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    Phantoms in the Smoke: Tales from the Eastern Shore, #5
    Phantoms in the Smoke: Tales from the Eastern Shore, #5
    Phantoms in the Smoke: Tales from the Eastern Shore, #5
    Ebook106 pages1 hour

    Phantoms in the Smoke: Tales from the Eastern Shore, #5

    By Warren Adams-Ockrassa

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    About this ebook

    For as long as she can remember, eleven-year-old Addy Wilder has been seeing visions of the past and future. Usually they're harmless, and she's even managed to make a few friends among the phantoms she sees in the smoke. To her, they're just a regular part of life, and nothing to be concerned about.

    Lately, though, her mind has been occupied by something better: She has a brand-new, official, for-real boyfriend, and a Halloween dance to attend with him, and they'll get their costumes sorted out just as soon as they're able to stop kissing.

    All is right in Addy's world … until the Sunday morning when she sees something that frightens her to her core: A vision of someone she cares deeply about, laid out in a casket, dead by an unknown circumstance.

    Now, Addy has only a few days to discover what to do about her latest vision and prevent that death. Even worse, she knows that if she fails, everything she's ever known and loved will die, as well.

    This free and stand-alone story serves as an introduction to Peed's Vale for those who have not visited before, and yields a good cross-section of Burlingham and its citizens. Come and explore Brooker Street, Burlingham Contiguous School, and the farmland-patchworked valley they rest in. Come and discover the customs and morés of a town from another time, in the universe next door, where life isn't as simple as it seems, and the people are unlike any you've known

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWarren Adams-Ockrassa
    Release dateSep 23, 2017
    ISBN9781386563587
    Phantoms in the Smoke: Tales from the Eastern Shore, #5

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      Book preview

      Phantoms in the Smoke - Warren Adams-Ockrassa

      Warp

      The firelight flickered amid the trees, making fitful silhouettes of the dozen figures huddled around in a tight circle in the late October Friday evening, casting their long, uneasy shadows over the semicircle of tents that lay beyond. The air was crisp but not frigid, and the temperature was not the reason the kids were gathered so close to the mellow crackle with its sleepy-cat eyes of coals. Their faces were cast in tones of gold and orange and crimson, and their eyes were bright and wide, and breaths were held suspended in chests as young hearts fluttered fast in slim bodies; shoulders wriggled as spines tingled with delicious thrill. Jensen Haakon was telling a story, and he had a flair for it. This was one of his better ones, and most of the kids here tonight hadn’t heard it before.

      "…It was too dark for anyone to see, but everyone could hear the little boy crying, so they went and got flashlights and ropes and a ladder and looked … but the well was empty. ‘It must be the wind,’ said Ruby Jorgensen, but then Becky Forster said it wasn’t windy. And she was right; it wasn’t. The night was calm and quiet, just like tonight. And Ruby said, ‘Then it must’ve been a cat.’ And that made everyone feel better, because no one wanted to think they’d actually heard a voice and crying, coming from that old well.

      "But just as they turned to go, they heard the voice again: ‘Please, help me … I can’t get out…’

      "So they went and looked again, and Frankie Pearce even climbed down into the well. It was empty, except for the water in the bottom, and that was still and clear and everyone could see there was no one in it. But Frankie saw some letters scratched on the wall, just above the water: JW. And numbers, too: 1917-1925.

      "And then, when they all went up to the farmhouse and got Mister Peed out of bed and told him about the little boy in the well and what was scratched into its bricks, he turned pale, and he looked around at them, and he said, ‘Jeb Winslow was eight years old when fell down that well one night. Fifty years ago, in 1925. He fell in … and he drowned there.’

      And then they all heard the voice again, even Mister Peed: ‘Please … help me … please…’ Jensen made his voice crack into a sob, just like poor Jeb Winslow must’ve sounded like, and another frisson of goosebumps ran around the little circle. "And then they heard splashing, and a kind of bubbling sound … and then nothing else.

      "The next day, Mister Peed filled in the well.

