The Dryad's Kiss
Page 12
“Oh.”
“Finn, don't be so eager to throw out experiences which don't mesh with your world view. That's too easy a habit to form and can blind you to a lot of the wonder of the world.”
I cringed internally. Unwittingly, Det. Hunter had cut right to the heart of my current problems. Was I doing myself an injustice by denying everything I had been seeing?
Det. Hunter looked back to her pad, and I'm sure I really did cringe when it was clear we were a long way from over. “Okay, my next question involves the Mighty Burger where you were working...”
Her questions were probing and thorough. She left me limp, exhausted, and frazzled.
“Do you have any last questions, Finn?”
“Uh, yeah. Am… am I going to go to jail?”
A sad smile crossed her lips. “I hope it won’t come to that.”
Thanks for that big shot of confidence there. “What happens next? Am I going to have to go to court?”
“If the prosecutor is not convinced by the evidence, then yes. It will be a few weeks at least, though.”
My eyes must have been saucers, because her once again strictly-business face softened.
“I’m sure it won’t come to that, Finn. It’ll be okay.”
“O-okay.” I didn't believe her.
“Thank you both for coming down.”
My dad spoke from behind me. “Finn, why don’t you go sit in the waiting room for a bit? I need to talk to Detective Hunter.”
I left and found myself totally without jealousy. If I never talked to Detective Hunter again, I would be perfectly happy. He only talked with her for a minute or two and then came back out. I wondered what they had to talk about.
He came out looking a bit sad and introspective.
“What's up dad? What did you need to talk to her about?”
I had the feeling that he was hiding his feelings behind his glasses. “Oh, we were just talking about her grandfather. We were close once and parted on bad terms. His health is failing. I just wanted to get an update.”
We walked out of the police station into the humid summer heat.
“Is he dying?”
“Yes, the doctors gave him six months to live about two years ago so he is living on borrowed time.”
We got into the car, and I asked, “Are you going to go see him?”
He shook his head. “I don't think he would want to see me.”
I looked at my dad and weighed my options. I decided he genuinely didn't want me to know any more so I forcibly let go of my curiosity. “I'm sorry dad.”
He gave me a weak smile as we pulled out of the parking lot. “Me too.”
We got home without incident, made our way to the kitchen to see my mom, and just as I started to relax, her cell phone rang.
Her opening line nailed my attention to the conversation.
“Principal Hayman, what can I do for you today?”
It went downhill from there. The call couldn’t have lasted more than five minutes, but her growing anger and my sinking heart made it seem much longer. Comments like, “That’s ridiculous!” and “But finals are coming up!” and “You can bet I’ll be calling the school board!” shot through the air.
When she slammed her phone closed, she had my dad’s attention as well. At his inquiring glance, she almost growled.
“That was the school. Finn has to appear at a hearing on Monday. They won’t let him back on school grounds until then. He has to stay home tomorrow.”
My guts twisted into a pretzel, and I suddenly felt cold. “You’re kidding right?”
“No, I’m not kidding, but this is totally ridiculous. We have to call the school board.”
My dad said, “I want to be on that call.”
Despite my parents’ vocal and passionate protests, I would not be allowed back in school the next day. My parents’ reaction softened the blow for me. Neither of them engaged in emotional outbursts often, but their outrage at my treatment made it clear they backed me unconditionally. They spent a lot of time on the phone talking to various officials. Nobody budged.
Surprisingly, it seriously affected me as well. I was intelligent, but I wasn’t what you’d call an ideal student. I took several AP classes, but only in the last few years had I taken school seriously. Before this happened to me, banishment from school always seemed like more of a reward than a punishment for bad behavior, but now that they had targeted me, I felt persecuted, guilty, and outcast. If someone had told me right then that my one-day suspension from school would be an event of earth-changing importance, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
Dejected, I retreated to my room and prepared for another marathon session of WoW. I had only been at it for about a half hour when my dad knocked on my door twice, then stuck his head in.
“Pack your things, Finn. We're headed back to the mound.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. I’ve got my grads filling in for me tomorrow. We’re leaving tonight.”
I about flipped my lid in excitement. “This is totally awesome, did Mr. Hatzer finally decide Mark could start?”
“Yep, he actually started at the beginning of the week.”
“What? Why didn't you tell me? Was that why you sound so guilty when I asked about the mound earlier?”
“Yeah, sorry, I made a bad call there. I feel bad not coming straight with you. I didn't want to distract you from your studies, but of course, that's all changed now. Go on, pack for three days.”
Excitement overrode any annoyance I had with my dad's handling of this. I jumped out of my seat and turned off my computer without saying anything to my WoW teammates. I pulled out my small suitcase and started throwing clothes into it.
I forgot everything else that had been happening in my excitement to go down to the mound again. My curiosity was burning to find out whatever was buried under that heap of dirt. It was something special. I just knew it.
