Dreamwood (5 page)

They disentangled themselves without looking at each other.

“We should start at the mill,” he said, moving forward without enthusiasm. “Everyone looking for work ends up there.”

Her father wasn't everyone. And if he needed money (which he always did) he'd look for someone who needed a ghost cleared. At least that's what she hoped he had done. Anya's words—
the stories he most wanted to hear were all about the Thumb
—echoed uneasily in her mind.

“We should start with the saloons,” she said, straightening her skirt. There was one facing the square that looked promising. It had a near life-size carved wooden bear out front, and a sign over the door read
ONE DEAD MULE SALOON. ESTAB
LISHED 1862 FOR THE REFRE
SHMENT OF REPROBATES
, INCORRIGIBLES, AND H
OLY TERRORS
. Her father always said there was nothing like a good, persistent haunting to drive men to drink. He'd found lots of his clients in bars.

From the saloon came the sound of a bar fight—bottles crashing and chairs smashing—and then a man came flying out the doors to land in the dust.

Pete looked doubtfully at the man, whose struggle to rise was hampered by the fact that he was also trying to throw a bottle at whoever had thrown him out. “Maybe we shouldn't.”

Lucy put her hands on her hips and turned. “Well, which way's the cemetery?” This was another of her father's first stops in a new place.

Pete's forehead crinkled in alarm. “Why'd you want to go
there
?”

“To find out if there are any ghosts here, of course.” You could sometimes tell who was a ghost from the condition of their grave: The soil around it tended to oxidize and turn red. Lucy's nose tickled from the dust and she coughed as another buggy tore by. “If there are ghosts here, someone might have hired him.”

“You're wasting your time,” Pete said. He plunged his hand into his pocket and brought out a shiny black stone. “See this?” From the appraising way he held it up, Lucy supposed she was meant to be impressed.

“Yes,” she said, fussing with her gloves.

“This is my ghost stone,” Pete said, with unmistakable pride. “So, you see, we don't need ghost clearers around here. We know how to protect ourselves.”

The remark she'd heard Pete make to Anya about her father and “bad luck” still rankled. Lucy took hold of the stone and examined it critically. “I've seen loads of these protection stones,” she said, which was perhaps a slight exaggeration. “But real ghost clearers don't use this kind of thing. Even if this is obsidian”—she rubbed the stone as if she doubted its qualities—“it's unreliable at best. Keep it if you think it works for you, though,” she said, handing it back to him.

Pete stared at her with an open mouth. Then, with a rather wounded look, he took the stone back and returned it to his pocket.

“I think I'll start
there,
” Lucy said, pointing up to a grand mansion on a hill.

She wanted to let Pete know her father was used to dealing with the highest society. And besides, behind a large fortune often lay the crimes and hurt feelings that let a ghost fester.

She started walking, making her way past a group of men in shirtsleeves who were unloading a wagon.

Pete bustled a few steps in front of her, as if she couldn't be trusted to find the way on her own. “That's Angus Murrain's place. He's the richest man in the territory.” From the reverential way Pete spoke the man's name, you'd have thought he could make coins fall from the sky. “And he's probably down at the mill. See, I told you we should start there.”

Pete's eyes were a bright green in the sun. Maybe he was sore at her for dismissing his stone—she had been a bit harsh. Whatever the reason, he insisted on taking charge and leading the way.

They walked down to a large, flat-fronted building with the words
PENT
LAND TIMBER COMPANY
painted on it. But the man in the front office told them Angus Murrain was out and didn't know when he'd be back. They walked outside again, passing by the lumberyard. A huge shed was open to the front, revealing a steel blade as tall as a two-story house. Ten men wrangled a giant red tree trunk into position and the saw began to roar.

Lucy stopped to watch.

“Those are kodok trees,” Pete shouted above the noise of the mill.

“What?” she shouted back.

“The red trees are kodoks. They've had to invent special saw blades big enough to cut them. They're the biggest trees in the world!”

Pete looked as proud as if he'd grown the trees himself.

