Aura: The Senses Novels, #1

By K.M. Aul

Time is up.

Darkness is falling, and none of us may survive.

An ancient evil is about to descend upon our world, and those that stand between it and us are so very few.

Blind since birth, yet able to 'see' and manipulate the very life-force that is in and surrounds each living thing, Jacob along with his companions, Rachel and Clarisse, will war with the human-shaped simulacrums that the enemy uses. This is no more than the prelude to the final battle.

Jacob knows that the survival of all life on earth depends on finding others like him and destroying the darkness that threatens our world.

The mind-bending adventure begins now.

Reality is not what you think.

"AURA" is a fast-paced novel that is sure to leave you haunted with its mind-bending implications." – 5 stars, Chesmok

"In the same style as Frank Peretti, KM Aul weaves a story that is almost impossible, but somehow is all too real. Thoughtful, intense, fast-paced, and thought-provoking, the story will leave readers clamoring for the next novel in the series." – 5 stars, Funnybean

• Language: English
• Publisher: K.M. Aul
• Release date: Jul 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781386733843

Book preview

Part One

Chapter One – Infancy

What I remember of my birth is that it was a living hell. The pressure was crushing down against every part of my body; something was gripping me and ripping me from the warmth that I had always known. I was being pulled and forced into a place as cold as ice and then as quickly as it had begun it was over. The next thing I remember is the soft, gentle gold everywhere, surrounding me and holding me safe, this was the gold that surrounds me. I knew that I was being carried by something large and blue. I felt myself floating down and then pressing against something very bright blue. I fell asleep with a blue/bright gold flowing down my throat and filling my tiny stomach. My mother would tell me the entire story much later.

When I was born, I was not breathing. Stillborn the doctors had told her and then, without any prompting and almost four minutes later, I began to breath on my own. The doctors were confused and even more confused when I reached up my little arms as though I was grabbing onto something and let out a singular laugh, something that in their experience, no other newborn had ever done. At that point, one of the nurses simply took over and began to treat me as she treated any newborn. She wrapped me in a blanket and then put me on the mother so that I could begin to breastfeed. My mother had been lactating for weeks and was ready for me. That was the start of my journey.

So, by now you probably can tell that there was, and is something that isn’t 100% right about the way I see the world. At the time though no one knew, and for me this was and is normal. According to my mother, I seemed to be a normal baby in every respect. I was small, I was wrinkled but smoothing out and I had the darkest blue eyes that she had ever seen. No one seemed to notice at the time though just how blue those eyes were.

While I remember everything, the detail would bore you to death, and it would quite literally take a lifetime to tell it all. I will talk about the highlights until we get to what I think matters.

As an infant, there were a couple of incidents that stand out. One involves the deep blue/dark gold one that moved too fast for me to follow. It would perch slightly above me on the dimly yellow and I could tell it was looking down at me. Then, without any warning, it would streak away too fast for my little head to turn. It was about that time that I realized that I could make a noise. It was a sharp and shrill sound that seemed to resonate inside my head and then would be outside of me. Whenever I did this, the deep blue/dark gold would slowly come back into view and suddenly rise back onto the dimly yellow.

My family would tell stories later about how our blue-eyed black cat would sit on the edge of my crib and look down at me and then suddenly take off full speed running out and around the room. They would also talk about how I was whistling at only a few weeks old, for some reason this seemed to fascinate the cat. By this time, I would assume that you are starting to get at least a glimmer as to what is going on here. If not, all will become clearer, I hope.

By the time I was crawling I had defined most of my world by what I could see. I could see square black things embedded into the large glowing pale green, and that was higher than I could easily tip my head. The square black things would often have the deep gold coming out of them. Within the deep gold that the black things gave out, there would be tiny blue specks. I loved to sit in that gold and blue glow; it was warm there and sometimes hot. I had also identified the various large bright blues in this place. There was the one that would hold me for long periods, remove the wet and messy place near my body and feed me. There was a larger one that would sometimes hold me and loved to raise me closer to the pale green above us.

Walls, windows, and the ceiling were words that I had yet to learn let alone associate with what I was seeing. There were things that I could only really know by the fact that they gave no light of their own. My understanding of this was years away.

There was one other incident that occurred during this period of my life that stands out. I was being held by the large bright blue that was around me most of the time when a ‘thing’ came into the same place we were. It was roughly the same shape as the bright blues, but it was a dense solid black. Both of my bright blues were there, and there were noises back and forth with the black. The noises became very loud after a little while, and the black approached me and seemed to be reaching for me even while the noises were getting louder.

I remember feeling scared, and as the black came very close to touching me something happened. There was suddenly no sound, and it seemed to me that everything was moving very slowly. The black was dropping away from me, toward the pale blue below me. Then, everything was moving its normal speed again, and the noises were quieter. My two bright blues were standing over the black. The larger bright blue seemed to get shorter for a minute and reach out to the black. The bright blue that held me took me away from that space so I that didn’t see what happened after that.

When I look back on it now, it’s possible that this was my first encounter with an agent of our enemy. I can’t be sure because my parents either didn’t remember the incident or simply wouldn’t talk to me about it, but I believe that this ‘person’ was there to take me away. I know that several times in my youth there were attempts to get my parents to send me to ‘special schools’ or put me into ‘special programs’. My parents were pretty traditional and refused these attempts, believing that the best thing for me would be just to grow up and be in classes with people in my age group.

