Child, page 7
part #6 of Sam and Sam Series
“Can’t do it,” he said, pulling out his phone. “But I can text him.”
He felt her stir up a sarcastic response that died when she couldn’t come up with something suitable.
“You’re a giant baby,” she said, instead. He grinned as his phone lit up the little space.
“Maybe so, but you’re the one who has to answer to him when he says that we shouldn’t have asked him.”
<><><>
Cell coverage was spotty. Sitting all the way against the wall in one corner, Sam could get texts in and out every few minutes, but he had to keep after it to make his phone retry after it failed. He had been charging his phone at the hotel, but hadn’t gotten it all the way charged before they’d left, and he wanted to get it turned off as soon as he was done, in case this turned into a multiple-day event.
Need help. Locked in a root cellar in a hick town in Nebraska. he wrote.
He didn’t hear back for about fifteen minutes, during which he marveled that Jimmy appeared to have actually gone back to sleep.
Ha ha. How is your honeymoon? Simon wrote back.
Not kidding. Sam answered. Need help with research.
There was another long gap.
Text Kerk.
Kerk is working with Jason. And will be a pain. Pls.
Why are you locked in a root cellar?
Sam sent him the driving directions on how to get there, as the roads had no apparent name. There was another long gap, during which he wasn’t sure if his phone was working, and then the answer came back.
People actually live there?
Everything is slowly dying. Has been since the 30s.
Satellite photos look dead already. You 2 okay?
Fine. Could leave any time. Want to help.
Give me two hours.
“He’s going to help,” Samantha said. Sam shut down his phone and felt his way across the stone floor back to where she sat.
“He’s going to try. I didn’t give him much to work with.”
“It isn’t the water, Sam,” she said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because it’s too strong. And it’s too big. I shouldn’t be this susceptible to something that’s just in the water, you know?”
He put his arm across her shoulders.
“Are you feeling okay?”
“Very portentous,” she said. “We’re in the middle of something here. Like someone else’s bad dream.”
He wasn’t sure what that meant, but he did understand her unease. It wasn’t just that it came pouring across the bond from her; he felt it, too. The whole world was open to him; he could just leave any time he wanted, catapulting his mind somewhere else, but sitting in the middle of it, the gravity of the town made the rest of the world feel like it was on another planet.
“No wonder they don’t leave,” he said. “Simon will figure it out.”
Samantha nodded.
“We’ll get them out,” she said.
He was more skeptical of that. It was possible that they would just have to flee, getting out while they could and not looking back, but he didn’t argue. He let Samantha settle against him and close her eyes, then he ventured out again, watching from as far out as he could get as the little town slept.
<><><>
“You aren’t going to sleep, are you?” Sam asked.
“No,” Samantha told him a while later.
“There isn’t anything going on,” he said.
“You aren’t sleeping, either.”
“I’m watching.”
He heard her smile.
“I can tell. No, sleeping with a spell around is always a bit dangerous. If there’s something about it that has to settle in, in order to become permanent, it’s generally going to be while you sleep.”
He had seen it work like that before.
“You got a light?” he asked. He heard the flick of her fingers and a brilliant white flame emerged in her palm. She turned her hand over, pouring it like oil on the floor, and a ring of it formed around them. The relief was immediate, like lifting a foot off of a hose. He could breathe.
“What did you do?” he asked. She shook her head.
“Nothing special.”
It was angelflame, twin to hellfire, and something she only used when she truly needed it. Sam had gathered it was dangerous. But the closed ring around them seemed to be shielding them from something crucial.
“Well, that’s interesting,” she said after another moment.
“What does it mean?”
She shook her head again, rolling onto her knees to put her hand through the flame, like a child playing with a lighter.
“It means that it’s evil. It isn’t just them.” She continued playing for a moment. “And that I can probably burn it out, if I can find it.”
“Is that safe?” Sam asked. She laughed, sitting back against him.
“You worry too much.”
“You wouldn’t let Jason do that.”
“No. And Carter would blow up the whole of New York, if he tried it.”
“But you can control it. Safely.” It was almost an accusation. He felt a little bad about it, but he needed to her the answer in words.
“It’s not a toy, Sam. It’s dangerous, and if I lost control of it, it would kill both of us, and there aren’t many people in the whole world who could put it out, before I burned to ash.”
Sam waited. She was giving him his concession. She drew another breath.
“I will be careful, Sam. I give you my word.”
She felt strange, channeling the strange, white energy. Hellfire felt like electricity and arousal and hunger that was about to be fulfilled. Angelflame felt like a bath in white lead, sunshine without light, flying. The light was so pure it hurt his eyes, and it felt like it showed the truth in things. Samantha was radiant.
“You look beautiful,” he said, leaning in to kiss her gently. He felt the shock of white light as she lost her grip on the flame and struggled to regain control. It was delicious. She pulled away from him quickly, but not with reproof.
“We probably shouldn’t do that,” she said. He understood. He hadn’t really realized how much she was focusing, it was so normal, but her loss of control was intoxicating and terrifying and drew into relief the true power of the white flames that encircled them.
