Ghost in the Machine

by Patrick Carman

  It was Henry.

  Bonner pulled off the mask and it was Henry underneath.

  I didn’t even realize the camera had stopped. I think I was in shock.

  That’s Sarah, writing in my journal. We’re back home now.

  Keep telling the story. Until I turn the camera on again.

  The most interesting thing about the look on my dad’s face when he realized his best friend was in the dredge at 3:30 A.M. was not his confusion. Sure, he was confused. Who wouldn’t be? It was the recognition in his eyes that something was very wrong. It was the hint of an idea that Henry might have put me and Sarah at risk, might have even tried to harm us. The wheels were turning in his head, I can tell you that.

  A son knows when his dad is onto something.

  Bonner checked Henry’s pulse. He was in bad shape, but he was conscious. His leg was shattered. I knew how Henry felt and how long it was going to take for him to recover. He was in for a long, painful ride.

  When Henry glanced at the faces hovering over him in the dredge, he knew he was caught. Dad looked like he was going to kill him.

  Henry lay there, broken leg and all, and started to deny, deny, deny. But my dad kept shaking his head slowly saying, “Just tell me the truth for once.”

  And that was it. Henry was ready for it to be over. He was finally ready for all the secrets to come out after twenty long years. Holding back that kind of tide must get very tiring.

  Henry would say something, then my dad would fill in a blank, then me or Sarah, until all the parts were flying around the dredge, together in one place at last.

  Henry was the only person besides Francis and The Apostle who ever saw Joe Bush move the lever and reveal the secret room. He discovered the secret room when the dredge was still tearing every thing apart and forming Skeleton Creek. Henry had suspected the three men were stealing gold. Who wouldn’t at least try? In fact, making sure gold wasn’t being stolen was one of Henry’s primary jobs on his frequent visits from New York. There was no way of knowing for sure how much gold should be coming out of the ground, which made it impossible to gauge with any kind of accuracy whether gold was missing. Henry had to sneak up on them, and that’s exactly what he did.

  In the middle of the night on a scorching-hot August 14 (even in pain, even so much later, he remembered the date), Henry got in the lake of water the dredge floated in, swam over amid the pounding noise, and boarded. Dripping wet from head to toe, he watched as Old Joe Bush moved a handle that didn’t seem to have any purpose.

  The thing that made me the most angry the whole time Henry was talking about this was that it seemed like he’d never, ever liked Skeleton Creek or anyone in it. From beginning to end, that had always been an act.

  This, for me, was an unforgivable deception.

  He only came back again and again for one reason.

  You got it, Sarah. Gold.

  It was only ever about getting his greedy hands on the gold.

  But finding the secret room was only part of the puzzle. It would take a lot more than that to get what he wanted, because Old Joe Bush was a really smart guy who loved Skeleton Creek.

  Henry didn’t actually say this. We figured it out this morning. We haven’t slept. And Ryan’s dad finally started talking.

  Yeah. Joe Bush created layers of secrecy within an organization he founded when the dredge showed up in town: the Crossbones. Its charter members were the three men who worked the night shift together on the dredge: Joe Bush, The Apostle, and Francis Palmer. Only those three were aware of the location — or even the existence — of the secret room. The three were absolutely sworn to secrecy, and together they recruited Dr. Watts, Gladys Morgan, and my dad, Paul McCray.

  Dr. Watts and Joe created the formulas for purifying and melting gold, but Dr. Watts never knew anything about a secret room. He was content to do the chemistry with Joe and keep out of the dirty details of stealing gold. Joe gave the combination to the cryptix to my dad and Gladys but no one else. They had no idea a secret room had been created or even why. And everyone in the Crossbones was given one primary objective: to save the town from the evil of the dredge. In due time, when Joe was ready, all the members would know every secret. But he knew that would have to wait a long time, at least until the dredge was shut down for good.

  There was one big problem. Old Joe Bush might have been smart as a whip, but he wasn’t impervious to accidents. According to Henry (but then, how much can we really trust him?), Old Joe Bush really did die by accident. He really was pulled into the gears by the cuff on his pants. His leg was smashed and the gears spit him out into the water below, just like the legend said. And it happened the night after Henry discovered the secret room.

  Only Joe knew every important detail: the existence of the secret room he’d made, where it was, the combination to unlock the cryptix, and the alchemy formula for processing gold the way he’d secretly done it.

  Henry went straight to Francis Palmer when he could no longer turn to Joe for answers. He threatened Francis with losing his job. But Francis didn’t know anything Henry didn’t already know. He knew Joe spent hours and hours in the secret room. He knew where the secret room was. But that was it.

  So Henry questioned Francis mercilessly and — as he told it — accidentally killed him. The same was true for The Apostle.

  Henry said it something like this:

  “They were all accidents! I never meant to hurt anyone. I scuffled with Francis up there and he fell. And that crazy Apostle, I dunked him in the river but I didn’t drown him. He just slipped out of my hands and drifted downstream in the dark. It wasn’t my fault he couldn’t swim.”

  As far as Henry was concerned, very little was ever his fault.

