Chapter 5 :- Manipulation
RECAP:- Three prewritten scraps of paper; three lives irrevocably changed forever.
Richard Gamblin. Killed by his own guilt. Thierry Rossteau. Killed by his brother's self preservation. Tuomas. Can now see ghost's because of the car accident.
My guardian, Travis, has extricated Tuomas from the wreckage, and we are now headed north. I would feel like a chessmaster, had I not known this was all fated to occur anyway.
As a result, I feel sick. I create the means for free will to become possible, and instead humanity lets me down.
Again.
When a ghost is about to reach out and touch me, I can turn and face them. Look them in the eyes and act accordingly. Smile, grimace, or stare blank faced. Make them believe that I can see them; make them understand that I know everything. They realise that I am not a normal human. That I am different, and they can do nothing about it.
This can be a disconcerting experience for a real ghost. But the ghost that now speaks to Tuomas in the back seat of the car is not a real ghost at all, but a figment of imagination conjured in the unique mind of Tuomas.
And yet this figment has a mind of its own. It understands that it should not exist right now. It just does. It should not have a memory and emotions, and an understanding of the current situation, and yet he has all these things.
And right now he does not question any of it, for emotion is driving him onward.
Mark Rossteau looks down at his son, cowering and confused. With a flickering tone of disdain and contempt, he is about to harshly tell his son to rise up. If his son will not listen to the soothing calm father, then he had better listen to the father angered at being ignored. "Get up, you are my son, God damn you!"
Tuomas is trying to decipher the meaning of it all, the impossibility of what has just happened, and what is happening at this very moment. He hesitates, and for the first time, he actually stares at the ghost that resembles his father. For Tuomas, it is as though he has just stepped out of the photo he once had in his wallet; moustache and stubbled chin. Same shirt. Same indomitable, hardened expression.
Two questions shall now be said by him. "What is going on? Who are you?"
Travis is driving on, cringing visibly at what he percieves as the young man's insolence and immaturity.
Travis was never one to cry to. Especially if you were a man. It was a sign of weakness, a lack of guts. If the ghost of Mark Rossteau knew what was going through the mind of Travis, he would whole heartedly agree.
Travis will now compare me to the bewildered man on the backseat. "There is a little girl here in the passengers seat, and in all the years I have guarded her, I have only seen her cry once! Now you go into a petrol station, all rushing with adrenalin when you got a shotgun in your hands, you blow the attendant away like a big tough guy. Then when you runaway and get in an accident, with no shotgun to back you up, your a sorry, bawling mess! You're a poor excuse for a man! You bloody sissy!"
"I never killed him! It was my brother...... Oh god.....my brother is dead!" Tuomas is reeling at the memory, at the guilt of killing his brother.
Everything is progressing perfectly.
Mark Rossteau now yells at Tuomas, ashamed at what type of person his son has become. "I told you Thierry is with me now, in the afterlife. That he is fine! Do you listen? No! Instead you cry and carry on like a baby! Listen, damn you!"
The temperament of the men in this car is becoming endemic, a virulent malaise of testosterone and ego's that I had foreseen so long before tonight that it bores me.
Tuomas looks up at the ghost that is his father, rising anger now supressing his fear of the unknown. His ego still exists. But not for long. "My brother is dead and you scold me for caring! You hate me for being human! My brother is dead, God damn you all!"
"Your brother is dead because you wanted to be Mr. Tough Man Look At Me With My Big Phallic Gun!" Travis is becoming uncontrollable. "Had you not gone in and done that robbery he would still be alive! But no, you had to fulfill your destiny! And now who do you blame? Not yourself! That's what a real man does! Not you! You blame the man who pulled you out and saved you! You bloody sissy!"
I lean to look out my side window, avoiding the spray of saliva about to be emitted. "I didn't ask to be saved!" Tuomas replies with spittle flying from his mouth. "I wish I was dead with my brother! Why did you save me at all?"
While looking out my window, I raise my hand at the moment Travis is about to turn and vent his fury, unabated and devastating. It catches his eye and he constrains himself, with obvious revulsion. He will never forgive Tuomas for angering him so. The gears of fate are beginning to lock into place again.
"Travis is right, damn you. You are a sissy! A scum sucking pig!" Mark truly despises what he sees before him, yet there is a small voice inside him asking why he is so irritated.
"And what do I care of what you say, your not my father! Your nothing to me! Where were you when I needed you? Me and Thierry had to grow up alone on the streets after mum died! We went through hell because of you, you bastard!"
