by R. L. King
Mollified, she nodded. “Your order will be up soon. Please excuse me.”
While he waited for his lunch, Stone sipped his coffee and unobtrusively studied the rest of the customers. Most of them had once again returned to their own conversations, but a couple were still casting occasional curious glances his way. One of these was a young man in a workman’s jacket, who was sitting at a table on the other side of the room with two other similarly-dressed men. All of them looked between late teens and early twenties. Stone met his gaze for a moment and held it; the young man looked away and returned to his food.
Stone’s order arrived soon after, delivered by the diner’s only other waitress, who dropped it off with a quick smile and hurried off before she could be drawn into conversation. He finished it quickly; the food was simple but tasty, and he scanned the newspaper’s few remaining pages as he ate. As he suspected, the incident at the paper mill wasn’t mentioned on any of them. When he finished, he paid his check, left a generous tip, and headed outside. As he left, he noticed the young workman was no longer seated with his two friends.
The parking lot had cleared out some since he’d arrived. As he headed to his car, he half expected to find the man waiting for him, but he saw no sign of him.
Instead of getting back in the car, he left the lot and strode at an easygoing pace down the street, looking in shop windows. Devil’s Creek was clearly not a tourist town, but it did have a small business district with quaint shops, old-fashioned buildings, and a diminutive but handsome brick church next to a tree-lined park. Stone thought about Winthrop, the stifling little town where Ian had grown up under the thumb of his tyrannical, homophobic stepfather, and wondered if the people here were any different. He had little experience with small-town America outside the Bay Area, and wondered, not for the first time, if he should consider taking a sabbatical from the University to drive around and explore some of its local legends. He might even get a paper or two out of it.
Except Hubbard would flay you alive if you leave before they hire another professor, he thought with amusement. Especially now, since his colleague had been furiously writing away on his next horror novel following the news that his previous one had finally been accepted for publication.
His thoughts of Ian reminded him of what had happened in the Overworld last night. He wondered if it was an isolated incident, a “glitch in the Matrix,” as Verity had called it, or a symptom of something more widespread. If Ian was using the portals a lot in his travels, he should probably at least warn his son to be careful. As he walked, he pulled out his phone and dashed off a quick text: Had problem with portal to Chicago last night. Take care when traveling. He sent it and waited a moment to see if Ian replied, then kept walking when he didn’t. He’d go a couple more blocks and see if he could find a library or other place where he might find the location of the abandoned paper mill, then head back to the car and find a place to stay. Regardless of whether he found the mill’s location right away, he planned to wait until after dark to head out there. Safer that way, and less likely the wrong people would notice him.
He located the library, a neat little building a block away from the church. Before he went inside he thought about using magic to change his appearance, but decided against it. If this small town was like every other one he’d ever encountered, the story of his arrival at the diner would be all over town before the day was over. No point in adding yet another stranger to pique their curiosity.
The librarian didn’t ask questions when he stopped by her desk and inquired about any reference materials she might have regarding the old mill. Although Stone could tell from her aura that she was curious about why he wanted to know, she led him silently to a room full of large, dusty books containing reference issues of the town’s newspaper, along with a couple of microfiche readers. She pointed him at the drawers where the microfiche reels were stored, told him to come back if he had any other questions, and turned to leave.
“Oh—I do have one question,” he called. “Can you tell me when the mill was built, and when it was taken out of service?”
“It was built in the late eighteen-hundreds, and shut down in…1938, I think. There was a fire, the owners went bankrupt, and then the war started. By the time it was over, nobody wanted to put up the money needed to get it back in business.”
Stone thanked her and settled down to his research. For the next two hours, no one bothered him as he pored through the books and swapped out reels on the ancient machine, trying to get a sense of the place’s history. It wasn’t easy since nothing was indexed, but eventually he located what he was looking for. The librarian had been wrong about the date of the fire, but not by much—he found the account on the front page of a paper from June of 1939.
“Hmm…” he murmured. “I can certainly see why they might have thought the place haunted.”
The account of the fire that gutted the inside of the Ainsbury and Son Paper Mill was sanitized, as such stories often were in those days, but Stone had no difficulty reading between the lines to reveal the truth: Marvin Ainsbury and his son Milton were unscrupulous businessmen, driving their workforce of mostly desperate young men and women to put in long hours in unsafe conditions. When a fire broke out one night, rumored but never proven to be caused by the improper storage of oily rags, many of the workers had been unable to escape and had succumbed to either the flames or the smoke.
Afterward, the relatives of several of the workers had sued the Ainsburys, and though they were never found guilty of any wrongdoing (probably because they bribed the right people, Stone thought), the negative publicity and cost of the trial drove them to bankruptcy. They fled the area to somewhere in Europe and were never heard from again, leaving the mill in a legal snarl nobody ever bothered to unravel.
After that, Stone found few other references to the mill, beyond brief accounts of a couple of abortive attempts to refurbish it and a few comments about the local children believing it to be haunted. It was declared condemned and the local government had arranged to have a fence built to keep curious explorers out.
“That’s not working out too well for you, is it?” Stone murmured, taking the last reel off the machine and returning it to its spot in the drawer.