“Should you put that out?” he asked. She sighed.
“Yeah.”
The flames damped down a bit, and then extinguished all at once. The grimy desperation of the place weighed down on them again in the darkness immediately, and he put his arms around his wife, settling in for a long night.
<><><>
There’s no record about anything, there, Simon said a few hours later. How did you find it?
Got a tip, Sam said, moving again looking for better signal.
Don’t know what to tell you. The place is a pit. Put it in your rearview and e-mail Kerk.
There’s something going on here. We’re certain.
There was a long pause and Sam thought Simon might have been done with him.
I did some checking with the other Seekers. Couldn’t get any good answers without being more specific. Carson might have seen it before.
Thanks, man.
Sam showed the conversation to Samantha, then went to go sit in the corner again and dialed Carson’s number.
His friend answered on the third ring, sounding sleepy.
“Sam, man, what’s going on? Are you okay?”
“We’re okay. Look, I’m sorry we’re calling in the middle of the night, but we might not get a chance in the morning. You’re on speaker.”
“Hey, Sam,” Carson said.
“Hey, Carson,” Samantha answered softly.
“Don’t even worry about it. What’s up, man?” Carson asked. Sam nodded, taking a deep breath and trying to pull together the relevant details as simply as possible.
“We’re in a tiny little town in Nebraska,” he started.
“Locked in a basement,” Samantha added.
“You’re what?” Carson asked. “I’m six hours away. On my way.”
“It’s not like that,” Sam said, silently scolding Samantha. She chuckled.
“The rest of it’s just depressing,” she said. “At least that part’s funny.”
“At least I’m awake, now,” Carson said.
“The whole town is dying,” Sam said. “The crops are pitiful, the cows are miserable, and the people are just bitter. No one ever leaves, but they’re all just sitting around waiting to die.”
Carson was quiet, thinking.
“Not that I don’t want to help, but what made you think to call me? Did you try Jason?”
“It was Simon’s idea,” Sam said.
“Well, then I know something you need to, but that doesn’t sound familiar. I guess I’ll start with the obvious stuff. Have you looked for evil eyes?”
“You ever seen an evil eye do something this big?” he asked.
“No, but maybe if you had someone with a long-standing rivalry and a lot of time on their hands…”
“It’s effecting us,” Sam said.
“Even her?” Carson asked. Unlike most Rangers, Carson had a pretty good idea just how special, and how powerful, Samantha was.
“Yeah,” Samantha answered. “You come here and you just feel miserable.”
“Wait a minute,” Carson said. “No, that sounds familiar. Um. Tell me more.”
Sam shook his head.
“They don’t clean anything. It’s all dusty and dirty and falling apart. The whole town. Most of the buildings are more than fifty years old. Most of the people are really old.”
“The last couple to get married never had any kids,” Samantha said. Sam nodded. That was relevant.
“So all of the land around here is going to them, and then… no one, I guess.”
“Wow,” Carson said.
“What?” Sam asked. The phone glitched in his hand and there was a static-y noise that hissed in his ear, sending crawling sensations down his back.
“Sam?” Carson asked.
“Yeah, I’m here,” Sam answered.
“Sam, you guys should get out of there,” Carson said.
“What is it?” Sam asked.
“It’s a wasting spirit,” Carson said. “The nastiest one I’ve ever heard of.”
Sam shook his head, answering Samantha’s unspoken question. He’d never heard of one.
“What is that?”
“Not like you get to interview one, but it’s a ghost that sticks around to punish the people who kept it from fulfilling its ambitions. Or so Tanner says.”
Tanner was his big brother, and very matter-of-fact. Sam could just hear him putting forth his unquestionable interpretation of what motivated a ghost.
“How do you kill it?” Sam asked.
“You don’t,” Carson said. “I dealt with one outside of Omaha. It was driving this couple crazy. They did just what you said, they sat around doing nothing, getting angrier and angrier, and skinny, man. And then they just… snapped. Tried to kill each other. Ripped apart the neighbors who tried to break it up. Police had to shoot them both dead. Fifteen in the hospital, before it was all said and done.” Carson paused, audibly remembering. “You’re sitting on a powder keg with a decades-long fuse. Get out.”
“We aren’t going to abandon them,” Samantha said. Sam agreed with her silently.
“What are you going to do?” Carson asked.
“What would you have done, if you had had more time?” Sam asked.
“Figured out afterwards that their teenage son had died of cancer. Long, slow death. They’d locked him in his room for like six years, trying to keep him alive.”
“So you’d have found him?” Sam asked.
“Dig him up, scatter the bones in a fenced cemetery, hope for the best,” Carson said. “But you know how they work, Sam. You even try, they’re going to blow the whole thing up before you get three feet down.”
Sam nodded. The angrier spirits tended to be very aware of what was going on around their graves.
“Thanks. That gives us a place to start.”
“Sam, please. Don’t do anything dumb.”
“We’ll be careful, Carson.”
“You want me there?” Carson asked.
