"Alexander Bledsoe - Tourist Trap" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bledsoe Alexander)

E-scape--Fiction: Tourist Trap

Tourist Trap

by Alexander Bledsoe

      My wife Tanna kissed me and said, "You'll never guess who came to my office today and said he needed a witch."
      "If I'll never guess, then tell me."
      "Chief Teague."
      I frowned. "Not about his wife."
      Tanna nodded. "Yep. He's pretty sure she didn't try to kill herself."
      I knew Jackie Teague pretty well; in this small college town, it was only natural that the newspaper editor and the head lawman would have a good working relationship. He also knew my wife Tanna, since she occasionally "consulted" (that's what they called it when they brought in a psychic) for the police. But he never struck me as the kind of guy who'd personally need paranormal help.
      Of course, when out of the blue his wife tried to drown herself in less than a foot of water, I guess conventional wisdom didn't do much good.
      "So what does he want you to do?" I asked.
      Tanna snuggled down next to me on the couch. She'd changed from her college professor's clothes to cut-offs and a black sleeveless t-shirt, and pulled her red curls back in a ponytail. She looked sixteen.
      "You know," I said admiringly, "you deserve a vacation."
      "What made you bring that up?"
      "Well, I was just thinking, I don't have any pictures of you in anything like a skimpy black bikini."
      "And why would you want some?"
      "Don't you want pictures to show our grandkids some day, before everything starts to sag?"
      She gave me a mock-drop-dead look. "Nothing on me will ever sag."
      "Even magic has to give way to gravity."
      She groaned, her usual reaction to my jokes. "Let's get back to Della. The way the Chief explained it, she was at the picnic with the first graders out at Callahan's Farm, and felt this urge to wander over to the creek at the edge of the woods. It's down in a gully, so no one saw her. When she got there, she was overwhelmed by sadness, and hopelessness. Out of the blue. She couldn't run, she couldn't call for help, she just wanted to die. So she tried to kill herself."
      "Just like that? Out of the blue?"
      "According to the Chief. I know how it sounds, but you've met Della--she's not exactly downbeat. And I got no bad vibes off the Chief, so I don't think he was hiding anything. He really doesn't know."
      She had a point; Della was the elementary school teacher everyone hoped their kids got. "So what happened to her?"
      "Well, as a psychologist, I'd say some smell, or sound, or conjunction of images at that place brought up some repressed memory. But I'm not just a psychologist."
      "As a parapsychologist?"
      "I'm inclined to think it's the place itself. A suicidal Della Teague just doesn't feel right." She put her head on my shoulder. "Could you check something out for me?"
      "See if anything else similar has ever happened there?"
      She batted her eyes playfully. "Would you mind?"
      "What's in it for me?"
      Grinning, she pulled me close and showed me.

      In addition to being a college professor, psychologist, parapsychologist, author and practicing witch, Tanna is also blind--most of the time, anyway. That's why she asked me to look into the history of Callahan's Farm. Besides, since I was a local and editor of the town paper, I had a better idea where to look.
      Della Teague had taken her first-graders for their year end picnic to a place called Callahan's Farm. There was no Callahan--the state owned the land--and the place wasn't a farm. It was just five cleared acres used as a park in the summer and a storage lot for the highway department's big industrial lawnmowers in the winter.
      As I looked into the history of the place, though, unusual patterns emerged. During the summer months people often reported trespassers, always at night, who were never caught or identified. Bonfires were reported, but never found. The only strange things ever found there were three bodies, one each in 1937, 1955 and 1976, respectively. All were suicides, all (according to the paper) people with no apparent motive for taking their own lives. Two had drowned themselves, like Della Teague tried; the other hanged himself.
      We employed local high school boys in the summer to drive around and stock our machines. One of them came through the office, on his way to pick up his check. I waved him over to my desk.
      "Hey, Stevie, can I ask you something?"
      "Sure, Mr. Tully."
      "You ever hang out at Callahan's Farm?"
      "No." He seemed surprised that I'd ask.
      "How come?" The place was far enough out of town to seem like an ideal place for what we used to call "parking."
      He shrugged. "Just don't. Everybody seems to think Satan worshippers use the place. Dwayne Holmes said he found a mutilated dog out there once."
      "What was he doing there?"
      "I dunno. Dwayne's kinda weird."
      "You really think there's Satan worshippers in Weakleyville?"
      He shrugged. "Might be. Jo-Mar Scurlock's got a pentacle tattooed on his chest."
      I'd heard rumors of devil worship when I was a teenager in Weakleyville, too. It was a kind of rural defense against the unacceptable "liberalism" brought in by the 5,000 students at West Tennessee University. If all those long-haired hippie freak grunge people were here, could Satan be far behind?
      I checked out the stories just to be thorough, but found no connection. There hadn't been a reliable incident of Satanism reported in the 73-year history of the paper. But I wrote down the seemingly unconnected odd events at Callahan's Farm and brought them home to Tanna.

