Child, p.6
Child, page 6
part #6 of Sam and Sam Series
“I think this has been going on for more than a lifetime,” Sam said. “They haven’t built anything here in decades, and even the stuff from the fifties was pretty half-hearted.”
“Look who knows so much,” Samantha teased. It felt a bit flat, but he tried to answer in kind.
“Agnes would be proud.”
They looked at each other for a minute, both wrestling with various feelings of desolation and dispiritedness.
“You want to get out of here?” Samantha asked.
“Yeah. They couldn’t put us up here, tonight, if they wanted to. Let’s go get checked in somewhere. I think we’ll think better, from there.”
She nodded and with mutual relief, they headed back to the car.
<><><>
They sat on the bed again, knee to knee, looking through various state websites, trying to find anything they could about the little town.
“I don’t see it anywhere,” Sam said.
“Me, neither,” Samantha agreed, closing another tab on her computer. “All of the tiny little towns are just a part of the county. No one started paying attention to them until pretty recently. Nothing about what might have happened to them.”
Sam was frustrated, but at least they were out of that place. She turned to face him.
“How about we talk about what it is, rather than figuring out when it happened?”
He shifted to turn toward her and nodded.
“Okay. So, what could do that?”
“Let’s start with do what?” she said. He sighed and nodded, settling in.
“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” he asked. She grinned.
“Do we conclude that the people are effected, or just crotchety?”
“I can’t imagine, even the weirdest of the weird, that they would act like that, if they were normal.”
“If you look at the plants, I really don’t think that’s normal. You combine it with the buildings, and the people, and it looks like there’s one thing that’s having the same effect on all of them. Yes?”
“Sure.”
“Can a ghost do that?” Samantha asked. Sam shrugged.
“I have a hard time imaging something a ghost can’t do. A spell could do it, yes?”
She nodded.
“Yeah. I could actually probably do it myself with what I’ve got out in the car, if I were motivated enough. I’d do it through the water. Touches everything, as long as all of the buildings have indoor plumbing.”
Sam cast his vision back down to the little town, struggling to find it as if it were underwater or down a steep decline, where his instinct was to keep on straight. Samantha paid close attention, trying to learn as much as she could from it. It didn’t make sense.
“It affects you, even from here, doesn’t it?” she asked. He nodded, his eyes still vacant as he roamed the town. The second idea of him, far away, was focused and alert, but angsted and lonely. He wanted to be back.
“How strange,” she murmured. After a moment, he snapped back into himself and nodded.
“They’ve pretty much all got water, from what I can see. Bathrooms and stuff. Maybe a couple of the really old farm houses are using wells and outhouses, but it’s hard to be sure. They aren’t lit anymore.” He frowned, looking sad. “They’re all sitting in the dark.”
“How do they get around?” Samantha asked, as it occurred to her. He shrugged.
“Walk. They’ve got farming equipment that looks modern enough, but I don’t see any cars on the roads.”
“So, yeah, if I wanted to cause that, I’d be looking at something I could put in their water supply, maybe into the ground water.”
“But how long would that last?” Sam asked.
“Like I said, after I died, it would fade out pretty quickly. So unless we’re dealing with a particularly vengeful immortal - which, that’s a pretty powerful combination of specializations, really - I don’t think a single sorcerer could do it.”
“Mother-daughter, or something?” Sam asked. Samantha nodded.
“That’s a heck of a grudge, but leave it on the list.”
“How about demons?” Sam asked. Samantha nodded slowly, breathing in time as she considered.
“Maybe. They’ve got their curses, and they certainly have the longevity to pull it off, but I think they’d have to be local. I think it would have to be one of them.”
“Easy enough to check, right?” Sam asked. Samantha nodded.
“So we should check the water, and we should demon-check the people. I can do that. What else?”
“What about Ashley?” Sam asked. Samantha frowned.
“How well-organized did the courthouse look?” she asked. He shook his head.
“Looks like they haven’t digitized anything. I don’t think there was a computer in the place. It’s just decades and decades of paper records.”
“Maybe it’s a middle name?” Samantha asked. “I wouldn’t know the middle names of everyone I hung out with. Even the close ones.”
“So we need birth records,” Sam said. “Or just to make everyone tell us their middle names.”
“I’m tempted to try to break into the courthouse while they aren’t there,” Samantha said. “What do you think?”
“I think you’re right. See what else we can turn up.”
“Right,” Samantha said. “Anything we’re missing?”
“Unless angels are on the list of suspects,” Sam said, shaking his head. Samantha gave him a laugh, but neither of them were in that good a humor.
“How long do you think they’ve been like that?” Samantha asked.
“I bet it’s been since my vision,” Sam said. “Eighty years.”
She sighed.
“What a miserable place to live for your whole life.”
He nodded.
“Yeah.”
<><><>
They had a quarter moon to work by.
Samantha had parked Justine outside of the little town, not wanting to attract attention, should someone come back into town, or to risk waking Jimmy up. Sam discovered that the old man lived in a tiny apartment above the courthouse that Sam had originally written off as an attic. They would have to be quiet, but from the pitch the man had used to speak to them, Sam figured they were pretty safe assuming the man was mostly deaf.
