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2024-10-29 19:42:56When my pupils adjusted to the brightness, I found that I lay beneath a clear blue sky in a world encased in, utterly suppressed by snow. Not a sound or flutter occurred. The story told in the dream had ended, and there was no epilogue. The point-of-view character had landed not in heaven or hell, but in oblivion, and this was what it looked like, a realm of white and blue. And yet there were memories, were there not? In his muscles and
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The Third Twin ONE - EGGS AND ELEPHANTS 1
ONEEGGS AND ELEPHANTS1The winter issue of Backtrails magazine appeared in my mailbox in February. Though I’d never heard of the magazine, much less subscribed to it, the following May I was on a plane for Munich answering one of its ads. It wasn’t unusual for me to respond to the call of a distant place or activity. An avid outdoorsman, I’d hiked, biked, climbed, snowboarded, skydived, even canyoned at various locations throughout the States and Eur
The Third Twin 2
Twelve days later we were in Brazil. O Festival da Aranha—the Spider Festival—was an all-weekend affair, so we decided to do it last. Our flight arrived in Rio de Janeiro Friday afternoon, and we spent that evening and most of Saturday enjoying Rio’s offerings. A bus would take us to Tago and the Spider Festival later Saturday afternoon, then back to Rio early Monday morning for the flight home.Rio de Janeiro was splendid, if in shambles. The remnants of its own carnival festival littered the streets, rendering it a city of motley tatters, a sad sort of vision to support a poignant atmosphere of loss. It was back to the misery of life for the residents, while the tourists that had come behind the carnival-goers seemed to linger rather than to explore. Kristin and I paid the mood of the place little heed in the beginning, eagerly
The Third Twin 3
Call me paranoid. Call me what you will. But this place was freakish, and never more clearly than now as I pushed through a crowd gathered around a transparent tank in which an armless and horribly burn-scarred man wearing nothing but a Speedo sat among thousands of hairy spiders that crawled over his body like a shivering coat of fleece. The onlookers squealed as the object of their delight opened his mouth, inviting one of the hairy crawlers inside. When the spider accepted the invitation, their voices grew even shriller. When the man bit into it, they lost all semblance of belonging to a civilized species.A snowboarding buddy once told me that in the Red Light back alleys of Amsterdam he had been dragged into a sex show featuring a woman with one leg ‘doing it’ with a woman with no legs. I asked him why he’d let himself be dra
The Third Twin 4
4The ensuing weeks would prove to be the worst of my fifty-one years of living, to include those surrounding Kathy’s murder. They began with a statement, a strange statement from Felicia’s lips, and ended in death and institutionalization. The period between was a blur of doctors, specialists, and investigators, whose paths, collectively, led essentially nowhere. Some answers were found, but only where there was the raw material to work from. The creature that had glutted himself on the slow brutalization of my family would remain the elephantine shadow upon all of our souls.Felicia’s statement came after a visit with one of the more mainstream of the above mentioned specialists, a psychiatrist who dealt speci
The Third Twin 5
I had one order of business to attend to before making the journey. His name: Bobby Owens. I’d no trouble spotting the young man when he came out of school the next afternoon. Coach Wells, his basketball coach and a friend of mine, had told me to look for a tall kid with younger girls draped over him. His entourage gave me the suspicious eye when I separated him from their company, but I paid them no mind as I suggested to young Mr. Groves that we take a ride. It wasn’t clear whether or not he knew who I was at this point, but he was certainly alarmed by my interest, as evidenced by the meager ‘Why?’ he managed to get out after a difficult swallow. To bring it all together for him, I threw out Dr. Whittler’s name. To this he responded more actively, glancing around to see who was looking before ducking inside the cab of my beat-up 4Runner, squeezing his backpack to his chest like a security blanket.
