Part of her unsure feeling was because she was married. It struck her as funny that she thought John's refusal to give in to Marcie was bordering on being mean, while she thought of any similar relationship of her own like that would be cheating on John. For the first time she put herself in John's place and felt an even greater love for him because he was so adamant about maintaining their personal relationship with such integrity. After all, Marcie was a ghost and no real threat to their relationship. That was why she had not understood John's reticence and avoidance of the little girl ghost. She had heard John's explanation of the little girl angle but had also understood Marcie's explanation of her age. It was funny and now, not so funny.
“It was your idea to ask her about this detective thing,” John reminded her.
“So, you think I should do it?” she asked again.
“I do not want you to put this off on me. This is a decision only you can make because you will have to deal with it. If you are worried that I will think you are cheating on me, then let me say that is not the case.”
“What if Emil turns out to be a hunk?” Kathy joked.
“He's still a ghost.” John reminded her.
“What if he's a well endowed ghost?” Kathy kept pushing.
“Then what have you got to lose? Your husband has given you permission to fool around with the handsome, young, well endowed ghost.” John laughed as he said it. “Now, I feel like a pimp or something.”
“What's that make me?” Kathy smiled one of her great smiles.
It had been what first attracted him to her. Well, maybe not the first thing, but it had been a reason to expect a warm reception from the young woman he had met. John shook his head.
“I have never had such weird conversations before I met you,” he told her.
“Meaning?” She was still thinking about her decision.
“Meaning I have been involved in some pretty strange things since I met you.”
“Good or bad?” She was still thinking things out.
“Good, I guess. Never really thought about it before. My life has completely changed since I met you.”
“It's not all me,” Kathy reminded him. “Some of it is Marcie's fault.”
“It's no one's fault,” John replied. “It's just that things have completely changed. My life. My view of life. The world I live in. Everything.”
“Okay.” Kathy answered. “I'll do it. I want to be part of the world you are in. I want to see everything you see. I want us to be together in everything. If that means I have to have sex with a ghost and sacrifice my fluids, then so be it. Doesn't hurt, does it?”
“Okay,” John nodded his head. Then he shook his head, no. “It doesn't hurt.” Not in a physical way, he felt like adding but he left that out. He had assumed that yes would have been an easy answer for Kathy. He was a little surprised to find that she had needed to talk about it. She had seemed so eager for him to continue his relationship with Marcie that he assumed the sexual aspect of life with the Mist was not a problem to her. Apparently he did not know all that he thought he knew about his wife. He loved that. More of her to discover.
“I'll let Marcie know,” John said.
“Let's do it tonight,” Kathy was eager to get this going. The detective thing, not the sacrificing of fluids thing. She was afraid she would lose her nerve if she thought about it too much. For all her bravery in facing what John had done, it was still what someone else had done, not her. It's always easier to help someone else be brave about something. Now she needed some help. Some reassurance.
“Soon,” she added as much to get past it as to get it going.
John smiled.
“I don't believe time is an issue in the Mist. Whatever time you want will probably be okay.”
Alicia Cranston sat alone in her apartment across town from where she had assaulted her own son only hours before. There was a tugging in her heart that reminded her she had done something wrong. The more she thought about it and reasoned away the action by assigning it a lesser importance than the result, the clearer her life became. She was Mother now. That was all that counted. Joe counted no more. He was the son of her past. For the briefest of moments she had thought him the father of the future but as soon as she had received the seed and knew its presence, she had known the truth. Joe was only a vessel. It had not been a matter of having sex with her son. It had been an action to open the vessel that carried the seed. She had opened up the vessel to receive the seed for the future. Now she carried that seed. That was what mattered. Not her. Not Joe. Only the future. She carried the future.
She sat back on her couch and slid her shirt up above her ample breasts. Slowly she rubbed her bared belly with both hands imagining the baby that rested there. Without thinking, she began singing to the unborn child.
“Soon, little baby, soon. Soon you will go forth and replenish the world with our kind.”
She giggled as she felt the baby respond to her words. She felt like a young mother again as she continued to massage the area she was imagining the young fetus would be in.
“Don't make Momma wait, now.” She giggled again.
Darkness settled over the campground early as the waning Summer sun gave up its seasonal domination to the approaching control of the Fall and Winter. John and Kathy finished their supper and gave each other plenty of room. She to contemplate the huge step she was making. He to allow Kathy the freedom to make a decision he could not hope to make for her.
