“Do not …. snnnt-snap… hang up. I … something impor—-nt… to tell you”, the distant voice on the phone said.
The woman on the other end of the phone pulled the phone away from her ear, stared at it, and then quickly and efficiently slammed it home to the receiver. She then stepped away from the phone as if it were possibly radioactive… and she was considering just how far away from the phone was a necessary distance to provide adequate safety.
The woman was considering the sound of that voice, it rang a chord of fear in her soul, but she didn’t know why. Then, while lost in thought, the long blonde hair began tingling with electric energy as the old radio sitting on the microwave came on. Some untuned AM station snapped in and out. Static. “He is not only able to cast wicked men into hell,” CRACK! “but he can most easily do it. Sometimes an…” thhhhht “earthly prince must” pop. phhhht.
The woman jumped and skittered back out of the kitchen and into the hallway.
… shhhttttttsshhhhttttt
The woman poked her head around the corner slowly.
“I… shhhhtttt” crackle “shtttTTTTshSHHH thought I said….” pause “don’t hang up.”
With that the woman, in spite of her heels and her long skirt, began closing the distance between the hallway and the radio… “SNAP. But it is not so with God. There is no fortress that is any defense from the power of God…” SNAP. The radio was off. Then with another thought she unplugged it, and in a fury of chords and falling plants, she sprinted the radio over to the window and tossed it outside. Slammed the window closed. Snapped it locked.
She swirled in a flair of hair and fabric before the radio had even hit the ground outside, the woman’s cell cried out. It was out of her pocket and on the table now. It was a picture of a face staring back at her that seemed to be familiar. Before she knew it, the phone was to her ear and she heard herself saying…
“SomeoneischasingmedownsomeoneisaftermeIdon’tknowwhatisgoingontheyarecomethingthroughtheradiotheyarecomingformenowidon’tknowwhattodo…”
“Swweets. Slow. Down. I have something I have to tell you.”
“wait. what?”
click.
pause.
The woman was running for the garage now. Visions of hammers. Nails. And boarded up windows was all she was thinking about. Hammer in hand. Nails in mouth. 2×4’s all akimbo under arms across her chest as she ran towards her bedroom.
She could hear her cell phone ringing on the kitchen table. Vibrating a death rattle across the house.
Door closed. A 2×4 against the door, slam, slam, slam. The nail driven home.
Three boards later. there was a nonchalant knocking at the window behind her. Panic shot up through her spine like an injection.
A form was there. A shadow. Then the slow steady sound of glass slowly cracking, splintering like ice on a frozen spring lake buckling under the weight of the coming season.
The woman watched from the bottom of the closet as the form was diligently and intentionally scoring the glass with thoughts, incantations, curses… what? She didn’t know.
And then the shadow dematerialized. Gone. Gone?
She didn’t want to know what the glass had to say. She wasn’t going to look. But she couldn’t not look. And then she was there. Close to the thin white opaque curtains blocking her view to the runes there on the glass. blocking her view to the ruins there on the glass.
And then she was staring at the cracks in the glass. The cracks that said nothing and everything. They were incomprehensible and yet she knew exactly what they said, she always knew exactly what they would say.
“I see you.”
And then she felt breath on the back of her neck.
Late in the afternoon, long after having woken from the jarring dream, she stared at her monitor and the work that was not getting done, when the computer began spontaneously typing…
I
am in
your
thoughts
always