Chapter Two – Childhood

As I grew up, I learned that what I saw was not what other people saw. Oh, I know, no two people see the same thing, we all just agree on the definition for what we are seeing. But that truly isn’t the case. For instance, if you aren’t colorblind you can pick out the same number and letters as other people who aren’t colorblind from those silly little cards that they use to test you. Growing up, I learned that I wasn’t colorblind I was object-blind. What I saw, what I see is not the world that you see. The truth is my eyes do not function at all. I am for all intents and purposes, blind. Doctors would not figure this out for many years because they could see me react to things in a way only that sighted people can.

My first day of school was a terrifying experience. Many kids have ‘separation anxiety’ that first day of kindergarten, but that wasn’t the problem with me. I was fine with my bright blue/mother when she took me by the hand and led me into that room, introduced me to another bright blue/teacher and then left. I was okay with meeting all the rest of the small intensely bright blue/children in the class, although there was one that seemed ‘off’. He wasn’t bright blue but more a sickly yellow and, of course, that’s where the trouble would start but not yet.

I suppose at this point in my life I was fairly shy. I didn’t have any real friends even though my parents knew plenty of couples with kids my own age. I just never seemed to be able to ‘relate’ to them. That shouldn’t be surprising I suppose considering some of my circumstances. Still, at that age I wanted friends, what kid doesn’t? Some time before, I had made up my mind that I was going to make friends with someone when I started school. My mistake was approaching the one person that I shouldn’t have. Perhaps it was only natural that I would choose to try befriending someone different, and the only outstanding difference that I could tell was the fact that this kid was not an intense bright blue.

I waited until after our ‘nap time’ during which absolutely no one napped except maybe the bright blue/teacher. The bright blue/teacher had told us that we should take some time and play with the toys in the room, but that we would need to make sure that we put them away. Wood blocks, I always chose wood blocks, which I will explain a little bit later. That is when I approached ‘him’. His name, I was told later, was Ernest. It was simple really; I got up from my blocks and walked over to where he was playing. I don’t know what it was, but it seemed to have wheels and he was rolling it back and forth.

Hello, my name is Jacob.

The world shifted slightly as the deep gold seemed to darken and wrap around me. He stopped, and two small red globes in the sickly yellow glow seemed to focus on me. To be frank, that was when all hell broke loose.

I can’t be sure if he was aiming at me or just flinging at random but whatever he was playing with went flying and sailed past my head. It looked as though the deep gold had pushed it away. Then he was up and rushing toward me with a screeching sound. The sickly yellow glow was pulsing with orange at the fringes. I knew that I didn’t want that touching me so as he got nearer the deep gold seemed to twist and he was past me. Unfortunately for her, the bright blue/teacher was behind me.

How a five-year-old child could inflict that kind of damage on a thirty-two-year-old woman is something that the school officials never were able to figure out. It was only the screaming and crying of the other children that most likely saved her life as it brought other bright blue/teachers running. My parents told me later that the only way that they were able to get him off of her was to literally kick him off, brutal, but effective I suppose.

They called an ambulance and the slightly less than bright blue/attendants, they weren’t called paramedics in those days, took our bright blue/teacher away. Another bright blue/teacher stayed with us for the rest of the day and had to explain to each of the parents what had happened as they came to pick us up. How you explain a berserk five-year-old giving an adult a concussion and severe beating with his bare hands is something I can’t fathom.

Even at that age it seemed that my world was starting to divide into different groups. There were those who were brightly blue, those who were oddly mixed and those who were deepest of darkness, a black so black that it could be felt. I am not saying that it was just me that felt these others; I noticed that these dark black ones also affected the brightly blue around me. I think that the worst of it was that not all of them were necessarily the same shape of the brightly blue or the oddly mixed. I had not met the fourth group yet, but that day was coming.

Most psychologists will tell you that infancy is the age of exploration for a child. I have to disagree with that. It is while in childhood that they are really exploring their world, their boundaries and themselves. I can say this because I could see how the colors shifted when a discovery was made in each of the brightly blues. Unfortunately, it is also the age when we, all of us, are completely wrapped up in ourselves. It is the ‘me’ age, without much thought as to what is happening in the larger world. I guess this is to be expected since we all have such limited exposure to the ‘real’ world. The problem was that the world and its events were growing towards a critical point.

While we were still many years from the events that would cause worldwide devastation, we were at the point where it could go either way. Maybe if some of us had been born a couple of decades earlier, we could have had an influence on what was to happen. What seemed to be random events, a large-scale terrorist attack in the Middle East, an illegal search of a politician’s home and office, the sudden devaluation of critical currencies and the theft of a religious artifact were actually all connected. At the time, I knew nothing about any of those actions, and I will get to them, or at least the one or two that I know the most about, a little later. Others will pick up the story on the rest when they have their chance.

By the time I was twelve, there had been a couple of more incidents like the one with Ernest, some more and some less savage. None of the attacks was able to harm me for reasons that I didn’t understand at the time. The same can’t be said for those who were near me when these attacks took place. One young girl was killed in an attack that happened near the end of my grammar-school days.

We had been practicing for our graduation from sixth grade. Seventh and eighth grade were reserved for Junior High School in those days. We were all standing on a set of bleachers and were running through a series of songs that we were going to be singing during graduation in the hot sun. In fact, the teachers should have known better than to have us all out there in one hundred degrees plus weather. The girl next to me seemed to be having a tough time of it as I could see the flashes of red coursing in her brightly blue. I had just turned to her as she started to collapse. I caught her before she could fall through the bleachers, as we were about four rows up and as I bent over the-gold-that-surrounds me darkened slightly, and I felt something pass over my head. There was a muffled scream, and the girl that had been standing by me fell through the bleachers. Something hit her in the chest. It was the fall though that killed her as she broke his neck when she landed.

This time is it wasn’t a kid that had attacked me. Standing at the bottom of the bleachers was