The Ongoing Tales of one William Hillman

Prologue: William

"William."

Wisps of morning light flickered through the window, thrown here and there by a swaying tree branch.

"William. Can you hear me?"

The scent of cedar and a hint of cigar smoke filled the air inside the cabin, making it heavy and almost suffocating. A robin warbled somewhere in the woods outside. It was an exceedingly perfect scene. William, the younger (and taller, by about half a foot) of the two men, lay on the down feather mattress in the middle of the otherwise empty yet cramped room. His right arm rested over his chest and his left lay stiff at his side, wrapped thickly in beige-colored bandages. The other, older man sat by his side, looking down at him—studying him, almost, rather inquisitively.

"William..." Andrew Brighting uttered the name again, this time sounding increasingly weary. Raising a gentle, slender hand, he brushed William's wispy ash-colored hair out of his face. He would have looked peaceful, if not for the grotesquely deep-purple bruises blotting his skin. Andrew glanced at the half-empty wooden box of cigars on the bedside table and the half-full ashtray beside it, pausing briefly to consider, and then looked back at his slumbering friend. He ran his hand along the top of his own bristly, balding head and sighed deeply.

"I suppose it's best that I go," he said, praying that it would be heard. He lifted his briefcase full of medical equipment off the hardwood floor and arose from William's side slowly, as if it was physically painful to do so, and looked back at him one last time.

"I'm sure Eden will keep you plenty company until I come back." He chuckled awkwardly, sticking his free left hand in his pocket, and turned to the door, half ajar, which led into the home's only hallway. On the way out he rushed past the small living room and William's wife, Eden, as she sat idly knitting in a rocking chair, acknowledging her with no words and a half-hearted nod. She returned the same.

Although these visits had only been happening for about two weeks, the life that existed for Andrew before them felt far away; the life, that is, in which he still had William. The life that existed before even that might as well have been a thousand years ago, and lived out by someone else. It was actually little more than four years ago when they met, William freshly out of high school and college-bound, Andrew a university student in his fourth year. Despite this gap in experience as well as their even larger gap in age (Andrew was older by nearly a decade), the two's intellectual capabilities were well-matched; at times Andrew envied William for the ways in which his mind seemed to operate. The young man's ingenuity far surpassed that of his peers and many of his elders—he could often devise solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems with uncanny ease, Andrew observed, as if a higher power was blessing him with knowledge deemed unsuitable for the intellectual inferiors that surrounded him at all times. It was undeniable that he possessed a gift.

At around 9:30 A.M., on the chilly Sunday morning of March 14th, 1921, Andrew Brighting stepped onto the porch of the white foursquare house of which he was the sole inhabitant. He plunged his numb right hand into the breast pocket of his evergreen coat and retrieved a small, silver house key, which he fumbled with and nearly dropped as he extended it toward the doorknob. He hesitated before opening the door and stared down at his feet. There wasn't anything there—save for the feet, of course, and the faded Oxford shoes covering them. He had a knack for doing this; not for staring at shoes, but for the pauses in between his movements. It made him seem rather tired, or perhaps old. The grey streaks already forming at his temples further added to his apparent age, despite only being in his early 30s.

Andrew pushed the creaking front door open and stepped across the threshold. He came to a standstill once inside, closed the door behind him, and looked from side to side. Indeed, it was the same as he had left it over a week ago. Give or take some dust. He sat his briefcase on the floor next to the front door and hung his coat and hat on the rack to his left. He then proceeded to cross his dim, minimally furnished living room into his equally barren kitchen. He paused for a moment before turning around, forgetting why he had gone there. He stumbled back the way he had come, and then down a narrow hallway opposite of the front door. At the back end of that, he turned left into his bedroom. This room, like the rest of the house, was bleakly minimalistic. Lying atop the twin bed and the tattered green bed sheet covering it was Andrew's other case, the one containing his important academic papers. He approached it and reached down to grab it, but pulled his hand back before he could. Something strange and miserable came over him at that moment. Almost all awareness of his surroundings was fleeing from his mind, and not long after he was collapsing onto the bed in a heap. The old, faded leather suitcase was knocked onto the hardwood floor, spilling its contents of paperwork every which way. He shifted onto his back and stared blankly as the ceiling swirled above him.

When Andrew awoke from a nearly twenty-four-hour stupor and lifted his trembling wrist in front of his eyes (his watch reading 8:50), his first thought was of William. He had been visiting his coma-stricken friend at eight o'clock every morning, and judging by the light coming in from outside as opposed to darkness, he had narrowly missed it - not that he was in any shape for it, anyway. His second thought was about the entire day of classes he had missed. His mind quickly wandered back to the former, however. He hated to admit it, but his fixation on William's health had become rather obsessive. Despite Eden's initial rejections, he had assumed almost full responsibility for William's recovery after the incident. He could not have stood the thought of placing his best friend's life in the hands of other doctors, especially during times like these. Besides, as a student of medicine himself (an exceptional one, at that), he felt confident that William was in better hands than could be found anywhere else. However, he did suspect that some of the more unorthodox treatments he had been testing made Eden uneasy. She seemed less welcoming to Andrew's presence as the days went on, at the very least. He paid this little mind, though—the treatments were undeniably yielding results.

-

The Hillman household that morning stood still and silent in the growing dawn sunlight. In front of the couple's simple log home and about halfway down the hill it sat on, a pair of children played, their hollers ringing faintly throughout the humid air. Closer by, a robin and a blue jay twitted back and forth from neighboring cedar trees. Indeed, the awakening world outside the house on the hill bustled with sound and life. The same could not be said for those within it.
William lay on the brink of life and death beneath a heavy patterned quilt - the one stitched by his mother, in fact, a month or so before her passing countless moons ago. He lay atop a mattress supported in a wood frame built by his carpenter father. If anyone were there to see him, they would be blameless to think he was a corpse. He looked more akin to a body in a coffin, battered and stiff, than a living man asleep in his bed. But William's heart beat on, pulsing blood through his cold veins. His body, at the very least, was alive.