Sean Traver - Graves' end

“Well…” he began. “A kid named Dave Normoyle tracked me down and gave it to me after the war. Davey. Guess I pulled him outta the water on Easter Morning of 1945, during the battle of Okinawa. That’s what he told me later on, anyway. I wouldn’t have remembered the date, myself.”

He paused, gathering his memories before going on.

“I can’t even describe to you what those days were like, Miss Hannah. The Japanese were using a tactic they called the ‘wind of the spirits,’ the kami-kaze…”

“Their airplanes,” Hannah said softly.

“Yeah, exactly right, their airplanes, crashin’em into the ships, plane after plane after plane. I still say they must’ve gone through thousands, even though I know that sounds like I gotta be exaggerating. Still, though, it’s what I remember. One of ’em hit a deck I was standin’ on, not fifteen feet behind me. Piece of its engine caught me in the ribs and knocked me into the drink before I knew what was going on.”

He looked away toward downtown, feeling troubled by the recollections.

“I remember that, and I remember the dawn,” he said in a voice pitched barely above a whisper. Hannah leaned in close to hear him. “That sunrise, well, it was about as gorgeous as any sunrise I’ve ever seen. Which I guess was sorta the worst part of that morning, in a way.”

He glanced up.

“You see,” he continued, averting his eyesockets before Hannah could ask him for clarification. “It, well… it hurt me, frankly, to think about how things like the dawn go on being beautiful for reasons all their own, even when you’re right in the middle of learning firsthand the ugly truth about how easily people can, you know… get themselves broken.”

Hannah nodded, thinking back to a thunderstorm she’d once watched from a hospital room window, now more than a dozen years in her past-a fact she could scarcely believe. Lightning bolts had forked and clashed all night long. She’d had little to do but watch them sear the sky while she sat there helplessly, feigning calm and waiting hour by hour as a cancer crushed the final drops of life from the wasted remnant of her husband, her Warren, whom she’d married in the spring of 1980 and had truly loved every day thereafter with every last ounce of her soul.

The memory of that spectacular storm hurt worse than the bandaged bulletgroove in her side. She thought she understood what Dex was saying.

“ Things like the dawn don’t care how messy and painful and scary it gets when people break,” he said, directing his words toward his lighter. “I remember thinking, while I was floatin’ in the blue, half-drowned and losing blood and dumb-lucky to’ve grabbed hold of a liferaft myself, that that old sun comin’ up on the far horizon there wouldn’t mind if I bucked convention and did something a little bit different that morning, like saving one little life. Hell, why not, I figured. As if it could matter anyway, one life, when so many others were comin’ to bad ends all around me, but Davey Normoyle was the closest body still twitching in the water, so he got hauled aboard. And then I don’t remember so much after that, for a time.”

When Graves chanced a look up at Hannah she was rapt, her eyes full of gentle sympathy. Almost more than he could bear. He turned away again, looking out over the view, although he barely registered it by now. The eye of memory was doing all his seeing for him.

“Wasn’t till a few years after that he finally tracked me down,” Graves said. “I didn’t really know the kid. I was in the intelligence service, moving all around the Pacific theater during the war, so he wasn’t on my ship or anything like that. But I guess I must’ve told him my name at some point, ’cause he found me later on through a buddy of mine. Charlie Lurp, up here in Los Angeles. Just a couple of months before I, y’know, died. Davey by then had a missus and a baby girl and a life he was glad to be living, which I guess he thought he owed to me instead of to a shellshocked whim that happened to hit me one weird morning. But he was serious about it. Said an angel or some such shit came in a dream and told him that really, he’d been slated to buy it in the surf that day, and his life had been returned to him for the sole purpose of giving this particular lighter to me , Dex Graves.”

Graves shrugged, examining the thing. It looked old, but otherwise unremarkable.

“He came up from San Diego to do it, even. Begged me to take the damn thing. Said the angel told him that if I didn’t then he would have died that day. That he would’ve gone under before I ever found him and his happy life would be erased, nothing more than a dream before drowning. Crazy, sure, but hey, war is. Guess I don’t mind telling you I wasn’t always the world’s cheeriest fella after I came back myself. So of course I took it. I was glad for the gift. I let it remind me that something I did one time, whatever my reasons, made a difference for somebody. And I needed that.” He fixed Hannah with his empty sockets. “Like you needed to help out Miss Lia, I suspect.”

“Yeah,” Hannah said. “Just like, I’d think.”

She took and squeezed Graves’ bony hand. He squeezed back, kind of hard, but she held on.

She felt sure that she could trust this man (or whatever he was), this Dexter Graves, to watch out for her Lia, come what may.

He knew the true value of things.

“ So, there’s the tale, anyhow,” Graves said, feeling a little awkward by the time he was ready to let Miss Hannah take her hand back. “What it means to me. Wouldn’t have guessed it’d be enough to drag a dead man outta the dirt, but hey, like the poet once said: I guess there’s more between heaven’n earth.”

“Hey, uh… guys?” Riley said from behind them.

They both looked over, their moment gone. Graves put the lighter away.

“Not to interrupt the sharing, which I think is really sweet, but-”

Graves stood up. “Is she awake?”

“No, not yet,” Riley said. “But her cellphone keeps ringing.”

Lia had a sense of something happening nearby, something her friends were concerned with, something that probably could’ve used her attention, but the pull of deep sleep was too strong for her to keep an eye on it properly. She drifted off instead, despite her efforts, sinking away from conscious awareness and down into the deep psychic blackness where the eternal currents churn. There could be other things besides herself moving through this sort of darkness. Shapes ancient and vast, leviathans of the imaginal sea that might, for an instant that would seem to contain the entirety of time within it, turn their alien-yet-familiar brand of awareness toward her .

Lia never liked it when that happened. It inspired as much dread as it did awe. At least she knew the things she needed to say to keep herself safe out here. She pitied the poor bastards who found themselves lost in these nether spaces due to madness, coma, or sheer unpreparedness for the experience before they intentionally set out to visit-all conditions that left them with little hope of escape or reprieve. One of those shapes that was too large to really comprehend would gobble up such cases sooner or later, but Lia had no way of knowing whether or not that ended their torment.

Danger, however, was not the only thing to be found down here. This ocean-between-minds was the font of individual consciousness, a primal headwater, older by far than human form itself. The currents here ran pure and strong and could be aligned with in the name of healing and growth, or to aid in the acquisition of knowledge. This was Lia’s own territory, in a way. Black Tom had long ago taught her to use these confusing, often disturbing, yet meaning-saturated dreams as an opportunity to better understand herself, if and when she found herself having them.