Читать книгу Billy. Going where darkness fears to tread… - Colin David Palmer - Страница 10

Moving On Billy called it. The term described shifting between the parallels or from one location to another within the same parallel. People, normal people have this conception that ghosts, spirits, whatever you want to call them, can appear wherever they want to. Well, whatever you think they are, they can do that. But there are limitations. They can’t decide that Tahiti looks good and just go there! They must have some history at the location first, in Life, then they can return whenever they want, if they want. Hence the commonly known “haunted house’ scenario. Most of them did exactly that for the first couple of years, (return that is, not haunt, a debateable difference) until things change so much that it begins to hurt. Survivors in Life, the widow, the widower, the girlfriend, boyfriend, whoever, always found someone else eventually. These transitory beings, transits, would usually give up after that, and after days, months or even years would finally pass on to wherever.

The Transits were the ones Billy saw moving into and out of Life as they checked up on their Reality. As soon as that was gone, so were they. Which helps explain why Billy was always so composed at such a young age. He needed to keep his feet on the ground, metaphorically speaking, but what he knew, what he alone saw and experienced granted a boy maturity beyond anything Life could give. He opened his front gate and walked slowly toward the front door, the front fence, garden and the outside of the house had been completely refurbished. He looked around in wonder.

“Who is it?” was the response to his tentative knock.

Billy didn’t recognise the voice and moved on into the house so he could see. The inside had also changed considerably. New paint, furniture, his Dad’s chair and TV were gone. His room was now a nursery; colourful mobiles hung from the ceiling and gaily painted animals and letters of the alphabet splashed over the walls. He returned and stood beside the woman as she opened the front door, and was greeted by nobody, of course. She peered around, up and down the street and then closed the door.

“Damn kids!” she muttered.

She walked back to the renovated kitchen where Billy had interrupted her cake making. He watched as she hummed to herself and resumed beating the mixture. It felt comfortable and Billy thought he might stay awhile but then shook his head.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he admonished.

The woman stopped beating and frowned. She looked around the kitchen, shook her head herself, and continued beating again. Her humming was softer, more restrained.

Billy looked around the house one more time then went to Tonys’ place. There was no mistaking that Tony still lived there. His room had not changed but his drum kit was bigger and more expensive, as was his sound equipment. Billy sat down at the messy desk and wrote a note, then took a deep breath for his next visit. This was going to be the difficult one. He went to Jens’.

He sat on her bed and looked around the room. Very little had changed but enough to know Jen wasn’t there anymore. Her photos were still there on the wall and the mirror of her dresser, exactly as he remembered them. He saw one of them together at the tennis courts as well. She was so beautiful. He quietly opened a few drawers of her dresser. They were empty. Her wardrobe was empty. Everything was completely empty. The room was like a shell, a facade. It didn’t feel like she had just moved out of home or anything simple like that. Billy thought that she would have taken the photos, and her parents wouldn’t have left her room looking like a mausoleum. Something felt wrong, even smelt wrong. He took one of the smaller photos from the mirror.

He could smell that cake cooking back at home, his old home, and remembered how hungry he was. His note for Tony, if he got it in time, would see them catch up before the weekend was out. Billy went to his other favourite place, the tennis courts, or more precisely, the clubhouse.

It wasn’t small anymore. It had more than doubled in size, and there was six courts now all green concrete with permanent painted lines. A lingering aroma of food remained and Billy assumed that he’d just missed the ladies morning comp. The smell reminded him again of his hunger. That’s the trouble with Life, you have to maintain it or die, or at the very least suffer in some way. There was a fridge and a freezer and a proper kitchen in there no less so he helped myself as well as he could. A frozen steak out of the freezer was soon sizzling on a hot plate. Some left over salad from the fridge went straight into his mouth. He ate the steak half raw and still part frozen in the centre, slapped between two slices of bread warmed over the cooking steak. The juices ran through the bread and made it fall apart but he didn’t care. It was a feast, and he made an appropriate mess eating it!

Billy’s ability to move in and out of Life used to give his Mum and Dad the heebee jeebees that’s for sure! His Mum would be pushing the stroller along only to find her toddler, Billy, gone less than two minutes after she’d strapped him in there! They got used to it eventually, but he remembered the looks of confusion they used to get from hospitals and doctors, counsellors and psychiatrists, as his Mum tried to explain that their “baby’ could disappear and reappear at will! Of course Billy never did it in front of anyone else – nobody would understand!

Before jumping to any conclusions, Billy is not dead. He hasn’t died, been killed, or anything like that. He was just born to it, and whatever or however it happened, not even the guys Over There can tell him why. They look to him with a reverence, naturally, because he is alive, and they are not. To Billy, it is all perfectly natural.