2 A Haunting In Oregon (13 page)

“Mom!” the boy’s voice cried from
the other room.

“Lunch is ready, get your butt up
off that couch and into the kitchen.”

As the boy entered the room, Eliza
introduced Steven and Roy. “And this is Troy,” she said. “He’s ten and plays
far too many video games.”

“Mom!” he said, sitting down at
the table.

“In the time I’ve been here,”
Steven said to Troy, “I’ve only ever heard you say ‘Mom!’” Do you say anything
else?”

Troy lowered his face,
embarrassed. “Yes,” he said.

Steven and Roy laughed. Eliza sat
a plate of sandwiches in the center of the table, and everyone reached for one.

“What grade are you in?” Roy asked
Troy.

“Fourth,” he replied.

“Is it the weekend?” Steven asked.
“I’ve completely lost track of time, we’ve been so busy with this.”

“Saturday,” said Troy. “No
school!”

“There will be no more video
games,” Eliza said, “until I see that grass cut.”

“Mom!” Troy wailed, tossing his
sandwich onto his plate.

“And don’t show off in front of
guests,” she added. “I imagine they had to mow their lawn when they were boys.”

“He made me do it with a push
mower!” Steven said to Troy, pointing at Roy. “And we had a huge yard. Do you
know how long that took me?”

“He’s your Dad?” Troy asked
Steven.

“Yes,” Steven replied, “he is.”

“I don’t have a Dad,” Troy said.
“My Mom won’t let me have one.”

“You say that as though it’s like
getting a dog,” Steven said.

“It would be,” Eliza said, getting
up from the table to retrieve a salt shaker from the counter. “He’d just eat a
lot and I’d have to pick up his shit.”

Roy and Steven half-laughed at
this. Troy stuffed the last of his sandwich into his mouth and bolted out the
kitchen door into the back yard.

“Seems like a good kid,” Steven
said.

“He is,” she said. “Typical ten
year old.”

“Does he know about your
abilities?” Roy asked.

“No,” she said. “Not sure when’s
the right time for that. They say to wait until they’re an adult, but who
knows. When did you tell him?” she asked Roy, pointing at Steven.

“About a month ago,” Roy said.

Eliza seemed impressed.  “Well,”
she said, “when he said you were in training, I would have guessed a couple of
years, not a month.” She winked at him. Steven smiled.

They chatted for a while longer.
Steven grew to like her even more. Her company was comfortable and her manner
calming and reassuring. Sitting at the kitchen table she listened to Roy tell
stories about Steven when he was little, and Steven tell how Roy had helped
eliminate the ghosts from his house, and how he’d learned of Roy’s gift. She asked
them questions and kept refilling their iced tea.

“Can I use your bathroom?” Steven
asked. “The iced tea has built up.”

“Oh,” she said, “of course. Just
down the hall there, and to the left.”

Steven walked down the hallway and
to the bathroom. He shut the door and relieved himself. He could hear Troy
yelling outside, kicking something around. The bathroom had typical feminine
touches and was immaculately clean. When he was finished, he walked back into
the kitchen to join Roy and Eliza.

“Eliza has invited us to stay here
while we figure this out,” Roy said.

“There’s no need for you to stay
at a motel,” she said, pouring Steven another iced tea. He waved his hand no,
but she poured anyway. “One more won’t hurt,” she said. “There’s two empty
rooms upstairs. There’s two bathrooms up there as well, so we’ll have plenty of
room.”

“Well,” Steven said, hesitating.
The idea seemed like a good one, if they weren’t imposing.

“Now I insist,” she said. “Roy,
tell him this is where you’re going to stay. I think you could both use an
extra mind working on this problem you’ve got.”

“You’re right about that,” Roy
said.

Steven looked at Roy, and Roy
didn’t seem to be against the idea. “All right,” he said. “We’ll move our
things from the motel.”

“Glad to hear it!” she said. “We’re
having chicken pasta for dinner.”

“We’ve been eating on the run for
so long,” Roy said, “a real meal will be a treat.”

