'Ezekiel saw the wheel' from a Novel by Fiver

Ezekiel saw the wheel...…

through his bedroom window, always at night and always more or less in the same place. It would come in from the east, sailing over the thick roof of trees above Miller’s ravine all lit up and happy looking like a birthday cake in a dark room before every one starts singing. Most of the time that’s what it made him feel like too.

Sometimes it would hover over the woods to the south for a while, spinning and wobbling like the plates on top of poles he’d seen on Ed Sulluvan or Captain Kangaroo. Sometimes it would turn on end and he could see a ring of lights, red, white, and green, turning slowly like the distant outline of a Ferris wheel. Ezekiel knew it wasn’t a dream but it was something that he accepted in the same way he would have if it were a dream.

It might not have always been there but it seemed to Ezekiel that whenever he went to look, it always was. It didn’t matter if he was lying in bed waiting to fall asleep, as he often had to do, or if he’d popped wide awake in the early hours, he would always, somehow start thinking about the wheel. Not like the way he thought about clouds or why words meant what they did, it was more like remembering than thinking, but it wasn’t exactly like remembering either. It was more like the way he knew when someone was behind him or when the first snow was going to fall. He would lie in his bed and feel the wheel coming like it was a secret being whispered by god. The feeling would get stronger, as if he was slipping into a powerful, grown-up dream where things were real all of the time. So real that he didn’t have to talk or worry about whether or not he understood things because somehow he already knew everything he needed to know. When this feeling had overtaken him and he felt quiet and strong, he would kick off the covers, tiptoe to the south window and peer out. Sometimes he had to wait a little while but he knew it would always appear and, usually just when he began wondering where it was, the wheel would come sailing along.

Sometimes it would already be there when he got to the window, hovering over the trees as though it had been waiting for him. On those times Ezekiel could feel something coming from it, less than awareness, more like a presence. Often when he was feeling deeply sad because dad and mom were yelling at each other again or he’d made a big mistake at school, the wheel would be waiting when he went to look. It would stay in the same place for a long time rocking gently as if it were floating on water. It was almost like the wheel was staying still long enough to make sure that Ezekiel knew it was there. He would gaze at it, chin resting on his hands until the wideness of the world with the wheel in the middle of it, drained away his sadness and he felt like he belonged where he was again. The wheel would then abruptly start moving and he would watch it fade into the night sky until it was just another unmoving star. It made him wonder if all of the other stars were wheels too.

Ezekiel had tried to tell his older brother Damien about the wheel once. Damien had gotten so mad that he’d smashed the Leggo skyscraper he’d been building with his fist hard enough to shatter it. Mom had come upstairs, yelled at both of them and made them go to bed early. Later when the lights were out, Damien had growled down at him from the top bunk.“There’s no such thing as the wheel.” You just had a stupid dream. Don’t ever talk about your dreams or people will think you’re stupid and crazy, understand?” Ezekiel didn’t understand. He thought about asking some questions but decided against it. When Damie got like this it was better not to talk to him. Besides, something inside him seemed to know that the wheel was supposed to be a secret.“Okay Damie, I won’t never tell anyone else about the wheel.” “EVER, stupid! You won’t EVER tell anyone else about the wheel. Now shut up and go to sleep!” Ezekiel had felt the wheel that night but he didn’t go to look at it. He knew that Damien was awake and waiting to yell at him if he got up. It was all right though, he knew the wheel would understand.

Although it always went from east to west, the wheel wasn’t always the same distance from his window. Sometimes it would come in much further away so that it looked less like a wheel and more like one big, twinkling light. Other times it would be much closer, what seemed like only a few miles away, and Ezekiel could feel something of its actual size, which he felt must be very big. One summer night, because Damien was sleeping over at Tim Burdock’s house and he felt particularly brave and playful, he had waited until the wheel was just passing directly south and called out,

“ HEY!”

-The wheel had stopped dead in its tracks and the lights that constantly chased themselves around its rim froze where they were. Ezekiel was so startled that he didn’t move for a long time.

Neither did the wheel.

Finally, he took a deep breath, carefully lifted the screen up so he could see clearly and, burning with a resolve far too intrepid for a little boy only six years of age, whispered,

“C’mere.”

