Discontinuum

By K.W. Moak

SCIENCE WRITER EDWARD MACDOWELL HAS NEVER HAD ANY INTEREST IN THE SUPERNATURAL.
As an open-minded skeptic, he assumes that all extraordinary events, no matter how baffling, can be explained rationally, given enough information. When a strange, hallucinatory encounter prompts him to investigate a haunting, he does so convinced the alleged ghost is at most nothing more than a rare optical phenomenon. But what he discovers will shatter that conviction, overturn all his assumptions about reality, and ultimately send him off on a desperate journey to- and beyond- the furthest reaches of our Universe. Before it is done, Edward and the woman he loves find themselves crossing unimagined dimensional barriers into bizarre other realms of existence while fighting for their very lives against an ancient, inhuman evil. The final confrontation will present them with a challenge no Humans have ever met, and lead them to a goal none have ever reached.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450288828

K.W. Moak

K.W.Moak writes on an antiquated computer, grows all his own vegetables, and makes pretty darn good cheese. A Season of Shadows is his second published novel; he is also the author of Discontinuum.

Book preview

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter One

I’ve never cared much for ghost stories, and this isn’t one (although it does have a ghost). I’m not particularly fond of rip-snorting adventure yarns, fantasy, or science fiction either: give me a good biography of Tom Edison or a stick-to-the-ribs history of chemical engineering any day. Unfortunately my reading preferences don’t alter the facts: what I’ve decided to relate includes a lot of adventure (If that’s what you want to call experiences heavy on confusion, pain, and oh-damn-I-can’t-handle-this! fear), locales fantastic enough to send Tolkien running for Travelers’ Aid, and science so aggressively weird it wouldn’t pass Doctor Who’s fact-checkers. I’d like to make this a simple, straightforward account of events that changed my life, but that’s not in the cards. If I want to tell what happened, I can’t very well edit the outrageous parts; not when outrageous applies to pretty much every moment of it. So, with due apologies to those who share my low opinion of escapist literature, I’m just going to tell the truth. Grit my teeth, accept that it’s a fantastic, science-fictional adventure. (And yeah, much as I hate to admit it, a ghost story.)

Having got that out of the way, now I don’t know where to start. There’s a whole lot of back-history involved, most of which happened long before I got pulled in. And while somebody reading over my shoulder just pointed out (sensibly) that, Any tale, Edward, is best begun at the beginning, I’m damned if I know just when that beginning was, or is. (Uh-oh. I’m already waffling on verb tenses. Not a good sign.)

One crucial event took place about three hundred years ago. But it wouldn’t have, if something unfortunate hadn’t happened, ages before that. Since my knowledge of the first is purely second-hand, however; and of the second only theoretical, I might as well pass over them for now. From my point of view, the logical place to begin is by telling how I came to meet Doctor Julius Haffer.

Well no, it isn’t. I’ve already jumped the gun. Before I tell you about Jules, I guess I’d better introduce myself.

My name is Edward MacDowell; age (as I write this) thirty-six. I was born and raised in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the only child of two normal middle-class parents who have nothing much else to do with this story. I was a normal, middle-class kid, too; in high school the dopers and jocks may have called me a nerd (behind my back; I was scrappy), but I didn’t wear glasses, nor- God forbid- a pocket-protector. Though I did embarrassingly well in science, I balanced that with work on the school newspaper, and track in my senior year. After I graduated from college (Penn State: BA in Earth sciences, minor in journalism), I decided to take the first real risk of my life, and try to make a living- for a few years at least- as a freelance science writer. For reasons that had as much to do with a certain commitment-ready lady then beginning postgraduate work at Harvard, as with the intellectual climate in Massachusetts, I moved to Boston. Unfortunately said intellectual climate did appeal to her, more than expanding on a senior-year romance: she dumped me within a week of my arrival. I was ashamed to slink home, and since Boston is a dazzling three-ring-circus compared to Harrisburg, it seemed romantically appropriate to try toughing it out alone for a while. After about three months hand-to-mouth, selling an occasional unscientific movie or record review to various twenty-bucks-is-all-we-can-spare street-papers, I got a break. The Globe bought a filler article on Bay State flood-control projects past and present: it generated a few approving letters, so they asked for more. To my great surprise (and the amazement of friends and family), freelancing actually began to pay the bills. I’ve been doing it with moderate success ever since.

Which explains how I came to meet Jules. Like all stringers, enterprising science pundits go where the stories are. For any kind of -ology, -ics, or -istry that boils down to conferences, and Boston has scads of them. When the market’s good I try to attend at least one a week, preferably one devoted to something just a little over the average reader’s informational horizon. Lunar geology fits the bill, and so it was, about seven years ago, that I found myself in my shabby best suit, tactfully hobnobbing with argumentative MIT grad students, intense NASA geologists, and a few condescending professors emeritus gathered to discuss Unresolved Problems of Lunar Origin.

Sometimes you strike out. The Moon’s history is a fascinating subject, but that particular conference chased it off into speculative orbital mathematics so rarified some of the presenters just showed slides of blackboard equations, and let them speak for themselves. There was nothing for me except refreshments after the first session (I wasn’t sure I’d stay for the next), and the slim possibility of striking up an acquaintance with someone who could translate. As I mingled, sipping wine and eating more than my share of uninspired canapés, I noticed a potential candidate lurking apart from his fellows. A tall, skinny, semi-bearded longhair maybe ten years my senior, dressed as casually as any of the lesser grad students- worse than most. But he wore a yellow name tag reserved for professional talent.

Moving in like an insurance salesman scenting insecurity I noticed, first that he wasn’t just skinny, he was etiolated, with all his joints just a little too far apart; second that his clothes weren’t just casual, they were cheap; third the name on his tag. Dr. Julius Haffer PhD, Astrophysics. The name didn’t ring a bell, which was no surprise; there are more astrophysicists at large than you might expect, and a lot of them had come out of the woodwork for that conference. I assumed he was an academic benchwarmer from the bush leagues. Just as well: I might have hesitated to strike up a conversation if the name tag had done him justice. (It wasn’t big enough to display more than one degree and specialty.)

Getting information from an academic benchwarmer, bush league or otherwise, is easy; they’ve all got opinions coming out the ears. I introduced myself, and without further preliminaries asked him which lunar theory he favored: near-miss capture or impact-rebound.

