Laying the Music to Rest

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  “So you mean to say this mirror is a machine of some sort?” Constance asked. “I don’t see how that can be. It’s too small.”

  “Not really a machine. More like what the doctor said earlier. A focus. In very crude terms, the glass works like a magnifying glass works on the sun’s rays. This glass focuses spatiotemporal currents, time waves if you will. Somehow, with the right sequence of events, a burst of power from a source location is triggered and pulls the person who triggers it through the glass and to the source. It’s the same principle that our return devices work on. Only hidden.”

  “Your return what?” Fred asked.

  Again Susan looked over at me, then back up at Fred. “My people use something similar.” She took the mirror and rubbed the handle a few times, then looked into it and again laid it face up on the table.

  We waited. I noticed that Susan seemed to be holding her breath.

  Again, nothing happened.

  “Maybe Gretchen turned down the marriage proposal,” Constance said. “Try turning it facedown.”

  Both Fred and I gave Constance a hard look and she shrugged.

  Susan nodded and started to again pick up the mirror. But as she reached for it, the air in front of the coffee table shimmered and the ghost appeared. She spooked me almost as bad as she had the day before. Only this time I kept my seat on the couch near the mirror. As she firmed up, the room temperature dropped twenty degrees. I could see why all the lodge guests had left.

  I glanced over at Steven as Fred made a hasty retreat around the back of the couch and away from the ghost. Steven again had that glassy-eyed look and was slumped back against the couch, staring off at the ceiling.

  The ghost stood and looked at the mirror for a moment, as if checking to make sure it was all right. Then she faded out and was gone.

  Constance rushed over to Steven as he slowly shook his head. I felt sorry for him. It was bad enough having that ghost pop in and out, but being able to sense her, read her thoughts, must have been awful. I was glad it was him instead of me.

  Susan stared at Steven. “Did you get anything more from her?”

  Steven nodded. “Constance was right,” he said, his voice again very weak. “Alex put his image in the mirror, then gave it to Gretchen. She turned the mirror facedown.”

  “Was there anything else?” Susan asked. “Just before he looked into the mirror?”

  “No,” Steven said after a short pause. “I have this picture of him simply wiping the mirror off, looking into it, and handing it to Gretchen. She turned him down and that was when he left. She wants him to return.”

  Steven’s answer seemed to have satisfied Susan. She held the mirror up in front of her and rubbed the frame along the right side as she kept her image in it. Then she turned it facedown.

  And waited. Nothing.

  She picked the mirror back up and tried rubbing the left side.

  Nothing.

  On the third try she found what she was looking for. She held the mirror up in front of her and ran her hand completely around the frame. As if she were cleaning it with a rag, she started at the handle and went clockwise around and back to the handle.

  Then she laid the mirror facedown on the table.

  Suddenly, she smiled, grabbed her pack, and pulled it up in her lap.

  I grabbed the mirror, pulling it out of her reach. She seemed to think she was going somewhere and I didn’t want her taking the mirror with her.

  She didn’t. She saw my action and smiled at me. She faded, shimmering as if we were looking at her through heat waves coming off hot desert sand.

  “Thanks,” she said to me, nodding at the mirror. “Keep it safe. Others will want to use it very soon.” Her voice sounded as if she had shouted it down a long tunnel and the look in her eyes was one of success. An ugly look that chilled me almost as much as the ghost had.

  She faded and I could see the chair through her.

  Then she was gone.

  You could have cut the silence and tension in that room with a dull knife.

  “Holy shit,” Fred said softly.

  I laid the mirror back down on the coffee table, being very careful to make sure it was facing up. Then I stood on what felt like rubber legs and headed for Fred’s liquor cabinet. If there was ever a reason to have a drink before lunch, this was it.

  I wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip by.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Monumental Cemetery

  June 28, 1990

  ALL PEOPLE IN the world, unless they go through life doing absolutely nothing, and I have known just such people, have a few moments in their lives when their world changes direction. For most, the shifts are gradual, like a slow curve on an interstate highway. The change of direction isn’t really noted unless in hindsight. “Oh, hey. Isn’t it amazing that I was going to be a heart surgeon and now I’m selling real estate?” People like that never really know the exact time the change took place. It just did.

  But changes in my life have been along the line of running into a brick wall. I’ve run into a number of small brick walls in my life. But only two major ones. The first was the exact moment Fred told me Carla was dead. Killed in a stupid car accident. I knew without a doubt that at that moment, my life had completely changed. And it had.

  The second time was today. When I laid that mirror back on that table and headed for the bar, I knew without a doubt that my life would never be the same. That the easy, don’t feel-or-do-anything way of life of the last few years at the Garden Lounge had suddenly ended.

  I flopped down on the couch after I had made myself a drink, downed it, made one each for Steven, Constance, and Fred, then made myself a second. Where the hell had Susan gone? I stared at the empty chair and then at the mirror. Was she in the same place as Alex, a man who had supposedly disappeared eighty years earlier? Where the hell would that be? In 1990, there were very few places in the world that could hide a large number of people for eighty years. Let alone a few dozen such places.

