3 Ghosts of Our Fathers (10 page)

Steven removed his flashlight from
his pocket and shined it into a corner at the other end of the room. The boxes
and the dark gaps between them became more visible.

Daniel scanned the boxes, looking
for the boy. Steven saw the face appear in one of the gaps and stifled a gasp.
It looked like it was just behind the box, dimly lit, and greyish white. As he
watched, it changed from the face of a toddler to a ten year old.

“Hello, Sam,” Daniel said.

“You know my name?” the boy said.

“Yes, and do you know mine?”

“No,” the boy said. His eyes moved
around the room.

“I’m Daniel. And this is Roy, and
Steven. They’re friends. We’re all friends.”

The face of the boy shifted to
several years younger, a five-year-old. He didn’t reply to Daniel.

“Sam, we’re here because of
Garth,” Daniel said. “Do you remember Garth? And Sean, and Frank?”

“Yes,” Sam said. “Frank used to
beat them.”

“That’s right,” Daniel said. “And
you helped Sean and Garth stop Frank, do you remember?”

“Yes, I remember,” Sam said. “And
Davy.”

“Yes,” Daniel said, “Davy was
Roy’s father. And Steven here is Roy’s son.”

“Oh,” Sam said, “fathers who let
their sons live. Why?”

“All fathers want their sons to
grow old,” Roy said.

“Not all fathers,” Sam said. “Not
my father.” Sam’s face began to shift rapidly between ages. When he would
speak, the face would normally be a ten year old. When he wasn’t speaking it
would drift between a toddler and a five or six year old. The constant morphing
was jarring and Steven found it difficult to concentrate on the words the child
spoke.

“Your father didn’t want you to
grow old?” Daniel asked.

“No,” the boy replied. “Because my
mother didn’t. I failed her. He told me so.”

“What happened to you, Sam?”
Daniel asked.

“I got older. I wasn’t supposed
to. I disappointed her.”

“Everyone gets older, Sam. You
can’t control it.”

“She said I could. She said if
only I could have remained a baby, things would have been perfect. I tried to
stay a baby. But I kept getting bigger. She was so sad.”

“Your mother wanted you to never
grow up?” Daniel asked him.

“Yes,” the boy said. “I tried, I
really did.”

“What happened, Sam?” Daniel
asked.

“My father. She was so sad and
upset, he knew he had to do something to make her happy again. He loved her
very much. So he tied me to the bench in the garage.”

Sam paused.

“What did your father do?” Daniel
asked.

“He hit my head with a hammer.”

Steven felt the air going out of
him and sadness and anger rise in the back of his throat.

“I remember thinking as he hit me,
if I could just become younger, mother would be happy again, and father
wouldn’t have to do this. I tried to become younger as he hit me, so he would
stop. But it didn’t work. When he was done, he buried me in the forest.”

“All boys grow up,” Daniel said
with a frog in his throat. He was clearly shaken by the boy’s story. “What your
father did to you was wrong.”

“No,” Sam said insistently, “he
loved my mother. He needed to make her happy. It was my fault.”

Daniel felt it best to move on
rather than risk angering the boy. “When you helped Garth and Sean, you gave
them things. A wooden box and a powder. Where did you get these things?”

“Martha’s friends.”

“Who’s Martha?”

“Martha moved into my house after
my mother and father moved out. I loved Martha.”

“Martha knew about you? Out in the
garage?”

“Oh yes, she could see me and hear
me and understand me. Like Davy. Like you.”

“Martha would talk with you?”

“Yes, once she found out I was in
the garage, she would visit me all the time. She wanted to help me. She helped
me become younger.”

“How did she do that?”

“Her friends. People like you
stayed with her all the time. There were always people in the house. She
introduced some of them to me. They helped me too.”

“How did they help you?”

“They taught me things. They
taught me how to do this.” Sam’s face switched rapidly from an adolescent to a
baby and back again. “See? I’m younger now. If I could only find my mother, I’m
sure she’d be happy again.”

“So Martha’s friends taught you
how to shift yourself?”

“Yes. Martha couldn’t do it, but
her friends could.”

“What else did they teach you?”

“They taught me how to protect myself.
I know how to scare people.”

