Deviance: The True Volition Hexalogy, #1

By Joseph Van Landschoot

Nathaniel Farrentino does not know what to believe; is life only coincidence, or is it destiny? After one long day of love and loss he runs away from home, not to be seen or heard from for almost four years. The one to find him is Vivian, and for her he chooses life on the road as a rubber tramp; stealing, fighting and being free. Growing pains turn his life into a fever dream while their gang of nomad punks head east for revenge, and Nathan's aching question grows once more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joseph Van Landschoot
• Release date: Mar 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463318010

Joseph Van Landschoot

My name is Joseph Van Landschoot and I find stories incredible. At a young age I would make up wild tales about heroes and far off worlds full of adventure, in which people battled monsters and good always prevailed. My name fit me well growing up as I didn't rise to anything exceptional, but the idea of experiences being told in extravagant and fantastical ways always burned a fire in my soul. By the second year out of high school, just before entering college, I found myself working a summer job where I groomed trees. I left my power zone to clip a high branch and to no great joy, slipped a disc. Now it's been several years from that incident and I've written four books, working on the fifth, and plan to write the sixth to culminate this grand tale. I am no literary savant, but more and more, words find a way to fascinate me. The characters of people I meet, and how they came to be who they are, inspire me. The never ending story of life surrounds us and our addition to it make for great things if we so choose. That is at least the summary of what I believe, and what I leave with you.

Book preview

To Mary Pat and Alexander Clark

For convincing me to write my story as a novel.

The

True

Volition

Hexalogy

Part One:

Deviance

Table of Contents

PART I: Innocence (Purity) 8

Chapter One: ~Graduation~ 10

Chapter Two: ~House Party~ 25

Chapter Three: ~Forty-Five Months, Twenty-Four Days~ 47

Chapter Four: ~The Bar~ 64

Chapter Five: ~A Long Time~ 74

PART II: Deviance (Aberrance) 89

Chapter Six: ~Initiation~ 90

Chapter Seven: ~Fever~ 108

Chapter Eight: ~The Road~ 123

Chapter Nine: ~Hotel Lakeshore~ 156

Chapter Ten: ~Quarter of Year~ 174

PART III: Adumbration (Anagnorisis) 201

Chapter Eleven: ~The Big City~ 203

Chapter Twelve: ~Genesis~ 212

Extras 229

**

The further you walk, the more you know. The more you know, the more you grow. The more you grow, the less you feel. And the less you feel, the further you walk.

*

Is your life a series of random events? Or is it a well-orchestrated plan, known only as destiny? Futurology is the science, art, and practice of hypothesizing possible futures. Practitioners stress the importance of alternative, and multiple futures, rather than one monolithic future. They frown upon the limitations of predictions and probabilities, versus the possible creation of endless preferable futures. Like many modern-day thinkers, futurologists consider David Kellogg Lewis’s theory of modal realism to hold great weight. Modal realism is the view that all possible worlds are as real as this one.

Was I born for a reason? What is my purpose? Life, in all of its complexity, is what you make of it. The meaning of life is discovered by those willing to create it for themselves. Some do not have the strength. Others do not care to make any meaning. But for Nathan Farrantino, reason and purpose are not created by him. They are crafted by entities far greater than he could ever conceive. On the day of his high school graduation, these forces begin to turn the cog of ‘destiny’, changing Nathan’s life forever. It is on this ‘fateful’ day, dear reader, that our story begins.

*

PART I: Innocence (Purity)

Chapter One: ~Graduation~

The Milky Way hung heavy in the late-night sky like an eerie, mysterious tone reminiscent of a menacing violin crescendo. There were no clouds and the moon had hidden away, leaving the stars in all their majesty to shine down on Earth. The vastness of space swallowed the sky, and in its deep silence... something stirred. Some thing that could not be seen, or heard, or touched; but it stirred, nonetheless. In the suburbs of a quiet Canadian neighbourhood, Nathan Farrentino tossed and turned, asleep in his bed. Darkness pressed around him on all sides as his eyelids flickered, pupils racing to and fro beneath them. As though his body sensed a change, his brow furrowed unconsciously, nostrils flaring.

Beware the quarter of year, a faceless feminine voice projected faintly from out of the darkness, with a tone more ancient than age itself. For in its time, fire and darkness will descend; the likes of which your kind has never seen. You alone must stop it…

As the voice trailed away, Nathan's unconscious mind twisted with distorted shapes and subtle flashes of light that created endless fractal loops of images yet seen by any. There was an overwhelming feeling of something just out of reach, omnipotent in its presence. Colours and shapes swirled together in a kaleidoscope that defied reality.

