The Waking Moon

Chapter Twenty-Four

Low, dark clouds were moving in fast from the west. I walked along the rundown streets, moving quickly past motionless bodies on the sidewalks buried beneath ratty blankets and newspaper. My head was reeling and my whole body trembled. Such violence. And passion. Because of me. 

I was so distracted, I nearly walked past Sampson, who was sitting on a graffiti-tagged bus stop bench trying to smoke a smashed cigarette butt. He seemed to be in the middle of a conversation. I approached haltingly and stood there waiting for him to lift his eyes. 

“…And so the farmer looks at the man, and he looks at his daughter, and he says to the guy, he says…” He stopped abruptly, as if someone had interrupted him, and turned to look at me. “Oh, good heavens, child. Where on earth did you come from?” 

“Can I ask you something, Sampson?” 

“Don’t mind the chatter,” he said with a brown-toothed grin. “Just visiting with my old friend Joe Garrity, an ornery drunk, just like me. But with better jokes.” He turned his head away for a moment, grunting and nodding at the air. “Go on, then, you old fool.” Without looking at me he patted the space beside him. “Sit and ask.” 

I hung back. “Are you talking to me?” 

He turned around and raised his scraggly eyebrows at me. “Sit! Ask!” 

I came around the other side and half-leaned on the edge of the bench. The wind nudged at the garbage-strewn gutters until a discarded soda can tumbled noisily into a mound of soggy leaves. I wasn’t exactly sure what to ask, so I sat there in silence. Sampson flicked the cigarette butt into the street and hunkered into his dirty parka like ruffled pigeon. 

“You’re afraid of him,” he murmured.  

I shrugged and looked down at my feet. “So, are there ghosts, just…everywhere?” 

“A lonely existence,” he said. “To be unseen and unheard. To watch the world move on without you, yet to go nowhere yourself, ever again.” He gave me a gruff, sidelong glance. “Never be lured by a Waking Moon, child. We all must go on to the next great adventure.” 

“And what is that?” 

He screwed up his eyes and held his hands theatrically in the air. “Now how could I know? I only meet the outliers.”  

“Do you know why he came back?” I asked. 

Sampson sighed heavily. “It’s not for me to say.” He squinted out at the street, sending a web of creases over his chapped skin. “Who wouldn’t try to run from death if given the chance? Is that what you wanted to ask me? Why?” 

 I let myself slide onto the bench a little farther, my cold fingers gripping the wood on either side of my legs. “No,” I said quietly. “I wanted to ask you about this…thing that he said happened as he was dying. That’s when we first met. There was an accident, and I was there, and…he said he saw me, like, inside of me…”

“He saw past,” Sampson said, his voice weirdly soft and low. Almost reverent. 

“What do you mean?” 

“He saw past your body. It happens. I call it bright eyes.”

“So you’re saying, he saw my soul?” 

He grunted and shook his head impatiently. “‘You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.’” He tilted his head and turned slightly toward me, one finger held in the air. “Thus spoke Walter Miller!” 

I sat there quietly, mulling over the words. I was a soul with a body. And Jack Welsh was the only person in the entire world who had ever seen the real me. The me beyond the long curls and freckled nose and skinny legs. He saw the me that I was still trying to figure out myself. And he thought I was amazing. 

In spite of the cold, my body began to feel light and warm. I looked at Sampson slumped beside me, his blue eyes ever gazing through the veil and into the densely populated ghost world. They were laced with vessels, one of which had burst into a creeping puddle of blood. His eyes were worn out from seeing so much. 

“He got angry,” I said quietly. “When he found out about the trouble I’d had. The Noirs. He was ripping the seats right out of the floor. The concrete floor.” 

Sampson grunted, though I couldn’t tell if it was with amusement or awe. He scratched his beard and stared blankly out at the street. 

“Sampson?” 

He sniffed, but didn’t respond. 

“Tell me honestly. Do you think I should be afraid of him?” 

He cleared his throat and got to his feet. Stale tobacco and body odor wafted into the air as he stretched and stamped some life back into his feet. 

“Let me tell you something about old men like me,” he said, squinting up at the slow moving current of clouds creeping over the mountains. “When the nights get long and cold, we hit the bottle pretty hard to keep the fire in our bones. I may have hit it a little too hard one night not long ago. Nodded out in park. Next thing I knew, a group of hooligans had rolled me right off my bench. Gave me a good kick in the ribs. Then that young man of yours came out of nowhere, and took on the whole ugly lot of them.” He chuckled lightly to himself. “Just to save an old drunk.” 

He turned and walked stiffly back in the direction of the deserted streets. I stared after him, speechless. He stopped and bent low to rifle another cigarette butt from the litter. 

“Do I think you should be afraid?” He studied the butt and wiped it on his sleeve. Then he looked at me, his scraggly brow low and stern. But his eyes were twinkling. “Only because the heart cannot escape love unscathed.”