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  Subtle movements stirred deep within Mural, slowly turning into sluggish jerks, as something reluctantly woke inside him. With another beckon from the demon, this thing within Mural climbed from his chest, clenching sharply up his throat. It scrambled, one hold after another in ascent, until it finally crept from behind his tongue and leapt out of his mouth. Left dumbfounded, he watched a frail glob of light, a darker blue than the orb, shoot from his mouth to the open hand of the cloaked figure.

  The demon balled up the object into its fist and placed it atop Veronica's mouth. Mural's liberated dark blue bubble sat wedged between her lips with the demon's fingertip nestled in the cleft above her upper lip. The blue entity wiggled in the divot between her violet lips until the stranger pressed its finger down. Its finger seared into her skin and burned down to the front of her teeth. Mural's dark blue ball sucked down into Veronica in a sick slurp.

  Mural sat and watched, light-headed and dazed, as slivers of life gathered, causing shakes in her fingers and twitches in her legs. The demon's finger was pressed firmly on her lips when her body awakened as if she burst free from submersion. Veronica's eyes fluttered and color returned to her face, clinging loosely to her cheeks like it knew full well it wasn't supposed to be there.

  Fastened to the ground with fatigue, Mural was lost in a feeling of incompleteness that spread throughout his body, and became more and more sorrowful of the cavernous space within him that used to harbor his soul. The demon removed its finger from her mouth and she slowly leaned up. A notch that was once her cleft, previously extending from the bottom of her nose to her upper lip, reached further down to her chin. Her lips were sealed shut. Veronica tried to speak, but only vague sounds sputtered out the sides of her mouth.

  "A piece of your soul has been barricaded inside her. Your soul will sustain her."

  Mural longed for his wife more passionately than ever. He watched and pitied her, knowing the curse she bore was rightfully his. She had a piece of him again.

  "She will live, but not without my care. Now open your mouth."

  Reluctantly, Mural opened his mouth and watched the demon's other hand open to expose the blue orb again. As soon as the orb felt the open air, it was forced into Mural's gaping mouth, crammed down into his chest. Anchored in a vacant place, the blue orb sifted around inside, searching for a niche. It snaked and wormed through Mural's soft innards, finally resting in the void of his fragmented soul.

  Knees shaking in the mud, Mural pounded his fists against the ground, splashing clumps of grass and earth, reacting to the sensations slipping around inside him. The confusion grinding about his chest forced him into convulsions. Swarming like bees behind his ribs, the orb settled and secured a hold in his throat as well. A steady silence enveloped his consciousness as his senses stopped completely. The blue orb shifted and settled in his chest and sent pulses throughout his body, getting a feel for its new home as it clamped onto his shattered soul. Mural could feel it joining. It hooked on like a monkey in a tree, gripping tightly around two places to keep a hold. Those paws curled around his throat, forming a constant lump at the bottom of his neck. It bobbed as he swallowed, always threatening to choke him as he gulped. He coughed and hacked nonetheless, wanting with all his might, to spit up this awkward presence. The other paw gripped somewhere in his essence, an area that he knew to exist but never located. It clutched his emotions strangely, touching his heart and mind at the same time.

  His compassion sank and his sorrow fixed on Veronica's sealed lips. The couple's sorrowful eyes met and teemed with tears. She stared at him curiously and immediately noticed a drastic change in her alienated husband and it showed in her eyes. Mural wasn't the same and would never be again. All she could do was watch.

  Mural went pale. The convulsions assumed control of him as his blood turned to ice, slowly sliding through his veins. With teeth clattering and knees shaking, blue tints replaced the pink in his cheeks and nose, as all natural color left him. All heat sped from him and leaked into the night, escaping with his breath into the air in a gray cloud, puffing from his purple lips up into the hot air, condensing and hovering around him. He wrapped his long black coat tighter and felt no warmth as the constrictions of the deal he had made continued to suck the heat from him. The demon slithered over to Veronica.

  "From now on my puppet, assuming that you wish to see her again...well, I'll put it simply, just stay alive. Enjoy the gift." It hissed and gently clutched Veronica's hand.

  Mural watched as the demon lead her off over the dark horizon, her hand raised in a dreamy reach for her husband. Yearning to save her, Mural reached out as well, but that was all the movement he could muster. They stretched for each other until she disappeared into a haze of enveloping shadows that covered the demon's departure. With one last wave of her pink hand, she disappeared.

  His search began after that night. A hunt that lasted for two hundred years. There were no expenses to be spared; she meant everything.

  Chapter 10

  Walking away from the night he lost his wife again, his entire purpose became darker than his previous murders could have ever whispered. For the first month Mural couldn't stomach much food; the lumpy blue orb, this gift, clogged his throat almost completely. Liquid proved to be the easiest substance to get past the gift. His life was bleak once again.

  Veronica was gone for a second time, but this time she needed to be saved. He needed to recover his soul and her life. Love's return proved harder than its departure; everything human inside his chest beat for only her.