The Third Twin Two - HALF-MAST 6
I actually felt calm during the long flight down into South America. For the first time in a while, Kristin’s condition wasn’t constantly at the forefront of my thoughts. Her ‘coming out’, triggered by a vicious nightmare, had been sustained by the decision on the part of her mother and me to refrain at all costs from mentioning anything to do with that nightmare or the whole nightmare in general in our daughter’s presence. Kristin had quietly given herself to participating in this covenant as well, which had made for strangely tranquil skies around the Ocason home for the days that had passed since then. Such that when I asked Felicia if she thought I should still go to Brazil, she said, more adamantly than the words describe: “God yes, Barry. Just don’t bring anything unhealthy back with you.”On the one hand she didn’t want to
The Third Twin 7
To my voiced approval, my hotel had a ‘business center’, which basically consisted of a computer and a printer perched on a desk that barely fit in the small cubicle. The internet service wasn’t the best, the load times irksomely long, but when the results for my search engine entry came up, the wait proved worth it. The very first link led to an interesting article, but when taken in context, became the unearthed Dead Sea Scrolls, a mysterious supporting document to a book built on faith or delusion.The website was a news oriented publication out of the UK. The article, dated January 24, 2009, focused on the abnormal ratio of twins to single births in a small Brazilian town. That fearsome villain of the modern era, Josef Mengele, was named in the title of the article. Strange that a name which ordinarily existed in the pages of history
The Third Twin 8
This time I took a taxi. Not because I didn’t want to walk, but because I didn’t want to be seen in advance. I’d no idea if she would be there, but if I was so lucky, I wanted to surprise her. I didn’t want her waiting on me, not again, flourishing that regal nonchalance as she spoke of her unnatural world and its black miracles. I wanted command, and the morning’s experience in Rio Tago—not least Investigator Pinto’s parting words, which had smacked of mortal psychopaths and investigable, mentally tractable serial offenses—hopefully would contribute to that. But I was to have more ammunition than this by the time I got there. They say cabbies can get you anything you want. Mine did that and then some, and I didn’t even have to ask.It started when I got in the taxi and didn’t quit until we were pulling up at the house.
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The Third Twin 20
I woke to a world so brilliant, I thought I was still in the clutches of the elaborate nightmare that seemed to have spanned years of mine and others’ lives; and that this must be the culmination of its chaotic conclusion, a blinding photograph to attach to mankind’s record, the moment in time when human evolution pinnacled not in glory, but in irony, for crimes against the very engine that had driven it.When my pupils adjusted to the brightness, I found that I lay beneath a clear blue sky in a world encased in, utterly suppressed by snow. Not a sound or flutter occurred. The story told in the dream had ended, and there was no epilogue. The point-of-view character had landed not in heaven or hell, but in oblivion, and this was what it looked like, a realm of white and blue. And yet there were memories, were there not? In his muscles and
The Third Twin 19
“Have you ever wondered what it would be like to sit next to God?” Maya said, eyes still moist as they reflected the fire’s whispery flames. “For me, that is not a simple question to answer because I have sat next to one who sits next to God. He dispenses his keys, breaks his genetic codes without regard for bystanders, or even those he dispenses his keys to, those whose codes he breaks. It is entirely possible he has cracked the genetic code to God Himself, but does he consider the possibility of offense? No, because there are no possibilities with him. There is only the thing he intends to achieve and the straightest route to that achievement. For him, God is a bystander. He’ll acknowledge Him if He gets in the way. Otherwise . . . ” She shrugged.Dianna and I sat on the opposite side of the fire. Outside the shelter, the snow came hard
The Third Twin 18
It was so out of place, character, context as the trees and their denizens fell away behind us, that Dianna and I could only stare in wonderment. The pavilion-like structure, which served as a covered porch to an adjoining cinderblock building, painted a mirage-like tableau. Two sides were open, while the one that stood opposite us abutting the building was a leeward wall fashioned of slim, rough logs lashed and nailed together. The roof, resting on six knotty supports, was just as crude, but the structure was clearly sturdy, withstanding the storm in creaking though staunch motionlessness. Yet it was the shelter’s interior that sang—with its fire pit, the stack of logs in the corner, the picnic table and bench, camping chairs. The scene was surreal, Daliesque, an unapologetic imposition upon rigidity and uniformity, upon the past itself. The shelter was Ritter’s lean-to, disassembled and put back together here, where in its alienness it somehow bel