Later that night, after Steven and
Roy had transferred their things, after the chicken and pasta, and after Troy
had gone to bed, Eliza invited them upstairs. “There’s something I want to show
you,” she said.

They ascended the staircase and
stopped on the second floor landing. She pointed up the stairs to the third
floor.

“If you go up this way, you’ll
find all the doors up there locked. It’s completely sealed off. I tell Troy we
keep it that way because I don’t want to pay for heating up there or spending
the time to keep it cleaned.”

She led them through the second
story hallway to the back room, which was a large room with dividing doors that
opened into a second large room. They passed through both rooms and headed
towards a small door on the back wall. There was very little furniture in
either room, and a few toys were scattered around.

“Troy plays in here, but we don’t
use it for much else.”

She opened the door in the back of
the room, revealing a staircase.

“It goes down to the first floor
and the basement. They could entertain in this large room and had easy access
to the kitchen. We, however, are going up.”

The staircase going up to the
third floor was much narrower than the one going down. It was just tall enough
to accommodate Steven, and he felt his claustrophobia coming on. It twisted
right making several corners. When they reached the top, Eliza opened a door
and they all walked into a large room similar in size and shape to the one they
had just left.

“Troy thinks this door is locked
liked the others,” she said, closing the door after they’d entered. “He’s never
been up here.”

Here was the lair Steven had been
hoping to see at Albert’s in Santa Fe. The walls were lined with bookcases
crammed with books. There were several work tables filled with projects and
plastic and glass containers filled with various objects. A large oversized
chair and a couch draped with tapestries formed a small sitting area next to
the work tables. It looked comfortable, inviting, and immensely interesting.

“Very impressive,” Roy said. “If
my wife hadn’t forced me to keep my gift quiet, I might have had a room like
this.”

“Well, Roy,” Eliza said, “you
could start one now if you like. Unless you want to keep honoring that promise
to her.”

“No,” Roy said, “I broke the
promise when I showed Steven. The promise ended when she passed on.”

“What I really wanted you to see,”
she said, walking over to one of the tables, “was this.”

She lifted up a silver dome that
looked like a food cloche. Underneath was another dome, made of light.

“This is what you saw this morning
in the clearing, right about there,” she said, pointing to a spot on the ground
under the dome.

Steven moved in for a closer look.
The entire geography of the area was represented under the dome of light. He
could see the exact boundaries of the barrier, more precisely illustrated than
what he and Roy had seen while in the flow the night before. As he watched he
could see tiny lights moving on the ground.

“This is how you knew about our
trance yesterday?” Steven asked.

“Yes,” she says. “I and a group of
like-minded people decided to erect this barrier many years ago. I got elected
the current caretaker, so it’s my job to make sure it stays up and is
monitored. This is how I keep an eye on it. When you two tranced in the
clearing yesterday, I received a kind of alert, and I came up here and checked
you out. Watch, I can zoom in.”

She moved her hands into the dome
and the view changed to the area she was pointing at. They had a bird’s-eye
view of the clearing they had been in earlier that morning.

“That’s how you saw my blindfold,”
Roy said.

“Why do you use a blindfold?” she
asked.

“That’s how my father did it,” Roy
said. “I picked it up. Now I’m used to it. It helps me concentrate.”

She reached into a pocket in her
dress, and removed a small flat rock. “This is what I use,” she said. “It’s
like a worry stone. I hold it between my thumb and finger, like this,” she
demonstrated. Then she placed it back in her pocket. “I suppose we all just use
what works for us individually.”

As Steven continued gazing at the
small representation of the land under the dome, he thought about what he would
use when he conducted his first trance.
Probably a blindfold, like Roy,
he thought.

“Traditions are good to maintain,”
Eliza said. “My mother used this rock.”

Steven wished he knew if she
really could read his thoughts or if her timing was just impeccable.

Eliza walked over to the sitting
area and plopped into the chair. Roy walked over and joined her, sitting on the
couch. Steven was enraptured with the dome.

“What do you think is your next
step?” Eliza asked Roy.

