Morgan Sinclair, Chpt. 3

Morgan awoke in a dream, or so it felt.

Light flooded his vision, and coalesced into a vastly different world before him.  Tall cliffs rose on either side of him.  Wind raged through the narrow pass in which he stood, carrying with it the salty smell of the ocean, the metallic tinge of blood, and the stench of human decay and excrement.  His vision was narrowed by the heavy metal helmet that curved around the arch of his brow and down the bridge of his nose.  The wind chilled his sweaty skin and brought sand to abrade his exposed flesh.  A large, circular shield of bronze held fast to his left arm, hugged to his torso.  He carried a tall spear in his right that extended upward nearly two feet above his own head.  His chest was clad in a thin chest plate that left his arms bare.  A short blade, perhaps two or two and a half feet in length from hilt to tip, hung from his waist, clanking against the armored battle dress that adorned his lower half.  Shin protectors were strapped over the rough cowhide sandals that laced up his calves to the knee.
            The sky overhead roiled with dark clouds, rays of sun graced the landscape through patches in the dense cloud across the horizon.  Morgan watched, an observer, through the eyes of another.  This he knew, for his body reacted without conscious will, as though reflexively.  The shield hefted higher, and he began to march.  Around him, ranks of men, before and behind, marched in unison; their eyes were hardened and emotionless, their bodies knotted with muscle and adorned with scar tissue.  The ground was uneven beneath his feet as he trod onward.  He looked beneath his soles to find the faces of the dead.  Enemies, he knew, somehow.  Moans and cries of pain were silenced as the weight of hundreds of soldiers crushed those unfortunate enough to have survived the onslaught underfoot.  Morgan, in his observant consciousness, felt a wave of revulsion, but this body he inhabited did not share the stomach churning feeling.  He returned his gaze forward to see them approach the mouth of the canyon.  A call to halt boomed between the massive walls on either side, and at once, obediently, the mass of soldiers planted their feet, raising their shields, and hefting their spears.  Morgan’s own shield went up and his grip changed upon the wicked javelin he held.

Three ranks from the front, Morgan could see, now, beyond the mouth of the canyon.  A vast legion stood beyond the walls to meet them.  He glanced around at his comrades, acknowledging in defeat that their numbers paled in comparison to the vast army that comprised the battlefield unto the horizon.  Distant drums pounded, resounding from the enemy, intending to incite fear, but, with another glance around, he saw that the soldiers surrounding were unfazed.  They were steel, forged in the fires of conflict.  A call bellowed towards them in a language he could not understand, and the massive army before them began to advance.  Slowly at first, and then more quickly, until advancing upon them was a tsunami of flesh and honed metal.  Their war cries, a million echoes, were deafening as they bounced in the canyon.  The ranks around Morgan tightened and braced for impact.  In a moment of clarity, Morgan knew where he must be.  Knowledge rose unbidden to his mind from history classes he had taken, and from his own interest in ancient mythology.

Thermopylae.  There could be no other place.  The legendary battle in which 300 Spartan warriors stood against an invading Persian army a million vast.  Fear crept into his consciousness as the invaders drew nearer.  No more than a hundred yards now.  His small force held their ground, soldiers of stone blocking passage.  The pass they guarded would serve to funnel the opposing force, rendering the bulk of their numbers useless in large scale assault.  Only the war of attrition to come, the pitting of undisciplined, but fresh front-line fodder against the progressively tiring Spartans would spell disaster.

With a resounding howl, an echoing clank of metal on metal, and the squelch of splitting, punctured flesh, the two forces collided with tectonic force.  Morgan observed bewildered as each rank braced the one before it to resist the Persian invasion.  As he dug his left shoulder down to further brace his large shield, his right arm lashed out over the heads of his comrades to impale an unlucky foe.  Quickly as he had struck, he retracted his harpoon, sending flecks of gore and muscle tissue to spatter his own face and the bodies of those before him.  He roared, reveling in the glory of his first kill of the battle.  Despite the acrid taste of adrenaline in his throat, Morgan felt, before he saw, blackness begin to swallow his field of vision.  Through the progressively blackening haze, his weapon stabbed and lunged again and again, scoring victim upon victim.  Before long, his vision faded completely, and he lapsed into unconsciousness, sung to sleep by the raucous song of clashing swords, shields, and spears.

