The bottles didn’t turn up until she’d reached the third box from the top, and by the time she got that one open, her joints were screaming and she felt exhausted and didn’t think she’d even be able to eat the soup, wanting only to get off her feet and shut her eyes. Then she got the tape off the third box and her spirits lifted, success bringing some energy back. There were nearly thirty different bottles in the box, all protected by the Bubble Wrap and labeled with a date. It took her only a few minutes to find a match for the one Eric Shaw had shown her. There was a piece of masking tape stretched across the wrapping, the year 1929 written on it. She’d been right.
She unwrapped the bottle and held it in her hand. It felt cool, but naturally so, the way glass was supposed to feel. Inside, the water was a little cloudy, but not so grainy and discolored as what she’d seen in Eric Shaw’s bottle.
She left the boxes on the floor. It was one thing to tug them down, another to lift them back up. With the bottle in hand she went back downstairs, checked on the soup, and then called the West Baden Springs Hotel and asked to be put through to Eric Shaw’s room. The phone rang several times, and then she got a machine.
“This is Anne McKinney. I have an idea… I’m not sure if it’ll be any help, but I don’t see where it could do any harm either. I found a bottle that’s the twin of yours. Only one I have from that year, and it’s still full. Never been opened. I’ll let you take it. My idea was that you could find a place to test the water. I don’t know who’d be able to do it, but surely there’s a laboratory somewhere that can. They could analyze both of them, and tell you what the difference is. There’s something in your Pluto Water that’s not in mine. It might be a help to you if you knew what that was.”
She left her number, hung up the phone, and went out to the porch. Her back throbbed when she pushed open the door. Outside the windmills were turning fast and steady, and the cluster of cirrus clouds that had stood in the western horizon at her last check were now directly overhead. The air was fragrant with the smell of rhododendrons and the honeysuckle that grew along the side of the house. An absolutely gorgeous day, but still that wind blew, and those clouds, they were warnings.
24
KELLEN CAGE SAT IN the desk chair and stared at the green bottle, touched it gently with his fingertips, and then pulled them back and studied the traces of frost as they melted away, leaving a wet shimmer on his dark skin. Eric had told him all of it by now, and Kellen hadn’t said much yet. He’d held Eric’s eye contact throughout, though, and that was promising. One thing Eric had taken away from years of gradually deteriorating meetings with studio execs-when people questioned your judgment or believed you flat-out crazy, they began to find other places to look during a conversation.
“I can believe this shit would give you hallucinations,” Kellen said. “What I can’t believe is that you ever drank it in the first place. Looks nasty to me.”
“It was,” Eric said. “The first time, at least. The second time, it was fine. And that last time, this morning? Stuff was good.”
Kellen took his hand off the bottle and scooted the chair back a few inches.
“Whole time we been talking, it just gets colder and colder.”
“Uh-huh.”
Kellen eyed the bottle distrustfully. “Good news is, maybe the visions will go away if you don’t take any more of it.”
That was probably true, but while the hallucinations were terrifying in their vividness, the other side of the coin was marked by what he’d come to think of as withdrawal symptoms, the headache and vertigo and dizziness. His head was throbbing as badly as it had all day, and even while Kellen sat there and told him how repulsive the Pluto Water looked, Eric found himself wanting another sip. Just something to take the edge off the blade that was turning slowly in his skull, a blade that seemed to have found its way to a whetstone in the past half hour. Withdrawal, indeed-he craved that infamous hair of the dog.
“Likely your mind is just spinning out from whatever’s in the water,” Kellen said.
“I’m telling you,” Eric said, “that guy in the train, his eyes were a perfect match for Josiah Bradford’s.”
“I believe it. But you’d already seen Josiah’s eyes. Got an intense look at them last night. So they were already in your brain, something for your mind to fool around with when the water took you on a trip.”
Possible, but Eric wasn’t convinced. That man on the train had been Campbell Bradford. He was sure of that in the same way that he’d been sure they had the wrong valley on that film about the Nez Perce, and in the same way he’d been sure of the importance of that photograph of the red cottage in Eve Harrelson’s collection.
The phone on the desk began to ring. Kellen looked at him questioningly, but Eric shook his head. Let it go to voice mail. Right now he didn’t want an interruption.
“I guess if it’s more than a drug effect, you’ll know soon,” Kellen said.
“What do you mean?”
“If it’s a drug effect that gives you straight-up hallucinations, then they’ll stay random, right? You’ll start seeing dragons on the ceiling next. But if it’s something else, if you’re seeing… ghosts or something, well, it’ll be more of the same guy, right?”
More of the same guy. Eric remembered him in the boxcar, saw that water splashing around his ankles and the bowler hat he’d tipped in Eric’s direction. No, he did not want to see more of that guy.
“I’m having visions,” he said, “not seeing ghosts. Maybe that shit sounds one and the same to you, but it’s not. Trust me.”
Kellen leaned back, one shoe braced against the edge of the desk. Looked like about a size sixteen. “You know what got me interested in this place to begin with?”
Eric shook his head.
“My great-grandfather was a porter at this hotel back in the glory days. He died when I was eleven, but until then his favorite thing to do was tell stories about his time down here. He talked about Shadrach Hunter a lot. Had a theory that Campbell Bradford murdered the man, like I said earlier, and that it was over a dispute concerning the whiskey Campbell ran through this town. He talked about the casinos and the baseball teams and the famous folks who came down. All those stories about what it was like to be a black man in this town in those times are what gave me my original interest. But those weren’t the only tales he told.”
Eric said, “Don’t give me ghost stories.”
“Don’t know if you could call them ghost stories, really. The man did believe in spirits, though-he called them haints-and he thought there were plenty of them down here. An unusual number, according to him. And they weren’t all bad. He thought there was a mix of both, and that there were a lot of them here. What he told me was that there was a supernatural charge in this valley.”
“A charge?”
“That’s right, just like electricity. Way he explained it to me was to think of it as a battery. He said every place holds a memory of the dead. It’s just stronger in some than in others. A normal house, according to old Everett”-there was a smile on Kellen’s lips but his eyes were serious-“was nothing more than a double-A battery, maybe. But some places, he said, it’s more like they’ve got a generator going, working overtime.”
“This hotel is one of those places?”
Kellen shook his head. “Not the hotel. The whole valley. He thought there was more supernatural energy in this place than anywhere else he’d ever been.”