We got out of the house in record time. I think my dad was as excited as I was. This time we had a three-hour drive to Serpent Mound. Along the way, my dad explained to me what had happened at the burial site since our last visit.
“I’ve heard from Mark every day this week. He’s been keeping me up-to-date on what he’s found.”
I had another momentary twinge of annoyance that my dad hadn’t been updating me. “Spill it, Dad.”
He grinned, but kept his gaze locked on the road. “Well, things haven’t been going very well at all on the dig.”
“What happened?”
“Apparently, it’s been a comedy of errors, although Mark isn’t laughing. First, they couldn’t get the bulldozer started, then there’ve been some serious accidents, and something happened yesterday that convinced him he needed us down there, though he won’t say what.”
I knew something was going on at that mound! I shivered at the memories of that night at the site, thinking what might have happened there since. Trepidation, vindication, and excitement make an odd mix of emotions. It left me bouncing in my seat.
“Now, he’s got three, maybe four days, at the outside before the owner is going to toss him out on his ear.”
“Ouch. How much has he gotten done?”
“About halfway of the way to the center of the mound.”
“That’s not too bad. Has he found anything?”
“Yep.” Then he fell silent. Dang it! He knew just how to push my buttons.
“So? What has he found?”
“Oh, not much; just two burial sites with full skeletons, some partials, and another animal effigy whistle.”
“Wow! That’s awesome!”
Happy to find a partner in his excitement, the grin on my dad’s clean-shaven face widened. “One of the bodies was huge. Mark said the guy topped out at around seven feet tall and had a whistle buried with him. So they’ve found a snake effigy whistle, in addition to your bear.”
“Sweet!”
After that, we rode in silence for a while. I started consid
ering everything that had happened to me at the mound. Something about the snake seemed familiar, but I just couldn't place it. I thought through what had happened to me that night at the mound, and my difficulties believing what I saw, heard, and felt while we were there. The parallel to my feelings about Erik's exploding bat was not lost on me. Would Detective Hunter tell me that I shouldn't doubt my experiences again? Hesitantly, I brought it up.
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“What if what I saw down there was real?”
“Now that would be interesting.”
“Yes, but Ricky felt something out there as well, and it freaked her out too. We have three different groups who have seen or felt something there as well. Isn’t it getting to the point that we would be ignoring facts that conflicted with our world view?”
My dad paused and then pulled out his teaching voice. “Finn, all through history, up to modern times, people have claimed to see ghosts and spirits and beings from other realms. People claim to be in contact with some,” he let go of the steering wheel to make finger quotes while he said, “Higher Power.” Hands back on the wheel, he continued, “On every continent, there are myths and legends of supernatural events and creatures, and people who believe there is some sort of life after death. There are people who claim that quartz crystals have healing powers and that homeopathics, water exposed to an element briefly and then made almost as clean as distilled water, can cure any disease you care to name.
“One thing that all these things have in common is that modern scientific methods have never been able to verify any of them. These beliefs contravene common sense and never seem repeatable in a lab under controlled conditions. The common denominator of supernatural events is human isolation, observation, and emotional reactions.”
I nodded, uncertain where he was taking this. “Okay, so? We’ve got verification here.”
“Finn, is it more reasonable to assume that there is some immeasurable and unknowable part of existence out there perceived only to a lucky and select few, or does it make more sense that what we’re really seeing are artifacts of the way we think and process outside stimuli?”
I considered this. “I suppose so.”
“Did you know that intense electromagnetic fields can cause visual hallucinations?”
I looked at him in surprise. “No, I didn’t.”
“Did you know that if ten people witness an event, you’ll get eleven different versions when you interview them a week later?”
“Come on, Dad!” I protested.
He chuckled and said, “Okay, so maybe I exaggerate a bit, but a person’s memory of an event is subject to manipulation and change. They’re starting to give considerably less weight to eyewitness accounts and identifications in criminal trials, because they’re so prone to failure. Do you remember that British TV magician we watched who played mind games with people?”
“Derren Brown?”
“Yes, him. Remember the tricks he could pull on people? He paid for things with blank pieces of paper. He programmed an entire mall of people to stop and raise their hands on his command. Without knowing why, everyone stopped and raised their hands in the air.”
I laughed. “Yeah that was awesome!”
“It was, assuming it wasn’t the television audience he was setting up. He was showing how susceptible people are to suggestion. So, doesn’t that suggest that maybe people see ghosts, aliens, and gates to Heaven because that’s what they have been programmed to expect, or our brain is wired to produce those experiences? Doesn’t it seem more likely than some immeasurable, unknowable set of forces and creatures?”
I nodded reluctantly.
“Are you familiar with Occam’s razor?”
“Yup. It says that the simplest explanation for a phenomenon is usually the correct one.”