Sam considered, but Samantha agreed with him that Carson was just going to be at risk.
“Should be all done by the time you’d get here,” Sam told him.
“All right. Give me a call if things go bad and you need more hands on deck.”
“Thanks,” Sam said, genuine, and he heard Carson laugh.
“Good to hear from you,” he said. “Good luck.”
“Yeah, you, too,” Sam answered, hanging up.
Sam waited, then hung up and powered off his phone.
“I hate chasing long-dead ghosts when I’ve got all the time in the world and I’m fifty miles away in a hotel with wi-fi,” he said. “Us being here is going to stir up a lot of stuff. Make it a lot more likely that they go off sooner than later. Could be they go off on us.”
“We have to try,” she said. “We’ll see what happens in the morning. Okay?”
Sam checked in on Jimmy again upstairs, where the old man was snoring loud enough that he wondered that they couldn’t hear him from down here.
“Yeah. Sam, I really don’t want to fight our way out of a mob of innocent old people.”
She sent him a tone of sympathy.
He understood the desperation she was trying to hide from him. It was all they could do.
<><><>
They didn’t sleep. The cellar was cold and damp, and somewhere something started dripping a few hours before dawn. Sam could at least go out, watching the buildings in and around town. Samantha was stuck in the dark, listening to the two of them breathe and her own thoughts.
Jimmy woke up around sunrise and went downstairs and left, coming back with Ellie and a woman Sam didn’t know.
“Fool old man,” Ellie muttered. All Jimmy had told them when he had gone to get them was that he had a couple of kids from out of town locked in the basement, and that had been enough. Sam wondered just how many people they’d locked down here, over the years.
“What do you plan on doing with them?” a woman who was just as shriveled as Ellie asked. Jimmy went to get his gun, holding it tight against his chest.
“They don’t belong here.”
“The county seat already thinks you’re crazy,” Ellie said.
“They’re going to close down the courthouse,” the other woman said.
“They don’t belong here,” Jimmy insisted.
They stared at each other for several minutes before someone spoke again. Samantha was having a hard time believing him that no one was speaking, as he stopped relating the conversation to her. He was having a hard time believing it, too. Who were these people?
“I’m going to let them out,” the third woman said, standing.
“Could just leave them,” Ellie said.
“No,” the other woman sighed. “We can’t.”
Jimmy held his gun tighter, and Sam indicated to Samantha that it was time to stand up again. He put his hand up above his head to find the rafters, trying to avoid hitting them once again.
The third woman opened the door, and the shaft of light coming down the stairs blinded them.
“Come on up here,” the woman called. Sam put his hand on Samantha’s back and followed her up the stairs. The woman sized them up for an uncomfortable period of time, then heaved a huge sigh.
“Look, don’t tell anyone what happened. Okay?”
Sam waited. There were no threats, no justification, no excuses, no accusations. Just the sound of tired.
“What’s wrong with you people?” he asked.
The three of them watched him without speaking, and he found himself nodding at nothing, just frustrated.
“Don’t you want anything? Didn’t you ever want anything? You’re alive. Act like it.”
The two women looked at him blankly for a moment, then Jimmy spoke.
“I wanted to be sheriff,” he said. Sam stared at him.
“What happened?”
Jimmy shrugged.
“My dad worked here. So I worked here.”
“Why didn’t you try?”
Jimmy shook his head.
“Don’t know.”
“I never knew you wanted to be sheriff,” Ellie said.
“Not much point of one,” the other woman said.
“True,” Ellie sighed. Jimmy nodded, resting his hands over the end of his rifle like a walking stick. Sam boggled.
“Do you have a cemetery?” Samantha asked. Sam sent her a quick startle, and she shrugged at him mentally. “Look, it’s what we want to know.”
“Of course,” Ellie said.
“What kind of animals do you think we are?” the other woman asked.
“The kind who lock strangers in the cellar below the courthouse,” Samantha said conversationally. “Will you take us to the cemetery?”
“It’s all the way across town,” Jimmy said.
“Your legs work, don’t they?” Samantha asked. He made a motion with his mouth like he might spit, then he shrugged.
“It’s this way.”
Sam cast a look at Samantha, and she hid a smile.
“Still think we just ought to shoot you,” Jimmy said. Samantha nodded.
“I get that. Simpler.”
Jimmy nodded, chewing his own saliva.
“You don’t belong here. Don’t go here at all.”
“Outsiders,” Samantha said. “You don’t get many outsiders, do you?”
“Why would we?” Ellie asked. Sam was surprised to find the other two women were following them. It was like watching the pied piper work.
“You don’t like us being here,” Samantha said. “We don’t like being here. You have any idea why that is?”
“Because you don’t go here,” Jimmy said. Sam was mentally pulling for the old man to come up with something different to say. Even Jimmy sounded frustrated at the gap between what he said and what he meant.
“Jimmy, we don’t go here because something is killing this town, and we aren’t part of it. It isn’t interested in killing us. You can feel that, can’t you?”
“Everyone dies,” Ellie said.
“Eventually,” the other woman agreed.
