Blood Moon RisingA Novel

.......Chapter 1: Excerpt from Levi Wilder’s Dream Diary

“My heart has stopped. With sudden violence, I realize I must fight my way up through the layers of thickness entombing me. I struggle to

penetrate the stifling darkness, my eyes sewn shut, not responding to the brain’s commands. Mouth will not open, nor can I utter the cry for help which swells sharply inside my sodden lungs.

Immobilized for how long? Where am I imprisoned? Mind begins to free associate. Movement and lucid hallucination.Falling from a water tower in the ink blue night. My feathered body turning

as I plummet and hit an updraft of rising air and level off, floating above the railroad tracks, looking down over the town and the river, which feeds over rapids into a pool of dark water in the moonlight. From the surface rises a golden translucent stone, glowing from within. Embedded in the center of this gem is a moving object, a living creature in em-bryonic form. As the figure squirms and wriggles, the stone encase-ment begins to crack. The embryo raises with a visible struggle, oversize head wobbling on thin neck.

Without warning, a bird of prey alights on the surface of the water. Its talon grasps the helpless figure. With its curved beak it rends the embryo and placenta into shreds, rips and swallows each piece in turn. The bird’s white crown is stained dark red by the blood as it feeds. I taste the liquid. It is salty and delicious. I raise my head in ecstasy.

Suddenly let loose from paralysis, able to suck in a sharp breath. My heart jump-starts with an electric jolt. Eyes opened, muscles convulsed as my torso tenses involuntarily into an upright position.

It is the Vision Dream again. These hallucinations on the boundary between waking and dreaming worlds, have been with me since I have been in recovery.

The Vision Dream always presages disaster.”

Friday MorningLevi’s eyesight adjusted and he began to discern the frame of a window and the woods beyond. Pre-dawn, surely.

The light was dim, nearly non-existent, no birds yet calling out. The barest fingers of sun had begun to bleed from the massive silhouette of the mountain behind his cabin. Red sky at morning.

He pulled air in again, more deeply this time, and willed himself to time his breaths in a deliberate metronomic pace. He had done this a thousand times in Vinyasa yoga meditation. In through the nose, out with controlled tone in a measured pattern. The heart will follow. Ujjayi Pranayama, the Ocean Breathing. Taking in air as a baby does.

The feeling of my heart slowing to near stop.This was not a new feeling. Once it was a desirable condition. This calmness in his chest brought him back through

decades of personal history. Although it had been long years since he had shot heroin on a daily basis, the gut feeling never completely disap-

peared. The seduction and danger of addiction, this sense memory. Come back to the now. Achieve balance by taking stock of the tactile world.

The outline of his guitar accumulating dust on its stand by the half-light window comforted him. Consciousness returning, Levi became aware of a pair of eyes staring at him from the foot of the bed, one green,

one blue.A crouched form, waiting.The muscled figure let out a warning rumble, “Rrrrrwwwwlll?”The Alaskan Malamute was tensed into a defensive position, alert to the fact that something was terribly wrong.

Levi shook off the veil of sleep and gently reached out his hand to signal the dog to come to him. Ohcum relaxed and crept up, jumped on the bed and sat on Levi’s chest to lick his face. It was always feeding time for this animal.

“Good boy, Ohcum,” Levi said softly, roughing the dog’s head and ears. “Scary, I know, having a master who al-ways wakes up paranoid.” The dog gave him a quizzical look.

“Don’t worry, the Foodgiver is still alive and kicking, my hungry little wolf.”He is my familiar, my benevolent protector spirit.He swung his feet over the side of the bed, gazed out the picture window which held the vista of the Autumn moun-

tains, colors seething with the glow of the dawn as it began to burn the edges of the sky. It would be a red dawn, not the gentle misty mornings he had fallen in love when he had found his way here so many years before in his blind escape from the city. The cabin had not been insulated then, and Winter had come early. Although he now slept in the nude during the warmer months, his sense memory still felt the unrelenting cold of those times.

He rose quickly and stood for a moment, groggily swaying before propelling himself into the kitchen to prepare breakfast for his insistent canine companion, who was nearly knocking him over with his wagging tail. This creature of the wild came to him during that dark time, thin and haggard as a ghost in the pine woods. He had been scrounging through garbage cans in the area and was unnapproachable in the beginning. He wanted only food and would not take shelter for the first 2 months.

Levi watched as Ohcum tore into the raw meat as if it were his last meal. Levi saw a bit of himself in this animal. He stag-gered to the bathroom to do his morning ablutions. Cold water cleared his head. He looked into the glass.