  After The Apostle died, the remaining members of the Crossbones fell quiet for years. Dr. Watts, Gladys, and my dad all went on with their daily lives. Between the three of them, they had no idea a secret room even existed. They only had a hunch there was some gold hidden somewhere and that someone had killed their friends in search of it. Best to leave well enough alone.

  Year after year, Henry came back, searching for clues. He was sure there was a stash of gold hidden somewhere on the mountain, and he was convinced the cryptix contained a map that would tell him where to look. If only he could unlock it without blowing himself up.

  On one of Henry’s visits some kids were sneaking around the dredge and he chased them off. After that he needed a plan to keep snooping thrill-seekers away from the dredge. So he created the ghost of Joe Bush. Eleven months out of every year in New York gave him plenty of time to figure things out. Every year he added a few more subtle touches. Underground speakers, remote switches for sounds, iridescent masks and hoods, invisible trip wires that let him know when someone was heading down the trail toward the dredge. He even had his own secret shortcut through a seemingly impenetrable fortress of blackberry bushes.

  Things were different with me and Sarah. Number one, we were persistent.

  I was persistent. What’s this we stuff?

  Like I was saying, we were persistent. But there was one thing that tipped Henry off that I didn’t know about until he mentioned it. Sarah had been going to the dredge and filming it for weeks before that first video she showed me. She’d already been inside, already scouted around for hours. And here’s one of the weirdest parts of the whole story: Henry had surveillance cameras set up inside and outside the dredge. Not only could he keep an eye on it from a laptop he carried with him, he could also watch it from New York. And watch it he did. Years of watching the dredge turned Henry into quite the technician with this sort of thing. If a person walked past certain places in the woods on the way to the dredge, they unknowingly set off alerts all the way out in New York. The best I can understand it, there were wide pads buried a foot underground and they were sensitive to pressure. If someone walked on the trail, Henry knew they were coming.

  And so it was that by the time Henry arrived in Skeleton Creek, he’d wa
tched Sarah with her camera. He’d seen her visiting the dredge not once but several times, recording all kinds of things. It worried him enough to put his well-worn scare tactics into high gear when he showed up in Skeleton Creek.

  Henry was also growing bolder because of all the talk about burning down the dredge.

  He didn’t know who else was in the Crossbones, but he was sure there were others. He’d seen little hints here and there from my dad. And there was that one night, when I fell asleep at my desk and woke up with words scribbled on my wall with a pen. I had that list — the list of everyone we’d discovered was in the Crossbones. It was that list that sent Henry to see Dr. Watts when he said he was visiting a friend.

  He had an excuse for that night, too.

  “I didn’t mean to kill Dr. Watts. I forced my way in, that much is true. And I questioned him. I knew he had answers, but the old loon wouldn’t tell me anything. I only swung one time, caught him right in the head. But he made me so mad, all clammed up like that. He was frail, more so than I realized. I’m sure he died of a heart attack, not that little bump on his head.”

  I guess you could say Henry’s confession was tempered with quite a lot of excuses. At least he didn’t do much complaining when it came to his own severe injuries.

  “Did you write those words on my wall?” I asked him.

  “What words? What are you talking about?” Dad asked. He was already mad, but the idea of Henry in my room, writing on my walls, brought his anger to another level.

  Henry just looked down at his broken leg and wouldn’t answer. He couldn’t bring himself to look at my dad, and I never knew for sure if it had been Henry or not.

  Finally, Henry just about passed out from the pain. Bonner called the hospital for an ambulance.

  And I got the camera working again.

  There was at least one more big surprise waiting for us on the dredge. But this part is better seen than said.

  SARAHFINCHER.COM

  PASSWORD:

  NEWYORKGOLDANDSILVER

  Wednesday, September 29, 4:30 P.M.

  I’m back in my room alone. I began writing things down in here, so it seems like the most logical place to end up.

  In some ways I’m more afraid than I was when this whole thing started. The danger had always felt as if it crept off the page of a scary story I’d made up in my head. Sure, it was spooky out on the dredge, but there was a feeling somewhere at the back of my mind that it was still a ghost story.

  Things are different now.

  Henry is out there somewhere. They searched the woods for days and found nothing. Chances are he planned for this and created a secret way to escape unnoticed. It would be just like him to think ahead. I wonder what his apartment is like in New York — full of cameras pointed at the dredge — watching them remove all the hidden treasures. I don’t know and neither does Henry, because he’s vanished into thin air. No one has been able to find him.

  We’ve taken his gold and left him injured. He hates us. And the worst part, Henry thinks I’m the cause of all his problems.

  From here on out the danger is real.

  I’m going to change subjects because I’m hoping it will make me feel better.

  Right after I pulled up that floorboard on the dredge and dumped the blocks of gold out, Daryl told us something we didn’t know about his dad. Part of me feels like we should have figured it out on our own a long time ago, but we never suspected.

  “You don’t know who I am, do you?” he asked us.

  It was Sarah who started chipping away at the options.

  “You’re not a part of the Crossbones. You didn’t haunt this place. You’ve never been here before this summer. Who are you?”

  “I’ve always suspected foul play,” said Daryl. “Always. But I never imagined …”

  “Who are you?” Sarah repeated.

