Soul Split

Try as he might, Jackson Harris couldn’t rid himself of an overwhelming feeling of guilt. Day after day, night after night, it clawed at his heart like some inner vampire, eager to drink his blood and devour his flesh.

His internal pain left external marks. His once tan skin grew progressively paler. His slender but fit body lost enough weight to make his ribs visible. His blue eyes lost their luster, and the skin below them darkened. The worry lines on his face grew deeper and longer.

Why did he feel so guilty? That was the hardest part—he had no idea. He would have understood the cause of his misery if only he could remember it. But nothing in his past would account for such a drastic feeling.

The magnitude of his guilt suggested that he had murdered someone in cold blood, stolen someone’s life savings, or tortured someone as his guilt tortured him. But he could recall nothing even remotely that drastic.

In truth, he was no angel. He didn’t go out of his way to help others, but he never went out of his way to harm anyone, either. Mostly, he took care of himself, but a lot of people thought first of themselves, didn’t they?

There was a time when he saw someone in distress by the side of the road and didn’t pull over. But these days, such a scene could be a trick. Lots of people had been robbed after pulling over to offer help, hadn’t they? Later on, he found out that it hadn’t been a trick and that the person whose car had broken down was shortly thereafter hit by another vehicle and killed. But Jackson couldn’t predict the future, now, could he? And if he’d stopped, maybe he would have been killed, too. How would that have been any help to anyone?

There was also a time when he’d stopped taking a friend’s calls because the guy had gotten to be so annoyingly needy. It wasn’t Jackson’s fault that the guy turned out to be suicidal and killed himself right after his last failed attempted to reach Jackson. If the guy had made clear what was happening, Jackson would have taken his call. Nobody could expect him to be a mind reader.

As Jackson thought about it, his life was full of incidents like that, but none of them were his fault. No, there had to be something else, something so traumatic that he’d suppressed the memory of it.

That thought led him to waste many hours with psychiatrists, who tried everything from hypnotherapy to transcendental meditation to jolt loose any repressed memories. Nothing surfaced from the murky waters of his subconscious mind.

This disappointment led Jackson to start consulting with a remarkably eclectic selection of religious leaders: priests, ministers, and rabbis to start with. They all disappointed him. They wanted repentance from him, but what did he have to atone for?

Jackson tried driving in an effort to push his guilt out of his mind by giving it something else to focus on. Driving didn’t help him at all. He still felt haunted by … something, though whatever it was remained elusive. Perhaps more would be better. Perhaps farther from home, as if he could somehow run and hide from his past, drive until his tires had no tread, and he had no idea where he was.

One weekend, Jackson got in his car and headed north on US-101, toward Santa Barbara. He’d intended to do some sightseeing, but his head started pounding as he was passing Summerland, so he took the next offramp.

His headache subsided before he even had a chance to park, which was odd, to say the least. And though his tires still had tread, he realized he wasn’t sure exactly where he was. Coast Village maybe, or Montecito. Not that it mattered much. His guilt still clung to him like the scent of tobacco clung to a heavy smoker.

Jackson was definitely in or near Santa Barbara. The distinctive Spanish Colonial Revival architecture, with its white stucco walls and red-tile roofs, was unmistakable. He found some unmetered street parking, got out of the car, and walked around a little, trying to get his bearings.

He had parked in what looked like a downtown area, though it was far too small to be downtown Santa Barbara, and he didn’t recognize any of the street names. Each street housed an assortment of nondescript small businesses, none of which interested him.

Just beyond the row of businesses on the south edge of downtown, Jackson noticed what looked like a large grove of oak trees. The branches jutted up well above the roof line. Coast oak trees weren’t unusual in this area, but a large stand of old trees seemed out of place in a suburban setting.

Drawn by curiosity, Jackson walked in the direction of the oaks. The moment that he passed the last row of businesses, he found himself on a residential street. To his left was a small park, currently empty. To his right stood the coast oaks, partially obscured by a small church that had been built in front of them. Because there were also oaks on each side, the church seemed at first glance to have grown up in the midst of them rather than being built.

That wasn’t the only thing that caught Jackson’s attention. Though the downtown area had been single-mindedly dedicated to Spanish Colonial Revival architecture, and the houses further down the block from the church followed the same pattern, the church itself looked as if it had come from a rural community in New England.

Rather than red roof tiles, the church had gray shingles, and its exterior walls were clapboards painted white rather than smoother surfaces covered by white stucco. There was a steeple, though it wasn’t particularly tall. He hadn’t even noticed it from downtown, though he should have been able to see it.

Off to one side was a simple sign with “Church of the Oaks” written on it in bold green letters. Jackson found the lack of denominational identification strange. The simplicity of the building and the church’s name told him the church wasn’t Catholic. If he had to guess, it must be some kind of nondenominational Protestant church.