Samantha put her hand on the doorknob and, with a flick of energy that Sam didn’t quite understand, unlocked it and pulled the rotting door open. Someone had made an attempt to paint the exposed wood on the building, but it had been years, and now two different colors of beige were visible alongside strips of raw wood.
Samantha clicked on a flashlight and let Sam lead the way back to the records room. He pulled out his own flashlight and they started going through filing cabinets.
“How much could they possibly have to record in a bitty town like this?” Samantha asked as she pulled open a drawer, marveling at the stacks and stacks of un-filed documents.
“Their offices are just like this,” Sam said, shaking his head. He picked up a piece of paper at random and held it out for her to see, lighting it with the flashlight. Samantha read it twice. Sam was more prepared, having seen how they lived and witnessed a couple of very small interactions as they transitioned from day to night.
“This is a record of a fight,” she said. He nodded. She read the paper again, taking it from him. “Over a cow.”
“Yup.”
“Because it ate the wrong grass.”
“Yup.”
“Sam, it wasn’t even a fistfight.”
“Nope.”
She stared around the room.
“They write down every time anyone disagrees with anyone?”
Sam paged down through the stack of loose papers where he had gotten the first, then moved on to the pile next to it.
“Sorted by who was fighting with who, from the looks of it,” he said. Samantha leaned her back against the door.
“Sam, I’m not reading all of this.”
This came as a shock. He jerked his head to look at her, and she shrugged weakly.
“This is the entire, miserable, combative story of their entire lives and…” she bent over to pick up a pile of very yellow paper from the floor, nodding, “yup, and of the lives of everyone before them.”
Sam sighed.
“This is what matters to them, I guess.”
“I’m not convinced it matters,” Samantha said. “This is just the only thing they can think of to do with their lives. This,” she said, holding up another paper, “an argument about whether the water tastes better in town or out of town, is the most important thing that happened to them.”
She read over the paper, feeling sadder and sadder.
“It wasn’t even a spirited argument. Jenny said it was better in town, and Hugh said it was better at his house. That’s it.”
She read another one.
“A cat scratched one of the children, and they were trying to figure out whose cat it was.”
“Sam, there aren’t any kids here,” Sam said. She lifted her head.
“Yeah. She told us that.”
“You think there’s a fertility issue, here?”
She gave a little mouth shrug.
“Could be. I bet they record how many cattle they have every year. That’s at least worth writing down.”
“This is just sad,” Sam said, picking up another page.
“Look for anything different,” Samantha said. “There might be things that are worth knowing, in this, but I’m not willing to bathe in their misery to find it.”
He nodded. It was still surprising to him, that she would turn down any stack of pages with that much information in them, but he couldn’t blame her. She went through a lot of really dry stuff in the interest of knowing things, but this was depressing. Even with the ability to take the stacks across the boundary to the paradise plane, where she could take her time to read them all, it just wasn’t worth it.
Samantha started going through drawers, and Sam eliminated pile after pile of loose pages.
“I’ve got some economic records here,” Samantha said. Sam came to join her, taking a folder of documents from behind the one she was reading.
“Wills and property transfers,” Sam said. “Basically the same thing. The land goes from one person to the next when the previous person dies.” He sat the pages out on the floor in front of him, tracking names. “The lots have been getting bigger and bigger.”
“More than one farm left to the same people?” Samantha asked. Sam nodded.
“Yeah. Jimmy and his wife have inherited three farms,” he said, then shook his head. “No, now Jimmy owns all of them by himself. His wife died eight years ago.”
“So Ellie isn’t his wife,” Samantha said.
“Better than if she were,” Sam said. She silently agreed.
“So is someone amassing power?” she asked. “Is this a play of some kind?”
He kept sorting.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so…”
She waited, watching him and not getting in the way. About ten minutes later, it was done.
“No. I don’t think this is about power.”
She nodded at him as he held it up.
“That’s a map of the town dying, isn’t it?”
The trees went the wrong way, in ever-decreasing populations, crossing over from time to time, but mostly reflecting the children marrying each other. He hadn’t found any outsiders on the documents; just extinct surname after extinct surname.
“No middle names, though?” Samantha asked.
“No.”
“Need birth records,” she said, returning to the cabinet.
She handed him another folder.
“That looks like the values of the holdings. See if the cattle populations are at least stable.”
“I wouldn’t expect them to be,” Sam said. She spiked interest at him without turning, and he continued. “I mean, cows are work, aren’t they? If you inherited your parents’ land, and your wife’s parents’ land, would you keep all of the cows? Or would you sell them and eat them?”
“Assuming they were worth selling or eating,” Samantha said. He didn’t argue. The size of the holdings seemed to step down from generation to generation, without any clear reason why.
“And if what’s going on has been progressive,” Sam said. She nodded.
“No telling. How many kids did they normally have?”
He went back to the estate documents.