“You’ve got it. Cut away the complicated, unlikely explanations and you’re left with the cause. I would submit to you that, in this case, the simplest explanation is that people’s brains are susceptible to suggestion and random pattern matching. It’s part of our brain’s nature. I’d even suggest that our ancestors’ pattern-matching abilities gave us the survival edge. Evolution designed us to see patterns, and by seeing patterns, we gained the ability to predict things like leopard attacks and plant growth. Once we saw a pattern, we could predict the future, and we became able to ask the question, “why?” and seek the reason. This is what separates us from all other life on Earth and why there are over eight billion of us today.
“However, that same ability to detect patterns causes us to see patterns in inherently random events. People gamble because they perceive patterns in the random movement of the roulette wheel, then the one time out of many that they hit the jackpot, they become convinced that the pattern they perceived predicted the outcome.
“If you flip a coin and get heads one hundred times, would you bet heavily that the next toss would come up heads?”
I grinned. “I’d rather bet it was a two-headed nickel.”
My dad snorted. “Assuming you have a standard coin, the chance the next toss would come up heads is still fifty percent. Previous tosses have no influence on the next one, but most people would bet on heads because of history or tails because they were “due”.
We see patterns or reason where there is none because that’s what we are programmed to do for our survival.”
I rubbed my chin in consideration. “I guess you’ve thought of this more than once?”
He laughed. “You know it’s something that has fascinated me my entire life.”
“Do you think everyone goes to this mound expecting to see ghosts, so they do?”
While tilting his head equivocally from side-to-side, he nodded shallowly. “Perhaps there’re some magnetic fields in the area that cause visual hallucinations, and we interpret them just like our brains interpret the random firing of neurons while we’re asleep as dreams. Perhaps it is something else. We’ll see.”
Recent events had shaken my faith in the nonexistence of the supernatural, but I couldn’t think of any way to voice my opinions—certainly not as eloquently as my dad had. I chewed on the thought that everything I had recently experienced could be attributed to my brain’s tendency to impose order onto random events. In some ways, that unsettled me more than the existence of human ghosts that turned into bears.
Mounds Again
We arrived in Seaman, Ohio about the same time we had arrived at the mound the previous weekend. After we checked in, we met my uncle at the diner.
Once seated and orders placed, Mark took one look at me, saw the fading bruises, and said, “What happened to you, Finn?”
“Well, I had a little run-in with some guys from school.”
“I hope they look worse than you do.”
“They do,” I admitted. “But only because they beat each other up so they could claim I went after them with a bat.”
He lowered his mug of coffee and arched his brows. “Okay, I’ve got to hear the whole story now.”
“I was jumped by three guys in the woods and they broke a bat on my arms and then beat the snot out of me. Two days later, they showed up at the police station all beaten and bloody and claimed I jumped them... I really need you to teach me how to fight, Uncle Mark.”
He nodded, his mouth set in a grave line. “Yes, you do. It sounds like only dumb luck or termites kept you from being hospitalized, or worse.” He grabbed my chin and turned my head back and forth while inspecting my face. “In fact, it looks like you got off pretty lightly.”
“Didn’t feel like it at the time.”
He slapped my hand where it rested on the table. “Don’t worry kiddo. I’ve got some moves that will mean they won’t have to rough themselves up to convince people that they were in a fight.”
My dad spoke up around a mouthful of pie. “Finn's been having trouble with these boys all year. They had to beat him to within an inch of his life to convince him to come talk to you.”
“Damn straight. Now, onto better, if similarly, dirty business.”
Mark told us about the problems plaguing the site. It started with a lot of stupid accidents and protests by people claiming to represent the local Shawnee Remnants. That was followed by sabotage of the heavy equipment, and finally, someone spiked the crew’s drinking water with mescaline or LSD. In the following chaos, the site had been damaged to the point where he’d had to file a police report.
“I talked with the sheriff yesterday afternoon and today. I’ve also been tracking down the workers to see if they were okay and to see if I could pinpoint the culprit. The incident traumatized them, but no one got seriously injured, at least nothing beyond a few bumps and bruises. Not a single one of them was willing to work here again though, including my GC. That’s why I called you two to come down. I’ve asked for Ricky as well, but Dan couldn’t let her go until tomorrow. She should be here in the afternoon.”
Things just kept getting better and better.
Mark continued, unaware that he had just made my weekend shinier. “I’d get more locals, but now I don’t trust them, and I’m running out of time. I will ask Mr. Hatzer for an extension, but I don’t know if I’ll get it.”
I suggested, “I know several guys who would do just about anything to get a chance to work this dig. Can I call them up and see if they want to come down Friday night and stay through Sunday?
Uncle Mark tossed a grin at me and then passed it to my dad.
Dad took the ball and asked, “Who did you have in mind Finn?”
“Well, Dave has a car. He, Alan, and Jeff practically salivated when I told them about the dig. I wouldn’t be surprised if Gregg and Jim would want to come as well. Can I call them?”