Wait - there was something! It was a two-dimensional orb, like a perfect cylindrical cut-out of spacetime, and it was growing, zooming in from the background until all there was had flattened into this new pitch black. As if someone had their hand on a dial, Nathan saw his own face fade into view right before him; eagle-nosed, thick-browed, and freckle-spotted. He reached out with his skinny, pale arm to touch the centre, but as he did his fingers morphed like the reflection of an orb, until it covered the circle’s surface. When he pulled his hand back to reveal his face once more, he only saw darkness. Beneath that though it became eerily apparent that there was a shadow of a figure.

It stood where Nathan once was, slowly becoming visible. A dark creature was staring back at him from within the orb. It was barely visible before disappearing, but it was just enough to disturb Nathan. The face was notably demonic: twisted, with three-eyes and a wide grin. But the horror soon fuzzed away to static sound. The static swirled around until transforming into voices. They were familiar to Nathan, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then one word began to stick out. One word which he immediately recognized: ‘Nathan.’ Again and again, they called his name. He recognized the voices of old friends and family members calling out to him from distant memories. Winds began to build, making Nathan’s mind uneasy. Quickly enough he began automatically focusing on specific voices, and a chorus of conversations began, one bleeding into the next with a sea of chaos behind them.

Over here! one boy yelled.

You never want to see me succeed, Nathan heard himself say.

I don’t think you’re ready, said a coarse unfamiliar man.

Just give it back! his younger self pleaded. Rising anxiety spilled over at an overwhelming rate.

I love you… so, much. That voice was familiar, but the phrase was not. It was the voice of a girl from Nathan’s school: Vivian, though she went as V. But she had never said that to him before.

What, his voice echoed, am, I? He didn’t know why he said it, but the echo brought a silence to the void. And a deep, menacing, masculine voice answered back…

Human.

Footsteps clicked and echoed in the dark. The soundwaves reverberated slowly but loudly through the blackness as they neared. Nathan was terrified and helpless because all he could do was listen as the footsteps came closer and closer. With them, a thin, curved line appeared in the forefront of his vision. It grew, changing from a simple line to the silhouette of a man in a suit. The man moved forward every few steps like someone on a wrong airport walkway until with one last click, it all cut away with a tremendous boom. The sensation shook Nathan to his core. 

-YAHWEY- the rumble wailed.

With the sound came flashes of images. Images Nathan had never seen before. He saw himself crying, sitting with his back to a fence. Then lifting logs onto a truck, followed by him having drinks at a bar with strangers who he treated like friends. He saw V’s face smiling at him. Then he was alone in the woods, looking at a tree limb that was floating in the air. It flashed away to both V and him riding motorcycles together down a vacant highway in the sunset. He was happy, and so was she, but she looked worried. And as quickly as it came, it was gone. Nathan, entranced in the imponderable, jolted awake.

*

Laying in his bed he stared at the ceiling, feeling jarred from the experience. It was so much more than a dream. He caught his breath and slowed it down as he settled.

What was that? he whispered to himself.

Nathan tended to speak to himself. He also tended to shut things out because of his sensitive nature, which made the dream all that more jarring. It was a dreaded feeling he couldn’t shake away like all of his waking ones. After sitting up slowly and giving himself time to properly wake up, he turned on the lamp by his bed. The light illuminated the walls of his bedroom, showcasing sketches and paintings that hung there. They were all of clouds, save a few portraits of trees. Nathan’s hopeful, yet naive view of the world was captured in his artwork; a stark contrast to the dark dream from which he woke. He tried to shake the feeling with a stretch. Every muscle pulled as he let out a silent yawn. 

It was still early in the morning, and his two parents and older brother were fast asleep. Nathan slid to his bedside and walked over to his desk. It was the same action he performed countless times. Day in and day out, he would sit at his desk and listen to his Walkman. Once in a blue moon he would try to draw something, but he couldn’t remember the last time he tried- a month, maybe? He would mostly just browse through old books until his parents woke up.

Though, for the last three months since March break, Nathan got into the habit of early morning bike rides to the Tim Hortons near his house. V started working night shifts there, and although Nathan wasn’t a fan of coffee, seeing her everyday was worth the bike ride and the caffeine. The small action of buying a medium double-double to put a smile on her face was worth it. Somehow, she still looked amazing in the uniform, which Nathan could never see himself saying about anyone else. It might have been her long, dark hair poking out of her hat as a bun, or her vibrant take-no-shit spirit that emanated even from Tim Horton’s khakis, or was it her soft lips that made him just so attracted to her. Nathan didn’t have the courage to talk to her without an excuse and coffee worked well for this.

