Seerstone: A Supernatural Thriller

By Joe Fasbinder

Seerstone is a thoroughly researched, tension-wrought tale of greed and how it dazzles and threatens, sometimes using the most arcane and unearthly means, to conquer a man and his family and to wring seemingly impossible changes, potentially enormous changes in the life of Dayer Preston, who, with his wife, has always striven to work toward the light, as they understand it.

The story takes place at the dawn of the nineteenth century in Williker Township, a cold and dying place in western New York State at a time when it seemed that there was no magic strong enough to make things right, to bring forth abundance from an earth that withheld its bounty, despite mans best efforts. Despite the magic that stirred the spirits of heaven and earth.

It is a strange and unearthly time. It was an era in which an average, everyday person knew that if you put a few hairs in a glass of water, they would turn into worms overnight, and that to assure prosperity, lamens scrawled with magic words would be placed behind the mantel. The line between magic and reality was blurred, and so the arrival of a ritual magician at your door on an early spring night wasnt much to be noticed, not even when he began to bring a struggling farm family closer and closer to the line between objective reality and a world ruled over by magic words scrawled on a page.

It is a tale of mystery. How much can the magician Walters bring forth? How much of what he says are lies? And how much of what he possesses can bring forth bounty and potential wealth from an unforgiving earth? How much is simply evil? And can it be controlled? And why is Dayer Preston so necessary to the grandest of all the magic rituals that awaits them?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984530226

Joe Fasbinder

Joe Fasbinder, have long been a student of family and ritual magic, as it existed in the early years of the colonization of America. Joe was a writer, reporter, editor and finally a columnist (on computer issues) at United Press International for 25 years, followed by additional experience at the keyboards of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, the Los Angeles Daily Journal and in more than a dozen other freelance and part-time positions. He is currently a regular contributor to the Brentwood News on the Westside of Los Angeles.

Book preview

Copyright © 2018 by Joe Fasbinder.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2018906251

ISBN:                Hardcover                978-1-9845-3024-0

                          Softcover                   978-1-9845-3023-3

                          eBook                        978-1-9845-3022-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 05/23/2018

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CONTENTS

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Part II

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

PART I

CHAPTER 1

Dark bullets of rain crashed all around and all over Walters, and crashed as well as through the nearby trees, which would soon be denuded of the sparse foliage they still held, made barren for a season, for the autumn was slowly advancing, as Walters headed for destiny: headed for a series of changes that would transform so many things in this place, in this season. Mischief was afoot—the kind that schoolboys can smell in the air as autumn evenings approached. But the mischief that followed Walters was several orders of magnitude above and beyond what even the most devious of schoolboys could imagine.

A thin smile was on his face. And something more. The cold water splattered and formed rivulets that rolled down the weathered visage as he walked along the old Indian trail. His face was one of pain and ecstasy, and one that held no look at all, elements of all these visual aspects reflecting something akin to confusion, as an old man might meet while staring contemplatively into a hearth fire. And despite the heavy clouds and the rain, the moon, the harsh moon, shone like a perfect orange stone in the sky. It was something only Walters could see, the moon.

The moon hung like madness above Walters, the magician, as his worn leather boots made tracks in the hard-packed trail that led toward Williker, a small, dying township in Nobs county, in western New York State. Of all humans, of everyone on Earth, Walters alone could see the moon. He started to force his features into a more genuine smile, but had forgotten how. He headed toward something in Williker, the moon hanging over his shoulder, hissing and saying words no one could hear, because Walters was there alone, on the trail forged by Indians long forgotten, as the cold wind picked up, blowing stern through the rags that he wore. The wind reached through his shirt, touched the secret thing he kept there. Walters kept secrets and kept them close.

Tharthar! shouted Walters to the wind and the icy moon. A voice from the Egyptian dust, or perhaps a lie from just a hundred years ago. Other words; words that cannot be spoken. Deadly dangerous words. Words that Walters had come to hold in a special place, like the secret that hung in a tight leather bag that swung from a leather lace around his neck.

The moon did not reply, but shifted and changed in its eternal shimmering. It hummed a soothing sound and laughed and something moved on the surface of the moon, moved and shimmered and lay still.

Something crawled across the face of the moon, with the exact image moving across Walters’s face, and it had nothing to do with the rain and the wind, and everything to do with darkness and the deep places that are darker than the darkest dreams.

Words that would sound as nonsense came now, to end the incantation, the prayer, the supplication.

The rain kept up. It got was an evil rain, merely drizzle with strong winds at most times, then a few drenching minutes, with no shelter for Walters.

Walters noticed, but did not acknowledge the foul weather. His breathing wasn’t even labored as he headed on a long, uphill stretch through the rugged farmland, now mostly gone to ruin, gone with the farmers who had subsisted there.

The moon drove him on. A shining orb that choked out the night when the night threatened to get too close. The moon that was his strength, which filled his mind with ice and fire and insights that came from outside his sphere of control. The moon that lifted each foot and placed it in front of the other, moving him forward, filling the night. Invisible to everyone but Walters, but filling all that he saw. Casting light that did not illuminate, singing songs no one could hear, the moon compelled Walters to move ahead, toward Williker, toward a cabin that he knew was ahead.

A thin layer of mud was forming on the Indian trail, despite its being packed so hard by centuries of use, leaving a thin gruel clinging to his worn boots. A shallow valley of immoderate fertility, with a loosely defined group of buildings surrounded by neat fields, barren for the most part now, the majority of the crops already brought in. Walters knew that of the few cabins and houses that stood there, many would be empty—abandoned by people who moved on to the West, called out by the threat of starvation after crops failed during the year without a summer, 1816, already being called Eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death.

