by Dale Mayer
“It’s not gas,” a voice said beside him.
Samson turned to see Stefan. Samson sighed, stretched out his feet and said, “It’s been a rough day already.”
“I know,” Stefan said. “Usually when Jamie starts to scream, I understand what’s going on. But this was strange. His voice was muted.”
“And that could also be the side effect caused by Jamie, or somebody, blasting a tunnel through my brain,” Samson said with a groan. “How do you guys keep this stuff up? I’m exhausted already.”
“And that has nothing to do with the cops who are even now going through your apartment.”
“Good luck with that. I didn’t do anything illegal.”
“You did forge a doctor’s signature.”
“Did I though? For all I know, that was Jamie.”
At that, Stefan burst out laughing. “You know what? That just might work. And, of course, dear Jamie never has to be held accountable for his actions. Is that it?”
“Sometimes I wonder if that isn’t the problem,” Samson said in exhaustion. “How is it that my younger brother gets to live in his dream state with absolutely no responsibility?”
“The problem is, he’s working on an element of life you guys never deal with, so, to you, he does nothing,” Stefan said. “But for myself and Dr. Maddy and several other spirit workers, we can see him out there trying to heal, trying to connect the world together. The trouble is, we need fifty thousand Jamies. One won’t be enough for this very sad, very sick world we live in.”
“I hate to even ask, but is there anything I can do?”
“You’re doing it,” Stefan said. “You are doing what you can. When you go outside and talk to that darkness out there, you need to make sure you show no fear because all it really is out there is unbalanced energy. And its energy is trying to right itself. It’s not sure how or why, but it’s attracted to the energy here at your place. It’s attracted to you and Jamie and Whimsy more than to the imbalance of energy happening here.”
Chapter 19
Whimsy curled up on the couch the next morning, a cup of steaming coffee in her hand as she stared outside. King and Queen were both lying on the edge of the porch—curious, but seemingly unconcerned about whatever was outside. Just the way she liked it.
She’d woken up with one thought running through her head. She was just waiting for a chance to bring it up.
Finally Samson walked in, sat down in front of her and put his feet up on the hearth.
“It’s midsummer,” she said, “and the comfort of the fire is very soothing.”
“It is,” he said. “It’s one of the differences that separates man from animal. The ability to create fire that cooks food and warms us up. Otherwise, we’d be burrowed in dens, like the rest of our furry families.”
She smiled. “I woke up with one thought this morning. What would cause that veil to thin?”
“Presuming it is a veil, and it has been thinned,” he said, “my answer is a simple, I have no clue.”
“Right. I was thinking about that,” she said. “Is anybody doing any drilling work in the sound? Or soundwave testing?”
He looked at her, startled. “They’re not allowed to.”
“You know a lot of people don’t listen to the rules,” she said, “and do whatever the hell they want.”
“True. But I don’t know of anybody drilling here,” he said. “Although I can’t be certain somebody isn’t doing earthquake testing or any number of other research projects.”
“Would your data show any tremors or any signs of irregular activity?”
“I’m not tracking tectonic plates for earthquakes,” he said, “or any vibrations. I’m tracking mammal behavior. But there have been odd ripples, strange wave patterns, but they don’t match seismic activity.”
“Might it have some effect on the plates?”
“Nobody really understands how and what the plates will do, if they’re ever put under major stress,” he said carefully. “Not to mention they move all the time. That’s normal. Whatever is going on here isn’t.”
“Exactly,” she said. “Therefore, it’s quite possible that whoever is doing this may not have any idea what other possible hidden damages they’re causing.”
“But you’re making it sound like there is a they involved in this.”
“I have to think that way, at least at the beginning,” she said, enunciating her words slowly. “This is all relatively new to me, and what appears natural to me isn’t natural to you, and what appears supernatural to me isn’t to you. But we’re talking about something beyond both of us here. I have to think there’s something that we, mankind, has done to bring it upon us.”
He frowned and shook his head. “Something’s out there, but I can’t tell you what it is. Or if it’s the result of human interference.”
“Unfortunately most events are,” she said softly. “I don’t know what it is either, but, if somebody was disturbing the energy of the plates, it makes sense that, with the plates being a point of intersection on our earth’s crust, that maybe it’s also a point of intersection of the energy of the earth’s crust. Like an energy route.”
She could hear his startled murmur just before he managed to cut it back. As she watched the idea grow in his eyes, she slowly nodded.
“Now you’re getting my drift.” She gave him a crooked smile. “I don’t think we’re on an energy ley line here, but, if we were, that could be part of the explanation. Or maybe add to the confusion.”
“It would be incredibly dangerous for anybody to be doing too much activity on the plates,” he said. “It could set off an earthquake, and we’d have a major catastrophe.”
“But people aren’t very sensible,” she said. “At least not all the time. And, on top of that, not everybody is exactly honest about what they are doing. For all you know, somebody has the best interests of humanity in mind and thinks the loss of a few million people is collateral damage.”
