Dreamwood by Heather Mackey Page A

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.
    â€œThe 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.
    â€œThe 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.”
    â€œAnd was it?” Pete’s eyes were wide now.
    â€œNo.” 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.
    â€œI was wedged in tight and couldn’t move. Then I saw my father. He looked like he was shouting. He was pulling me, but I was stuck tight.”
    â€œSo what happened?” Pete asked.
    Lucy bent over the wooden railing and stared at a police wagon coming up the dusty street. “I don’t know. It loosened up a bit. I popped out.”
    Pete leaned an elbow on the railing beside her. His eyes were thoughtful. “And you were okay?”
    â€œSure. All I did was get my leg stuck. Only after that my father said it wasn’t a ghost after all, but something else, something he’d suspected but no one had ever proven the existence of. A nature spirit.”
    That night her father was more distracted than she’d ever seen him. Muttering to himself, marching up and down.
    â€œThen after that he didn’t want the railroad to dynamite anything. He called the newspapers and said there was a spirit in the rock and he’d prove it to everyone. He went out there with his thought interferometer—”
    Pete’s forehead wrinkled. “What’s
that
?” He had some sunflower seeds in his pocket, which he now began to eat, cracking and spitting them over the edge of the sidewalk into the street.
    â€œIt’s like a colander with wires. You wear it on your head. And his od-oculars.” She heaved a big sigh. “They’re like goggles. But the newspapers just took photos of