Steven thought of the goat’s head
that Garth described.

“So if people try to disturb you,”
Daniel asked, “you scare them away?”

“Yes,” the boy said. “It usually
works. It didn’t work when they tore down the garage. But I just waited, and
eventually I found this place. No one bothers me here. Except Jeremy.”

“Jeremy visits you here?”

“I love Jeremy. He’s like you, and
Davy.”

So Pastor Wayne has the gift,
Steven thought.
No wonder he keeps this place locked up, he’s protecting the
boy.

“Sam, you said that Martha’s
friends gave you the objects you gave to Sean and Garth,” Daniel said.

“Yes, they did,” the boy answered.
“The ones I gave to Sean and Garth I got from William. He was a very nice man.
He taught me many things about how to be younger. One day he told me he had to
leave in a hurry, and he wanted me to have his things. He gave me a large bag
full of objects. I never saw him again. I’ve been playing with them, figuring
them out. Some of them I know how to use, like the ones I gave to Sean and
Garth. Others I have no idea how they work.”

This is right up Daniel’s alley,
Steven thought.

“The ones you gave to Sean and
Garth, we need to know more about those,” Daniel said. “Frank’s soul was
trapped by them, but the cage is coming loose. Frank will be free again soon.
He plans to attack Roy and Steven, and Steven’s son Jason, to punish them for
what Sean and Garth did, because Davy helped them.”

“Is Frank going to kill them
because they’re too old?” Sam asked.

“No,” Daniel answered, “because
Roy’s father, Davy, helped imprison his soul all those years ago. Davy followed
your instructions. He told Sean and Garth what to do, remember? Now Frank wants
vengeance. He’s angry, like when he used to drink and hit Sean.”

“He made Sean go hungry,” Sam
said. “He was a bad man.”

The child’s illogic was swirling
in Steven’s mind. It was OK to murder someone for being too old, as his father
had done to him, but not OK to starve them.
Ghosts are truly fucked up,
Steven thought.
Just as Roy told me.

“We need to understand the cage,”
Daniel said. “Frank is still in the cage, even though it is coming loose. We
need to stop him before he can get out of it. We only have a few hours to do
something to stop him.”

“I have more of them,” the boy
said. “I could give you another one. You could do it again.”

“Frank’s body died years ago,”
Daniel said. “There’s no way to get him to drink anything.”

“You could try this,” the boy
said. As they watched, a thin, frail arm extended from another dark gap in the
boxes. Its tiny hand held a wooden box with intricate carvings, about twice as
large as a pack of cigarettes.

Daniel reached for it, but
stopped. “What is it?”

“They’re bugs,” the boy said.
“Jeremy gave them to me. He brought them back from one of his trips. He gave me
several boxes, so he won’t mind me giving you this one.”

“What do they do?”

“They can crawl inside him. He
won’t be able to figure out where you are. Don’t open it until you’re ready.
They can only live for a few seconds outside the box without someone to go in.”

Daniel took the box. “Thank you,
Sam, that’s very kind of you to share with me.”

“Here,” said the boy, extending
his arm again. On his palm were a couple of small objects. “Take these too.”

“What are they?”

“I don’t know. William gave them
to me. Maybe you can figure them out.”

Daniel looked like he’d just won
the lottery.

“Will you come back and visit me
again?” he asked.

“I will, if you want me to,”
Daniel said.

“Yes, I would like you to,” the
boy said.

“Jeremy may not let me in, though.
He keeps this place locked up.”

“I’ll ask Jeremy to let you in,”
the boy said. “He’s very nice. I’m sure he’ll let you visit.”

Steven’s concerned heightened. He
wasn’t at all sure it was a good idea for Sam to tell the Pastor that he’d had
visitors. Then again, there was no way to stop him from telling the Pastor
anyway.

“Do you want us to find your body,
in the forest?” Daniel asked. “We could bury you properly in a grave. Maybe a
hallowed grave, here at Jeremy’s church?”

“No,” the boy said. “Please don’t.
I want to keep trying to get younger. If I could just stay younger long enough,
mother will love me again.”

