by Donnie Light
“My guess would be it’s in here somewhere,” Galen said. “Let’s look for a phone list and anything we might find about that ball.” He checked his watch. “We’ve got a little over an hour,” he said. “Let’s get busy.”
Audra walked over to the cluttered desk and Galen to the table where he had opened the box and let the crazy ball out in the first place. The box lay overturned on the table. He cautiously turned it over with a wooden ruler. Seeing nothing unusual, Galen removed the velvet the ball had sat on, along with the wooden insert that held the ball in place. He found nothing else in the box.
Audra was shuffling things around on the desk searching for a personal phone book. She searched the drawers and the surrounding bookshelves but could not locate a list of phone numbers. She glanced up and looked around the room. Galen was searching a table below a window, sorting through the various piles of stuff. She noticed the personal computer on the small desk along one wall.
“Did Al use his computer much?” she asked.
“All the time,” Galen answered. A smile crossed his face as he realized what she was thinking. The smile turned to a frown as he approached the computer desk.
“Do you know how to work a computer?” he asked Audra. “I haven’t the foggiest idea.”
“Sure,” she said, walking toward him. “We use them all the time at the hospital.”
“Well, what are you waiting for?” he asked as she approached.
“Hey, just keep your pants on, Buster,” she said as she pulled out the chair.
Galen watched over her shoulder as she turned on the machine. “Al used to say these things were the greatest tools in the world, once you got used to it.”
After the machine warmed up a moment, the screen displayed a menu. “Word processor, spread sheet, checkbook manager,” Audra said, reading the list of programs. “Recipes?” she said, and looked at Galen.
“The man had to eat,” Galen chuckled.
“PC maps, a disk manager, and a telecommunications program,” she continued. “Ah! Electronic Phone Book,” she said and pushed a couple of keys.
The screen blanked for a moment then reappeared with a list of names and phone numbers. They were in alphabetical order and Audra stopped the scrolling when she reached the P’s.
“Paxon, John,” she said. “555-403-5621.”
Galen grabbed a pen from the desk and wrote the number on the back of an envelope.
“Good,” he said. “Can you find out if there’s anything about the ball in there somewhere?”
“We can look around,” she said. “He probably kept written notes in the word processor.”
She exited the phone-listing program and entered the word processor. Another menu appeared and Audra chose “List Files”. The screen filled with the names of the files Al had stored there. At the bottom of the screen, a message appeared saying, “press any key to continue”.
Each time Audra pressed a key, the screen filled with the names of more files.
“There are hundreds of files in here, Galen,” Audra said, reaching the end of the list. “He must have written an awful lot of things.”
“Is there any way to tell if any of that stuff is about the ball?”
Audra thought for a moment. “We could look through the file names and see if any of them say anything about a ball. But since we don’t know what he called it, it’ll be a long shot.”
Galen scratched his chin. “Why don’t you keep looking through the computer and I’ll see if I can get Paxon on the phone.” He walked over to the desk and sat in the big leather chair.
Audra continued to search through the hundreds of files, looking for anything related to the ball. Audra knew that on this type of computer, a file name was limited to eight characters. She had herself experienced the meaning of this limitation. For instance: if you wrote a letter to your mother every week you couldn’t name it “letter to Mom, March 13, 1991”, so you might shorten it to “LTM31391”. Like a personal code, filenames could be hard to decipher. Audra searched for clues to the meaning of the filenames. She heard Galen as he began to speak into the phone.
“Yes, Mr. Paxon. My name is Galen Morris, from Willow River, Illinois. I’m calling because a good friend of mine, Professor Albert Gaston has passed away. Before he died, he instructed me to send you something. The something is what I’m calling about. It’s very urgent that I talk to you. Actually, it’s a matter of life and death. I’ll be leaving soon, but will try to call you again later. Thank you.” He hung up the phone and looked at Audra. “I hate answering machines,” he said as he folded the envelope with the number on it. He stuffed it into his pocket. “Having any luck over there?”
“Not really,” she answered. “There’s just too many files to go through and without having a clue as to what he named them…” She shrugged. “It’ll just take time.”
“Something we don’t have a lot of,” Galen said. He leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath. He reached across the desk and retrieved an ashtray. “I don’t know what to do next,” he said after lighting up. He blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. “I guess we’re gonna have to go somewhere and call Paxon again later.” He took a long draw on the cigarette. “I hope like Hell he’s not on vacation or something.”
Audra looked around the room as if searching for something.
“What are you looking for?” he asked, bellowing out another cloud of smoke.
“Where’s the printer?” she asked.
Galen took his feet off the top of the desk and sat up. “Beats me,” he said, looking around.
“Maybe it broke down or something,” she said, still scanning the room. “If he did this much writing, he must have had a printer.”
Galen shrugged again. “He didn’t mention anything about it to me,” he said.
“Let’s take it with us,” Audra said, still tapping at the computer’s keyboard.
