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Short Stories & Tall Tales
The Vision
By Christopher Scott
Silas quickly sat up in bed. He listened intensely, but heard nothing past the pounding of his own heart. He rubbed his face and ran his hands over his thick black hair. It was wet. His whole body was wet, drenched in the sweat of a reoccurring vision. A vision so clear, he swore it was real. But he knew better, he was still in bed.
Throwing off his sweat soaked covers, Silas turned and sat on the edge of his well-worn mattress. For a minute or so he sat quietly, collecting his thoughts, then made his way over to the nightstand where he poured some cool water into a washbasin and splashed it upon his face. He stood in the dark, hands on his face, staring into the darkness as water ran down his arms and dripped from his elbows onto his feet. The cool night air began to chill his wet body enough to bring him back to his senses. Stepping over to the fireplace he stirred the last of a few dying embers and added a chunk of wood, hoping to revive the flames and add a little heat and light to the cold and darkened room.
Silas Walker lived alone in a small one-room cabin deep in the woods of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. It was a choice he had made many years ago. The quiet solitude was to his liking and he found the surrounding hills and trees quite comforting. The Indians in the area kept to themselves and disappeared altogether during the winter months. The vision was one he had had before, but not in such vivid detail. The profuse sweat was not to his liking but he had no more control over it than the vision itself, but this time it was different, this time, the vision had taken his very breath away. It shook him to his very core. It put the very fear of God in him. Enough to keep him up for the rest of the evening, stoking the fire and listening intensely to every night sound that filtered through the thin cabin walls. Each unknown sound made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.
At first light, Silas stepped outside and began to scour the ground around his cabin, looking, for what, he wasn’t quite sure. Hoof tracks would be the main thing, but anything out of the ordinary or out of place would do. He needed something that would convince him he wasn’t slowly going out of his mind. He hadn’t found anything yet and it was beginning to worry him.
Sure enough, just as before, nothing was seen, nothing was found. “But the vision was so real,” he told himself. “The sound was so lifelike, the colors so vivid. Why am I dreaming this same dream over and over? I must be going mad.”
Like the riders in his vision, the answers he searched for eluded him. Questions and doubts played upon his mind like a riddle with no ending. They occupied his thoughts to the point of overwhelming him.
Four horsemen there were, each upon a different steed, white, red, black and pale. Approaching his small cabin in the dead of night. They rode hard and they rode fast. A sense of determination hung about them like a shroud. The hooves of their horses beat the ground with a thunderous roar. The wind howled and lightening flashed all around them. Where they came from, Silas didn’t know. And where they were going was withheld from him. All he knew for sure was that they had been sent. By whom and for what purpose, he didn’t know. But he sensed an unshakable air of determination about them that could not be denied.
Silas didn’t know what to make of this dream, this vision that haunted him from the very depths of his soul showing itself only in the dead of night, in his deepest sleep. The feeling of dread he felt each night gripped at his heart and held it tight, maybe too tight. Sleep was beginning to scared him half to death.
The dream never subsided. In fact, over time, it became more frequent and more intense. It tore at him throughout the winter and into the early spring. The seasonal rains were at their peak and had not let up for several days, but this night was the worst. It was on this particular night the wind blew fiercely and the rain poured down in sheets. An unusual display of roaring thunder and lightning lit up the night sky. It was one of the worst spring rainstorms to hit the area for as long as he could remember.
It was late in the evening and Silas was fitfully sleeping when the vision came upon him once again. Four riders at full gallop were heading in his direction. Four horses with nostrils flared, bellowing plumes of steam as their warm breath hit the cool night air. They paused only to rear up and paw at the darkness of the night. The distant sound of powerful hoof beats grew louder with each passing minute. Soon they were at the door; so close Silas could see the faces of the riders as never before. He looked into the depths of their eyes and what he saw was almost unbearable and totally indescribable. Deception, war, famine and death permeated their very being.
Silas jumped from his bed, so shaken at what he had just seen, he cried out into the night. Once again he was drenched with sweat. The night air was cool and quiet. The wind and rain had stopped. Silas stooped close to the dying embers of a once roaring fire. He stirred the few remaining coals and revived the flame, where he sat and warmed himself in it’s light. The fear of going back to sleep was more than he could endure and it kept him awake the rest of the night.
As the morning sun finally broke over the horizon, Silas stepped outside. The cool morning air held a light morning mist close to the ground. The last several days of rain should have washed away every track in the area. Should have, but didn’t. There on the ground, all around his cabin Silas discovered a multitude of hoof prints from a number of horses set deep into the soft ground. The horses had not stopped. The tracks were set far apart as if they were running full speed with no thought of slowing down, as if they were being chased…or maybe chasing something themselves.
As Silas stood amongst the tracks his mind began to ponder upon this thing that had happened last night. Had his vision become reality? Had the faces he had seen so vividly last night been real? Silas dreaded to think of such a thing. He tried to forget it as best he could, to relegate it to the back of his mind. What he did think about, and for no apparent reason, was a continuous phrase, like the constant beat of a distant drum, it held a cadence in his head, repeating over and over in his mind to the point of nauseam, Revelation six, he tried to dismiss it, Revelation six, he tried to ignore it, shake it out of existence but the thought persisted throughout the day. He went about his chores as the beat continued on, and even into the evening as he settled in for the night, it was there.
Silas started a fire and lit an oil lamp that sat upon a small table. In an attempt to distract his mind from the persistent thought that hounded him all day, he picked up one of the few books he had in his possession. It was one left to him by an old traveler who had happened upon his cabin several years ago. The traveler had extracted a promise from Silas that he would read it, but up to now, he never had. He blew the dust off the cover exposing the title, ‘Bible’. Sitting in his only chair, he let the book fall open. Whether it was pure luck, or divine providence, no one can say for sure. But there, right before his eyes, were the words that had tore at his mind all day, Revelation, chapter six.
Silas had never read from this book before, and after reading from it that night he never had the vision again. Nor did he forget it.
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