Hyllis Family Story 1: Telekinetic (16 page)

Just as he’d decided that he’d gone into this, this… experiment on another human being
without enough thought, he felt something happening inside the tumor. He immediately stopped heating it, his heart thumping in his chest with fear that he’d done something horrible. He kept his ghost there in the tumor trying to feel what was going on. It felt like the tissue had somehow become more… homogenous. He sent his ghost down to the tumor in the liver. There, at a level much larger than the vibrating molecules he had sensed were responsible for temperature, he felt separate tiny little bags that he realized must be the cells he’d learned about. Each cell seemed like an industrious little bag of molecules. Going back to the tumor in the lung, he realized that the walls of the cells had broken and the molecules were escaping.

Tarc
wondered if this meant the cells were going to die as he’d hoped and, if so, whether the membranes always broke when cells were dying. He sat there, eyes closed, as he sensed with great wonderment the changes occurring in the tumor.

Suddenly, Mrs. Gates coughed. Then she was seized by
a fit of coughing and when she pulled her hand away from her mouth it had blood on it! Heart pounding, Tarc called, “Mom!”

It seemed like forever
, but probably was only a few seconds before Eva appeared at their side. She gave Mrs. Gates the towel she always carried in the kitchen and said, “Here, Mrs. Gates, cough that nasty stuff out.”

Belying her calm tone,
Tarc saw over Ms. Gates’ shoulder that Eva’s eyes were wide. He wondered if she knew what to do about this coughing up of blood. “Mom…” he started.

Eva waved him to silence and bent over Mrs. Gates.
Tarc presumed she was sending her ghost into their patient. After a moment she straightened and said cheerfully, “Good news, Mrs. Gates. The treatment has mostly killed two of the cancers in your lungs. You’re coughing up the dead parts of the cancer, which is really great! I’m sorry that the coughing is so unpleasant.” To Tarc’s surprise she winked at him.

Mrs. Gates coughing subsided. She gasped a few times, then said, “Are you just trying to kill me
now
? Don’t want to wait for the cancer to do it?”

Tarc
’s mother gritted her teeth a moment, but then she smiled. With a grin she leaned over and patted Gates on the shoulder, saying, “Don’t think I haven’t thought about it, you mean old witch.”

Gates’ eyes flashed wide and she looked up at Eva in startlement. Seeing Eva grinning at her, she narrowed her eyes and said with a slight upturn at the corner of her mouth, “I won’t be paying you if I’m dead!”

Eva grinned and shrugged, “You’ve hardly been paying me while you’re alive. It wouldn’t be a big loss.”

Gates coughed a couple more times and then actually smiled up at Eva, “Do you really think you can fool me with a jar of moonshine?” Her eyes glanced down at the glass beaker
Tarc was still holding against her chest, “You probably ain’t done nothin’ really. Just like all the other times.”

Eva gently smoothed Ms. Gates hair, her actions in contrast to her next words, “Probably not. I suspect it’s just your general meanness
that killed your tumors.” She took a deep breath and gave Gates a serious look, “Whatever killed those two tumors, they’re dead. You just lay here scaring off our customers for a bit until you feel good enough to go home. Then come on back in a few days and let me check on those tumors. If they stay gone, we’ll try treating some of the other ones.” Eva patted Gates gently on the shoulder again, then turned and went back to her kitchen.

Tarc
lifted the beaker off of Gates’ chest and held it away from him, not liking the smell of the vapors rising from it. He stood.

Gates looked up at him and said with a tiny hint of a grin, “Is your mother that rude to all of her customers?”

“Um, no, I think you’re a special case.”

Gates snorted and turned her eyes away
, buttoning her blouse.

Having finished unloading the wagon into the kitchen, Tarc drove it into the stable. He un-harnessed Shogun and got the old horse some oats. He took oats to the two horses they were boarding at present, then put the shovel away. Before leaving the stable, he turned, snatched a knife out from behind his neck, and sent it flying to stand quivering in the wall. As soon as it stuck, he threw a second one at a different mark. His first throw had been a little wild, and he’d missed the knot he’d been aiming at by an inch to the right. The second throw buried its knife exactly in a knot, but the knot broke open and fell out of the board, letting the knife drop to the floor. As he retrieved his blades, he thought to himself that he needed to mark some targets on the wall with something so he could throw at something other than knots. They really didn’t make very good targets.

When he went back in, he carried a couple of buckets of water
in from the well to top up the barrels in the kitchen and bar. Daum said, “I need a couple more bottles of ‘shine up from the cellar.” He held some empty bottles out to Tarc.

Tarc
took the two empty bottles and picked up a candle. He stopped at the fire to light the candle and then headed down the stairs to the cellar. He lifted two new bottles of shine out of the current crate and put the two empty bottles in their place.

Without warning, the candle guttered out.