“All right, we’re going to go now,
Sam,” Daniel said. “Thank you for visiting with me. I’ll try to come back and
see you later.”

“Goodbye,” the boy said, his face
beginning to dim.

“I’ve only heard about these,”
Daniel said, “and most people think they’re a myth.”

They were in the car, returning to
Seattle. Daniel was in the back seat, looking at the wooden box that contained
the bugs.

“What do they do, exactly?” Roy
asked.

“Well, if I marry up what Sam told
me,” Daniel said, “with what I’ve heard about them, they’re a kind of parasite.
The box keeps them dormant. When I dump them out they’ll seek a host.”

“So the idea would be to dump them
out onto Frank, if he appears tonight?” Steven asked.

“Yes,” Daniel said. “One of the
side effects of these insects is that they open up all moments in time, but
they cause the host to misjudge the present moment. It creates constant anxiety
in the host that they feed off. That will neutralize Frank, because he’ll never
be able to find us.”

“What, he’ll be looking for us for
eternity?” Roy said.

“Essentially,” Daniel said. “He’ll
have billions and billions of moments to choose from. The odds of him picking
our present moment are so great, he’s effectively gone forever.”

“I would prefer to kill him,”
Steven said. “Leaving him hunting for us for the rest of time seems like a bad
idea.”

“It works,” said Roy. “It achieves
the goal.”

“No Dad,” Steven said, “my goal is
not to leave another monster able to return and cause havoc. We left Michael,
we left Jurgen. David left Frank. Nobody ever finishes up these problems, they
just ‘neutralize’ them. Frank needs to be gone, not just inconvenienced in his
search for us.”

“I don’t think you fully
understand what ‘gone’ means,” Roy said. “Nothing’s ever really gone. Frank’s
body is dead, but you can’t kill a soul, not one with this kind of energy.”

“And these things,” Daniel said,
examining the other objects Sam had given him while not really paying attention
to Steven and Roy’s discussion, “are amazing. One of them might be a rare
chronosphere. I’ll have to check it back in Spokane. Absolutely amazing, can’t
believe he gave them to me.”

“Sam likes you,” Roy said. “I
think the fact that you’ve got a boy that is about his age when he died made a
connection with him that neither Steven or I would have been able to make. So
I’m glad you came along.”

Steven was still fuming from the
kill vs. neutralize conversation. He’d go along with the plan for now, lacking
any better alternatives. But if an opportunity arose to completely take down
Frank, he was going to do it.

-

They all decided a large room was
needed to work in, so Steven decided to sleep on the couch in the living room.
Roy and Daniel agreed to watch, taking shifts if necessary. Steven removed the
rectangular object from his arm and left it in his bedroom, locked in a
nightstand drawer. He didn’t drink any protection. This time they wanted Frank
to appear.

“The moment we learn Frank is in
the room,” Daniel said, “we should move into position around Steven.”

“Then you’ll open the box?” Roy
said.

“Yes, I’m guessing he’ll grab
Steven by the throat, that’s what he’s done in the past. I’ll move over to him
and open it. Be prepared to enter the flow immediately after I do; I don’t
think you’ll be able to see these insects unless you’re in the River. We only
need one to enter Frank. If there are a couple more, they’ll die off quickly,
but don’t touch them.”

“What about the glass?” Steven
said. “Will that stop them from entering him?”

“It shouldn’t,” Daniel said. “The
cage keeps him from getting out, but it shouldn’t stop things from getting in.”

They settled into chairs and
Steven rested on the couch, closing his eyes. It was just after ten o’clock and
they were all tired from a long day.

“Daniel,” Roy said, “perhaps you
and I should drink some protection.”

Before Daniel could answer, the
glass figure appeared in the room. It was not standing next to Steven, it was
standing next to Roy. In two quick moves, it had its hand around Roy’s neck,
then had Roy lifted off the couch.

“Steven!” Daniel shouted, waking
him. Steven swung his feet off the couch and stood, moving over to Roy and the
glass figure. Roy was gasping for air.

Daniel stood and raised the wooden
box above the left shoulder of the figure. He slid the lid of the box open, and
turned the box upside down. At first Steven saw nothing come out, then he
remember to enter the River.

