Hyllis Family Story 1: Telekinetic (17 page)

Tarc
went out into the great room. Mr. Benson sat at his usual table. Tarc noticed that he didn’t have a beer, evidence that he was at least following some of Eva’s instructions. The big stranger and his companion sat at the same table they had before, over near the fireplace.

Tarc
went to Benson first. “What can I get you Mr. Benson?”

Benson smiled up at him, “
Tarc! My foot is much better. Tell your mother ‘thank you’ for me.” He blinked, “What are you doing waiting tables?” He winked, “I was hoping to see that pretty sister of yours.”

Tarc
felt surprised to realize that, even though Benson essentially had the same feelings about Daussie as the strangers, somehow it seemed harmless in the jovial storekeeper. He grinned and answered, “She’s doing some other chores. You’ll just have to come back another day if you want service from the
good
-looking sibling.”

“No, no,” Benson grinned up at him, “you’re handsome enough,” he twinkled, “just not my type. You tell your mother I’ll eat whatever she thinks is best for my gout.”

“Oh, Mr. Benson, you’re really asking for it, saying something like that.” He leaned down and said conspiratorially, “You place an order like that, and she’s gonna feed you nothing but vegetables!”

Benson grimaced, but said resignedly, “If that’s what she says, that’s probably what I should be eating.”

“Okay, it’s
your
funeral.”

Tarc
stood, for a moment having completely forgotten about the strangers. He’d been thinking that he’d be going back to talk to Eva about Mr. Benson, but then his eyes caught on the big stranger. The man had his eyes on Tarc. His stomach knotted again, but he started that way.

Before he reached the strangers’ table, the big man rumbled, “Not you again! Where’s the good-lookin’ lass?”

Tarc stopped a good distance from the man’s table, remembering with a shiver the almost instantaneous appearance of the big knife at Tarc’s breastbone. “She’s busy with some… other stuff. Can I take your order?”

The man eyed
Tarc as if he were some particularly undesirable form of insect. “I’ll pay double your usual charges to be waited on by the girl.”

Tarc
shrugged, “Like I said, she’s busy.”

The man chewed his lip for a moment and
Tarc braced himself to run if the men started to stand. Then the stranger grinned unpleasantly but only said, “You still have the sausage and fried potatoes?”

Tarc
nodded.

The stranger said, “Bring me a big helping.
” He glanced at the man with him.

The other man hardly turned. “I’ll have the same.”

“And some beers,” the big man said.

Tarc
turned back for the kitchen, wondering how he could deliver the plates without getting near the men’s table. Just before he went through the door into the kitchen, Ms. Gates came into the tavern.

Back in the kitchen, Tarc said to Eva, “Two plates of sausage and fried potatoes. Also, Mr. Benson is here and says his foot is much better. He sends his thanks and wants to order whatever you think is best for his gout.”

Eva smiled, then got a distant look as she pondered Benson’s order. “I think… roasted chicken breast,
whole-grain rice and a cabbage salad.” She looked at Tarc, “He should avoid red meat, liver, and beer. So, if he’s already ordered himself a beer, go take it away from him.” Then Eva blinked, as if suddenly realizing something. She frowned, “Where’s Daussie?”

Tarc
jerked his head toward the great room. “Strangers. One of them’s the big one that scared Daussie the first time. She’s putting away the wagon and hiding.”

Eva’s eyes widened, “The one that held a knife to you?”

Tarc nodded.

Eva sighed. “You go tell your dad that I’ll have the strangers’ food ready in about five minutes. He can come get it for them. You shouldn’t be getting near them.
”

Tarc
felt a sensation of relief, then felt guilty. His father shouldn’t have to get near those men either. “Okay. Ms. Gates was coming into the big room just before I got back to the kitchen.”

Eva nodded, “Tell her to take a seat at the treatment table.” She gave
Tarc a knowing look, “While you’re talking to her check to see what happened to the two tumors in her lungs.”

Tarc
went back out into the great room. Ms. Gates had already seated herself at the treatment table so he went first to the bar, stepping inside.

Daum looked upset. He turned to
Tarc and said quietly, “I was tapping the keg and didn’t notice the two strangers until you were already taking their orders. You shouldn’t have had to take their orders. In fact, I should’ve told them they weren’t welcome here.”

Tarc
shrugged, “I’d hate to try to throw them out of here.”

Daum’s eyes went back to the strangers. “Yeah,” he muttered.

“Just like before, they want Daussie to wait on them. She’s hiding out, and I told them she was busy.”

Daum nodded, “Thanks.”

“They ordered a couple of beers. Mom thinks you should take them their food. She’ll have it ready in about five minutes.” He shrugged, “I’m not sure it’s any safer for you to wait on them than me.”

Daum sighed, “You’re probably right, but if one of us is going to do this dangerous thing, it’s not going to be you. Tell Eva I’ll be back to get their food
in a little bit.” He turned and began drawing a couple of beers.

Tarc
went to Benson next. “Chicken breast, rice, and cabbage salad.”

Benson sighed, “I guess it could’ve been worse.”

Tarc grinned at him, knowing how much Benson liked sausage. He went to sit across from Mrs. Gates. Sitting down across the table from her, he sent his ghost into her chest while saying, “How are you doing Ms. Gates? Do you think the new treatment made any difference for you?”

“Yeah. It made me cough up blood for days! I don’t know what the hell good your mother thought that was going to do me?!”

The tumors in Gates’ lungs had shrunk. Their centers were smaller and cooler. Tarc had the impression that the material in the center of each tumor was dead. The tissue around the surface of the tumor felt like scar to him, though he didn’t know how he could be sure that that was what it was. “Um, if it hasn’t helped you, why are you coming back?”

