Soulseeker

The first time Derek noticed the strange lights he had just turned seventeen. Literally. It was around midnight and he was with some of his friends, having just gotten out of the movie theater to see a late-night showing of Kick-Ass, which by the way really did kick ass. As soon as they were outside the theater, his four friends tackled him to the ground in a birthday hug.

“Seventeen and lookin’ better every second!”

“I dunno, he’s still a scrawny bitch to me.”

“What the hell do you know, McCoy? Derek could totally take you.”

The jeers and light teasing were all a part of the firm friendship that they had formed throughout their high school years, and now with senior year a little less than a week away, it seemed as though nothing would change. They would always be, in their peers’ eyes, the Fantastic Five, the silly schoolyard name given to them when they were in elementary school. Let’s face it, though. Schoolyard names tend to stick forever.

Underneath the teeming pile of manly B.O., leather, and jeans, Derek laughed. The crazy antics, the faux-fighting, and the loud banter...it was all so familiar. Derek liked familiarity. He was most comfortable with it, as most people usually are.

They only stood up from the ground when one of the movie theater attendants yelled at them to get a move on. Derek brushed the dirt off his clothes and sandwiched himself smack in the middle of the group of boys as they slowly made their way into the parking lot.

“I’m thinking a diner run, to celebrate,” said Pete McCoy, the boy directly to Derek’s left.

“You just want to go to the diner to see that hot waitress,” Nathan Parker teased on Derek’s far right. “You know she goes to the other high school in town?”

“So?” Pete retorted.

“So you’re fraternizing with the enemy, dumb shit! She’s off-limits.”

“Nothing is off-limits for Pete, dude,” Carver Gibson chuckled as he broke off from the group to walk ahead. “You should know that.”

“Yeah. Remember that chick at Ashley Benson’s party last year? She was with her boyfriend. Pete still went after her,” the final of the fifth friend, Jake Livingston, added with a laugh. “I swear, I thought her boyfriend was gonna kick your ass.”

“He should’ve,” interjected Derek. “If she’d been my girlfriend, you wouldn’t be breathing right now, man.”

“And here we cycle back to the whole ‘I could take your skinny ass in a fight any day’ spiel,” Pete said.

It was then that a bright light caught Derek’s attention, just out of the right corner of his eye. He turned and saw a girl his own age walking along on the sidewalk by herself. She seemed to have her earphones plugged into her ears and she was dancing lightly to the beat of the song as she walked.

At first Derek thought the light was from her iPod, or maybe a reflection off of her shiny purse, but the longer he looked, he noticed that the light was coming from her, or more specifically, from her back. He narrowed his eyes and stared. Was she wearing a light bulb on her jacket or something? Had she Bedazzled the poor thing into oblivion? But no, as far as Derek could see, there was nothing there that was clearly emitting this bright white light that took up a spot on her back the size of a dinner plate.

“Derek?” It was Jake. “What’re you looking at, man?”

“Nothing. That damn light got in my eyes,” Derek said.

“What light?” Pete looked all around him but his eyes never lingered on the girl.

“That light over there, by that girl.” Derek pointed.

The four boys looked.

Carver gave him an odd stare. “I don’t see anything, man.”

“I think he’s just smitten,” Nathan said in an exaggeratedly feminine voice. “He probably sees a halo above her head or something. You gonna go over there and say something to the pool girl, or just stare?”

“Shut up.” Derek shoved him lightly and grinned. He let the mysterious light fade from his mind.

The next morning, he saw the same girl’s photo in the local newspaper.

She had been knifed in the back and murdered only hours after he saw her.



The oddities continued for weeks.

And so did the lights.

Derek saw a bright light shining in a man’s eye, once when he was at the mall with Jake. He also saw one at the crown of a toddler’s head, and around a boy’s neck.

Later that day, a drug lord shot the man in the eye. The toddler fell off a second-floor balcony and cracked his head open. The boy hung himself from the rafters of his grandparents’ barn.

All of this Derek gleaned from the newspaper obituaries. He took to reading them as though he would suffocate without doing so. This couldn’t be a coincidence. The lights, the people, the deaths...they were all connected somehow.

He couldn’t figure out what bothered him more: that this was at all possible, or that this was happening to him and him alone.

Nobody else could see the lights, that was for sure. He had asked Jake about the ring around the teen boy’s neck, but Jake swore he saw nothing there. Unless he was lying about it...but why lie about something so seemingly trivial? It didn’t make any sense. None of this made any sense.

At first, Derek tried to ignore the coincidences, but the more times he saw the light, and the more people that died, the stronger the feeling became that this wasn’t merely a coincidence. This was something.

School began in September, and soon Derek was inundated with piles of homework, not to mention the looming certainty of the ever-terrifying senior research paper that would be due at the very end of the school year. Though Derek had promised himself that he would get a head start as soon as possible, he found that he couldn’t concentrate, what with the ‘lights thing’ going on almost weekly. He began to keep a notebook and wrote down a lot of his sightings, searching for any patterns in the deaths.

Eventually he figured out that the light coincided directly with where the person’s final death blow would happen. The light came from the first girl’s back because that’s where she was stabbed; then it came from the toddler’s head because he cracked it open, etc.

A week after this revelation, Derek saved someone’s life for the first time.

A month and a half after that, and twelve saved lives later, Death paid North Moorwich a visit.