CHAPTER 5

Nightmare

 

“oney, what happened? It sounded like the house was exploding!”

Margo had been the first on the scene, with Oliver and Dot close at her heels. Josiah and Henry Hapgood, two rawboned middle-aged brothers from the search party were now poking their beaky noses into the room as well. The Hapgoods had been near the house and heard the big bang.

“I don’t know. I think it was a nightmare,” said Casey. He stood at the foot of Pearl’s bed with his fingers crossed behind his back. He really didn’t know what caused the noise. And no matter what those glistening shadows might be, they were definitely nightmarish.

Margo sat down on the edge of the bed and placed her arm protectively around Pearl, who was watching the commotion in her suddenly crowded room with wide-eyed interest.

“Maybe that loud noise had something to do with the wiring. I thought I smelled smoke when we dashed in here,” said Dot looking a bit more unruffled as her no-nonsense Vermont composure reasserted itself in the midst of the crisis.

“Electrical problems! Oh no, what next?” Oliver sighed deeply and closed his eyes. He crossed his arms and slumped against the wall, angry and deflated.

Josiah Hapgood started running his big red hands over the walls near the light switch. “Nope. Cool as a cucumber over he’yuh. How does that wall feel over to that thay’uh outlet, Henry?”

“Feels right as rain over he’yuh too,” said his brother. “Check around the outlets, Josiah.”

Dot stood, thoughtfully watching the two skinny old Yankees. With thin lips creased into permanent frowns beneath their remarkable noses, Henry and Josiah continued to pat the plaster, bobbing up and down like a pair of unhappy herons.

Casey sighed. He felt as though he had been lying to everyone. Or at least he hadn’t told them all he knew. But what did he know really?

How can I say that I saw monsters in my little sister’s closet, but I killed them with her magic stone? he wondered. They’d tell me I had an overactive imagination or that I was hysterical. They’d probably be right too.

Casey slipped quickly into Pearl’s closet and retrieved the white stone. He curled his fingers around it, feeling a little more secure. Maybe some of this was his imagination. Some of it. Maybe.

Oliver noticed the worried look on Casey’s face.

“Don’t worry, son,” he said. “The sheriff’s men will keep looking for clues to what happened to Mrs. McCurdy, and we should be very safe here tonight.”

“Do you think they will find Carlisle?” Casey looked at the floor self-consciously. He felt a slight twinge of guilt to be worried about a cat when his nice neighbor was missing. “Mrs. McCurdy’s cat…Carlisle. I know he’s just a cat, but Mrs. McCurdy will be looking for him if…um … when she comes back.”

“A big old alley cat like Carlisle can take care of himself,” said Oliver. “I’m sure he’s fine, and he’ll come home when he is ready. That’s why they say cats have nine lives.”

Casey’s fingers traced the grooves on the white stone in his pocket.

He’ll need them.

Dot Clydesdale sighed and drooped against the doorframe. “Let’s get some sleep and, with any luck, things will look much brighter in the morning. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I feel like a wilted tulip.”

As if on cue, the Saint Bernard nudged its way into the room and carefully climbed up on the bed next to Pearl. The mattress bowed under the giant dog’s weight and the bed springs groaned. Pearl let go of her stuffed bear and instinctively turned to the reassuring warmth the big dog offered.

“Penny!” gasped Dot, reaching for the dog’s collar. “That’s not your bed.”

“Let her stay there, Dot. I like the idea of such a gentle giant sleeping next to my little girl with all this craziness going on.”

Casey skirted around Josiah Hapgood who was staring suspiciously at Pearl’s tepee lamp, and headed down the hall. He paused, peering cautiously through the door of his own bedroom which was apparently monster free.

The room looked sane and comforting with its carefully made bed and organized desk. He turned on his desk lamp and squinted at the white stone. Nothing seemed that unusual about it other than its peculiar shape. Casey turned the stone around in his hand. It didn’t levitate. It didn’t give off sparks. It felt warm, but maybe that was because he had been clutching it so tightly all evening.

There was a gentle knock.

Oliver poked his head through the doorway. “Some sheriff’s deputies are going to stick around tonight to keep watch. There’s been no sign of Mrs. McCurdy yet, but they’re scouring the neighborhood looking for her.”

“Could this all have something to do with that missing boy that I heard you and Mom talking about today?”

“I don’t know, Casey. I really don’t, but it does seem odd that three people have disappeared in the last couple of weeks.”

“Three?” Casey felt a tendril of fear rising up around his throat. “Who’s the third?”

“Do you remember meeting Doctor Applegate, the botanist who has the lab next to mine at the school?” Oliver leaned against the wall and shoved his hands in his pockets. “He has been missing since Monday. It will be all over the news soon, so you might as well hear it from me. There doesn’t seem to be any pattern here to all this. Roger Applegate didn’t know the Marksons. I’m sorry, Casey. I didn’t mean to come here and scare you even more. Why don’t you give all of this a rest for tonight, son? See if you can get some sleep.”

Casey nodded, but that was the last thing he intended to do. Minutes later, he was leaning into the screen of his laptop, hoping the notoriously erratic and unreliable Whistlebrass web connection wouldn’t fail him.

Luck seemed to be with him, and soon he was studying photographs of geodes, crystals, and lava formations. Unfortunately, nothing quite matched the strange white rock from the riverbank.

He fell back in his chair, and turned the stone over in his fingers, studying it carefully. There wasn’t a mark on it, in spite of the explosion when it made contact with the living shadows. It was odd that nothing in the room had been disturbed either. Perhaps all of the energy that had been released when the stone connected with its targets had been dispelled into the creatures themselves.

“Found it!”

A website focusing on gems and minerals featured a picture of a white stone with a spider web of silvery veins running through it. Howlite, a phosphate gemstone resembling white turquoise was sometimes called white buffalo stone, and could be found throughout North America, most notably in the Southwest.

Howlite figured in the beliefs and legends of several southwestern tribes as a link to the realm of spirits. There were photographs of small howlite sculptures and ceremonial necklaces, but there was nothing that resembled the grooved and flattened cone from the riverbank.

“According to this, howlite is supposed to possess calming properties and disperse anger.” Casey tapped the stone with his finger. “You had a ton of anger to disperse today, didn’t you?”

He shut down his laptop and curled up in the window seat with Victor Wilberforce’s journal. He flicked through the pages of the journal until he found the spiral. It did look remarkably like the pattern on the riverbank.

Casey yawned, too tired to read any more. Lamps burned in every room filling the house with comforting light. All of the shiny new locks that Oliver Wilde had installed were securely latched. From time to time a stray flashlight beam would find its way inside as the remaining sheriff’s deputy patrolled the area.

Surely the Wilde household would be safe this night.

Surely.