The Unbinding of Lumen

The Unbinding of Lumen

The grass was golden, whispering as I walked across the flat space where voices had once been raised in worshipful praise. It spoke of hot, dry breezes just outside the sweltering canvas tent. Of wooden chairs and hymnals. Of the Bible and men who preached. Of children, hushed by mothers who prayed. Of quiet rebellion against a Saturday afternoon wasted in forced silence.

I didn’t belong here then. I’ve never belonged in this place, nor did I wish it to be so. I wanted freedom from expectations and conditional love.

I stand in the center of the place that used to hold a hundred lives in limbo for seven eternities on the calendar. I can see the tent flapping in the breeze, its lines snapping, and birds calling overhead, innocent of any sin. I can smell the meals I ate and hear the faint clink of the dishes I washed.

I closed my eyes, but felt only the cold wind of the October day. Summer had fled, taking green grass, bright flowers in jewel tones, and clear blue skies with her.

I didn’t care. Autumn calls me like a preacher exhorting a congregation to shout “Hallelujah.” The parched desert heat submits to cold breezes and rain falling like tears on sacramental bread.

I don’t know why I’ve come back to this place so long abandoned by my family and their summer revival. The tall elms around the fields, the smell of leaves and faint smoke, the calling geese leaving for southern skies. It’s final.

I turn to walk back to my car when something flutters in the wind. A stray leaf, fallen to the faded grass. It lifts and turns in the wind, and I can’t tear my eyes from it as it dances. “Carolyn.”

My birth name on the wind!

“Remember,” my mother whispered, her lips cracked and her eyes dim from the cancer killing her. “When you hear your name on the wind.”

She pressed her locket into my hand and –

I turned away from my car and slowly returned to the extreme right of the field. The wind swelled and shivered in the limbs of the trees. Something joined the wind, a voice I recognized. Low, breathless, but charismatic and manipulative. “Carolyn,” he whispered. “I knew you’d come back.”

“She told me you’d call me on the wind,” I replied, my hand reaching for the locket, a silver heart, antique, but shining. It felt – different. Warmth enveloped it, but not from body heat. Something strange. Tingles shot through my hand, and I flinched away from its familiar contours.

“You wear her symbol,” said the man we’d all called Preacher.

“It’s my symbol now,” I said.

I reached for the pendant and clutched it tight despite the tingling in my fingers and the rising warmth.

I thought I heard Preacher’s voice roaring as it did on a summer’s night twenty years ago. The cry that terrified children and claimed absolute obedience.

“She took you from our circle.”

“No,” I shouted to the trees swaying around me, as if in a dance of possession. “I was never yours. My mother taught me freedom.”

“You’re here,” Preacher said, and his tone shifted again, as in the late afternoon light something began to take shape.

The shadow rose from the dead grass and fallen leaves, faded and brown. It lifted, stretched, and shaped into the tall man I’d known as a fifteen-year-old girl: the long face, the black cloak, the bloodshot eyes, and wispy blond hair. Something was off, though, because his long fingers ended in razor-sharp claws and his feet hovered above the ground.

“You’re dead,” I confronted him as my heart began to pound and my legs to shake.

The wind whirled around us, and storm clouds began to gather, pewter, black, and white. They roiled as though living in Preacher’s fury.

“I never left this place, my child.” He grinned. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

My mother told me that Preacher would never leave this world until I destroyed him. She said the secret lived in my blood and my will.

My throat was as dry as the paper pamphlets handed out to true believers. I swallowed hard against the thunder that boomed and flinched at the lightning. The booming crashes battered my ears, but I could hear something other than the Preacher.

Music, far away on the wind, but fading in and out like a poorly tuned radio. It was a song we were forbidden to listen to—a song that spoke of Jacob’s ladder, and running from a preacher man.

“One day, we’ll escape,” my mother had whispered to me late one night. “I promise. I won’t let him dim your shining light, my Lumen.”

The song wavered in my memory as Preacher smirked at me. “You can’t escape me, child. You and your pathetic excuse for a mother are linked eternally to me.

He rose from the ground, levitating several feet above my head as the thunder continuously boomed, but no rain fell.

“You have what he doesn’t,” My mother’s voice sounded in my head.

I watched Preacher spread out his arms as the wind blew so hard it whipped the trees into a frenzy. I could barely breathe, and when I attempted to speak, the wind tore the words away, like an angry child discarding a toy.

“Death freed me,” Preacher shouted, and then he laughed, only it sounded like a wolf howling under a full moon. The sound increased until I couldn’t hear the music.

