THE PROPHECY

Louisa couldn’t always lucid dream. But once she was aware of the ability there was that one place and time she consciously kept going back too. January 8 1998, the little cabin in the woods in North Elba, New York. Against a backdrop of pure white snow twelve years old Louisa Coleman stood in her newest, least favorite, grey, winter coat doing her best to keep her eyes open. The snow was falling only lightly but there was a wicked breeze blowing against her face. A stone throw distance from where she stood an hymn steadily rose out of the cabins little shed where a small group of people had gathered for her granduncles funeral. Louisa would have questioned the oddity of burying someone in the middle of winter considering how hard and icy the ground was but her mother had randomly explained that grand uncle Sean had died a sad man and had spent his last few months digging himself a grave next to his dead wife and only son behind the cabin. Her mother being his only trusted, living relative had been left instructions on where to bury him and when. That was funny because Louisa had never met or heard of grand Uncle Sean even at her grand pas funeral. Not wanting to join or disturb the little ceremony, Louisa wandered towards the shimmery lake on the other side of the property. She wished she could glide across the ice gracefully like the girls back home in Michigan, like her mom once upon a time. But Louisa barely ever seemed to have control over her own feet; she stepped out onto the ice regardless and walked a few feet out for good measure. Occasionally she slide about and made a game of writing letters on the ice with her winter boots.

               ‘Hey kiddo, that’s dangerous’, someone called and Louisa looked up from imprinting Anthony Hobarns name in the ice. A large man was staggering towards her and she couldn’t tell if his steps were so unorganized because of the ice beneath him.

‘Ophelia, now’s not the time to be dancing on ice’, the man admonished.

‘I’m not Ophelia, that’s my mum’’, But the man wasn’t listening, he waddled over with great effort and stood in front of her looking down. There were wrinkles on his face, in about every corner. His eyes were an unusual red and his teeth was not the whitest, he also smelled of the woods and Louisa took a couple steps back.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         ‘Come on get off the ice Philly, it ain’t safe’, he held out a hand to her and Louisa wasn’t sure if he was trying to help her off the ice or if he was asking her for help. She ignored it but walked off the ice anyway.

‘Hey kiddo’, Louisa turned, the giant, sad, old man was still on the ice. She could see the deep red in his eyes from where she stood.

‘You’re gonna do great things, don’t forget that, happy new year’

She shrugged and began to march back towards the shed where she could already hear her mother asking around for her. Before she turned the corner, Louisa looked back to see the old man on the furthest end of the lake now, she watched silently as he slipped, caught himself on all fours and crawled into the woods.                                                                                                                                                                                                                Finally getting into the shed , the real Ophelia had a short admonition for her daughter before dragging her in to pay her last respects. ‘You mean my first respect’, Louisa murmured. Her mother shushed her as they emerged in front of the ceremony and handed her a flower. Reluctantly Louisa hastened to the open coffin to pretend to say a few words and put the flower in but what she expected to be her first meeting with a dead man was none other than the man from the lake in a box. Wearing the exact same clothes. She looked up from the box in disbelieving shock only to come face to face with a smiling portrait of the same man. She screamed.

Louisa hated road trips, at eighteen she still got horrible motion sickness from being in a vehicle too long. Her favorite pastime during road trip was to lucid dream like every other normal human being. Today she had slipped into a rare but gold dream and she woke up with a laugh on her lips. Her mother who was driving beside her looked over with a smile, ‘the cabin?’ she asked.                                                                                                                            Louisa shook her head.                                                                                                                                                                               ‘How far away are we?’, Louisa asked                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  ‘Another hour and forty five minutes and we would see your beloved cabin’.                                                                                                                                                               ‘I guess I could stay awake then’, Louisa announced fetching her phone from the dashboard.

It was another two hours and thirty five minutes before they got to the cabin, Ophelia had not driven that road in so long she had taken a few confident wrong turns. She watched as her daughter’s face lit up at the sight of the cabin, it was only Louisa’s second time there but ever since her strange first visit Ophelia had noticed her daughters’ uncommon obsession with the cabin. She received frequent interviews and at first her daughter’s questions had been asked in eerie awe.                                                                                                                                             Did she ever have cause to think the cabin hunted? How many people had died in the cabin?, how long had the cabin been in the family?

