Now he wasn’t sure he’d be able to check in with him at all.
“Mrs. Stout?” Winn said, standing in the doorway, looking at the small, thin woman.
“Come in, come in,” she said. “Call me Peggy, please.”
Winn walked into her home. She led him through the living room into a small family room where a bed had been arranged; a large screen TV sat opposite it. In the bed was an old, withered man.
“Maynard!” Winn said, worried. “Oh my god!”
Peggy reached for a remote and turned off the TV. Maynard’s eyes didn’t change; they remained open, fixed ahead.
“They tell me he might be able to detect sights and sounds,” she said, “so I keep the TV on for him most of the time, tuned to the shows he likes.”
“That’s thoughtful of you,” he replied. “What happened to him?”
“It was about a week ago,” she said. “He was out working in the orchard when he said he felt a sharp pain in his side. He collapsed. I thought he’d had a heart attack, but the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong.”
“There’s nothing wrong with him?” Winn asked, looking down at the withered man he’d once known as robust and full of vitality.
“When he came to, he kept talking about a pain in his side,” Peggy continued. “He said it felt like he’d been stabbed.”
Winn paused. “What day did this happen?”
“Last week,” she said. “On Tuesday.”
Winn thought back. That was the day he and David had confronted The Fist of God and his wives. Winn remembered the piercing pain he’d felt as The Fist had stabbed him with something — something he healed from quickly, but something Carma had been concerned about.
“Yesterday he made me get him a notepad,” she said. “He wanted to write. He could barely talk. Now he can’t talk at all.” She paused, glancing down at her husband, concern in her eyes.
“What did he write?” Winn asked.
She pried her eyes away from Maynard, turning to walk to a shelf filled with small books and trinkets. She slipped a wire-bound notepad from the side and handed it to Winn. “I didn’t read it,” she said, “except for the cover. That’s why I called you.”
Winn took the notepad. On the red cardboard cover were written the words, “To be read by Winthrop James.”
He opened the notepad and glanced through the pages. Most were blank, but in the middle he found one that Maynard had written upon. He glanced it over.
“Does it say anything that might help him?” Peggy asked.
“I’m not sure,” Winn said, continuing to scan the page, reading:
Winn,
It took lying here with my thoughts to realize it. Disaster is about to strike. I would try to stop it myself, but whatever has happened to me forbids it.
I met your friends, Steven and Roy, when I went up to Seattle to help them. They shared with me a secret I am under oath to keep confidential. However, lying here, contemplating a few things, I realized that I must break that oath, at least to the extent of involving you.
They are in great danger, and they do not realize it. You must help them — you’re the only one who can. I could do it if I had the strength, but I’m getting worse, not better. I will try to draw it out for you while I still have the ability to move my hands.
Winn turned the page. On the next sheet, there was a rough sketch of a triangle, with circles at each tip. Inside each circle was a stick figure. Maynard had scribbled a “V” next to one of the circles, and connected it with an arrow.
In the center of the triangle was another circle, and inside the circle was a box, divided in half. An “X” was placed in one box, and a stick figure drawn in the other.
Below the central circle Maynard had drawn spirals, filled in, as though they were clouds, swirling down below the diagram until they reached the bottom of the page. There, at the bottom, another “X” was placed, and the letters “DR,” with an arrow pointing to the X.
Winn scanned the drawing, trying to make sense of it. He turned the page again, where Maynard’s last lines appeared:
Don’t fail them, Winn. Save them.
He paused and looked up at Peggy. “Anything?” she asked. “Anything at all that might help him?”
“He’s more concerned with helping others,” Winn said, closing the book and turning to Maynard, examining his face, trying to discern from the wrinkles in the man’s skin what the warning in the notebook could possibly mean.
###
Author’s Note
While The Massacre Mechanism is a work of fiction, the Mountain Meadows Massacre was a real event that occurred in Utah in 1857. One hundred and twenty men, women, and children of the Baker-Fancher wagon train were slaughtered at the site mentioned in the novel. Do they desire revenge? Impossible to say. This story was a way of providing some in an imagined way, and was not intended to represent the feelings of the murdered, or their descendants.
You can read more about the Mountain Meadows Massacre at Wikipedia.
Two excellent books on the subject are Blood of the Prophets by Will Bagley, and The Mountain Meadows Massacre, by Juanita Brooks.
Michael Richan lives in Seattle, Washington.
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And if you haven’t already, enjoy the books of the companion series, The River.
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By the author:
The Downwinders series:
Blood Oath, Blood River
The Impossible Coin
The Graves of Plague Canyon
The Blackham Mansion Haunting
The Massacre Mechanism
The River series:
The Bank of the River
Residual
A Haunting in Oregon
Ghosts of Our Fathers
Eximere
The Suicide Forest
Devil’s Throat
The Diablo Horror
The Haunting at Grays Harbor
It Walks At Night
The Cycle of the Shen
A Christmas Haunting at Point No Point
The Dark River series:
A
The Blood Gardener
All three series are part of The River Universe, and there is crossover of some characters and plots. For a suggested reading order, see the Author’s Website.
The Massacre Mechanism (The Downwinders Book 5) Page 19