Car Wars at Lake Chetaqua High School
Dreamed about 5 A.M. on April 29th, 2017.
May first, 1980 started as a rather quiet sunny morning at Lake Chetaqua High School. Students were rushing off to homeroom. “May Day!” May Day!” competed with the other topics of the day, even drowning out the burgeoning excitement concerning the ever-nearing summer break.
Unknown to most of the townspeople and the students, the local coven, following a night of celebration, had finalized its plans for war. Lake Chetaqua was slated to become a dark sanctuary for the dark master.
The Lord Most High had other plans. Among those plans was the use of a most unlikely servant in a most untimely manner.
…
April 28th, 2017. An old man named Wayne fell asleep about the usual time and did not wake up throughout the night as was his custom. The Lord talked to him in a dream, moments following his entrance into the lands of nocturnal hibernation.
“I have work for you to do, my servant,” said Jesus. “Tonight, I want you to complete a task for Me and gain some battle training. I am sending you back to school!” Jesus laughed warmly, “I know that you have had nightmares about being forced to go back to school. But this will be quick, and you will be too busy to be concerned. You will, however, be young once more, Wayne. Your mind and spirit, will for a short while, be in young Wayne again. I know that as of late you have been longing for the strength and health of youth. Young Wayne will not remember the day with clarity, but for old Wayne, it will be a day never forgotten.”
…
Just before the bell, Wayne entered his homeroom, taking a seat. As young Wayne prepared to listen to Mr. Huzzah and Miss Harlie-Quinn, the band teachers, vocalize the day’s announcements, life temporarily ceased to exist. Following the proclamations and the bell that announced the first class of the day, it appeared to everyone as if young Wayne was on his way to history class. It was not. Old Wayne was about to relive a lecture about Nazi Germany and “Kristallnacht: Night of the Long Knives.”
Mr. Fitzel paused in his recitation to brandish a photo of a crystal knife, “Who can tell me what this is and what it has to do with Adolph Hitler’s rise to power?” I remembered the answer and said nothing. Seconds later one of the “Straight A” girls squealed, frantically waved her hand in the air, and then provided the correct answer.
At the same time, a wispy form swirled from the photo. I could not see the others, but I could feel their hard coolness and dark taint. I began to pray in my spirit silently. Suddenly the bell rang and just as quickly the pressure of battle was over. I heard a crackling buzz as the intercom announced, “Wayne O’Conner, please take your vehicle and drop it off at the auto shop building.”
Although I did not remember my High School having such a service, or a designated auto body class building near the football field, as happened in my dream, in this reality, one did exist. Apparently, one could volunteer their vehicle for free mechanical work in exchange for allowing students to practice the craft of auto repair.
I walked out to the student parking lot, still reveling in the feel of my young body and the lack of muscle and joint aches. When I sat in the sun-warmed blue seat of my Dodge Dart, I smelled the old leather. Even though it was ten years old, it felt new to me. I became almost as excited as young Wayne had been. My pulse raced. My breath quickened. I felt very much alive. I looked in the mirror. I had all of my hair! None of it was gray! No age-related skin tag on my left cheek, just below my eye! I shook my head and whispered, “Oh, to be young again.”
When I pulled into the rising garage door of the large brown crenelated auto shop building, I was surprised by the muffled crunch of fine dusty gravel. I had expected the auto shop to have a cement floor, but it seemed to be merely packed sand. There was a dip where constant tire pressure formed a gully between the islands of red Snap-On tool carts in the four work bays.
One of my best friends, Gary, was cleaning his wrenches with an oily gray shop rag. I tossed him the keys, which he caught adroitly, like a trained juggler, as he simultaneously pocketed them and dropped the silver wrench in its proper slot. He flicked his bowl cut straw blond hair, shoved his dark brown glasses up his nose and said, “I finished Louie Lamour’s The Empty Land last night. It started out, ’For thousands of years, the lonely canyon knew only wind and rain, wild animals, and an occasional native hunter. Then a trapper found a chunk of gold, and everything changed overnight.’” Gary grunted, “I like it when he starts out with a bang, like with Sackett or Iron Marshall or Silver Canyon. I don’t like his slow start ones, but once it got going, it was good. Really good.”
I nodded, “I am in the process of reading one of my favorites of his, Fair Blows the Wind.” After a pause, I asked, “When should I come back for the car?” Gary looked thoughtful, then replied, “I am not sure how long it will take. I’ll just park it out where you usually park it.”
Gary suddenly exclaimed, “What’s Darko doing here?”
One of the English instructors, Darren Kovitch, was peering in through a long rectangular side door window that led to an outdoor break area. Tall, thin, and sporting a mop of chaotic, prematurely aged white hair, Darko’s belly protruded, giving his otherwise skeletal body the look of an anaconda that had just swallowed a prize pig. Always dressed like a Professor Snape clone, Darko’s face seemed to have frozen into a perpetual sneer. Rumor had it that he was a local Warlock High Priest who only smiled or laughed during the lewdest or most horrific occultic rituals. Gary had started referring to him as “Darko” back when we were freshmen.
That’s when things became strange. Once again, I felt the pressure associated with supernatural battles but didn’t see any smokie critters. Darko’s long Saturnine face disappeared from the window. The abrupt sound of a bang, hiss and metallic pop caught our attention. We looked back at my car.
We both gazed at what no longer looked like my 1970 Dodge Dart. Gary turned white and cut loose with a line of expletives. Unless he was mad, boiling mad, he was not one for cursing. A scattered damn or hell, here or there but little else.