Once in the flow, he looked for
the insects. There were not one or two emerging from the box, there were
dozens
.
They were bright white and about four inches long. They twisted back and forth
as they moved, like a centipede. Several landed on the glass surface of the
figure and began to bore into Frank. Dozens more hit the ground and began to
slither around, searching for a host. Steven saw a couple remain on the box,
and began twisting towards Daniel, who was still holding it.

Drop the box!
Steven
thought. Daniel didn’t move. He wasn’t yet in the flow.

Steven left the flow at the exact
moment that Daniel entered it. He rushed behind Daniel and swatted the box out
of his hand. It crashed to the floor and slid a few feet away. Then Steven
reentered the flow.

Several of the centipedes had made
it to Daniel’s hand before the box was dropped, and were crawling up his arm. Daniel
could see them now and was swatting at them.

The glass man had dropped Roy, who
was holding his neck in pain. Roy had entered the flow, and was avoiding the
insects as they moved toward him. They were slowing.

Vertical bars began to appear in
the glass man and within a few seconds he was gone. Steven turned to look at
Daniel, who was still struggling with the insects. He had swatted all of them off
his arm except one, which he was pulling on. Its head had entered the skin near
his wrist, and Daniel had hold of the body of the insect, tugging at it.

Help me,
Daniel thought.
Steven didn’t know what to do to help.

Just hold onto it,
Steven
thought.
Don’t pull so hard you break it.

It’s boring into me,
Daniel
thought.
It’s got its head in already. I’m not pulling it, I’m just trying
to hold it in place. It’s going to break itself off. Do something! Hurry!

What do we do?
Steven
thought. The idea of using a flame to get a tick head to release from the skin
came to mind, but would that work on these creatures?

It didn’t matter. Steven saw the
body of the insect snap, leaving an inch of the body in Daniel’s fingers. Before
Daniel could drop the broken half and reach for what was left of the bug, it slithered
under his skin. Daniel looked up at Steven, panicked.

Maybe we can cut it out,
Steven
thought.

Vertical bars began to appear in
Daniel, and he started to fade.

Daniel!
Steven thought.
Wait!

In another moment, Daniel was
gone. All of the white centipedes on the floor were now still, turning
translucent. Steven exited the flow.

Daniel’s body was slumped on the
floor.

“Shit!” Steven said, kneeling next
to Daniel and searching for a pulse. It was there, he was still breathing.

Roy returned from the River,
holding his neck, barely able to speak. “What happened to him?” he asked.

“One of them got into him,” Steven
said. “He didn’t drop the box fast enough. Hundreds of those bugs came out,
there were too many of them.”

“Some landed on Frank?” Roy asked,
kneeling next to Daniel’s body.

“Yes, that part worked, I think,”
Steven said. “What do we do?”

“Help me get him up onto the
couch,” Roy said. They lifted Daniel carefully and laid him down. He seemed to
be sleeping.

“Well, this is fucked up worse
than Hogan’s billy goat,” Roy said.

“Do we take him to the hospital?”
Steven said. “We know what’s happened to him, but we certainly can’t tell the
doctors and nurses that.”

“We gotta get this figured out,”
Roy said, “or he’ll stay like that forever. And if he’s in a hospital, it’ll
make it damn hard to do anything with him when we have a solution.”

“I’ll call Eliza,” Steven said.
“Maybe she’ll know what to do.”

“Yes, call her,” Roy said.

Steven took out his cell phone and
called her.

“Steven?” Eliza answered.

“Eliza? We’ve got a big problem.”

-

Steven saw Eliza waving her arm at
the arrivals pick up. She was hard to miss. She was a tall and imposing woman,
but not overweight. Her hair was wild, swirling around her head chaotically.
She moved gracefully and deliberately. She had a large suitcase with her.
Steven parked the car at the curb and popped the trunk, then stepped out to
give her a big hug and help get the suitcase into the back of the car. They
both hopped back into the front seats and Steven drove out of the airport. It
was around 10 a.m. Eliza had taken the first flight out of Sacramento.

“It was bad timing,” Steven said.
“Had he entered the flow just a second or two earlier he would have seen how
quickly the insects were moving and how many there were.”