The emphatic honk of a car horn returned Morgan Sinclair to reality.  He raised the lids he hadn’t known had been covering his eyes.  They felt heavy, as though waking from a deep sleep, and he found himself standing at the edge of the sidewalk, as though preparing to cross the street, his hand clasped on the post of a street light.  He was, to a moderate degree, confused as to the events that had just occurred.  Morgan glanced around to see one person, a young woman, walking away from him, but peering over her shoulder at him, suspicious.  Looking down, Morgan saw that he was still dressed in hospital scrubs, the incessant shade of blue that had dominated his existence for the past five days.

It had been two more days, after his initial encounter with Lily, before the hospital had been confident enough to release him.  The doctor had scheduled him to return in two weeks to check the progress of his healing.  Lily, the fiery haired angel, had returned each day subsequent to their meeting, partially, he knew, to check his condition as per her duty, but also to converse with him casually and at length.  As his clothes had been left in bloody rags from the events of his accident, they had returned his effects to him and graced him with a pair of scrubs to wear.  A reminder he could keep of his pleasant times in the blue partition of the ward.
            Pleasant, he thought with a mental laugh.  What a joke.  What he had not received upon his departure was the necklace Lily had relieved him of while he lay in his morphine induced stupor.  But in Morgan’s mind, he had lost that sometime during the night of his attack.  The doses of pain medication had been reduced during the length of his stay, now having dwindled to a Vicodin prescription held crumpled in Morgan’s pocket.

Beneath the overcast sky outside the hospital door, Morgan inhaled deeply, falling in love with the air that wasn’t tainted by the scent of cleaner.  Ironically, his first effort was to wriggle a mangled pack of Marlboro Blend 27 cigarettes from the front pocket of his scrubs, and put one to his lips.

“You know those things will kill you.” The voice came from behind him, speaking both matter-of-factly, and carrying a jovial tone.  He turned and glanced over his shoulder to see Lily approaching from several paces behind.  He offered a short laugh and returned to lighting his cigarette.  After pausing to take a drag, he answered.
            “If I’m still alive by the time these things come back to haunt me, I clearly didn’t live epically enough.”
            She grinned.  “Fair enough.”  Lily crossed the distance between them and stood beside Morgan, shoulder to shoulder.
            “Thanks for helping maintain my sanity,” Morgan commented lightly.
            “No problem,” she replied with another smile.  “Waiting for someone to take you home?”  He laughed wistfully.
            “No, if I held my breath for someone to pick me up, I definitely wouldn’t need to worry about these cigarettes.  I don’t live too far away.”  He took another drag and exhaled slowly, sending streams of smoke spiraling from his nostrils.  “I should get going, though.  It is a bit of a walk.”  She nodded and gave him a light embrace, the mark of a friendship having been forged during the extent of his hospitalization.  He returned the embrace.

“How about that dinner sometime soon?” he asked.  She pulled back to meet his gaze.

“It’s against policy to date a patient,” she replied with a half-smile.  Her message was clear enough as she pressed a piece of paper firmly into his palm before releasing her hold.

“I suppose that means I should heal quickly,” Morgan said as she turned to walk inside.  Her only response was a furtive glance before she was swallowed maw of the hospital that salivated disinfectant.  He filed the piece of paper in his pocket with his crumpled prescription, and began trudging along toward his little piece of suburbia a couple miles to the north.  Due to the slight influence of the painkillers, the street before him was sluggish to follow his gaze.  The only way Morgan could describe the town surrounding him was to say it was cute, but it would be spoken mirthlessly and sans any fuzzy feelings the word implied.  Put plainly, it was boring.  Devoid of activity or entertainment for the younger generation.  As he traversed the sidewalk, cars passed calmly by, weaving through the latticework of streets between buildings, none of which were more than four stories high.

Winter winds under a mottled gray sky brought a chill to the air.  Dead leaves littered the streets, swirling in dervishes with each passing vehicle.  As he walked, he checked his watch.  The large face, mounted on an even larger band, read 12:15 PM.  Approaching a busy intersection, he slouched against a nearby light post.

