Traveling Salesman: Astronomgonist

Chapter 2

 That day, Teerkedas saw his mother dead on the floor with defensive marks on her hands and wrists. Her head bloody and a red crutch near the body left him with more questions and anger.

He'd immediately called the police. He'd gone completely numb afterward as he waited for them to arrive. Everything in the room seemed to lose reality or purpose.

"I'm not home yet. This is just a nightmare. I'm still on the train," he thought, his own voice inside his head sounding disorganized and unreal to him.

His mind and body felt juxtaposed in the crux of focus and truth. Time seemed disjointed and false. He needed to wake up. He screamed inside his own head to jolt himself awake, trapped at the bottom of nowhere with no way out. But there was no mercy.

"I'm in the classroom and this is just another mock crime scene my professor has me shooting for final exams," he thought, his mind detaching as it dissipated into holes of darkness as derealization of his environment and surroundings took its course.

He wasn't in his body or mind. His astral abilities made the depersonalization not just mental and physical but cosmic like a meteoric fragment thrown into space from impact.

Teerkedas majored in forensic photography. He'd taken pictures of the crime scene with his camera. He looked down at his camera in his hand and then over his shoulder toward the wide-opened door where his duffel bag lay partially opened outside the doorway next to the threshold. He raised a brow. He'd recalled the door was open when he arrived. He'd dropped his bag instantaneously when he saw his mother, Valliya on the floor motionless.

Shortly after, he'd lost his grip on everything in that moment in real time. Remembering his homecoming to his mother's murder tore him out of being and he stayed in the idea of a bad dream for as long as he could until he couldn't anymore.

When the police finally arrived, he heard the voice coming out of him when being interviewed about the crime, but it was so foreign and disembodied he swore it was someone else talking to the officer. His head flooded with lava-like heat. He let out a breath to release the pressure inside and outside his skull, his lungs between breathing fiery chaos and cinder blocks. He let out another breath when the interview from the officer was over.

There was no family to go back home to. His father was unknown to him. He could finish school anywhere.

A week after his mother's death, he took a hiatus from college and boarded the train on a journey to find the murderer. "I'm Teerkedas Clytherde." He heard himself say aloud to a passenger on the train who spoke to him as he sat down looking distantly out of the window. The passenger's last name "McQuiggan" was all Teerkedas's mind found palpable.

Leaving his hometown of Phantasm Township in the country of Anagram, he was living the meaning of the motto of the town ("The place where phantoms follow"), and the meaning of the town's name "Phantasm," except he was also chasing the "phantom" that killed his mother.

Drifters and grifters always came through Phantasm Township carrying their demons around, with a monkey on their back to boot. He never paid that type of hard luck reality any mind before, until he felt himself becoming that kind of man with that same haunting in his soul. He had no idea who he was looking for, but he was hell-bent on finding the culprit. Even if he died trying, he'd crawl out of his own grave tooth and fingernail to continue the search again to get his "eye for an eye," because that's how restless his soul was.

Teerkedas stepped off the train into DragenCamp. He was 6'4 of nasty sexy, the kind of man that made your blood run cold and your mind think dirty. He was twenty years old, with a chip on his shoulder that he carried like dead weight that didn't bother him much at all. He had a brawny build with the brains to match. His black hair was curly and cut short, but thick and tousled like he had just rolled out of bed hot, sweaty and naked. He had blue eyes, kissable lips, light olive complexion with dark undertones and a strong chiseled jawline with a five o'clock shadow. He was half-Moroccan, Ecuadorian and Scandinavian.

The weather was chilly, but the hint of dragon breath and sugar cane left the odor of fire and brimstone with sugary sweetness in the air, leaving his throat with a choking feeling. He stopped at the soda shop down the street. He ordered a coke in a plastic bottle, though he wanted something stronger. "A sober head's best," he thought. He twisted the cap off and took a long drink, raising a furrowed brow. He wished it was Canelazo, a type of sugarcane alcohol made with water, panela or brown sugar, cinnamon cloves, anise, orange juice, lime and aguardiente or white rum. He and his mother as vendors would sell this to tourists, grifters and drifters during the holidays in Phantasm Township.

In Anagram night was day and day was night in the two parallel regions DragenCamp and "Nothing Not Dead Man's Land," co-existing on the same plane as long as the time continuum wasn't disrupted, never touching or intersecting going on literally for eons, with the same year, same day and time. But in the two perpendicular regions that intersected at a 90◦ angle they were opposite reciprocals of each other, twenty-four hours of night with the moon reaching its first quarter by about day seven in one perpendicular region called "Hault Horizon" where time was irregular and the other perpendicular region had twenty-four hours of sunlight in Phantasm Township where Teerkedas had lived, which was in the southern region where time was regular.

His favorite t.v. western, "Bonanza" was airing on the color t.v. in the soda shop. Teer watched almost the entire episode of Bonanza before he got interrupted by the roar of a dragon, rippling through the walls.

He was sitting in the back near the back door, where the cane men and women had filed in on their lunch break from harvesting the sugar cane, which due to the mild winter season could grow until late October.

His mother had worked in the sugar cane fields and had trained him how to when he was a boy.

From the beginning, when Teerkedas was old enough to understand his mother let him know she drank sugarcane tea to bind her powers. But she always told him it's his choice, if he wanted to bind his powers. He chose not to. She respected his decision as he respected hers.

Teerkedas turned the radio on, sitting in the corner of the table and turned the volume low. He took an envelope from his back pocket. He opened the flap and took out the pictures he took of the murder. He had given the police the original photos, but not before he'd made copies.

He looked over each image with precision and clarity. His eyes glimmered a bright green and then he switched them to a bright red, focusing his photographic vision power at different ranges like his camera. His irises turned at various angles to get various scopes of any details.

He clenched his jaw and the muscle in it tensed and jumped as he found what he needed, something that the police would never be able to see with their naked eye.

The killer had signed his name in an invisible ink on TeerKedas's mother's left cheek, the kind of invisible ink that fades completely within fifteen minutes after the victim's death.

"The Death Storyteller. Is that what you call yourself? I will find you and make you pay," he thought, his fist balled up on the table with licking flames rising from his knuckles. He slowly opened his hand and laid it flat, the flames still billowing from it. He swallowed hard, stilled himself and the flames fizzled out.

He took his glasses off as his eyes welled up with a fiery river of tears. He hadn't allowed himself the chance to mourn his mother's death. He couldn't, not yet. Not until he found out who the Death Storyteller was, their real name and where to find them. The pain inside him was like a wormhole eroding at the force field of his focus. But he had to remain steady or he was going to break. He so badly wanted to break, to rage.