Banished To Earth Splintered Souls Book One (1)

Banished To Earth Splintered Souls Book One

Chapter One

1

      Chase Gillette was only twenty-two, but he already had a substantial bank account and a cozy seaside bungalow recently left to him by his wealthy, sympathetic uncle. That alone should have painted a perpetual grin on his boyish face. However, as he leaned against the wooden railing of his deck, the sweet serenity of this balmy sun-kissed morning escaped him. The sheet of sparkling water undulating beneath the cloudless blue, the gentle sea breeze teasing his shaggy, dirty-blonde hair, lightly kissing his tanned, handsome face, had yet to relax his clenched jaw or part his pinched, piercing eyes.

      On that early September morning, like so many times before, he peered out at the Atlantic Ocean, scanning the sea for no reason other than thoughtless habit. Had someone noticed him, they might well have mistaken him for a much older, broken man desperate to find something or someone lost long ago.

      But Chase could not see himself. His eyes were, of course, always looking out, never within. After all, one cannot see in the dark. And darkness filled him, a darkness recent and old, so very old. A darkness hidden, even from himself, but indelible.  Was that why he loved the morning so much?

    Until now, the dawn’s promising glow, ever sliding across the face of the planet, perpetually turned away from the eternal night of space, afforded him a false comfort he could find in nothing else. But this morning, even that lovely lie had yet to lift his features. The reason lay coiled and buried deep within. The truth relentlessly clawing its way up. A truth he had buried long ago, even though he wore it on his face like a deep scar anyone could see.

    He reached over to grab his first mug of steaming black coffee from the deck railing. The familiar hush and roar of the pounding surf finally lifted his features and softened his focus-hardened eyes.

   “Still lost,” the words escaped beneath the roar of the crashing waves. He felt more than he heard them. He glanced up, scanned the beach, not unlike a sentry, completely unaware of why he was doing it. Then turned his attention to the sun-bleached deck and thought,... ‘it needs staining again’…neatly deflecting his mind away from those two odd words and what they meant and why they haunted the shadowed perimeters of his consciousness.

    A white Adirondack chair sat a few feet behind him. He eased into it, cup in hand, and waited. His morning ritual. Not that he meant to wait. After all, there was nothing to wait for.

2

    Today would be the same as yesterday. Would it not? But this time, his forgotten past was going to pound that question into dust and blow it into oblivion…

     The wind whipped up and slapped his dirty blonde hair across his eyes. It was as if someone had slung a great freezer door open. His skin pimpled. He shivered. His grey zipped-up hoodie, jeans, and sandals scarcely shielded his wiry, five-foot-seven-inch body from its icy blast.

    Clutching his mug, more to warm his hands than anything else. He took a long sip, longer than he expected. It wasn’t even Lukewarm. Odd that. It was, after all, still summer and his coffee freshly brewed. Funny, the weatherman said nothing about a front moving down from Virginia.

     The sun streamed golden light across the distant dunes and hotels far to the east. He squinted from its harsh glare. Breath vapor curled up in the ominous stillness that had settled over him, unnoticed.

   He rose from his chair; to go back inside, looked out across the glittering swell, then scanned the deserted shoreline one last time.  Saw nothing. Sighed and laughed at himself just before the world shuttered, a momentary ripple that was so fleeting it could have been easily forgotten as the rest of the day churned on. It was as if the sun had blinked, but only for a half second. However, it broke the unbreakable, cracking the walls of the world.  

      Something new, massive was looming, rising, reaching out, summoning, claiming its own.

   A part of him knew what it was, feared what it was, longed for what it was. But he had buried that part, that dark, impossible part. He had moved on. Forgotten that senseless strangeness. Forgotten, yes, but failed to erase. Even now, it was touching his mind, charging his memory…

      It couldn’t be. It was not dark. He was not nine. He no longer squirmed under his mother’s brutal thumb, hiding his eyes from their eyes, hiding from his mother’s narrow prodding glare.  Their white, pinprick, unblinking eye lights peering at him from every cavernous shadow of his gloomy childhood bedroom had faded out long ago. Had they not?

      And he had dutifully situated his mother in a rest home ten miles inland. Moreover, he lived in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina, his happiest place on earth. The sky was blue. The sun, blindingly bright.  There were no shadows. No darkness.