Ophelia was a bit alarmed especially when she remembered Louisa unexplained scream during their visit but then the questions started to change. Did she ever have holidays at the cabin as a little girl?, how many times was she by the cabin during winter and did she ever dance on the ice? What was gran uncle Sean like before he lost his wife and son? Suddenly almost in a blink of an eye the cabin went from eerie to magical and Ophelia wanted to know why, but whenever she asked Louisa would shake her head and giggle to herself the rest of the day. Once though she revealed that she had frequent lucid dreams about the cabin and it at first gave Ophelia chills but after she read up on it and realize hoe harmless it was she calmed down. That was why when Ophelia had received that letter in the mail concerning the cabin she’d asked Louisa to come along. One road trip before her track star went off to stun at college, one last chance to get her answers.

 It was already evening and even though it was the middle of summer the atmosphere was chilly, Louisa ran a hand up her arm she was in a simple black cotton tank top and a pair of above knee length peach shorts. After stretching about every limb in her body she stopped briefly to look around, somehow everything looked the same. There was barely an overgrowth and the cabin looked in good shape. The lake that was beginning to shimmer from the now appearing moon was of course water now but it looked as magical and beckoning as the first time. As they both marched into the little cabin Louisa wondered if she was to expect anything out of the ordinary, she wondered if her mother would be part of the experience this time or if she was only destined to experience that sort of abnormality once in her lifetime. The inside of the little cabin was a little warmer but a lot less kept, there was dust on about every surface even though it was a much thinner layer than she would have expected. She wondered for a second if the house ghosts sometimes cleaned it up then mentally smacked herself.

Early the next morning Louisa went down the lake even before breakfast, she was surprised to see her mother sitting by the lake in her bathing suit, her hand troubling the gentle water left and right. ‘Good morning mum’, she called. Her mother jumped for a second then called back a greeting and beckoned for Louisa to come over.

‘How did I ever miss bringing you here on holidays’, she murmured.

‘What do you mean?’, Louisa asked.

‘up until I was nine my cousins and I vacationed here every year without fail, whether it was summer or winter or Easter break we were here throwing snow, planting trees, dancing on ice or egg hunting. The cabin was never big enough for everybody so we use to bring tents to sleep by the lake and on Halloween we slept under the stars or stayed up all night telling lame scary stories and tossing each other in the lake’.

‘What happened when you were nine?’

Ophelia shrugged, ‘it actually happened the year before that, none of the kids know what it was. We’d come back from a hiking trip and the adults were in an uproar, they seemed to sort it out shortly after but before the next trip I overhead my mother telling my father that they couldn’t break tradition for the sake of the kids but we only stayed three days into our stay and my father came to me one morning in one of the tents and asked me to pack up my things, we’ve been estranged from the family ever since’

‘That most have been really sad ‘

‘it was, my parents moved to Michigan then and we barely ever stepped foot in new york. The day before yesterday my father’s brother wrote me from jail. He said he’d left the cabin in my name and I had to do right by it now’

‘Wow mum, that’s crazy. How are you feeling?’

‘Like I’ve got a lot of cleaning to do’

Mother and daughter spent the morning cleaning, forgetting basic things like breakfast and other morning necessity. Louisa was cleaning an old cricking book shelf a little too roughly when a dusty large book fell on her big toe. She howled, blowing several breathes in and out to hold in a stream of cusses.

‘What happened?’, her mother asked turning the corner into the little shelf space by the quint dining area.

‘This large book just crushed my toe’, Louisa said pointing accusingly at the old book that not sat open and askew on the dusty floor, ‘who even makes books that big’

‘That’s my Grammy Ange’s old photo album, where did you find it?’

‘My toe hurts mum’

‘Oh Lou you’re not two, come seat let’s look at this together’.

Once they were settled at the dining table, Ophelia began to turn through the pages, the pictures at the beginning were really old and could barely be seen but as they turned further Ophelia began to point out uncles and aunties Louisa had never met or heard about. There were pictures of her grandparents young and pictures of her mother young. A lot of the pictures were in Polaroid and black and whites and some were barely even clear.

‘This is Aunt Penelope and Wilma with me. Aunt Penelope is the one holding me’

‘Identical twins’, Louisa noted but her mum shook her head, ‘Aunt Penelope had a leaner face and broader shoulders than Wilma. But the wright boys were certainly identical, it was a game among us kids to look for differences between them and I don’t recall if we ever found’. She flipped the pages as she spoke, ‘same height, same hair color, same shoe size, same finger nail shape, same voice. The wright twins could have been the exact same person, except that they certainly weren’t personality wise. Oh here’s a picture of them Uncle Sean and Uncle Joey’

Louisa looked and found two men, who could have been photo shopped. But it wasn’t the outstanding similarity that caught her off guard; there was something about the two men that seemed familiar.