Jules said, They’re both impossible. This- waving a hand inclusively, is all bullshit. We should be discussing how the damned thing was parked in orbit.

Okay. I had a sudden urge to be elsewhere, in a crackpot-free zone. Now the cheap clothes, shaggy hair, and dearth of chatty colleagues around him made sense: he was obviously a crank. Despite conference-planners’ best efforts, they do sneak in, often on the strength of real accomplishments in some field unrelated to the misunderstood one that brings out their loopy side. Julius Haffer… now that I thought about it, the name did seem to ring a faint bell, in a different context. Nothing to do with the moon, or astronomy… Particle physics! Surely it was an American, Dr. J. Haffer who had recently published an analysis of sub-quark structure in one of the European journals, which concluded that the long-sought Higgs Boson was a pipedream. The supercollider crowd had all but burned him in effigy; I remembered the furor, and remembered that no one had been able to fault his equations.

Distracted by that unlikely connection, I waited too long to make my escape. Before I could say Wups! Gotta run, the MC called us to order, and bid us settle down for a stirring panel discussion on statistical critiques of ALSEP methodology.

This will be painful, Jules declared. You’re a journalist, right? (I didn’t have a press-card: Jules can be eerily perceptive.) Come on; I’ll buy you a cup of coffee and explain the Vasin-Shcherbakov theory.

I let him steer me out, partly because the panel discussion would be painful, partly because I’m a sucker for unfamiliar hyphenated Russian theories, but mostly because he might be the rascal who’d suggested that the Emperor- the Standard Model of particle physics- wasn’t fully dressed. I’d suspected from time to time that the Higgs Boson was indeed a pipedream, and given that my prejudices are just as compelling as anyone else’s, was willing to put up with a crank for a while, in the interest of furthering them.

A while turned out to be two hours in the hotel coffee shop. I never even got around to asking if he was the infamous J. Haffer (he is); I was too busy having all my ideas about the moon turned upside-down. Jules didn’t try to convince me it’s a giant spaceship parked in orbit around Earth eons ago, just did as he promised; explained the theory to that effect. I still didn’t believe it, but I came away from our meeting sure of one thing: Jules was no crank. On the contrary, he was that rarest of birds: a well-informed, open-minded scientist who appreciates the true value of consensus in science. That is, not quite zilch, but close.

I also came away with his card- Dr. Julius Haffer, Consultant- and an invitation to have lunch in the near future.

So that’s how we met. I phoned him to confirm the lunch offer next day, after doing a quick biographic search. Jules somehow manages to keep an improbably low profile on the Internet, but I’m an expert surfer, and found enough to convince me I’d stumbled across a source well worth cultivating. Multiple doctorates (four, at last count) aside, he’d evidently done consulting for Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, NASA, Bell Labs, and for all I could tell to the contrary, Disney World. He’d published quite a few abstruse papers; most (not all) relating to physics. He’d locked horns with any number of pompous science VIPs, and was rumored to have once given James Randi the finger.

I already had a crass appreciation of him as a likely Quotable before we met for lunch; by the time we finished I thought we might actually become friends. We did, but surprisingly, Jules never panned out as a source. He’s too far ahead of his time in all the fields that interest him, too dismissive of most others, and he’s offended so many Great Authorities that science editors shy away from his name.

On the other hand, he has more obscure information in his head than Wikipedia and the New York Times morgue put together: when all other sources fail, I can always rely on him to supply me with the minutiae of arcane disciplines. Actually, he does it without being asked: Jules likes to talk, and since I’m a professional listener, I’ve spent many hours being lectured on the probable highlights of Twenty-Second Century science.

And that finally brings me to the point at which this story begins. I had no idea at the time, but it was one of our freewheeling conversations that started it all. I’d known Jules long enough by then to take his iconoclastic pronouncements with a grain of salt. Like old Charles Fort (whom I’d always scorned as a pariah, until bullied into reading The Book Of The Damned), Jules loves to argue in favor of the craziest concepts not because he believes them, but because they’re intrinsically no crazier than those everyone is expected to believe. Having tumbled to that, I was less inclined to always play the awestruck Watson to Jules’ Holmes: I began looking for lunatic-fringe theories I could toss into the mix. Sometimes it even worked: Jules would feel obliged to argue against whatever wacky concepts I professed to accept, and end up contradicting some equally wacky concept he’d recently gone to great lengths supporting. (If that sounds sophomoric, well, maybe I do have a slight touch of nerdiness.)

The relevant conversation took place in a pizzeria near MIT. Jules and I had both happened to attend an open lecture on carbon nanotubes, ran into each other, and decided to swap opinions over dinner. For once we were just about equally informed on a topic; Jules didn’t have much scope to lecture me. I could see he was fretful about that, so after our second or third beers I gave him a chance to wax authoritative, by sharing the latest silly theory I’d come across: that ghosts were holograms.

Actually, it didn’t seem all that silly to me. As I recall, the author was an optical physicist, who proposed a reasonably believable mechanism whereby a person’s infrared image might be captured fortuitously by surrounding objects, and thereafter projected as a hologram whenever conditions were right. Of course the logic couldn’t stand close inspection: if some common substances could record dim infrared images without benefit of lenses and processing, if those images were, for reasons unclear, holographic, and if polarized moonlight or temperature shifts ever did project those images, there’d be spooky figures floating around all the time, and only a tiny fraction of them would relate to long-ago murders or injustices. It was definitely a Gee, what if… hypothesis; I doubted even Jules would leap to its defense, but he does have a thing for holograms, and I thought the idea of naturally-occurring ones might raise his spirits.

It did, for a while. He heard me out, scowled at my gullibility, and proceeded to explain pretty much what I noted in the last paragraph, only in considerably more detail. But then he turned moody.

The average so-called scientist today is a creature of deep, but brittle faith, he grumbled eloquently. "Like a low-level priest who clings to his church’s doctrine without knowing or caring a damn thing about theology. Reductionism’s become a cult, and the modern scientist’s real job is to interpret nature according to holy writ. Hell, Ed, the traditional explanation for ghosts satisfies Occam’s Razor a damn sight better than does some pseudotechnical babble about improbable holograms, but your nitwit optician couldn’t bring himself to consider it, because it’s not part of received dogma. He obviously wasn’t interested in facts; probably didn’t even bother researching the available data."

