To Dwell Among Us Begins Today

Today marks the beginning of To Dwell Among Us, my series of blog posts featuring the prequel to my suspense novel, Fulfillment.

In the City
A course, wrinkled man fell back against the stone wall of the interior Temple room with a thud. An onslaught of arthritic pain combined with the raising of what little hair remained at the back of his neck set him on edge. The small lamp he carried splashed oil on his blue and gold linen robe. 

The sudden gust of air extinguished the flame on the room’s other light, atop a tall iron lampstand. Before he could relight it, the lamp flared sending flame and smoke to the high ceiling. The flash settled down as quickly as it had exploded into life. It sat upon the lampstand waiting while flickering amidst the ominous glow and dancing shadows.

The old man leaned back against the wall for support and sank to the floor. He passed a wrinkled, swollen-knuckle hand through his thinning hair. In the damp coolness, he wiped the cold sweat from his forehead. He placed his tiny lamp on the floor in front of him, and like the shadows dancing in the flame of the oil lamp hanging from the lampstand above, he waited.

The other men drifted in, the elders before the younger. They sat upon the stone floor in a circle around the old man’s tiny lamp.

“You look as though you have seen a ghost, Zechariah,” said Jaaziah.

“Perhaps I have,” replied Zechariah.

“What does he mean?” asked Shelomoth the youngest among them. His voice trembled.

Zechariah’s face lit up as he came out of the shadows and into the meager light cast by the lampstand and his little lamp on the floor. “I mean what I say and I say I have seen a ghost.”

He pulled upon his beard, wrinkled his brow, and moved to within a locust’s length of Shelomoth’s nose. His broad smile revealed two yellow, plaque-encrusted, decaying teeth on his top gum and one stump of a molar on his bottom gum.

Zechariah rolled his tongue about as though in search of a word and then, finding the right one, whispered, “The wind nearly extinguished the flame.” He pointed up towards the faint light on the lampstand.

Young Shelomoth’s dark eyes followed Zechariah’s arthritic, bending finger.

“Then as the flame diminished…” Here Zechariah raised his voice to a shout, “…another wind came and the lamp flared into flame and fury…” Once again he lowered his voice above a whisper and placed both hands on Shelomoth’s shoulders, “Yet the lamp I used to light it, the very one sitting here on the floor, did not feel so much as a gentle breeze and did not flare or hardly flicker.” Zechariah released Shelomoth and settled back into the darkness.

Shelomoth swallowed hard and whispered, “But how… how could a wind come in here?”

“Zechariah brought it with him.” Jaazia laughed. “Do you understand, my young one? Zechariah makes the wind. Zechariah makes the ghost himself. With such a wind, we all will soon be ghosts.”

The others snickered at Zechariah’s expense.

***

Read the next installment of To Dwell Among Us on Monday, November 12, 2012.

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