“The only option I can see,” Roy
replied, “is to locate the grave and try to determine what’s there – without
digging, of course.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Do you think a trance over it
will reveal its contents?” Steven asked, still looking at the barrier dome.

“It’s worked before,” Roy replied.
“I don’t see why not. You’ve got your doohickey; we follow it and search from
that spot. Jurgen said we’d know it when we found it.”

“If he said that,” Eliza added,
“then it must be powerful, whatever it is.”

“I’m sure I can find it,” Roy
said, “What worries me is I won’t know what’s in the grave. I’ve never been
able to do that.”

“Would you like me to come with
you?” Eliza said.

Steven and Roy both looked at her.

“You can detect what it is?”
Steven asked, walking over from the work table to join them.

“It’s one of my specialties,” she
answered. “Detecting things underground is one of the reasons I live here, one
of the reasons I am part of the group that maintains this barrier.”

Steven smiled. Not only was she a
wonderful host, she was also going to be an asset as they tried to solve Pete
and Sarah’s problem. Things were looking up.

-

Steven led them through the low
brush that was common in forests. They were a mile off the road they parked at,
some thirty miles north of Clearlake. Roy and Eliza followed behind, easily
keeping pace with him. Eliza was carrying a backpack that held water and food.
Roy had required them to drink protection before they left the car. They were
prepared in case anything went wrong.

“It’s less than thirty yards from
here,” Steven said back to his two followers. Within a few steps the forest
opened to a small clearing, enough to let direct sunlight filter down to the
ground. There were two large fallen trees, and Steven rested against the branch
of one.

“It’s over there, fifty feet,” he
said, motioning to an open spot not far away. Roy and Eliza stopped and Eliza
passed a bottle of water around. They all drank.

“Everyone doing OK?” she asked.

“Fine,” they replied in unison.

Steven walked over to the exact
spot. “This is it,” Steven said. “At least, according to this thing. Do you
want to try here, Roy?”

Roy walked over to where Steven
stood. He closed his eyes and concentrated for a minute. “I get nothing.”

“Let’s spiral out from here, you
following me,” Steven said.

“No,” Roy said, “I don’t mean
there’s nothing there. I can’t tell. I get a blank. Never felt that before.”

“It’s the barrier,” said Eliza,
stepping over to them. “Mind if I try?”

“Not at all,” Roy said, letting
her take over.

She closed her eyes, and Steven
noticed she had her hand in her pocket.
Holding her mother’s stone
, he
thought.

After a couple of minutes she
opened her eyes. “About forty arrowheads in the first twelve inches, all over
this area,” she said, waving her arms. “Hundreds of shell casing, too many to
count. Lots of blood from men, women and children. Bodies there,” she pointed,
“there, there, and there.”

“I’m not going to be able to
determine more about the bodies,” Roy said. “Can you see which one is the
strongest? Which is the one Jurgen is interested in?”

“Sure,” she said, and walked over
to one of the places she pointed to. She closed her eyes again, and remained
frozen for a moment. Then she opened her eyes, and walked to another of the
locations. She repeated the process a couple of times. Finally she walked to
the last spot.

She closed her eyes, then
immediately opened them. “Oh,” she said, looking at Steven and Roy, “this is
it.”

Steven and Roy walked over to her.
Roy closed his eyes and concentrated. “Very faint for me,” Roy said. “but I can
feel it. I don’t know if I’d have found it on my own. Jurgen is a fool to have
sent us to look for it.”

“It’s the barrier,” Eliza said.
“It’s very powerful. I’m going to remove it over just this spot, for just a few
seconds. Go into your trance, and be ready when I do it.”

Roy turned to Steven. “Do you want
to join me?”

“Yes!” Steven said, and stood next
to Roy. They closed their eyes.

Steven entered the flow, and
within a few moments he saw the trance develop around Roy’s body. He entered
the opening Roy gave him, and together they waited for Eliza to remove the
barrier under them.

