Carter and Brenda watched carefully and tried to extract every detail they could from what they could see. The talking ceased and they just watched as Adam moseyed around the room almost as if he was sleep-walking. It was like the scene on the monitor was taking place in slow motion. Carter could feel Brenda’s squeeze and hear her accompanying murmurs, which were getting louder. Carter was burning inside as he tried to contain himself, but he knew that watching what was going on in that room was for the best.
The television suddenly went on, and they could see the channels moving from one to another, and then the television just as suddenly went off. That television had been broken for almost a year, and sat unplugged in the corner of his bedroom. The working TV was on the wall and it was off. Adam’s parents had front row seats to the show.
There was a low symphonic sound coming through the monitor. There were no radios in the room, so they could not be sure where music was coming from. The camera was built in and carried audio and video to their computer, but the installer never said anything about a musical background. In fact, Carter was pretty sure that no such thing existed.
Suddenly, something even stranger began to occur. As the symphony continued to play back to them softly, the high notes seemed choreographed to dim the lights. Whenever the notes went up, the lights slightly dimmed. Whenever the notes went down, the lights slightly brightened. Still, since it appeared that Adam was not in imminent danger, the band played on uninterrupted and Adam continued his search for an answer to the spiritual unknown. Carter and Brenda were getting a sneak peek into Adam’s world without his knowledge, and it was beginning to pay dividends.
The bedroom door opened and Bradley from next door wandered into the room. Adam looked at him and didn’t react to his midnight entrance. Adam had to be sleep-walking because such an occurrence would create some sort of excitement, some reaction, or some element of surprise. However, everything that was happening was just another day in paradise.
“He looks like he’s sleep-walking, or under a spell,” said Carter.
“No,” said Brenda. “I think Adam’s very much aware of his surroundings, but I don’t think I can take much more of this.”
“Then how do you explain his lah-ti-dah attitude to everything that’s going on?” Carter was mystified.
“Carter, he was awakened by something in the middle of the night!” Brenda protested. “You saw him just sit up in bed. He was looking around trying to adjust. He hasn’t said a word. He’s just observing at the moment.”
Adam looked at Bradley and the two boys sat on the bed. They began to carry on a dialogue which was precisely what Carter and Brenda wanted to happen. They watched as Adam and Bradley looked at each other as if they were daring the other to go first. Bradley took the initiative.
“Can you help again?” he asked.
“I guess so,” said Adam. “What’s he want?”
“Same thing…garden. He really wanted me to get your help tonight.”
“Okay,” said Adam. “I guess I have to…if he wants me to.”
“Yeah, he wants you to and says we have a lot to do, so I wanted to get you now so we can get out there and get it done.”
“Can you believe this?” asked Brenda. “Again, Bradley comes over here in the middle of the night and takes Adam from his room. He can’t be doing this. His parents are clueless. They need to keep better tabs on their kid. This can’t go on another minute.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Carter.
“I’m gonna talk into the monitor and tell Bradley to go home.”
“Why don’t you just let this play out like you wanted earlier?”
“Carter, I can’t let Adam leave his room again. He can’t keep being taken from his room, even if it’s done without a chance of harming him, and besides, I’m not comfortable with this one bit and will not let it happen. I think what I should do…like I said…is speak through the monitor and see what they have to say.”
“Do you know if that’s even possible?” asked Carter. He located the booklet that came with the device, opened it up and checked the table of contents, and eventually accessed the section for the microphone. There was a section for allowing communication between the two devices.
Brenda was leaning over to communicate with the boys through the speaker when she was cut off by another voice, which knocked her off her momentum for implementing her plan. She froze, pulled her head back up, and saw the two boys looking over in the area of the closet. Brenda’s talking wiped out whatever the voice said.
She regrouped, brought her head down and pushed the speaker button to deliver her message, but again there was a voice in the room talking over her, forcing her to stop. She decided that she was just going to put her plan on hold until she determined whether she was getting feedback from her speaker or whether there indeed was a voice other than the boys coming from Adam’s room. As far as they could tell, all of the spiritual communication was done through telepathic messages.
They watched the boys as they started to engage in a conversation. They zoomed in closer to get a better shot at their mouths in order to read their lips when they spoke because six year olds tend to mumble. The zoom lens closed in on the boys until they could see that their lip movement matched the sound coming out of the speaker.
“Are you scared?” Bradley asked.
“I don’t know,” said Adam. “A little bit, I guess.”
“Is it the guy? Does he scare you?”
“Yes, sometimes,” said Adam. “I’m just afraid what will happen if I don’t do what he says. He’s not nice.”
“Mine isn’t too bad, but I’m afraid too. That’s why I’m here. He wants me to do things…like now, so my parents don’t know what’s going on. If they find out, he says that they won’t let me help him, and he needs help. He says that he needs my help bad. He says if I help him, then he can go away. What about you? What will happen if you don’t help?”
