Greywalker

The Chronicle of Amos Garr

Greywalker

By Patrick Heffernan

Copyright © 2012 Patrick Heffernan

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Smashwords Edition

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

ONE

Back to Top

I am Amos Garr. There are probably only fifty thousand or so people in this entire world who would hear my story and not think me a madman. Of that fifty thousand, probably only three or four thousand are like me. Yeah, thousands of people sound impressive, but with all the billions on the planet we’re a drop in the bucket. It’s one hell of a story. It took me a long time to believe it myself. You see, I am a Greywalker.

There is a spirit world very few people can see or fathom. Well, that’s not true. A lot of people see it, but don’t fathom it. But there are a number of us who do fathom it and walk in that world as easily as the corporeal world we all know. I can only speak to my own experiences, but until a few years ago I walked in that Otherworld all the time but didn’t really know it. And then after a time there that was particularly bad, I grew very ill in this world. I was in a coma and floating between life and death. At different times, different angels came to me while I was in that netherworld that’s neither life nor death. I know not their names and to be honest, I was terrified to ask. You see, part of that world is dark and blackness, and part of that world is light and whiteness, sort of like that yin and yang symbol. Greywalkers like me can wander into both worlds, albeit not in safety. Some take people from light into darkness. Others like me take people from darkness into light.

Those angels painted scenarios for me. Some of them told me I should just walk toward death and what lies beyond, others tried to lure me toward the dark and life, and one of them showed me what I am. Even in that lost world that is a coma, I knew that angel was right, although I was scared half out of my wits. But the angel told me I was his warrior, his Greywalker, and woke me from my coma. I was given no choice in the matter. I guess most of us, one way or another, are conscripts. To be honest, I kind of feel most of the time like those poor fuckers in that Matrix trilogy who often wished they’d taken the ignorance pill. My life would be far happier if I wasn’t a Greywalker. But I admit it would also be less satisfying. What I do when crossing those lines, I do well, and no matter the toll it takes on me I know my rewards will be great when this earthly life ends. Honestly, I think I’ll just be satisfied with peace, you know?

The first visit I made to the Otherworld, to my recollection, happened when I was still a teenager. I thought it was just some kind of a terrible nightmare, and believe me, I was experienced in some doozies even as a toddler. I had walked down a dark corridor of some sort, that was only dimly lit and found a little girl who was divided into two people. One was sad and bewildered, and the other was just about feral. The feral side was trying to divide into more girls and that scared me half to death. The feral one turned on me and had fangs as she launched herself to attack the sad one and me at once. I managed somehow to cast a field that held the feral one at bay. The sad one clung to me and cowered, terrorized of her twin. Somehow I reached into the mind or spirit of the mad one and saw horrible things going on, things that I barely remember to this day, all these years later. She wasn’t evil, but was lost, I remember that. She wasn’t evil, not then, but easily could have tipped fully toward that darkness and been enveloped in it. The spirit didn’t speak a tongue I knew, but I nonetheless understood a lot of it, and its terror at what was going on in the corporeal world. Looking back, I think she was victimized sexually in this world and on the verge of dissociative identity disorder. I didn’t fight her or harm her. I just let her expend herself on whatever field it was I had cast to protect myself, and her true self. Once she had expended her fear and hate, I cast a pale blue light over her and she was too spent to fight it as she integrated back into her true self. And then I carried her to the border, and cast her back into the White a split second before I woke in this world, screaming to the heavens in terror and grief for that tormented spirit.

To this day, I don’t know who she was. I think her mother tongue might have been Greek but even that is more a guess than a certainty. I doubt her life in this world grew any happier, although my angel showed me images of her life, and her spirit had remained intact that entire time.

I will tell you angels aren’t sweet cherubim or women of beauty like you see in the popular literature. Not the angels I’ve seen, at least. Many of them, I think, fell with Lucifer, and are dark and twisted, pure evil. Many of them, I think, serve Gabriel who stands before God. They’re not sweet or kind, people. I will remind you an angel probably in Gabriel’s legion drifted over Egypt and killed the first-born without remorse. And I’m pretty sure it’s one of Michael’s angels who guards Eden with a sword of fire, and I pity whoever the poor dumb son of a bitch is who discovers that garden. We Greywalkers serve Michael, who is known as God’s warrior. And he’s not some harmless half-mad clown like the one John Travolta played in that movie. No, Michael is as hard as any living spirit can get. The angel I serve isn’t Michael, mind you. I don’t know if any mortal could see Michael the Archangel and emerge with his mind or spirit intact. The one I have is terrible enough.

