“Departures” is a supernatural thriller and love story published as a serial novel with new episodes dropping every Tuesday morning. Anyone can read or listen for free. Paid subscribers gain early access to new episodes. Watch the trailer or visit the table of contents to browse all the published episodes.
Previously…
In the last episode, the young barista whose death Wild had predicted was tragically killed rushing from Wild’s apartment convinced the older man was crazy. Wild bared witness as the young man bled out on West Peachtree Street.
Juniper wasn’t the type to fall in love easily or really to fall in love at all. She preferred her own company. If you had asked her when she first met Wilder Thorne, she wouldn’t have been able to tell you because he had just always been there, less than a minor character in her story. He was towheaded toddler #2 playing with trucks in the sandbox, awkward tween #4 making fart noises at the back of the bus, or boisterous teenage hoodlum #3 smoking pot in the school parking lot during lunch.
Then he disappeared from her periphery like tertiary characters do. She hadn’t even noticed until one day his name appeared among the new patients scheduled to join her daily group session at the clinic. It had been well over a decade since she could recall seeing him, so when he slumped into the low-ceilinged room, tentatively pulled a chair from the circle and sat, she struggled to reconcile the appearance of the gaunt man in front of her with the cocky, clear-eyed golden boy in black sheep’s clothing who had horrified everyone at graduation by dropping his pants and mooning a full auditorium.
To say he wasn’t the same person was an understatement, but in fairness, this was the sad story of every single schizophrenic patient she had come to know in the clinic. He said nothing for the first three meetings and didn’t give any indication that he recognized her, but that hadn’t been surprising. Juniper McGowen had never been on his radar.
She was still in training and didn’t see any patients privately, but the clinic encouraged her to interact with members of her group outside of group whenever possible. On that Friday afternoon after he had been in her group for a week without speaking, she was eating her lunch in the courtyard and he appeared there, standing in front of her.
“Can I sit?” he asked.
“Yes, of course.”
He settled on the wooden bench of the picnic table opposite her and for the first time, looked her in the eye. It was unsettling, the profound sadness she saw there. Most of the patients were heavily medicated so she understood that she might not be witnessing anything but a Lithium malaise, but there was something more there, buried in the sallow planes of his cheeks and down-turned corners of his mouth.
“I remember you, June. It’s been a really long time. I’m sorry I don’t talk in group. I can’t. I’m not supposed to be here.”
“It’s alright,” she said, setting her sandwich down. “Is there anything I can do? Would you like to talk now?”
“I’m not sick. I’m not crazy but I do need help.”
“Tell me more.” She cringed saying this. It sounded like she was reading from a script.
“I’m afraid to tell you my story because it will only convince you that I’m delusional like everyone else in here and then I’ll be stuck forever.”
“I can see why that might make you afraid to share,” she said, mirroring and validating as she was taught. “But you can trust me.”
“I hope so.”
He looked around before continuing. The courtyard was beginning to fill up with other patients and staff coming out to enjoy the unseasonably cool afternoon.
“Could we maybe take a walk?” he asked.
She stuffed the remainder of her lunch into the brown paper sack and they set out. The facility was part of a larger complex of buildings set in the leafy shade of a suburban neighborhood north of the city. They walked along a path toward a small pond. As they walked, she noticed he kept a distance between them that seemed curious. Once they were out of earshot, he began to tell his story.
“Something happened to me and now I see things, know things I shouldn’t know. Things I don’t want to know.”
“What kind of things?” she asked.
“I don’t want to tell you yet. I want you to know me a little better first.”
“Okay.”
He told her the abridged version of his story, much of which she knew. The Thorne family was an institution in Atlanta and she had grown up around him. She understood his rebellion, but the seventies were a time when everyone was rebelling against the establishment. Apparently as part of his rebellion, he had dropped out of his third year at Duke University and fucked off to South America under the guise of joining the Peace Corps, but really just to be free to roam beyond the gaze of his parents and their expectations.
With just a backpack, he had traveled by foot across Central America and into Brazil. The trip had started with a couple of friends he had met in the Peace Corps both of whom were finishing their stint. Wild had decided to release himself early after just five weeks in the program so he could join his new friends. When he told June this, he stopped walking and she turned to look at him.