‘I can still tell them apart though’, Ophelia went on, ‘Uncle Joey is on the left and Uncle Sean is on the right’

Louisa blinked, ‘Did you say uncle Sean?’

‘Yh he and uncle joey were the cool uncles’

‘You mean uncle Sean was a twin’        

Ophelia glanced over to see her daughters’ dazed expression, ‘Are you ok Lou?’

‘Do you know if your uncle Joey was at the funeral from the last time we were here?’

‘Ermm a few cousins mentioned they saw him but I didn’t really believe them, uncle Joey had been estranged from the family a year before my father. They said he was crazy drunk but I forgot about him because I was so busy and I didn’t have any contact with him until his letter last week’

‘He’s the uncle in jail?’ Ophelia nodded and Louisa screamed in disbelief.

Dear Grancle Joey,

My name is Louisa Coleman; I don’t suppose you know my father he has been in some place in Asia searching for soul peace since I was seven. You know my mother though, her name’s Ophelia Wright, your niece. We have met once, you and I at grancle Sean’s burial on the frozen lake by the cabin. You called me Philly and told me that I would do great things. Imagine the fright when I walked into that burial ceremony and saw you in the coffin, dead and only few minutes later the ice on the lake broke. My entire life changed that day; I thought I had seen a ghost. A glowing red eyed, fanged, giant ghost. For almost three months I lost sleep all the negative parts of that day kept coming back to haunt my dreams, I got worse in my already bad classes, got diagnosed with mild dyslexia, forgot completely how to relate or communicate with people and my father forgot to send a post card when I turned 13. I was young and it felt like my life was falling apart

            Then something happened the weekend before my mother made up her mind about child therapy. I was attempting to draw in my front yard, you see since getting diagnosed with dyslexia I was trying to find things I could do that didn’t involve letters, that’s when I saw Mrs. Rashid’s baby stroller start rolling down our hilly street. I don’t quite remember what happened only that I shot up after that pram as fast as I could. Another neighbors’ dog ran with me history has it that it couldn’t keep up; literally the story appeared in the local new paper. Anyways I caught that pram before it made it to the intersection, there was no baby in it but it didn’t make me any less a hero. Mrs. Rashid was beyond thankful the stroller hadn’t caused any accidents or gotten damaged and every other person on my street was amazed at how fast I could run. I was amazed at how fast I could run. Amidst all the praise I heard someone say, ‘You’re going to do great things’. Guess who else said that to me even though he called me Philly. I thought it was you, I thought I had a second encounter with grand uncle Sean’s ghost but this time I wasn’t even a little bit scared. I was encouraged I thought I had been ignoring a prophecy. That night I dreamt of the cabin again but it was different, it wasn’t scary it was just a supernatural experience unique to me. I felt like I was getting help and instructions from beyond, I felt heard and it was a magical experience. Whenever I felt sad or down I’d sleep and will myself to go back to that place, to that time, it was my biggest comfort. Over the next few months after the stroller incident, I got asked to try out for track, became their star athlete, won a lot of competitions locally and on the state level, I fell in love with myself, I became somebody, I made friends, I forgave my father and I began therapy to improve on my reading and writing. Because my dyslexia was so slight I actually got a lot better, there’s occasional wrong spelling or misplaced letter but I am doing fine. I’m happy I got into Brown like my mum on a sports scholarship; I will be leaving in a few weeks. I guess this was the perfect time for the universe to reveal its secrets. It was quite a shock to find out that I never met a ghost after all but I’m glad I met you. I know you’re thinking how farfetched your contribution to my life was but it is beyond what you can imagine. If I had never thought that I had a paranormal backing I would never have been confident enough to try out for the track team. Track is everything to me and I can’t imagine who I’ll be without it.

This is a thank you letter but above all I thought getting a long letter from your grandniece whose life you magically impacted would be a great encouragement to push through your current challenges. And even though the family fell apart and we became estranged from each other, I want you to know that my mum and I will be waiting for you on the other side when you’re realized in three months, we will be cheering for you, mama sends her greeting and I want you to remember if ever you feel useless or empty remember that you changed Louisa Coleman’s’ life for the better.

Best of wishes, hugs and kisses,

                                                                                                                                           Your grandniece,

                                                                                                                                               LOU LOU.