A Grave Tree (5 page)

“Mark and I saw something yesterday in the woods. Two white figures just off the path. They spooked Sylvain, and he didn’t seem to know what they were, not that he would tell us if he did.”

Russell’s eyebrows rose and then fell, and he flicked a look over his shoulder into the driveway still misty with rain. Evidently he had no additional insight to provide.

“Shall we do some physics then?” he said.

“Only if you know more about its supposed links to witchcraft and are prepared to share,” Abbey said. “Otherwise, I don’t see the point.” Her words were biting, and the implication that she knew more than he did about physics was clear.

Russell gave a rueful half smile. “I may know some things.”

Abbey crossed her arms over her chest. “And are you allowed to share?”

Russell shrugged. “Depends.”

“On?”

“Whether you’re going to take me up on my suggestion that we hang out and get to know each other.”

Was he actually blackmailing her into dating him? She gave him a tight smile. “Well, we’re together right now, and in case you haven’t noticed, my hall pass is a little limited, so I doubt I’ll be attending any movies or going to dances any time soon.”

Russell gave an amiable smile. “Fair enough. I want your word though that once you’ve been sprung from hiding, you’ll go out on a date with me. Just one. I’ll behave, I promise.”

Abbey hesitated. There was no reason why she couldn’t. Most girls at Coventry High would kill for a date with Russell. She wasn’t set to marry Sam for many years, and surely knowing who her future spouse was did not preclude her from dating someone else. And although she liked Jake, she had no idea if he liked her. But something about Russell’s interest bothered her.

Still, he was only asking for a date. Maybe she could propose a sibling double date and have Caleb and Anna come along too. Besides, if Caleb was planning something, which he most likely definitely was, and Abbey managed to steal Russell’s phone, which she saw the outlines of in his track-pant pocket, chances were Russell wouldn’t want to date her anyway.

She glanced at the pendulum clock over the mantle. 10:12. She didn’t have very long.

“Fine,” she said, trying to inject as much confidence into her voice as possible. Best to establish herself as an assertive, and not to be toyed with, female. “Tell me what you know.”

Russell gestured at the couch. “Let’s sit down and talk.”

Abbey followed him slowly over to the leather sofas and carefully took a seat on the one across from Russell. He raised a single reddish-blond eyebrow at her seating choice, but said nothing. She realized her mistake. If she was actually going to get his phone away from him within the next fifteen minutes, she should have sat next to him. A loud thump came from the office, but Russell didn’t appear to have heard, or maybe he thought it was part of the game.

“So you understand the basics of entanglement and spooky action at a distance, right?” Russell said.

“I understand that at a quantum level, particles can become entangled, such that measuring the physical properties of one particle, or set of particles, influences the physical properties of an entangled particle, or set of particles, elsewhere. And this holds true even if the measurements are taken more quickly than light could travel between the particles.” Abbey repeated this by rote. Anyone who was into physics knew this. But even after decades of experiments, nobody could explain why or how it happened, other than to call it spooky. “I’m assuming you’re going to tell me that witches can create entanglement at a macro level.”

“Well, sort of. From what I understand, we’re entangled with each other. And the Madronas, because they all came from the seeds of a single mother tree, are too. The stones work when they’re near a Madrona, and the docks are made from the wood of the Madronas.”

Abbey’s mind tried to process what Russell was saying. “So, you’re saying our physical states are all correlated. But quantum decoherence would make that impossible over any length of time. Even in the diamond experiment, the entanglement was short-lived and fragile.”

“Apparently something about our genetics produces a damping effect on decoherence. It still happens, but at a slower rate, which means our states are not perfectly correlated, but more like connected.”

Abbey frowned and shook her head. “I don’t believe it. Are you saying we all exist in superposition? Who’s undertaking the measurement that collapses the wave function?”

“I don’t know,” Russell said. “Apparently the lack of decoherence has something to do with gravity and the DNA Phantom Effect.”

Abbey shifted her eyes to the clock. 10:25. She had to get that phone. She crossed her arms and tried to shift her face into some sort of facsimile of the pouts she had seen some of the older girls at school give their boyfriends when they wanted something. “What are you talking about? I don’t believe you. I’ve never heard of the DNA Phantom Effect.”