“We already know lots of people who’ll do that,” he said slowly. “You’re correct there.”
“I don’t really want to be right,” she said with a tight smile, “but it is definitely something we have to consider.”
“We’d have to get proof of any activity along this part of the sound as it was.”
“What would that require?”
He frowned, pulled up his phone and flicked through his contacts. “I might have somebody I can call who can answer that,” he said. “It would be stupid to play with the plates though.”
“Especially anywhere along the Ring of Fire.” She shook her head. “But surely, if somebody was doing something, and tremors resulted, the earthquake centers would be recording them.”
He frowned and stared off in the distance. “It’s a matter of making inquiries without alarming anyone.” He hopped up and grabbed some coffee. “I’ll go to my lab and fire off a couple emails.”
She watched him go, a smile playing around the corners of her lips. She liked that about Samson. If she had something to say, he listened. He never knocked down her ideas as being too silly. He was a godsend in a way.
Her ex-fiancé had been many things, but more of a sports jock and not so much a brain trust. He had downplayed her own educational achievements because he had nothing to compare it to. It hadn’t bothered her because she understood where he was at. But now it was hard to think about him in any positive light.
She also had no explanation as to why these men who she’d met while kayaking would want her dead. As far as she was concerned, her life was blameless. Okay, so she wasn’t perfect. She’d said and done things she wasn’t terribly proud of, but she was essentially a good person—had never cheated, maliciously lied or knowingly hurt anybody. So why kill her?
And that was something that refused to stop prodding her. There had to be answers. There had to be something, some explanation. People just didn’t randomly pick up PhD students and shoot them when they were out in the water. So why then and
why her? How could she check with the police about Mark’s story without alerting them to where she was? They still were hiding from the police after breaking Jamie out. Still, the cops knew about the shooting at his place. Mark wasn’t going to get away completely free, but justice might have to wait. Even then if that eluded him, she did believe in karmas and she’d get him in the end.
With Samson busy in the lab, she opened the front doors, stepped onto the porch and sat down on the steps. Both dogs nuzzled her, looking for attention. With her coffee cup secure on the step below her, she put one hand on each of the dog’s heads. In her mind she called out, Ocean, do you need to talk to me? She’d promised Samson she’d try to talk to whomever had contacted her in the sound. She wasn’t sure this was the best way, but it was an opportunity to try.
The result was a weird buzz.
Ocean, you need to make it clearer. Are you in trouble? Has something hurt you? Is there something down there that’s going to blow? Or something we need to know about?
She felt foolish even attempting to send her thoughts in that direction, but was it any crazier than anything else going on here? The ocean was vast; it obviously knew exactly what was going on down on its seabed, way more than any human did. It also understood earthquakes better than any human did too. That was all natural, normal stuff happening in an ocean. She couldn’t imagine that any of that bothered the ocean much. There would always be change—geological, hydrological, anthropological.
It all came under the heading of Mother Nature versus humanity. But, if man was down there drilling, if man was testing, even setting off light charges to check reactions so they could anticipate what to do in a major reaction, she just couldn’t imagine how Mother Nature or the ocean would feel about it.
As she stared off in the distance, she swore something was out there in the water. But then it was a waterway. There should be ships, although it was relatively empty of any shipping traffic right now. She had no telescope, but she wondered if somebody had satellite imagery of what was going on at any time. She’d go to Google Maps or Google Images, but those snapshots were years old—she needed real-time images. She thought about all of her studies and then considered the shipping lanes. Her laptop had come with her, but she didn’t know how to get internet here.
She went back upstairs, grabbed her laptop from her bag and came downstairs. She hesitated at the opened door to the lab until Samson looked up and asked, “What’s up?”
“I just thought about traffic on the shipping lanes,” she said. “I don’t have internet access to see what’s going on or to access any of the cams. And maybe there’s even satellite imagery in a live feed, and it wouldn’t hurt to check that out too.”
“I’d highly suspect,” he said, “anybody, if they’re doing something illegal like we discussed, is deliberately not wanting to be seen.”
“So then where could they be? Surely the satellites would pick up everything.”
“Not necessarily. They could be in the islands,” he said. “And theoretically close to here.”
That shocked her. “Well then, you’d see them though, wouldn’t you?”
He nodded grimly. “I do know a couple companies that operate out here. Sometimes scientists stop in. We’ve shared a couple beers and sat down, just shooting the breeze. I’m contacting them now.”
“What kind of research are the companies around here involved in?”
“Anything from water salinity research to global warming, for example. Bruce, a friend of mine on a nearby island, is studying algae growth and the change in plant life with the shipping lanes,” he said. “He’s fairly fanatical about how much damage is being done and how an oil spill could kill all plant and mammal life from this region.”
“How fanatical is he about it?” Whimsy asked. “What’s the chance he’s doing something to cause waves underground to stop the ships from traveling in the region?”