“I’m afraid to find out,” said Adam. “That’s why I do what he says. Remember when I said that he made me go out to that grave place and I stayed there overnight and I had to stay there?”
“Yes,” said Bradley, listening and looking.
“Well that’s what he does. He tells me that if anyone asks, tell them that he just puts these thoughts in his head, even though I can hear him talking. Can you hear him talking at your house?”
“I can only hear my guy,” said Bradley.
“That’s what I mean. Can you hear him talking out loud?”
“Yep,” said Bradley. “I wonder if I can hear yours though. I wonder if he will talk to me here. Do you think he will?”
“Don’t know,” said Adam. “I guess so, but I don’t want to call out to him now and bring him here.”
“You can do that? I can’t do that, but you can do that?”
“I never tried, and I don’t want to try. I’d much rather have him not here.”
“Yeah, me too,” said Bradley. “He used to live in my house, though, so I think he misses it.”
“Mine didn’t live here,” said Adam. “He lived far away from here, but he said his parents used to live here. He also said he knows my mom and dad and if I don’t do what he says, he might have to hurt me. He knows about bad things I see in people and tells me not to tell my parents about them. It gets scary, so I don’t tell them. He’s meaner than yours and he does meaner things.”
“Meaner like what?” asked Bradley.
There was a loud noise that came from the closet. Adam and Bradley quickly turned around and looked toward the closet.
“I think he’s back,” said Adam. “He does that whenever I start to talk about him. I be
tter stop talking about him.”
Brenda wanted to stop the experiment then and there, but Carter stopped her. After all, they had gone this far, so he wanted to see where it led. At this point, they had everything in the way of circumstantial evidence, but they needed to delve into it more. Maybe Bradley being there was hurting their chances of obtaining this information, but perhaps not since he was a child too. Martin liked to work through children because they were easier to bully and get his way without them giving up his secrets.
Another crash came from within the closet and a small empty box fell down from the shelf and bounced out into the middle of the bedroom. Adam walked over and picked up the box and brought it back to the floor of the closet. As he was walking back to the bed, the box shot out quickly and hit Adam in the back. Adam jumped up onto the bed and Bradley retreated to the head of the bed by the pillows, which was the farthest point away from the closet. He pulled the blanket over his head as if to dodge incoming projectiles.
Adam was more mad than scared, and picked up the box from the floor and ran back to the closet and fired it back in. He then shouted at the closet. “Stop it! Why are you being mean? Stop doing that!” He bravely stood in front of the closet, looking in. From his parent’s standpoint, it almost looked as if Adam could see something within the closet. He continued to stare at it without being afraid.
“Go back there.” This voice bellowed from within the closet.
Carter and Brenda gasped at the sound of the voice. It wasn’t so much the fact that there was a voice coming from the closet as it was the sound of Martin’s voice.
“That son of a bitch really is back,” said Brenda.
CHAPTER 23
Carter played the tape back to listen to the voice again, but there was no sound, almost as if it did not happen. He hit the rewind button a second time, and nothing. Even further back did not have a box scene, where the box flew out of the closet and pegged Adam in the back. It was almost as if Martin somehow erased the tape so that they could not play it back for Evelyn.
This time Carter could not stop Brenda as she hit the speaker button and said, “Okay Adam, what’s going on in there. Are you okay?”
They watched as Adam and Bradley looked around the room with surprised looks pasted on their faces. The boys had no idea where the sound was coming from. They recognized the sound, but they were more blown away by the sound of Brenda’s voice then they were by the goings on in the bedroom.
“Mom?” Adam said.
Brenda fumbled for the speaker button. “Yes, honey.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m on the camera. I can see you two, and I was wondering if you guys were okay or if you needed any help.”
Adam looked at Bradley as they both stood in the middle of the room. His shoulders went up and down to indicate uncertainty.
Before he could answer, the curtains blew into the room. The television popped on again, and Adam’s head jerked over in that direction, knowing that it hadn’t worked in almost a year. A radio blared and a terrified look appeared on the faces of the boys.
Brenda looked back at Carter to tell him to go into the room right away, but he had already made the move. She looked on the monitor and could see him busting into the room. He scooped both boys up into his arms and rushed them out of the room and away from danger. The experiment was over. They knew when to say when. By the time he reached the outside of the room, both boys were shaken up and crying, but it was short lived. They had grown thick skin as far as spirits were concerned, but they were almost too young to understand what exactly was going on.
Brenda was ready to receive the boys on the outside of the bedroom and gave them both big hugs as soon as Carter put them down. “You guys are certainly brave boys,” she said, “but Bradley, first of all…what are you doing here so late?”
As Brenda was asking some questions, Carter was heading in the opposite direction into the bedroom. He wanted a real front-row seat in the action to see what was really going on. It was one thing to experience something virtually, but being in the middle of the storm was something entirely different.
