“Messiah crowned,

God’s reconciled decree,

rebelling angels,

the forbidden tree...”

-Andrew Marvel, 1668, on John Milton’s Paradise Lost

…

At Mort Induction

It is surmised by the Considered Majority of the Remote Viewing Fraternity, that the death of an obstructive body, and the departure of that body’s animating soul via consumptive means, or Terra Sanguination, in the presence of either the Drake Eye or Pewter Eye, generates an impressionistic wake receivable by remote view.

It is surmised by the Speculate Minority that the slaying of a willfully malevolent soul occurs when the body has been entirely devoted to the animating evil, and that rather than being ejected from the slain body and sent to its master or ken, or offered a reincarnation of recompense, that said soul is extinguished. In so doing this extinguished evil projects a final imagery into the viewing field. This projection is more receptive to Passive rather than Active Viewers.

It is cautioned by the Select Theoros of the Speculate Minority, that remote viewing of such a terminal impression by a female viewer who is with child, might effect a demonic possession of the unborn and require prenatal exorcism. If the Select Theoros opinion is correct, then the At Mort Induction provided by the slaying of the apparently random criminal Limber Shoop by Seeker Cain, may have been a planned or impulsive act of demonic propagation.

The view is that vantage of the fled soul lingering in morbid guardianship over its body, a circuitous, floatish and ultimately myopic view.

-Signator Minor, Sloan Vatesh

…

The tall man, blood running from a nose once long and now shorter by a full inch, the white of the nose bones showing as the fleshy sprit of the nasal bow had been knocked away, peered down over that ruined nose in what appeared to be sorrow.

Towering taller over his foe then before, he spoke at once like the low keys of a piano, sinking to the sadder amplitude of organ-kind, “To have once reveled in such, just doth Heaven turn away in disgust.”

Three men gathered around the body, one bald and bearded, one tall and pointy-chinned with a mop of curly hair, the third, short and stout, thick of blond hair now running to brown with the grime of his homeless conviction and as well his mechanical occupation.

The view now rises above their heads and the three wise men of the lot engage the Victor in turn…

Voice 1: “You okay, Sir. Thought for sure he hit ya.”

Victor: “Cropped snout en broke rib o’ blows do pain. O’ his haste ‘o lead I did no’ taste.”

Voice 2: “Would a been a shame if he clipped you with that ghetto windage. You hit him but one, and that after he came for you. If the cops ever get here, I’ll vouch.”

Voice 3: “Good on you, Sir. Hope when I’m up in years I can crack like that.”

Voice 1: “Shit, Tray, if the cops come for this saint, we loose everything. I say we clean up—my camper can’t even move.”

Voice 2: “Bro, there is a recycle bin right there.”

Voice 1: “On it, Bro. Right back.”

Voice 3: “Would you like his gun, Sir.”

Victor: “Not I, ye deck, ye booty fall.”

Voice 2: “The call won’t bring cops for an hour or two. You have time, if you have a need to rest with us. We might be able to patch that nose—looks painful. Got a girl inside patch you up while these two take out the trash.”

Victor: “Did I not offer parlay—knew this man not, sought but guidance on a lass o’ concern.”

Voice 3: “Clear as day, I heard it. Shit, with you on a cane and haulin’ ruck, he could have left. Seemed he was here for no good purpose—look at this dumb fuck, had alternating brass and stainless steel casings and hasn’t cleaned this thing for who knows how long. Good piece though—I’ll get ‘er ship shape.”

The sound of plastic wheels and the vibration of a bin was heard, lending a rising cadence of dread to the voices that wafted up as if from the tops of those four heads.

Victor: “I could do with a bit of rum. My own physician shall attend the worry of nose.”

A blue bin was wheeled into place. It was opened by the bald man and the other two bent and hoisted the dead man and deposited it within, all three closing the lid and clasping hands over it like pirates at conclave.

As the men stepped away from the bin, standing about it in a circle without apparent concern, the vantage of view descended to the lid of the can, and remained there, as if the parting eye and ear of the just departed perched there as a ghostly gargoyle about a church eve or more like a crow above a laden gallows, but facing the stark visage of he who had separated body from soul.

A white Toyota CRV pulled up behind the victor, whose nose had already ceased to bleed. It stopped abruptly as the man turned and regarded the occupants: a dark, bald man in ski cap and blue coat, and a pale woman, nodding out in the front seat, her head lolling under a green baseball cap nearly fallen from her head.

“Spawn of Hell!” thundered the strident voice of the old tower of a man as he began to hobble towards the CRV. The driver seemed to consider a bold action, then three guns appeared in the hands of the three tweaker mechanics and the driver set his CRV in hard reverse, knocking the girl’s head into the dash board. Off flew the hat, as her pretty little head bounced back against the seat to be lost to sight as the driver did a stunt turn and his wheels shreaked away.

The tall man stopped and hung his head, then turned towards the men as Voice 2, came from the blond mechanic, “Fancy piece of driving considering what he is. Lucky for Old Time here his friend weren’t as handy with the firing iron.”

Voice 3, coming from the bald and bearded man, intoned, “Wheel that box of shit to the blind spot behind the berm.”

He then turned to the taller, much older man, “Daughter, granddaughter?”

The man’s pale face grew ashen gray and the nasal bone seemed to dull to a lesser white as those two unnatural wide shoulders rolled round and stopped down. He groaned, “Daughter of mercy stumbled upon cross ways. I know the lass not. She now be under my protection by oath, where now would such a jackal take her?”

The sound of the rolling bin intruded and then overwhelmed the conversation even as the vantage drew further away, past three campers and a make shift auto-mechanics shop, around parked cars, through a camp of blue tarp tents pitched atop wooden pallets, through a veritable swamp of plastic bottles and aluminum cans, past more wretched cardboard huts, around a miserable form shivering in a dirty blue sleeping bag, under a railroad bridge and into a deep grown grotto of blackberry brambles.

The vantage began to tilt as the voices that spoke now in the absence of rolling wheels on road, faded as if the hearer were suddenly afflicted with deafness.

The men walked away from the vantage, fuzzy and increasingly combined in outline, as the view grayed and narrowed, then darkened and closed like a shutter.

…

Postscript

Remote Viewer Isabel Frank, Anchorage Station, fell faint and delirious and thence into coma as she transcribed the final passage above. Isabel is stable and under care. The chief concern, the close of her seventh month of pregnancy, has not resulted in pregnancy termination or fetal distress, but oddly, in an increased health and vigor of the unborn.