My angel told me before he woke me that I have crossed into that Otherworld almost constantly. The nightmares I had suffered as a teen were from those battles I was ill-equipped to face, when I was facing powerful minions of the darkness. He said I had battled in the darkness almost nightly, that my sleep was my ventures into combat, and sometimes when it was bad, it manifested physically. My coma was the extreme end of it, but waking up hurting somewhere unusual without a good explanation was often wounds I’d suffered in the Otherworld that manifested in my corporeal life. The wounds weren’t visible, at least in my case, but it was a form of stigmata. The doctors had no real answers about my coma and wrote it off to encephalitis and sent me on my merry way a few days after I woke. But I knew. My angel had told me. I hate him for his hardness that verges on cruelty, but he’s never wronged me. And why would an angel lie to me or any mortal? What would be the point?

I do know I often sleep poorly, and there are often times I’m simply afraid to sleep. But I’m mortal, not an angel, and to continue living in this waking world, I must sleep and face whatever happens in the Otherworld. Usually, to be honest, I wake with no recollection of what went on there. Are these nights when I simply patrol without incident? Is the combat there such a matter of routine that it doesn’t lift my spirit’s brows? I don’t know. I do know what brought me to that coma but that’s a story to be told later. What skills and powers or abilities I possess aren’t things I gained knowingly. I do know my spirit is my weapon there, and I battle instinctively, unthinkingly. My weapon isn’t wisdom but an instinct of darkness and a certain knowledge that light dispels that darkness. I suppose my mortal reward is my knowledge I serve the White. There’s no money in it, and as witness my coma and other wounds, no promise of immortality, invincibility, or even overall good health. By day I drive a hotshot truck. By evening, I am a husband with a teenage son. By night, I am a Greywalker. Fucking angel of mine. I hate that son of a bitch sometimes.

TWO

Back to Top

My thirteenth and fourteenth years were plagued by these awful visits to the Otherworld. My parents couldn’t afford a shrink, but good Catholics that they were, packed me off to the parish priest, worried I was possessed by demons. Thinking back on that, it makes me laugh, but it’s not a laugh of humor or good cheer. The thing is, they were right. Well, sort of right. I was (and am) if not angelically possessed, at least angelically driven. They sure the fuck never asked if I wanted to be a part of all this, because I sure the fuck would have told the bastards no in a resoundingly loud voice.

Toward my fourteenth birthday, I remember waking six nights in a row sweating, sore and with my heart pounding so loudly in my ears I was deafened by it. I saw the Nightmare on Elm Street movies and thought they were a series of comedies. They literally did nothing to frighten me. I had seen things in the Otherworld that would probably have killed most of my high school friends. Anyway, I guess I should tell you about those six horrible nights rather than digressing and dancing around it, huh? Avoidance is coward’s armor, after all.

Anyway, on each of those six nights, I went to the same place and faced the same tormented soul being tortured by the same evilness. That first night, I knew it was a young guy, maybe eighteen or twenty years old. He had flirted with Satanism, and Satan seemed to have taken him seriously, and now the guy was terrified of the things he had done and the choices he made. Again, I didn’t face Satan or one of his fallen angels. Like Michael or Gabriel, I am convinced that engaging one of those would only have seen me destroyed utterly and irrevocably. They were demons, and looking back, I know they were lesser demons at that. But they were plenty strong and plenty evil as they terrorized that guy.

Again, I don’t know his name, and neither will I ever know where he was from, but I know he was only a little older than me. And while, again, I understood the guy’s thoughts, his mother tongue was a mystery to me. It wasn’t English nor anything vaguely Latin, but beyond that, I’m at a loss. I’ve wondered at times if he was even from Earth. I do remember he was naked and shivering in the cold darkness, and his spirit seemed coated in sores and blisters. And bite marks. I cast white light over him and at the demons, and the demons quailed but fought back. That first night, one of the demons bit and clawed at me, hard. I woke feeling burning punctures on my face, although there were no wounds. The last thing I did was bellow with fury and cast a blinding intense light toward the demons, which dispelled them. But on waking I knew I was far from done with that battle. It was destined to be a long and hard fight for that spirit, I knew deep inside my own spirit. I was right. I had never been so tired in my young life as I was in the instant I cast that barely healing spirit into the White five nights later. I woke with a fever up over 104 degrees, and was in bed sick for four nights that followed. I’m glad I at least didn’t wake on any of those nights with a dose of the screaming meemies that only seemed to terrorize my mom and convince my dad I was in need of yet another interminable whipping. Honestly, I wish Dad had been right, that his belt could have solved those issues once and for all. Insane people can get treated and sometimes cured, and bad conduct can be reversed, you see. Greywalkers have no hope of peace. Absolutely none.

