Soul Seekers (7 page)

17

The rickety door’s rusted hinges squeaked and groaned as he pulled the door open, thick creepers rustling as they were forced out of the way. Cas aimed the flashlight beam into the deep blackness within.

He could see the rusted springs of an old bed that had collapsed with age onto the floor of the shack, the mattress having long since crumbled away. An ancient lantern dangled from an overhead beam and he smelled musty air inside the shack. His legs quivered beneath him as he crept inside.

To his amazement the interior walls were covered in old writing, words and numbers and letters and weird equations filling every spare space.

‘What do they all mean? Emily whispered. ‘Who wrote them?’

The flashlight beam swept across a bench on the opposite side of the shack to the bed, on top of which was a layer of thick dust and an old book. Cas edged toward the book, the flashlight illuminating the cover and a name inscribed there with a jagged, uneven script. A chill ran down his spine as he read the name.

Jo.

‘That must have been Crazy Jo’s diary,’ Emily guessed.

Cas reached out for the diary and opened it, the cover rustling with age as he turned it over to reveal pages of scrawled script written with ink that had faded, the pages yellow with age.

The writing was barely legible, as though Jo had suffered from some kind of illness, but Cas could make out a few solitary words and passages.
Gravity loops. The past is the present. The illusion of time
. Then a single passage leapt out at him.
Reincarnation is real.

‘What’s reincarnation?’ Emily asked.

Cas felt another chill ripple through his body as he realised what the passage meant.

‘It’s the belief that we have all lived before, and will live again,’ he replied.

‘You mean in the past?’ she asked. Cas nodded, captivated by Crazy Jo’s scrawlings. ‘But how did a man who lived hundreds of years ago know that?’ she asked.

Cas suddenly had a premonition of doom as he began to put the pieces of their shared puzzle together in his mind, and as he turned to Emily so his own words sounded as though they were spoken by somebody else.

‘Because his name wasn’t Jo.’

A shadow crossed the open doorway to the shack even as Cas whirled the flashlight and Emily’s hand whipped up to cover her mouth. The flashlight beam settled on a terrifying sight.

In the doorway stood a man, his ragged gray hair glowing like an unearthly halo around his head and his eyes wide and round. His mouth opened to reveal stained, broken teeth surrounded by a long, straggly beard as he slowly raised a hand to point directly at Cas, a bony finger trembling in the light.

From his mouth came a long cry of despair that roared ever higher in Cas’s ears as the figure lunged into the shack and charged toward him with arms outstretched, the face stricken with anger.

Emily screamed and hurled herself past the figure and out of the shack as Cas dropped the flashlight onto the floor.

In the sudden and overwhelming darkness the ghostly figure screamed in his ears as it slammed into him.

*

‘Cas’, are you okay?’

Cas blinked awake and stared up into Emily’s eyes. He was lying on his back in the shack, Siren and Jude standing over him.

‘What happened?’ he asked as he sat up.

‘Emily screamed, we came running,’ Siren said. ‘Found you where you are now.’

Cas struggled to his feet as Emily dusted him off. ‘I’m sorry I ran,’ she said. ‘I just panicked.’

Cas turned to look at the diary on the bench beside them.

‘Did you see him?’ Siren asked. ‘Crazy Jo?’

Cas nodded and picked the diary up. ‘And this is our evidence,’ he said.

‘What are we going to do with that?’ Jude asked.

‘I’m going to show it to my mom,’ Cas explained.

‘What the hell good will that do?’ Jude wailed.

‘Crazy Jo,’ Siren repeated, barging in front of Jude. ‘What did he say?’

‘What did he do to you?’ Emily asked him in horror. ‘You passed out.’

Cas felt as though he had awoken on a different planet. He knew that he had passed out in shock but at the same time, just before he had fallen, he had seen Crazy Jo’s face up close and he had realised that the old ghost was not enraged.

He had seen an incredible look of relief and joy on the ghost’s face.

‘He tried to hold me,’ Cas replied.

Jude raised an eyebrow. ‘Like a choke-hold? I didn’t know Crazy Jo was a wrestler.’

Cas shook his head.

‘His name’s not Jo,’ he replied. ‘It’s Joshua. The ghost was my father.’

* * *

18

Hascomb Air Force Base

The gates of the base flashed in the headlights from Karen Ryan’s car as she drove up to them, the engine wailing and then the tyres screeching as she braked to an abrupt halt. Cas watched as armed soldiers strode out from the guardhouse, eyeing the car suspiciously.

In the back seat sat Jude, Siren and Emily.

‘You sure this is the right thing to do?’ Jude asked him.

Before he could answer, Cas’s mother got out of the car and stormed across to the nearest soldier. Cas could not hear what she was saying, but the towering soldier she confronted gradually began to back away, raising his hands in compliance and ordering his men into the guardhouse.

‘She’d never have believed me on my own,’ Cas said, and tucked the diary under his jacket. ‘That’s why we needed this, and why you all needed to be with me at the shack.’

Cas had led his friends home as soon as he’d been able to, carrying his father’s ancient diary with him. He had knocked on his own front door and quietly accepted the blast of outrage from his mother for having snuck out without telling her. He had also quietly accepted his being grounded for a month just so long, he’d told her, as she would listen to the important things they had to tell her.