The next thing he knew, he was awoken by the emphatic honk of a car horn.  His eyelids were heavy as though awaking from a deep sleep.  He looked around; finding himself still perched up against the streetlight, subject to the curious, suspicious glance of a young woman who had clearly walked past just moments before he came to.  Morgan glanced down at his watch.  It read 2:24 PM.
            Holy shit, where had the time gone?  His last memory before the intensely vivid dream episode was nearly two hours previous.  Have I really been standing here for that long?  Morgan stood confused for another moment, before bewilderedly wandering onward across the street.  His mind’s eye was a cinema playing the dream—was it a dream?—on repeat.  What had spawned such a sensory vividness within his mind, and of a topic so non-sequitur to his life?

The rest of the walk passed quickly as Morgan walked in a dissociated trance, lost in thought.  Again and again, he played through the events of his crash, the attack, and now the waking dream he had just experienced.

A half hour later, Morgan reached the steps that led into his house.  The lights within were dim, the blinds drawn.  He sighed as he turned the knob and crossed the threshold, all too familiar with what he knew he would find inside.  A narrow set of stairs yawned upwards before him.  Gray daylight filtered through the closed blinds, illuminating the innards of the house in a mottled light, robbing it of any hue.  Morgan rambled up the stairs to his room where he stripped out of the scrubs.  The room was clean, fastidiously organized, at the least.  Posters of various musical acts blanketed the walls.  A large bookshelf loomed in the shadowy corner, stuffed to capacity with books from various genres.  He grabbed a set of clothes; dark jeans, a black t-shirt, and gray hoodie, from his closet, and meandered into the bathroom.

Morgan leaned on the counter over the sink, surveying himself in the mirror.  It was almost as though a different person was looking back at him.  Having eaten little in his hospital stay, fed fluids constantly through an intravenous drip, he had lost weight.  His face was gaunt and hollow.  Days of hygienic disregard had left a dusting of thick facial hair covering his chin, neck, and cheeks.  After turning the shower to a scalding hot temperature, he shaved, the activity made awkward with only one good arm.

Fifteen minutes later, he emerged from the bathroom, showered, dressed, and refreshed.  Downstairs in the living room, he found what he had come to accept as normal, but had never gotten particularly accustomed to.  His father sat in the middle of the dark room, the only real light emanating from the television.  The man had always had problems with addiction, be it alcohol, cigarettes, or harder substances.  Come to think of it, his mother had as well, but she had excused herself from their lives several years prior in an attempt to help herself.  Morgan never knew what she had run from, whether it was both of them, just his father, her addiction, or other personal issues she had never confided in him.  In retrospect, it should not have come as much of a surprise at it had at the time, but at the tender age of thirteen, losing a parent was a fairly inconceivable idea.  Like most, Morgan had dealt with the unreasonable feelings of guilt at her absence, and his father had only gotten worse from there.  Morgan had remained blissfully unaware of the addiction hitherto her departure, but ignorance became more and more difficult to maintain.  His father had been wrapped in the constrictor coils of addiction, moving progressively downward in a spiral of increasingly potent intoxicants.  Formerly a respectable, well-paid computer programmer, he had lost his job a year ago in the face of his grief and substance abuse as he slipped from achieving his goals.  Initially dismayed, Morgan had tried to find help, find solace, but his stubborn father would not be reached.  Before long, he had accepted it as inevitable, and focused on maintaining his own quality of life in any way he could.  Fortunately the small suburban house in which they resided had been paid off prior to the termination of his dad’s employment.  Life savings and retirement funds had supported them for a while, but dwindled quickly in the face of wanton spending on narcotics.  His father now, somehow, retained the presence of mind to apply for welfare and unemployment, which Morgan was sure would soon be gone as well.  Groceries, the majority of which were consumed by Morgan, were purchased by his low paying job as a night shift stock manager at the local grocer.