“Already there’s definitely been enough protests from merchant mariners,” Samson said. “An awful lot of people want to move the shipping lanes down south.”
“But Seattle is a main port,” she said. “I highly doubt anything simple will create that level of change. The shipyards are big business.”
He looked at her, surprise in his eyes. “You’re not suggesting they’ll do something big in order to stop it, are you?”
“We’re back to that sacrificing three, five, fifty million people,” she said, “in order to save a complete ecosystem.”
Samson shook his head, as if trying to shake off her words, and then he finally looked at her and nodded. “Hang on a second.” He clicked a few buttons on his keyboard and brought up some codes. “Put this in as your network password.”
Following his instructions, she had her laptop hooked up. “Is the internet decent? Can I sit in the other room and work?”
“You should be able to,” he said, but he was already back to pounding the keys.
She could see multiple screens with data streaming in the background as he worked on writing an email in the foreground. She walked back into the main room, sat down. He got up from the lab, entered the kitchen to pour himself another cup of coffee and went back into his lab again.
Whimsy wondered if Stefan was interested in giving her lessons on energy. There was so much she didn’t know. Didn’t understand. What if that energy outside was just the opposite of good, positive energy? He’d said something about it, but she hadn’t understood. Was the energy in the dark water here different from the smoky energy she saw in the trees here?
She hadn’t felt any malevolence to the being in the water, and it had certainly saved her, but why? And were the two—the mammal and the whale spout—actually the same energy? She had seen and met something out there in the sound, but this waterspout was something entirely different.
It also made sense that the waterspout could have been created by somebody working on this island or working close to this island. If Jamie were awake, she’d ask him, but he didn’t appear to be getting up anytime soon.
She had been working on her degrees for twelve years, and, in all that time, she had learned quite a bit about which governmental bodies were helpful and which private companies were not. It was hard to sort through them all in her head at the moment, so she started a list.
As Samson had said, just because somebody might be out there, that one person’s presence didn’t mean a big corporation or the government was involved. A little company could be doing contract work for a bigger one or for the government itself. Or just a harmless researcher with a small presence here could be visiting from another part of the world. It was a disturbing thought to think people were behind this disruption of Mother Nature, but Whimsy couldn’t see how else all of this was happening. And usually, when it came down to the ills of the planet, mankind was behind it. Barring any supernatural influences, she didn’t think this would be any different.
She started looking at the websites she knew how to access. First, she went to the longshoremen’s site and the port of call. Both should have satellite imagery of the port itself but not necessarily anything outside of the immediate area. And of course, there would be lots of shipping liners. Most research vessels wouldn’t be hanging around Seattle but would be deeper in the open ocean.
It took her a bit to find this island on the map, but, as soon as she did, she brought up satellite imagery to see if anybody was in the area. Search and Rescue operations and the Coast Guard would have the most up-to-date information. She frowned, thinking about it. She’d met a couple people who worked there. She didn’t know if there was any way to get their assistance without letting them know what was going on here.
She searched her email and came up with the name of one student she’d worked with who was now part of the Coast Guard and sent him a message. She was looking for any research or rigs engaged in testing anywhere close to where she was. She gave him a one-hundred-mile radius, which was a pretty massive area and would possibly pull in all kin
ds of data she wasn’t interested in. But it would give her a place to start.
Getting a little confused herself, she opened up a Word document and typed in some notes. Notes about her hypothesis, notes about this energy stuff, notes about whatever might have saved her, notes about Jamie, notes about her sister, and then finally, she put down notes about Samson and Stefan.
She didn’t understand Stefan’s part in all this, other than he was obviously an incredibly powerful energy worker. She didn’t know if the term psychic even applied anymore to somebody who could do what Stefan did. Then she brought herself up short because, whatever had happened on the beach, she’d seen herself sitting half out of her own body. And, if that didn’t make her some kind of a freak, then what did? And what it really meant was she had to do a paradigm shift of her own thoughts.
Normally she was nimble with her thinking, but this?
Then she’d been through a lot lately. As she thought about it, she wanted absolutely nothing in her apartment, other than enough clothes so she could wear something clean each day for one week. Her mother was back East, but Whimsy had as little to do with her mother as possible. Inside, she still couldn’t help feeling her mother had arranged for her sister to be separated from her. And it was hard to forgive that kind of nastiness. She wanted to believe her mother would have done it because she was worried about her sister, but, in Whimsy’s heart of hearts, she knew it was more of a jealousy issue because Whimsy had been much more caring and loving to her sister than her own mother had been to Marion.
Shaking her head to cast off the melancholy thoughts, she went back to her notes, until she felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. She glanced at the dogs, and immediately they were on their feet, the ridges of their spines up too. They curled up their lips as they looked toward the trees. The trees bent and curled with some sort of wind, but, as she glanced out another window, she saw absolutely no sign of wind. Slowly she rose, walked to the doors, opened them, but remained inside between the two dogs. “What is it King, Queen?”
