Who is Raven James?

Raven James is a fictional character created by me, writer/director Ben Wydeven and played by Daniel Harris in my short film "A Hot Summer Chill." He is also the main character in my upcoming novel "Drowning Demons," as well as other short stories.

Exclusive to this blog, you'll find short Raven James stories, as well as updates and news regarding the novel's progress to publication.

Monday, August 15, 2011

SALT

From The Raven James Chronicles by B.H. Wydeven

When Raven drifted through the door of Mickey’s Place for the first time, Benny was hobbling behind the bar on crutches, a white dishtowel slung over his shoulder. He smiled with delight as soon as he recognized Raven.
            “Mr. Raven, good to see you again,” Benny replied as Raven approached the bar.
            “I’m impressed that you remember my name after that accident. How’re the legs feeling?”
            “Well I’m still here, a thanks to you. The legs will heal and so will the memories.” Benny dropped a coaster onto the bar. “What can I get you?”
Raven shook his head.
“Please. It’s on me. You saved my life. Let me at least buy you a drink.”
            Raven shrugged. “I’m feeling like a brew.”
            “How about a dark ale?”
            “I’d prefer something light. I don’t like to chew my beer."
            Benny chuckled. “So what brings you back to Lafayette?”
            “I never left.”
“I thought you were traveling the countryside.”
“I was. But I was traveling the countryside looking for a job and I decided to stick here in town for a while. I’m kind of broke.”
            “I can get you a job.”
            “You can?”
“Yeah. Ever been a bartender?”
            “No,” Raven said. “But I know my way around the bottle.”
            “Where are you staying?”
            “Nowhere yet.”
            “Stay at my place. I got a whole house to myself," Benny said with a smile. "It’s quiet and peaceful.”
            “Somehow I doubt it,” Raven mumbled, taking a seat at the bar. Benny placed a glass of light yellow beer in front of him.
            "There you go. Domestic light. After a few they taste like water."
            Raven lifted the glass with no reserve and took a long drink, as if it were the first drink he had taken in weeks.
            "So, where are you from?" Benny asked. Raven continued downing his beer until two-thirds of it was gone. He waited a moment for a response but never got one.

            A group of four twenty something's entered the bar and Benny spent the rest of the night keeping up with orders. Raven spent the rest of the evening people watching and drinking light beer. Periodically, Benny would refill Raven's glass without so much as a pause to see if he wanted more. Benny could tell by the tired look in Raven's eyes, he needed to forget something that happened somewhere.
            Most everyone who entered his bar had that look.
            But Raven had saved Benny's life.
           
            By about 12:30 a.m. the crowd began to dwindle and Raven seemed well acquainted with the light beer he had been drinking all night, downing a glass every fifteen minutes or so. By 1 a.m. Raven was leaning over the bar like a top heavy palm tree about to collapse. Occasionally, his head slumped over, the tips of his long hair dancing on the bar top. Once or twice, a few strands dipped into his glass, although he didn't seem to notice or care. As Benny refreshed Raven's glass, he managed to get in a question.
            "How did you save my life?" Benny asked. Raven hesitated at the question for a moment. There were still a lot of people in the bar, and he didn't particularly want anyone to know he could communicate with ghosts so well it had driven him to a strange bout of  alcohol dependency. He leaned into the bar towards Benny.
            "Can you keep a secret?"
            Benny leaned back as Raven leaned in, the smell of light beer on Raven's breath. "Sure."
            "I can see ghosts," he slurred, letting the S drift through his teeth into a hiss, "It's why I drink."
            "Drowning your literal demons. How poetic."
            "Not demonssss." Raven squatted the idea of out the air. "Ghosts. Restlesss Sspirtss who want my help."
            "So I was a spirit?"
            "Not quite," Raven said, then slumped face down onto the bar.

            By the time 2 a.m. rolled around, Raven was still slumped over the bar, one arm extended over the bar and his long dark hair piled in a heap. Benny shook him awake and he slowly opened his eyes to the bright ceiling lights.
            "You alive?"
            "Eeh," came the response from under the hair pile.
            "Ready to see the house?" Raven slowly lifted his head, his hair lifting up like strands on a mop.
            "Sure."

