was just beginning.  Her car key did not unlock her door, so she rattled and inserted, over and over again.  Lightning and thunder boomed and she thought for a moment she would be struck dead.  Then, it worked as it had always done, up until this moment.  She got inside the cab soaked to the bone. 
She cranked the car and pulled out of the hospital parking lot, only for the rain to become a torrential downpour,
making it hard for her to drive.  A rally of bizarre
lightning
bolts lit up the distant sky, illuminating the outskirts of the sidewalks on each side of her, and in those brief flashes, the white coat nurses, ghostly in figure, stood, one after another.  “No.  It couldn’t be.  It’s just your mind. Drive on.  Get home. It’s the curse”, Maw Sue said.  That’s when a crop of doves out of nowhere hit the windshield, causing her to swerve and stop on the side of the road.  She gathered her wits and floored it.  She didn’t let off the gas pedal, despite the ominous weather.  She simply drove
like the crazy woman everyone thought she was.

Finally home, she skidded to a halt in the driveway, barely missing th
e shed. She ran up on the porch, pausing for breath, and holding the post rail to steady herself.  The power of the gift activated was almost too much to bare.  For years, she lived a bland existence, not able to accept what the gift expected of her.  But now, since she put it to work, e
verything in her sight and sound was crisp as if seeing and hearing for the first time. The
sky poured a waterfall, pounding hard on the ground like drumbeats, and the Gods of thunder answered while they yielded their swords of lightening like bolts of wrath. 
The
night sky was inky and lower as if she could touch it with her finger and draw on it. 
A bark rang out inside the house.  Her dog Peppy was glad she was home, since the thunder drove him under the bed.  Hearing her car drive up, he came out and scratched the screen door. 
The hum of the freezer on the porch was a loud tribal chant, the buzz of insects off the lights pinged and strummed. 
She wasn’t used to her senses in such high alert capacity, so it was unsettling.  It also bought to mind things she had put away, long ago. 
She was not used to dealing with emotions, feelings, sounds, issues. Just hearing the gift in her ears was enough to send her packing. She wanted to run—leave it all behind, not look back, take a bottle full of tic-tac’s
and forget she had a mission.  But when the thought hit the corridors of her mind, my violent newborn screams entered in the spaces, filling every hole, crevasse and orifice.  My infant cries were terrible,
damning,
and pleading. 
You are my only hope.  You understand. It is your responsibility. 

 
Maw Sue breathed a long sigh and walked towards the door, walked towards my destiny that waited.  She pulled the screen door open, it squealed at her as if it was introducing itself for the first time.  The
tiny bell attached to the inner latch rang out like an iron church bell in a cathedral, clanging and releasing a host of new fears. The attachment would make its presence known—
and soon.
 She had to hurry. She covered her ears as if they would bleed out but the words impaled
her like hot swords. 

From the fires of suffering, and the ashes of affliction, one shall inherit the greatest of stre
ngths in the darkest of nights.  Touch the pain but do not allow it to take you.  Feel the pain but do not absorb it lest it destroy you from within. 

Peppy
jumped on her thighs, excited to see her. 
She rubbed his back
while she labored in thoughts.  The ancient words stirred inside her.  She knew what it meant, but it didn’t make it any easier to do.  She’d read these words before, from ancestors in the old journals and from stories she heard her mother talk about.  A flashback of the elevator startles her, in mind, in spirit.  It was just a ploy to thwart her, from the Amodgians stirring her to retreat.  If she failed—then the newborn didn’t have a chance.  A loud rustling sound came from the back
bedroom.
It was calling her.
It was calling me.
 
The time was now. 

Her mind spun, sifted and revisited the old.
Could she do it?  She had never been able to handle it before—what made her think she could handle it now? 
The early years
left her nothing but madness so she denied the gift.  Ran from the curse.  Goose bumps lined her arms and her heart felt faint.  She could easily take a few pills and forget this happened, yet every day, I’d be the reminder.  The great granddaughter she failed. 
Again.
Once more a failure.  Susannah Josephine Worrell, a failure at life, at everything.  She could simply walk away.  She had done it countless times before.  Simply erase it.  Non-existent.  Take a pill. 
But it
was no longer about her.  It was about me. 
This time—
she could not fail.   