Even though he’d found his earlier attempts to gain comfort from religion unsatisfied, he found himself walking toward the church, anyway. Perhaps stumbling upon it like this had been more than just coincidence.

Perhaps the solution to his problem lay within.

Jackson pulled open the door, which was heavier than it looked, and went inside. The narthex was as plain as the exterior architecture. The sanctuary itself, with its multicolored stained-glass windows, would have been a brighter space but for the fact that the oaks effectively blocked out any sunlight that might have filtered in at this time of day, leaving the room dependent on artificial lightning. The size of the room and the small number of pews suggested a small congregation.

A man Jackson took to be the minister stood near the front, looking expectant, almost as if he had known Jackson was coming. But of course, that was impossible.

The minister gave him a wave, and Jackson walked down the center aisle toward him. The man wore a plain brown suit with no clerical collar, but Jackson supposed that was common among Protestant ministers outside of church services. The minister was somewhat older than Jackson, a difference indicated by the man’s thinning hair, once brown but now liberally sprinkled with gray, and by his thickening waistline. He greeted Jackson with an unsettling look of concern and motioned for him to take a seat in the front pew. The minister sat down next to him.

“I’m Reverend Falco,” said the minister, offering a hand. Falco sounded Italian, and therefore probably Catholic, to Jackson. But Falco had introduced himself as a minister.

Somewhat off balance, Jackson took the hand, realizing as he did so that his own was shaking. “Jackson Harris,” he mumbled. Falco leaned in as if he hadn’t quite heard the name.

“What can I do for you?” he asked in a worried tone.

Faced with telling yet another stranger what his problem was, Jackson hesitated for a moment.

“I can refer you to a substance abuse program—” began Falco.

“I don’t need that,” snapped Jackson. But a second after, he realized that he probably looked as if he needed one. Nothing made his problem feel even worse than a stranger assuming he was a strung-out junkie.

Forcing himself to speak, Jackson stumbled his way through the clearest description of his problem that he could manage. Falco listened patiently until he was done.

“The guilt reaction suggests that you really do blame yourself for problems that you say aren’t your fault,” said Falco. “You can’t change the past, but you can do better in the future. Put more effort into actually helping others, for example. That could ease your guilt.”

“But I really haven’t done anything wrong,” said Jackson. “Isn’t there a way to just get rid of the guilt? I mean, like an exorcism or something?

Falco struggled for a moment, as if trying to choke back a laugh. “A guiltorcism? I’m afraid there is no such thing, and with good reason. A demon can be exorcised because it isn’t really part of you. Your guilt is part of you. It can’t be banished, except by your own efforts.”

At first, the conversation had given Jackson a ray of hope, but now, it appeared to be boiling down to the same advice he’d heard so often before—do a lot of work to atone for something that wasn’t really his fault.

Jackson got up, thanked Falco for his time, and came pretty close to running out of the church. Falco took a few steps after him but must have realized that Jackson wasn’t going to come back.

“Don’t take the easy way out!” Falco yelled after him.

Jackson resisted the temptation to turn and look back. He was afraid he would see in Falco’s eyes what he’d seen in the eyes of so many others—disappointment.

But as Jackson thought about the conversation, he grabbed hold of a couple of things he hadn’t noticed initially. First, Falco seemed to treat demons as if they were real rather than just a symbol for temptation or something like that. Second, his parting yell suggested that there might really be an easy way out for Jackson to take.

By the time Jackson reached LA, a plan had already formed in his mind. No religious leader was going to help him. That much was clear. But an occultist might.

Jackson was no fool. He knew that occultism attracted a lot of crackpots and charlatans. He spent considerable time combing the internet for people who looked as if they might be legitimate. It didn’t take him long to recognize red flags, like fortune tellers who included a fine-print disclaimer about providing only entertainment or supposed magic practitioners who thought that the Necronomicon was a real ancient grimoire, not a fictional creation by H.P. Lovecraft.

However, after a while, a few promising leads emerged from the mountainous heaps of madness. Jackson followed up each one as meticulously as he could without giving out his credit card number. One by one, they disappointed him just as much as the clergy had. Maybe more. At least the religious leaders had been sane and honest, if unhelpful.

He was down to his last California lead, a psychic in Madisonville, a small town a little east of Merced, who claimed to be able to heal a soul split in two by trauma. That was the opposite of what Jackson was looking for, but if the psychic really knew how to merge two parts of a soul into one, maybe he’d know how to split a soul. That might be grasping at straws, but it was all Jackson had left.