I was slightly miffed: intellectual getting-of-the-goat works both ways. You’re the one who’s always saying preposterous assumptions should be challenged, I pointed out. And I think the author of that theory did pretty well at it. The poor guy isn’t a nitwit because he rejects the idea of disembodied spirits.

Why? What’s wrong with that idea? If you substitute ‘consciousness’, or ‘mind’, or ‘anomalously persistent synaptic waveforms’ for ‘spirit’ and clear away all the mystic flotsam that’s washed in from religion, what’s so preposterous about it?

I said, Well, for one thing, neither consciousness nor mind can be defined in terms of— But Jules wasn’t listening.

Ghosts, he went on, talking right over me, Are far more complex phenomena than any hologram could ever be. Many have a detectable electromagnetic signature, some have a degree of corporeality: they make an impression in a chair when they sit, for instance. And they interact with observers, often in a way that suggests muddled consciousness. How else can you explain the vast body of ghost-chasing lore? Just how does one reason with a hologram?

At that point I was lost, and more than a bit muddled myself. I had no idea that Jules held any opinion of ghosts one way or the other, much less had an apparently well-stocked mental reference shelf on them. I suspected he was pulling my leg; it seemed like a good time to change the subject.

Yeah, I can see what you mean. But what’s really interesting is the premise that a holographic image of any sort could be formed spontaneously, by—

That’s drivel, Jules advised dismissively, then went on without deigning to explain why. In all likelihood ghosts are people, Ed. People trapped in some alternate reality.

Just then the waitress came with our next round of beers, distracting Jules long enough for me to come up with a good rejoinder to that.

If they exist, Jules, they’re dead. Dead people aren’t conscious.

He drank, said, Mmhmm, and paused to wipe foam off his upper lip. Snagged the last slice of pizza. Then they can’t be dead, he got out around a mouthful of cheese. (I suspect Mr. and Mrs. Haffer were never able to drag their Little Prodigy away from his studies long enough to share a meal with them, much less learn basic manners.) "Proves my point. You can’t be dead and not dead at the same time in our universe; ergo, ghosts are people who, when in peril of life, somehow took themselves out of our universe, into… I don’t know what. A pocket of space, a loop of time. It’s probably a latent ability in many of us: the ultimate defense mechanism, you might say. Only it backfires: once they’re in, they can’t get out."

"They wouldn’t have anything to get out to. The idea is, somebody has to die to make a ghost: there’s a body. The ghostee didn’t just poof! disappear when they got stabbed or whatever."

‘Ghostee’? Not bad, Ed. Maybe some do go poof; there are a lot of inexplicable disappearances. But that’s only requisite if you accept the lamebrain assumption that we’re just chemical robots. We aren’t, obviously. Our bodies are nothing but aggregates of atoms- most of them common as dirt- held in an intricate colloidal structure by electric charge. Everything we are- composition, shape, function, thoughts, memories- comprises information, and all that information exists, basically, as a complex of charges. Take away the charge and all you’ve got is a lot of gas, some carbon, iron, alkali metals, and a few grams of trace elements. That’s your body. But take away the atoms, while retaining the pattern of charges, and you’d still exist, still be alive and at least marginally aware for as long as it took the pattern to decay. If you could somehow transfer that electronic self into a…mmm, static continuum, you might drift around the fringes of our dynamic continuum, still alive, for a long time. Centuries.

Just a psychic fly in amber. Doesn’t sound too appealing.

He took that seriously. No, I imagine it’s horrible. Unless they aren’t fully aware of their predicament- which they don’t seem to be. But horrible or not, you’d be safe. At least until some ghost-chaser convinced you to go away. They always do, you know: people make funny movies about ghost-busting, but it’s basically murder. Send the hapless ghost on its way, probably into oblivion. He made a shooing gesture.

I preferred the comic approach myself. Well, you gotta do something with them.

"Mm, I suppose a ghostee might agree with you. But it’s interesting to speculate what might happen if a ghost-chaser ever told one to stay, to come back to reality, instead of ‘moving on’ to a confabulated heaven. That could be the only way out. Or, if you got lucky, I suppose you might happen to drift by at the moment some child was being conceived, and impress your identity on its DNA; that could explain reincarnation… Which reminds me: I was reading a fascinating proposal for developing nucleic acid logic systems the other day. Arrange the molecules vertically on a substrate…" And with that he was off, happily lecturing me on the prospects for chemical supercomputers.

As I said, at the time I had no idea that screwball conversation was even worth remembering; much less that it would, in the not too distant future set off a train of events which included putting me through a reasonable facsimile of hell.

I didn’t exactly forget all about it overnight: it hung around in the back corners of my mind for a while, mostly because I couldn’t decide whether to file it away under jokes, lectures, or general Haffer weirdness (an inclusive category I’d created after Jules once showed me an elaborate graph of Red Sox batting averages somehow plotted on a Fibonacchi spiral). After a week or two, however, even desultory puzzlement faded. Maybe Jules really did believe in ghosts, but I didn’t, nor was I interested. And there matters stood for the better part of three years.

I certainly had no conscious memory of that exchange left two summers ago, when it came back to bite me. Life was pretty good that year: I’d sold three articles before Easter, then lucked into a brief, but profitable job as assistant background research advisor on a WGBH production. I’d bought a three-room condo almost within walking distance of the Public Gardens. I was dating, alternately, a stewardess and a medical student, both of whom professed a reassuring contempt for marriage. I owned a car that hadn’t yet gone into terminal decline, and my balance in savings finally had more digits than a cartoon character’s hand.

I wasn’t taking it easy, though, by any means. That spring I’d started work on a history of continental-drift theory; a more substantial article than I’d ever attempted. Journal-length and exhaustively researched, with an eye to impressing some editor at Scientific American. By August it was ready for final-draft revision, and I was ready for a break. Getting out of Boston for a week or so of the hottest weather seemed like a good idea, but following half my fellow Bostonians to the beach, mountains, or Lakes Region didn’t.