† † †

To Raven, the taxi ride back to Benny's house was a blur. When they got to the house, Benny, whose right leg was in a cast, mostly hopped up to the door, while Raven lurched toward the house on two staggering feet.
The ranch style house looked small from the outside, it's convex picture window in the middle reflecting the lights of the taxi, giving it the appearance of a Cyclops with one glowing eye. Benny reached the front steps before Raven did.
The living room was plainly decorated. White walls, an old reddish brown recliner and a long gray couch. Raven's first impression was that the house was cozy, and not haunted.
"Most of the furniture was my dad's," Benny explained. "I got the house when he died, I just kind of moved in."
Benny went to the back of the house and switched on the light in a small hallway.             
"In here is the guest bedroom. Might be a little dusty, but it's all yours. The bathroom is right next door." He switched on the bathroom light. Raven meandered into the guest room and collapsed diagonally onto the bed, face down.
"I'll leave the bathroom light on in case you..." Benny stopped short when Raven began snoring.

† † †

Raven awoke several hours later to a cold breeze on the back of his neck. It felt like someone had walked past him quickly and distilled his hair. Having forgotten where he was, Raven rolled onto his back and looked around.
The room was dark and chilly and he was laying diagonally on the lower half of the bed, his feet dangling off the edge and his shoes anchoring his legs down so much he couldn't feel his feet. He could barely see the outline of the door, but he knew where it was. The window on the other side of the room was a distorted square of light which projected shadows on the walls.
But that's not what gave him the Goosebumps.
At first, Raven thought he was seeing a bizarre design of shadows against the wall between the door and the window. But when the entity moved away from the wall and he saw its scarlet eyes, he knew.
The entity was 10 feet tall with arms that stretched down to the floor. Its head was oblong, roughly the shape of a balloon. Its eyes were a harsh glare of red, they had no depth or pupils.

Raven froze as he lay sprawled on the bed, staring at the entity, wondering what it wanted or even what it was. It made no sounds, but it’s presence alone created an intensely hopeless sensation that made Raven feel strangely depressed, merely out of suggestion.
But he knew better.
            Looking around the room, Raven attempted to repress the entity’s persistent influence. To his left, the single window let in stray streaks of moonlight, yet the entity’s figure was not illuminated.

Suddenly, the entity raised its arm, a long stiff limb with three pointy fingers which reached out and completely covered the window, turning the room almost completely dark. Before he could jump out of bed and vacate the room, Raven felt an intense pressure on both his arms and chest. His entire body was paralyzed. He couldn’t even move his jaw. His tonsils pulsed silently as he tried to shout. He felt a cold breeze drift over his body as the presence dominated him and the door gently clicked shut, pinching out the last sliver of light the room had left. The only thing Raven could do was close his eyes.
Raven was safer in his subconscious than he was with his eyes open. He was running through the waiting room to the hallway. As he rushed through, dozens of entities began shouting and whispering, the residuals meandered around him like inmates in an asylum. Raven didn’t make eye contact with any of them as he ran through the open gate, slammed it shut, wrapped the chains and locked the padlock.
He hurried down the hall, past the doctor’s office to the third door on the right. The door opened to an empty room with white walls covered with phrases. He moved around the room looking for a specific phrase; he read it out loud, in latin: Whoso dwelleth under the defense of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say unto the LORD, thou art my hope, and my stronghold; my God, in him will I trust.
Nothing happened. He repeated the phrase louder this time.

The feeling of hopelessness was the first thing to leave him, then eventually the pressure on his chest. He let in a long gasping breath of air. Suddenly, his entire body shook and someone was shouting his name.
Raven opened his eyes to a bright light and an unfocused face peering over him. He heard his name muffled in his ears as if from a distance. Slowly his senses came back into focus and the blurry image of a man standing over him took shape. The bright, blurry shape became Benny's husky frame back lit by the ceiling light. He was holding onto a crutch with one hand and shaking Raven's shoulder with the other.
“Raven! Raven wake up! You’re having a nightmare!” Benny was screaming. 
Raven took in the white walls and brown closet doors in the room for the first time. The bedspread he was laying on was waves of light blue with round swirling streaks of dark blue. To Raven it looked like the ocean.
The corner where the entity had stood was empty.

