The Chair (6 page)

She stood a moment later and pulled the worn leather-bound journal off the bookshelf lining the walls of the nook, sat again, and started to write.

Half an hour later she shelved the journal and patted it twice before turning and walking out of the kitchen.

The journal would be his someday. Lord willing.

O
n Friday morning Corin walked into his store and stopped just inside the front door and looked toward the chair. He’d covered it with the tan blanket after Brittan and his mom left; he wasn’t sure why. It just felt right. Maybe because if there was something more to it than just an ancient hunk of wood, he didn’t want every shopper through his door pawing at it.

More than just an ancient chair.

Right.

He needed to stop his comic-book imagination from flying into the realm of the ludicrous.

Corin glanced at his watch. Nine o’clock. An hour before opening. Plenty of time to give the chair a meticulous examination.

After dropping his keys and wallet on his sales counter, he flipped on the radio to 88.7 KCME FM. Classical seemed the appropriate music to set the mood.

He eased over to the chair, drew back the blanket, and started with a visual inspection. Like before, the coloring captured him. It was surprisingly even for a chair this old that there were no cracks in the finish.

Beautiful. Looking at it stirred images of standing on Pikes Peak as dawn broke into the eastern sky.

Time to touch the chair. See if the tingling in his fingers was imagined.

Corin walked around to the back of the chair and held his fingers just above it. Then he lowered them to the chair as if he were touching a newborn’s cheek.

He waited.

Nothing.

He slid his fingers back and forth over the surface. Still nothing.

Must have been his imagination. Had to be. At least that’s what he told himself.

He circled around to the front, then placed both palms on the sides of the seat and slid them back and forth.

Still nothing.

After twenty or thirty more seconds he shrugged, leaned in close, and ran his forefinger along the seams where the legs met the seat of the chair.

Then where the seat met the back.

Marvelous.

It was so precise it looked and felt machine created. No gaps anywhere; no bumps where the pieces came together; no cracking in the wood, which meant previous owners over the years had either taken great care with it or the wood had been cured in such a way that the changes in climate and ravages of time hadn’t adversely affected the chair in even the slightest degree.

He pulled out a small tape measure and studied the chair’s dimensions.

Amazing.

The dimensions were perfect. Absolutely even distance along every centimeter between the edges of the seat. The legs were the exact same length. Exact.

After another ten minutes of examination, he stood back, gazed at the chair, and smiled. He needed to do research before he could set a price, but his instinct told him he had a piece worth thousands on his hands. Maybe hundreds of thousands.

God’s chair? Maybe not, but it still might be manna from heaven.

Could he sit in it? Was it sturdy enough? The woman had said he shouldn’t sit in it till he was ready, but what did that mean?

Brittan sat in it, why couldn’t he? He couldn’t be more than 120 pounds heavier than the kid.

Corin grabbed the back of the chair with one hand, the seat with the other, and gave it a gentle twist. Solid. He set it down and leaned into it with most of his weight. No movement. No creaking. It was as if the chair was carved out of a solid block of wood.

He squatted in front of it and rapped the seat with his knuckles. It could take his weight easily. Corin stood ready to sit but something stopped him. The feeling was like the time in high school where he’d been part of a trip to the state capitol and had been invited to sit in the governor’s chair. The same nervousness he’d felt twenty-one years ago filled his mind.

Corin sniffed out a laugh at his foreboding and sat.

It was comfortable and fit his body well.

Another few seconds and he’d need to get up and open the front door. But he didn’t want to. He wanted to wait for . . . what?

Don’t be an idiot.

What was he expecting? A spiritual massage? A vision from heaven? It was just a chair.

Old, yes, maybe very old, but just wood.

It felt like a thousand other chairs he’d sat in over the years. Hard seat. Constructed well. End of story.

But still, the lady was right; whoever crafted it had considerable skill. And to make the sales copy more interesting when he started advertising it, it would be nice to know who built it.

After grabbing his camera and taking thirty or thirty-five shots of the chair from all angles, and then ten more with his cell phone, he threw the cloth back over the chair and clipped toward his front door to welcome the hoards of customers who would fling cash his way today.

Early next week he’d spend some time on the Internet and maybe head for the library to dig up any info on the chair.

If he lived through the weekend.

T
he sun crept over a small tree behind their camp at 5:45 a.m. and splashed its light on Corin’s face, reminding him where he was. Seven thousand nine hundred and forty-one feet above sea level. But not for long. He stretched and breathed out a hard yawn. Too early for most Saturday mornings, but this wasn’t most Saturdays.

He was already awake—thinking about the jump—and the sunlight peppering his eyelids convinced him to get up. A hint of blue spruce filled his nostrils and the deep cold of the morning almost felt like splashing water on his face.

He glanced at the others. Still sleeping but he’d need to wake them as soon as he made coffee. Instant java yes, but it was still coffee. The forecast said no wind, but he didn’t want to take chances. This would be the lowest jump he’d done in two years, and he didn’t want any uninvited breezes to crash the party.

The lower the jump, the higher the adrenaline factor. He smiled and rubbed his hands together.

By the time the water boiled like a minicauldron, Tori had crawled out of her sleeping bag and sat on a boulder next to the Soto OD-1R Micro cooking stove.