However, this morning was different; distinctive. That was no ordinary dream. The booming sensation still shook his bones. Nathan opened his notebook for the first time in almost a year and put pen to paper.

-1996/06/25-

How do we know this is the real world? Because we can feel it? But what happens when a dream feels more real than reality? We’re all people in space, and every person dreams. Are we alone? Are dreams just in our heads, or are the worlds that we dream of something else? Something just like the reality we share? Could they be real places that we visit? Worlds within worlds… What if there’s something beyond this one? He sighed. I don’t know. I had a weird dream, that’s all.

Nathan… came a whisper. A disembodied female’s voice; the one from his dream. He couldn’t remember what she said but he recalled her voice. Nathan frowned as he looked behind him. He wasn’t surprised to see that no one was there, having already scanned his bedroom when he moved to his desk. He sat for a moment, comprehending what he heard. It definitely was the same voice from his dream.

He opened a copy of Webster’s dictionary and searched for auditory hallucinations. The resulting definition was as he suspected; stating that hearing one or more talking voices may be associated with psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia or mania. Maybe I’m still waking up.

Though he knew better, Nathan couldn’t shake the eerie feeling that he was being watched, so he distracted himself by popping in a mixed CD he made into his Walkman.

Nathan stretched and sighed, rubbing his temples to ease the tension building there. I gotta stop goin’ to sleep so late, he grumbled to himself.

*

The sun had just started rising, giving colour to the morning clouds. Nathan fiddled to secure his Walkman while biking down the familiar suburban streets he’d known his whole life. Today he planned to bike down the shores of Lake Ontario, rather than get coffee. He had a lot on his mind and bike rides to the lake always helped. Whether it was the cool breeze, or the sound of rippling waves, there was something about standing on the edge of that vast space spanning the horizon that filled Nathan with a beautiful sense of scale.

Song to The Siren, by This Mortal Coil clicked on as the next song. It was a good kind of fit for someone feeling like they just came back from space. As the song played, he lightly closed his eyes. His body controlled the bike as if on autopilot. As a kid, Nathan’s imagination would take over sometimes. Grocery malls turned into battle grounds. Parks, into newly discovered planets. He watched movies like Star Wars, Labyrinth, Mad Max, and Studio Ghibli films. They played into his imagination, building ideas about what could be out there among the stars and in parallel universes. As he biked, he whispered to himself, and as he whispered to himself, he imagined flying upwards into the clouds.

"The Sun. Mercury. Venus. Earth. Mars. Belt. Jupiter. Saturn. Uranus. Neptune. Pluto… I go out past the stars, the Milky Way, Laniakea, and the universe. What do I see? I’m just looking at a quark... There’s nowhere outside, no way out of existence. God, you are the universe trapped inside yourself; a Flying padre- just a conscious entity made up of us, like brain cells are to a brain…"

He could see the clouds shoot past him, and the horizon bent as he left the atmosphere. He soared into space, as if he’d been catapulted into the air by a slingshot. The Earth disappeared, and the Sun shrank. Then the Sun disappeared with the other stars. Orion’s arm glowed in its brilliance, then shrank, giving way to the Milky Way. Further and further Nathan went out into the grand cosmos. Galaxies became dots like stars, intermingling into the veins of Laniakea.

Nathan rode on one of its filaments, until he was the size of the supercluster itself. The farther out he flew, the dimmer it got. The superclusters bubbled and gave shape to the borders of the universe. Vision blurred as other spheres appeared in the darkness, followed by electrons whizzing by. The electrons quickly shrank, giving way to atoms. Then atoms, to molecules. Molecules, to an optic nerve. Nathan rode the nerve, which connected to the macula of a retina. And out he rode, through the crystalline lens. His sight went black, then began to focus outwards, only to be looking at his own eyelid. 

An entire day of standard procedures came and went with him in and out of a daydream. Nathan was currently seated in a pew beside his classmates, all in gowns, inside the Cathedral Basilica of Christ the King. It was their graduation ceremony.

Nathan—Farrentino, said the master of ceremonies.

He opened his eyes and stepped out of his pew. His mother, father, and brother were all standing in the back of the church. His brother was not thrilled to be there, but Nathan’s