Monday, September 2, 2002
The old man walked from the front door of his house to the mailbox. Thoughts of the premonition he had recently received were making him stir crazy, and he needed some fresh air. If his message to the Keeper didn’t succeed, the young girl would certainly die.
Pushing the thought from his mind, he walked slowly through the small garden courtyard along the stepping-stone pathway that had been carefully leveled so as not to cause him to stumble. He used his cane to steady himself with each step. It wasn’t an ordinary cane. Anyone who looked at it could tell that. It was a cane unlike any other in the world. If he’d had to guess, he would say that it probably didn’t come from this world.
He stopped at the mailbox and hooked the top end of the cane over one arm, then retrieved the mail and began flipping through it. The usual assortment of junk mail, a coupon advertiser, a flyer from the local grocery store, a cell phone company advertisement, the water bill, and an envelope from an online picture-printing service. This must be the pictures of his daughter and the grandkids that she had mentioned on their last phone call. Facebook was fine for when he was on the computer, but he liked to have framed pictures around the house to look at. His daughter sent him new pictures about four times a year so that he could keep up with the growing grandkids and all of their new activities.
He smiled to himself as he collected the mail in one hand and then took hold of his cane to begin the journey back to the house. It would be the highlight of his day to look through the pictures and decide where to place them. Maybe it would keep his mind off of the vision he had seen.
One of the flower beds caught his eye on the way back to the house, and he frowned. Weeds. He told the yard man to pull those weeds last week. He’d do it himself, but his knee had been acting up again. Laura would never have allowed weeds in her garden when she was alive. He’d have to find a new yard man, pure and simple. He just couldn’t bring himself to call that young man a gardener, even though that was what it said on his business card – that would elevate him to a status unbecoming his horticultural skills – or lack thereof, as the case may be. Yes, yard man would be a better term.
He poked at the weeds with the tip of his cane, as if to send them a message that their days were numbered. The afternoon sun reflected off of the shiny, black surface of the cane, and his mind was brought back to that unique artifact. It had been given to him some years before when he injured his right leg on a mission to save a young priest in South America. The priest would one day help save many lives during a bloody revolution, if only he survived the assassination attempt on his life. He had foreseen the assassination attempt, and been able to help save the young man’s life, but had his right femur broken in three places in the process. Upon waking up in the hospital, he had found the cane in a gift box at the foot of his bed. He could still remember the note that had been with it, verbatim:
I thought you might have use of this, considering your recent injuries. There is no other cane like it in all the world. Should you ever need to contact me for any reason, simply place the cane on the ground in the full light of the new moon, and I will find you.
There had been no signature on the note. There hadn’t needed to be one. He had known exactly who it was that had written it by the unique handwriting. It was a man – if indeed he was a man – that he knew simply as the Keeper. It was the same man who had given him the gift of seeing the past, present, and future – the gift of the Seer. It was the same man who he had attempted to summon just last week, with the very same cane.
Of course, he couldn’t see everything in the past, present, or future – just certain events. There were some things he could do to direct his special gift, but mostly it was through dreams and through physically touching people or things associated with the events he would then see in his mind. Last month he had foreseen the death of a little girl. If that little girl were to die, tens of thousands of others would perish in horrible agony. It was his job, as a Seer, to make sure that didn’t happen.
He had tried to find her himself. He knew she was here in Tucson, near a hospital, but he hadn’t been able to track her down yet, and he was running out of time. He was getting too old for this sort of thing; his body couldn’t take the long hours of surveillance and tailing required for this kind of work anymore. Last week, in desperation, he had summoned the Keeper.
As he shuffled slowly back to the front door of his house, with his mail in one hand and the cane in the other, he only hoped the Keeper would come in time.
As soon as he opened the front door, he sensed a strange electricity in the air, and he had the feeling that someone else was in his home. Although he was hopeful, he was somewhat apprehensive. If the Keeper were here, it would be only the fourth time he had ever seen him, and each time had been both exciting and terrifying all at the same time. He gripped the handle of the cane more tightly as he made his way forward into his study.
As he rounded the corner from the foyer into the adjoining study, he saw the Keeper. He was facing the bookcase that lined the far wall, and he was holding something in his hand. As the old man continued forward, he could see that it was a shark’s tooth. It wasn’t just any shark’s tooth. It was one he had retrieved himself from the bottom of the ocean during one of his early missions as a Seer.
Even viewed from behind, the man standing before him was still an imposing presence. The Keeper was well over six feet tall, with shoulders so wide they reminded the old man of a professional football player. He was wearing a black suit, which was offset by his snow-white, closely cropped hair.