At first he could only see ground.
Slowly it cleared until they saw a corpse about seven feet under where they
were standing. Steven could see that it had a sick glow, greenish, pulsing. The
more he looked at it, the more sour his stomach became. He felt as if he might
throw up, and he exited the flow.

Standing next to Roy, he recovered
himself. Out of the flow he rapidly felt better. Roy ended his trance and Eliza
opened her eyes.

“What was that feeling?” Steven
asked. “I’m sorry I left, but I felt like I was going to puke.”

“That’s some bad juju right
there,” Eliza said. “A hundred times worse than any of the other bodies I’ve
seen.”

“The glow you saw around him,” Roy
said to Steven, “was the power his body still has. It’s why Jurgen wants him.
This was an evil man when he was alive.”

“Could you tell who it was?”
Steven asked Eliza.

“His name was Samuel Stone,” she
said, “and he’s responsible for a lot of the blood in the earth here.”

“Ever heard of him?” Roy said.

“No,” Eliza said, “but his last
name rings a bell. I don’t like being near this guy. On the way back I’ll tell
you what I know.”

Steven used the GPS to mark the
exact location of the grave, in case they needed to return. He made sure it
wasn’t marked in any other manner by their visit. Then the three turned and
walked back to the car, relying on Steven for directions.

-

“So he wants us to mark the grave
of an evil man,” Steven said, driving Roy and Eliza back to Eliza’s house in
Clearlake.

“It’s worth a lot more than a
normal corpse,” Roy said. “In his mind, recovering that body will make him
enough profit to compensate for the loss of the tunnel.”

“I’d say that man was evil
enough,” Eliza said. “His corpse would be as valuable to people like Jurgen as
thousands of normal corpses. It’s like finding gold to people like him.”

“So,” Steven said, “we were to
pour that marker on the grave, and something that would have been able to cross
the barrier would have come in and dug it up.”

“Wouldn’t have worked,” Eliza
said. “It might cross the barrier, but the bones would have slipped down as
they dug. It never would have reached it to cart it off.”

“Unless,” Roy said, “Jurgen had
come up with a way to counter the barrier in just that one spot.”

Eliza scoffed.

“Don’t underestimate him,” Roy
said. “He’s resourceful. He stole that tunnel, he repurposed harvesters. He
might have found a creature that isn’t barred by your barrier and can counter
the effects when they dig.”

“It’s obvious he knows about
Samuel Stone, and thought we could locate the grave,” Steven added.

“But he didn’t know you wouldn’t
be able to detect it,” she said.

“Unless he figured we’d be
resourceful enough to overcome that,” Roy said, “by running into someone like
you.”

“Now you’re making me nervous,”
Eliza said. Steven watched her in his rear view mirror. She seemed to be
thinking it over.
She thinks she might have been used,
Steven thought.

“If,” she said, “this was his
plan, you two didn’t know you’d need me. I volunteered. But I do hate the idea
of helping that little squirrel in any manner.”

They rode in silence for a moment.

“What can you tell us about Samuel
Stone?” Steven asked Eliza.

“I don’t know anything about him
exactly,” Eliza replied, “but it’s his last name. ‘Stone’ is well known in
these parts. A character named Stone brutally enslaved the local indigenous
people in 1850. He and his partner built a ranch not far from Clearlake,
raising cattle. Made the Indians work for nothing, starved them, beat them.
Killed them if they complained. He would rape their little girls, and if the
Indian parents protested, he’d have them hung from a tree. It was so brutal
eventually the Indians rose up and fought back. They killed him and his
partner, a guy named Kelsey.”

“That’s horrific,” Steven said.

“Oh, it gets worse,” Eliza continued.
“The calvary decides the Indians have to be taught a lesson for rising up
against their enslavers. While most of the young men are off hunting, the
calvary comes in and massacres old men, women, and children in retaliation for
the deaths of Stone and Kelsey. Kills more than a hundred of them. The place is
still called ‘Bloody Island’ to this day. There’s a historical marker to prove
it.”

“Jesus Christ,” Steven said.
“Never heard about that in history class.”