2 A Haunting In Oregon (17 page)

“What is that?” Roy asked calmly.

Jurgen marched the object over to
Roy, held it for him to see. “That,” he said, “is what you worked to get for
me. What you and your brain dead child located. Like dogs sniffing out
something buried in the woods.”

“It looks like a bone,” Roy said.

“It is, you stupid fuck,” Jurgen
said. “You did all that work for me, but I’m the one who’s made the millions.
I’ll make a hundred thousand off this bone alone.”

“I thought you said the body was
on its way to Japan,” Roy said. “Why do you have that?”

“A souvenir from the buyer,”
Jurgen said. “It fell off as we were transferring the bones, and he said I
could keep it as a token of his appreciation. Looks like part of a finger,
doesn’t it? Isn’t it beautiful? Even this tiny bone exudes tremendous power. I
can feel it, can you?”

“It’s shameful what you’re doing,”
Roy said. “Those bones belong in the ground, not ground up. It’s obscene.”

“You won’t make anything off it,”
Steven said. He knew he had to derail Jurgen soon, say something that would
take him off guard. “You’re going to give it to us for our time. In fact, we’re
not leaving here without it.”

Jurgen turned to face Steven, and
glared at him. “You’re dreaming!”

“We’re taking it,” Steven said
again. “If you’re not going to stop tormenting the manor, we’re going to take
that bone. We found it, it’s ours, we’ll sell it ourselves.” Steven felt he
should do something to further upset Jurgen, so he began pacing in the room.

Jurgen walked back to his desk. He
placed the finger in a mortar. “Tell you what,” he said, grabbing a pestle, why
don’t I crush it up, and we’ll split it three ways!”

“We don’t want it,” Roy said.
“Don’t crush it. It’s bones from a human being, show some respect.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Jurgen said,
“I’m not really going to share it with you. I just wanted junior here to get
his hopes up. What do you say, junior?”

“I’m taking the whole thing,”
Steven said, pacing back and forth.

“Oh really? You’re hilarious!”
laughed Jurgen, waving the pestle at him.

“Jurgen, stop,” Roy said. “Don’t
crush it. Let us rebury it. You know that’s the right thing to do. Please.”

“You do-gooders really get on my
nerves,” he said to Roy. Then he stopped. “Why do you want this finger so bad?”

Steven and Roy looked at each
other, but didn’t answer.
What’s the right move here?
he thought.
Act
guilty. Let him think he’s on to something.

Steven looked away from Roy like
he was trying to hide something.

“Ah, so something’s up,” Jurgen
said. “This visit isn’t just to see if I’m going to let up on your friends. You
were hoping to get a piece of the body back.”

Wow! Go with it,
Steven
thought. He looked at Roy again, and Roy’s expression seemed to say the same
thing.

“We promised a friend in
California we’d try to get her the body,” Roy lied. “That’s why we came here
today. Obviously we’re too late. But we could return that bone at least.”

“What does your friend want with
it?” Jurgen asked. “I’m guessing it’s not money. Some do-good cause?”

“Well, yes,” Roy said.

“She maintains the barrier,”
Steven said. “She said if we could return the bones intact to her, she could
use it to bolster the barrier for years, keep dregs like you out permanently.”

Jurgen slowly leaned his head
back. “Oh,” he said, raising the pestle, “wrong answer.”

He brought the pestle down into
the mortar full force, smiling as he twisted it into the stone. They all heard
the bone break.

Jurgen knew something was wrong
almost immediately. Red wisps of mist swirled up out of the mortar bowl and
surrounded him. In a matter of seconds Jurgen’s face aged fifty years. He fell
to the ground, twisting in agony.

Steven and Roy stepped closer to
the desk and looked over the edge. Jurgen’s body was contracting violently, as
though he was being punched and kicked. Grunts came out of his body as the air
was forced out of his lungs.

Steven entered the flow and
observed the scene. The red wisps of mist continued to move in and out of his
body, like sharp wide needles darting in and out. Each time they came out, they
were bigger, extracting part of Jurgen, and his body shook in reaction.
Whatever ability Jurgen had was being stripped from him a stroke at a time.
With each moment Jurgen looked more and more like a frail old man. The needles
struck at him relentlessly, extracting every ability and power left in him.
Soon Jurgen laid still, without enough energy to move in response to the stabs
and withdrawals. Eventually the wisps faded and the room was silent. Steven
looked for any sign of power in Jurgen’s body and saw none. He exited the flow.

Roy walked behind the desk and
helped Jurgen stand up. He walked him to the chair he had been sitting in when
they first entered. He carefully sat him down in it.