Well, coincidences happen. (Jules claims they don’t; that synchronicities are implicate conjunctions in the phenomenal syntax of eventuation. Whatever. In this case I think he may be right.) Just as I was about to give up on the idea of a vacation and plunge back into my heavily-annotated German edition of Alfred Wegener, I got a call from a casual friend who wanted a favor.

Chuck is a glorified PR man for Raytheon, whose job description includes befriending science writers. We get together about once every six months to talk about cutting-edge microwave technology, and invariably, minerals. He’s a passionate rockhound, and I’d scratched over a few mine dumps in my younger days, so of course he sees me as a potential convert to the hobby. I’m not, but his dogged attempts at proselytizing have put us on a somewhat better than professional standing. I knew, for instance, that he had a cottage (a mining camp in his words) somewhere up in New Hampshire, and that he made himself useful boosting Raytheon overseas, just so he could collect in remote corners of the world. I didn’t know the cottage was being sold, nor that he was packing to go talk sales and service of radar to the national airline of Wheretheheckisitstan.

I’ve wanted to unload the camp for some time, he explained. "Collecting isn’t any good around there any more: all the best mines are either posted or built over. And I’m getting a sweet price, because of the lake footage. It’s final first of the month. Thing is, I haven’t cleaned out the place. I don’t care about the furniture, but there are a couple of boxes of old Ruggles material in a closet I’d really hate to lose. I was going up next week, but then this trip came along- I can’t pass on it; that area is legendary for pegmatites. I just need somebody to drive up and rescue, I don’t know, maybe fifty, sixty pounds of specimens. And for some reason your name came to mind. I don’t know what you’re up to right now, but if you can, it would sure be a help."

Uhm, well… The prospect wasn’t instantly exciting. I knew fifty or sixty pounds of specimens probably meant two hundred pounds of dirty, if not radioactive rocks, and wasn’t too comfortable with the idea of removing things from a cottage I’d never seen, that was effectively owned now by someone I’d never met.

You’re welcome to stay as long as you want, up to the end of the month. And take anything you can use: there’s a good TV, some camping gear… Like I said, I was planning to go up one more time: the water’s turned on, gas heat, food in the pantry, there’s even a bottle of Scotch. All I want is those rocks, but no reason the rest should go to waste. And the buyer’s probably just going to toss everything.

Yeah, I guess I could do that. Where is it exactly?

Oldham. I can give you directions. It’s a beautiful area; if you like unspoiled, you’ll love Oldham. You have something to write on? Okay. The best way is to go up Ninety-three to Eighty-nine in Concord; take that as far as—

I jotted down the instructions, which were complex enough, after the interstates, to renew my misgivings.

Are you sure I can find this place?

Oh yeah, it’s not really that hard. The only turn you’re liable to miss is the one off Goose Pond Road down to my side of the lake; they logged up there last winter, and left that stretch looking like shit. Ruts everywhere. Watch for the mailboxes: if you keep straight you’ll end up in Witch Hollow. And the ghost’ll probably get you.

I wasn’t listening. I’d been looking down at the pad while he spoke, underlining 2nd left dirt- 4 mailboxes when movement, or a change in the light suddenly told me I wasn’t alone. I jerked my head up and had what was, at least for the next day or so, the weirdest experience of my life.

There was a blue man standing- not quite touching the floor- less than a yard in front of me. Translucent blue, slightly luminous, and just a bit fuzzy around the edges, but he was three-dimensional, and solid enough to occlude the wall behind him. Alarmingly detailed, too. He looked fierce: scrawny, dirty, bearded, unclothed except for coarse, tattered pants, and much-abused, wildly-incongruous everyday sneakers. His hair was matted; his nose was swollen with darker-blue inflammation; one of his bare shoulders was deformed. And worst of all, under the filth and injured nose he had my face.

I was too stunned to be sensibly frightened. Paralyzed is more like it, but the spectre wasn’t. It- he- seemed to be hopping mad: bounced up and down, flapping his scarecrow arms, then began jabbing a finger at the telephone, while nodding furiously. He was yelling, too; at least that’s how it looked, though I couldn’t hear a thing. Every time he pointed at the telephone his mouth opened wide: I’m no lip-reader, but the emphatic nods that accompanied it suggested he was bellowing Yes! Yes! Then, as he started to fade, he shook a fist at me and said something else; a whole sentence, with the last word repeated several times. It wasn’t yes, instead he appeared to be demonstrating how to moo like a cow.

The experience didn’t last nearly as long as it takes to describe; eight seconds at the most, but that was long enough for Chuck to notice.

Ed? You there?

Aah… Excuse me?

What’s the matter? I thought we’d been cut off.

No. I’m still here. I just… Uh…

Jeez, I didn’t mean to scare you.

Scare me? How?

’The ghost’ll get you’? He laughed. I didn’t. Ed, are you okay?

Uh, yeah. Fine. What ghost?

The one in Oldham, he said suspiciously.

Oh. I don’t know anything about that.

Obviously not. I just mentioned it. Are you sure you’re okay? You sound… Odd.

Sorry, just… I guess I drifted off.

Ah! Working in your head: you writers are always stirring the pot, aren’t you?

Yeah, basically. Tell me about the ghost.

Nothing to tell, really. Supposed to be a witch that was burned, or hung, or something back in colonial times, and now her ghost haunts the woods up in Witch Hollow. It’s mainly a teenage lovers’-lane legend, but you know how small towns are; ask anybody and they’ll swear it’s true.

That’s it?

What more do you want? I’ve been told if you go up there around the full of the moon you’re liable to see her wandering among the trees. Just a shimmery blue figure, he added in a bad Bela Lugosi accent.

Blue?

Hey, Chuck, I have to go. I just remembered—

Wait, let me tell you how to find the spare key. I want you to know I really appreciate this; there are a couple of pieces of gummite in those boxes that’ll knock your eyes out. Classic stuff. Okay, as you walk up to the door, you’ll see an old air compressor off to the right- it came from one of the mines in Gilsum; I hauled it up years ago. There’s a flange where the hose attached…

After finally getting rid of Chuck, I sat there for a long time, while that deferred sensible fear crept up on me. When a translucent blue wildman doppelganger suddenly appears and disappears in your living room you’ve either crossed over into the Twilight Zone, or you’re having hallucinations. All things considered, the second possibility was somewhat less alarming, but I couldn’t quite make myself believe in it. Any condition, psychological or organic, severe enough to generate vivid visual hallucinations usually creeps up on you: schizophrenia and brain lesions both take time to develop. I’d never had any symptoms of impending trouble, and didn’t feel disoriented or confused now. Just scared. Which meant, in all probability, that something, well… paranormal had just happened.