The wheel’s lights started to spin again and very slowly it began to grow in size.
At first Ezekiel had been thrilled and gripped the windowsill with anticipation like a cast-a-way savoring the sight of a rescue ship but as the wheel began to draw nearer he began to feel strange and serious.
He could plainly see the swing sets lit up like noontime as it passed over the playground next to Miller’s ravine. It was bigger than he’d thought. It was bigger than the whole playground. When it came within a block of Phil’s corner store on Longbridge, the big black dog that lived across the street started to bark frantically but as the wheel moved slowly overhead the dog yelped loudly and fell silent. Ezekiel could feel the skin tighten around every hair on his head as he watched the streetlights dimming one by one when it drifted over Kindleburger Avenue. The wheel was closer now then it had ever been and, again Ezekiel could feel a presence, but he felt something else too, something that hadn’t been there before…something bigger.
As the wheel came over Bankson’s lake it seemed to pull a big hump of water along behind it and the raft where Ezekiel always fed the bluegills with Stella Lancaster spun like a top in it’s wake. His eyes were starting to sting from holding them open but he didn’t dare blink. It was so big! Bigger than anything he had ever seen. The wheel drifted silently over Maybury common and as it rose above the top of the tall steeple of the Church of Christ in Spirit at the end of Kent Road, the big blue neon cross on the front turned a deep blood red and blinked out. There was no noise coming from it at all, but that almost made it worse because it was so big that Ezekiel kept thinking it should make some kind of noise. It was so much bigger than he’d ever imagined and it still kept getting bigger.When the wheel reached the small patch of woods that ran between Kent road and the hill top where Ezekiel's house was, a pale blue beam of light seemed to almost fall from the it’s dark underside. The crickets that had been ringing like bells all night abruptly stopped and the only sound he could hear was his heart pounding in his chest. The blue light seemed to casually search the hidden ground as the wheel drifted above the tree line and a cold, electric sweat washed over Ezekiel's whole body. He could feel the gravity shift as he watched it come over the woods, slowly filling up the whole sky. The lights around it’s vast rim were green, red and white but everything around was lit up with a blinding white light that was so bright it seemed to squeeze around solid objects, making them thinner. The lights were brilliant, perfect colors that seemed to be made of lots of different colors and they didn’t really blink on and off as they had seemed to do from a distance. Up close they moved like liquid and seemed to flow in and out of one another. The white light they threw off was so bright that it seemed to spray through the south window and burn away all of the shadows in the bedroom. Ezekiel began to tremble, as the wheel loomed close over the house. It was so big...so incredibly big that he couldn’t see all of it. Tears began to well in his eyes. It wasn’t the wheel anymore; not the happy wobbling thing that had sailed passed his window like a big Frisbee. This was a gigantic swirling nightmare, like a weird, dark city floating above his house, looking down at him like he was a bug on a sidewalk. He wasn’t a brave, intrepid soul anymore, he felt small and frightened and foolish, like Mickey Mouse with all of the brooms marching over him. He wanted the big, frightening wheel to fly over his house and keep going until it was just the wheel again, but he knew that it wouldn’t go away. It was rotating slowly now, and the blue beam was sweeping back and forth over the backyard, stopping over the sandbox briefly, then the blow up pool with the green stuff growing in it, then Dad's car in the driveway. What if Dad came out and saw the wheel? What would Damie do when he found out what had he had done? Ezekiel felt his throat closing and the tears went chasing down his face. "Why does this have to happen?" he thought, "Why?"

Ezekiel stopped crying...

He remembered why.

He stepped back from the window and took a deep breath. He fixed the wheel in a steely gaze, extended his arm, palm up and with voice like iron, said:“Stop!”

The Wheel stopped.
The blue beam went out and it hung in the sky above the house, utterly motionless and silent.

Before it’s terrifying size could overwhelm him again, Ezekiel said, with the same iron voice:“Go back!”The wheel seemed to jump back over the ravine so fast it was like a camera trick on Bewitched or Lost in Space. It just suddenly stopped being over the house and started being across the ravine. Ezekiel stood at the window taking slow, deliberate breaths. A fog of perspiration rose from his cotton pajamas as the cold sweat boiled away from the rush of hot adrenaline. He felt totally alert but strangely calm, almost peaceful. The wheel was where it usually was, directly south. It was stationary, as on those times when it seemed to be looking in on him. Ezekiel stood for a long time, listening to his breath and trying to see the wheel the same way he used to see it before he'd changed everything. He felt just like he did when he'd thrown too hard during a "dodge ball" game at school and hurt Jane Rosegrant. Everyone had been having so much fun until then but after he'd hurt Janie, it was all over with. It was like the sun had suddenly gotten dimmer.

"Did I ruin everything?"

he asked aloud. The wheel did nothing except continue to wobble slowly as it often did when it was waiting for him. Ezekiel dropped to his knees to rest his chin on his hands so he could watch it rock and try to feel better but as he did so, the wheel did something it had never done before. It flipped end over end like a coin being tossed and flashed its lights very brightly in sequence. First all green, then all red, then all white and then all at once before going back to the usual clockwise chasing lights. Ezekiel found this delightful and immediately began giggling and waving.The wheel flew off then, like a dragonfly over a lake, disappearing without a trace.

Ezekiel did not remember when he first began seeing the wheel, or when he stopped seeing it. Later in life, he seldom, if ever thought about it just as he seldom thought about the many other strange events that he was part of or had witnessed in the little town of Spindrift.It wasn’t because he had come to believe that none of it was real. He knew he hadn’t imagined any of it. Perhaps he even understood that if he had ever thought to tell anyone they would have found such things unbelievable but that had nothing to do with why he never did. It simply never occurred to him to tell anyone because the few, dim memories he still held were no more paranormal to him than having once believed in Santa Clause. Perhaps it was because he had long believed that such things were over and done with. Perhaps it was that he had so accepted his truly odd childhood that he had all but forgotten it.

Perhaps it was something else altogether.