She almost gritted her teeth, but she managed to keep her lips thrust out in what she hoped was a cute way. She had, of course, heard about the DNA Phantom Effect. It referred to the ability of DNA to attract light molecules, and the fact that the light molecules remained in place for up to thirty days, held by some strange gravitational force, even after the DNA had been removed.

Russell blinked, apparently surprised that Inquisitive Abbey the Science Geek, as she was called at school, would be unaware of such an important discovery. Abbey’s pout started to slip. Russell was not removing his phone to show her an article on the phantom effect, as she had hoped.

The
World of Warcraft
volume in the office spiked, but it was accompanied by another sound, the faint skitter of something across the roof. Farley lifted his head from where he had been sacked out on the carpet and looked around, the tags on his collar jingling.

Abbey shifted gears. “Anyway, whatever you’re talking about, I’m sure it was disproven in that paper that Borkin and Elsie just published about the falsification of the diamond entanglement experiments.”

“What?” Russell said.

She shook her head indignantly. “Didn’t you read the paper? I thought
everyone
had read the paper.”

Russell squinted at her, withdrew his phone, entered his password, and started typing furiously with his forefinger. He shook his head. “I don’t see anything. Where did they publish the paper?”

“Give me your phone and I’ll show you,” Abbey ordered, her palms damp. The pendulum block read 10:29.

Russell shot her a frustrated look but nonetheless held out his phone. Abbey took it, trying not to snatch, and pulled it to her chest. She started typing random letters into the search bar. Whatever Caleb was planning, he’d better get on with it, or the gig would be up.

She glanced back at Russell, but he had lifted his chin slightly and appeared to be intently looking over her shoulder at something outside.

Abbey whirled to the window and stared out. At the edge of the driveway, amid the trees, two ghostlike figures stood staring at the cabin. Abbey choked back a shriek. Unlike the ghosts of the previous day, which had just looked like indistinct human figures going about their day, these ones wore tattered clothes and had the blank, aggressive affects of ghosts from a bad horror flick.

“What the…?” Russell rose from his seat and crossed the room to the window. The ghosts vanished, blinking out of sight, only to reappear farther away in the trees.

Russell flung open the door to the cabin and rushed out onto the front step. The alarm system offered a loud and angry beep. A scrabbling sound on the roof followed, and then Russell was cloaked in a multi-colored polka-dotted afghan blanket that Abbey recognized from the couch in Sylvain’s office. The corners of the blanket appeared to have been weighted down, and it fell over Russell perfectly, making him look like a Halloween circus ghost. Caleb’s form followed as he dropped heavily from the roof, stumbling to his knees before launching up to grab Russell’s struggling form. He began to wind a long electrical cord around Russell’s torso while Russell the afghan struggled, swore, and kicked at Caleb. Another electrical cord slithered off the roof after Caleb, and Abbey handed it to Caleb, who added it to the cord already encircling Russell.

“Sorry, Russell,” Abbey mumbled, still holding his phone.

“You’re not going to get away with this!” Russell yelled. “Sylvain is monitoring the alarm. He’ll know the door opened.”

“That’s why Abbey is going to text him and say we’re just letting Farley out,” Caleb said.

Abbey turned her gaze away from Russell. Farley. Where was he? He’d headed toward the edge of the clearing in front of the house where the ghosts had been, and now he was gone. Her stomach flip-flopped as she scanned the area all around the front of the cabin. Had the ghosts gotten him? Did ghosts get dogs?

“Text Sylvain, Ab,” Caleb prompted.

“No way. You don’t understand what you’re doing,” Russell barked, but Abbey bent her face over the phone, opened Russell’s text messaging app, and sent a note to Sylvain. <
All well. Just letting dog out.
>

When Caleb judged that Russell was sufficiently bound, they pushed his still-kicking form into the cabin, where Caleb forced him to fall into a chair and proceeded to tie him to it with another electrical cord.

Russell jerked around in the chair and snarled that they were making a big mistake and would be in big trouble. Caleb ignored him.

When Caleb ran out of cord, he removed a pair of scissors from his pocket and clipped the cords from two lamps in the living room to add to the cords already around Russell. Abbey watched in mute horror.

“What are you doing? You can’t cut those. Sylvain is going to kill you…” she said.