"I was DEAD you stupid idiot, laying in a grave you and your brother never visited once!!!! Not since the funeral, where you swore you would visit me regularly! I was murdered by that scum who Thierry just blew away tonight; he avenged me! Don't believe me? Open your clenched fist in your right hand! Those two scraps your brother handed to you in the car before the accident! Look at them."
As he opens his fist, I reach up to the interior carlight and switch it on, flooding the predawn darkness in the car with visual stimuli for The GhostTalker's benefit. Travis drives on wondering why I did that, for he cannot hear what I hear in the backseat. Cannot envision Mark there, as I can. But he knows that I never do anything without a reason.
Tuomas sees the prewritten scraps now. With shaking hands, he opens one of them up.
*Richard Gamblin killed Mark Rossteau twenty years ago over a matter of $260. This man killed your father.*
"Your brother told you! Before you killed him by looking over at him, when you should have been looking at the bloody road! You could have saved Thierry still. You were headed straight for the car. But you selfishly turned the steering wheel and saved yourself, at his expense! Twice you secured his death! Three times if you include the fact that you wanted to rob the fuel store, not him! If it wasn't for you he would still be alive now!"
"I don't understand..... This is just a peice of torn paper with writing on it.....how......"
"This was written by the little girl in the passengers seat, Shadow! She knew the facts, she knew what was going to happen, she left that note for Thierry to find, and when he questioned that old bastard about it, that bastard who killed me twenty years ago confirmed it, confirmed it with his eyes! That's how Thierry found out the truth! How he knew the means of avenging me!"
"So the little girl.....she is the cause....."
"Don't blame her! Oh no you won't get away with your responsibilities so easy. She gave the choice thats all. She gave the choice and Thierry did what I wanted him to do. What you wanted to do for so long! Blow the head off the man who killed me! Avenge me god damn it! And now you sit there and blame a little girl for killing your brother?"
Tuomas scrunches the two scraps into a tight ball in his fist and as he closes his eyes I turn off the interior light, allowing the moody, ominous darkness return once more. "I grew up with no one but my brother..... Now he is dead...." Sobbing, profuse sadness fills Tuomas and overflows. "I needed you, Dad. I can barely remember you as a child. But you always made me happy. You always were there, then you were gone..... My real father wouldn't speak like this to me....."
Mark now pauses, discomforted at the scene. "The father you knew as a child was loving because you were just a kid. I had twenty years ahead of me to turn you into a man. Richard Gamblin deprived those twenty years from me. And so you grew to become this. A child in a mans body. I hate Richard Gamblin and curse his soul to hell for that. But I hate you even more for becoming the disgusting bastard you are today. Those twenty years should have made you stronger. Instead it made you a weakling. Blaming a little girl for all your woes? You make me sick. As God is my witness, I am back here now to make you into the man you should have been. Cry you scum. Cry all you want. Because the next time I see you I am gonna crush your sorry soul in hell. Drag it across the coals of total despair and hang it up for the vultures. If that doesn't turn you into a man, then nothing will. I wish you were never my son."
Tuomas grimaces as he sees his father vanish, and his heart falls away. With a broken voice he whispers. "This is impossible......this can't be happening....."
Travis looks over to me now, and although I am looking away from him, I nod and he speaks his favourite lines. "Impossible is the most irrelevant word in the english language. In any language. It's a word for fallible humans with weak minds. Nothing is impossible, only highly improbable. As you saw when I pulled you from that wreck, I have supposedly impossible powers. Shadow here is omniscient. That's meant to be impossible as well. But we exist. And for the meantime, it is your destiny to be with us. So get over it. Lie down. And shut your god damned trap."
Tuomas feels his lips tremble and only willpower prevents them from opening anymore. I can see him in my mind closing his eyes, concentrating on pressing them together as hard as he can, hoping in vain that if he focusses enough on the single tear that is flowing down his cheek, the physical sensation would somehow suppress the emotional pain. He opens his eyes however, and a wave of depression crashes over him. Turning to where his dads ghost once was, there is only emptiness.
For the first time in his life, Tuomas realises how important his brother truly meant to him.
He is about to start talking to himself. His ego is slowly being destroyed.
'You have no friends or family left in the world now. Loneliness blankets you, suffocates you. Like you always deserved.'
Tuomas lays down across the backseat, and softly cries into the cushioning, hoping the sound of the tarmac and the engine masks his guilt ridden embarassment at being such a failure to the ones who he loved most.
'You never deserved your brother...'
I frown to myself. Not at the fact that Tuomas is in such pain. But at the fact he is so predictable. He has the free will to choose not to walk the path towards melancholy. To be his own man.
The melancholy will eat at his soul, turn his pain inward onto himself, and so feed the new power that he possesses. For to see the dead he must feel dead himself.
Humans are so easy to manipulate.