The great saw spun through the log, casting off a red haze of sawdust and wood chips.

She stood watching the saw; she loved to see mechanical things at work.

The mill workers brought in another log. The saw spun like flashing silver. But after a moment, it slowed, chugging through the wood as if moving through a sticky cake. When the wood fell apart, Lucy could see congealed red veins lacing its interior. And she could smell the rot.

The mill workers looked at one another and began to clear away the pulpy mass. One man threw a piece of the rotten wood, and it splatted against the ground like a soggy pumpkin.

The trees are coming down sick,
Lucy remembered the porter saying. She stepped closer, and was surprised to feel Pete's hand on her shoulder.

He was trying to pull her back just as things were getting interesting. She shrugged out from under his hand and stepped away.

“Hey! We should get out of here.” Pete jogged to catch up to her again.

Men were streaming by them now, going to look at the rotten wood. Some were shouting. This felt like a protest or a march. Lucy pressed closer to the mill.

“I want to see what's going on.” She shouldered her way through the crowd.

“I'll tell you what's going on,” Pete said in frustration. “It's Rust, and it'll get this bunch riled up. Do you want to get caught in something?”

If it was interesting, yes, she did. And there was no Miss Bentley around to rap her knuckles for demonstrating “excessive curiosity.”

“What's Rust?” she asked.

“That mess. It's putting people out of business,” Pete said, raising his voice above the men, who were shouting now. Lucy resisted for a few more moments, but she was getting jostled. Someone stepped on her foot and she felt suddenly small next to all the angry men. She was carried several feet, just as if she'd been caught by a wave in the ocean. She'd lost sight of Pete's russet hair. Where was he?

And then he was there, grabbing her hand. This time, she held on tight and followed him away from the mill.

• • •

Pete thought they could get a root beer at Dawson's general store and ask Mr. Dawson if he'd had any dealings with Lucy's father.

“I'll bet you fifty cents he knows something about your dad,” Pete said. They'd both been a bit shaken by the mob at the lumberyard. But Lucy's confidence returned once they were seated at the soda fountain in Dawson's store.

It turned out that Mr. Dawson
had
seen her father. Three weeks ago William Darrington sold him his horse and saddle, bought jerky, salt pork, and hardtack, and cleaned him out of his stock of writing paper.

“Didn't care about the price he got for his horse,” said Mr. Dawson, looking down his long, thin nose. “Didn't want to catch his own food. He was particular on that account. Excitable fellow.”

The storekeeper licked his pencil and made a tiny, precise notation in his account ledger. Lucy figured most of the world appeared excitable to Mr. Dawson—he was as slow and dry as a tortoise. But he did tell them that her father also spoke of needing to pick up supplies from the apothecary.

Their next stop was a crowded little shop stuffed with jars and bottles of all kinds of medicines and miracle cures: Dr. Lloyd's Toothache Drops, Stickney & Poor's Female Tonic, Dr. Kilmer's Swamproot Kidney Cleanser, and many others. The proprietor of this medical wonderland was an Arthur Lyman: a man in his early fifties with a twitchy nose, untamed eyebrows, and an air of nervous energy that made Lucy think of a high-strung rodent.

William Darrington had come here with an unusual request. He asked the apothecary to make up a tincture to stop dreams.

“And it used some very expensive ingredients,” Mr. Lyman said petulantly. He clearly felt he'd not been well compensated for his potion.

But he didn't know why Lucy's father didn't want to dream. Nor where the ghost clearer had gone once he received his dreaming cure.

They asked a few more questions. But the druggist made it clear that if they weren't in the market for vitamin drops or a baldness tonic they were wasting his time. He turned his back on them and began unpacking a box of skin creams.

“You might try the Climbing Rose,” he told them, seeing they were still there. “A drinking establishment of the lowest sort.” He picked up a feather duster and applied it to one of his shelves.

But as they turned to leave, one last thought occurred to Mr. Lyman. He stopped, poised with his feather duster in the air. “He is not
the
William Darrington, is he? Of Boston?”