Jurgen was old. His skin looked
thin, like paper. You could see the blood vessels, red and pronounced in his
hands, face, and neck. His hair had turned white, and his cheeks were hollow.
The skin that used to be a jowl under his neck now hung wrinkled and empty,
like the wattles of a rooster. He looked near death, defeated.

“Ah,” he said in a thin voice that
Steven and Roy had to strain to hear. “You double-crossed me. I should have
known better.”

“You brought it upon yourself,”
Roy said. “Had you been an honest man, it wouldn’t have happened.”

“What was it?” Jurgen asked
weakly.

“Native American spirit,” Steven
said. “It claimed Samuel Stone’s body yesterday. The body you had dug up was a
changeling. When it learned what you intended to do with the bones, and your
general personality disorder, it agreed to judge you if you damaged the corpse.
All your power is gone now, Jurgen. You won’t be able to torment my friends
anymore.”

“I’ll kill you for this,” Jurgen
said. “You’re both dead.”

“At your age? With your power
gone?” Steven said. “I don’t think so. You’ll be lucky to make it to bedtime
without croaking.”

“You’ve got a bigger problem than
us,” Roy said. “When your Japanese buyer uncrates that skeleton, it won’t have
any power at all. It was all just expended on you. He’ll want his millions
back.”

Jurgen’s head lowered in his
chair. He whispered something neither of them could hear. Roy placed his head
closer to Jurgen. “What?” he asked.

Jurgen whispered again.

Roy raised up. “He said, ‘Kill
me.’”

Steven looked at Roy, and Roy
looked back. They knew they had won. They turned and walked out of Jurgen’s
office. Then they walked the long march between the workers to the front door
of the warehouse. Steven wondered if Jurgen might somehow come after them, but
then he thought of Jurgen in the chair behind his desk. He could barely walk. He
was frail and likely close to death. He was no longer a threat to them. He
would be leaving his office today, and his few remaining future days, in a
wheelchair.

Steven grabbed two bottles of
champagne, one of the real stuff and one with no alcohol, and walked out the
back door of the kitchen and through the utility room. Here was where Claire
and Sarah had communed with the washer woman. He walked through the same door
that she walked through every night, carrying her basket of clothes on her way
to meet her death. He stepped down onto the grass of the yard, and walked
around the back of the manor.

The weather was cool but the sun
was out and the day was pleasant. It was late afternoon and they had all just
arrived. Sarah had asked Steven to retrieve more champagne from the refrigerator
in the kitchen. He went around the back of the house to do it, enjoying the
view.

He returned to the gazebo, where
Roy, Pete, Eliza, Claire, and Sarah were waiting. They had invited Dixon, but
he was sailing near Cabo and didn’t feel like leaving. Steven sat the bottles
down and Sarah thanked him. She uncorked one and began pouring refills.

They had already toasted to their
success and to Steven and Roy for their work. Steven and Roy had thanked them
profusely and thanked Eliza especially for her help. Eliza and Sarah had
toasted Claire as well. Finally Pete had stood and given a long and unnecessary
speech about his and Roy’s history, the good old days, and why he knew Roy was
the man for the job. When he sat down everyone applauded, as much for the end
of the speech as the sentiment.

There were a number of snacks
Sarah had prepared for their reunion, arranged on small tables around their
central table in the gazebo. They grazed from them occasionally and poured refills
of champagne liberally. They were all staying the night at the manor, and none
of them had to drive anywhere.

They had asked for a retelling of
the final encounter with Jurgen, and Roy had delivered it with drama and flair.
Steven felt he had embellished only a few aspects and he felt no need to
correct him.

“So he aged rapidly?” Eliza asked.
“To presumably his real age?”

“I was surprised at that,” Roy
said. “In removing his powers, whatever he had done to stop or to mask his age
was removed as well. I had no idea he was really much older.”

“I suppose he could have died,”
Claire said. “I wonder what it feels like to have your powers sucked out of you
like that.”

“I’m sure it’s unpleasant,” Roy
said. “Perhaps it would feel like part of you has been cut out.”

Both Eliza and Steven nodded their
heads at this, and Pete and Sarah watched them, unable to relate to the idea.

“Would it wind up making you
normal, like us?” Sarah asked, glancing at Pete.

“I guess it would,” Claire said,
“which isn’t a bad thing. Except for the feeling of loss, that you lost
something you used to be able to do.”

“It would be worse than that for
me,” Eliza said. “It’s a huge part of me and what I do. I’d be lost without it.”

“I imagine then that Jurgen is
lost,” Sarah said.

“He is broken, that is for sure,”
Roy said. “And retired.”