“I found this medical supply store
on the internet,” Eliza said, referring to an address she had on a scrap of
paper. “It’s between the airport and your home. I need to stop there and pick
up some things on the way to your place if that’s all right.”

“I’m sorry, Eliza,” Steven said.
“This was certainly not how I wanted your first visit here to go. And I’m sorry
I got Daniel wrapped up in this.”

“Daniel’s a big boy, he makes his
own decisions,” she said.

“But Troy…” Steven said and then
paused, unsure if he should have brought it up.

“Ah, he told you,” Eliza said.
“Well, that does complicate things. But I’d be helping him no matter what, he’s
a good friend.”

“You found Troy a babysitter?”

“He’s staying with Joe. Having
Tommy to play with, he’ll think he’s in heaven. So he’s fine. And Joe will keep
an eye on the barrier.”

“Any ideas how to proceed?” Steven
said. “Roy felt we shouldn’t take him to a hospital.”

“God no,” Eliza said. “They’d just
poke at him and it’d make it hard for us to do what we need to do. No, his body
is going to need some routine care but we can do that. We’ll get an IV going to
keep him hydrated, and we may need to place a tube in him to feed him. I’ll
catheter him and we’ll get a bedpan. We’ll keep him clean and comfortable, make
sure he doesn’t get bedsores or his muscles atrophy. It’s a short term solution
but we can keep his body going for a while. Unfortunately, just as we need a
time expert, we’ve lost access to the best one I know.”

Steven reached over and grabbed
Eliza’s hand. “I know we’ll figure this out,” he said.

She squeezed his hand and looked
back at him. “I’m not so sure.”

-

When they arrived at Steven’s
house, Roy was there. He and Eliza greeted each other warmly and they took
Eliza to Daniel. He’d been moved into the guest bedroom next to Steven’s room. Steven
half expected Eliza to react when she saw Daniel lying on the bed like a
corpse, but she when straight to work without a moment’s hesitation. She
checked all of his vital signs, then began arranging things, asking Steven for
help as she went. After an hour she had Daniel’s room the way she wanted, and
she joined Steven and Roy in the living room. Roy had his book in his hands,
reading through it. Steven was sipping coffee.

“Would you like some?” he offered
to Eliza.

“I would love some,” she said.
Steven went to the kitchen and poured her a mug.
I think she takes it black,
Steven thought.

“Correct,” she said from the other
room. Steven smiled and brought the mug to her.

“Well, he’s about as comfortable
as I can make him,” she said, sipping at the hot coffee and settling into a
stuffed chair. “I can guarantee you this was the right thing to do. The
hospital wouldn’t have known what to do with him, and they’d just be sending
him through endless tests trying to figure it out. Daniel doesn’t have that
kind of money. As long as we keep an eye on his fluids, he should be fine for a
while.”

“Any progress with the book, Dad?”
Steven asked Roy.

“Some,” he said, “some. Turns out
Charles knew a bit about parasites. He didn’t call them that, but that’s
essentially what they are.”

“What does he say?” Eliza asked.

“Well,” Roy said, “he had a
drawing here that looks an awful lot like the buggers Daniel used.” Roy twisted
the book around and showed the picture to Eliza and Steven. It did indeed look
like the white centipedes that had emerged from the box. It was difficult to
tell scale from the drawing.

“He lists a lot of different
parasites and what they do. He’s noted that this one is rare, so there’s not
much about it, but there’s several pages about other ones. Some of them are
quite nasty.”

Steven shivered, thinking of one
of the insects burrowing under his skin. It was the stuff of nightmares.

“The good news is that there is a
common method to remove these parasites that seems to work on all – or most –
of them.”

“What is it?” Steven asked.

“It’s a salve that you rub on the
body. The recipe for it is here. Once the salve is applied, the afflicted party
drinks a special type of protection. That recipe is here, too. According to
this, once they drink the protection with the salve applied, the insects leave
the body.”

“Well, that might work to get the
bugs out,” Eliza said, “but it won’t solve the problem. In fact it might make
it worse.”

“How so?” Steven asked.

“Well,” she said, “these parasites
open up all moments in time, and then confuse him as to which one is our
present moment, right?”