      That night, we stood at the top of the gully at Callahan's Farm. The flat acreage around us, blue-gray in the summer moonlight, was about as threatening as a pool table. Tanna knelt and put her hand on the damp grass.
      Around us, the trees pulsed as thousands of fireflies filled them. These insects, plain ol' lightning bugs, boosted my wife's considerable psychic powers in ways even she didn't understand, so that during the summer months she was able to "see" despite the fact that her eyes biologically didn't function. At night, in the presence of these insects, she was at her peak.
      I slapped at a buzzing near my ear. "I wish lightning bugs ate mosquitoes."
      "There's something here," Tanna said. "It's like a psychic vibration. It's very faint, very subtle. But it's here." She climbed down the gully, not needing my flashlight. I followed.
      A couple of little yellow flags on wires marked where the other teachers had found Della. Tanna knelt there, and I sat on a tree root.
      The night was bright, and calm, and heavy with summer humidity. I remembered Cesca, my old dog, and the nights we'd run around in the back yard long after dark. I also remembered how I'd felt when Cesca had died, run over by the school bus as she ran to greet me.
      I did more than remember it. I practically relived it. Tears filled my eyes, and an odd pressure in my chest made it hard to breathe. Tanna looked up sharply.
      "Ry? What's wrong, honey?"
      "Nothing," I said, sounding like a pouty twelve-year-old.
      "Hey," she said gently as she sat next to me.
      "I was just thinking about Cesca."
      "Your dog?"
      "Yeah."
      "Why? What brought that on?"
      "I dunno, just something reminded me of her."

      Tanna jumped up and grabbed my hand. "Come on, we're done here." She led me up the slope and back across the field.
      Amazingly, about halfway across the open area the depression vanished. I mean, whoosh, it disappeared, as if I'd removed a heavy coat in a sauna. So did the pressure in my chest. I stopped. "Wow."
      "Don't feel so bad now?" Tanna said as if she expected it.
      "No," I said. I still felt sad about Cesca, of course, but it felt like a grown man's memory again, not a little boy's pain. "Is this spot haunted or something?"
      "Or something," Tanna agreed.

      "Della, I'd like to hypnotize you," Tanna said.
      Della Teague looked at her husband. The recent strain showed mostly in the tight thin line of her lips.
      Jackie Teague frowned thoughtfully. "She is a doctor, Della. And a friend."
      Tanna put her hand on Della's knee. "Della, I know you're not suicidal. I think it has something to do with that place. What I want to do is take you back to the moment before you...well, you know. It'll get rid of a lot of your own uncertainty, too."
      Della sighed. "I guess this is the only way. Just...I've heard you can make people forget things when they're hypnotized. Can you--"
      "Forgetting it won't help anything. Don't you want answers?"
      She nodded. "You're right. Go ahead."
      We lowered the lights, lit scented candles (Tanna was experimenting with aromatherapy) and pretty much turned the Teagues' comfortable sunken living room into a kind of Oriental salon. Tanna talked Della into a light trance, then eased her deeper and deeper, until she was far enough to recall the events at Callahan's Farm without trauma.
      "You're at the edge of the gully, looking down," Tanna said. "What do you see?"
      "Water in the stream. Little fish...tadpoles. Muddy bank. Smoke."
      "What do you feel?"
      "Sadness. Unbelievable sadness. I remember my miscarriage. It's like it happened yesterday, all the feelings are fresh, painful." Tears seeped from her closed eyes.
      "Now, Della, remember, you're just watching, not participating. What do you do next?"
      "I walk down to the water. I can't breathe, like something's squeezing my chest. I feel so sad, I don't want to live any more. I failed as a mother...I lost my baby. I get down on my hands and knees and p-put my head in the stream. I don't even hold my breath."
      "Then what?"
      "I hear...engines. People talking."
      "Can you hear any words?"
      "It's not English. Or Spanish. One word, over and over, though . . . 'killika?' 'Killikia?'" She swallowed hard. "Then someone jerks me out of the water."
      Tanna brought Della back to reality in slow, easy steps. Just before she came out of her trance, Tanna told her to forget the reality of her sadness. Then she awoke.

      "'Killika' or 'killikia' doesn't exist in any source I can find," Tanna said the next morning. Her eyes were as red as her hair from reading until her vision finally faded at dawn. "It's a dead end."
      "Where do you think she got it, then?" I asked as I poured her coffee.
      "I think, as she got closer to the moment of death, she got closer to whatever caused that place to have this effect. Places can record strong emotions, you know." This was one of the tenets of parapsychological research that Tanna accepted as fact.
      "She also heard engines."
      "I know." She shrugged. "Well, at any rate, we helped her deal with it."
      "Yeah, but what about anybody else who heads out there? We can't exactly post a sign saying, 'Danger, Bad Vibes.'"
      "No. But if Chief Teague can arrange some privacy for me on the eighteenth, I'm pretty sure we can do something to put it to rest."
      I knew what she meant. The eighteenth was the night of the full moon, and "we" meant her coven, Evening Light.