The man, or the shell that was left, sat hunched in the middle of the couch, half lidded eyes fixated on the television screen.  There was no telling how long he had remained there, motionless.  Strapped loosely, forgotten, around his bicep was a length of rubber tubing that acted as a tourniquet.  On the floor by his feet laid a lighter, and a discarded hypodermic needle.  A large spoon, the handle bent around to be easily held by a shaky hand, sat on the table, crystallized remnants of a solution dusted the bowl of the utensil.  So it was heroin this week.  Morgan sighed.  It was always something different.  He had seen transitions from marijuana, to cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine, heroin, and even methamphetamine.  In all honesty, Morgan was surprised the man was still alive.  He had attempted to enroll him in rehab, even call the cops, but the stubborn, idiotic, man always managed to slip through the cracks, returning to his oceanic trench of drugs and despair.

Morgan walked carefully into the living room, into his father’s field of vision.  It was a pathetic sight.  The man’s skin was sallow, a yellowing pale in hue.  Sweat beaded his brow and unshaven upper lip.  Stubble consumed his hollow cheeks and chin.  Long ago, Morgan had stopped feeling guilt or sorrow for the man who had once been his father, now he felt only pity and contempt.  The man was slow to acknowledge the presence of his son.

“Morgan,” finally came the croaking whisper from his parched throat.  “Where have you been?”  He spoke slowly, as though it was a great effort to undertake.

“I’ve…I’ve been busy,” Morgan responded.  The man might have acknowledged him with a barely perceptible nod, perhaps not.  Either way, he had returned to his world of demons and television, with nothing left to say.  He had failed to notice the giant cast that encompassed his son’s arm.  Failed to notice the bruises, the hospital bracelet.  Morgan sighed again and left the room, retreating to his bedroom.  He was tired, exhausted; both in a mental and physical sense, but as he laid on his bed—not bothering to pull back the tautly drawn sheets—he knew sleep would not come to him.  This was by no means an unusual occurrence.  Due to his graveyard work shift, his sleep schedule was irregular at best.  More often than not bordering on the insomniac.

Again, images of his crash, of his attack, flooded his mind.  The sensation of insanity crept further and further into his mind as he lay staring at his ceiling, until he could bear it no more.

Morgan scooted off his bed, and reached beneath it to withdraw a shoe box.  From inside he pulled a Heckler and Koch USP .45 handgun.  A relic of his father’s that he had confiscated and hid in lieu of his rare but dangerous drug induced rages.  He pushed the full magazine into place, checked to ensure the safety was on, and left a round unchambered, before stuffing it into the back of his waistband.  It was past time to return to the site of his attack and verify his sanity, or insanity.

A local bus dropped him across town, where it would be a short walk to the edge of the forest.  For the second time in less than as many weeks, Morgan found himself tromping through the underbrush.  Dead leaves crunched underfoot as he searched.  The musky odor of bark and decaying foliage filled his nostrils.  The winter winds blew through the treetops scattering leaves, pinecones, and small branches to litter the forest floor.

For two hours, Morgan’s endeavor bore no fruit.  The early sunset, characteristic of the season, advanced quickly in the late afternoon.  The deep orange of the sinking sun blazed through the barren trees, casting long shadows across the ground which seemed to yearn and grasp for Morgan like spindly fingers.  Finally, and predominantly by sheer luck, he discovered the gaping hole in the earth from which he had emerged the victor of a life or death struggle.  Painted in hues of orange, red, and black, it looked like a bloodied maw; the wooden boards that had once concealed it broken, like the jagged, rotten teeth of a carnivore.  Morgan gave a quick glance over his shoulder to watch the golden-orange orb begin to sink below the mountains in the distance.  He gave an involuntary shudder as a chill skittered the length of his spine.  Fear, borne of memory, rose within him, accompanied by the all too familiar bitterness of bile in his throat.  His hand absently brushed the pistol in his waistband before he calmed himself with a shake of his head and a few deep breaths.