  Fred dropped onto the other couch and stared at the mirror. “Maybe you should tell us what she said last night.”

  “You know, I didn’t believe one word she said. I do now and I’m scared to death.”

  “That bad, huh?” Fred asked.

  I nodded and motioned for Constance and Steven to sit down. This was going to take a while.

  Susan’s chair was left open, as if she might appear at any moment. It took about thirty minutes to relay what Susan had told me the night before. Now I wished I had asked more questions, because damned if I could answer half of the ones the three of them threw at me. I just hadn’t believed her, so I hadn’t bothered. Instead I had laughed.

  But I told them what I could remember of her story about how she was from the near future and how all of the people then were descendants of what she called seed groups, people taken randomly from our culture. She had said there were four such main groups. When I had asked her why she had been trying to find the mirror, she’d tried to explain a little about how her world was in conflict, with both sides trying to find the original groups of the other.

  When I had managed to ask her what had happened to our present world, she wouldn’t say. But she made it very clear that during her time, there were only the seed groups left.

  “Pretty farfetched,” Fred said after I was finished with the part of her story about how one of the groups called Lomax was a genetically altered group. “What do you make of it all?”

  I pointed at the empty chair. “After that, I don’t know what to think. It makes sense that something like we witnessed with Susan happened to the ghost’s lover. Would tend to shake anyone up, especially someone in 1909. Shook the hell out of me, and I’ve watched a dozen ‘Beam me up, Scotties’ on television.”

  “I agree,” Fred said. “It would explain the ghost’s lover disappearing.”

  “And it would also explain,” Steven said, “why Gretchen was so traumatized into waiting around for him after she
was killed.”

  “So how come these seed groups are fighting?” Fred asked. “And why are they looking for these mirrors?”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t let her get that far.”

  “Do you think we’re going to blow ourselves up?” Constance asked, her voice low.

  “I read the morning paper. Nothing major seems to be going on at the moment. But you never know. There are a lot of crazies in this world.”

  “And not all of them are in Russia.” Fred said.

  “I’ll drink to that,” I said, and downed half of my drink to try to clear that image from my mind.

  We all sat in silence for a few minutes.

  “One thing to remember,” I said, breaking the silence in the big room. “We still haven’t solved the problem of the ghost. And now she pops in and out of here like an unwanted in-law. Anyone got any ideas?

  “Somehow,” Steven said, “Alex must return. That is the only thing I am completely convinced will free Gretchen’s spirit.”

  “Lovely,” Fred said.

  “Maybe Susan will help him get back,” Constance said. “If she went to the same place and wasn’t lying about all that time travel stuff, she might.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “But I suppose there is always hope. Assuming that this Alex is still alive after all this time.”

  I let that sink in for a moment, then said, “I need to take a walk. How about we all do some thinking. Maybe there’s something we’re all missing.”

  No one disagreed, so I grabbed my coat and wandered down across the logjam and up a trail under the trees growing on the old mudslide. I found it hard to imagine that at one time, this entire area had slid down and blocked the valley. I looked up through the thirty-foot-tall pine trees and then back at the smooth forest floor and just couldn’t imagine it.

  But it had happened, the same as the ghost had led us to the mirror and Susan had disappeared right out of a chair in the middle of the lodge. There was no getting around the reality of it all happening. Maybe I was starting to do what I had always feared most—close my mind to new ideas.

  I had hated those who refused to live in the present, but instead stuck to the values of their past without thought or reason. I had prided myself on being able to be open-minded with the kids who sat in my classes and who now came into the bar. But maybe I had been kidding myself. Maybe I was as closed-minded as the next fool.

  I stopped and stared through the trees at the lake. Susan had disappeared from the lodge after triggering a mirror she called a transportation focus. That was a fact. And there was a ghost waiting for her lover. That was also a fact. The next question was what to do about it. I was starting to understand how the people of Roosevelt must have felt when they tried to fight the moving wall of mud and rock I was now standing on.

  I wandered away from the lake until the trail dropped down across what Fred had said was Mule Creek. The trail forked at that point, one fork going up the Mule Creek valley in the direction of the old Dewey Mine. Fred said it was a fun place to explore. I didn’t feel like exploring right at the moment.

  I turned and headed down the trail along Monumental Creek, away from the lake. Fred had told me that the trail ran down into the Big Creek valley and then after that into the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. I had thought I would amble a mile or so and then turn back. I didn’t make it that far.

  About three hundred yards past Mule Creek, in an area of the hillside that was flatter than any other, I noticed the old cemetery.

  It was above the trail and fenced off with the bleached remains of a short wood fence. A few of the markers were wood planks on which most of the writing was long gone. About fifteen stone markers dotted the brush and needles under the pines. Most were tipped at odd angles. Another four or five were knocked down. In a few places, the ground had sunk into a grave.