Outwardly, I was just another mixed-up kid, mind you. God knows those teen years are a hellish time without the issues I was facing. I honestly wondered if I was mad. I remembered reading somewhere that the truly insane never question their sanity. It was cold fucking comfort then, and even colder now. Do I say fuck too much? Yeah, I guess I do, but pardon me the conceit of thinking I’m entitled to my bitterness. The idea of suicide was a constant companion throughout my teens, but I was young and foolish enough then to think the Holy Mother Church was right, that suicide was a one-way ticket to Hell. I worried that my dreams were taking me to Hell, and it sure wasn’t a place I wanted to be forever. I’m older now and know better.

Hell is far worse than the Otherworld, and there is no line of demarcation into the White. Hell is a whole different place and getting from Hell to the White … well, you’d have better luck flapping your hands and flying to Jupiter and back. You see, we Greywalkers don’t win every battle we fight. I’m not even sure if we win the majority of them, and honestly I don’t think we do. Some of the losses are spectacular and gruesome, and their implications can be far-ranging. But Hell, well, once there, you’re there. There’ll be no red glowing EXIT signs to guide you back out. Bitter experiences mean I know Hell is real. And my angel told me no Greywalker serving the Light has ever been damned to Hell. And yeah, before you ask, I do still flirt with the idea of suicide. But my wife needs me here, like it or not. My son needs me too. I think he might need me more than my wife does. In fact, I’m pretty sure of that.

Oddly enough, despite being staunch Catholics, the men of my family have all been given Old Testament names instead of being named after various saints, as Catholics are supposed to do. As far as I’m able to determine, I am the only person in my family who does my own spiritual thinking rather than abdicating my thought to the Church. I am Amos. My father is Jeremiah. My grandfather was Benjamin and my great grandfather was Jesse. My own son is Isaac. I’ve wondered at times if those Old Testament names are something to do with my walking. But I don’t know. In a way it would be comforting to know that my family line is touched by the angels. But in a far bigger way, that thought scares the living shit out of me. Either way, I know it’s out of my hands. I graduated high school at eighteen, just about smack in the middle of my classmates with a B-minus grade average. Not interested or able to afford college, I got a job and a few months later my own apartment, and a year later my wife. Other than the occasional funeral and Isaac’s christening, which I did mostly to appease my parents and in-laws, I haven’t set foot in any church since I moved out of my parents’ house. I met Cora, who is now my wife, at St. Theresa’s Catholic Church when we were toddlers in the day care there. She doesn’t know I’m a Greywalker, although she does know I have terrible sleep patterns from time to time. After one experience when I was sixteen, I never dared tell anyone again what I might be. Cora quit going to church just because she doesn’t like waking early on Sundays, and doesn’t like the whole concept of confession. She doesn’t like Father McCarty, and suspects he beats his meat while hearing confessions. I think she might be right.

Anyway, I said nothing about my walking then because I didn’t know what I’d have been talking about. I’ve said nothing since, because I would be the only one who knows what I’m talking about. I am grateful no churches are still in charge of nations and kingdoms, because my angel did show me several Greywalkers burned at stakes through the ages and otherwise executed by various cultures for one brand or other of spiritual impurity or heresy. If you think we’re all that modern entering this Third Millennium, look at how many are executed in the Middle East for apostasy. At least seven of those in the last forty years were Greywalkers. Religion seems to be the enemy of too much that I do, and too much that I hold dear. It’s a bone of contention with my parents, and to a lesser degree, my in-laws, that I am at most an armchair Catholic. They cannot seem to grasp that I have lost no faith in God, but have lost all faith in man-made religion. They are convinced, all four of them, that the only way to Heaven is not only (or even primarily) by Christ, but through the New and Improved Vatican-approved Christ, available in this little town by special arrangement through St. Theresa’s via Father Peter McCarty. Greywalkers make for shitty evangelists. We’re busy grappling with far greater things than philosophy, folks. Every fucking one of us has a plate plenty full as it stands.

Remember me mentioning an incident when I was sixteen? Well, it was a punishment from the demons. I was locked in battle for some poor old man with cancer, and fighting his own despair. I won that battle, but my own grandmother was its casualty. As I cast light on the demons to run them off, one headed toward my world, and I lost track of him. Some time later, my grandmother, my mom’s mother, came to me in my sleep. It was around four in the morning. She kissed me and held me tight, then whispered to me, you did good, Amos. Fight the good fight. And then she was gone and I snapped awake and I knew she was gone. I went instantly and woke my mother to tell her. She