Portals to the Vision Serpent

Carla Woody

Published in

ILLUMINATION Book Chapters

10 min readNov 7, 2021

Interior and cover design: Kubera Book Design. Cover art: ©2013 Carla Woody.

Sybilla

Chapter Six

With every ragged breath she took, Sybilla’s heart wrenched in emotional pain. The most important person in her life was keening with the most horrible lament, much worse than any wailing grief she’d ever heard in the war-torn places she ventured in her work. He was hers. Maybe that’s what made it unbearable.

As she tried to pull him to her, his little fists rained down on her in fury. His screaming became louder still.

“What have you done with her? You hate me! I always knew you did!”

“PJ!”

“You took away the only person who loves me! Why can’t you just go away and never come back?”

“Oh, PJ. I love you, honey.” In the course of trying to pull him to her Sybilla inadvertently grasped Preston tightly by both shoulders. He responded by jerking away sharply, tearing his shirtsleeve.

“I hate you! Go away! Go away! And don’t ever call me PJ again! PJ is for babies! You don’t know anything about me!”

His normally sweet face was red hot, twisted with intensity. He turned from her and ran outside, slamming the back door. The house shuddered from the fierce impact.

Their struggle knocked the wind out of her. Sybilla sank to the floor. She sat there dry-eyed but bereft. Her heart was a dark empty cavern. She wandered in it unable to find a way out. Her mind alternated between two thoughts.

How could this have happened?

What am I going to do?

Her anguished questions merely echoed over and over again in the cave of her interior. No other voice came back to answer her. Finally she began to cry. The sobs were uncontrollable.

Somehow she got through the day. Just before dark, Preston came home. She didn’t ask where he’d been. He refused dinner and went straight to his room, but she felt gratitude as much as relief.

“He really is a good boy,” she whispered to herself, noting that he hadn’t chosen to stay away and worry her further.

Before going to bed, she tapped lightly on his closed door. There was no answer, but the light shone underneath. She turned the knob slowly and peeked inside. He was lying on his bed curled in a ball facing away from her, a sheet over the lower half of his body. Sybilla walked over and sat on the edge next to him. Eyes shut and breath contained, he held his body frozen like a rabbit trying to hide from a predator. She laid her hand gently on his shoulder and thought she felt him flinch slightly. A tear slipped down her cheek. In his half-closed hand, she saw a stone.

Sighing, she stood and left the room, extinguishing the light. If Sybilla had looked back in the split second before darkness, she would have seen her PJ turning his head silently to catch sight of her, eyes filling.

It was 3 a.m. Sybilla was wide awake. She’d tossed this way and that for hours, finally giving up any attempt at sleep. Staring at the ceiling, she noted the more she gazed into the darkness above, the more the space seemed to recede, trying to suck her into some abyss. Breathing through a stuffy nose, tears trickled into small pools in the cups of her ears.

She became aware of a profound yearning, accepting it as the one lodged perennially inside. She always kept it buried in its furthermost place by remaining on the go, focused on her work, and the greater good she believed she served by her commitment to photojournalism. Now, however, the wash of misery surfaced and splashed over her. In despair, she spoke to the oblivion in a small child-like voice.

“I’m so tired of doing this alone.”

There was no audible answer, but something directed her attention into the burgeoning emptiness above her. From a place in her memory a face emerged — his face. A bittersweet pang in her chest identified the source of her longing. She made herself stay with it, to still the image, to engage with it. When times got loneliest, when she most hungered for a loving touch, some comfort after seeing things in her work that brought up vulnerabilities that she steeled herself against, she let his image become visible. This act was always a mixed gift that she gave herself, not knowing if it made things better or even worse. Even so, she’d been allowing herself at least this for nearly five years — after the grief had settled enough for her to stand it.

Sybilla thought wryly how she appeared to her colleagues from the outside. Talented and successful in her field, arising out of obscurity without any formal training, she was in demand. But not claimed where she most wished. The man she continued to love was long gone, just as her mother had prophesied, and she’d somehow alienated the child they’d made together.

She played over the question she’d asked herself earlier in the day and added more definition.

How could this have happened to me?

She had to admit that she knew part of the answer to that question. She held some responsibility, as she acknowledged everyone must for their lot. But much of it was still a mystery to her, remaining an impenetrable fog. She allowed herself to slip back in time by ten years. She couldn’t believe it had been that long ago.

Back then Sybilla lived in the small town of Johns Wake in northern Georgia, located just a piece down from the point where the state touched Tennessee and North Carolina. She belonged to the first family who settled the area, not counting any of the original residents who were successfully eradicated. Over time, her ancestors cleared the forest on the land they claimed for themselves, and bit by bit established a large cotton plantation. The Johns’ became the most prominent family for miles around, owning more than one hundred slaves. The sons and daughters mostly stayed close, and after marrying, either lived in the old mansion or built their own homes on the family land.

Back in the 1800s, Greenville, the town closest to their home, was renamed Johns Wake in honor of her grandfather, several generations removed, who had become a statesman and served the area well. But Sherman’s army marched through and destroyed everything. The Johns’ family fields and homes were burnt to the ground. Their slaves fled.

By 1865, the Johns’ family wealth had been effectively wiped out by heavy investment in the Confederacy and acts of war, a common story of the era. They never recovered their fortune. But Southern pride ran deep, and its memory was tenacious. The Johns’ continued to live the illusion of Southern aristocracy, a shabby gentility tied to the past, and the locals collaborated with them. This was the mythology Sybilla was born into, with all the expectations surrounding it perpetuated by the family members and that of the community at large.