“I know this makes me sound like a piece of shit, first quitting one of the most prestigious schools in the country and then bailing out of the Peace Corps. I know I’m a piece of shit. I just don’t want to hide anything from you about my story, because it’s important you believe what I’m going to tell you next.”
She nodded and held his gaze until he broke it and they began walking again. When they reached the small stone bench under a willow tree beside the pond, she sat and expected him to sit beside her. Instead he sat on the grass in front of the bench. Looking up at her, he continued his story.
“One of the guys, Diego, was a native Peruvian. For months he talked about his great granddad who was some kind of medicine man that lived off the grid in the Amazon rainforest. His stories about the old man were amazing and I said I wanted to meet him. It took a couple of months to reach him and there were a number of misadventures along the way that I won’t get into but eventually, I did meet him and that’s when everything changed.”
The most exotic place Juniper had ever been was the Bahamas and that hadn’t been her choice. She imagined Wild getting into drunken brawls alongside his new friends in some dusty, dark dive bar, and sleeping outside. It all seemed so scary and improbable to her but it was thrilling to imagine.
“So, we met the old guy after several days of pretty intense hiking through the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. The Amazon jungle is like some alien planet. There were insects the size of birds and birds the size of dogs. We were still a day’s hike away from the little village where Diego’s great granddad lived when I got really sick– I mean shitting my guts out sick. Fever, chills, the worst. I thought I was gonna die. Diego and Peter had to literally carry me for much of that day.”
“I don’t even remember much of that but I do remember waking up a couple of days later inside this little hut filled with woodsmoke. They had taken care of me, nursed me back to health. The old guy and a couple of his relatives had watched me round the clock making me drink this foul-smelling sour milk and applying this paste on my chest and forehead.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t die,” Juniper said.
“Yeah, though it might have been better if I had.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I’m getting to that,” he said.
Juniper could see he was eager to tell the rest. The malaise had gone from his eyes. The way he spoke, he didn’t seem crazy to her, like the other patients she had worked with. He was lucid, focused, and even charming. She nodded for him to continue.
“So, apparently while I was out of it, the old man said my spirit had left my body. He told me all this through Diego who translated. We were sitting by the fire that first night when I was able to sit up and eat something. To hold my spirit, the old man had bound it to a howler monkey or something crazy like that. I didn’t believe any of that shit, but I was happy to be alive and I expressed my gratitude. Then the old guy said something I wasn’t ready for. He said I was still sick but not my body. He said my soul was sick, burdened and he asked if I wanted help with that.”
“What do you think he meant,” Juniper asked.
“I don’t know. Again, I thought it was all bullshit but I was raised to be polite. That’s how I ended up in a ceremony the next night that totally fucked me up.”
“What kind of ceremony?”
“Honestly, I really couldn’t tell you. I was a dumb American kid who had mostly slept through my anthropology elective. There was this compound, this medicine I was to take as part of the ceremony. They called it mother Aya or ayahuasca. It was supposed to help lift the dark spirit off of me. I had already done plenty of stupid shit by then so I wasn’t worried. If it made the old guy who had saved my life happy, then I would take his medicine. What? The look on your face…”
“Sorry, I’m just uh… I can’t imagine taking such a risk. But go ahead.”
“Whatever that nasty brew was I imbibed, it peeled off the top of my skull and opened my brain to the universe. June, I can’t even describe the experience in a way that would make sense to you. Even if you’ve dropped acid, this was a whole new level.”
“Okay, well what happened after. Do you think it caused brain damage?”
“Ha, yeah. You could say that. But not in the way you think. The trip lasted so long I felt like I had traveled across decades, no centuries. When I came down the next morning, I felt completely different. Everything I saw had a depth I had never seen before. A flower, a caterpillar, a cloud, a face. It was like what a baby must experience, seeing everything for the first time.”
“That actually sounds pretty great. I’m not understanding what the problem is.”
“I didn’t have a problem. I thought I had found a key to unlock the universe. All the shit I used to worry about with my dad, my family, all of it was just gone, and then it started happening.”
“What? What started happening?”
“At first I had no idea what was happening to me. I’d been so out of it for days and then I’d really been out of it, taking that medicine trip, that the first time I saw the vision I just thought it was a side effect or something. We were packing up to leave and saying our goodbyes. This meant shaking hands or hugging each of the people I’d gotten to know in the little village.”