I’d always prided myself on being a reasonable skeptic: not a true disbeliever like the professional debunkers Jules loathes, but a sensible person with enough scientific savvy to know that extraordinary phenomena do occur, but are rarely inexplicable. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred they appear fantastic only because we lack necessary information. I was open-minded regarding the remaining one percent: maybe a handful of well-attested UFOs really were spaceships, maybe Mr. Bigfoot really was a relict Gigantopithecus hiding out in the wilds. After sparring amiably with Jules for about five years I had a better-than-average familiarity with fringe science; besides which, my recent focus on plate-tectonics pointed up the folly of dogmatic disbelief: Wegener was called a crank and worse when he proposed the idea of Pangaea.

Nonetheless, for me psychic phenomena were still beyond the pale. Apparition was the only word for my luminous blue visitor, and apparition was simply a euphemism for ghost, and ghosts were preposterous on the face of it. Nobody seriously—

If I’d been thinking out loud, I’d have cut off in mid-sentence. I suddenly recalled, for the first time, that long-ago piece of Haffer weirdness concerning ghosts. Not only recalled it; I remembered every word, as though it had taken place the day before. Eidetic memory isn’t extremely rare, but I’d never experienced it, and that added to my discomposure.

So there I was, grappling with two outrageous events; one impossible, the other just highly improbable. Could the day get any stranger? Well, yeah, it could. It already was, when I thought about it, because Chuck- damn his eyes- had added a bizarre synchronicity by mentioning another ghost- presumably not my wildman doppelganger- that just happened to be blue. Mentioned it at the very moment a blue apparition arrived to yell silently at me. Okay.

What are you supposed to do when reality goes haywire three different ways? I don’t know. What I finally did was get up, pour myself a drink, sit back down in a different chair, and indulge in some energetic rationalization. Chuck’s inadvertent contribution actually made it easier. With a little alcohol in my system I could use it to work out a comprehensible scenario that went something like this: I was tired, overworked, fretful about not taking a vacation. Part of me welcomed the chance to drive up to the puckerbrush; part of me didn’t. Dissonant feelings primed me to slip briefly into the sort of altered state that can easily include eidetic recall. Maybe it wouldn’t have, but when Chuck mentioned the word ghost, I suddenly free-associated myself back to that stupid conversation with Jules, and experienced a hypnagogic hallucination. I couldn’t remember Chuck saying the Oldham ghost was blue, at first, but he must have. Blue ghost, ghosts trapped in spacetime, me trapped in the city… naturally my runaway imagination would create an angry wildman with my face. It all made sense; maybe not perfect sense, but close enough. More than that, it demonstrated just how badly I did need a vacation.

I thought that pretty much settled it. Responsible skepticism triumphs again. And of course that was why I now found myself surprisingly eager to head for Oldham. I’d just caught the message my subconscious went to so much trouble sending. In fact, not only was I eager to go, I decided I might as well accept Chuck’s offer to let me stay a while. Some rustication would do me good; Boston in August makes everybody a little crazy… By way of proving me right, a passing truck chose that moment to tackle a monster pothole half a block away. Brief silence after the crash, then the driver began swearing with captivating expertise. And thus diverted, I dismissed ghostly encounters from further consideration.

At least I meant to. But several times that day I caught myself making odd faces at various reflective surfaces, idly shaping my mouth into moos that somehow weren’t quite what I recalled seeing.

I took off for the North Country next morning; early enough to avoid rush-hour traffic on I-93. Metro traffic, anyway; I caught the peak further north, between Methuen and Manchester, but made up for it on I-89. Chuck’s directions were good: I followed them off the interstates, along fifteen miles or so of a major state highway, then a minor one, finally a secondary paved road so unimportant it still had post-and-cable guardrails, and arrived in Oldham well before noon.

I wouldn’t call Oldham a one-horse town: I’d rate it as only the hindquarters, or maybe a couple of fetlocks. There’s a church, a town hall that looks like a church, a new brick police station/fire department building that would fit comfortably inside most 7-11s, and a country store with one gas pump and a back corner reserved for the post office. Not that it’s primitive: the store probably has a good selection of DVDs for rent, and most of the few houses visible from the center of town display the glossy paint, new roofs, and showy flowerbeds that betray the presence of wealthy flatlander retirees. Some don’t, of course; it has its share of run-down farms, trailers, and battered 4WD pickups with plows 4 SALE BO, but you have to look a little harder for them. Western New Hampshire has a lot of hamlets just like it; tucked away between mountains that aren’t quite high enough for profitable ski-slopes, in flood-prone valleys not quite wide enough to support profitable farms. Most tourists don’t even know they exist: the townies drive long distances to work and school in places like Keene, Claremont, and Lebanon, but only have to put up with rockhounds, tax assessors, and much-hated let’s-build-our-hideous-splitlevel-second-home-here urbanites, mostly during the summer.

It’s beautiful country out that way, but unspoiled is a relative term. Halfway up Wild Goose Pond Road en route to Chuck’s cabin I came to the logging operation he’d mentioned, and believe me, those yahoos had spoiled everything with a vengeance. It wasn’t a selective-cut: they’d taken pine and hardwood indiscriminately, leaving nothing larger than saplings, and broken most of those in the process. A hundred acres or more of forest had been reduced to splinters and brushpiles, with skidder tracks gouged back and forth over those. Worse, pink-taped boundary stakes and a couple of low-end prefab houses already dropped on the debris proved that some fastbuck developer was hot on their heels. The turnoff to Chuck’s road was indeed all but obliterated; if I hadn’t been looking hard, I’d have missed it.

A quarter-mile in I reentered healthy woods, their perimeter liberally supplied with bright orange POSTED NO TRESPASSING signs that betokened a rural feud in the making. Another quarter-mile took me past even the pervasive scent of sawdust, and the illusion of a maintained road. It split into several narrow, rutted lanes leading to secluded cottages. Chuck’s last name was painted on a board pointing down one, above a realtor’s sign with SOLD tacked across it.

