Off the Grid

Jodie tossed Graham’s bag in the trunk of her car and asked him to wait for her inside the car. Jodie went back into the station and spoke to Staff Sergeant Barnes so she could update him on her progress so far. She also wanted to know the areas the search teams had been in and if there were any new developments. There had been none. She didn’t mention Graham. Carting a civilian around during an investigation like this wasn’t exactly by the book. In fact, if her bosses find out about Graham being along for the ride, she may find herself pushing a cruiser in a small town, at the northern tip of Ontario where summer sun and green grass didn’t exist. Only barren trees, grey skies and snow…lots and lots of snow. That was one of the reasons why Jodie didn’t ask Graham to come with her at the start. She didn’t know how he did whatever it was he did and she couldn’t figure out a way to explain any of it to her bosses even if she did understand. What would she say? He was good at finding people? How did she know that? What were his skills? She didn’t even know. To bring him in without answers, without qualifications could taint the investigation. Imagine Graham on a witness stand? Jodie would never want to put him through that. At this point though, Jodie was getting desperate. Too many people were dead and the longer it took to find Lynda the less the likelihood there was of her ever being found at all. In Jodie’s mind, her primary job, her primary responsibility, was to find this girl and bring her home alive. Everything else was secondary. And Graham knew it too and was willing to maybe risk his health. Maybe his sanity. To help Jodie achieve her end he was potentially subjecting himself to great pain. Walking back out to the car, she patted her gun and slung her vest over her shoulder. It was too hot to wear right now and the people she thought were involved in trying to kill her were being monitored by surveillance so her vest would be fine in the back seat.

Graham, wearing a wide-brimmed fisherman’s hat, peered at her with his one eye. She got in the car and started it.

She said, “I’ll get the AC going.”

She turned the fan on high. The hot air hit her face and she waited for it to cool before driving to the exit of the lot. She paused at the exit and said, “You know where we’re going?”

Graham, his eye fixed on a spot in the distance said, “Yes. I’ve known since I got here. Turn left.”

Jodie turned left and keeping an eye on Graham, noticed a line of sweat navigating the runnels of his shattered face. His fingers drummed a steady beat on his knees. She reached over and held his hand. She said, “I’m glad you’re here, Graham. And not just because you’re helping.”

“Can you tell me how this works? What is it that you’re seeing?”

“Right now I see a black tornado, spinning in the sky. It’s big. Real big. Bigger than I’ve ever seen before. It scares me, Jodie. Something is there and I can tell we’re not going to like what we find.”

Jodie scanned the sky ahead of her. Clear blue with sparse cotton drifts of clouds. The flat yellow sun burned the asphalt. Although she couldn’t see anything, she didn’t doubt that Graham saw it. But she was curious about it and said, “How are you seeing that? Do you know?”

“No. I don’t understand any of it. Only that it is. And the fucked up part, the part that made me doubt my sanity was the fact that I’m not seeing any of it with my one remaining eye. I see it out of this hole in my face, where my old eye used to be, overlaid onto the real world. I don’t know what it is I’m seeing. It’s like residual fear, or residual horror. The stain left by people who have either committed terrible things or have had terrible things done to them. Sometimes, I see it over people thinking about doing a terrible thing. I can’t explain it so for the most part, I don’t even try. I do know it hurts me. Whatever it is. It’s like my brain is baking in my skull or its swelling in there, pushing against the bone protecting it and it feels like my eyeballs are going to pop out of my skull from the pressure. Yeah, I said eyeballs because I can feel what used to be when the dead eye-hole sees what no one else sees. And I can’t even close my eye against the visions. There is nothing to close.”

“That’s why you live the way you live.”

