Raven's Fire ( Archived) (4)

It slithered under the closet door like a snake, a noiseless and malevolent darkness. Jamie knew what it was. He knew the shadow of the dead raven had come for him at last.
Black and silent, it existed in that realm where imagination became reality in the mind of a ten-year-old boy. Countless times the closet door had been thrown open by a frustrated parent to reveal no “bogeyman”; but a ghost is a ghost, though it be banished by an adult’s lack of perception.
Jamie was a very bright kid; the teachers called him gifted. They were all ignorant of exactly how gifted he was.
The shadow wanted his young talent. For what, only God knew; or the Devil, perhaps. Jamie didn’t believe in either. But mythology has a way of creeping up on you when you least expect it.
Mom had tucked him in hours ago and planted a kiss on his forehead. He’d given up trying to convince her of the reality of the poltergeist, so he’d accepted her attentions stoically, and pretended to slip into slumber.
It was Dad who’d cleaned the chimney that summer, and found the skeleton in the chimney, right behind the wall of his closet. It was a raven’s skeleton. The old and mummified corpse still had patches of dried skin, desiccated flesh, and limp black feathers stuck to it. Gross!
Dad had laughed at Jamie’s fear, and placed the skeleton in a small wooden box; a little bird coffin.
“No big deal, Jamie,” His father had scoffed. “Ghosts are all in your mind. Here. I’m putting this box on the mantle over the fire. He’ll rest here for eternity. Serves the dumb bird right for flying into the chimney in the first place.”
Objects started moving on their own, but only when Jamie was alone.
Like the time, doing his homework in the kitchen, when the silverware drawer had flung itself open. The silverware crawled out and did a little dance on the counter, invisible strings making a complex ballet out of the spoons, forks, and knives. Jamie had peed his pants in fright. When his parents returned, they accused him of making it all up to cover his “accident”.
He didn’t care what they thought. He knew what he’d seen.
The shadow was on the wall, climbing toward the ceiling, above Jamie’s bed. It would fall on him and drink his blood, or worse, smother him. He was sure of it.
Jamie had asthma; he knew how suffocating felt. The thought was a self-fulfilling prophecy as his terror incited an attack. His breath tightened into a rough wheeze as the passages in his lungs constricted.
He choked. His medicine was in the living room, a hundred miles away. Calm. He needed to be calm.
The raven was on the ceiling, slithering across the fan, closer and closer. The dim light of the night-light only made things worse. Full darkness would have been better. Ignorance is bliss.
Jamie thought of his last chess match, as white inexorably closed in on him. One move away from checkmate his talent had flashed, and with the grand sweep of a castle he’d turned every bad move he’d made into a prison for his opponent’s king. Bad things weren’t always as bad as they seemed.

It slithered under the closet door like a snake, a noiseless and malevolent darkness. Jamie knew what it was. He knew the shadow of the dead raven had come for him at last.
Black and silent, it existed in that realm where imagination became reality in the mind of a ten-year-old boy. Countless times the closet door had been thrown open by a frustrated parent to reveal no “bogeyman”; but a ghost is a ghost, though it be banished by an adult’s lack of perception.
Jamie was a very bright kid; the teachers called him gifted. They were all ignorant of exactly how gifted he was.
The shadow wanted his young talent. For what, only God knew; or the Devil, perhaps. Jamie didn’t believe in either. But mythology has a way of creeping up on you when you least expect it.
Mom had tucked him in hours ago and planted a kiss on his forehead. He’d given up trying to convince her of the reality of the poltergeist, so he’d accepted her attentions stoically, and pretended to slip into slumber.
It was Dad who’d cleaned the chimney that summer, and found the skeleton in the chimney, right behind the wall of his closet. It was a raven’s skeleton. The old and mummified corpse still had patches of dried skin, desiccated flesh, and limp black feathers stuck to it. Gross!
Dad had laughed at Jamie’s fear, and placed the skeleton in a small wooden box; a little bird coffin.
“No big deal, Jamie,” His father had scoffed. “Ghosts are all in your mind. Here. I’m putting this box on the mantle over the fire. He’ll rest here for eternity. Serves the dumb bird right for flying into the chimney in the first place.”
Objects started moving on their own, but only when Jamie was alone.
Like the time, doing his homework in the kitchen, when the silverware drawer had flung itself open. The silverware crawled out and did a little dance on the counter, invisible strings making a complex ballet out of the spoons, forks, and knives. Jamie had peed his pants in fright. When his parents returned, they accused him of making it all up to cover his “accident”.
He didn’t care what they thought. He knew what he’d seen.
The shadow was on the wall, climbing toward the ceiling, above Jamie’s bed. It would fall on him and drink his blood, or worse, smother him. He was sure of it.
Jamie had asthma; he knew how suffocating felt. The thought was a self-fulfilling prophecy as his terror incited an attack. His breath tightened into a rough wheeze as the passages in his lungs constricted.
He choked. His medicine was in the living room, a hundred miles away. Calm. He needed to be calm.
The raven was on the ceiling, slithering across the fan, closer and closer. The dim light of the night-light only made things worse. Full darkness would have been better. Ignorance is bliss.
Jamie thought of his last chess match, as white inexorably closed in on him. One move away from checkmate his talent had flashed, and with the grand sweep of a castle he’d turned every bad move he’d made into a prison for his opponent’s king. Bad things weren’t always as bad as they seemed.

