Hold the Light (8 page)

He had to live on to find Veronica. And that was that.

"God I wish I could see her."

Chapter 11

But it grew worse before it got better. Before Mural learned to adapt his life around his impairments, as long lasting men do, he was at their mercy.

Mural had deciphered the patterns of the gift winding around inside, predicting the times when he'd start convulsing by the amount of cold beneath this skin. As soon as goosebumps rose on his neck and arms, he visibly braced for the shakes. The physical effects could be handled easily enough; it was the other effects, the mental occurrences that gave him the worst troubles. It was the memories that rattled in his mind, ones that he swore were untrue, perhaps lived by the intrusive force within, that threatened his sanity and livelihood. The thin line between himself and the light he swallowed proved nearly nonexistent over these next thirty days. As did his identity. Mural felt, no knew he was an apparition of what he once was, slipping ever so slowly and easily into the daily routine the gift inside gave him - which was nothing more than eating some scraps, sparsely sleeping and enduring hours of indiscernible yet horribly haunting thoughts that latched onto and fed off his genuine memories like parasites.

Slumped in a chair that used to melt away his pains and worries, Mural sat on what felt like razors, staring into the fireplace, stirring no more than the layers of dust coating his entire house. He never wondered why his once great girth, now dangerously emaciated, had never perished. He should have rotted after two months and how great a release that would have been, yet, it seemed, he had forgotten how to die. His flesh and bone would have none of it. But, oh God, if he could only do so, oh how he wished he could, then the death in his head that had abandoned his body, would take him.

But it would not.

As if the light put inside him aimed to only torture, death was the only constant stream of thought screaming in his skull. The ends of countless and vague souls, lives he hadn't the slightest idea of who they were, paraded before his mind's eye with twisted and fearful deathly faces, spewing their woes at him in breaths of putrid decay.

It took Mural only one more afternoon beyond the first two months to become completely stolid to the horrors in his mind. They were nothing new anyway, once he truly began to see them. He had seen death, what was the fuss over? And, in truth, life was but a dream. A dream that merrily, merrily rowed further and further away from him each day. And he happily waved it goodbye. It was nothing more than a burden.

"What kind of life can be found in death anyway?" he asked to the air.

And in those lucid words came an answer that chilled his blood. Not cold out of fear but from the light inside him. He trembled and shook.

Images of murders played out for him as if it was a vivid recollection, but only in feelings and sensations. Nothing concrete was ascertainable by a single one of his five senses. These recollections weren't from the past, no, nothing seemed that familiar...except for a face. He saw a room, not the room in house where he sat, but an unfamiliar room before him in a manner such as a reverie, with blue wispy tints, yet he knew he was in the present. The normal flashes from the gift, with all its haunting ambiguity and doubts, showed him he was on the other side of town, on the border of Boston. A man lay before him in his deathbed, coughing out his final breaths in sick spats. It was so vivid, the man, the place...and the color. Oh God color! Now, blinding in its brilliance, all the blue in the world came to his eyes, as though his colorblindness stepped aside just for this single shade alone.

Fully immersed in the dream reality, Mural was drawn to this ailing man. He slowly walked to him, flatly placing his boots along a wooden floor that never creaked. The atmosphere was heavy, almost damp, tears mixing with humidity. Others paced along the floor as it moaned under them but Mural continued forward without a sound, feeling none of his weight. Whether it was his illness or terror, the man cringed as Mural closed in, shaking his feeble limbs in irritable gestures to ward Mural off.

The dying man's anxious family hovered all about the room, huddling around him and attempted to comfort his pathetic yelps, wailing and preparing for the inevitable. A young woman pleaded with him to calm; calling with such a love that Mural identified her as the man's wife. She must have worried that her husband had gone mad at the end.

A clumsy thought of reason plugged itself into Mural's rationale and he began to recognize the man. Yes, he was familiar and from his own past even.

No one in the room, save for the dying, could see Mural stroll up to him. The man's breaths grew panicked and he whispered strange words.

