The Beacons I See

By Ty Unglebower

Vanessa is a highly sensitive person on the Autism Spectrum. Like the other women in her family, she can see promises. Anywhere a promise has been made by people, she sees spheres of colored light she calls beacons. Mostly she overlooks them, and mostly she prefers her solitude. 

One day on a much needed vacation to the family cabin, Vanessa sees the impossible: a beacon high above the trees, where no normal person could possibly promise anything.

Torn between investigating the woods with the help of strangers, and following her original plan to withdraw from the stresses of the world, Vanessa spends the summer learning more about her gift, herself, and her relationship with other people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ty Unglebower
• Release date: Jul 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386523819

Ty Unglebower

Ty is a freelance writer, actor, and occasional poet who, according to his official tagline, generally seeks to "shift the everyday a few inches."

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

A promise lies suspended in the air where it was made. Think of the first moments of the tea bleeding into the hot water, though twice as vivid. More colors. Soft wisps undulate gently in place, forming a sphere several inches larger than a basketball. There they remain for the whole of their existence, which as with anything else on Earth is temporary.

I call them beacons. Others may call them something else.

When that promise is fulfilled, its beacon swirls—a circular dance of color that fades a bit with each revolution until the beacon vanishes. Silent. Peaceful.

When a promise made in good faith becomes impossible to keep, (as in the case of death for instance) or when a person is released from a promise, the beacon doesn’t swirl. Rather, it uniformly fades into nothing in a few seconds. Simple, though not as artful as the departing dance of a promise kept.

And broken promises? A stark difference.

As a line of ignited gunpowder is consumed inch by inch in sparks, so to is the beacon of a broken promise burned away inch by inch. Drained of all color it leaves behind a viscous, lingering black puff of smoke that slithers down to earth and into the ground, as though embarrassed to be seen.

I’ve seen each of these scenarios countless times during my life, though most people haven’t. This extra sight, unknown to most of the world, is my gift and my curse. My identity and my destiny.

My name is Vanessa Martine and I’m a Promise Seer.

If you traveled back to the first known occurrences of this special sight, you’d find that Promise Seers once assisted royalty, the clergy, the wealthy, and even common people. Though the early story of our kind remains dust-covered by long expanses of history, my grandmother and a few others believe those with our gift were once used to detect betrayals, and warn the proper victims, or to confirm the loyalty of those in distant lands, in a time when news of a treachery might require weeks or months to reach someone.

This extra-sight was always rare, if the yellowed pages of our people’s chronicles are to be believed. Yet in modern times there are even fewer of us. Based on any knowledge ever recorded, Promise Seeing is passed down through the maternal line, to females only. According to my grandmother, I am currently the last branch on one of only three family lines of Promise Seers left on Earth.

Ours is the only family known to survive in North America. The rest long ago withered to gnarled dead branches on the tree of human civilization. (As you could have guessed, one line here in America met its demise in Salem, Massachusetts.) Since around that time, with few exceptions, Promise Seers have blended into the background of the world, and assumed normal lives, keeping their gift to themselves.

I have chosen this path of secrecy. My grandmother usually does as well, paying heed to beacons only when they could protect her family, or in dire situations when the welfare of the public at large is at stake. (She tells me this has happened just twice in her life.)

And my mother? I have to assume that she also would have chosen a similar path. However, she was born blind, and thus unable to see anything, including the beacons. You must understand that we are not psychic. We see something in the air by means not yet explained, but we do so with our eyes; we can no more see a beacon without our eyes than you could see glass of water without yours.

One gets used to the swirls of bright color, though it overwhelms me on occasion. Especially broken promises. Not only are they hideous (but brief) sights, their frequency is a depressing commentary on humanity. That’s why one summer I packed for a journey to my grandmother’s cabin in the mountains where nobody other than family and Gram’s dearest friends have ever been. A place where promises are never made. No beacons.

I left on a day in late June that baked away the moderate spring for another year. I packed some clothing, my drawing pad, extra allergy medicine, and the equipment I needed to do my transcribing work. I caught the bus for the four hour drive I was too nervous to make myself. (Driving being a major stressor to me, and I was stressed enough that summer as it was.)

On the subject of traffic, I’ll point out that promises don’t linger in vehicles, even if made in them. Rather they remain in the area of space the vehicle was traveling through at the time of said promise. So yes, when I drive I have to avoid beacons, so as not to be blinded. Beacons are in some ways merely another form of light, after all, and would making driving difficult if allowed to blaze right in front of my face.

On the way to Gram’s cabin that day though, the bus ran through few beacons. Not many promises made on that road, who knows why? Perhaps the road’s winding nature conspires with the farm and forest surroundings to sedate travelers beyond the need of making promises and agreements with one another.

For the first half of my bus journey I concentrated on my latest drawing: a penciling of Vishnu, one of the three Hindu Supreme Deities.

I’m not a Hindu. I’m not sure I have a religion. Vishnu has always fascinated me though and drawing him comforted me. The Hindu religion stresses the inner-connectedness of the human and divine; quite appropriate then that I should seek my inner self to call up an outer image of him.

I didn’t complete the drawing during the bus trip. After just over two hours I packed The Protector away in my bag, and allowed myself one of the sublime pleasures of everyday life—drifting in and out of sleep on a moving vehicle.