He thanked the librarian and left, his mind still on the workers who’d perished in the mill because of the Ainsburys’ greed and neglect. He wondered if there were echoes lurking around the place, and the rumors of hauntings came from people occasionally spotting them. With that many dead in such a tragic way, it wasn’t at all surprising that some of their echoes had unfinished business. He’d have expected to find many more stories of sightings.
Ah, well. If echoes were all that was causing the problems, he could verify it and be home by tomorrow. They were interesting, certainly, but no more than any others he’d encountered. Perhaps he could even do something to help them, but he doubted it. Echoes were tricky and persistent, and he didn’t see any immediate way to deal with them. That wasn’t why he was here anyway.
He headed back to his car and located a small, brick-fronted bed-and-breakfast called the Lamplight Inn near the edge of town, the only one of its kind he’d discovered. Devil’s Creek definitely wasn’t much of a tourist destination.
By the time he settled into a small, country-kitschy room and took a hot shower, it was already late afternoon. He decided to stay in for an early dinner, calling one of the two pizza-delivery places on the flyer he found on the nightstand. He’d already piqued enough local curiosity at the diner today; best if people thought he’d moved on so he could make his trip out to the mill after dark in peace.
The pizza was good, at least. By the time he finished half of it and put the other half in the room’s mini-fridge for the morning, the sun had gone down. He pulled on his overcoat and slipped out the back door, walking casually. The fewer people who suspected what he was up to, the better.
He’d parked his car behind the building. The tiny lot was dark now, illuminated b
y only a single streetlight. By the small number of other cars, Stone suspected he might be one of only a few other guests, if that. That was all right—it made it even less likely someone would notice him leaving. He reached the sedan and fumbled in his pocket for the key.
A vehicle pulled into the lot, its headlights dazzling Stone’s eyes as it slowed down, coming to a stop directly behind his car.
6
Startled, Stone stopped, taking a step back to put more distance between himself and the new vehicle. “Can you move, please?” he called. “I was just about to leave.”
The truck’s lights switched off.
Stone blinked as his vision adjusted. He could see it a little better now in the faint streetlight: it was an old Chevy, dusty and dented. The window rolled down and a figure leaned over. “You were asking about the thing at the paper mill.”
Stone tensed. It was a man, but he still couldn’t make out any detail. “Yes, and?”
“I have some questions for you. I heard you were stayin’ here.”
“Step out of there—let me have a look at you.”
The door opened, and the figure jumped down and moved into the light. “Remember me? From earlier?”
Stone relaxed. With a better look, he recognized the young man who’d been sitting at the diner with two friends—the one who’d left. “I remember you. What do you want?”
“Would you get in? We can talk in the truck.”
Without hesitation, Stone hurried over and climbed into the cab. It wasn’t as if he had anything to worry about from some farm boy in Armpit, Iowa. Immediately, the young man pulled out of the parking lot and began driving at a leisurely speed down the main street.
“Who are you?” he asked Stone. “You’re not from around here. Not anywhere near around here. That’s pretty obvious.”
“No, I’m not. My name is Alastair Stone, and I’ve come from the San Francisco area.”
“Why?” The young man didn’t look at him as he drove. He appeared to be heading out of town. “I’m Mitchell Kirkson, by the way.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Kirkson.” Stone studied him. He looked to be about twenty, tall and solidly muscular—the type of build Verity called “cornfed.” In addition to his workman’s jacket, he wore a plaid shirt, well-worn jeans, and scuffed leather work boots. His dark-blond hair was cut in a short, no-nonsense style, and his deep tan and calloused hands suggested he spent a lot of time outside.
“Why did you come looking for me? I got the impression from my reception at the diner that my questions weren’t exactly welcome.”
“People don’t like to talk about what happened. I think they’re all tryin’ to forget it. Even the ones who weren’t there.”
“And why is that?”
Mitchell Kirkson turned onto another road just outside town. “I’m just gonna drive around for a while, if that’s okay with you.”
“Of course. Don’t want to be seen with me, I take it?”
“Makes it easier.”
“Fair enough. So what’s going on? How much do you know about what happened? Were you at this party, or gathering, or whatever it was?”
For the first time, Mitchell looked troubled. “Yeah.”
“What was it, exactly?”
“It wasn’t anything, really. Not a party, not exactly. Just a few friends getting together to drink a little booze and blow off some steam. We’ve done it before. Nellie’s right—the mill’s been kind of a hangout for years, long as anybody can remember. Everybody in town knows who’s too young to drink, so we can’t go to the bars.”
“So this sort of thing happens often?”
“Hanging out at the mill? Yeah, fairly often. The police come by and run people out of they catch ’em, but mostly they don’t bother as long as nobody drives drunk.”
“Mr. Kirkson—do you know a young woman named Leith McCoy?”
“Name sounds sorta familiar, maybe. Why?”
“She’s the one who put me on to this in the first place. Her cousin lives in my area, and she’s a friend of good friend of mine. I spoke with her on the phone recently.”
