The Burnside Prophecy - Chapter One

 

Jonathan Chase saw the blood dripping from his right hand. His own eyes looked back at him through the emergency room mirror.

He splashed cold water on his face and knocked back a few aspirin tabs, hoping it would calm his frazzled nerves. He had just punched and broken the mirror.

He kept thinking back over the past several months. His mind replayed the memories over and over again. He couldn’t forget the strange old priest, the priest who tried to warn him.

If only, he thought. Somehow, if I’d paid attention, this could have changed everything.

It started years ago when a photographer, Jonathan Chase, saw a young girl walking toward him from a distance. Her appearance was unusual. Yet, somehow, he knew. He just knew ... maybe it was fate, something else, some sort of destiny. The attraction between them was immediate and powerful. Yet, it was clear; she had been through something terrible. She wouldn’t speak of it, but he could tell it was something horrible that bothered her deeply. Something had happened in her life. There was something she was holding on to, something she had kept long buried in her past. Now she lay in a hospital bed, barely clinging to life. Or maybe it was just a terrible, terrible dream. He wasn’t sure.

Long ago, Jonathan had photographed a local priest for a story about street people in the Pacific Northwest.

“Don’t listen to him,” the kids shouted from a nearby park bench, “he’s just a crazy old man, don’t pay him any mind.”

Now it was a memory. Something he still didn’t understand but something he could never forget. He looked at his camera and recalled the photographs he’d taken. He had to understand why it happened. Why his life and his world had been shaken to the core.

He thought again about the old priest, that crazy old priest. Like a vision, he kept muttering something about a prophecy and how he must “Hear the prophecy.” An image of the priest still hung on Jonathan’s wall, but there was also a living image in his mind. It was an image he couldn’t forget.

There was a fire in the old priest’s eyes. He looked like some kind of mad outcast, some poor broken loser. Still wearing a priest’s collar, he was unkempt, dirty, and maybe a little insane. His hair was straggly … his face was unwashed. There was no escaping the fire in his eyes, though, nor the intensity of his voice.

Jonathan had taken plenty of pictures that day. He used several of them for a story in a local magazine. The old priest had handed him a little black book trimmed with gold and some scribbled writings. He used a few lines from it with the photo essay but mostly dismissed it as trivial and unimportant.

The words in the little book spoke of the typical things you might hear coming from any street preacher working in the Burnside area of North Portland. It was easy for Jonathan to dismiss it when the priest handed him the book.

“Take this,” said the priest. “It may just be a road map to your soul, to your salvation.”

Jonathan ignored his warning but was still curious to read the book and a message scribbled by hand within its cover. The prophecy seemed odd and held little solid meaning for him: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive in a garden, not of her choosing. Travelers from the east will succeed in destroying the child, but only by destroying the garden. The wounds will be deep, and the garden shall rain with fire, separating limb from limb and the good from the evil. And the kings of the earth shall flee their gatherings, but they shall not be harmed.”

“Yeah, right,” said Jonathan after reading the little book. He turned and tossed it into his camera bag and didn’t think much more about it.

But now, all these years later, he wondered if it had still been necessary? His mind kept replaying the words of the old priest over and over again. He thought about what had happened. He remembered how the explosion had knocked him flat on his back. He felt the force of the blast but still managed to hold on to his camera. It saved his life. A shard of metal had hit the camera striking the lens dead-center.

Somehow he was still alive. He remembered the struggle to regain consciousness, desperately trying to pick himself up and find his way out of the devastated building.

The memories raced through his mind like flames through an abandoned house. Had it happened like the prophecy said? If I only knew then what I know now? After everything that happened, many people died, and some were still unaccounted for.

Jonathan checked his phone. Hoping for some word from Cassie, but there was nothing. He looked at the time. What could I have done differently? He just wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

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