Reaching with strained, almost hungry fingers, Mural went to grab from the dying man what he knew was his. Mural watched the man's purple cracked lips tremble out a tantalizing puff that he innocuously caught as if he was expecting it, like a dog catching a ball. Among the hazy impressions and prodigious meanings, Mural watched his diaphanous blue hand open to reveal a blue ball. He saw it presently and as a memory. He saw it like he saw the ball stolen from his mouth by the cursed demon and, therefore, saw it for what it was. It hummed in his hand for a second, as if it applauded his recognition, then shot off into the dark corner of the wall.

Slowly the man's face settled and his eyes dulled. Mural studied him, barely remembering his features. The family surrounding them was fixed on the man lying in his deathbed, never noticing Mural in the slightest. And he couldn't help but smile. This man who lay dead before him was the man who dragged him through the streets, dangling from the noose, all those years ago. Mural licked his lips and tasted his own power. This was a gift indeed. Mural's melancholy lifted and he loved the gift.

"This is a far better purpose than the whispers ever provided," Mural thought, vowing then and there to follow the gift's internal guidance, which had to lead to Veronica, as well as to the occasional smiting of his enemies.

The final fluttering of the man's soul beat within his ears and Mural was forced to leave, not under his own power.

"I am the keeper again!" Mural exclaimed. "Wiping away the unholy...but this time I work with the direct purpose of Death itself."

He returned to his house and was revitalized. Time had passed as normal; it seemed that only a few seconds had elapsed. His smile grew larger and he, as if the last two months didn't occur, grew back into his old self. Murdering returned as his way of life and the means to keep things in place, only this time, it was not out of spite for his wife, but in her favor. His old role had suited him for years, but this was grandiose. Never once did he contest or complain, rather he became significantly caught up in his tasks, never thinking he would be bound for this.

The gift snapped him back into full alertness.

"This is amazing, how could someone like me be given this honor? Everyone that is and ever will be is now under my decision as to when they expire. I will retire all that I am commanded to and with each breath I take, I will come closer to Veronica."

Decades passed, but Mural did not age. His neighbors grew suspicious since he rarely left the house. Mural never visited the printing press that was passed to him when he was twenty, and his employees grew just as suspicious. So he sold the business at high profits and developed the habit of moving around the city whenever people's misgivings arose. The thought of leaving Boston never entered his head.

As more decades tore away, he was left the same, in feeling and appearance, as he was the night he lost Veronica. Mural's hair never ripened into gray or white and not a wrinkle dared to cross his skin, but beneath his face was cold solitude that only age can bring. Time elapsed, but the gift made the cycles smaller and tolerable even as his past friends and neighbors grew old and died, while he stay suspended in time, taking them to their demise. Everything around had an end except for him.

Everything would wilt, but he was outside the rotation of life and didn't have to pay its highest price.

But as people do, he began to question.

"I can't bear the notion of Veronica suffering as I lose myself in these excursions. Maybe I should refocus my ..."

Before his tongue could carry any more words, the gift stirred inside him. Confused and curious Mural egged the light within him on with questions, but it was never to speak to him. And he felt insulted.

"I've been played a fool, a patsy in some arcane game. I will not sit idly by and have no knowledge or control over Veronica's fate."

But he had no choice. He would experience only what his convulsions would allow, leaving his own self a shell yet again.

Mural watched the coming of the twentieth century. He had spent well over a hundred years obediently working for his unseen demon, all the while hoping for answers. Any vestige of his previous life was so old and desiccated that it was out of memory. Seasons and lifetimes blew past him as if they were the wind. He watched the winter of everyone's life pass and carried them from this life and knew that his own humanity had wilted and withered.

There was only one thing left to do when hope abandoned...he took up an old practice and prayed. He begged for an absolution to the only power left more powerful than his own and still received nothing. God had abandoned him so long ago he had forgotten the warmth of faith and knew only the frigidity of death. For a soul, if he could be that, with as few options as he had left, Mural stumbled across the only answer left to him.