All the tires were flat. The axles were bent. The windows shattered. The auto’s metal chassis, which was crumpled, wasn’t even the same color. And it had some spoilers or after-market attachments that I would never have used on my car.
“Impossible!” shouted Gary. “Where is your blankety-blankety car? That is a much older blankety-blank model of your car! It looks like it just went blankety-blank through a scrap yard blankety-blank demolition. This blankety-blank car isn’t even road legal if it is in a drivable condition!”
I remembered that Gary was a strongly opinioned agnostic and only barely tolerated his mom’s church involvement. I exclaimed, “In Jesus’ Name, I bind your works devils! If there are any fallen angels involved, may the Creator God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, rebuke you!”
Gary exclaimed, “When did you become a TV preacher!” He grunted, then pointed at me dramatically and asked, “Where is my friend Wayne and what did you do with him?”
Then Gary looked at the car. My car was back with no visible damage.
Gary stopped, threw up his arms, and his face turned white, all over again. No longer angry, he was twice as shocked as before. Gary exclaimed, “Cancel that! I don’t want to know! This never happened! And I don’t ever want to talk about it!”
Suddenly we heard screams just outside the shop, followed by a huge crash, the shriek of stressed metal, and then the wall where we had last seen Darko quaked and convulsed, buckling inward.
Gary and I ran outside. Twelve men and women were scattered, half naked and bleeding, limbs sprawled at strange angles, across the lawn, but mostly alive. Darko was thrust into the very metal of the corrugated building, as if the victim of a Manhatten project experiment, a snarl of anger and terror, permanently etched into his dead, twisted face.
“Call an ambulance Gary!” Gary, still white-faced, raced for the shop office phone.
Llana, one of the injured priestesses, cried out to Jesus as she became conscious. She was part of my graduation class, but I had not known her well, as she had only been attending Lake Chetaqua High School for less than a year. Llana had been one of the pretty and popular group. I had heard that her parents were Satanists.
I had once heard her whisper to a classmate, while a teacher had left for an errand, that her parents “were just average Satanists.” She had added, “like most Christian churches, many covens have mostly converts who are just along for the ride and far from being sold out for their cause.” For all I knew, Llana’s parents were amongst the injured and dead bodies scattered around us, but she did not seem to be mindful of that issue if they were. My feeling was that the dead and injured were or had been leaders of local covens and not simple followers.
I knelt and comforted her. Llana wailed, “Forgive me, Jesus! Please help me!” Weeping softly, she continued, “I am sorry Wayne. I am glad our prayers did not work against you. How did you survive?”
I answered as the wail of sirens blasted the air. “Jesus is real, and He is my protector.”
Llana Peterson, the youngest of the twelve scattered warlocks and priestesses, exclaimed, “But we have been attacking all of the local churches and we hardly ever lost. When we did, nothing like this happened! What’s going on?”
“Everything is not as it seems, Llana. And this won’t make sense, but even though I look like the Wayne you know, I am a much older version of him.
When your coven friends failed to win this battle, and the town, for your former master, his non-human servants punished the leaders responsible for that failure. If you are serious about serving Jesus, know this Llana: You must have a relationship with Him. Just agreeing to join a local church, whether it is in your home, or with a traditional denomination, isn’t enough to warrant divine protection and provision. You must submit to Jesus, read your Bible, and strive to make him the top priority in your life. Just going through the motions won’t help you mature or gain the special blessing and protection that starts to follow you when you live a life of submission and devotion to Jesus. Never forget that times may arise where you are called to suffer or even die in His service. You must let the Holy Spirit change you from the inside out to be more like Jesus. For whatever reason, Llana, Jesus took your former master’s attack on this town personally. After we are close to old enough to enter an early retirement, your old master may be allowed to take dark sanctuaries for his use in America, in this manner, until the time of his imprisonment, but that time is not yet.”
Teachers and students began rushing from the other buildings. As the first responders and ambulances arrived on the scene, old Wayne awoke from his dream, and young Wayne was trying to figure out what had just happened and wondering why he was holding a softly crying Llana Peterson.
I made up most of the names in the dream, but the dream ran pretty much as written. While I slept the night through without waking, until after the dream, I added the section of Jesus talking with me in the dream.
Twenty-four hours later, while rereading the dream, I remembered the shop scene as being slightly different than I wrote it down. I am not sure if I will leave the change as an addendum or edit it into the final copy that comes out in the book.
When I brought the car into the garage, an instructor was talking with Gary. The instructor asked if Gary could work on the car alone since there weren’t any other teachers or students scheduled to be in the shop. Gary replied something like, “This is an easy job. I could do it blindfolded.” The instructor walked out of the building through the open garage door. Gary and I talked about the L’Amour books. A few moments later, Darko walked into the room, wearing an open-collared white button-down shirt, carrying his black cloak over his arm and looked at us with his perpetual sneer. Darko flamboyantly placed his hand on the top of my car, mumbled something unintelligible, and then walked back out the still open garage door and continued walking behind the building. And then Gary asked, “What’s Darko doing here? What was that all about?” I had my suspicions but did not say anything. After that Darko had peered through the side door window and the car wars began.
A final version of “Car Wars…” will be available in my upcoming book Kingdom Lessons 4: Daydreams & Night Visions.” For information about my books please click the link below:
https://wayneoconner.com/autumn-2016-updated-books-by-wayne-oconner-list/