Page 6 of Nightshade

I pulled my locket from where it lay tucked inside my T-shirt and ran my thumb over the tiny picture embedded inside. A small piece of my past that I kept with me every day.

They’d called him crazy, my father. We’d lived in a small fishing community on the east coast, where he taught Ancient Christianity and Christian Apocalyptic Literature at Yale. I’d spent the majority of my childhood on campus, oftentimes tucked away in his office, reading books. My mother, a secondary education teacher, had homeschooled me up until fourth grade, when she’d died in a horrific car accident. Lightning had struck a nearby tree, and in swerving to miss it, my mother had veered through a guardrail and over the edge of a seaside cliff. Tire tracks and random car parts were found after search crews combed the waters. But the vehicle and my mother were never recovered.

My father had subsequently gone through a number of stages of grief, the most notable being his obsession with the afterlife. He’d believed something had stolen my mother that night, and that it had not been an accident, as investigators had dismissed it to be. In an effort to prove as such, he’d thrown himself into his studies, closing off the world around him.

Searching for my mother in the inexplicable.

According to him, she continued to walk among us. Or in another realm.

A place called Nightshade.

His infatuation with what he’d insisted was a real world had soon become the ravings of a madman. One who’d attempted to drown me on an afternoon in early spring, when I’d just gotten home from school and my father had called me up to the second-floor bathroom. He claimed he’d fallen and hit his head while trying to start a bath, and as I’d rushed to help him, he attacked me for reasons I’d never understood. He’d thrown me into the bath and held me underwater, ranting and raving that I’d been spawned from Hell and sent to murder his wife. I couldn’t recall what had happened after that, as I’d blacked out. When I awoke, I’d found myself in a hospital bed, with a woman I’d never met telling me I’d be coming to live with her.

At his own insistence, I’d been sent back to Chicago, where my father had grown up, to live with his estranged sister, Aunt Nelle. Sometime later, he’d apparently moved there, as well, and while I wasn’t allowed any contact with him, he’d managed to keep himself in the forefront of my thoughts with the occasional gifts he’d leave behind for me. Small trinkets and tokens that would only have meaning to me, like the infinity symbol made of string that he’d left on the bannister of Aunt Nelle’s porch. I love you infinity. Something he’d always said to me as a child.

And then, one snowy, winter’s eve, Aunt Nelle had received word that my father had allegedly leapt to his death from his downtown apartment building. Like with my mother’s tragic accident, no body had been recovered. The only evidence of his apparent suicide had been a rooftop camera that showed some strange erratic behavior, as if he were talking to someone who wasn’t there, and seconds after, the lens had captured him jumping over the edge.

According to police, he’d have never survived the six-story fall. And so, it remained a baffling mystery.

I’d blamed myself. For the years that I’d acted out, distracted him from his work. And in my sadness and grief, I’d eventually followed in his footsteps and pursued degrees in subjects that I’d hoped would better help me understand him.

I rifled through the contents of the box nearest me, not finding a single reference, or note, about the Pentacrux, in the few books I’d thumbed through. Instead, I drew out a book whose seal I’d recently cracked, setting it down on the desk.

Chronicles of Nightshade.

Nightshade. The shadowed world he’d become obsessed with—a land far beyond our own world, which he’d often likened to Purgatory.

A fairytale, as far as I was concerned.

The date written on the inside page read December 21st, 2016. Just below the date was a hand-drawn image of a crescent moon inside a circle, and at the base of the crescent, another smaller circle. The symbol for Nightshade. Like the Pentacrux symbol, it’d also plastered my father’s office walls. After tracing my finger over it, I turned the page.

The best Pri’scucian translation I could decipher were the words ‘shadow’ and ‘moon’, which I later cross-referenced in Roman text as ‘noc’tu umbraj’, or Nightshade.

Notes which followed described Pri’scucian as an ancient language that predated Enochian. When I turned the page, a diagram of what looked like stars within circles and squares with strange symbols, some overlapping the spaces like a Venn diagram, was labeled as the alphabet. After studying them a moment, running my finger over the hundreds of small symbols written in and out of the embedded shapes, I flipped the page for more of his notes.

From what I’ve gathered, Nightshade a place, not unlike our own world, but much more ancient. A parallel plane described in ancient texts as purgatory. It was believed that the Fallen walked freely there, and could traverse between our world and theirs. Human souls also occupy this plane, though the nature of how they arrive, or why, is obscure. As I understand, they are not free to come and go. Given the information and what is known, I would venture to say these souls belong to those bound for the infernal realm, or those which are easily corruptible with unfinished business. Lost souls.

It’s here that, I’m certain, I will find evidence of my beloved Evelyn.

The journal contained notes on the concept of human souls, and mentioned articles that debated the human soul hypothesis. With relative coherence, he’d detailed how the mind and brain functioned separately from the soul, and referenced Socrates, who suggested that the soul existed after death. He also elaborated on his theories of angels and what he’d coined their essence, which he believed was something of a fingerprint of the celestial beings.

Once, in the dead of winter, he’d dragged me to the subway station to collect all the pieces of gum that’d hardened to the handrails. He claimed that the gum had effectively captured the ‘fingerprints’ of the angels, preserving them. By the time we’d returned home, I was cold and humiliated, having watched my father enthusiastically rush from handrail to handrail, collecting his evidence and laughing like a lunatic.

I’d desperately wanted to believe him, but I couldn’t. It just seemed that, my whole life, he’d made everything so ridiculous. Like believing in a story. It was fiction to me. All of it.

‘Everything has meaning,’ he’d always said to me. ‘You just have to look for the signs.’

I flipped through the pages to more notes on the angels. Ones he described as the opposite to heavenly angels. The Fallen. I’d known about them from the time I was young. My father had often warned me of their depraved and deceitful nature. They were the boogeymen I’d grown up fearing. Only slightly worse than those he called The Dark Ones, or Sentinels. According to him, the ancients called them messengers. Harbingers of death and ruin. Some were born to protect mankind, but others were made to destroy us, and due to their capricious nature, my father had never entirely categorized them as the good guys.

These beings appear to be some sort of guardian, not entirely like their white-winged counterparts. I’ve pondered the purpose of their black wings and came only to the conclusion that they are designed to disguise themselves among the winged demons.

Turning the page showed a detailed sketch of a man. Crouched on one of the stone remains of the church where I used to play, he stared off, as if distracted by something far away. His profile showed a sharp jawline. The perfect slope of a roman nose. Mature and wise eyes.

All of the details familiar to me.

For most of my childhood, I’d been plagued with visions of a stranger, always in my periphery. On the fringes of my view. He had always watched me play, and for the longest time, I thought he’d lived nearby. Perhaps in one of the few houses in the neighborhood, or as a transient from the old motel up the street from us. Every day that I’d ventured to the church, I saw him standing off a short distance from me. Not once did he approach me. He’d watch for a while then disappear.

For years, that went on, and I’d see him everywhere. At the market when I’d tag along with my father. Across the street from the school playground.