Ezekial's Train, Chapter Two

Dropping the paper cup into a bin, Daniel Christiansen looks around. The ceilings of the room are tall, held up with a complex set of beams, rods, and struts and surrounded by a multitude of windows that give way to dust ridden beams of light that fall heavy onto the throngs of people. Stirring about, greeting friends and family or waiting to, they're eating, talking, and shuffling with cases and bags. He feels that he's in the rumbling belly of a colossus of brick, steel, and glass and it made him uncomfortable.

“Pardon me, suh,” A rather handsome black man stands not a meter from him Perhaps in his thirties or forties he wears a dark three piece suit a size too large for his frame and obviously old but well-kept. He smiles but he stands tall, exuding an air of both humility and importance all at once. “Are you a Mistah Ezekial?”

“Yah. How do you-”

“Oh, my apologies, suh. I beg ya pardon,” the man says quickly, “Now, I didn’t mean to startle ya.”

“Do you know me?” says Daniel, his voice shaking.

“Well, no suh, not in the flesh, suh. But, ya see, I know ya just as well.” The man notices the emotions playing out on Daniel’s face and shakes both his hands in the air in an odd, but seemingly friendly gesture, clasping them together in front of himself, “I beg ya pardon, suh. My name is Reverend Elijah Marshall Thompson and I reside here in Miami, suh. I preach at a little church in town, New Zion Baptist Church, not too far from here, and we got ourselves a mighty fine congregation and they’s hungry for the word of God, yes Lord. Ya see, my father was a Reverend and his mother was mighty God fearin’ woman so, you see, the word of God’s been in me ever since I was a little baby, suh.”

Daniel blinks and nods as the man prattles on. He speaks passionately but quickly and his words do more to confuse Daniel further than make clear the reason for the man approaching him. The Reverend Thompson seems to realize this as well, after a while. “Well, suh, ya see, I says all that to tell ya I’s a man of God. So, when I says I know ya, I mean to say that I dun seen ya before, in a vision, suh.”

It takes Daniel a second to latch onto the man’s statement, blinking and shaking his head all the while, “A vision?”

“Well, yes suh. A vision, suh. Ya see, the Lord sends me visions in the night. He sends ‘em to me in dreams while I’m sleepin, suh. Now he don’t send me too many, ya see, but he dun sent me a vision of you and I tell ya it was as clear as you stand right here in front ‘uh me.”
 
“You say that you had a vision . . . of me?”

“Why, yes suh, you can bet  I did, suh. And I saw ya clear as day and the Lord says to me, ‘Elijah, I’m sendin’ a man to ya. This man is mine, ya hear me. He’s a very important man and I needs ya to help him. Ya help him become the great man I made  him to be ‘cos that’s what I made ya to do, Elijah.’ And uh’ course I says, ‘Well, yes Lord. Anything ya says, Lord. I am yo good and faithful servant, Lord, and yo will be done.’”

Obviously this Rev. Thompson is an insane, foolish, religious nut. I'm sure he does this all the time, approaching young white men arriving to town alone, swaying them with words about God and convincing them they are special or important in his kind and commanding way. This is what Daniel thinks, and even more so, this is what he wants to believe. But Daniel has seen far too many things in his life to write off Rev. Thompson’s vision as mere absurdity or some underhanded plot.
Daniel has seen angels and alien landscapes and beasts with nearly a dozen heads and horns and wings and teeth of iron and eyes like fiery pits. He has been to heaven and hell and planets beyond the reaches of which men will ever achieve. He has been spoken to by beings beyond this earthly realm in languages the human tongue cannot even begin to replicate.

He's never been certain whether these occurrences occurred solely within his own mind or if they were in fact what they appeared to be, so it is hard to not be frightened and wary of Rev. Thompson’s claims, but he knows that there is likely something strange and true to Rev. Thompson’s words because the one thing that remained constant throughout all of Daniel’s strange encounters with other worldly beings is that they all called him by the same name. Ezekial.