“When word gets around what
happened to him,” Eliza said, “you’ll both be famous in certain circles. And I
expect there will be a quick decrease in grave robbing. No one will want to
risk what happened to Jurgen.”

“Oh, the sign!” Pete said,
standing up and walking out of the gazebo. “I’ll be right back!”

“He has something he wants to show
you,” Sarah said. “He’s very proud of it. And I suppose I am too.”

Pete disappeared into the basement
door and returned with a sign in his arms. He turned it to face the group.

“It’s the new sign for the entryway
of the house,” Pete said. “What do you think?”

The sign read
Mason Manor Bed
and Breakfast
.

“I thought you were going to
change it back to Snow Meadow?” Steven asked.

“Well,” Sarah replied, “we decided
to split the difference. After learning what I did from the former residents of
the place – thanks to Claire – I came to realize that the history of this place
is what makes it so interesting to visit. It had to stay Mason Manor.”

“What about changing the
reputation to overcome the bad publicity?” Steven asked.

“Well, funny you should ask,”
Sarah said. “Look at this article that ran in
The Oregonian
a couple of
days ago.”

Sarah produced a copy of the paper
and they all passed it around. It had been written by the guest who had taken
the pictures at the manor the first night that the ghosts had become visible.
It made Mason Manor sound like the most haunted place on earth. A couple of the
pictures that accompanied the article showed ghostly images, and the
journalist’s retelling of the apparitions he’d seen were vivid and fun to read.

“Looks like he used a flash on
those pictures,” Eliza said. “You can’t do that with ghosts.”

“What an article,” Steven said,
worried it had hurt Pete and Sarah even more. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to celebrate,” Sarah
said, pouring herself another glass of the fake champagne, “because starting
tomorrow we are fully booked for two months.”

Eliza shouted a “hooray!” and
began clapping. Everyone else joined in, raising their glasses.

“The author of
The Ghosts of Mason
Manor
called us about writing an updated version. He’s coming next week,”
Sarah said. “We’ll be selling the book in a new gift shop we’re going to
construct next to the drawing room. And Pete is having plaques made to honor
several of the ghosts we met. We’ll place them on the walls in the rooms where
they appeared, and people can read their stories.”

“We’re renaming the north wing the
Dennington wing!” Pete said proudly. “What do you think of that?”

“I’m sure he’ll be impressed,” Roy
replied.

“We wanted you all to enjoy the
place before it reopened,” Pete said. “We’re the only ones here tonight, aside
from the ghosts. Tomorrow will be another story. But you must stay as long as
you like.”

“It will be good to see this place
running normally,” Steven said.

“Thanks to you,” Sarah said, “and
Roy. I didn’t believe it could happen. You gave us back not only our
investment, but our home. We’ll be eternally grateful to you. And you are
welcome to come stay anytime. You have a lifetime invitation. And you should meet
with the author of the book when he’s here.”

“Nah,” Roy said, “you can leave us
out of that. You should concentrate on how the ghost stories can help you reestablish
your business. We don’t want our names in his book.”

“All right,” Sarah said, “but you
could become celebrities. I also got a call from a ghost explorer show. You
could let them interview you. You’d be famous.”

“God no,” Roy said. “Absolutely
not.”

“How about you, Steven?” Sarah
asked, refilling his glass. “Would you like to be famous?”

“I’m with my Dad on this one,”
Steven said. “He’s the boss.”

Steven glanced at Roy and Roy gave
him a quick wink.

“And one more toast,” Pete said.
Steven stifled a groan. “Sarah has informed me,” Pete continued, “that I will
be a grandfather in about six months. Sarah, here’s to you, to the stunning
transformation you have made, and are about to make!”

Everyone raised their glass and
cheered again. Steven realized Pete was the last to know.

The conversation and drinking ran
on, and after a while Steven found himself wandering out of the gazebo and into
the open meadow. The sun had set and the sky was beginning to darken. He
glanced back at the gazebo. All the others were chatting between themselves,
unaware that he had stepped away.

He laid down in the tall grass of
the meadow, gazing up at the sky. The buzz from the champagne was running
through him and he felt great. He saw the first stars of the evening appear in
the sky.
Hard to see this in Seattle,
he thought, remembering his first
night at the Manor when the night sky had been filled with millions of stars.
Maybe
I’ll just stay right here until they all reappear.
He closed his eyes and
felt the coolness of the grass on his back.

“Steven! Steven!” someone was
shouting from the gazebo. “Come here, you have to hear this!”

He opened his eyes and sat up. He
stood and turned to the gazebo, which was now lit up by hundreds of tiny lights
strung over the roof. It looked beautiful, almost as beautiful as the stars.