Wild Goose Pond really had wild geese in it; a half-dozen took flight as I drove up. The pond was just large enough for them to gain altitude to clear the steep slopes around it, without VTOL capability. It was a pretty little glacial tarn; maybe ten acres of what looked like deep water, with not very many more than ten cottages tucked unobtrusively on its wooded shoreline. Chuck’s was typical: an oldtimer built probably in the ’Thirties, maybe a decade before that. It had been upgraded sporadically over the years, but was still fairly minimal, and hadn’t seen a lot of maintenance during Chuck’s tenure. (He probably makes more in a bad month than I do in a good year, but he’s got kids in college, and advanced collectors don’t bat an eye at thousand-dollar specimens, so I wouldn’t hold it against him.)

I won’t bother describing the place in detail. Think of a smallish barn, with seven-foot varnished pine partitions making three alcoves on either side of the haymow, and you’ve got the idea. Minimal. There wasn’t much furniture: beds and unmatched chests of drawers in three of the alcoves, a table, chairs, lamps, and the good TV (it had seen a lot of sitcoms come and go). There was a framed, yellowish print of two hunters surprised by a moose on one wall (I kind of wish I’d taken that), and old topo maps on another, all dotted with red and green pins (presumably relating to the accessibility of mines). In the smallest alcove I found the rocks; no more than a hundred pounds of them, some reasonably collectible. In the tiny kitchen I found a refrigerator running, with nothing but ice inside, and in the pantry I found canned goods and the scotch. (A full bottle of Glenfiddich, actually. I wish I’d taken that too.)

So there I was. Far from the madding crowd at about one o’clock of a beautiful afternoon, alone beside a scenic lake at the very acme of summer. Just then one of my neighbors howled by on what sounded like an aquatic motorcycle, but I took it in stride. I filled an unconscionably large glass with Glenfiddich, inventoried the cans and decided beef stew would be good for supper, then went down to the shore and communed with nature. Nice. Even the noisy boat had stopped circling while the cap’n and his female passenger got naughty out in the lake. Air so still I could hear her giggles and the pop of beertabs.

By one-fifteen I was tempted to yell across and ask what kind of mosquito repellant they used. I was wearing a whole lot more than both of them together, and I’d already lost a pint of blood. By one-thirty I’d found a can of DEET spray in the bathroom, and poured another drink. Maybe the can had been sitting too long: I finished that glass on Chuck’s screened porch.

By three I’d looked for reading matter. A coming-apart copy of New Hampshire Mines And Minerals didn’t appeal, neither did any of Perry Mason’s cases. I decided I probably shouldn’t have embraced rustication to the extent of leaving my laptop and Alfred Wegener at home.

Finally I went for a long walk. The mosquitoes weren’t as bad away from water, and strenuous exercise put me in a considerably better frame of mind. By the time I got back it was late enough to eat my canned stew and ponder boredom. The strange thing was, I don’t usually bore easily, at least not like I had that afternoon. Ordinarily I’d have found something engagingly mindless- like counting mosquitoes I killed- to occupy me until something important came along. Not that anything important would; certainly not anything I was anticipating. If there was something important looming, of course I’d be antsy, and that might feel like boredom on a lazy do-nothing afternoon when you were waiting for—

For the moon to rise.

That little mental addendum didn’t make me happy. Not a bit. It slipped out of my subconscious like an unopened bill from last month’s junk-mail. It was completely unexpected. It was kind of creepy. And it was true.

I couldn’t deny it. All that day, rushing up the highway, fretting about mosquitoes and the lack of reading matter, I’d been expressing an impatience I didn’t recognize. But now that the inner me had put it in so many words, it was obvious. I was counting down the hours ’till moonrise.

At first that made no sense at all. I knew instantly that it related somehow to my weird experience the day before; that it had to be another symptom of what looked now like impending psychosis. Irrational obsession… Not good. Alarmingly not good. People who spend an afternoon irritably pounding scotch while waiting for the moon to come up, without even realizing it, are, pretty much by definition, lunatics. Especially when their lunar compulsion has no discernable source- and mine didn’t. Or did it? Until that moment I had ignored- but obviously not forgotten- one meaningless thing Chuck said: the Oldham ghost appeared around the full of the moon.

Which, of course, tied everything together. All the weirdness, incipient dementia, whatever I wanted to call it, came back to Chuck’s stupid ghost story. Not even a ghost story; just a throwaway bit of local color, but for some unimaginable reason it had a profoundly bad effect on me.

I seriously considered leaving right then; bolting for home and the Massachusetts mental-health care system. I know exactly why I didn’t. I was sitting there, damn near hyperventilating with fear of an imminent breakdown, when I suddenly realized something. The moon was going to be full either that night or the next. I happened to know because Gloria, my stewardess friend, was flying both nights, and had mentioned it.

Now wait a minute. That was just one coincidence too many: it injected a much-needed dose of absurdity. The phase of the moon had absolutely nothing to do with Chuck selling his cabin, needing somebody to get his rocks, with the timing of his business trip, or with my wanting to get out of the city. Even if he’d known it was nearly full, and used that to embellish his ghost story, he sure as hell wouldn’t have planned around it. No more than I could possibly have planned around it before he called.

Which meant… What? Probably what I already knew: I needed a break. Chuck had creeped me out unexpectedly, and all the rest followed. I wasn’t losing my mind; I’d just let stress and an abnormally receptive imagination run riot. The more I thought about it, the more reassuringly silly it all seemed. Spooky coincidence? You get one out of twenty-eight chances at a full moon every month; not exactly casino odds, and I wasn’t even sure which night it was: maybe Gloria got it wrong.

I finished the pan of stew, made a cup of instant coffee, and reflected on how easily things get blown out of proportion. No wonder otherwise normal people go around believing they’ve been abducted by nasty little aliens, or have memories of life in Atlantis. In all likelihood most of those delusions could be traced back to one unnerving, transient mini-fugue with attached coincidences such as mine. How many lifelong obsessions could be avoided if people just looked under the bed and proved there wasn’t a monster hiding there?