  I read a few of the old stones. Just names and dates, mostly from a few years before the flood. One stone caught my attention. It looked newer, a little whiter, as if it had only been there half the time of the others. I walked over to it and read the simple inscription on it.

  Richard Haycroft

  Beloved Grandfather

  1867—1943

  The first and only Mayor

  of Roosevelt, Idaho. He

  loved the town and wanted

  to be buried here.

  I sat down with my back against a tree near the stone marker and stared out over the narrow valley and the creek below. I knew where I wanted to be buried. Beside Carla in Boise. But now I wondered if I was going to get that chance. Damn it all to hell.

  I took a deep breath of the clear mountain air and tried to organize my thoughts into some sort of reasonable pattern. Being able to order thoughts into rational form is a learned skill. Good trial lawyers have it. So do most scientists. Chess and go players also have the ability to see order in things where, to the untrained observer, there is none.

  I had learned the trick by doing year after year of lectures. Complex or simple topics, I could always boil them down into hour segments, and then within each hour keep the discussion moving along a certain track. Good note takers in my classes always ended up with clear outlines of the material that needed to be covered. It was a trick I hadn’t used in years. Not much need while marking time in a bar.

  But now, with so many new things to make sense of, I tried to force my mind to drop back into that organizational frame. I had to sort out some details.

  After half an hour, I had the questions and events organized into four main areas. First, I had come to help Fred and Constance get rid of a ghost so that they could keep their new lodge afloat in a way they would like. No solution yet. Even with the mirror and the disappearance of Susan, the ghost was no closer to leaving than before.

  Second, I now believed that the ghost did exist and was waiting for someone named Alex to return. The ghost believed that even though eighty years had passed, Alex was still alive. That fact was interesting, considering Alex’s probable age. Of course, as Steven said, ghosts seldom are in touch with the current time.

  Third, Susan had come here looking for something and that something had turned out to be the very same mirror the ghost had focused on. That Susan said she was from the future and had enemies was either believable or not. However, if there were others looking for the mirror, they might show up. I didn’t much like that thought, but Susan had said others would want to use it soon.

  Fourth, Susan had clearly done something to the ghost’s mirror and disappeared. There seemed to be no way of knowing where she went, short of triggering the mirror and following her.

  All four points crossed and crisscrossed and all ended up boiling down to one simple thing. The mirror.

  Yet the biggest questions surrounded the mirror.

  So, I had a fifth main section. What was the mirror? Susan had said it was a random selector device planted by what she called Seeders. If that was the case, where did the Seeders come from? And how were they planting devices like the mirror at the turn of the century?

  There seemed to be no clear answers, especially sitting here in a cemetery. If anything was to be done to help Fred and Constance, then answers were needed. And it followed that the only way to get those answers was to trigger the mirror and see where it took me.

  There. I had finally got to the point that I knew I had to get to the minute Susan disappeared. I had to follow her. Simple and crazy as that.

  For the next few minutes I sat and thought about being buried beside Carla and how important that had become to me in the last few years. If I followed Susan through the mirror, there was almost certain chance I would never make it back. In eighty years, Alex hadn’t. But there was a chance I would. Alex hadn’t had Susan to help him eighty years ago. She seemed to know a lot about what she was doing.

  But was Susan right? Or was she crazier than I was becoming? I kept picturing her sitting there in that big old chair one moment and then gone the next. If I had to place a wager ri
ght now, I would bet on her telling the truth. I didn’t like that bet.

  There was only one way to find out. I stood, brushed off my pants, and headed back down the trail.

  ***

  Constance was sitting beside Fred on the main living room couch, talking to Steven as he paced up and down in front of the fireplace.

  “Ghosts don’t lie,” he said. “From everything we know about spirits, it would be impossible for a ghost to purposely tell a lie. At times ghosts have been mislead by the passage of events since their death. But no, I would stake anything that a deliberate falsehood would not be possible.”

  I dropped down onto the couch in front of the coffee table and the mirror. “What’s that about?”

  Constance shrugged. “I asked Steven if there’s any chance that Gretchen was lying about Alex being still alive.”

  Steven shook his head. “No way. As far as she is concerned, and as far as I can feel by being in contact with her, Alex is still very much alive.”

  “He’d be at least a hundred years old,” I said.

  Fred nodded. “At least.” He stood and handed me an old eight-by-ten framed picture. “That’s one of the pictures we had copied down at the historical society and used to decorate the cabins with. Read the inscription on the back.”

  I glanced at the picture of seven men standing in what looked to be ankle deep mud in front of a large white tent. There was a sign hung across the peak of the tent: ATTORNEYS HOLBERG & WINSTON. In the background were some of the main buildings of the town. The last thing I wanted to look at was that dead town. I needed another drink.

  I flipped the picture over. In Constance’s printing it said, Roosevelt’s first law office.

  “It also had names on the original,” Constance said, “but I didn’t think to copy them down. I do remember that the shortest man there, the one on the left, was named Alex. They put that he was from Boston in parentheses beside his name. That’s why I remembered it.”