Straight black hair now streaked along its edges with sil-ver. High cheekbones peppered with age spots, the crinkling around the eyes, where depths of brown and green with flecks of gold sparkled. Skin still unusually taut for his 60 plus years on this planet. The eyes themselves contained the true story: A haunted and world-weary knowledge.

Of the darkness that always lies in wait. Meditation exercises brought his body back to real-world

balance. Aches and pains were part of his everyday reality now, with a body that had seen its share of abuse, both voluntary and unbidden.

These early morning hours were a gift in a way. These were the times before most of the world had risen, when Levi could be alone to wrestle with the thoughts that plagued him.

These thoughts were not simply the troubles of his everyday life. Those were difficult enough, dealing with the maintenance

of sobriety, the precarious balance of survival. If one is fortunate, he realized, thankfully, a measure of contentment. No, these thoughts were the product of some external consciousness. Perhaps, as his therapist claimed, they were

the result of too many years experimenting with drugs, psychedelic and otherwise. As Ken Kesey had said to him, there comes a point when it becomes impossible to close down the iris. Once you have dilated your third eye to let in the light, you can’t just shut it down. You cannot un-see something you have seen. You cannot heal the brain scar.

Levi was not sure he subscribed completely to this view, but he could not fully explain the plague of visions either.Daily, and especially nightly, the dreams came, both waking and sleeping. More often than not, they took a dark

form. The problem was, Levi often could not always separate the vision from the waking reality. Often the visions were prescient, accurate if interpreted correctly.

Each dreamer contains his own set of symbols, experience had taught him. Reading the symbols had become his vocation. Time after time, he had predicted with uncanny accuracy crimes that had been committed in the vicinity of his adopted home of Falls Mountain. For this reason, Sheriff Tom van Houthern had taken Levi Wilder on in an unof-ficial capacity as consultant.

The pay was not great, since he was officially listed as automotive mechanic of the small fleet of police vehicles. It kept him alive and sober. His motivation for waking up and going about his day depended on it.

He boiled water for his morning coffee and began to get dressed in preparation for his morning sojourn into town.

.......Levi pulled his Jeep Commando into the small lot in front of The Caravan, a converted rail depot that housed the

bistro favored by the Falls Mountain locals for breakfast. It was really a glorified diner, but with few breakfast options in this small village, the choice was a foregone conclusion. The decision turned out to be a good one. The simplicity and hominess of this eatery made it appealing to regulars, of which Tom and Levi were the most stalwart.

This is where Levi regularly took his breakfast. Jessie was there, as she was most mornings, and greeted him with a warm smile, a mug of tea and a menu. The menu was just a formality. He always ordered the same thing: Two eggs, sunny-side up, 3 slices of bacon, cut thick and cooked rare. Levi had attempted veganism at one time, but bacon had drawn him back to the dark side. “The Gateway Meat” his butcher had called it.

He sat at the end of the counter, the place with the best view out the picture window and the door. Some minutes after he had his first gulps of coffee and started to eat, Tom van Houthern strolled in.

“Hey, Tom,” Levi mumbled.“Levi,” Tom returned without even looking in his direction. This was their habit. They had met here pretty much

every morning for more than a decade.Tom took the cup Jessie poured him and slid down the counter next to Levi, the local paper tucked under his arm.

The sheriff’s lean face was freshly shaven, his uniform pressed and clean. The sandy hair and moustache had become liberally streaked with silver, which gave him a tough but genteel look. The lively blue eyes expressed an easy sense of humor. The skin on his neck was finely wrinkled, like a buttersoft leather jacket, from many seasons working outdoors.

These pale white men burn in the sun, Levi thought idly. His own face was lined, too, but darker, more olive-skinned as befit his mixed Mediterranean and indigenous American blood. He looked at his hand as it held the coffee cup, rough and heavily veined. He could feel his own blood pulsing. An unpleasant memory arose of the morning’s dream. Tom’s voice distracted him from his momentary reverie.

“See they’re doing one of those Full Moon Frenzy events tonight for Halloween,” Tom read from the paper. “Bound to stir up some trouble if the Wyckmanns have anything to say about it, and they will. Last Society meeting they was making a stink something awful. Wanted to close Trickster and his crew down completely. Hear he got some lawyer up from the city to fight them in court and keep the thing up and running.”

“Why the town fathers object so strongly?” Levi asked. “Trickster has been here a long time. Hopefully he has left his large-scale drug-dealing day behind him.” (to be continued)