“You were screaming something in a foreign language. ” Benny explained. “You were so loud, I was afraid the neighbors might call and complain. Are you okay? You're freezing man! Do you want some blankets?”
Raven rubbed his eyes. His face was cold.
“I’m not sleeping in here anymore.”
“Why not? What happened? Is it a ghost?”
“Do you have any salt?”
Benny crinkled his nose. “Salt?”
“Yes, salt. Regular good old table salt.”
“Let me go and check.” As Benny disappeared into the kitchen, Raven ripped the sheets off the bed, grabbed a pillow and retreated to the living room couch. In the kitchen, a cupboard slammed.
“Looks like I got about half a container,” Benny said, shaking a carton of salt. Raven got up quickly and without a word, grabbed the carton, walked up to the entrance of the guest room and without hesitating or explaining, he poured a generous amount of salt in a line at the doorway of the bedroom.
"What the-" Benny stammered.
Raven looked at the corner of the room where the entity had stood. He could still feel an intense energy coming from that spot. Glancing down at his feet, Raven watched his salt line gently scatter in the cold draft.
“Do you have any packaging tape?”
“Raven, buddy, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning. Why the hell are you pouring salt onto my carpet?”
“There’s an entity inside that room,” Raven explained. "Relax, I can get rid of it. But no one goes in until I say it’s clear, okay?”
Benny closed his eyes, trying to find his words. He swayed a bit, feeling the comforting invitation of sleepiness numb his body. With his mouth gaped open, Benny watched Raven kneel on the floor, scrapping up strands of salt out of the carpet and create a solid white line across the doorway of the guest bedroom.
"Where's that packaging tape?" Raven said, frantically glancing up at Benny.

In that moment, Benny wanted to just call Raven crazy outright. But the look in Raven's eyes was not of a crazy person's. He was wide awake, his eyes large and alert, and yet only hours ago, Benny had seen this guy barely walk to the front door. Something had scared him sober in a hurry.
“You really do see ghosts don't you?”
"They're fucking assholes. But Benny." Raven grabbed a hold of Benny's crutch. "Right now, I need some tape to keep the salt on the floor. It keeps the entity in the room and away from attacking us.” Raven spoke with such convention and sincerity that Benny immediately went back into the kitchen and rummaged through the drawers until he found some clear packaging tape.
“What were you saying in your sleep?” Benny asked. “Do you even remember?”
“It was Latin. I was shunning the entity from this house.”
“Will it work?”
“I hope so,” Raven explained. He didn’t want Benny to know just how dangerous this negative entity could be. He wasn't sure if he could trust Benny with his most coveted secret yet.
The spirit that had been dwelling in the corner was most likely there because of Raven. He had found out a long time ago that earthbound spirits are drawn to him, a curse he shared with his late mother.

As far as he could tell, the entity was powerless; Raven had shunned it into the waiting room of his subconscious. But if he wasn’t careful, it could escape or worse, invite more of its kind.
Raven needed more salt.
“Tomorrow we need to go to the grocery store and buy more of this stuff.”
“Why?”
“We need to surround your entire house with it. Spirits will find me. But with the salt, they won’t be able to enter this house without our permission.”

† † †

The next day, as planned Raven and Benny went to the grocery store. Just before they left, Raven cleaned out two gallon milk jugs and brought them along.
“What are those for?”
“Just in case,” Raven said.

He picked the church because of its giant angular front doors and tall steeple.
            He entered the church with the two empty milk cartons, a bible and a cross. Father Peter came out to greet him, glancing over Raven curiously.
            “You are not here for mass, are you?”
            “Sorry, no,” Raven said. “I need two gallons of holy water.”
            Father Peter raised an eyebrow.
            “What is this for?”
            “Just in case,” Raven said solemnly.
† † †
TO BE CONTINUED IN 'SALT WATER'

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