The Acolytes of Crane

21 LINCOLN: ABOMINATION





“My eye lids were weighed down with the advent of death, and my armor was saturated with dark, red, and soupy blood. Ted took one last look back at me before he led the charge up the stairs. I only saw his lips move because the sounds of battle and explosions muzzled his voice.”

He said, ‘Thank you.’

The pain and regret draped over me and shrouded my senses. I thought if I just shut my eyes once, and rested, I could embrace death. The fatal loss of blood was crushing my spirit to hold on to life.

I coughed into my hand, and blood painted it. I watched as Theodore ran up the stairs with the crew.

Visions of my life sped through my mind, flashing across the backs of my eyelids, and my life-reel ended. I was left with a defeated Travis and pinch of life in my pocket.

That piercing look on Dan’s face as he realized I was just about gone. I think I was the first loved one of his to die before his eyes. I regret that my death may have hardened him. I hope he will always be the carefree lad I always have known.

And Mariah—my Mariah. She held my hands as I lay dying, and she looked at me in the eyes. Oh, these eyes. I knew. We both knew.

With that vision of the lovely Mariah dissipating, with the battle sounds fading away, all was blackening between blinks. What happened after was difficult to explain, even for me. A tiny light appeared. It was the size of a tip of a pin. The pin grew to a large circle. The light gleamed into my eyes. I felt different. I felt weightless, as if there was no effort to raise my hands to my eyes.

Then I heard a familiar sound: it was cool rhythm and blues coming from my radio next to the bed. The artist’s deep voice was pounding my eardrums with his smooth vocals, but it was so loud I smashed the snooze button to stop it.

I jumped out of bed hurriedly, stepped onto a cluttered floor, and stretched my T-shirt up over my head. I rubbed my chest and looked frantically in the mirror for a wound, but nothing was there. There was just olive skin and a puny flat chest.

‘Is this heaven? It can’t be,’ I said to myself. ‘Dad!’ I yelled from within the frame of my bedroom door.

There was no response, just the sound of a fan blowing air around the room. I walked up to the fan and hummed into its blades. I always enjoyed doing that; it made my voice sound fluttered and funny. I walked outside. The sun felt soothing and the warmth made me smile.

‘Good morning Lincoln,’ a sweet female voice said, ‘Oh my! I don’t think you have ever hugged me that hard. Let up, or you might break a rib!’ My mother stood before me as a tangible apparition and she seemed so full of life.

She was carrying laundry up from the basement. She was just as beautiful as I remembered her. The sun striped her black hair with a highlighted tone of blue. Her eyes twinkled and glistened from the light. Her touch was extremely reassuring.

‘Mom, is it you! Is it really you?’ I asked.

‘Honey, of course, are you okay. Did you have a bad dream?’

‘But you are, you are—you died!’ I shouted.

‘Now just relax, Lincoln. We will figure this out. Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘I have to go. I will be back. I just have to check something!’ I said in a rush.

‘Hurry back, I am making buttermilk pancakes for breakfast!’ she yelled, as the sound of her voice grew quiet from my distance.

I needed to know. I sprinted. The sneakers on my feet flopped, as if my feet were exhausted. They slapped the ground like clown shoes.

As I ran, oddly my shadow was behind me, I wasn’t completely sure why. If it was morning, the sun should have cast a shadow in front of me, not behind me.

There was a hill leading up into the cul-de-sac; it was my last jaunt before his house. I ran up it like a marathon runner on the last leg of a race.

My heart didn’t pound, and I raised my arms over my head to fight a cramp that wasn’t there. I ran up the stairs and stabbed the doorbell with my finger.

I was breathing heavy while I waited, but I wasn’t tired. Oddly, I didn’t feel anything at all. I wasn’t sure why my breathing was heavy if I wasn’t even exhausted, or why I was slapping my feet up the hill. I thought I should have felt gassed and weakened by my run.


Theodore’s grandpa came to answer my dinging. I could see him through the white segmented window of the storm door. When I saw that he was there, I began to think that I was really back home, and all was well.

‘Good morning, state your name and business, boy,’ Marvin said over the ringing of a phone behind him.

‘I am Theodore’s friend, Lincoln—you don’t remember me?’ I asked, and he turned from our encounter to answer the phone.