Jamie could do this. He wasn’t afraid.
With this assertion, his lungs relaxed, and he could breath again. Jamie slid out from under the covers, preparing to jump off the bed and run.
He was alone, had nowhere to run. Mom and Dad could banish it for a time, but it would be back. It always came back.
The bones…a voice in his mind, edged with fire. Pain and rage all bundled into a tight flare of expression. Jamie flinched at the psychic intrusion…release me!
Bones? What about bones? And then it hit him. The raven’s skeleton! But what should he do with them? What did the creature want? How did you banish a tortured bird-ghost?
The fire…the thought came like a migraine, assaulting Jamie’s head… It burns!
It must have been bad, to die in the heat and smoke of the chimney. So terrible that the fear and pain had lingered on, a memory too powerful for the world to forget.
In a flash of insight, akin to the sudden miracle of the magic rook, he knew what to do. The creek behind the barn. He’d immerse the raven’s corpse in the clean, natural water of the creek. Perhaps that would relieve the bird’s spiritual suffering and let it finally rest in peace.
Yes! Water…an overpowering thirst came to the creature and was transferred to Jamie. His mouth suddenly dried up, felt like the Sahara Desert, and he gagged on sand.
“Okay, okay. Just shut up! I’ll take care of it.” Jamie whispered. Every thought from the entity was like jabbing a hot poker into Jamie’s brain. He needed relief just as much as the raven did.
He left his bed and crept into the living room. The ghost was silent, thankfully, and glided, a black wraith, in Jamie’s wake. When they reached the living room, the ghost slid over to the mantle and into the box, right through the wood, and disappeared.
Schroedinger’s Birdbrain, Jamie thought, and restrained a giggle, remembering the lecture on Schroedinger’s Cat in quantum mechanics class. The Raven was now neither alive nor dead, or both, simultaneously. Pure waveform.
He could hear Dad snoring from his parent’s bedroom, the light and noise of the television blending in with the wheezy, nasal sound. They always slept with the TV on. Jamie didn’t understand why.
He wasn’t tall enough to reach the mantle, but he solved that easily and quietly enough with Dad’s favorite footstool. He removed the box from the mantle with care and crept back to his room, where he quickly dressed and put his shoes on.
Dad would punish him for stealing the box, but he didn’t care. This had to be done.
The night air was chill and brought goose bumps. Jamie paced across the landscape into the grove of trees behind the barn. The farmhouse remained dim and dark in his absence. Good. His parents were still clueless.
The little coffin opened easily. The corpse manifested inside, a darkness lingering around it, a shadow that maybe only Jamie could see. With painful thoughts of fire that only he could hear. He would never be able to tell anyone about this. It would be his secret, whether he liked it or not.
The experience with the silverware had been enough to convince Jamie of that. People couldn’t see, or didn’t want to, and made up “reasonable” explanations for everything.
Jamie’s genius in quantum mechanics made him suspicious of “reasonable” explanations. Reason and logic were virtues in the old classical physics, but Niels Bohr and friends had changed everything.
Reason was obsolete. Nothing made sense anymore. “Supernatural” meant exactly zilch; it was impossible to label the new model of nature in such simplistic terms.