With a twist in her insides Lucy nodded. “Yes,” she said, feeling nothing good could follow this. “That's him.”

The druggist's eyes turned bright with malice. “I
thought
so. Yes. Your father acted as if he were doing important research. But the William Darrington I'd heard of was famous for trying to save a rock because he claimed it housed a local deity.” He clucked his tongue. “I knew that man was a crackpot as soon as I set eyes on him.”

“What's he talking about?” Pete asked. “What rock?” He looked at her in confusion. But Lucy, too humiliated to answer, pushed through the door, Mr. Lyman's laughter ringing in her ears.

Once they were outside, Pete ran to catch up with her.

“What was that about?” he asked. “Your father thought a rock was a god?”

This made it sound even more ridiculous than it was. Pete had a smirk on his face, which she supposed she deserved after the way she'd treated his precious stone. If he wanted to get her back for it, he couldn't have done any better, for the story was the most humiliating thing that had happened to her.

“No!” She crossed her arms. “Well, not exactly.”

“What was it, then?” Pete shrugged as if he were simply curious. Maybe he didn't want to make fun of her after all.

Lucy went to the edge of the wooden sidewalk and leaned her elbows against the railing. She might as well tell him.

“Living things are alive, right?” she asked Pete. She didn't expect him to understand what she was about to explain.

Pete's face contracted as he thought this over. “Er, yes.”

“How do you know?” She tilted her chin at him.

“You just know?” He sounded as if he knew this wasn't the right answer.

She shook her head. “There's something that shows they're alive. It's an energy called the Od. Life energy. And you can measure it with a vitometer, which my father invented. People have more Odic force than, say, chipmunks. Ghosts are part of the Od, too. But they're fainter.”

So faint, her father had to create special oculars to see them.

“Okay,” Pete said. “I
better
have more Od than a chipmunk.” He flexed his arm muscles to reassure himself.

“But then my father started thinking that he could detect the Od in things that weren't alive. Rocks, rivers, caves . . .” Lucy frowned. This was where everything had started to go wrong.

“There was a big rock near where we lived, the Maran Boulder. It was famous for being haunted. People would hear noises, they'd get lost. Old folks would say, ‘Don't wander there by yourself, you might not come back.' But they also said the First Peoples would go there and ask for a vision, if hunting was bad or people were sick. Some folks from our town would leave little bits of things there for good luck: bread, bones, flowers . . .”

Lucy paused, remembering the strange lichen-encrusted rocks poking up like teeth, the little piles of offerings, and emerging at the center of the rock field, the great black boulder itself.

Pete settled against the railing next to her. She liked telling stories, but this wasn't one of them.

“The railroad was coming and they were going to lay track right where the boulder was—so they planned to dynamite it. But men started getting sick, and the dogs kept running off. The mules were spooked and wouldn't pull. So the railroad hired my father to fix it. We went out to the Maran Boulder thinking it was no more than a bad ghost.”

The morning they set out was the most exciting of her life. She got up before dawn to help her father pack the equipment and make sure the instruments were in working order. For the first time, she would have her own vitometer to help her search out places where the Odic force indicated spirit activity. She was to take the south side of the rock field and her father the north, which, being colder and darker, was more likely to be the ghost's terrain.

“The first clue that anything was wrong was the vitometer—that's the instrument he invented to measure Odic force. The reading was higher than for anything he'd ever recorded. So if this was a ghost it was a humdinger.”

“And was it?” Pete's eyes were wide now.

“No.” Lucy still felt the confusion of that day. “We tried clearing it. My father's the best ghost clearer
in the world
and nothing worked.”

She looked out onto the town square with its cheerful bandstand and shivered. “It was getting late, and I wandered off. I remember I felt kind of sleepy. I must have stumbled, and then . . . somehow, I fell into a crack in the rock and got myself stuck.”

She still felt chills when she thought of it, recalling how she tried to call out, how faint her voice was, almost as if she'd fallen into a lake. The world felt like it was rising away from her, while she fell, pulled deep by something ancient and hungry.