  No matter how callow or abundant his emotions, the gift struggled with his feelings, taunting and influencing what happened inside him. It seemed to study his every notion and mimic his reactions, trying to fit in. After the gruesome night on the porch, all that was inside of Mural, everything he thought or did, felt as if he had little or no part in it.

  If a feeling came to him, there was no way for him to be sure it was genuine.

  Most of his sensations felt skewed or mangled by the gift. The stubborn feelings it radiated swayed him heavily for the first month. After a week it began to pity itself, constantly moaning in melancholy, yearning for its home, wherever that was. After two weeks, Mural struggled to find where it was stolen from. The gift began to resist him with such vigor and passion that he started to pity it. He wondered how to set it free. So alien was the feeling between them that the first time he sneezed, he kept his hand far away from his lips, hoping it would shoot out. But it burrowed deeper within him, further down than his past heartbreaks, and it rested in his guilt, sharing space with his shattered soul.

  After a month, survival was trying in every aspect. Mural sat in his living room chair, shivering and shaking with each stir within him. An everlasting cold possessed him. His convulsions became uncontrollable and ice water seemed to have replaced his blood. Time stretched into oblivion as Mural stared into his fireplace at ashes he could identify with. He was banished, never wanting to walk the streets again, but he attempted it nevertheless. One day he ventured out. His hatred for solitude forced him to his front door, pushing out into the fresh air he'd missed for so long. He had walked no more than twenty yards when his body began to shiver uncontrollably. The sidewalk began to vibrate at first as he reached out for the brick wall to keep steady, but the wall shook as well. His weight quickly became too much to bear as he fell into the brick and slid down to the ground, quivering in the fetal position. Mural's arms and legs curled up into his chest and his fingers jittered. His head jolted up, stretching to the end of his neck like it was trying to run away. Mouth open wide, without trying to make a peep, a scream skipped past his mouth and leapt right into his head. He began to cry, coiled up within himself like a snake.

  Then he abruptly stopped and went stone cold.

  An onlooker with very acute vision would have seen a thin blue streak soar from his face. This beam shot away from him and left him lifeless. He became a pale, crumpled ball for a few seconds until the streak r
eturned with the same speed it left. Mural woke with a jolt of a horse kick. His eyes fluttered vehemently trying to gain bearing on where he was, as if he himself had left. The alien mass in his chest grew heavy, resettled in its newest home, and left Mural confused. Weak and battered, he rose and hobbled home using the wall as a brace, feeling his way down the coarse brick towards his doorstep. While walking up the narrow stairs into his home, images began to pop into his head. A barrage of images slid before his eyes, playing out a violent show of murder, one he hadn't remembered committing. It was fragmented with settings and areas that he had never been to, with monuments that he recognized, but had never visited. As the flashes slowly became even more familiar, more intimate than deja vu to him, Mural caught a glimpse of what he had become. Unnerved with the loss of control, not because of the murder, but because that didn't remember committing it, Mural began to shake. He was losing his grip on the gift nestled in his chest, trying to decipher it from his actual memories.

  Mural's maroon leather chair was the only place comfortable enough to keep his thoughts away from suicide. He would live to see Veronica again. Just the sheer thought of her with that venomous, thieving creature kept him from standing all day. He imagined the perverse pleasures the demon would wipe all over her body if he were to die. As the vivid visions of the gift inside him drove him towards death, thoughts of Veronica drove him toward life, but those red eyes, so deep and evil and devastating and bloody - that red could transcend his colorblindness. Red had always been able.

  So he sat for a month.

  Standing only when his stomach cried out for food, he would venture to the kitchen for some scraps, and hurry back to the chair to stay safe. The convulsions came with great frequency, bearing down like lightning - sharp and painful. On rare occasions, Mural would grow more used to the convulsions and attempt to walk around his house, trying to wean himself into old patterns, but the old whispers never came back and he felt alien in his own life. The gift eclipsed everything.

  Time crawled. Thirty days had passed more like years.

  Melancholy took him and, ironically, gave him his first familiar notion. Mural knew how he dealt with that before. And as soon as he thought it he found himself at a wash basin. Leaning over slowly he picked up a shaving blade and looked into the mirror at his shaggy face. His eyes were glazed and dull like a cows. His beard was thick and tangled. With trembling hands the blade pierced the tuft of curly brown hair that covered the point where his jaw line met his neck. The razor indented his skin and he thought, with trembling longing, of opening his throat and finishing what he started but stopped those short years ago on the hill. Yet, almost against his every urge, he slowly cut away his ragged beard. After shaving most his facial hair off, a convulsion took him. His hand shook the blade against his sandpaper cheek. The straight razor pressed against his jugular as the convulsions grew worse and blood ran along the blade's edge. His control diminished but his mind tried to lurch back to the day he sat on the hill, blade to his throat, ready to end it all over Veronica. But now, his wife was the safe driving force pushing in the opposite direction.

  He had to live on to find Veronica. And that was that.

  "God I wish I could see her."

