Ashe couldn’t believe what had just happened. It was impossible. But as he looked at his son’s limp, lifeless body, he knew it be real. Scott was gone. Taken. Just like Susanne had been taken from him. By a lunatic. In an instant. One minute they were alive and the next they were alive no longer.
He had poked another bear and his son had been the one to pay the ultimate price that time, the same way his wife had paid when Ashe had poked his big stick at Steven Reynolds. And it was all his fault, back then and right at that moment. It was the only truth that he needed to take from it. It was his fault and no one else’s.
The ability to form words continued to elude him. He could only stare at Lucky Barrett. Ashe’s stare took up his entire material presence, involving more than just his two eyes. The glare came from every fiber of his being. And it remained unshaken, unbroken as the world around him began to explode. Even as the Calvary invaded, officers and armored SWAT, Ashe refused to take his attention away from the man that had just killed his son. If any part of him honestly believed in the paranormal and unexplained, he would have tried to kill the man with his thoughts.
But that was impossible.
Or was it?
Vertigo took over Ashe’s senses and he could no longer identify up from down. What he considered to be his deep rooted beliefs began to spin like a top. What good were his beliefs, anyway? He felt his whole self faltering, shuddering at a place beneath the skin, a low place within his body where his soul might be cradled, if a soul did indeed exist. Maybe a soul did exist. For the first time he considered the possibility, which went against everything that he had allowed himself to believe in. He didn’t know what he honestly believed anymore. His whole mountain of understanding was crumbling and rocks and boulders were falling all around him. What good were his beliefs anyway? Could everything he was sure of about the world be wrong? Maybe the pill could foretell someone’s death? That might indeed be possible. Lucky Barrett knew it to be true, without a single ounce of doubt to sway him. And so had Scott. What made Ashe right and made them wrong? What? It was arrogance to assume that he was right about everything.
Along with paranoia, arrogance controlled people like Franklin and Lucky Barrett. And Ashe was far from immune to the effects of his own arrogance. It had gotten his wife and son killed. Maybe he should learn to look at the world differently, with an open mind to the impossible, to the limits of his psychological understanding, toward mysterious pills and future foretelling. What else could be possible outside of his little box?
He instantly came to the conclusion that he no longer had room for arrogance in his life. He needed to throw out everything that he had had one hundred percent faith in and go back to square one. He needed go back to being what the philosopher John Locke had called a Tabula Rasa…a blank slate, clear of anything that his education and experiences had jotted down upon the surface. It would be erased at once, wiped clean, only to be covered back over with new and fresh information he obtained from new found and seemingly impossible perspectives.
Even if he was to late save his son or his wife, he needed to take the journey from that point on. Ashe needed to gut himself empty, because his so called knowledge had led to his destructive arrogance. He no longer had knowledge. He no longer knew shit about anything.
It was all gone.
Oscar, his old friend, found him amongst the onslaught. The detective was beginning to free Ashe when he noticed Scott’s form slumped over in the parallel chair. Oscar instantly became like a statue, motionless. “I’m sorry, my friend,” he said. Breaking the temporary stillness, he grabbed a second to look back over his shoulders to make sure that Lucky Barrett was being secured, along with his armed goon. He then continued to rid Ashe’s wrists and ankles of the wire restraints. Oscar brought his mouth close to Ashe’s ear. “We have him. We have him, Ashe. And he will pay for this. I promise you.”
Oscar stayed close, within arm’s reach, when Ashe was able to stand. He watched for any sudden movements from his old friend. But the psychologist didn’t have the energy to retaliate. He could rush toward Lucky Barrett, ignited by a desire for immediate revenge. Instead, he went over to Scott and closed his son’s eyelids.
How could his son ever truly rest with his eyes wide open? The psychologist wondered. His eyes had been opened. That phrase had come to mean something different. Ashe, too, had had his own eyes opened. He didn’t know if God had a hand in it or not but Ashe no longer ruled out the existence of God…or a God-like being. His eyes had been truly opened to any and all possibilities, even those on the fringes of what science was able to explain.
“I’m sorry,” the father said to his son. “I love you. And I let you down.” He kissed his son’s forehead, which was already becoming cold. “I am truly sorry, my boy. Forgive me. Please.”
Oscar put a hand on Ashe’s shoulder.
“Will you get me out of here, Oscar?”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere else,” Ashe replied. “Anywhere else in the world...whatever world that I may have left, that is.”
Part Four
“So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the unjust, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.”