“Take what with us?” Galen asked.
“The computer,” she said, turning to face him.
“Can you plug it into the cigarette lighter in your car or something?” Galen asked.
“No, silly,” Audra responded. “You can’t plug it in to a cigarette lighter, but you can plug it in to a motel room’s electrical outlet.”
“Hey, give me a break. I told you I didn’t know anything about computers.” He crushed out the cigarette. “Let’s get rolling and put some time between us and that thing.”
They unplugged Al’s computer. Galen carried it while Audra carried the monitor. They placed it carefully on the back seat, which was now becoming cluttered with supplies. They drove quickly back to Audra’s.
Galen was amazed at how quickly she returned with extra clothes. He had pictured her going through her closet, making sure everything matched. He visualized her neatly folding all of the clothes as she placed them into an overnight bag.
“Your turn to drive,” she said, as she motioned for Galen to take the driver’s seat.
She felt as though she were going on some great adventure. Although the fear of the ball remained with her, she couldn’t help being excited by the thought of traveling with Galen. Maybe it was just that she was breaking out of the boring routine she had fallen into. Work, read a book, sleep; sometimes a movie. Of course, there was always laundry.
This was different, it was exciting. It meant facing the unknown in a world where everything was the same all of the time. She wanted to find out what the ball was, even if it meant risking her life.
Galen, on the other hand, was truly frightened. He had thought a lot about the night before when he had been running from the horrible wall of flames. That had scared him badly. He did not want to know what it was, or how it had come into Al’s possession. He wanted to be rid of it. He wanted to feel the freedom of his mundane, regular life again.
It had been less than twenty-four hours since he had first set eyes on the thing, but it seemed as if it were years. Now his entire life depended upon staying ahead of the
ball, which meant constant running. What if this guy, Paxon, had never heard of it? What if he offered no help at all? He could not run for the rest of his life.
Galen was also feeling a tremendous responsibility for Audra. He had been the one who had invited her to Al’s last night. She had been generous in her offer to help. Now she was in danger because of her generosity and for no other reason. It was his fault. He must find a way to set them both free, to enable them to return to normality. Galen, once again, considered life as an accountant.
Galen drove west on route 20 toward route 39 south. Audra slept for a while, leaning uncomfortably against the door. She stirred only once and had asked Galen if she could use his bag of clothes for a pillow. He had told her she was welcome to it and she seemed to drift back to sleep within seconds.
Audra had fallen asleep thinking about Galen. She could smell his scent on the bag. She had never felt this way about a man before. She felt different about him now than she did when she had first gone to Al’s with him. At that time she felt he was so confident, so strong. Since then she had seen him cry. She had witnessed his uncertainty, his vulnerability. She felt now that he had leaned on her in his time of need. It felt warm. She wanted to be needed by someone like him.
Of course, there were things she disliked about him. She did not care for his temper or his harsh use of words. She also did not like his smoking. However, she felt something for him on a different level of her consciousness; something that she could not describe, but liked. She felt that by spending a little more time with him she would learn what drew her to him. She would learn if the qualities she envisioned him to have were really there.
She hoped he did not show her that he could be like her sister’s worthless husband, Jack. She did not want to find herself in the same trap that Sharon was in. She would be very careful. She fell asleep with these thoughts hanging like cobwebs in her mind.
She was still sleeping soundly when Galen pulled the car into the parking lot of the Pinewood motel, just outside of Bloomington. Galen woke her by gently rubbing her shoulder.
She awoke with a yawn and looked around. She had a large mark across her cheek from lying so long on the handle-strap of his bag.
“I’ll get us a room,” he said. “Sit tight. I’ll be right back.”
She nodded her sleepy head.
A few minutes later Galen carried the computer from the back seat of the car to the motel room.
The room was small and dim. The dark brown carpet seemed to absorb what little light there was. The bed was the main attraction in the room, as with most cheap motels. On the nightstand, a small sign with a coin-slot promised a luxurious massage in exchange for twenty-five cents. The room could not be described as dirty, but well-worn seemed to fit fine.
Audra cleared a place for the computer on the small desk. She plugged it in. After seeing that it was working, she told Galen that he might as well sleep for a while.
Galen looked at his watch. He calculated in his head how far they had come. He figured it would be about a ten-hour trip for the ball and subtracted the three hours it had taken them to get here. He subtracted another hour for a safety factor.
“About six hours and we’ll have to go again,” he said. “I’ll call Paxon from here before we leave.”
Audra nodded, already pounding the keys. “Sweet dreams,” she said before turning back to the computer.
“Yeah, right,” Galen said. “I’ll try to sneak them in between the nightmares.”
Audra ignored the sarcasm. She turned back to her work on the computer.
She noticed many of the file names started with common groups of letters. She considered that they were somehow related. She pulled up a file called “RFP.001”, and began to read. It was a piece titled Rain Forest Peoples. It was also chapter one. This makes some sense, she thought. She could cut the time to reading just one file out of a group.