Intellectually, Tarc had always known that the cellar was a very dark place, but he’d never actually been down there without a candle before. He could see
absolutely
nothing and thought of his father’s saying, “black as the inside of a coal miners ass.” His first thought was that he should have propped the door to the cellar open when he came down, but of course it was too late for that now. He reached out, feeling for the stacked crates of moonshine he thought were just to his left, but didn’t encounter them with his fingers.

Tarc
tamped down his incipient panic. Closing his eyes he tried to think of exactly which direction he’d been facing when the candle went out. Suddenly, he realized that his ghost could feel the crates of moonshine behind him and to the left! They just weren’t directly to his left as he had thought.

He reached out his hand and felt the crates
, exactly where his ghost said they were. He expanded his ghost into a large nebulous sphere around himself. With dawning excitement he recognized that he could feel almost everything in the basement!

It was very different than seeing. He had no idea about colors.
Instead of color, this sense differentiated things by how warm they were. Objects that were cold were actually quite hard to detect. The surfaces of the walls and the objects in the cellar were slightly warm, presumably heated by the air. This warmth made those surfaces faintly detectable by his ghost.

Just like his ability to push things diminished with distance, he
could tell much more about the things that were close to him than he could about those that were far away. In addition, up close, his ghost could even tell him about things behind surfaces that would have blocked his normal sight. With some concentration, he could tell which crates had full bottles of moonshine and which had the empties. This was moderately difficult, because the bottles and their moonshine were relatively cool. On the other hand, by their warmth, he could quite easily discern the location of four mice that huddled in little crevices.

And one rat.

For a moment he wondered if he should be trying to catch the varmints. However, he knew that if he so much as approached their hiding places, they would quickly move on. It would probably be better to set traps for them now that he knew where they were.

Back upstairs,
Tarc handed the bottles of moonshine to his father. “We’ve got some mice and a rat in the basement. Do you want me to put out traps?”

Daum narrowed his eyes at
Tarc, “How do you know we have mice and rats? Did you find some droppings?”

“The candle went out while I was down there. I had to use my ghost to find my way out of the cellar and I realized that I could feel the mice and rats with
it too. They’re warm, just like a person.”

Daum snorted, “I’ve had this talent for decades, and I’ve never thought of looking for varmints with it!”

Tarc grinned at him, “And here you as much as told me our talent was useless.”

“Well,
I
had
figured out I can balance my knife with it.” He winked, “And, I have been using it to aim my arrows for quite a while. Just like I’d hoped though, your talent is a lot stronger than mine. Your mother is really excited about what you can do for sick people and that makes me really proud.” He gave a little laugh, “And now that you’ve figured out this new use for our talent, we have fallback careers chasing vermin if this tavern thing ever falls through.”

Tarc
laughed with him, “I’d rather stick with the ‘tavern’ thing.”

***

Tarc had just finished his breakfast when Eva said, “It’s been four days; let’s try getting Jacob out of bed.” As they climbed the stairs, she quietly said, “We’ll get him up very slowly. I’ll do the talking. That way you can keep your ghost in there on his spleen to make sure it isn’t bleeding. If it even feels like it’s going to start bleeding, you put pressure on it so it doesn’t happen, okay?”

When they got up to his room, Jacob became quite excited at the prospect of getting out of bed. At first,
Tarc had been somewhat jealous of his friend because he got to lie around in bed. After a day or so, however, he realized that being in bed all the time must be something like being in jail.

Eva helped
Jacob slowly sit and swing his feet down to the floor. Tarc didn’t feel anything happen to the clot on the spleen during this maneuver, but when it was over Eva paused. Tarc suspected her ghost was checking Jacob’s spleen itself. She said, “Tarc, Jacob’s going to be very weak still from the blood loss. You sit down on the other side of him and we’ll put his arms over both of our shoulders. We’ll all slowly stand up together.”

They did
so; Tarc constantly monitoring Jacob’s wound. Jacob winced as he moved, but Tarc thought that the pain came more from the stab wound in the wall of his abdomen than it did from the spleen injury. Eva had them stop and just stand for a moment when it looked like Jacob felt a little dizzy. Bored with just standing, and eager to determine whether he was right about the pain coming from Jacob’s abdominal wall, Tarc used his ghost to gently poke at Jacob’s spleen. As he’d surmised, Jacob didn’t react much to that. When Tarc tugged on Jacob’s abdominal wall, however, Jacob winced and sucked in a hissing breath.

Excited about what he’d learned,
Tarc looked at Eva thinking about how he wanted to tell her. He realized however, that she was glaring at him which suggested that she already knew what he had done. Looking sheepish, he mouthed “sorry” at her.

Eva had them walk Jacob slowly downstairs and seat him at her treatment table. “Daussie,” she said, “bring Jacob a bowl of the soup and a link of the sausage.” Eyeing
Tarc, she said, “You go bring in some wood. We’re getting low.”