The drive to the Merced area was a long one, so he had to wait until the weekend to go. Fortunately, the psychic had weekend hours. Jackson wasn’t sure whether that should have been a red flag or not, but at this point, he had little left to lose.

Madisonville wasn’t much wider than twenty blocks at any point, so it was relatively easy to find the home of “Dr.” Simon Cyprian, alleged psychic. Based on visits with others, Jackson had expected to see a fairly odd-looking house, but what he found was so conventional that the place even had a white picket fence. The house itself, a two-bedroom one bath tract house by the look of it, was also painted white. The front lawn was well mowed, and the landscaping well-trimmed.

The “doctor” himself wasn’t what Jackson expected, either. He was a clear-eyed, clean-shaven, serious-looking, middle-aged man of about average height and weight, with a mixture of black and gray hair. Rather than dressing to emphasize that he was running a business, he was dressed casually, in a James Madison High School T-Shirt and jeans.

“I apologize for my outfit,” he said as he shook Jackson’s hand. “But this is, after all, casual Saturday.”

Jackson wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or put off by Cyprian’s seeming normality. Never having met a real psychic, he had nothing to which he could compare the doctor.

“Well, I was expecting a black cloak covered with stars and crescent moons,” said Jackson. He had intended that line as a joke, but the quizzical way Cyprian looked at him suggested that the joke had fallen flat.

“That kind of look is mostly for sorcerers,” replied Cyprian, smiling as he paid the joke back with interest. Jackson let himself relax a little. At least, this experience didn’t seem as if it was going to be awkward.

Cyprian ushered him into the second bedroom, which the doctor had laid out as a meeting room with one circular table and several chairs. Jackson noticed the absence of a crystal ball on the table. Nor was a pentagram etched into the tabletop. The ceiling hadn’t been painted black and then splattered with silver to represent the astrological signs. There wasn’t even a deck of Tarot cards in sight.

“Sit,” said the doctor. “Can I get you anything?”

“No,” replied Jackson. “Just answers.”

Cyprian nodded. “Right down to business. That’s good. So, what are your questions?”

Jackson talked for quite a while about his pointless guilt and his desire to separate from that part of his soul.

“My specialty is healing that very kind of separation,” said Cyprian. “It is possible to go the other way, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Why not?”

“Well, that kind of separation can only be induced by trauma, and there’s no way to peal the guilt out of yourself. What we might be able to do is separate the good from the evil. If the evil part of you is gone, the good part has no reason to feel guilty.”

“Pardon my cynicism, but how much is that process going to cost?”

Cyprian smiled. “Nothing upfront. You can pay me if you’re satisfied.”

Jackson didn’t know how to react. The whole thing sounded too good to be true. But if it was a scam, he didn’t see how Cyprian could profit from it.

“What do I have to do?” Jackson asked.

“Well, trauma is involved. How do you feel about waterboarding?” Cyprian waited for Jackson to gasp and then smiled. “I was just joking. I have an easier method.”

Cyprian got up and left the room for a moment, after which he returned with a heavy looking book.

“This is The Book of Cyprian, named after the saint from which my family name came. If you read it from cover to cover, you will attract the attention of a being who can help you.”

Cyprian dropped the book on the table with a thud.

“What kind of being?” asked Jackson.

“That’s complicated, but is that really important if the being gets the job done?”

“I suppose not,” said Jackson.

After a few more questions, Jackson thanked Cyprian, took his book, and made the long drive home.

The book proved to be a huge bore—hundreds of pages of what seemed like a medieval grimoire. It took almost two weeks, but Jackson finally finished it.

As soon as he’d read the last word, he felt a chill run down his spine.

“What do you want?” asked a voice that sounded like a hoarse whisper with a weird echo. The chill spread through Jackson’s entire body.

“I … want to separate the evil part of my soul from the good part and remove it.”

“Done!”

Jackson shuddered, but not from the cold. He felt a moment of intense pain followed by relief. For the first time in weeks, the guilt was gone, and he found himself caring about other people. How could he make his neighborhood a better place?

A loud knock shook Jackson’s front door. He glanced at the clock. The time was just after midnight. Who could be knocking at such an hour? Maybe it was someone who needed help!

Without hesitating, the new and improved Jackson hurried to the door and threw it open without even looking out the peephole.

Outside stood a man whose identity was unmistakable, even by the dim glow of the porchlight. It was Jackson himself, with a mischievous grin on his face and a dark gleam in his eyes.

“Are you … are you my twin?”

Other Jackson smiled more broadly. “Evil twin might be a better description. The part of your soul that you threw away didn’t just vanish, you know. It had to go somewhere, so it became me. But you see, there’s only room in the world for one of us.”

Jackson didn’t notice the knife until it was already buried in his gut.