“Morning,” Corin said.

“Barely.” Tori frowned at him. “Ugh.”

“I love you too.”

“Remind me.” Tori pulled off her stocking cap and ran her fingers through her tangled hair. “Why did we hike for three hours yesterday to get up here?”

“Are you kidding? Look at this view.” Corin motioned to the stunning display of the Rockies in the distance. “Plus no one has ever BASE jumped from this spot.”

“I’m feeling better already.” Tori extended her coffee cup and Corin filled it halfway.

“No, I paid for a full cup. I need it to the brim.”

He laughed and complied.

“This coffee looks thin.” She stared into her cup.

“Jittery and jumping only should get close to each other in the dictionary.”

“Coffee doesn’t make me jittery. Jumping does.” She took a sip and grimaced. “Should I get the others up?”

Corin rubbed his head and squinted at her through the sun filling their small campsite. “The other night, when we were talking about that chair I got the other day, you said your parents would say it was made by Jesus.”

“So?”

“Do you think it’s possible?”

“That He made the chair the lady brought you?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know; why does it matter?”

“I took a good look at the thing yesterday. She was right. Whoever made it had considerable skill. It’s a fascinating piece. The quality is a little mind-blowing.”

Tori stood, drained the last of her coffee, and dropped her cup at Corin’s feet. “You’re making my head hurt. Too early for comic-book talk, okay?”

“Agreed.” Corin laughed and picked up her cup. “But not too early for jumping off a cliff. Let’s get the others up.”

Twenty minutes later Corin, Tori, and six others stood in a circle, arms and hands locked onto each other’s shoulders.

Corin glanced around at their bright eyes staring back at him. “Ready?”

In unison they chanted, “Some people snort for it, some people eat mushrooms for it, some people mainline java. All we gotta do to get that wonderful wired feeling is jump, baby, jump!”

The group broke up to put on their parachutes, and the only sound for the next five minutes was the cinching of harnesses and the deep breathing of people scared enough to feel like they had to pee, even if they’d gone two minutes earlier.

“All good?” Corin asked.

After hearing agreement from the other seven, he led them to the edge of the cliff, then put his arm around Tori. “You want to go first?”

“Be my guest.” Tori motioned to the edge and Corin laughed.

Tori looked over the drop-off. “This never fails to get my heart beating five hundred times faster than it should be.”

“Heart rate up without exerting yourself. It’s the noncardio, cardio workout,” offered another of the jumpers.

Corin looked over the edge and his heart pounded like an Olympic sprinter after running the hundred meters. No matter how many times he’d flung himself over the edge of a cliff, his hands still went damp the moment he looked down.

And every time an image of himself lying broken on the rocks below seared itself into his mind. And every time he pushed the image from his head and refused to give in to its morbid portent.

It was all part of the game. A game he had to play.

A game he had to win.

The canyon floor was only 465 feet below the cliff, which meant they needed to release their chutes almost immediately after jumping.

Which meant they had to leap out at least twenty feet away from the cliff to avoid having their chutes catch on anything sticking out from the cliff wall. Branches, rock outcroppings, everything.

Which meant there was no room for even tracing paper-thin errors.

It heightened the terror factor considerably more than most of them were comfortable with.

But it also shoved their brains into the higher reaches of the thrill-zone.

Krystal’s eyes ping-ponged back and forth between all three of them. “This is good? We’re going to be all right? We’re going to survive?”

“No doubt. It’s just like taking a stroll through Riverside Park,” Peter said.

“Twenty feet out,” Corin said. “That’s our target distance. Which means you sprint as hard as you can toward the cliff’s edge and push off with your foot like a trampoline when you jump and you’ve got two seconds
max
before releasing your chute. There shouldn’t be any wind in the canyon, but if there is, it will be updrafts that will help us, not hinder.”

Corin looked around at his friends. Rush time. “Anyone want to say a prayer?” Wow, this chair business was frying his brain.

They all laughed except for Krystal. “I think that’s a pretty good idea.”

Corin looked at her. “Are you serious?”

“You weren’t?”

“Not really.”

“I’m scared.” Krystal hugged herself. “This is the craziest thing we’ve ever done. Jumping from this low is . . . crazy.”

“We’re just upping the rush a little.” Corin smiled. “Nothing to be scared of.”

“Just death.”

“I’m not scared of dying.” He looked toward the edge. “Not at all.” He ignored the increase in his heart rate that seemed to beat inside his head instead of his chest. “The only thing I’m scared of is not living while I’m still alive.”

The instant Corin said he wasn’t scared of dying, a shadow seemed to drown out the sun and his mind felt like it was wrapped in lead pulling his head to the ground. Where was this coming from? He wasn’t scared of dying. It’s what allowed him to dance on the razor’s edge without slicing his feet open. It’s what freed him each time he jumped or rode or luged or glided or took part in any of his insane adventures.

He shook his head and swallowed. Time to roll before his mind told him another lie. “Let’s do it.”

Corin strode back twenty steps, spun on his heel, and without hesitating sprinted toward the edge of the canyon, every step pumping another nitro-shot of adrenaline into his veins. Launch codes were locked and loaded. Ten feet. Three. None.