   3

    But it was still there, lurking in the cold light. No. In his subconscious, in his inner darkness and his broken heart. His past, buried and forgotten. But, clearly, not deep enough to escape remembrance or free himself from its ancient grip.

     He forced his lips to smirk when he turned toward the sliding glass door that led to his living room. The moment his fingers curled around the door’s cold metal handle, his stomach cramped so violently it knocked him to his knees. A sheet of darkness dropped over the world. No, not over the world, over his world, blocking out the sun. Waves of fiery pain burned through every cell of his violently convulsing body, now writhing against the rough planks of his deck.

   His mind blinked off, extinguishing the fire, just before the air around him began to shimmer like a heat mirage rising from sunbaked asphalt. It rippled and pulsated until it coalesced into a clearly defined ovoid of distorted air molecules, which sucked him in and spat him out miles from his home…

    The sweet pungent smell of pine needles teased his mind back from the darkness. The distant chirping of a happy little bluejay gently tapped his ears. He groaned and sucked in a cleansing deep breath of cool, sweet air. Dampness licked his right hip and leg; his jeans were soaked from the wet forest floor. He sat up and buried his face in his hands. Still hiding the truth from himself.  He cracked his eyelids open. The blinding golden glare from the setting sun streamed through pines he had never seen before. His new reality easily pushed past the bars of denial, like smoke. He squinted, jerked his head down and masked his face with his hands.

     Still, how could he know, accept, embrace? How could he embrace the impossible? Teleportation nonsense, fanciful drivel, and, apparently, even time travel! It could not be. 

   But here he was, sitting in a forest, who knows how far from his beloved beach. How, and more importantly why, he came to be here. Time would certainly tell. However, for now, at least, he stubbornly clung to his willful ignorance, like a child clutching a teddy bear. But the bear was a lifeless toy, old, ragged and falling apart…

    Finally, after a few more moments of self-indulgent, futile denial, he forced himself to look up and focus on his surroundings.  Pine trees, thick green underbrush where sand and sea should be. 

   “What is this? Dreaming! Crazy! None of this is real!” He yelled up at the blue, dispassionate sky peeking down at him through the dark green pine needle canopy.

4

      He jumped to his feet, slinging his head down. Did he really think an easy explanation was squatting on the pine straw looking up at him? Of course it was not.

     Then it hit him. The eyes. His mother’s glare. The waiting, the searching, pretending he was normal. Then struggling to embrace this hateful world, a world made more hateful by a Mother who always made him feel a stranger. His past, his childhood nonsense, was roaring back, daring him to forget and dismiss. This time it would not be denied and could not be buried in his subconscious.

    He hugged his chest. Yes he was still alive, still corporeal. But he was more, so much more. An odd comfort began to seep in, a delicious sense of identity. His name was Chase Gillette. This he knew. But that was a new name. However, he knew he had another name. An ancient name, a name yet to surface in his mind, but it did grant him peace, perspective and a firm inner footing he had never imagined he could enjoy.

    However, this realization also stung his conscience. He knew not why.

   His question would have to wait. “Get her!” A man yelled off to his right. Lust! That and anger coiled in the air like the smell of putrid carrion and awakened yet another part of himself he never knew existed.

    “She’s running for the lake,” another man yelled. “Head her off Mitch!”

    Someone was in nasty trouble. With thoughtless instinct, he sniffed the air. Water, sodden wood, animal excrement, directly ahead. Without hesitation, he tore through the trees, briars and underbrush, with such unnatural force it shredded his clothes but not his skin. His hoody and jeans ragged, dangled from his unscathed limbs like bunting, but still more intact than his sandals, lost to the woods forever, when he emerged from the pines to find himself standing on the gravel studded shoreline of a large silvery lake.

    “There she is,” He hollered. His tone was lascivious and brutal.

    Chase jerked to his left. His eyes watered. His body went slack at the sight of the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. A tiny helpless figure all alone, a hundred feet from the rocky tree line where he stood gaping like a fool. Weirdly, she sat on the beach, head  bowed. Waiting? An odd white garment covered her slight, wonderfully proportioned frame. Her hair, blindingly white in the last rays of the dying sun -draped over her delicate bare shoulders oddly undulating all the way down to the wet pebbly dirt, which seemed to be serving her up to these soulless brutes like a tasty meal.