“Yeah. That’s part of it. After the hospital, my parents were driving me home, well, to their home and I saw this blackness at this intersection. It moved and swirled as though it were alive and I knew it was bad. I could feel it in my stomach. I could smell it on the air, a rancid smell that was thick on my tongue. It looked bad, it felt bad, it smelled bad and I didn’t want to go anywhere near it. I started screaming in the back seat.” Graham smiling, one of bitterness and not of pleasure continued, “My dad almost drove off the road and my mom, she clamped her hands to her ears while my dad pulled the car to the curb. I was yelling ‘Get away!’ And my parents thought I was yelling at them but my dad stopped right in the thick of the blackness. It swirled around the car and I thought it would creep right in through the window and it would get in my mouth. I didn’t want that inside me, I didn’t want to taste that…filth. They didn’t know what to do and I didn’t know what I was seeing, not yet and my brain felt on fire, like someone funnelled gasoline in my skull and lit it and I remember my mom shaking my shoulders and my dad leaning over the back of the front seat holding onto my wrists, so I wouldn’t hit anyone I guess and the pain building in my head was unreal. I thought my brain would burst and ooze out my ears and all the time, that black smoke swirled around us and then I passed out. I woke up in the hospital, again. It was two days later. My mom told me I had a terrible fever and the doctors couldn’t explain the reason for it. They thought it was viral. Couldn’t figure out why they couldn’t lower my temperature to normal levels. I was released a week later and for some reason, one I couldn’t tell you, I googled the intersection. Two days before we passed through, there had been an accident. A car versus a delivery truck. The car caught fire and a family of four was trapped inside. They were burned alive. The car was too hot for anyone to get near to even attempt a rescue. They screamed for a long time. Even then I didn’t figure out what I had seen. It wasn’t until later that I realized I was seeing the residue of their pain. Their terror, their agony left an otherworldly stain of sorts. No one else could see it. If someone could, we would know about it by now, wouldn’t we? Then I thought maybe some people could see it and learned early on to keep it to themselves or else end up in a hospital somewhere with a bunch of doctors telling them that what they could see wasn’t real, just a hallucination brought on by repressed guilt or unresolved daddy issues. Who knew? I didn’t and I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. I also thought that maybe getting shot in the face may have scrambled my brain and I wasn’t seeing anything real. That the images I could see through a non-existent eye were synapses not firing or firing differently than they had before. I didn’t know what was going on. I was scared. I was angry. Angry all the time. Not only that though, I was seeing little clouds of darkness over people’s heads and sometimes in their eyes. All the white gone, only blackness. The denser the cloud, the more dangerous the person was. You remember a couple of years back, when for no reason, some guy on the subway platform pushed that woman in front of an oncoming train? Remember that?”

“I saw that guy before he did it. I was leaving physiotherapy from downtown. I couldn’t drive anymore. The headaches, the anger, I just couldn’t do it. I’d take the bus from my parent’s house to the Yorkdale station to get to my appointment downtown. I hated those appointments. Even on the hottest of days, I’d wear my hood up to cover my face and people would stare at me anyway. Keep my hood down, get stared at, put it up, get stared at. I couldn’t win. Anyway, I hopped off the train at Yorkdale and I saw this darkness hovering over a man’s head. He was seated on a bench, leaning over his knees, his hands clasped in his lap staring at the ground. The cloud was black, thick and swirling like a mini tornado. I stopped, mouth hanging open because of how thick it seemed. He must have sensed me looking at him because his head popped up and he stared at me. His eyes were black pits in his head. I felt a cold breeze passing through me, right at the navel. Sweat collected on my brow and my head began pounding, throbbing like an, I don’t know, an aching tooth. I ran out of there and just made it to my bus. The further away from him, the better I felt. When the bus pulled away from the station, I was relieved to be moving away, to be leaving. I could still see the cloud in the air. I bet it was right above where the man was sitting. The next day, they had his picture in the paper. After I left, he pushed that woman in front of the train. She was pregnant. I knew something was wrong with him and I left. I just left.”

Jodie said, “I remember that. They ran the story for a few days. The woman he killed looked a lot like his wife. He found out she had been cheating on him. She was leaving him. So he killed this stranger because he couldn’t kill his wife, I guess.”

“Whatever it is, it drains me. It hurts. After I found Francine, I was sick in my bed for four days straight. My head hurt so bad. I didn’t move. I laid in the darkness, sweating, wondering, because of what I can see, if there really was an afterlife and would I see my family again? I don’t know. All I do know is that I don’t control it, it’s weird, whatever it is, and the longer I use it, or it uses me, it hurts.”

He didn’t tell her the time when he had an argument with his father. He had an idea of what it meant but to say it out loud would make it real and that, ability or curse, scared him the most. Especially because his anger seemed to be a separate entity from him. A malignant growth sprouting unwanted and once released, uncontrollable.

“Do you see it now? This cloud?”

“Have you tried looking at a map? Would you see it on Google Earth or something?”

“I never tried. I don’t have a tablet. Honestly, that never occurred to me.”

“You might be able to pinpoint the location better.”

“You believe me then?”

She glanced at him with a frown, the look reserved for idiots and she said, “Of course I do. You’re my friend Graham and even if you weren’t, I now understand how you found Francine. You went for a walk and saw the cloud. Right?”