It was the summer after high school and Sybilla was eighteen years old. Her mother told her she had the world at her feet. She’d endured being brought out at the requisite debutante balls and found it all pretentious and rather boring.

What interested her more was the camera she’d received as a graduation gift and learning how to capture subjects in changing light. That was exactly what Sybilla was doing early one morning, having ridden a few miles on her bicycle to a particular pasture she’d photographed previously in late afternoon. She was so trained on the scene that she didn’t detect a man approach on foot.

“Can you tell me how far the next town is?” He had spooked her. She quickly looked around for his car. There wasn’t one.

“Where did you come from? You shouldn’t sneak up on someone like that!” She gasped.

“Sorry,” he had a low laugh. “I thought you saw me.”

“Did you have a breakdown?” She considered him frankly, finding him unlike the young men from around there.

“Not the kind you mean,” he chuckled again, “More like a break out. I’m hitching around seeing what the country is like. Maybe finding my place.”

“Really?” Sybilla caught herself simpering. Disgusted with herself, she shook her head slightly, deciding she’d like to appear more sophisticated.

“I’m called Gabe.” He had a rakish appearance that drew her like a magnet. Startling blue eyes looked out beneath dark hair that fell below his eyebrows and curled around his ears. The color of his dark skin contrasted sharply with his light eyes, creating an otherworldly look, but which world was uncertain. He tilted his head backward, narrowed his eyes in such a way that he seemed to gaze right into her very soul. And maybe he had because that day he seized something of hers.

Like someone walking stealthily room-by-room through her interior house, he’d stolen her heart and captured every other part of her that summer. He was looking for work and Sybilla directed him to a nearby farmer who needed help. Curious, she found her way more and more frequently over to the shed where the farmer let Gabe sleep. It turned out that he knew something about photography and gave her a few pointers.

But that wasn’t the reason she went. There was something in her that wanted him. He spun intricate stories of adventures about hitching all over the West and Southwest, times just over the border into Mexico with the Indians, places unknown to her. Vague about where his home was or who he called family, Sybilla was intrigued. He was her opposite.

She’d only been outside Johns Wake a few times, down to Atlanta and once up to Nashville. Plus, her family stretched back generations in the same town. There was too much that was known and demanded. With his influence, she’d begun to realize how stifled she’d felt her whole life.

Even then, Sybilla acknowledged to herself something seemed a little dangerous about Gabe. But maybe she just wasn’t used to someone who got so revved up that electricity literally charged the air around him. It ignited her, too. Although he was just twenty-four, at least in her eyes, he had vast knowledge that she lacked.

She hungered for all the education he could give her. So when one day they were sitting in the tall grass of the pasture where they’d met several weeks before, and he looked intently at her, putting his hand lightly on her arm, she’d melted into him not waiting to see if he wanted something different. Sensing his increasing restlessness, she sought to bind him to her physically. Maybe it would keep Gabe in place for a while. With that act, Sybilla drastically changed the fabric of her entire life and veered off course from the one soundly prescribed for her. Paradoxically, she simultaneously began to find and lose herself.

Sybilla kept her visits with Gabe a secret, intuitively knowing that her mother, or any of her extended family, wouldn’t like it. Besides, their clandestine meetings heightened the drama, an addiction she was inadvertently catching from Gabe. But Johns Wake was a small town, and there wasn’t any hiding. There was no use trying to trace exactly how her mother got wind of her new involvement. One day Sybilla came home after yet another visit to the farmer’s shed, making a beeline for her room when she heard her mother’s voice.

“Sybilla, come in here. I want to talk to you.”

She turned and noticed her mother sitting stiffly in the front parlor that was never used. She must have been waiting for her but continued to stare out the window.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“What do you mean?”

Her mother turned furious eyes on Sybilla. “Don’t give me that! The entire town knows you’re running around with that nothing. I hate to think where he came from by the looks of him. Do you want to ruin yourself? Nobody to want you after he’s done with you?”

After all the years of toeing the line, Sybilla was weary of it. She drew herself up. “He makes me feel alive, Mama!”

“That’s nothing! Gone in a flash.” Her mother moved quickly, like some wild animal, and held her by the shoulders in a vise grip. “He’s not like us. His mongrel looks. Who knows what he is! I forbid you to see him again!”

“I’m not a child! I’m not ending up a dry sack like you!”

Instantly, her mother drew back her arm, open palm connecting with Sybilla’s cheek in a sharp retort. Stinging, Sybilla fled the house with her mother’s shrill words at her back. “He will leave you! Mark my words!”

Lying in her bed in the middle of the night now, Sybilla heard her mother’s voice as clearly as though she was physically there. But the truth was that she hadn’t seen her family since then — for two reasons. She couldn’t bear to go back to the small-minded place where she grew up. But even more so, she didn’t want to witness the triumphant I-told-you-so look on her mother’s face. As far as her mother was concerned Sybilla had made herself a pariah, disgracing herself and the family, by going against the rules and suffering the consequences.

©2013 Carla Woody. All rights reserved worldwide. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be directed to: Kenosis Press, P.O. Box 10441, Prescott, Arizona 86304. Email: info@kenosis.net.

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Find links to all chapters as they are published in the Table of Contents below.

Table of Contents

Synopsis and Author’s Note

Preston

Sybilla