“What do you want?” I screamed as the sky blackened.

“Your soul,” he screeched. “Your innocence offends me, dear Carolyn, even now. Your mother can’t protect you, child. You will be mine. Death thwarted me, but this time, no power on earth can stop me.”

The pendant pulsed like a heartbeat in my hand, and I remembered.

That night. The storm. The rain that pelted down like an angry god determined to drown all living creatures. Sleeping on a narrow cot, huddled under a thin blanket meant to keep out the chill of the rain, despite the July heat. Then, a snick of metal near my ear, the tug of my hair, and that smell. Peppermint. Preacher!

“No,” my mother screamed. “Leave her be.”

“She belongs to me, just as the others who’ve attained the holy age. Tomorrow we will seal the bond.”

Mother was gone, taken away by other members of the True Light. I screamed for them to stop, to listen, but Preacher backhanded me so hard my mouth began to bleed, and others tied me to my sleeping cot.

“I hate you,” I spat at him.

He hit me again, and I knew no more.

“You remember,” said the phantasm of wind,

He floated above my head, static despite the wind buffeting us like a hammer against virgin steel.

“I never forgot,” I screamed over the shrieking roar of the wind.

“Now, we’ll complete the spell, and you’ll be mine even in death. Like all the rest!”

I looked around, trying to see the marker I’d left, but the shadows were too heavy, and the wind swirled leaves so fast that I couldn’t see the trees. “Mom,” I screamed, and tears began to roll down my cheeks.

“You see,” Preacher shouted, and his voice boomed above the thunder. “You can’t escape.”

He began to sink to the ground, his blue eyes changing to endless black as he settled back onto the grass, still hovering as he reached out with his clawed hands. “I don’t need your filthy hair, little bitch!”

“Mother,” I screamed as he drew closer, the stink of sulfur permeating the fierce winds like a miasma. I backed away from him, but stumbled over a fallen tree limb and crashed to the ground. My head slammed into the grass, and I couldn’t move. The pain was like a living thing in my skull, and all I could see was Preacher crouching over me. He reached down and -

My hand burned as I instinctively reached for the locket. I hissed and let it go, but instead of falling back to lie against my neck, it hung in the air and began to shine so brightly that I had to squint. It glowed white hot like a flame, and the entire meadow lit up like noon in summer.

The tree, standing five feet away, suddenly shivered in the wind and broke in two, falling to the ground with a crash I barely heard over the wind and the screams of Preacher.

He floated still, as if held in place by an invisible force. He reached for me, but I could move now. I leapt to my feet and ran to the base of the fallen elm.

“No!” I could hear Preacher shouting, but the light from the locket showed me the depression in the ground.

The next morning, the men from Preacher’s inner circle took me to the tent. All of the True Light waited within, singing and praising, but none of them met my eyes. They stared up at Preacher with expressions of adoration that made my stomach flip in disgust. I fought not to vomit to show any sign of weakness. Fighting was useless, as no one would let me leave this tent alive. I knew it, like it was truth written in stone.

“Bring her forward,” Preacher said.

He stood alone at the altar, dressed in a black three-piece suit, despite the sweltering heat that lay like a wet cloth over the congregation.

“No!”

My mother screamed as the singing voices, now echoing like a funeral dirge in an ancient cathedral, suddenly stopped.

“Brothers and Sisters,” Preacher shouted, his arms outstretched.

His guards held me and my mother at the altar. They were huge men, muscular with faces of granite and no pity in their eyes.

“Today, we welcome a new bride of the Lord to our midst. Carolyn joins us willingly.

“No,” I shouted. “I do not –”

One of the guards hit me across the face so hard I almost passed out. Blood ran down my face from my nose, but I couldn’t raise my hands, still tied tightly with rope.

“Hush,” Preacher said, and his voice had lowered. “It is time for you to pledge yourself to the Lord’s work.

He pulled out a lock of my hair he’d stolen and wrapped in red ribbon.

“Please,” my mother sobbed. “I’ll stay with you willingly. Let her go.”

“No, mom!”

The silence around me made my blood run cold. No one in the congregation tried to help; The True Light didn’t speak or move, just stared like a flock of birds on a power line.

Preacher laughed as my mother struggled against the men who held her still. “It’s too late for that.”