Mitchell narrowed his eyes. “You’re not makin’ much sense, Mr. Stone. You want to tell me why somebody like you gives a damn about some weird stuff goin’ on in podunk Iowa?”
“I’ll tell you that, but first I’d like you to tell me something.”
“What’s that?”
“Why did you seek me out? Why are you willing to talk to me when the others seem reluctant?”
For several seconds, the only sound was the rumble of the truck’s powerful engine, and the faint strains of a country music song coming from its old speakers. Mitchell gripped the steering wheel tighter, and as Stone watched with magical sight, his aura roiled with sudden unease. Stone got the impression he looked tired, and not the kind of tired you got from doing hard physical work. Psychic tired.
“Mr. Kirkson?”
“Yeah.” He swallowed. “See, here’s the thing—the other folks who went to the mill don’t remember what happened. But I do. And it’s scarin’ the devil outta me.”
7
Stone twisted in his seat. “You remember what happened that night at the mill?”
“Yeah.”
“And nobody else does?”
“I don’t think so. They could be lyin’ like I was, I guess, but I don’t think so.”
“I…see. And why are you telling me this, if you haven’t told anybody else? You don’t even know me.”
Again, Mitchell didn’t answer right away. The country song faded, replaced by another one about a man whose wife had left him to run off with a traveling salesman. “Maybe that’s why,” he said at last.
“What do you mean?” Stone settled back, projecting unruffled calm even though he wanted to grab the young man and wrest the story from him. That would be a mistake, he could tell—Mitchell Kirkson was like a skittish deer, wanting to trust him but ready to bolt if he pushed things too fast.
“I mean, you’re a stranger. Sometimes it’s easier to tell stuff to a stranger.”
“I could be a reporter, you know.”
“You ain’t a reporter.” Mitchell’s tone held certainty.
“How do you know that?”
“Reporters don’t look like you. There’s something…strange about you. And I don’t just mean the way you dress.” He glanced sideways. “You look like the kind of guy who might believe what I have to say without either laughin’ or callin’ the guys in the white coats.”
“I promise, I won’t do either. Mr. Kirkson—”
“Call me Mitch, okay?”
“Mitch, then.” He hesitated, wondering if he was going too fast, too soon. They were heading up an arrow-straight road now, stretching out before them as far as he could see. On both sides, white fences marked pasture fields dotted with cattle and sheep. “Would you be willing to show me this mill, after you tell me your story?”
Mitch’s aura flared. “I don’t know. I don’t really feel like goin’ back there anymore. Especially not after dark.”
“All right. That’s fine. Just—tell me what happened. I promise I won’t laugh. Do you mind if I take some notes?”
Another sideways glance. “You can’t tell anybody where you heard this. You have to promise, or I won’t tell you anything.”
“I give you my word, I won’t reveal your identity to anyone. I just want to know what happened.”
Mitch considered his words, then tightened his grip on the wheel again and fixed his gaze straight ahead. “Like I said, bunch of us go out there sometimes on weekends to blow off steam. Mostly the ones who are out of high school, workin’ but not old enough to go to the bars yet. We take some cases of beer, play some music, just hang out. The mill’s pretty big and mostly empty, except for some of the big broken machinery too big for the scavengers to haul out. People have been doin’ it for years.”
“You mentioned beer,” Stone said. “What about drugs?”
Mi
tch shuddered. “No, sir. No drugs. Well, maybe a few folks bring a little weed now and then, but never anything harder than that. Lot of us have jobs at a couple factories around here that do random drug testing. They can’t afford to get fired, so nobody takes chances.”
“Was it all beer that night? No weed?”
“Yeah. I’m sure of it. Even if somebody went off to smoke on their own, we’d’ve noticed the smell.”
Stone nodded. “Go on.”
“Okay. So, it was about midnight. We’d been up there for a couple hours. Somebody’d brought an old portable CD player and we were just sittin’ around drinkin’ beer and listenin’ to tunes like always.”
“How many of you were there?”
Mitch shrugged. “Maybe fifteen. Twenty at most.”
“And no one new? Nobody brought a friend you’d never met before?”
“No, sir. Everybody knew everybody else, same as usual.”
“All right, go on.” Stone settled back and watched the truck’s headlights pick out the scenery, which still hadn’t changed from flat pastures broken up by the occasional mailbox or trundling farm truck.
“Yeah. So…like I said, we were just listenin’ to music. Some folks were dancin’. I was sittin’ in a folding chair, lookin’ at the machines and thinkin’ about what it must have been like there when the mill was runnin’. And that was when I saw ’em.” He shifted in his seat, clearly uncomfortable.
“Saw who?”
“People.”
“What people? New ones? Did some other people show up?”
“You don’t get it, Mr. Stone. They were people, but…they were dressed strangely. Old-fashioned. And…I could see through ’em.”
Stone tensed. “You’re saying you saw…ghosts?”
“I don’t know what I saw. I mean, I’ve heard the rumors that the place is supposed to be haunted—everybody has. But far’s I know, nobody’s ever seen any ghosts. But I wasn’t the only one who did. Everybody there saw ’em. As soon as they showed up, people in our group started pointin’ and freakin’ out.”