      But sometimes, when the moon is full and the wind is calm, when the pumpkins are in and the Jack-O-Lanterns are grinning all gold and flickering, when the leaves are rustling on the ground and the candied apples are cooling on the windowsill … sometimes, on nights just like this … sometimes the dogs won’t leave their beds and the cows won’t cud … and if you listen really close on those quiet nights, sometimes you can still hear crying, the crying of a little boy who fell into a well fifty years ago, and never got out.

      There was a long silence, the silence of a dozen kids hoping no one did anything to break the silence, including — most especially, because these things seem funny at the time to certain moderately-twisted or even sprained minds, but do a real disservice to the storyteller — shouting BOO.

      No one did.

      A collective held breath was let out.

      It didn’t matter if the story was true or not. It didn’t matter if the kids named in the story were actually there on that night by the well or not. It didn’t even matter if a boy really drowned in the well or not, fifty years ago. For a moment, for just a moment, the ancient reptile hindbrain was on high alert in every boy and girl there; the veil between the hard-facts world of earth and sky and forest, and the realm of dreams and phantoms and visions, was thin enough to be peered through; and shivers and raised hackles made their rounds and were relished and cherished. For a moment, for just a moment, everyone there believed.

      Everyone, that is, except Jensen, whose story it was; and Addy Wilder, who didn’t have to believe.

      Jeez, that was a great story, Jense, said MeriLee Brenlow, the troop leader. Bush Club rules were that until you were at least ten years old, you couldn’t be in an overnight troop, and that all overnight troops had to have a leader who was at least fifteen. MeriLee was thus the oldest person present; Jensen was the youngest. Does anyone else have a story? Bailey Palmer held up his hand. Go on, said MeriLee.

      I, uh, well, my dad was talking to my moms one night about something he saw once when him and some of his friends were out in a troop, when they were kids like us. They were looking at the stars, and then they all noticed that one of them was moving…

      Addy tuned it out; she’d heard Bailey’s story before. She wasn’t sure about flying saucers, or Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster — though any of those things could seem possible on a night like this, under the stars, amid the trees, by Halter Lake — but she figured if UFO aliens really were coming to visit, they’d want to land someplace a little more interesting than Burlingham. But Bailey was a nice enough boy, and she didn’t think he was making it up. Maybe his dad really had seen something one night, or maybe he’d been confused by something he saw. It didn’t really matter, in the end, whether it was true or not, just like it didn’t matter with Jense’s story. It was a Bush Club overnight troop (one of the last of the season), it was a week before Halloween, and it was just the right time to be telling these kinds of tales — or at least hearing them, and maybe believing them a little, for a little while.

      She thought of Jensen’s story, and Tanglehollow Tree. Tanglehollow Tree was the skeleton of a cypress, its wood blackened now and hard as iron, its limbs bare of leaves all year round, its gathered-curtain trunk still holding secure against the shore of Halter. It had died around the time Jeb Winslow did (according to Jense), but would have died much sooner if the townsfolk had a practical way to get to it, chop it down, and clear it away. But it had grown with half its mass obtruding into the lake, and on the shoreward side the undergrowth was all cattails and duckweed in soft, clinging mud. Tanglehollow’s roots, below the lake’s surface, were a skein of twisted forks, knuckles, and fingers, knotting back and forth under the surface, plunging into the mud, and it was on the shore by the tree that Addy had met Ezekiel, Abraham, and Liesl. They were like herself and her friends in many respects: They knew the shore and its inlets and coves; they knew the forest and its hollows and stumps; they knew Brooker and the old schoolhouse and the new old schoolhouse, now the library. But their memories of it all ended in 1883 and she could see through them, because they had died in the foundation of Tanglehollow Tree in that year, victims of woolen swimsuits and gnarled roots, the reason that the Tiger Sharks, even now, practiced and swam nude.

      Addy knew the story of Zeke, how his suit had snagged in the roots, and how Abe and Liesl had dived in to save him, only to find themselves caught as well. She knew the story from her history classes at BCS, and from the dead youths themselves; they talked to her about it. They liked to talk about the lives they’d led, and they liked it when Addy told them about life now, nearly a century after

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