Chance Walker’s Secret: The Opening

  **Summer, 1995. Rural Missouri. Chance was eight years old.**

  The sun hung low and heavy over the back forty, turning the corn stalks into golden knives. Chance had been told a hundred times: *Stay away from the fence.* The new high-powered electric fence his father had installed to keep the coyotes out of the livestock hummed with a low, angry buzz, the kind that made your teeth ache if you got too close. Barbed wire twisted along the top, insulators gleaming white against the wooden posts. A faded red sign nailed crooked read: **DANGER – HIGH VOLTAGE – KEEP OUT.**

  Chance didn’t listen.

  He was chasing a stray barn cat that had darted under the bottom strand, tail flicking like a taunt. The boy scrambled after it, small hands reaching, boots slipping in the dry dirt. His fingers brushed the lowest wire—just a graze, nothing more.

  The world exploded.

  Electricity slammed through him like a freight train. Blue-white fire arced from the wire into his palm, up his arm, locking every muscle. His body jerked rigid, teeth clenched so hard he tasted blood. The cat yowled and vanished. Chance’s vision tunneled to black spots dancing like flies. He couldn’t scream; the current stole his breath. Time stretched—seconds became hours—then snapped.

  He hit the ground hard, face-first in the dust, the fence still crackling above him like distant thunder. His right hand smoked faintly, skin blistered red in a perfect line across the palm. Heart hammering wild, lungs burning, he lay there gasping.

  And then he *saw*.

  The farm didn’t look the same anymore.

  Overlaid on the ordinary world—like a double-exposed photograph—was something else. The air shimmered with faint, rippling color. The cornfield glowed soft green-gold, pulsing gently like a living heartbeat. The old oak by the barn radiated steady silver light, calm and ancient. But closer—much closer—something dark coiled around the fence post nearest him.

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  A thin, oily blackness, like smoke made of tar, clung to the metal. It had no shape at first, then resolved into a vague, humanoid smear with eyes like dying coals. It watched him. Not angry. Curious. Hungry.

  Chance blinked hard. The thing didn’t vanish. It tilted its head, as if amused by his fear.

  He scrambled backward on elbows and heels, breath coming in ragged bursts. The darkness receded slightly, but didn’t leave. It lingered at the edge of his sight, patient.

  Then he looked down at his own hands.

  A soft white-gold light surrounded them, faint but steady, like candle flame in daylight. It flickered brighter when he focused, dimmed when panic rose. His aura. He didn’t know the word yet, but he *knew* what it meant: this was good. This was him.

  He staggered to his feet and ran—half-stumbling, half-falling—back toward the house. The spiritual plane didn’t fade. It rode with him. The family dog barking in the yard had a warm amber glow. His mother, hanging laundry on the line, shimmered pale blue, peaceful but edged with worry. His father, stepping out onto the porch with a shotgun in hand after hearing the fence spark, carried a deeper gold threaded with iron-gray resolve.

  And in the distance, beyond the fields, Chance saw flickers of red-black spiking upward like distant fires. Things that didn’t belong here. Things that watched back.

  The doctor said it was a miracle he hadn’t been killed outright. Second-degree burns, a mild concussion, nerves jangled but intact. Chance’s father grounded him for a month and added more warning signs. His mother prayed over him every night, murmuring psalms.

  But Chance never told them what he really saw.

  That day on the fence line, the veil had torn open inside his head. The mind’s eye—third eye, clairvoyant sight, whatever the old books would later call it—had been forced wide. He could see the spiritual plane overlapping reality: auras blooming around every living thing, good ones warm and bright (gold, white, soft blues), evil ones cold and rotten (black voids, crimson spikes, sickly green deceit). Angels appeared as distant, radiant pillars of light. Demons slunk as shadows with too many edges, their presence like a drop in temperature.

  He learned to hide it quickly. Kids at school already called him strange. If he stared too long at someone, trying to read their colors, they’d ask why he was “being weird.” So he practiced in secret: sitting alone in the hayloft, watching the auras of birds, cows, his family. He tested it on strangers in town—farmers with steady earth tones, a traveling salesman whose red-black aura made Chance’s skin crawl.

  By twelve, he could spot a lie by the way a person’s aura flickered green at the edges. By fifteen, he saw his first full possession: a drifter in a diner whose human outline was hollow, black smoke pouring from the eyes like exhaust. Chance didn’t act then—he was still just a kid—but he remembered.

  The electrocution hadn’t just scarred his hand. It had scarred open his soul.

  Chance Walker grew up knowing the war was real, fought on a plane most people never glimpsed. Good and evil weren’t abstract. They wore colors. They walked among us.

  And one day, when the labor pains of the beast system began in earnest, that sight would make him one of the few who could see the tide rising before it drowned the world.

  He kept the secret close, like the silver dagger he’d one day forge. But the opening never closed. The spiritual plane stayed visible, a constant overlay on the everyday.

  Chance Walker was marked at eight. And the mark never faded.