She smiled, “Jesus. I never would have figured that out. I mean, who would, right?”

“Because it’s crazy.”

“It’s not crazy if it’s real.”

“Sometimes, the real is crazy.”

“Yeah. But I still never would have figured that out.”

“What did you think I did?”

“I don’t know. Something. But not that. Still, grab my tablet from behind my seat, pull up the maps app and type in Kaufmann’s Vale. See what you see.”

Graham, aware of the approaching cloud, did as instructed. He switched the view to satellite and the incorporeal eye burned in his misshaped socket.

“Jesus. What’s going on in this town?”

“What do you mean?”

“I see three clouds. Three different sizes and three different shades of darkness.”

“Let’s go to the biggest and the darkest. Could be Lynda right? The darkest one?”

“I don’t know. This isn’t something I’ve ever seen before. And I read up on all this paranormal stuff. God, I hate saying that word.”

“Yeah. Like I’m some cliche from the X-files show.”

“The what files?”

“You’re killing me here.”

He zoomed in on the biggest cloud and saw that in order to get to it, they’d have to pass the lightest shade of cloud. He told her this and Jodie said, “Point the way, oh mystical one.”

Even though a headache was beginning to form, he smiled. Even after all this time his face still felt weird. Muscles pulling, bones moving to create an expression that had once been so natural now felt disconnected from him. As though someone was using their fingers to push his cheeks one way and his jaw the other. His parts didn’t respond to his wishes and because of that, they felt alien to him. He sighed. There was nothing he could do about that.

“Slow down. You’re going to want to turn off soon. There’s an old road running behind some trees.”

Jodie, easing on the brake said, “This is where Bruce and that unknown girl were found. At the end of this road. If it’s the same one.”

“This is the road.”

She drove through the low hanging screen of foliage onto the rutted dirt road. Branches assaulted the paint on all sides. Small golden breaks in the overhead leaves dotted the road. At the end of the road, where the burned out truck held the murdered corpses, small piles of ash spotted the ground. Jodie parked outside of the death zone and turned off the car. She stepped out of the car and touched her side. Her bandaged ribs throbbed from the movement. She grabbed her portable radio and patted another pocket to make sure her phone was there. Three areas of darkness. She wanted to call them in but what would she say? My friend can see things others can’t. I believe him because I’ve kind of seen him in action so yeah, if you could just go and check these areas, I’m pretty sure you’ll find Lynda. All this worried Jodie. If they did find Lynda, how could she explain it without sounding crazy? She couldn’t tell the truth and she certainly felt gross having to lie. Made her feel almost physically ill. There were no secrets in her investigations. It was wrong to do the job that way. But what was more important here? Her integrity, or the life of a young girl? Frowning, Jodie didn’t hear the other door open. She turned back and saw Graham sitting in the truck, his one eye glowing like a searchlight.

She opened the door. “You okay?”

He removed a plastic pill container from his pocket, cracked the top and shook two pills into his palm. He tossed them into his mouth. She heard him dry crunching them as he replaced the top. He sighed, cast a glance at Jodie and then opened the door and stepped out. He turned his face up to the sun. He shivered.

The sun felt wonderful on his face. It combatted the cold growing in his bones. The warm rays didn’t penetrate as deep yet they warmed him and helped him to remember there was pleasure in life. Even in moments of great pain, great fear.

Darkness swirled around where a burnt hulk used to be. It gave form to what wasn’t there anymore. An outline of the truck, an outline of the bodies. He could smell the lingering fear of the killers, their indecision and worry, as pungent as crushed garlic. He told Jodie a lot of what he could do and he felt better for it only he kept some of it back. He didn’t know why. She believed him and he had no idea how important that had been to him until he saw her belief, her trust, etched on her face. In that moment, he recognized he loved her, as he would a best friend. Jodie, the nosey detective whose curiosity made her befriend the gremlin in the woods. Even still, that wasn’t enough for him to share everything with her. Years of secret keeping instilled in him a phobia of revealing too much. Or maybe some things were a little too crazy, a little too much for even a best friend to take. Was there a tipping point? Where she would say, ok now, let’s not get crazy here, Graham. I can only accept so much. He didn’t think so. Why was he keeping some if it back? Didn’t matter. Not now. A larger, darker cloud spun in the distance. It’s where Lynda had to be, right? It smelled of fear. It smelled of pain.