  “I was a foster kid in the city until I was twelve. That’s when the Bonners adopted me. About a year after that I started going by my middle name — Daryl. I guess I was looking for a break with the past. A fresh start.”

  “What’s your first name?” asked Sarah. She could make a really good investigative reporter. Always first with the questions.

  “Joseph,” said Daryl. “I’m Old Joe Bush’s son.”

  I remember feeling light-headed for some reason, like the ghost of Joe Bush had inhabited his son and we were about to be appropriately scared out of our wits. But the moment passed and I realized something as Daryl went on. The guy had lost his dad to the dredge. He’d obviously lost his mom young, too, and he’d been through the toughest kind of childhood. But curiosity had gotten the better of him. He’d been searching for answers just like we had, only the stakes were even higher.

  “Now I know the truth,” he said, looking at the opening to the secret room.

  All this happened before we realized we’d basically forgotten all about the cryptix and the secrets we’d uncovered. After we figured out Joe had liquefied the gold and hidden it inside the planks of the dredge itself, Daryl piped back in.

  “I should have guessed he would come up with something like this. My dad was about the handiest guy in town, everybody said that. That’s why they chose him to run the dredge. He was gifted with motors and cranks and all kinds of machinery. But he was also a carpenter. A really good carpenter. He built the house we lived in. I remember him bringing these planks home, saying he was fixing them or replacing them. No one would have ever guessed differently. It was his job to repair things, and they were always just planks coming out of the dredge, so even if they checked, there was nothing to find. As far as anyone else was concerned, the dredge was slowly getting a new floor that always looked better and better. But when those boards went back, the centers were gone, ready to be filled with a block of pure gold. I guess my old man was pretty smart.”

  The diagram of the dredge we found in the secret room was very detailed. It showed every floorboard on both floors of the dredge. The ones Joe Bush had filled with gold were colored in with a pencil. There weren’t very many empty planks yet to be filled in. In other words, the dredge was a ship of gold. There were hundreds of hidden gold bars.

  A year after New York Gold and Silver abandoned dredge #42 in Skeleton Creek, the town bought it for a dollar. There was some talk of turning it into a tourist attraction, but it never materialized. Who wants to walk way out into the woods and look at an old hunk of wood and metal? Nobody, that’s who.

  But it ended up being the best investment Skeleton Creek ever made.

  I got an update from my dad when I came home today. So far they’ve pulled 1,400 pounds of gold out of the dredge. Every floorboard they pull up has another ten or twenty pounds of pure gold hidden down the middle. The price of gold is high these days, pushing a thousand dollars 200 an ounce. My dad carries a calculator in his pocket, adding up the numbers over and over.

  “At a thousand dollars an ounce we’re at sixteen thousand per pound of gold,” he told me earlier today. “Do you realize how much money what they’ve found is worth? Over twenty-two million bucks.”

  “It’ll reach thirty million before they’re done tearing it apart,” I said. I’d studied the diagram carefully. There was a lot more to be found.

  Thirty million dollars’ worth of gold. Can you imagine? And it was always right there, sitting in the woods just waiting for someone to find it.

  Even the dredge won’t come out too badly in the end. There are already plans in the works to build a wood-plank trail from Main Street all the way out to the dredge with signs all along the way describing the amazing story Sarah and I uncovered, ghostly sounds and sites included. The fact that Henry has gone missing will only add to the urban legend and bring in even more tourists. Some people say they hope he never comes back and never gets found.

  I am not one of those people.

  There’s talk of rebuilding the downtown and turning Skeleton Creek into a world-class fly-fishing and sightseeing destination, with the creek
and the dredge as its centerpiece. Thirty million dollars ought to cover it.

  My dad’s planning to open a fly shop, since the town is “gifting” my parents and Sarah’s parents five percent of whatever comes out of the dredge.

  Oh, and they’re giving Sarah and me enough money to attend any college we want after graduation. We’re currently on the hunt for a university known for excellence in both writing and filmmaking. I can only imagine what kind of trouble we’ll get into when we show up on campus.

  Everyone in Skeleton Creek seems to believe we can turn this place around. Still, for me, the town wasn’t the most important thing the dredge gave me back.

  What I got back, what really matters, is my best friend. They can have all the money as long as they let me and Sarah stay together, which it appears they are going to do. I suppose it would be hard to justify keeping us apart, seeing as how we saved Skeleton Creek and all.

  I’m talking to my dad more these days, and he’s talking, too. The fly shop will be good for us, a common interest we can share. Plus he’ll be around a whole lot more, doing something he loves.

  He doesn’t talk about Henry. I can’t imagine how it would feel for your best friend to betray you like that, to lie about so much for so long. It has softened my dad about me and Sarah, but he’s going to have a hard time trusting like that again.

  We’ve both learned a lot about the risks and rewards of friendship.

  One of the nice things about being a writer is that writing is always there for me when I need it. During the past few weeks, through all the trauma and loneliness and fear, writing has been my replacement best friend. I’ve spent more time writing during the last twenty days than I did during the hundred days before that. Writing was a comfort. I feel I owe it something in return.