Walters stopped for a moment at the top of the nondescript hill, taking his bearings, dropping his pack of books and talismans, his gathered herbs and Indian charms, and carefully laying aside his good, solid rifle—his only means of gathering food—and he allowed himself a moment of reflection before entering what remained of Williker, a township that was being slowly abandoned.

The bag held secret things, as well as the effects a traveling man would normally carry. The bag held memories of ages past of a past youth, of moanings of ancients, papers covered over with wax to protect the letters and images, the lamens and the tools, the offerings and things that only he knew of, secrets of secrets, words that could bring forth pleasure of the most exquisite type, or alternately, pain—in that same measure. The Long Lost Friend was inside, and the Key of Solomon. The Black Pullet rubbed covers with the secrets of Albertus Magnus. And other things, more secret things, were in the bag. Things that should not be spoken. The moon laughed and sighed and knew the secrets of Walters’s bag and why he could never let it be separate from him, and of the terrible things that might happen if such a situation should occur.

But his most precious magic charm was not in the bag. It was hanging around his neck.

He kept it in a soft leather pouch that was oily with age and dirty from being handled. The bag had been made by an Indian in the distant past, a plain, nondescript thing that had been poorly tanned, a thing of dubious background and little value.

But Walters knew it held a secret. A terrible secret. He pulled the stone from the pouch that hung around his neck.

The moon burst forth, knowing the secret, knowing Walters’s tie to the outer realms through its awful magic, knowing and turning and moving, and casting a glow into Walters’s eyes that only he could see.

It was a crystal stone, a pyramid in shape. A seerstone of marvelous antiquity, polished and perfect and smooth. A treasure. Walters laughed at the word. Treasure. A treasure if death and birth and madness were treasures.

And he looked down into the little village of Williker. Can God help you? he called out loudly. A taunt. A challenge.

And the only answer was the night, with its slowly diminishing rain.

The rain abated now, revealing a hilltop sheared clear of trees by the passing of a thousand winter winds. Walters could see the township more clearly, as it lay in the rain and in the illumination that only existed in his mind, the orange-yellow of the glowing orb over his shoulder that indicated the usual and the sublime, the unseen things, the stirrings and scurrying.

From inside his dirty shirt he brought forth the stone, the glorious stone, and held it out before him, letting it suggest a direction to proceed.

He held the stone forward, at the end of his arm and looked, peered with one eye closed, intensely, studying the inner places that he could discern with his spiritual eye. The stone glowed and moved and shifted just so slightly, like a slumbering animal, its polished surface and sharp corners glistening in the rain.

The stone sang a note that Walters could hear, in voices primeval, in moanings of dust, in laughter that was courage and foolishness and awful things that could not be spoken. In the voices of the Indians who had ruled this place anciently it sang, a song now dead and forgotten. The stone was the moon, and then it wasn’t and then it was again.

Walters laughed. He had heard the words that were not words, strange things that no one but the magician could really ever know. He was the magus. He moved forward, pushed ahead by the winds of the autumn, a season soon to turn to winter.

Over rocky ground to a ramshackle cabin that was separated from the others by a few rods distance, a cabin with only a partial roof. A safe place in which to build a fire and spend the night, out of the wind, away from the tormenting rain, should it choose to return.

A place to seek a disembodied spirit, to listen and to discern, before revealing his magical vision to some favored resident on a farm in the hillsides hereabout, of riches he could discern in his magic stone, and to tempt that man to the madness the treasures would bring. He laughed, quietly. So much mischief to be done.

The fireplace was essentially intact, the flue clear to the top of the house. Nobody had been in this place for a long time, Walters could tell. Mouse and bird droppings were everywhere, and pieces of the roof had fallen in, giving him fuel for his fire. Soon it crackled and danced, formed shadows that amused and patterns that only Walters could see.

A sparrow he had killed along the trail was his meat and his amusement was the flames that he watched in earnest, seeing strange and wonderful sights in their midst.

Spirits there, he saw in the flames. The cunning animal eyes that hid themselves from all except those who knew them. They moved in the flames. The salamander was there, the only beast that can live in fire. It shimmered and hid and teased as it spoke to him in hissing noises, moanings and cracklings and movings in the electric night. Walters laughed and coughed. He spoke little things. Little things and then he slept, gathering his magic as he slept, growing strong for the mischief that was soon to begin.

Nearby, Dayer Preston dreamed of ancient wealth, but he was not still. He cried out in the night and in the bed, his good wife Johanna comforted him. And in that night he shared a dream with a man he did not yet know, with Walters the magician.

CHAPTER 2

The morning was cool and clear and the cattle were calm and lowing as Dayer Preston knelt next to his still-sleeping wife Johanna and said his earnest prayers before beginning another hard day’s work on his farm, in the valley adjacent to a clear stream. The work was going to be doubly hard today, he knew, because of a malaise he felt, whose origin he could not identify, and because of the lingering tension of the night, of the lingering remnants of his strange dreams.

The farm was small by any standard. The one-room house looked out over a yard with but a single barn in which Dayer Preston kept his two strong workhorses, Bess and Able, each in a stall of its own. They were fine, sturdy horses, but getting long in the tooth, as was Dayer Preston, to his own thinking. Getting old. The barn also held two calves and two cows. Outside, under a lean-to, the sheep nestled; a small flock, but adequate for the needs of his now-tiny family, for meat and for wool, and there were chickens, too, fowls that were easy to maintain when disease did not sweep through their numbers. They were kept in a separate whitewashed structure, removed from the barn. One bad year, before the year-without-a-summer, disease