"To Hell with Veronica, she was probably already there with the damned demon! Well over a hundred years had passed! What a fool I have been. She has to be long dead. So what is the point? I did this for her...and without her...what is the point?"

Unsure if he feared for his immortal shattered soul or if he just had to prepare so expertly, Mural took another thirty years, in which he felt every second, to concoct his ending. Time had very much been on his side, and as good allies always do, time and Mural worked together to compose a flawless conclusion.

Chapter 12

As the sun blushed and sank on a dusty evening during the worst economical crisis his country had seen, and one hundred and fifty years since he found the sword in the charred remains of his childhood home, Mural wandered out past Boston's city limits with a loaf of bread in his hand and a carnal need for closure. Just as the loaf did in front of him, the city from behind slowly disappeared from sight. The horizon held a mantle of winking stars and an invigorating new moon that sped his pace. Mural almost forgot what stars looked like; he hadn't seen their twinkle in years. The bright glow that emitted from both the city and the stars was enough to distract him from the light within. His neck remained craned skyward, remembering the city from over a hundred years ago, as he approached another town. Trees replaced the buildings and dirt roads overpowered the stone and cement in this new town he approached.

Life felt different to Mural this rural town, more alive, though ravaged by poverty and littered with pathetic beggars in food lines.

"They're all snakes, slithering into breadlines, waiting on their bellies, flickering their tongues out to feel for meals."

Little makeshift huts were crowded together in the outskirts as Mural passed through, maliciously chomping his bread in front of the starved. Just like the pathetic people back home, they all huddled together for heat. He scoffed at them as the last piece of bread slid down his throat, falling past the clenching gift.

Darkness loitered heavily as midnight drew near and he came upon what appeared to be the town's center. The scattered electric lights flickered as thunder heralded an abrupt storm, spurting down sharp rain and jagged lightning nearby. The unexpected storm caught many off guard and people scurried for shelter. Mural continued to stroll down the wide street that led to a circle of buildings. Before him a cobblestone road encircled a gazebo that gently rested in the middle of a patch of green grass, slick and matted from the rain. Men and women huddled under the gazebo's roof, sheltering their expensive clothes from the rain as the more ragged individuals made for the alleys. The well-to-do people underneath the gazebo laughed and joked with each other, blissfully touching and kissing, waving

hellos at companions hiding under an awning in front of a nearby theatre.

Mural relentlessly sloshed through the increasing rain that had already gathered into puddles along the cobblestone road. Trudging onto the wet grass, water logging his pants below his knees, he grew angry watching the laughing people ahead. The harder the rain fell, the more enraged Mural became and he began to pick up his pace. Surrounded by wet darkness

Mural focused in on the brightest light he could see, which was the glow from the theater, but he had to cut through the gazebo to get there. It was no matter though, the brightness drew him in; it fed his fervor and the malicious desires that bubbled up within him. He had found his spot.

One sybarite caught the blur of Mural speeding at them, and all the onlooker could do was utter a futile and mumbled plea as the massive body barreled towards him. The others didn't see Mural coming until he was right in the middle of the huddled mass under the gazebo. He shoved through them, ramming heads into the wooden supports with a callous push. One woman's head collided with the wooden support so hard that splinters burst all about, flashing Mural's memory back to Benjamin's missed blast on the porch so long ago. A lifetime ago. His anger built into an eternal rage that served him far past death.

The lady's head split open and she slid down leaving a red streak on the white post. Her eyes rolled up into her skull. Mural barely felt the convulsion that sent him to retrieve her soul and it was over within moments and his wrath was unbroken.

Once past the gazebo he broke into a sprint for the group huddled under the canopy in front of the theater. Running through the silver streaks of rain, his heart panted with the desires of thirst again. His butcher knife once again sang to him and gleamed. Several couples backed out from the canopy into the rain and ran from his assault, but five people stood still, dumbfounded under the awning, gazing at impending doom.