Raising the Antigone, Ch. 1

PROLOGUE

He lay on the couch that served as his bed on board the Antioch, and gazed at the two pieces of metal that were nailed to the starboard wall. They were identical; two lengths of copper, bent three-quarters of their length to form rudimentary handles. They were beginning to darken in some spots, but as the man who had given them to the captain had promised, had not begun to oxidize.

As the Antioch made its way up the Atlantic Coast, headed slowly towards the northeast tip of America, tow things stood out about the ship. The first was that the pieces of metal on her wall had not only saved her from rot, but given her a newer, better life than she had ever seen. The second was that her captain, though he handles her with the experience of a veteran, was nineteen years old.

He had found her with the dowsing rods, restored her with his hands. Now he was taking her to Maine, where his new life awaited him.

CHAPTER ONE

May 6, 2005

Andrew Lewis was a unique boy, although the word applied to him in age alone. In appearance he passed as twenty-six, sporting a short beard and mustache, and carrying his extra weight on a smaller frame then most; though he claimed five-ten, he would never grow passed eight inches above the mark. In age, he could have been middle aged. He spoke with authority, matching vocabulary with any adult, and surpassing many unintentionally. He left the impression of being polite but passionate, a man of the world at only sixteen years of age.

What few new was his newly-discovered spirituality was taking leaps beyond even his own imagination.

He currently stood in dirty white sweats and a black long-sleeve shirt, unusual wear for the springtime. He was holding his arms out in front of him, bent at the elbow. In his hands were two pieces of what appeared to be a bent coat hanger. Richard Graves, the boy’s parents’ landlord, was standing beside him with his own set of coat hanger pieces, giving advice that would have raised eyebrows to any casual listener.

“Now, I’ve just put a stream of water down there. I’m not gonna tell you how deep, or where it is. Think you can do that?”

Andrew, Andy to everyone expect his mother, nodded and closed his eyes.

“How potable? A five out of ten?”

Graves nodded, and Andy registered this through closed eyes. Picture it, the older man’s voice rang through his head. Program it up in your head, and let your tool do the rest. He did, thinking only of water that was five out of ten, running, underground. As if suddenly recollecting something crucial, he opened his eyes, dropped his left arm, and spread the fingers of his right hand wide. He let the bent coathanger swing from the length of his humb like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. He stared at it intently, never letting his mind leave the thought of running, five-tenths water.

“How deep is it? Ten feet?” At this, the coathanger stopped swinging abruptly. “Okay, one.” The coathanger slowly began to move again, seemingly of its own accord.

“Two.” Still moving.

“Three?” The coathanger slowed, but did not stop.

“Four,” Andy muttered, knowing what would happen. It did; the hanger ceased movement.

“Five out of ten, three feet down; okay, I can do that.” He looked up at Graves, whose face had exploded into one of his wide grins. Andy grinned back, knowing that the same thought was traveling through both their minds: that he was a natural born dowser.

Andy raised the dowsing rods—that was, after all, the purpose the coat hangers were serving—and began to walk slowly across the Graves’ yard. The two rods began to move slowly apart, until they were pointing in opposite directions. He dropped them, and walked to the other side of the yard, and repeated the process. He found that, on the first go, he had found a width of no more than a foot. Exceptional.

Richard waved his hand absentmindedly over the ‘stream,’ and the rods fell to their original position. Andy stood for a minute, trying to process what had happened. The Voice of Reason, which he was viewing more and more as a blind traitor now, was trying to explain away what had happened. Simply the wind, or magnetics, or whatever the hell you want, but one could not find water via spirit.

Andy was grateful that the voice was down to only the merest whisper in his conscious. He knew that the more he practiced, the closer it would come to vanishing altogether. In truth, the Voice of Reason was only there out of habit; he had ceased listening to it long ago. He knew that there was such a thing as dowsing, and that he had a knack for it. He knew a good deal about spirituality now, thanks to the Graves, who had no reason to doubt a word of what they said. They were two of the healthiest people Andy had ever met; both were in their sixties, and pushing seventy, and both could function physically with the ease of a thiry-five year old in prime condidtion. According to the doctors, Rita Graves should be dead; Richard, close to it.

Rita Graves had been a chain smoker all her life, putting away Winston cigarettes by the pack. Current estimate made by the staff of the surgeon general said that she should have passed of compound lung cancers a decade ago. She showed no signs of cancer; more remarkably, she showed no signs of lung damage. Two packs of Winstons a day seemed to have no other effect on Rita than giving her healthy skin. Her husband, Richard, made her remarkable case seem as if she only dodged colds.