I was taking my coffee on the porch. It was early evening by then, less than an hour before dusk. Still fully light, though the sun had gone below the surrounding hills. To the east I noticed a sliver of moon peeking over a lower ridge. Full, or so close as to make no difference. Presumably Witch Hollow lay in the same direction. Now there was a bed with a monster, or at least a blue ghost, under it. I caught myself wondering how far it was. Probably not too far: a ten, fifteen minute drive. I could easily make it up there before dark; take a look under the bed and doubtless sleep better for having done so. Why not? I am feeling kind of bored…

From the turn onto Wild Goose Pond Road it was less than two miles. Just over three from Chuck’s cabin. Most of that was a pretty drive through old, essentially climax softwood forest: pines and hemlocks big enough, far enough apart to look like a maintained grove. The clearcut ended a thousand yards or so past the turnoff to Chuck’s, though survey stakes continued, ominously, to the very end, and almost all of the fine old trees had death-warrants spray painted blue, red, and orange on their bark.

There wasn’t a sign identifying Witch Hollow, but I knew when I arrived. The road had been winding around a moderately steep slope for the last half-mile, past lots of mossy boulders and several little streams that crossed it without benefit of culverts. I say road, but it had dwindled to more of a trail by then: deeply rutted from ATV traffic, with problematical puddles and oil-pan-killer rocks to make it interesting. It ended, decisively, at the Hollow: two or three acres of flat pine woods set into a deep wrinkle of the hills. The road petered out at a messy clearing large enough to park six or seven cars. Many beercans, crumpled cigarette packs, used condoms, and generic crud proved that cars did park there. A well-beaten trail led into the woods. In addition to the logger/developer’s paint-slashes, trees and rocks nearby had nitwit teenage graffiti all over them, much of it in the pop-satanic motif. Quite a few skulls, inept pentagrams, and 666s. Definitely Witch Hollow.

It could have been a beautiful spot, but it wasn’t. I parked, got out, nearly stepped in dung that sure as hell didn’t come from a deer, and started to get right back in my car. That seemed a waste of effort, though, so I set off down the trail (stepping very carefully), to see where it led.

It went less than a hundred feet, ending at a rough square of loose stones that might possibly be an old foundation, or a forgotten cemetery, or more likely a random scattering that generations of spook-hunting kids had helped into alignment. It was about fifteen feet on a side, with no more than seven or eight stones defining each. There was a firepit and scorched beercans in the middle; rubbers and still more beercans outside. Someone had puked nearby, not too long before. Someone else had left her teentsy lavender panties beside the firepit. A real nice place.

I stayed, though. I walked around, exploring the environs, while daylight faded to black. It got dark faster than I expected, and with the sun went about twenty degrees of warmth, replaced by deep-woods mosquitoes looking for supper. I felt kind of stupid, hanging around there in growing discomfort while shadows piled up, but I wasn’t bored. Actually I was excited, though I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time. Pretty soon I couldn’t make out my car through the trees, but about then the moon rose high enough to cast some light. No reason to leave; wait a while, it would get brighter. I swatted mosquitoes, wished for a sweater, stopped wondering what in God’s name I was doing there.

After another fifteen or twenty minutes my car reappeared, gleaming in moonbeams. It was a very clear night; beercans glistened everywhere. The young lady’s discarded underwear was plainly visible: grey, of course, not lavender. You can’t really see color by moonlight. The beercans’ bright logos gave the impression of chroma, but they were grey too. Everything else was sharp black and white. Everything except the trees thirty, forty feet off to my left; for some reason they looked… different. I stared, and amended that: it wasn’t the trees, it was the moonlight under and around the trees. It was blurry. The blurriness was moving toward me. And it was blue.

I didn’t have time to try dismissing that dim azure haze as an optical illusion: two or three seconds later it became unequivocal. Coalesced very rapidly into a transparent blue sphere six feet across, bright enough to erase all the nearby moon-shadows, and cast new, horizontal ones far out into the woods. There was a figure, a human figure, inside the sphere. It looked like a ghost ought to look: much more gauzy and indistinct than my living-room apparition had been. It was draped in something- a gown, or shroud- even less substantial, that seemed to be unraveling into whorls of mist. It had long hair, disarrayed as if caught by wind. I could tell it was female, but its- her- features were just starting to take shape when the sphere vanished. Shrank instantly to a brilliant speck of light, then went out.

I wasn’t scared. A bit later that would astonish me, but while the phenomenon lasted it seemed perfectly normal. Not scared: excited, which was understandable, and also irate, which wasn’t. Irate with myself, for some incomprehensible reason, as though I’d just missed an important phonecall by one ring. I actually walked over to where the sphere had been, and stood looking around for several minutes before my hackles started to rise. I realized I’d just seen a ghost. I was all by myself, miles from the nearest house, at night, in a certifiably haunted forest. Believe me, those reflections were not conducive to a warm and fuzzy feeling.

Something rustled, away up on the hillside. I’d just seen the ghost of the Oldham witch. It didn’t take a feat of word-association to think of Blair Witch. A screech-owl chose that moment to announce his presence not very far from me. I left. I wouldn’t call my progress through the trees and beercans running, exactly, but in military terms it would have been a disorderly retreat.

Once safely in my car, with the windows up, doors locked, engine running, and lights on, I soon calmed down enough to think back and marvel at my initial reaction. I couldn’t decide whether it was shock, courage, or sheer stupidity that had held fear at bay. I didn’t even consider lunacy as an option; I’d been jerked right out of that comforting denial, at least. I had looked under the bed, and there really was something down there. Now what was I going to do about it?

Most of that rumination took place while I was driving back to the cabin. The last question didn’t raise its hand until I was halfway there. When it did, I almost ignored it. What can you do about a ghost? You gotta do something… Thanks to my little eidetic episode the day before I remembered saying that, and remembered what had prompted it: Jules grousing about ghost-chasers. What might happen if a ghost-chaser ever told one to stay…

That was Jules talking off the top of his head, no doubt about it. Still, it was an intriguing what-if. …To stay, to come back to reality… Which was impossible; an order of magnitude more impossible than the mere existence of ghosts. Whatever that blue thing (blue woman, I corrected myself automatically, and felt silly doing so) in Witch Hollow was, it wasn’t a conscious being. It (she, MacDowell, she) was obviously some kind of image projected, or preserved, or generated by some condition or process that involved no more sentience than gravity. A rare phenomenon, and certainly beyond our current level of understanding. But how many people ever get to see a meteorite land? And didn’t everyone think they were either magic or lies until science finally took notice? Now we use them to date the universe. For that matter, gravity itself wasn’t recognized as a force until Newton came along. What if Newton had just picked up that apple and eaten it?