Into the pit he descended, slowly, testing each decayed step before putting his full weight on it.  He stepped gingerly onto the dirt floor.  Since the roof had been forcibly opened, nature had begun to consume the room and turn it into any other hole in the ground.  Leaves littered what had been a cleanly swept stone floor.  In the fading daylight, the inside of the sanctum was nearly too dark to see.  Morgan cursed himself silently for not having the presence of mind to bring a flashlight.  He never would have imagined the search would take this long.  Pausing a moment to let his vision adjust to the darkness, a vague shape sparked his memory.  In hues of mottled black and blue, the form of a desk materialized.  Atop the desk sat the form of a long unused oil lantern.  Perhaps it still worked.  Morgan reached his hands out before him, feeling his way forward.  Suddenly, his foot caught on something, invisible in the black, and he sprawled forward.  The fall dealt him a glancing blow to the forehead as he struck the leg of a chair.  Morgan swore.  It hurt, but undoubtedly was not a critical injury.  He slowly pushed himself to his feet, and spidered his hands across the desk until he found the base of the lamp.  He seized it from the desk and scrounged in his pocket for the lighter he always kept on his person.  With a flick of the flint, the small flame lit up the corner of the room.  Morgan carefully opened the door to the lantern, and set the feeble flame to the wick.

Mercifully, the fire took, the lantern blazed to life; illuminating the small room, and casting harsh shadows.  Now that he had light, his mind had begun to wonder what he had tripped over, and answered the question even before he turned to look.  The wolf.  The monster.  Whatever it had been.  Morgan slowly turned, and lowered the lantern to the floor.  Indeed, there it was, the wolf-thing.  It had injured him for the last time, tripping him.

It was nothing like the creature in his memories, from his nightmares.  It was not the giant beast with knives for canines, talon-like claws, cold intelligence, and murderous intent.  What lay before him, however, was unusual.  It was a beast unlike any Morgan had, personally, seen before.  The creature looked more like a normal, pack-hunting, moon-howling wolf, if it had been fed from birth with steroids.  Morgan judged it based on his scant knowledge of dogs, and saw it to be at least the size of the biggest Newfoundland he had ever seen.  Weighing in at one-hundred-eighty, perhaps two hundred pounds, possibly more.  It was coated head to foot in a long black fur that was matted and missing in spots.  Even in death the beast looked mad, mad in both meanings, angry and insane.  Its mouth was agape, the fangs, though not as terrifying as memories served, still stretched to the length of Morgan’s longest finger.  The eyes, rolled partially back in their sockets, held large irises of a vibrant ice-blue.  The light glinted off something silver in the creature’s mouth.  The knife.  The curved blade that Morgan had slain the wolf with.  After a moment of hesitation, Morgan reached uncertainly into its mouth and grasped the hilt to tear the blade free.  As the knife came out, Morgan saw the flesh where the blade penetrated, had turned from a pinkish gray to a cauterized, dead black.  The flesh had shriveled, as though burned.  Sufficiently perplexed and weirded out, Morgan’s curiosity was sated, and he turned to leave back to whence he came.

For some reason, unbeknownst to him, he stopped as he reached the ladder, and turned back to the room, holding the lantern high.  Beneath the desk, past the overturned chair that had assaulted Morgan earlier, came a dull glint that flickered with the light.  Morgan’s brow furled.  He walked to the desk, making sure to step over the body of the beast.  Crouching by the desk he placed the lantern down, and grew only more confused at what he found.

A book.  It was an old hand bound book with a leather cover.  The small button clasp on the cover had glinted in the lantern light, its partially rusted surface still held enough luster to shine.  On the cover a phrase was painstakingly engraved into the leather.

Be wary of what you wish,

Forever was never as desirable

As it was in my dreams.

Augustus Godfrey

Morgan raised an eyebrow and glanced inside.  The handmade paper was covered in refined, handwritten script.  He placed the book under the crook of his arm and returned to the ladder.  He took a deep breath as he broke ground, as though he had been held underwater.  Above him, thick clouds roiled, and thunder bellowed in the distance.  Morgan turned to look at the mysterious, underground domain for a last time, before he threw the lantern back in, letting it shatter on the floor and ignite.  The blaze began to spread as the oil leaked out and spread across the floor.  Quickly, it reached the desk and chair and the fire began to devour the small room.  The desk, the dead body, everything.  Nobody should ever be subjected to the nightmare Morgan had been through.  He would make sure of that.  The inevitable rain would quench the fire.

Hefting the book and sliding the blade through his belt, Morgan turned and began his trek back home.