Their lives had gone down unnatural paths from the moment they had met. Now, with Kathy's decision to sacrifice more fully to the Mist, they would be drawn even deeper into the mysteries of the spiritual planes of existence.
As the son of a minister, John had often wished that he had a better picture of how all the life after death stuff worked. His father had always seemed so sure while he himself had many questions that regular religion seemed unable or unwilling to answer. It had always bothered him that his father could be so sure of things and he could not see it. Maybe it had been a part of his father's calling. Maybe God made things more clear to those he called to spread the word. But John could not live with maybes. He needed something more. That was why he had walked away from a church calling so many tried to say rested on him. He would not follow in the footsteps of his father who had worked himself to death in small and medium sized churches trying to help others who seemed mostly unwilling and unable to help his father or even appreciate the help they received. Truth was, most people seemed to resent those that helped them afterward. John did not want that life.
Thankless. That was how he saw ministry work in America. Thousands of good men and women sacrificing their own comforts and dreams for the work of creating a bastion of hope for others. Mostly ignoring their own families to care for the families of others. Teaching their own children to set aside their dreams and ambitions to allow some other child to have their place. All in the name of piety and sacrifice. The way John saw religion in America, every convert would be better off to die right after conversion so they could get to the reward and skip the pain of life on earth. Not that any self respecting church goer would say such a thing. But the truth was as John saw it. Undeniable. Misery accompanied most religion. Not joy. Not celebration. Pain. Wasting. Misery.
Kathy had been the daughter of a struggling fisherman who doted on his daughter until the day she was kidnapped and consequently rescued. Then their relationship headed down dark roads of distance and wondering about the days that once were when he made her feel like she was his whole world. Then, after she met John, she discovered her father had been a murderous child kidnapper and killer who had hidden among the community and performed his evil deeds in the quiet of the woods that now was their campground.
She had struggled for the past several months to realign her life with the facts that now presented themselves. This struggle was made worse by the fact that she and John had chosen to not say anything about her father being a serial killer or that he had fo
und a way to carry on his murderous task after death by way of making deals with the elements of the spiritual planes to share the life forces of the blood, fluids and spirits of the victims with the elements.
Now, as she prepared to make a giant step forward into a realm of life she could only imagine, Kathy was unsure of her own place in the cosmos. She had never before considered her presence in the universe as anything more than just a girl, growing into a woman in her small community. Now, with her experience in the underground realm of the spiritual plane of the Cabin, where John had come to her rescue, she was forced to consider her place. She was no longer a part of only the plane of existence known as earth or the natural. The Mist had saved her life years before when she had spiritually sacrificed herself to the life force that was the Mist. Now, years later, the Mist had once again played a large part in allowing her new husband, John, to get through the maze of the Mist and enter the Cabin to rescue her.
She was not the same Kathy who had gone into the Mist to find John that fateful day. Everything had changed the minute a spiritual force of evil that was her departed father took her prisoner. Whether she had been sacrificed for her father's world or rescued as John's wife, Kathy was destined for change. She had felt it as surely as she had gone into that Mist. Her life had called to her. She sensed it more than heard it. And hearing John's description of what had happened to him in the Mist had brought her senses to full alert. Something in his experience called to her inner being. Something more than whatever she had at the moment. Something greater.
She had to explore it. She knew John was probably thinking she was being flippant or uncaring about suggesting he explore his relationship with Marcie, further. But she had method for her madness. If John got closer to the source of the mystery of the Mist, maybe he would share them with her and she would discover in a vicarious way what was drawing on her so unceasingly. For she felt that something was calling to her from another plane. She just could not hear it clearly or understand it fully. It felt far away.
Now John had come with a proposal for her to enter into an agreement that allowed her to explore the mysteries of the Mist for herself. Her plan of sneaking up on whatever was calling her was not going to happen. It was forward, into the Mist now. She would have to screw up whatever courage remained in her and go forth with an adventurous spirit of her own. John had promised to be there with her the entire way, but the sacrifice had to be hers and hers alone. He was going to walk with her but the first step had to be hers.
And time was coming for the step. Her step. Her sacrifice. When she had been a child, the sacrifice was one of spiritual commitment since she had been too young physically to offer the Mist anything but her dream energy. However, to enter the Mist and know the Mist as John did, she would have to make a sacrifice now that was in a physical commitment plane as well as a spiritual commitment plane. Her time. Her sacrifice. What a step, she sighed to herself.