A Knight Of The Word

The elevator doors opened and he stepped in. There were stairs, but he still walked with difficulty, his resignation from the

Word’s service notwithstanding. He supposed he always would. It didn’t seem fair he should remain crippled after terminating his position, given that he had become crippled by accepting it, but he guessed the Word didn’t see matters that way — Life, after all, wasn’t especially fair.

He smiled. He could joke about it now. His new life allowed for joking. He wasn’t at the forefront of the war against the creatures of the Void, wasn’t striving any loner to prevent the destruction of humanity. That was in the past, in a time when there was little to smile about and a great deal to fear. He had served the Word for the better part of fifteen years, a warrior who had been both hunter and hunted, a man always just one step ahead of Death. He had spent each day of the first twelve years trying to change the horror revealed in his dreams of the night before. San Sobel had been the breaking point, and for a while he thought he might never recover from it. Then Stef had come along, and everything had changed. Now he had his life back, and his future was no longer determined by his dreams.

His dreams? His nightmares. He seldom had them now, their frequency and intensity diminishing steadily from the time he had walked away from being a Knight of the Word. That much, at least, suggested his escape had been successful. The dreams had come every night when he was a knight of the Word, because the dreams were all he had to work with. But now they almost never came, and when they did, they were vague and indistinct, shadows rather than pictures, and they no longer suggested or revealed or threatened.

Except for his dream about Simon Lawrence, the one in which the old man recognized him from the past, the one in which he recognized that the old man’s words were true and he had indeed killed the Wizard of Oz. He’d had that same dream three times now, and each time it had revealed a little bit more of what he would do. He had never had a dream three times, even when he was a Knight of the Word; he had never had a dream more than once. It had frightened him at first, unnerved him so that even though he was already living in Seattle and working for Simon he had thought to leave at once, to go far, far away from even the possibility of the dream coming to pass.

It was Stef who had convinced him that the way you banish the things you fear is to stand up to them. He had decided to stay finally, and it had been the right choice. He wasn’t afraid of the dream anymore. He knew it wasn’t going to happen, that he wasn’t truing to kill Simon. Simon Lawrence and his incredible work at Fresh Start and Pass/Go was the future John Ross had chosen to embrace.

Ross stepped out of the elevator into the coffee room. The room was large but bare, save for a couple of multipurpose tables with folding chairs clustered about, the coffee machine and cups rotting on a cabinet filled with coffee-making materials, a small refrigerator, a microwave, and a set of old shelves containing an odd assortment of everyday china pieces, silverware, and glasses.

Ray Hapgood was sitting at one of the tables as Ross appeared, reading the Post-Intelligencer. “My man, John!” he greeted, dancing up. “How goes the speech-writing effort? We gonna make the Wiz sound like the Second Coming?”

Ross laughed “He doesn’t need that kind of help from me. Most people already think he is the Second Coming.”

Hapgood chuckled and shook his head. Ray was the director of education at Pass/Go, a graduate of the University of Washington with an undergraduate degree in English literature and years. of teaching experience in the .Seattle public school system, where he had worked before coming to Simon. He was a tall, lean black man with short-cropped hair receding dramatically toward the crown of his head, his eyes bright and welcoming, his smile ready. He was a ‘black’ man because that was what he called himself. None of that ‘African American’ stuff for him. Black American was okay, but black was good enough. He had little time or patience for that political-correctness nonsense. What you called him wasn’t going to make any difference as to whether or not he liked you or were his friend. He was that kind of guy — blunt, open, hardworking, right to the point. Ross liked him a lot.

“Della sends you her love,” Ross said, tongue firmly in cheek, and moved over to the coffee machine. He would have preferred a latte, but that meant a two-block hike. He wasn’t up to it.

“Yeah, Della’s in love with me, sure enough,” Ray agreed solemnly. “Can’t blame the woman, can you?”

Ross shook his head, pouring himself a cup and stirring in a little cream. “But it isn’t right for you to string her along like you do. You have to fish or cut bait, Ray.”

“Fish or cut bait?” Ray stared at him. “What’s that, some sort of midwestern saying, something you Ohio homeboys tell each other?”