Richard was a retired aerospace engineer who, through the course of his life, had a hand in developing some key inventions of the modern world: the optical sensor used in “smart” weaponry today; a type of scuba gear that would allow a diver to stay below for three hours at a depth of four hundred feet. He had done many things in his life, from teaching a renowned diving class to creating the most sensitive sonic detector that had ever been invented; on the first day of its testing, it picked up a three-point earthquake in Hong Kong from Boulder, Colorado.

Since those days, he had been ravaged by brain cancer, which was reduced as much as possible after three surgeries. He lost an eye and part of his frontal lobe in the process, and modern science positively dictated that he should be on a third- grade intelligence level. His I.Q. was 130—ten points below the original—and he was, apart from faulty short term memory and loss of depth perception, just fine. Even more so, the cancer that should still have been in his brain had vanished without a trace. He attributed it to the wide variety of herbal supplements he was taking, some of them well known, others not so. Only himself, his wife, his doctor, and now a bulky teenager named Andy Lewis, knew how it had truly isappeared. Just as Richard was a born dowser, (and so, apparently, was Andy, though he had more of a talent for auras than water) so was Rita a gifted healer.

She stated before anything else that there was no trick, that she didn’t know how she did it, just that she could. She sensed auras well, and read them like books. “An aura, sweetie,” she had told Andy after he had convinced them that he was ready for this new aspect of the world, “is like an outline of the person. It’ll let you know what’s going on inside them, how they’re feeling, if there’s anything wrong with them, without even having to look. It’s all about frequencies, darling, because that’s all anything is. We’re all just different frequencies; everything’s got it’s own. I change them a little, draw energy in and put it where it should be to make things right.”

She had her “sessions” with any family that had an ailment, and after months of practice, she found her skill in healing remotely. No contact was nevessary; she often recalled the story of her giving a solid dose of pure energy to a terminally ill woman who should not have lived through the night. The woman not only survived, but demanded breakfast at six in the morning.

Rita had gone to work on her husband, and he had put in more than his fair share of self-healing as well. The pruduct was undeniable, as these were unthinkably healthy individuals for their age, though they didn’t look it.

Andy felt a pulling at the front of his mind, and he decided that he would, despite the weather warnings, take the family canoe out anyway. He, along with his parents, lived on Bayou Chico, an unremarkable little body of water on the Florida panhandle that emptied out into the Gulf of Mexico. They were one of the few waterfront houses not to own a sailboat or larger, but he never minded; the canoe had a good feel to it, and was a vital part of the weight loss program on which he randomly put himself. He knew his destination, too. Down a mile from his house lay a small island, basking under the shadow of a new bridge that had only been constructed a year back. There was nothing on it to speak of; it was a small piece of land, covered in reeds and pelicans on one side and a stretch of beach and trees on the other. He had been there before, after Hurricane Ivan had all but demolished Pensacola, and buried there in a large wooden box a thirty-two pack of bottled water and two cases of Meals, Ready-to-Eat®, which, according to his father, were “three lies.” He had only explored the reed-covered half of the island, though, and had never found time to investigate what may have lain on the other half of Zion, the name he had inexplicably given to the quiet bit of land.

“I’ve got to run,” he said to Richard. “I’ve got to get to get out on the bayou.”

“Oh?” Richard inquired, his blue eye staring at Andy with bemused interest. “What’s out on the bayou?”

“Something,” Andy responded in a far-off voice. “I don’t really know yet. I’ve been wanting to look at this island for a while, but never found the time.”

“Or,” said Richard, the grin on his face widening, “it didn’t want you finding it until now.
Go on. Just remember to practice, and the rest will come easy as pie!”

Andy grinned back, then narrowed his eyes in concentration. His brow wrinkled as if in deep thought. “Do you know that you’ve got a leak in the backyard?”

At that moment, Rita came bursting out the front door, a look of triumph spread on her kind face. “What did I tel; you, Richard? He’d find it sure enough, but you said he wasn’t ready yet! Dinner’s on you tonight, and I’m pretty hungry for steak.”

Andy strolled away, laughing out loud, but focusing internally on the pull he felt. Two months ago he would not have listened for a minute to his landlords as they revealed knowledge of what the general public labeled ‘mysticism.’ Now, after he had found for the first time religion and acceptance, he had no reason to doubt it. He was, after all, very open minded, and was dowsing and reading auras himself now. He could do it with ease, and so, according to the Graveses, could everyone else, if they would listen.

He was listening, though, to the wind, and his spine tingled with fear and excitement as he realized that his name was being whispered from down the bayou. From Zion.