She
walked through the pink bathroom, every step like trying to get through thick sludge.  She stepped inside the bedroom and closed the door, leaving
Peppy to claw and bark. She gathered herself, took a deep breath, turned
and walked to the cedar closet and stopped in front of it. 
It was like standing i
n front of a desecrated shrine of her past, a past she did not want to resurrect. 
Her dress
was soaked from the downpour and now heavy like weights, pulling her downward, so much she hoped the floor would just swallow her.  End it all.  Make it easy.  Unable to still herself, she leaned side to side, while her wet leather shoes squished and squashed.  Adding to the sounds, she meticulously heard each d
rip of rain panning off the hem of her skirt and
falling to the floor. 
With each crashing drip, she felt a malevolent force dunk her underwater. 
“God help me.” She whispered. 
It had begun.
 

A strong sense of resistance came over her, while a thick, palpable fear besieged her stiff. She had been here before. Long, long ago. This is the crossroad, the same intersection of fear she had faced numerous times over the course of her life. It knew how to control her. It saw her weaknesses, strengths, an
d her fragile state of mind.  It used all of them, against her.  S
purts of air left her lips in small panicky gasps.
Heat erupted in her belly, an old pain gurgled and crawled up her throat to choke her, evoke its power over her. 
She bit her lips till she could taste the metallic blood pooling in h
er mouth.  Parts of her enjoyed the old pain, lingered in it, and tasted its genesis, fluid from the Gods to remind her, make her feel alive again. 
Minutes passed before she was able to steady herself and do what she knew she had to do. 

“Devenio—Susannah. Devenio—devenio.” 
The voice said startling Susannah.  Tears flooded her face in hearing her mother’s voice as if it rode in on the outskirts of the dark whispers invading her soul,
between the pain and the pleasure, between the known and the unknown. Maw Sue’s hands reach out in automatic response.
Letters crawl up her throat, slicing and determined to make their way out no matter the pain. 

“Devenio!” She spat.  Blood and spit thrust outward and spewed in the air.  The word had not left her lips in years, centuries it seemed.  The
old stories came back touching her memory, touching her pain in terrible, awful ways, especially for those like her, who deny years, who deny the gifts,
those who act when it’s way too late. 

“Devenio!” 
She said again. 
It was easier this time. She formed childlike hands and reached to touch the invisible 
inter
 realm her gifted eyes could see, feel and touch. She re
ached past all she knew, she touched the pain and felt its demise.  How easily it could take her, right now, wipe her out in one swoop. 

“Devenio!
Devenio! Devenio!” She shouted.  Her voice mixing with the thunder, the lightening, the rain. 
She felt chains break
off her wrists, her chest, her waist, her legs, her feet, as if bound for years without knowing.  It
freed her to move forward, past the barrier that wanted to hold her back, make her retreat. She shuffled towards the closet, reached up and jerked the orange pleated curtains back. The gold dowel rod vibrated with clicking sounds and years of accumulated dust
stormed like a dirt cloud. 
She looked
into the darkness.  Her eyes waxed over with fear. 
The mere sight of it paralyzed her. It sat in the exact spot she left it years ago…
ages ago.
 So long ago, it felt like another life. 
Not real, not hers.
 The giant figure pressed its back against the wall, from floor to mid-ceiling,
a colossus figure made from piles of boxes, papers, books and fabric bags from generations of ancestors she never knew.  Together they constructed a giant, with big bones that wrecked fear inside Maw Sue’s heart.  She closed her eyes.  Her eyelids grew black which allowed her to enter in the realm,
and while in the power of the gift, she
whispered three times, the word, “Devinio”.  She was now inside
the
Imperium realm of the Cupitor where all is not what it seems. 
It had been a long, long time since she
was here.  It was surreal, the realm of
what was, the glow of all things surrounding her, while the shadow imps of darkness swished through the air, clearly seen for exactly how they are, visible to the eye, unlike in the other earthly realm wh
ere we only feel their presence. 
In the realm of the imperium, the shadows are able to manipulate and punish as they normally do by feeding off the fleshy fear, but they cannot harm us in
the Imperium realm. 
This is the realm where all exists as it is. Maw Sue clearly sees how the shadows survive off her weakness, her fear, her regrets and her troubling mind. She sees her past before her, her pathway, her choices, both right and wrong, all strewn together as if she time traveled gathering pieces to fit, to sort, to work out and see life as it turns out, from the inside realm and the outer realm. Her choices 
stare her down like possessed demons. 
Everything is blended, the bad, the good, the light and the dark, the lesser light, the good and the evil…
all is purposed to an end
but she cannot see the ending yet, for she has more to do.
And she must get to it now.