Caleb raised an eyebrow. “Ab, we’ve tied Russell up and we’re staging an escape, and you’re worried that Sylvain is going to be mad about a few electrical cords?”

“I have to go find Farley,” she said. “I think the ghosts might have gotten him.”

Caleb snorted. “I suggest you go look on the roof first. Mark might need some help.”

“What?” Abbey said, walking out the front door and into the circular driveway. She turned around and looked up. On the peak of the sloped roof sat Mark, clutching Sylvain’s data projector and an umbrella, his face rigid with fear. Evidently Caleb was not so sanguine about Sylvain’s stuff that he was willing to damage the high-end projector.

Then Abbey understood.
Of course.
They had used the data projector to create the ghosts. Abbey had thought she’d recognized them. They were from the movie
The Innkeepers
, which she and Caleb had watched over the Christmas holidays.

“I don’t like heights,” Mark said. “Caleb said he would be coming back to get me down. I don’t like heights.”

“Just stay calm, Mark,” Abbey said, shifting her eyes around in search of Farley. “I’ll go get Caleb. How did you get up there?”

“The access to the attic is in the closet of the bad man’s office. There’s a small vent that leads outside. We had to climb. I don’t like heights.”

“Just hang tight for a few more minutes. I’ll send Caleb up right away.” She spun around in the clearing. “Farley! Farley!” She thought she could hear faint barks, but the brown dog didn’t come bounding out of the bushes to greet her like he normally would.

“Mark, can you see Farley from up there?”

Mark whipped his head back and forth in a violent headshake, his eyes now closed.

Abbey sighed and returned to the house. Caleb had cut a small hole in the afghan for Russell’s eyes and nose. Russell’s eyes shone with fury, but he looked so hilarious wrapped in the blue, pink, and green blanket that Abbey almost laughed.

“Abbey, please,” Russell said. “You don’t understand what’s going on out there. You’re in danger.”

“Well then, why don’t you
tell
us what’s going on?” Abbey said.

“Let me go, and I’ll tell you.”

Abbey studied him. Could Russell provide them with useful information regarding what was happening beyond the walls of the cabin?

“Not a chance,” Caleb said crisply, then turned to Abbey. “Okay, Ab, we don’t have a lot of time. We need to be scarce before Sylvain returns from his errands. The phones are going to have to stay behind so Sylvain thinks we’re still in the cabin. Pack the usual stuff while I extract Mark from the roof. Don’t open and close the door again until we leave, or you’ll tip Sylvain off.”

The usual stuff. Caleb meant the usual stuff they took when they were going to use the stones to go to the future. Flashlights, a compass, food, matches, their dad’s hunting knife—which they no longer had—hoodies, although they should be bringing full rain gear, and an atlas. But which stones was Caleb planning to use? The only ones still accessible, as far as Abbey knew, were the ones in Salisbury Swamp, and to use those, they needed Ian.

“Farley’s missing,” she said. “I have to go look for him.”

“He’s probably fine. He’ll come back,” Caleb said. “We’ll find him when we get out of here. Just pack the stuff while I get Mark down.”

Extracting Mark from the roof took more time and more coaxing than either Abbey or Caleb had expected, so Abbey had plenty of time to stuff supplies into a backpack, send another email to Sam—asking if he had any news and suggesting the potential role of gold nanotechnology in the Burton extraction process—and scan the clearing and nearby woods in search of Farley. But the dog was nowhere to be seen, and Abbey was nearly sick with worry by the time Caleb and Mark stood in the doorway of the cabin ready to depart.

“Farley’s not back,” she said, her voice tight.

Caleb frowned and stared into the trees, then shook his head. “We’re going to have to go without him. Sylvain could be back really soon, and we have to be long gone by then. Farley will come back. He knows this place, and maybe we’ll find him along the way.”

“Where exactly are we going?” Abbey said.

“To meet Ian,” Caleb said, holding up a rectangular white card.

They set out along the trail where Abbey and Mark had seen the ghosts the previous day (a bad choice, Mark felt). He walked warily, still rattled from being on the roof and wondering if they were going to encounter the real ghosts again. Caleb was setting a pretty rapid pace, and if it weren’t for the fact that Abbey was dawdling because she was reading the card Caleb had received from the beret man, Mark would have fallen behind.