“Because…
” She seemed a little nonplussed, “
otherwise
I’m going to die. Even a damned fool kid like you should be able to tell that!”

Tarc
wondered whether he should banter with her about her crotchety nature like his mother had, but decided not. With a sigh, he stood, “Okay, I’ll tell Eva.”

A little later, Tarc sat holding the beaker of cotton balls doused with moonshine over Ms. Gates’ liver. Even though he was ostensibly treating the tumors in her liver, the first one Eva had told him to treat was the lump in her brain. Eva said that holding the beaker on Ms. Gates head might get her upset thinking about a tumor in there. After all, the beaker was merely a distraction.

Tarc
thought the tumor in her head felt a little bit bigger. He wondered whether it was doing something to her brain that made her so ill-tempered. Eva had been concerned that perhaps Tarc shouldn’t kill too much of the tumor in her brain at once for fear that the reaction to a large lump of dead tissue in her brain might cause serious problems. In the old days, apparently, they had killed areas of tumor in the brain with radiation. The body resorbed the dead material somehow, but Tarc agreed that it would be better to kill too little than too much in this first treatment. He heated an area about one third the size of the whole tumor in her brain. He’d been worried that she would feel the heating. However, Eva had said that surprisingly the brain, even though it was full of nerve cells, had no sensory nerve endings inside of it. So the brain, which felt everything that there was to feel in other parts the body, could feel nothing inside of itself.

Sure enough,
Tarc heated the tumor in the brain without any reaction from Ms. Gates. When he heated the tumor in her liver, she grimaced a little but otherwise had little reaction. Most tumors apparently don’t grow many new nerve endings inside of themselves either. The pain that the tumors cause comes from the nerve endings in the tissue around them so Tarc tried not to heat the surrounding tissue very much.

Finished,
Tarc lifted the beaker off and started to stand.

Ms. Gates said, “What the
hell
are you doing boy?”

“Um, the treatment’s done.”

“How the hell would
you
know? You hold it there ‘til your Mama comes back and
says
it’s done.”

Tarc
gritted his teeth, settled back into his seat, and waited.

After the lunch rush, things predictably slowed down. Tarc went up to his room and started reading about the ear. Although the textbook’s description was pretty dry, Tarc was fascinated to learn about the little waves in the air that made up sound. Even more interesting than the way those waves traveled into the ear canal to strike the eardrum and activate the cochlea, there was a brief description of a device that made sound. The device had been called a speaker in the old days. It vibrated a membrane that created waves in the molecules of the air.

Tarc
gazed off into the distance as he thought about the diagram of the speaker and the ear in the old book. Suddenly he wondered…

He reached out with his ghost, used it to grip some air molecules in the middle of the room, and shook them. To his disappointment, he heard nothing. He turned back to the book and looked to see how fast these airwaves were shaking the molecules.
Hundreds of times per second!

It sounded impossible, but then he realized that when he was shaking molecules to create heat, he was vibrating them much faster than hundreds of times per second. He reached out for some air molecules again and started vibrating them faster and faster. First he heard a low hum, then it increased in pitch until it became a piercing squeal then disappeared. He knew he was still vibrating the molecules, but didn’t know why he couldn’t hear it until he looked back at the book and saw that the human ear couldn’t detect vibrations above and below certain frequencies.

Tarc sat in stunned wonderment, contemplating the mysteries of sound. Somehow he felt that his ability to create sound should be useful, but found himself wondering if it was no better than his father’s knife balancing.

He wondered if, rather than simply vibrating molecules
at a certain frequency to create a tone, whether he might be able to re-create a sound he’d heard. He said “hello” to the empty room. Then he tried to replicate it with his ghost. He didn’t try to shake the molecules like he’d felt them vibrating at his own word, he just imagined the word being made out there in the room.

To
Tarc’s profound astonishment, he heard someone say, “Hello,” right there in the room with him. It didn’t really sound like his
own
voice to him, but it was clearly and recognizably the word, “hello.”

He tried vibrating out some words without saying them first. From the middle of the room, the strange voice said
, “My name is Tarc.”

He picked a spot right next to his own ear and generated a whisper, “Look out behind you.”

Hearing a disembodied voice whispering in his own ear sent goosebumps trickling down his spine. He wasn’t quite sure how this might be useful, but thought that surely someday, whispering to someone from across the room would come in handy. A good trick to play on someone, if nothing else.

Daum called up the stairs for Tarc in the late afternoon; the usual signal that things were getting busier. As Tarc passed Daussie’s room he saw her sitting there, looking out at him, wide-eyed. It hadn’t struck him when Daum called up, but he hadn’t called for Daussie, only for Tarc. He said, “Dad’s calling us down.”

Daussie shook her head nervously,
twisting something in her hands, “He only called for you.”

Tarc
narrowed his eyes, “We
always
go down together.”

“Dad always
calls
both of us.” Daussie looked quite upset. “What if he didn’t call me because…”

Daussie didn’t finish, but
Tarc knew exactly what she was worried about. “Okay, I’ll call back up if it’s safe for you to come down.”

Quietly, Daussie said, “Thank you.”

When Tarc got to the bottom of the stairs, he saw that Daussie had been right. The big soldier stood at the bar with four other strangers. Daum said, “Tarc, these men are going to stay the night. Can you stable their horses? They’re the five tied up out front.”

Tarc
blinked, sure that his father didn’t want the strangers’ business. He could imagine, however, that turning away the five hard looking, sword carrying men might be more uncomfortable than simply renting them rooms. “Sure, just let me get something from my room.”