Free Hold the Light by Ryan Sherwood Page A

that had abandoned his body, would take him.

    But it would not.

    As if the light put inside him aimed to only torture, death was the only constant stream of thought screaming in his skull. The ends of countless and vague souls, lives he hadn't the slightest idea of who they were, paraded before his mind's eye with twisted and fearful deathly faces, spewing their woes at him in breaths of putrid decay.

    It took Mural only one more afternoon beyond the first two months to become completely stolid to the horrors in his mind. They were nothing new anyway, once he truly began to see them. He had seen death, what was the fuss over? And, in truth, life was but a dream. A dream that merrily, merrily rowed further and further away from him each day. And he happily waved it goodbye. It was nothing more than a burden.

    "What kind of life can be found in death anyway?" he asked to the air.

    And in those lucid words came an answer that chilled his blood. Not cold out of fear but from the light inside him. He trembled and shook.
    Images of murders played out for him as if it was a vivid recollection, but only in feelings and sensations. Nothing concrete was ascertainable by a single one of his five senses. These recollections weren't from the past, no, nothing seemed that familiar...except for a face. He saw a room, not the room in house where he sat, but an unfamiliar room before him in a manner such as a reverie, with blue wispy tints, yet he knew he was in the present. The normal flashes from the gift, with all its haunting ambiguity and doubts, showed him he was on the other side of town, on the border of Boston. A man lay before him in his deathbed, coughing out his final breaths in sick spats. It was so vivid, the man, the place...and the color. Oh God color! Now, blinding in its brilliance, all the blue in the world came to his eyes, as though his colorblindness stepped aside just for this single shade alone.

    Fully immersed in the dream reality, Mural was drawn to this ailing man. He slowly walked to him, flatly placing his boots along a wooden floor that never creaked. The atmosphere was heavy, almost damp, tears mixing with humidity. Others paced along the floor as it moaned under them but Mural continued forward without a sound, feeling none of his weight. Whether it was his illness or terror, the man cringed as Mural closed in, shaking his feeble limbs in irritable gestures to ward Mural off.

    The dying man's anxious family hovered all about the room, huddling around him and attempted to comfort his pathetic yelps, wailing and preparing for the inevitable. A young woman pleaded with him to calm; calling with such a love that Mural identified her as the man's wife. She must have worried that her husband had gone mad at the end.

    A clumsy thought of reason plugged itself into Mural's rationale and he began to recognize the man. Yes, he was familiar and from his own past even.

    No one in the room, save for the dying, could see Mural stroll up to him. The man's breaths grew panicked and he whispered strange words.

    Reaching with strained, almost hungry fingers, Mural went to grab from the dying man what he knew was his. Mural watched the man's purple cracked lips tremble out a tantalizing puff that he innocuously caught as if he was expecting it, like a dog catching a ball. Among the hazy impressions and prodigious meanings, Mural watched his diaphanous blue hand open to reveal a blue ball. He saw it presently and as a memory. He saw it like he saw the ball stolen from his mouth by the cursed demon and, therefore, saw it for what it was. It hummed in his hand for a second, as if it applauded his recognition, then shot off into the dark corner of the wall.

    Slowly the man's face settled and his eyes dulled. Mural studied him, barely remembering his features. The family surrounding them was fixed on the man lying in his deathbed, never noticing Mural in the slightest. And he couldn't help but smile. This man who lay dead