He walked into the bedroom and sat on Adam’s bed, looking around to see if things were out of place as depicted by his computer. He got to his feet and made his way over to the closet where the majority of the action had taken place. Nothing took place with him standing there. In fact, you could hear a pin drop. From the closet, he looked back at the bed and then over to the window where the curtains hung still.
Carter walked out to the hallway and asked Adam to join him. When Adam entered the room, Carter asked him to sit on the bed. Adam walked over and sat on the bed, but nothing happened, so Carter asked him to walk over to the closet. Adam did as he was asked, and still nothing happened out of the ordinary. He then walked over to the window where the curtains once blew, as requested by his father, and still this world was silently calm.
“Adam,” said Carter, “what does it take for you to hear from your imaginary friend?”
“I don’t know,” said Adam. “He comes to me. I don’t know when he comes.”
“Do you know who comes to see you? Does the imaginary friend have a name?”
“His name is Martin,” said Adam.
“Martin. Did Martin say what it was that he wanted from you?”
“Just to be close,” said Adam.
“What did he mean by that?”
“I don’t know. That’s all he said. He wanted to be close.”
“Close to you?”
Adam shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“No.”
“Adam. We saw your friend in action from the computer monitor that we have. When I say friend, I don’t mean Bradley. I mean your imaginary friend.”
“You don’t need to call him that. We all know who it is. It’s Martin. You don’t have to call him my imaginary friend anymore. He’s not imaginary, and he’s not my friend. You said you’ve seen him?”
“That’s right. I’ve seen him in action. From now on we will refer to him as Martin. I have seen him like I can see you now, but I saw the curtains blowing around and the small box flying out of the closet. Caught all of that on tape. I would like to know what he wants…why he’s here. Does he say anything to you about what he wants?”
“He doesn’t say anything. He puts thoughts in my head and I do it. He was doing that when we heard you on the speaker.”
Carter remained in the bedroom as Brenda took the two boys into the living room. He wanted to poke around Adam’s bedroom to see what was going on without him there. Brenda knew what he was doing and was holding the kids off for a bit. She wanted to wait to bring Bradley home until Carter returned from his investigation of the bedroom.
As the boys were busy watching TV in the living room, Brenda decided to see what was going on with Carter. Instead of disturbing him, she grabbed the laptop and noticed that the live footage was still rolling. She saw that nothing was happening with Carter at the moment, and figured that nothing would happen without Adam there, so she decided to play back the tape to the point where they all left the room. The taping would resume even while in playback mode, so nothing would be lost.
Brenda hit the rewind button and the tape zoomed back until she could identify people in the video through the warbled blur of the fast moving footage. She then moved ahead to the point where Adam and Bradley were sitting on the bed talking. Then they were all leaving the bedroom. The door remained open and the room was quiet and still.
Brenda just waited for Carter to enter the empty room. She kept eyeing the door, and a few minutes had passed and he had yet to enter. There wa
s a slight movement of the curtain on the bedroom window. Brenda was made aware of this because of the movement of the shadow on the hardwood floor, made possible with the help of the moonshine lighting up the room. Snow formed on the TV screen for a brief moment before it went black. Things were heating up in Adam’s room.
There was still no sign of Carter. She continued to look on and saw a presence in the air and it was crossing the room to the closet. It was like a mist, but there was a darkness to it. Brenda continued to hone in on the closet where the entity had gone, and suddenly it stopped and began to take shape.
Something was happening in the bedroom. The light of the moon continued to light up part of the floor, which was where the shadowy figure crossed. Still, there was no sign of Carter, but Brenda expected him to pass through the moonlight at any moment. He had returned to the bedroom shortly after they moved the kids into the living room.
The moment arrived when Carter entered the room and like clockwork passed through the moonlit spot on the floor, opting to leave the light off for the time being. When he turned the light on, he looked around the room to see if he could see anything out of place. Brenda continued to monitor the situation without Carter’s awareness.
Carter moved toward the closet and slowly opened the door. He was cautious as he did this, in case something jumped out at him. Suddenly, the door swung open just after he let go of it, forcing him to dash out of the way as the door smashed into the wall, forcing the TV to turn on. The squiggly lines through snow was the only reception they got, but seconds later the TV shut off.
The closet door was now wide open, and Carter was careful not to step into the line of fire, planting his left foot down on the floor as a blockade in case the door went flying back closed. He stuck his hand in the closet and moved hangers side to side on the rod. Down on the floor underneath the rod was the empty box that had flown out of the closet. Carter reached down and picked it up. It was weighty, so he loosened the box flaps and saw that it was filled with greeting cards and pens and miscellaneous items. He looked around and could find no other box like it.
Desert Son Trilogy: Desert Son, Wayward Soul, Spiritual Intervention (Books 1-3) Page 66