The Third Twin 17
When I opened my eyes on the morning of the seventh day, faces lingered in the snow shower that greeted me, warping, swirling, dissolving among the driven flakes, among their own echoes. The snow came hard, and on an unfriendly and capricious wind, and the bed was now at least six inches deep. But Ritter wasn’t going to let us off this time. He’d had us get our packs ready and do what body cleaning we were going to—the usual boiled water and alcohol-based wipes—before we went to sleep. He gave us just enough time to shovel down our Pop-tarts and brush our teeth before we were on our way.The going was tedious from the outset, and the blow only intensified as we went. We tried to keep our path as shielded from the brunt of it as possible, but there was only so much navigable ground, and Ritter’s memorized route to keep. The exposed stretch
The Third Twin 16
To our relief, the snow showers quit around noon, though the sky remained threatening, in moving shades of gray. A wind had risen, channeling along the opposite slope and lifting the fallen snow up in swirls, but the road before us nonetheless looked traversable. We didn’t relish the thought of trudging across treacherous terrain in the face of a cold stiff wind, but we didn’t doubt that our Teutonic Knight, Champion of the Cause of Human Endurance, would drive us on, probably double time, to our next site. He had been eyeing the weather with impatience ever since he’d finished sewing Higgins up, likely having been anxious to flee the uncomfortable silence that had descended. It nearly knocked us backward when he entered the shelter saying he thought we should wait until morning to set out again, that even if we managed to avoid more snow, we were going to find the next shelter, a lean-to he had constructed himself out of tree limbs, less comfortabl
The Third Twin FOUR - THE WINDS OF EVOLUÇÃO 15
On the fifth day out we saw a wolf. The five of us, weary, hungry, and sweat-chilled, had just broken out of a patch of short alpine trees that hard weather had left in a perpetual balletic bow, and there it stood not twenty meters away, silhouetted along a blade of rock, watchful eyes shining coppery in the moonlight.As we froze, Higgins as usual was the first to comment, his frosted whisper like glass shattering in the cold May night. “It’s beautiful.”“Hush!” hissed Maya, an even sharper aftershock.The wolf seemed more curious than alarmed—in custom for its kind from my limited experience. Granted, in Southeast
The Third Twin 14
The five of us sat as a group for the first time at an outdoor table at Berchtesgaden’s Café Strasbourg. The views from the terrace were grand, Herr Ritter having obviously selected the location that would speak most eloquently for the element in which his party would be spending the next two weeks. The restaurant was situated on the side of a hill, and from where I sat, Dianna to my left, Ritter to my right, I had a dead-on look at Germany’s third highest mountain, Mount Watzmann. Against the backdrop of an isolated cloud cluster in an otherwise clear sky, its twin snow-capped peaks looked like the hooks of a nasty vise that was as likely to shear its victim in two as to clamp it in place. Conspicuously out of the view was Mount Kehlstein, on a spur of which rested Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, a visit not for another day as I’d have thought, but one which, unbeknownst to us, had been written into our itinerary. When I heard this, I’d been instantly suspi
The Third Twin 13
In the darkness of my hotel room, I found myself again in the alternate sentient state, my dream-sense lucid enough this time that I was conscious of the soft tick-tocking in the background, and the foreignness of it, from the very beginning. We were walking to the chapel, side by side, my third daughter and I. This time, instead of breaking off on the animal trail, we remained on the main path, which shone with purpose in the columns of sunlight filtering in through the canopy. The building was just becoming visible ahead when she touched my hand with hers.“Father?” she said.“Yes?”“What is my name?”
The Third Twin 12
12As we sat back for the first time in at least an hour, the ladies on their couch, I in my cushioned armchair, I’d left out nothing. No detail that I could readily recall, no impression, however fanciful it seemed. And not once had their suspension of disbelief seemed strained. Equipped with at least Dianna’s longstanding relationship with the paranormal, they’d apparently made the decision somewhere along the way to quit resisting what lay outside known bounds and to proceed as though the supernatural was as legitimate a player as anything that could be converted to formula. Which effectively rendered ‘suspension of disbelief’ an obsolete term unless proven otherwise, and somehow I didn’t see any of us reserving hope that the land-based and scientifically logical explanations would suddenly pop up out of the puzzle’s assembly. The sobe
