The Fair Exchange - Part 2

When I eventually regained consciousness, the air reeked of death and decay, the terrible stench so close at hand that it seemed to emanate from my own flesh, my limbs as stiff as if my muscles and skin had calcified to bone. With tremendous effort I finally managed to open my eyes to the faint light of individual flames moving slowly through the night, a blood moon weakly illuminating the surrounding stones.

A great host bearing votive candles marched toward me, their ranks filled with bent bodies and ragged skeletons, their ghastly faces gazing in fixed torment, as if the sufferings from their final minutes on earth had followed them into death. In the far distance flames licked the trees surrounding the cemetery as the wind scattered plumes of ash around my recumbent and petrified figure.

In the terror of the moment I believed I had died and reawakened in Hell.

Within their ranks an apparition as black as a moonless night appeared, its teeth and eyes faintly glowing. “Tis a cold night to be mother naked,” it rasped with a bare-toothed grin. I cowered in fear as it brought its dark and formless visage near mine, the smell of burning Sulphur overpowering my senses.

Grasping me roughly, it pulled me to my feet as I trembled with cold and dread. Wrapping a cloak around my shivering body it asked, “Do ye know us, Jamie?” But speechless with fear, I faintly nodded my head in answer.

It gestured to follow, the rustling of the ash beneath my bare feet the only sound disturbing the spectral calm. We stopped when the pathway split into two and diverged in the gloom, one path winding away into utter blackness and the other into the distant hope of light. It asked –“Which way will ye choose?” But long I stood staring first into the darkness and then into the promise of faraway light. When it finally rasped “Want a hint?” I nodded my head. Pointing to the left it asked— “What do ye see?”

“Na-nothing,” I replied, my teeth chattering with terror and cold.

“And if ye walked into that darkness, what would ye see then?

“Da-da-don know.”

“More nothing,” it replied with a burst of ghostly laughter. Pointing to the right it asked - “What do ye see out there?”

Staring into the distance the light began to grow. “Ta-town?”

“Come see.” We began to walk again, the light growing stronger till I found myself standing in the rear hallway of my school. Pushing through the students I saw a pair of boys squaring off to fight. But when the smaller one knocked his opponent to the ground I blinked in terror and disbelief. The one standing breathlessly over Joey was me.

My future unfolded before my eyes like a movie set on fast forward, weeks passing in the blink of an eye. One moment I witnessed myself desperately fighting the meanest kid in school and in the next joining the Marines. Time passed in a rickety blur: a combat tour in Vietnam, meeting Gretchen upon my return; marriage, babies born, our children marrying and raising children of their own. My future unfolded so rapidly that the promise and majesty of love seemed inseparable from the heartbreak of its loss, the strength and power of youth separated by no more than a whisper from its own decline and death. When we finally arrived at the end, we watched an old man struggling for his final breath and I knew without a doubt that man was me.

Standing at the headstone above my grave it whispered “These are but shadows of what might be. Ye can live a life where ye know whom ye will marry before wooing her. Ye can live a life knowing every joy and sorrow ye will ever face. Ye can live a life knowing in advance the last day ye will experience on this Earth.”

Or,” he giggled as if a riddle impossible to solve. “Or,” he said with the finality of the grave.

Placing his hand softly on my shoulder he finished with surprising gentleness.

“Or … ye can enter a story that was written for ye but cannot be known. It is your fate, Jamie Faust. Which will ye choose? Ye won’t find Gretchen out there,” it said pointing to the unexplored pathway. Choose well … ye will never stand at these crossroads again.”

His remembered words echo strangely in my thoughts as I wipe the tears from my cheeks. I have no recollection of ever consciously choosing this life. Yet I have lived it just the same, the feeling persisting that I never had a choice at all.

So why return home now?

____________________

The Fair Exchange - Part 3