Most people wish to sleep uninterrupted. Yet I’ve always found my bliss in that wonderful wandering state of semi-consciousness between wakefulness and slumber. To be asleep is to be unaware. To be falling asleep is to partake in a mysterious transition into altered states of consciousness and contentment. It is nigh unto impossible to feel the burden of any earthly cares as that state seeps into a weary body and mind. They say the space between the bars is what holds the tiger in his cage. That’s how I perceive sleep—the brief wakefulness as the space between the bars.

As I drifted in and out on that bus ride, images of Vishnu and my grandmother swirled and coalesced with semi-perceived snippets of other passenger’s conversations, resulting in a pastiche of serenity.

I woke for the final leg of the journey. We passed through a town and then stopped in a medium-sized city where most of the passengers disembarked. That left just me, an elderly man snoring near the front of the bus and a mother with two of the quietest toddlers one could ever hope to encounter.

Beacons tend to cluster in cities, and they did so in this one. A congregation of them hovered at the bus depot itself, along the downtown area. This is a common pattern everywhere I go, at bus stops, train stations, airports. It puzzled me for the longest time, until when I was 13 I asked my Gram about it.

I’ve noticed the same thing, she told me. Probably all the promises to keep in touch.

It was as logical an explanation as any to me.

The last thirty minutes of the bus ride took us over hilly terrain. All around us on both sides of the bus an occasional house near the road or an unincorporated village with a store here and there, but mostly it was woods. Forests provide some of the best respite for me—lots of nature and almost never a beacon.

On the final leg of the trip the bus stopped for a few minutes while police cleared some fender-bender in the road ahead of us. I remember the bus easing to a halt, and the driver groaning. I had my bag in my lap, prepared to depart the bus at the terminus. I took stock of the woods outside my window, now that we were stopped. Evergreen trees for the most part. Lots of birds and squirrels flitting and jumping around.

Stay in the woods, I said to them, in my mind. Don’t get creamed out here. Nevertheless I was resigned to the fact that a dozen of them would probably be crushed by a vehicle over the course of a day. As I shook that unpleasant thought, I walked to the front of the bus to check on the fender bender.

That’s when I saw it.

Some fifty yards or so into the forest on the right side of the road, just above the tree line was a beacon.

Purple. Though beacons tend to glow, this one shined clearer than an average beacon from that distance. The stark contrast of its color against the green of the tree tops further enhanced its visibility.

Several things stood out. First, why make a promise above a tree, not to mention how. It also occurred to me just then that I’d never seen a deep purple beacon before. Ever. Not that I could remember, anyway. Navy blues, blazing oranges, candy pinks, greens as deep as the oceans and ruby reds. Whites the shade of nougat. But never purple.

My Gram always insisted that the color of a beacon bore no connection to the type of promise made. I’d always suspected different, but could never confirm it, since a Promise Seer rarely sees a promise being made. That shade of purple, though, made this beacon, of the many I had seen in my life, an outlier. Even then, I’d have missed it had the bus not had to stop for the accident.

The bowels of the bus beneath my feet whined, and we crawled, then gathered speed away from the place. I craned my head to look behind me and watch the purple beacon flicker a bit as trees passed through it. In a minute or so, it was out of my sight.

But not out of my mind.

CHAPTER TWO

Gram’s cabin is spacious but homey. Stone fireplace, with framed pictures of the family from various eras on the mantle above it.

A few easy chairs, and a couch not quite suited for a residence anymore inhabit the living room. A simple kitchen, full bathroom and a single bedroom in the back. Hung throughout are several framed oil paintings of landscapes painted by Gram’s father, who I sadly never met.

Though not a log cabin, it’s nonetheless made of wood, and smells of it.

In years past, Gram and Grandpa would come to this place for a month each year, but when he died, visits became infrequent. It remained clean however, as Gram let certain friends stay there. When there were extended vacancies, some trusted neighbors would stop by to clean every month or so.

I myself hadn’t been in the place since my childhood. Still, it was home as soon as I walked inside.

After washing up, I tried to nap on the couch. The remaining early-evening sunlight poured through the trees and into the living room by way of two huge windows looking out into the forest. I was exhausted and mentally weary after so much time spent not only on a bus, but around strangers. I always need time to recalibrate after such exposure. But I couldn’t sleep. Every time I had the vaguest sense of drifting, I’d remember that solitary purple beacon I’d seen, and sleep would flee.

I was spending an inordinate amount during my first hours in the cabin pondering what I’d come there to avoid altogether: beacons. (Among other stresses. I’m a sensitive sort.)

Surrendering any chance of napping, I worked on my Vishnu sketch. I hoped to lose myself in it, as I do with many of my drawings. This too failed. My heart wasn’t in it, and a being of such profound significance to so many people on Earth deserved my full attention. I wasn’t sure I could give that at the time. Instead I flipped the page and started a sketch of the room I was in. Not at all an original subject, but its mundane nature did the trick, and I started to relax.

I’ve read that in bygone eras, weary soldiers on the march could attain something quite similar to sleep even as they continued to tromp on toward whatever hell and glory awaited them. There are accounts of the rhythmic sound of boots pounding into the waiting earth conspiring with a soldier’s emptied mind to induce a state of semi-consciousness that was restful, even as some segment of the brain kept the watch and moved the soldier forward. I’ll never march, but that night I had a similar experience; I tell you I drew even as I slept in a way.

I looked at the sketch later on; it was no doubt unusual. First the lines and shading were not as precise as I prefer.

Secondly, without realizing it, I had drawn a a well and bucket just outside the window in the front of the cabin; in reality there isn’t one there. I couldn’t tell if this ephemeral addition improved the true quality of the piece, but I appreciated the drawing anyway. Not bad for being half asleep.