No one ever knew with absolute certainty what she meant. The last word she uttered was incongruent when juxtaposed with the spectacle her death presented to the traumatized onlookers who witnessed her passing. As they surrounded her, completely aghast, eyes wide with wonder and terror, the unfortunate spectators surrounding her could only ponder the paradox presented by the last word that escaped her tortured lips. Those who stayed on to be interviewed by the police and news team that arrived, far too late on the scene, reported that they had watched helplessly, dumbfounded, as the girl choked up copious streams of a mysteriously odious oily substance that they claimed appeared to be black as pitch, had the viscosity of blood, and smelled like a potpourri of burning rubber with just a hint of sulfur and ammonia, filling the air with the lingering aroma of the most rancid fart the world has ever known.
The viscous abomination frothed about her lips and burbled from her tongue in a rabid display of tortuous, impending rigor mortis. If she had been an animal, one of the men would have grabbed his rifle and shot her on the spot without asking any questions, just to put her out of her unfathomable misery. But she wasn’t an animal. She was a young woman in her early twenties, and out of respect for her humanity and fear of her predicament, all anyone could do was stand by and watch her die helplessly, while trying not to soil their underpants from fear.
Just before the victim of this hideous scene made her last, staggering attempt at respiration, her wide, blood shot eyes stared upward, rapturously, as if she were in the throws of diametrically opposed sensations resembling ecstasy and agonizing pain. To many, it looked as if she were before the very throne of God on Judgment Day. In the final spasms of death, her body convulsed and writhed, like a rag doll struck by a tirade of lightning bolts, causing her dreadlocks to undulate like a nest of electrocuted vipers. Eyewitnesses interviewed by the 11 o’clock news team said that the only word she uttered through her gnashing teeth, before she screamed and died, was simply, “Sublime!”
“Sublime.” Nobody understood what she meant. No one could see anything “sublime” in her grotesque and untimely release from this mortal coil. Later on, everybody in town had their own ideas about what she might have meant. Not a single one of them could prove their thesis empirically. Clues were everywhere. Enormous clues. But after a certain point, the clues all lead to mysterious dead ends. They were just psychic footprints that disappeared into cosmic snow. It was as if she had been spirited away by a god or a demon.
Farmer Joyless was the first person to weigh in on it. “I figure she probably got into that Satan worship we all hear so much about in church these days. She was most likely sayin’ prayers to The Prince of the Power of the Air and offering him dead babies and masturbating with crosses under the full moon. You know how they are!” By “they,” he meant white girls with dreadlocks who wear patchouli oil and smoke marijuana. She had definitely been one of “those” girls.
Moby Vandyke felt differently about it. She felt called upon by the voices in her sober head to tell everybody in her AA meeting exactly what she thought about it. She wasn’t there when it happened. She didn’t need to be. She knew in her deepest innermost heart of hearts, which had been clean as the driven snow for 43 years, by the Grace of God, that the girl was most definitely an addict. She was obviously in the final stages of her disease. This revelation came to Moby while she was smoking a cigarette before her 7 AM meeting at the local Alano Club. Unfortunately, nobody could really prove that the hapless girl had been an alcoholic. Nobody knew anybody that had actually died from too much weed. Nobody could prove that she had ever done heroin, meth, bath salts or any other kind of street drug known to man. Several AA groups and their sub interest groups got into horrible fights about it. The worst dry drunk brawls erupted in the early morning meetings. Eleven people relapsed over it. One of them overdosed on household inhalants and died. All of the rest of them are still technically “out.” Those who were left standing agreed predominantly to disagree. When hard pressed they all conceded that the answer was truly unknowable.
However, there was someone who knew better than anyone the closest approximation to a relatively concrete answer to the mystery. He was just a scrawny, little boy of five years old, with enormous blue eyes that were haunted by unseen monsters, and a mop of disheveled blonde hair resembling a wheat field in the aftermath of a hurricane. Unfortunately, he wasn’t speaking to anyone. He had taken a vow of silence. Mostly he just sat in the corners of his padded room at the Ruffneck County Asylum and rocked and hummed.
In addition to rocking and humming, the macabre little boy drew pictures with crayons and markers all over the floor and walls of his cell that were as unfathomable as they were deeply disturbing. Psychiatrists at the institution wanted to know why this trembling waif was covering the walls of his padded cell with drawings of occult symbols, human sacrifices, KKK rallies, burning crosses, and images of torture and mutilation. And how did he posses the precognition to draw the girl with the dreadlocks just before she died while he was being kept under lock and key AND under close observation with no apparent connection to the outside world?
Hotshot psychiatrists were flown in from across the country to analyze the seemingly possessed child and his morbid drawings. The ramifications of any attempt to “fix” the problem only made the situation more puzzling and horrifying. The first “expert” to arrive on the scene began to laugh uncontrollably like a hyena by the third day of his exposure to the boy in his padded prison cell. The venerable doctor had to be removed by force and dragged away in a straight jacket. As orderlies and security officers escorted him into the white van that had come to take him away, the physician couldn’t stop singing, “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” Eyewitnesses to this gut-wrenching spectacle recalled that, to their amazement, the afflicted doctor sounded exactly like Judy Garland, in her later years. He sang so soulfully, almost everyone present wept.
The second and third “experts” who were imported to analyze the enigmatic patient and his drawings were also driven bat shit crazy tout suite. Within hours of their exposure to the boy and his art, invisible forces, that no one could explain, thrust the good doctors beyond the precipice of reason. No one could explain it. The drawings just looked like mad scribbling’s to the average person. Perhaps he needed Adderall? Or shock treatment…When the boy spontaneously displayed stigmata from his wrists and wrote the word “NEXT” on the wall in his own blood, the very worst was feared. The elite few who knew of it kept it a secret. They didn’t want the populace at large to discover the truth and panic. They believed that the writing on the wall foreshadowed a dismal and potentially apocalyptic omen of something even more terrible to come. And, for once, they were right.
TO BE CONTINUED...
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