Saturday Stories
May 12, 2018
Psychic abilities are real. There are people who can read thoughts. There are those who can see the future. And there are folks who move things with their minds.
What if psychic powers can also be shared with someone else with just a touch?
It's rare for one person to be able to do all these. This is what makes Ted Brautigan different from others.
I read Stephen King's Hearts In Atlantis and I wondered what's it like to have something that makes you special but also makes you an outcast.
Ted comes to a small town he has never been before, answering a newspaper ad for a boarder.
His powers make people with negative vibrations feel uncomfortable around him, like the landlady who was full of secret self-contempt.
Yet her young son, Bobby, liked him instantly, as all pure-hearted people react that way to Ted.
Ted's gift is also his curse. It made him the target of those who would exploit him. His dark past include a world different than this.
He was in Black House, imprisoned in the Dark Tower by the Crimson King – the immortal enemy of Roland The Gunslinger.
But he escaped. Now he is a fugitive, knowing that those in pursuit have the power to track him down – and his time is running out.
I've seen the movie version on cable before I read the book, which is only a small part of the whole story.
Yet now I can't imagine anyone but my beloved Anthony Hopkins as Ted and Anton Yelchin as Bobby. I felt sad Anton died so young. He was perfect as Chekov in J.J. Abram's Star Trek, but I'll always think of him as Odd Thomas, one of my all-time favorite literary characters, in the film version of Dean Koontz' hit novel series about a short-order cook who talks to dead people.
My favorite scene is when Ted and the kids were in the porch. He was playing a harmonica as he watched them play a board game.
That was where he said my favorite lines in the book: “Sometimes when you're young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you're living on someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been..."
There were other things going on. Bobby and his friends Carol and Sully were growing up.
It was the sixties. Carol would be an anti-War activist and Sully will go to Vietnam.
They will all see the depravity that man is capable of, but they will each find a measure of redemption – but at the cost of changing them forever.
Photo courtesy of MovieStillsDB.com
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