  Chapter 11

  But it grew worse before it got better. Before Mural learned to adapt his life around his impairments, as long lasting men do, he was at their mercy.

  Mural had deciphered the patterns of the gift winding around inside, predicting the times when he'd start convulsing by the amount of cold beneath this skin. As soon as goosebumps rose on his neck and arms, he visibly braced for the shakes. The physical effects could be handled easily enough; it was the other effects, the mental occurrences that gave him the worst troubles. It was the memories that rattled in his mind, ones that he swore were untrue, perhaps lived by the intrusive force within, that threatened his sanity and livelihood. The thin line between himself and the light he swallowed proved nearly nonexistent over these next thirty days. As did his identity. Mural felt, no knew he was an apparition of what he once was, slipping ever so slowly and easily into the daily routine the gift inside gave him - which was nothing more than eating some scraps, sparsely sleeping and enduring hours of indiscernible yet horribly haunting thoughts that latched onto and fed off his genuine memories like parasites.

  Slumped in a chair that used to melt away his pains and worries, Mural sat on what felt like razors, staring into the fireplace, stirring no more than the layers of dust coating his entire house. He never wondered why his once great girth, now dangerously emaciated, had never perished. He should have rotted after two months and how great a release that would have been, yet, it seemed, he had forgotten how to die. His flesh and bone would have none of it. But, oh God, if he could only do so, oh how he wished he could, then the death in his head that had abandoned his body, would take him.

  But it would not.

  As if the light put inside him aimed to only torture, death was the only constant stream of thought screaming in his skull. The ends of countless and vague souls, lives he hadn't the slightest idea of who they were, paraded before his mind's eye with twisted and fearful deathly faces, spewing their woes at him in breaths of putrid decay.

  It took Mural only one more afternoon beyond the first two months to become completely stolid to the horrors in his mind. They were nothing new anyway, once he truly began to see them. He had seen death, what was the fuss over? And, in truth, life was but a dream. A dream that merrily, merrily rowed further and further away from him each day. And he happily waved it goodbye. It was nothing more than a burden.

  "What kind of life can be found in death anyway?" he asked to the air.

  And in those lucid words came an answer that chilled his blood. Not cold out of fear but from the light inside him. He trembled and shook.

  Images of murders played out for him as if it was a vivid recollection, but only in feelings and sensations. Nothing concrete was ascertainable by a single one of his five senses. These recollections weren't from the past, no, nothing seemed that familiar...except for a face. He saw a room, not the room in house where he sat, but an unfamiliar room before him in a manner such as a reverie, with blue wispy tints, yet he knew he was in the present. The normal flashes from the gift, with all its haunting ambiguity and doubts, showed him he was on the other side of town, on the border of Boston. A man lay before him in his deathbed, coughing out his final breaths in sick spats. It was so vivid, the man, the place...and the color. Oh God color! Now, blinding in its brilliance, all the blue in the world came to his eyes, as though his colorblindness stepped aside just for this single shade alone.

  Fully immersed in the dream reality, Mural was drawn to this ailing man. He slowly walked to him, flatly placing his boots along a wooden floor that never creaked. The atmosphere was heavy, almost damp, tears mixing with humidity. Others paced along the floor as it moaned under them but Mural continued forward without a sound, feeling none of his weight. Whether it was his illness or terror, the man cringed as Mural closed in, shaking his feeble limbs in irritable gestures to ward Mural off.

  The dying man's anxious family hovered all about the room, huddling around him and attempted to comfort his pathetic yelps, wailing and preparing for the inevitable. A young woman pleaded with him to calm; calling with such a love that Mural identified her as the man's wife. She must have worried that her husband had gone mad at the end.

  A clumsy thought of reason plugged itself into Mural's rationale and he began to recognize the man. Yes, he was familiar and from his own past even.

  No one in the room, save for the dying, could see Mural stroll up to him. The man's breaths grew panicked and he whispered strange words.

  Reaching with strained, almost hungry fingers, Mural went to grab from the dying man what he knew was his. Mural watched the man's purple cracked lips tremble out a tantalizing puff that he innocuously caught as if he was expecting it, like a dog catching a ball. Among the hazy impressions and prod
igious meanings, Mural watched his diaphanous blue hand open to reveal a blue ball. He saw it presently and as a memory. He saw it like he saw the ball stolen from his mouth by the cursed demon and, therefore, saw it for what it was. It hummed in his hand for a second, as if it applauded his recognition, then shot off into the dark corner of the wall.

  Slowly the man's face settled and his eyes dulled. Mural studied him, barely remembering his features. The family surrounding them was fixed on the man lying in his deathbed, never noticing Mural in the slightest. And he couldn't help but smile. This man who lay dead before him was the man who dragged him through the streets, dangling from the noose, all those years ago. Mural licked his lips and tasted his own power. This was a gift indeed. Mural's melancholy lifted and he loved the gift.

  "This is a far better purpose than the whispers ever provided," Mural thought, vowing then and there to follow the gift's internal guidance, which had to lead to Veronica, as well as to the occasional smiting of his enemies.