‘Just one second, I have to answer this damn phone. Laverne, this phone isn’t going to voicemail like it is supposed to! Hello, speak up, I cannot hear very well,’ Theodore’s grandpa yelled into the receiver of the phone, ‘Lincoln? He is at my door right now. It is for you. I think it is one of your friends,’ he said, turning toward me, with the phone held out for me to grab.

‘Who is it?’ I asked.

‘He said his name is Theodore.’

I snatched the phone. I could not help but realize his grandpa was acting as if he didn’t even know me, or Theodore, for that matter, and the confusion set in.

Marvin was rambling loudly in my ear about someone calling me on his phone and who the hell was I. His voice just drifted into the background, and I focused my senses toward the speaker on the phone.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Lincoln, it isn’t over bro. Are you hearing me? It isn’t over! Look up! Trust me, just do it. You should see a sun and two moons, right?’ Theodore asked.

I looked up and saw the sun, emerging on the horizon. Lo and behold, at opposite angles above the solar giant, were two moons, grey and distant.

‘Yes, what is this all about,’ I demanded, for fear of my current state.

‘Don’t worry. We will get you out, Linc.’

‘Out of where?’ I asked.

‘Sephera!’

The phone call ended. Departing the house, I tore off along the road, marching down the middle of the street to my house.

I shouted, pretending to speak like Ted, ‘Oh by the way, you are dead, Lincoln . . . It is okay though, because we are coming to get you.’ I scoffed to myself. ‘To think I jumped in front of that golden pitchfork for you, Ted! I was fine with the thought of dying. It’s over, right, baby? Oh, but look up, he says. Sephera, he says!’

Theodore’s grandpa Marvin tailed me shortly, because he was bewildered by our interaction. At least he wasn’t shoveled an absurd Sepheran reality.

‘Welcome to Sephera!’ I yelled through my unfiltered state of brash insanity as I turned back to the sight of this old man huffing as he ran behind me. Oddly, his frail looking body was easily absorbing the pounding of his feet upon the road.

Then from the window of a tiny yellow bungalow, another elderly man yelled, ‘Pipe down! You could wake the dead!’

How ironic that a man without a clue of his own demise would yell that from a porch in shocking baby blue golf shorts and a pastel pink polo shirt.

I just continued on, stomping my Dietonical feet upon the pavement, as Marvin gave up and headed back home. I whipped my arms from front to back, angered by the state of my body and my delivery into a realm that in my eyes was an Omnian prison.

When my life and blood were flowing from my body, after that gangly Dark King’s trident impaled me, my mind was registering all the recent events that had culminated in the termination of my fifteen-year span of life in the cosmos.

I welcomed death; I embraced it. The problem was that I spent fifteen years conditioning myself with an option of either heaven or hell. It was much more complicated than that.

I felt serene when this proposition of death gently tugged at my favoring eyelids. I thought, what is wrong with an eternity of black nothingness? Will there be a gate? Will I have to pay a toll to gain entry into Heaven’s utopia?

No. I was, and forever will be known by the Multiverse Council as the first human boy that died and went to Sephera. Was reincarnated by Zane into fifty-billion microscopic metal Dietons, and reunited with his already-dead mom version-two-point-oh. My God!

“I was strangled under the asphyxiating grip of a disturbing question: why did I kill myself for Ted? That is the end of it! Can you hear me guard? I am finished!”

I hear the guards’ steps outside of my cell, and reality returns to jolt me. My assessment is that this intergalactic jail is the origin of my physical imprisonment. However, the detainment of my metaphysical essence, registering into Dieton form on Sephera, is the beginning and the source of my anger.

“Prisoner eight-six-seven-six, stand against the wall, place your hands in the wall restraints, cross your feet and bend over until your head enters the wall vise.”

I do what they ask.

“Prisoner, do you have any final requests?”

“Yes. Tell Theodore I appreciate his efforts.”

“Warden. This is guard twenty-eight, requesting termination sequence for prisoner eight-six-seven-six. Awaiting confirmation.”

“Will he feel it?” the younger of the two guards asks.

The older guard returns quickly, and says, “He cannot feel. He isn’t alive.” I process the truth in his statement, and he is right. “Prisoner. The warden wants a verbal confirmation of your termination request. It is the Multiversal Council’s protocol.”

“I am ready.”