Preacher placed the hair on the open Bible and raised his hands over his head. “Oh, mighty Father, we pray for your guidance. Send your spirit to bless this union and –”

Suddenly, Preacher stopped. He swayed, and his face went as white as new snow. “Preacher,” shouted a guard. The man ran to him, but Preacher dropped like an ox felled by a slaughterhouse hammer. He lay still, staring into infinity.

Outside, thunder boomed, and rain pelted the tent like the wrath of God.

The vision or memory ended as quickly as it had come, and I blinked, finding myself staring down at the depression in the soil. I remembered. It was the spot my mother had buried her most precious possession. She’d said she’d hidden it in plain sight.

I dropped to my knees, the light from the locket still as bright as the noonday sun. I began to dig in the soft soil with my hands.

“Stop,” a voice commanded me, but I ignored the commands of the Preacher until I felt a cold wind pass through me, and he was there, hovering over me.

“You can’t hurt me.”

He howled into the tempest, but the thunder drowned out his impotent screams. My left hand jammed a rock and cut the skin, but I didn’t stop digging until I found the small wooden box. I dragged it from the soil’s embrace and brushed away the dirt.

“No,” the Preacher shouted. “Do not touch that box.”

I ignored him as he reached out for the box, but his hands passed through it, and he screamed in fury.

The locket I wore still glowed, but had cooled. I took it off and opened it. It fit the lock perfectly, and the box opened with a creaking groan. Dirt filled the hinges, but the box was intact. Inside, I found that same lock of hair, still tied in the red ribbon.

“NO!”

Preacher recoiled when he saw it, and his eyes were no longer black.

I knew what to do. It was instinctual, like breathing. I pulled the ribbon free and let the strands of hair fly free.

Preacher screamed in agony, and his form began to dim in the light of the glowing locket. He dissolved slowly, like a photo negative under intense light. His form faded away, not with an explosion, but with a whimper.

Overheard, the tempest began to break up. The winds slowed to a gentle breeze that tugged at my hair instead of tossing it into my eyes. The storm moved away and thundered with a slight echo in the distance.

The air around me felt clean, purifying without burning. The tempest had ended. My locket no longer glowed. Sundown brightened the western horizon in blood red and orange, fading to purple. Trees and a house in the distance stood out as black, featureless silhouettes.

I picked up my mother’s beautifully carved, keepsake box and carried it back to my waiting car. I whispered into the cold night. “I was never yours to control.”

I wondered as I walked back to my car, where Preacher had gone. Then, I thought I smelled vanilla and mint on the wind. It didn’t matter. He was gone for good this time. I wish my mother were still alive.

I wiped a tear from my cheek and slipped into the car. I heard an owl hoot as I took my seat and remembered that I used to fear them.

“Who,” I said to the empty car.

When no one answered, I drove away, back to my life.

One day later, I hurried into a small, stone edifice. My chosen church. A place welcoming to all. The spire pierced the sky, and the hardwood floors creaked invitingly. I decided to sit in the back pew. I gently placed the keepsake box on the seat next to me.

Inside, I found a note with my name and the words, “Read this when the darkness is truly gone.”

My dearest Lumen,

Remember, daughter, you were always my bright shining light. Without you, I would’ve drowned in the True Light’s darkness. I know one day we’ll walk away together.

I’m sorry I led you into a literal den of vipers. I wasn’t strong enough to resist Preacher’s manipulations. You are!

Never let anyone dim your light, and most of all, do not dim yourself to fit in this world. Walk in your own path, my dearest.

I love you always,

Your Mother.

Tears gathered in my eyes and blurred the room around me. I wiped my eyes and drew in a breath. The tears stung but clarified. My mother was right. We had walked away together from the True Light. From the chaos after Preacher’s death.

The police told us he’d had a massive stroke. The Medical Examiner never determined the cause: no drugs, no underlying medical issues, just a sudden death.

I believe it was God’s hand.

I carefully folded the letter and returned it to the box. I closed it and locked it with my pendant. I held the silver heart-shaped locket and let it glint in the chapel’s light. The night of Preacher’s destruction hadn’t damaged it. I let it drop to my chest and then closed the keepsake box.

I was about to pick up the box when something warm and soft touched my cheek. It was a gesture I remembered well.

“Mom,” I whispered.

The scent of mint and lilac filled the air. My mother’s favorite blend of essential oils. I breathed it in like a balm. “I love you, Mom.”

“My Lumen,” I heard as if it were a musical note on the autumn wind. “Be bright.”

The warm touch on my cheek disappeared. The scent lingered for a minute, then faded away.

“Goodbye,” I said, smiling.

THE END