She searched the files for almost four hours. She was amazed at the diversity of Gaston’s writings. There were stories, articles and letters to other educators and friends. There were notes from his many studies and an unfinished novel. Finally, after all of the searching, she found what she was looking for.
It was in a group of files starting with the letters EOH. She pulled up the first file in this series, EOH.001, and began to read. It told of Gaston’s studies of a legend from the south called the “Eater of Hearts.” It described how and where Gaston had found an object, shaped like a ball and made of crystal.
“Galen! Galen, wake up!” Audra said.
Galen leaped from the bed. He looked as if he were ready to do battle—or run. The sleepiness drained from his face in an instant leaving the look of stark terror.
Audra clasped a hand over her mouth, quickly identifying her mistake. “Galen,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you like that. It’s just that I… I found the files.”
Galen dropped backward onto the bed. He slapped his right hand over his heart and his bandaged left hand across his forehead. He really wanted to yell now but again fought the urge.
“I’ll be alright,” he said, looking at the ceiling. “Really, I will. Just give me a minute.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Sitting up on the bed, he said, “I hope you have some kind of really good news.”
“I’ve found the files describing the ball,” Audra said. “It’s called the Eater of Hearts.”
Galen grimaced, and then a look of surprise sprang upon him. “That’s what Al was saying before he died! Eater of Hearts, that’s it!”
Audra nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “That’s what it sounded like.”
“What does it say?” Galen asked.
Audra began to read. Galen sat against the headboard of the bed and listened.
She read to him about how Al had heard of the legend on a trip to the south. It said in the entry; “I have become totally fascinated by the legend and want to study it in more detail. It looks like this legend would make for an outstanding novel.” She began to skip over paragraphs trying to quickly locate more substantial information.
“Does it say anything about how to stop it?” Galen asked, looking over her shoulder.
“I don’t know yet,” she said, scrolling through a file. “There are dozens of files in here concerning that thing. We’ll have to read through them.”
“How long will that take?” Galen asked, obviously anxious for any information that might help them stop the ball.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Could be awhile; seems like there’s enough information in here to fill a good-sized book.”
“Shit!” Galen said, and then slapped a hand over his mouth. Galen tried not to swear in front of women, although it happened quite often. Even in the nineties, it still seemed a little wrong. His face flushed red as he turned to her. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to swear. It’s just that we don’t have time to read a whole book!”
“Gee, Galen, lighten up,” she said. “We’ll do our best. Just try to mellow out a little.”
Galen looked at his watch and saw that it was after four o’clock, after five in Georgia. “I’ll have to call Paxon again in a little while,” he said. “You want a soda or something?”
“Yeah, that’d be great,” she said, beginning to read through the files again.
Galen left the motel room and walked to the soda machine at the end of the long, one-story building. He took a quick glance around just in case there was a chance the ball arrived a little early. Realizing he had no change, he walked to the office.
The same woman that checked him in was still behind the counter. A few pounds overweight and her face heavy with makeup, Galen thought she was at one time an attractive woman. She was reading a romance novel with the typical half-dressed man and woman on the cover entwined in a heated embrace. She looked up when she heard the bell over the door ring. She removed a pair of old-fashioned black framed glasses and laid them on her desk. She looked much better withou
t them.
“Checking out so soon?” she asked, as a “you-devil-you” smile crossed her face.
Galen knew what she was thinking as she smiled. You read too many of those damned romance books, Galen thought. “Actually, I wondered if you had any change for the soda machine.”
She looked disappointed and turned to retrieve some change from the cash drawer.
He dropped a dollar onto the counter.
“Did you get a listing of our closed circuit movies?” the woman asked. She handed him a listing.
“Uh, no, I…I didn’t,” Galen responded.
“Well, it’s a little early yet. The really good ones come on a little later,” she said, showing a lot of teeth.
“Thanks,” Galen said, just wanting to get away from her.
She waved to him in what he guessed was supposed to be a seductive way. He glanced at the X-rated movie listing then tossed it into the trashcan next to the soda machine.
He carried the cold sodas back to the room.
Audra was still plugging away on the computer. “Thanks,” she said. He set the can of Coke on the desktop next to her. She did not even look up, focused only on reading the computer files.
Galen sat on the bed. He dug for Paxon’s phone number in his shirt pocket. “Find anything interesting yet?” Galen asked, rubbing his eyes.
Audra held up one hand. “Just a second,” she said. She then turned her seat to face Galen. “It’s incredible,” she said. “What I know so far is that the thing was a part of some religious ceremony a hundred-and-somethin’ years ago.”
Galen lifted an eyebrow.
“Yeah, really, by some runaway slave down south. He was captured in Africa and brought here as a slave. He and other slaves from the same tribe still practiced their African religion after being brought here. They cast a spell on the slave’s master.”