When Tarc had brought in enough wood for the kitchen, he brought in a strap for the great room’s fireplace. After he’d stacked it, he headed back towards the kitchen and saw Daussie cutting up the sausage and feeding it to Jacob. Tarc’s friend looked gobsmacked!

Tarc
’s stride faltered a moment as he once again confronted the possibility that his little sister attracted men like moths to a flame. Apparently noticing the falter, Jacob glanced guiltily at Tarc, but then turned his eyes back to Tarc’s sister—like a miser’s eyes, drawn to a pile of gold.

***

Three days later, Eva decided that Jacob could return home.

When the Calder’s came to pick him up, Mr. Calder brought new boots for all four members of the
Hyllis family. “I know… I know these can’t repay the saving of Jacob’s life. Nothin’ can… But somehow it feels right to repay you for something that you are really good at with something that I’m good at. Though…” He said embarrassedly, “I’m knowin’ that makin’ shoes ain’t nearly so important as savin’ lives, it
is
what I do.”

The boots were excellent quality, sturdy, with soft leather. Eva and Daum’s boots were made of cow skin, Daum’s in black and Eva’s in sharp red leather.
Tarc’s eyes widened as Mr. Calder handed him a pair covered in alligator skin. He’d admired a pair like them once when he’d been over visiting Jacob, but couldn’t believe Jacob’s father had remembered his interest.

He pulled them on, not expecting them to fit
. He’d wondered whether the Calders would have anything even approximating the same quality in a size he could actually wear that he could trade for. Then he’d thought to himself that it would be very rude to try to find an expensive pair like these in his size. He would have to trade them for something much blander he thought sadly. However, when the boots slid into place, they fit almost perfectly. Goggle eyed, he looked up at Mr. Calder, “They fit!”

Calder
just smiled and nodded, “I made them just for you. Over all the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve gotten pretty good at judging the size of people’s feet.”

Tarc
looked over at Daussie. Her boots were made of a dark blue doe skin, so soft that it rumpled going up her calves. She’d bloused her pants into them to show them off. As she turned this way and that for Eva to exclaim over them, Tarc realized their heels were nearly 2 inches high. They made her legs look even longer and more slender.

Tarc
hoped she didn’t wear them while serving the tables. He had a feeling they would result in even more unwanted attention.

The
Hyllises expressed their deep appreciation of the high quality boots. Mr. Calder repeatedly expressed his feeling that the boots weren’t sufficient compensation and that he still owed Eva for her services. Tarc had the impression that Mrs. Calder thought they were overpaying, but at least she had the grace not to say so.

As Jacob left, he expressed near pathetic gratitude to Eva and Daussie.

Afterward, Eva came to Tarc and said, “Remember, Jacob doesn’t have any idea what
you
did for him. You and I know that it was what
you
did that actually saved his life.” She paused, then said with a twinge of sadness, “You’re going to find, working as a healer, that sometimes you get appreciation all out of proportion for little things that really didn’t matter… and sometimes you get no thanks at all when you’ve actually done something tremendous.” She put a hand on Tarc’s shoulder, “This time, they’re not thanking you because they don’t know what you’ve done. Other times it will be because they don’t
understand
what you’ve done. You’ll just have to know for yourself that you saved your friend’s life and that will have to be thanks enough.”

Tarc
nodded curtly.

Eva gave him a sad smile, “I can tell you think it’s not fair. You’re almost certainly wondering why we can’t tell them what you did?”

Tarc shrugged minutely.

“I have a feeling that someday…” she trailed off,
then said, “you may be very glad that people
don’t
know about your talent.”

***

Ten days had passed since Jacob had been injured. During that time there didn’t seem to be any of the strangers in town. But then one afternoon Tarc returned from the store with a load of supplies. As he parked the wagon by the kitchen, Daussie came out of the kitchen and started helping him unload it. “What’s gotten into you?” Tarc asked

“I’ll finish unloading
the wagon and put Shogun back in the stable if you’ll wait the tables,” she said in a subdued tone.

Tarc
immediately knew what was wrong. “Strangers?” he asked.

Eyes downcast, Daussie nodded, seeming ashamed
, as if somehow the strangers were her fault.

Tarc
’s stomach roiled, and he thought to himself that the deputies shouldn’t have let strangers back into Walterston after what had happened to Jacob. He knew however, that strangers brought business and news. The town needed them, even if some brought trouble. He eyed Daussie, “What did they say?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. I saw him as I came out of the kitchen.
I’m pretty sure I came back out here before he saw me.”

“Him?
You mean that
big
guy?” Tarc said, putting a sack of potatoes down on the kitchen counter.

Daussie nodded again, but only
whispered, “Will you wait the tables? Please?”

Tarc
unclenched his jaw. He didn’t want to go out there either. But, much as he didn’t want to see that man again himself, he didn’t want his sister to even get near the guy. Tarc gave a little nod. Daussie went back out to the wagon. He glanced at Eva, but she was chopping up chickens. She didn’t appear to be aware of the presence of the strangers.