      The Circle of Evening Light took its name from Tanna's totem, the fireflies. She was its founder, priestess and leader.
      I won't bore you with the names and histories of the other coven members. Some were students, some faculty, some just people who found Paganism a whole lot more rewarding than Christian orthodoxy. Some had alternative lifestyles, most were bright and upbeat and all were quite intelligent. I'm not a Wiccan, but I respect them, and I've seen some amazing things because of Wicca. But I'm ahead of myself.
      We arrived at Callahan's Farm just before sunset, in four vehicles. Police sawhorses blocked the road, but I moved them aside and we drove down to the gully. I was along as an observer, something not usually allowed in Wicca, but as the husband of the high priestess I had a little pull.
      Darkness fell, and fireflies filled the trees around us. The others changed out of their street clothes and into the druid-like robes they wore when a skyclad (nude) ceremony wasn't possible--despite Weakleyville's admirable tolerance, they were still Pagans in the heart of the Bible Belt, and sometimes prudence ruled over tradition.
      The gully was so narrow some had to stand halfway up the bank and some atop the ridge, but they formed a circle around the spot where Della tried to kill herself. I sat on the hood of my truck about thirty feet away, ignored the mosquitoes and wondered what I'd witness tonight.
      Tanna lit her candle, then touched the flame to the candle to her right. The light spread around the circle. After they were all lit, Tanna looked up at the sky. A mixture of orange candlelight, yellow-green firefly glow and cool blue moonlight lit her face.
      "The One Power that moves the moon moves through us. The Power that lights the sun lights our lives. It is female and male, it is one and all. It lives in the damp earth and swims in the deepest seas. It plays in the wind and dances with flames. It is all life, born and unborn." Her invocation filled the air with pulsing, like the beating of some vast universal heart.
      I had a job, too, sort of. I stood as Guardian of the Circle, which meant I stayed out of things and made sure no one barged in. The energy created by the circle wasn't physical in the same way as electricity, but it was equally real and equally capable of being disrupted.
      For long moments the only sounds were insects and the scuffle of bare feet on grass and mud. The weird light combinations worked on my imagination, and made it look like shadowy figures slipped from the trees and momentarily joined in the circle before fading back into the night.
      Then I saw a faint glow at the center of the circle. No, not exactly a glow, more like a luminous fog. I blinked. Images appeared on it, like photos projected on a cloud. At first I thought I was seeing shadow-effects again.
      I saw a white, oval-shaped object, about the size of my truck, that seemed to be nose-down in the gully like a football stuck in mud. As I watched, an opening appeared in the side, and figures stumbled out of it. They were small, like children, but wore little wrinkled suits, like--
      Space suits.
      Some of the suits were covered with blue smears around rips and tears. The half-dozen figures collapsed to the ground almost immediately. I heard a sound, like a distant buzzing. I could almost catch the words....
      Killikili-killikili-killikili . . . .
      The egg-shaped object silently exploded. The vision faded.
      I didn't know how much time had passed. I saw the witches, now still, their candles extinguished. The fireflies pulsed slowly, the way they did when their magical energy had been exhausted.
      The witches slowly walked toward the cars. They whispered in small groups, and a few giggled. A kind of euphoria always followed a successful ritual, so I expected most of them to show up with alcohol back at our house.
      "That ought to disperse any lingering psychic vibrations," Tanna said. She kissed me, then frowned. "You okay?"
      "Yeah," I managed. I felt drained. "I need a big, cold beer."
      "Did something happen?"
      I looked at her. "You didn't see anything, huh?"
      "No."
      "Well, I'll be damned. My first real paranormal experience."
      I ignored the rest of her questions and managed to drive home despite the shakes. I felt a sort of responsibility at being the one to see the vision. Now I understood why that ground held such a sense of suffering. Wherever they were from, whenever they'd died, it'd been a long way from home, in air they couldn't breathe. Maybe their own kind didn't even know what happened to them.
      Could the bonfires seen over the years have been psychic glimpses of the explosion I saw? Could the reported "trespassers" be images of the tiny, dying creatures? Could killikili, whatever that meant, have been eventually corrupted into Callahan? It formed a pattern, but like a lot of psychic information, it couldn't be proved.
      But Callahan's Farm, so far as anyone knows, remains unhaunted since that night. By human ghosts, or any others.

by Anita S. Moore © 1998. All rights reserved.

E-scape--Fiction: Tourist Trap

Tourist Trap

by Anita S. Moore © 1998. All rights reserved.