“Do you remember when you found this?” the Keeper asked without turning around. The old man had never heard anyone else speak the English language with such a strange, other-worldly accent.
“I do. If I hadn’t have stayed down that extra fifteen minutes to find that tooth, I would have been blown up by the bomb that destroyed the boat I was scuba diving from.”
The Keeper placed the tooth back on the shelf and turned around. As he did so, he smiled ever so slightly at the sight of the old man. That smile was something the old man had never witnessed before – indeed, few people had.
“It’s good to see you, Gregorie,” he said, stepping forward and grasping the old man’s shoulders. “Please, sit down,” he said as he motioned to the reading chair that Gregorie normally sat in.
As the old man sat down, it occurred to him that the Keeper didn’t seem to have aged a single day in the almost fifty years since their first meeting. He was still bald on the very top of his head, and his face was still deeply chiseled with the creases accompanying an almost continually stern countenance. Along with his pale skin and ice-blue eyes, it made for an unforgettable impression. But he looked as if he had stepped out of a time-warp from almost fifty years prior, with no signs of having progressed any further in the aging process. And while his facial features made him appear about sixty years old, his physique and his apparent vitality were those of a much younger man. Wonders never ceased.
“I wondered if you would get here in time,” Gregorie said as he took his seat.
The Keeper sat down on a nearby sofa, extending his hands toward Gregorie, palms up. “Show me what you have seen.”
Gregorie looked down at the Keeper’s hands and hesitated. He knew exactly what he wanted. A Seer had the ability to show people the same visions they had seen by touching them and forming a sort of human interface at a subconscious level. Yet, this was no ordinary person. The first time the Keeper had touched him had been to impart the gift of the Seer to him all those years ago, and he’d been in bed for days afterwards in a coma-like state. At his present age, he wasn’t sure he could even survive a similar experience.
The Keeper noticed his hesitation and responded, “Don’t worry, you won’t be harmed.”
Gregorie reached out and took hold of the Keeper’s hands. The vision that he had seen came flooding back, all at once. In the first part of the vision, a young girl grew up and helped to save countless lives, bringing hope and life to thousands with untold positive outcomes spreading far into the future. Then, there was a second vision where she was killed as a young child, and those same thousands were dying in horrible agony, their loss to the world echoing down through the future generations.
When the vision was over, Gregorie released the Keeper’s hands and sat back in his chair, exhausted.
“Would you like some tea?” the Keeper asked.
“Yes, I would. Green tea, if you don’t mind.”
The Keeper left the room and returned a few minutes later with a cup of hot tea, which he handed to Gregorie. After he had taken a sip of the tea, he sat it down on a coaster on the table beside his chair. He was definitely getting too old for this kind of work, Gregorie thought to himself.
“I know the girl is here in Tucson, and that she’ll die sometime this week if we don’t do something to save her.”
“There is no time to bring in another Seer. They’re all working on other assignments,” the Keeper explained as he sat back on the sofa, considering the options available to him. He closed his eyes, reviewing the visions that Gregorie had shown him in his mind.
“There was a man in a tan, button-up shirt standing at a counter when the little girl was in the hat shop, in the vision of the future where she was saved from death.”
Gregorie closed his eyes and reviewed the vision in his mind.
“Yes, I believe there was.”
“I need you to tell me where he will be tomorrow, around noon.”
Gregorie opened his eyes. The Keeper was looking directly at him.
“I... I don’t know if I can do that.”
“You can,” the Keeper replied with absolute confidence. “You have only to concentrate on him.”
Gregorie slumped in his chair. “I don’t know if I have the strength,” he said wearily.
The Keeper extended his hands toward Gregorie. “I will help you.”
Gregorie stared at the Keeper’s hands, and then at his face. There was precious little he knew about the man seated in front of him, but there was one thing he had learned with absolute certainty over the years. When he said something, you could bank on it. He thought about how many lives were at stake, and then he reached out and took hold of the Keeper’s hands. As he did so, he felt a cool, refreshing sensation begin to creep up his arms and course through his entire body. He began to feel more alert and energized.
He began to focus on the man he was seeking in the vision. As he did so, time moved backward. He saw the man leaving the hat shop, walking backward. He bought some gum and then walked backward to a restaurant. He saw the man looking at a menu, at the top of which was the name of the restaurant – The Little Dragon, then he looked at his watch, and Gregorie saw that the date on the watch was set to Tuesday, September 3rd - tomorrow. At that point, the vision ended. He opened his eyes, but there was no one else in the room. The Keeper had vanished.