“In the fifties and sixties, two or three. In the seventies and eighties, one or two…” He held up the last stack. “And Ben and Katie are the last two. She’s in her thirties, it looks like.”
“Really?” Samantha asked. “I would have guessed older.”
Sam nodded. He would have, too.
“So it could be a fertility thing,” Sam said.
“Or it could just be like she said. They lost interest,” Samantha answered. She grunted. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”
She handed him another folder and he looked at it. It was the birth records she had been looking for. He glanced up, and she came to sit next to him.
“Ashley,” she said. He nodded, then pulled out the certificates.
They were hand-written on heavy paper, the product of the same hand, most of them, steady and elegant.
“I bet that was Ellie,” Sam said. Samantha nodded, watching the beautiful writing go by, page after page.
“There’s no Ashley,” Samantha said. “None of them.”
“Then who are we here for?” Sam asked. Samantha shook her head.
“I don’t care, if you don’t. I’m going to find what’s doing this to these people and squash it.”
Sam nodded, then frowned. His focus had drawn in too tight, and he hadn’t noticed that Jimmy had stopped snoring. The courthouse was too dark for him to see where the old man was, but he should have been able to hear him. He stood, focusing.
Had he just died?
The door flew open, and Jimmy stood in the hallway, looking a little unsteady on his feet, but holding a rifle pointed at Sam.
“What are you doing in here?” the man asked. Sam looked at Samantha, who stood with her hands raised.
“Eloi Anadidd’na Anu’dd,” she said. My name is Hello, Friend. The old man didn’t wiggle. Sam had seen demons fly into a rage at the sound of angeltongue, and disappear altogether when Samantha introduced herself in it.
“Talking gibberish,” he said. “I have plenty of space to bury a couple of outsiders, if I have to. Get out.”
“Who is Ashley?” Sam asked, keeping his hands up and in front of him, trying not to look any more intimidating than he had to, fully a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than Jimmy.
“Eh?” Jimmy asked. “You don’t belong here. I don’t want you here.”
“We want to help,” Samantha said. “There’s something wrong here.”
He swung the gun to point it at her, and Sam resisted the urge to step back in front of it. Samantha mentally scolded him. She respected his desire to protect her, but his life was worth just as much as hers, and neither of them had any defense against a human with a gun, other than to counter-attack. And neither of them wanted to do that.
“There’s nothing wrong with us,” he said, his voice rising to a yell. “You kids always saying there’s something wrong.”
“There is something wrong,” Samantha said. “Everything is dying. You can see that.”
“What are you doing here?” he yelped again, his voice rising. “You broke in.”
“We’re trying to understand,” Samantha said.
“Out,” Jimmy said, taking a few steps down the hallway and motioning with the end of the rifle. “Now.”
Samantha looked at Sam. He was evaluating just taking the gun - there had been opportunities - but Samantha didn’t want to scare Jimmy. Maybe they could get him to tell them something useful. He felt the grain of hope and he rolled his eyes. Fine. He would let the tiny old man march them out of the courthouse, but it was going to leave a bruise on his pride. Samantha sent him a tiny mental jab. His pride would be just fine.
They walked quietly out into the hallway and into the foyer, but when Sam turned towards the front door, Jimmy barked.
“Forward.”
Sam looked at Samantha, and she sent him a mental confused thought mixed with resignation and curiosity. What was it going to hurt? He agreed, begrudgingly, and kept walking towards the far wall. At the wall, Jimmy pulled at a light fixture and the panel slid sideways. Samantha looked over at Sam with her head tilted to the side, and he widened his eyes at her. No, he hadn’t evaluated the inside space against the outside space. Why hadn’t she?
“Move,” Jimmy ordered. Sam went first down a stairway that was barely as wide as his shoulders and entered a short root cellar lined in rock. Jimmy stood in the doorway for a moment where Sam couldn’t read his face, then left, going back up the stairs and sliding the panel closed again, leaving them stooped over in perfect darkness.
“Can you get out?” Samantha whispered. Sam leapt out of his mind easily, following the shuffling noise as Jimmy went back upstairs. He boggled.
“The coot just went back to bed.”
Samantha laughed under her breath.
“I can open that door and get us out of here any time we want, but I say we ride it out. Maybe he’ll clue us in by accident. Sam sighed.
“The bed at the hotel was so much nicer,” he said. “What if he’s in contact with a demon?”
Samantha shrugged.
“Then he’s got two tigers by the tail,” she said. Sam grinned at the darkness.
“You and it?”
“And I’m the big one,” she said. He felt her sit, then the disgruntled reaction as her butt got wet.
“Serves you right,” he said, sitting down beside her.
“Call Simon,” she said.
“Can’t do that,” Sam said.
“Is that pride or pragmatism?” she asked. It was a little of both. Simon had dumped them pretty hard, and Sam didn’t want to ask for help.
“You want to call Kerk instead?” she asked. He resented that even more, and he felt the subdued amusement from her at his revulsion.
“Call Simon,” she said again.