So what do you do about a ghost? If you’re a scientist, or like to think like one, why, you try to make sense of it. And how many scientists ever get the chance to observe a real, shimmery, luminous, woman-shaped ghost first hand? No wonder I was annoyed with myself back there: I’d been given a one-in-a-million chance to observe something extraordinary, but except for an annoyingly clear memory of the ghost’s streaming hair and not-quite-discernable features I hadn’t come away with anything.

Or had I? When I thought about it, I realized I’d learned one important thing: the phenomenon was energetic. It radiated light- fairly intense, probably monochromatic- from a well-defined spherical surface. I also knew, more or less, how long it lasted. Four or five seconds: transient, but not even close to instantaneous. That was a start. Were there any incidental effects? Maybe. When I saw it I’d felt a chill, and a sensation of goosebumps. Surprise and alarm (I wasn’t alarmed, though) could easily account for both, but so could a sudden drop in ambient temperature, and an electrostatic field. What I hadn’t experienced might also be meaningful: no sound, no smell… no fear, either, but however odd that might be, it was purely subjective.

I did a lot of thinking that night, and came to several decisive conclusions. The first, most obvious one was that I needed more background information. Chuck had presumably told me all he knew, which wasn’t much. A blue ghost, said to be a witch, appeared at the full of the moon. Except for the witch part I’d verified all that. How long had it been appearing? Why was it identified with a witch? Had anything else strange ever happened in the Hollow? Those questions could, hopefully, be answered without too much trouble, by doing some basic research. I intended to start that first thing in the morning.

Second conclusion: I wasn’t going to stop there. Depending on what I came up with in the literature, I might want to interview some locals. Even if the phenomenon only appeared at long intervals, some of the many partying kids up there must have seen something. Their recollections could be valuable. After that, well… My connections with the world of high-tech gave me access to every kind of sensor available, and friends who knew how to use them. Magnetometers, infrared scanners, field meters… If there was any geophysical anomaly in the Hollow, I could probably detect it.

The third conclusion didn’t come as easily, nor as quickly as those two. It had to wait for the eleven o’clock news, watched on a TV afflicted with its own, perfectly comprehensible ghosts. Reception was terrible up there in the hills. The one station Chuck’s rabbit-ears could get was marginal, but happened to be coming in well for the weather report. Clear and cooler for the next few days. There was a weather almanac feature, that told me the moon wasn’t quite full: it would be the next night. So, if the phenomenon was indeed triggered or enabled by lunar phase, its window was at least two days wide; probably three, possibly more. I didn’t think it would appear again so soon, but it could. In twenty-four hours the polarized moonlight would be a bit brighter, gravitational stress would be marginally higher… whatever. I decided- not too enthusiastically- that I’d better be on hand for a long-shot repetition.

In hindsight I realize there was another unlikely coincidence at work. While drawing my conclusions, especially the last, I kept wishing I could run the evidence past Jules. Of anyone I know, he would have been the best equipped to put it in perspective, give me a reality-check, quite possibly come up with an explanation satisfying enough to save me considerable work (and another vigil in those creepy woods). There was a phone in the cabin, but it did me no good. Jules was out of town, out of the country that week; attending a physical-standards conference somewhere in Europe. He doesn’t carry a cell (I don’t either, but I’m not as smug about it), and I wasn’t even sure what city he was in. He claims he’d have advised me to do just as I did, but you never know…

So I had to manage on my own, and damn if I didn’t make a good job of it. By eight next morning I was looking for libraries. Maybe Oldham has one (most New Hampshire towns do): I didn’t bother to check. Village libraries aren’t big on historical reference materials. I did stop at a couple in larger towns nearby, one of which was open when I got there. It had some local histories that gave me a start, but somebody was using their patron computer, so I didn’t linger. The nearest college town was Keene; between its large public library, and the more academic one at Keene State I found most of what I needed.

I was looking for records indicating that a witch had once been executed in Oldham; that was the first point to clarify. It should have been easy, but my initial search almost convinced me to stop looking. The problem was, all sources agreed that the Salem witch trials of 1692 came right at the end of America’s flirtation with that mostly-European mania. There were a few accusations, trials, and acquittals in New England after that, but not many, and by l700 witches were definitely passé. But in 1700 western New Hampshire was wilderness. Oldham wasn’t settled until 1773; none of the towns nearby were founded more than a few years before that, and some dated from considerably later. If a card-carrying, broomstick-waving witch had been the first tenant in the first house built in Oldham she could have carried on business without fear of legal repercussions. Besides which, several historians noted that the only witch trial in New Hampshire ended with the defendant suing, and collecting damages from her accusers.

At first I couldn’t see any loophole in that. The dates were firm: there was a gap of at least seventy years between witch trials and Oldham. Logically, that meant the witch part of my phenomenon was a later addition; a perfectly understandable dollop of folkloric license. I wasn’t quite ready to give up on the one historical datum I had, however; so I looked a little harder. And I found something that set me off in a new direction.

It was a paragraph in a Nineteenth-Century county history. The author was interested in how towns got their names, and had this to say about Oldham: "While definitive proof is lacking, yet we may, at only slight risk of incurring the ire of our more scholarly and critical readers, confidently assume that ‘Oldham’ was originally ‘Goldham’. Rumors of gold, either veracious or fabricated, were in those times of nascent Westward Expansion often promulgated as a desideratum in hastening the development of new, struggling towns, nor were such enticing mendacities- howsomever exaggerated- necessarily spurious in toto. In light of the mica and other mineral resources subsequently proven to exist in our happy county, it is, if not susceptible to verification (at this late date), still within the bounds of reasonable inference, that traces of the precious yellow metal- or more likely perhaps, of pyrites, i.e., ‘fool’s gold’- may have gleamed alluringly in local streams, and an