Wild paused at this point, and looked down at the grass. He plucked a few blades and studied them before he continued without looking up.
“June, I can’t describe exactly what it felt like, but I’ll try. The first older woman that hugged me, it felt like being tugged underwater. I was there, floating along, breathing air, and then suddenly I was in this underworld of colors so vivid and crazy. In this world I disappeared, my body, I mean. I was a part of the swirl of colors cascading and refracting and flowing everywhere. And then when she let go, I was back in the real world, but I had this connection to her, like this strange tugging sensation I felt right here.”
Wild gestured to the place at the center of his chest, just below his heart.
“And I knew she was going to die in a couple of months. It was a powerful feeling I had nothing to compare to. I thought it was my internal voice, you know, like you do sometimes– make some snap judgment about someone you bump into. But it was way different. The thought felt other. It didn’t come from me.”
He looked up at this point, and his eyes were pleading. He wanted Juniper to see him and to understand.
“I know how fucking ridiculous this sounds. Just let me finish. Every person I touched as we said our goodbyes tugged me down into the other place. Some didn’t take me so deep. A few were just a little bob below the surface, but the connection I felt right after, and the date of their death, those things were consistent. It was like being shot through the rapids of a river and struggling to stay above water. By the time we were on the trail the visions had subsided and I was mostly my normal self again. But I was worried. I knew something had broken inside me and I would never be the same.”
“Okay,” Juniper said. “Wild, I’m going to be honest with you. As a friend but also as someone who’s spent the past decade studying psychology. What you describe is a break with reality. It is a textbook example of delusional thinking that you and only you have some kind of magical power.”
Wild looked away from her and she watched his whole body give up like a blimp in the Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade rapidly losing air. He didn’t say anything, and after a minute he stood and walked away slowly back toward the facility, ignoring her calls for him to come back.
She reported the conversation and her concerns to her supervisor and Wild was put on twenty-four hour watch for fear that he might hurt himself. Juniper had not been able to stop thinking about him the entire weekend. She had done nothing wrong, but she felt terrible, like she had completely crushed him. On the following Monday when Wild did not show up to the group meeting, she went looking for him. He wasn’t in his room or in any of the common areas.
When she stepped outside, she saw him standing down by the pond where they had spoken three days prior. The sky was dark and ominous and threatening to rain at any moment. She hurried, cutting directly across the lawn rather than taking the gravel path. He heard her approach and turned around.
“Hey, you weren’t in group so I got worried. Wild, I’m sorry I upset you on Friday. I want to believe you, but you must understand I also want to help you. It’s my job.”
He didn’t say anything. He turned back around to look at the pond which was starting to dimple with the first drops of rain. In his right hand, he was holding a thick book. She watched as he opened it and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He opened it and looked at it for just a moment before turning back to her, stepping forward and placing it on the bench between them.
“What’s this?” she asked, reaching to pick it up.
He didn’t answer so she unfolded the sheet of notebook paper and studied it. It was a list of fifteen or twenty names and dates written in surprisingly fastidious handwriting. All of the dates were many years into the future. They seemed like science fiction. July 29, 2024 was a date when she imagined flying cars and tiny pills that could cure cancer. She recognized many of the names as colleagues of hers or staff who worked in the facility. There was one name/date pair that was underscored multiple times.
Jillian Carmichael - August 20, 1988
The date was less than a month away and Jillian was one of the only people at the clinic Juniper considered a friend. Occasionally they would go to a movie or grab dinner after work.
“You wrote these down?” she asked. “What am I looking at exactly? I’m assuming these are the dates you predict all these people will die.”
He didn’t respond or turn around, but he nodded slowly.
“How come I’m not on the list?” she asked.
“I don’t want to know when you’re gonna die.”
Just then there was a flash of lightning that strobed the entire landscape followed by a teeth-rattling crack of thunder. Then the sky opened up and rain came pouring down in great drenching buckets. She rushed to fold the paper and tucked it inside her shirt in the lining of her bra. Wild had not moved. She shouted to be heard above the storm.
“You need to come back inside now. They’ll come and force you if you don’t.”
He didn’t move or acknowledge that he had heard her. He just tilted his head back and let the rain fall on his face. Juniper made an exasperated sigh before turning and running back across the soggy lawn to the safety of the facility.
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