Lost for words, his mother had let them all in and in the living room in front of the fire Cas had told her everything. When she had inevitably stood up and accused them all of living in a fantasy land, Cas had handed her Joshua’s diary.

Two minutes later, having recognised the handwriting of her own husband on the pages of a diary far older than she was, they were being bundled into the family car. As she had driven them toward the base at breakneck speed, his mother had used the car phone to call Jude and Emily’s parents.

Now, as he watched the soldiers trying to control his enraged mother, two more cars pulled up and more irate parents stormed toward the guard house.

‘Sometimes,’ Cas said, ‘parents can actually be useful.’

Jude and Emily grinned in the darkness, but Siren did not react.

Two minutes after his mother had launcher her tirade against the guards, they were escorted inside and driven toward the same huge hanger where everything had started.

*

‘Mrs Ryan, I must apologise for everything that has happened.’

Doctor Harrison stood before Cas’s mother with his hands raised palm-out before him.

‘
Apologise
?’ Karen snapped. ‘I think we’re due a bit more than that, don’t you?!’

Cas had not realised it before, but although his mom was very beautiful she also looked very dangerous now that she was truly angry. Both Jude and Emily’s parents were happy to let Karen do the talking.

‘Yes, I do,’ Doctor Harrison agreed. ‘But there’s not much that I can do. The military contingent own and run this part of the airbase and I…’

‘Will be leading us inside,’ Karen interrupted him. ‘Because if you don’t I’m going to go public with what you’ve done to our husbands and our children!’

Doctor Harrison looked worried.

‘But how could you do that?’ he asked. ‘Nobody would believe you.’

‘They’d believe a two hundred year old diary written by my husband!’ Karen almost shouted. ‘Are your bosses so incompetent that they’ve been outsmarted and exposed by my ten year-old son?’

Doctor Harrison gaped at her and was about to answer when a deep voice rumbled across the hangar.

‘What diary?’

They all turned to see General Winchester glaring at them. Karen marched toward him, not at all intimidated by his towering bulk.

‘A diary that will remain out of your hands,’ she shot back, ‘until we get answers! I’m guessing that a two hundred year-old diary with modern physics all over its pages would raise some interest in the media about what you’ve been up to out here, don’t you think General?’

General Winchester looked at the parents and the children for a long moment and then turned his back to them.

‘Follow me,’ he growled.

A group of soldiers formed an escort for them as they were led down into the underground passages beneath the hangar. Cas walked just behind his mother, with Siren, Jude, Emily and their parents following. The general led them into the same corridors that they had seen during the tour that morning, although it felt like a week ago. Soldiers were busy clearing rubble from the recent explosion and repairing computer terminals.

The general led them into one of the laboratories. At the rear of the lab was a door that he accessed using a key-card and a retinal scan, leaning close to a mirrored panel on the wall that fired a laser beam across his eye. The door clicked open and he led them down a long corridor to another, bigger steel door.

A video camera swivelled to watch them from above as the general spoke out loud.

‘Winchester, General Abraham: zero-six-five-nine-nine-one.’

As the door opened on hydraulic hinges, Jude leaned in close to Siren. ‘Zero-six-five-nine-nine-one? Your pa’s got a weird middle name.’

Siren ignored him as they walked into the facility deep beneath the airbase. Cas saw that they had already repaired the fallen ventilation shaft, and that all of the smashed computers had been removed from the room. A large star-shaped scorch mark on the ground marked where the huge ball of energy had been. The device that had generated the energy was gone.

On one wall a huge screen had been erected that showed a map of the entire planet. Wavy lines stretched across the map, each tracking the path of what Cas supposed must be satellites or something.

‘What is this place?’ his mother asked, stopping in the centre and looking around.

General Winchester stood atop a raised platform in front of the giant screen and looked down at them all.

‘This
was
the site of a major investigation conducted by the United States Air Force and the Pentagon. After the events of this morning it has been shut down.’

Cas stared in disbelief at the general. That explained why all of the computers had been taken away and all of the machinery dismantled.

‘Where is my husband?’ Karen demanded of the general.

‘He is here,’ General Winchester replied, ‘mostly.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ asked Jude’s mother, a formidable woman named Arrabella. ‘What has happened to our children?’

The general looked to one side, where Doctor Harrison had joined him on the platform. The kindly scientist spoke with a weary voice, as though he too had been without sleep for far too long.

‘For two years this facility has been used to run experiments that were part of
Project Hawkeye
, a secret initiative by the government and the CIA. It was designed to take advantage of new discoveries made by our finest scientists, discoveries so shocking that they have been classified ever since for fear of the effect that may have on the general public.’

‘What discoveries?’ Karen demanded.

Doctor Harrison looked at the general for permission, who nodded for him to continue.

‘The discoveries were made by mathematicians, and their calculations resulted in the realisation that what we understand as the passing of time is an illusion. Although time does flow as we see it, from the past to the present to the future, the past is not lost. It can be seen and even interacted with.’

Cas spoke up. ‘But I thought time travel was impossible?’

‘It is, Cas,’ Doctor Harrison replied. ‘No human being can travel through time.’

‘But we saw the past,’ Emily insisted. ‘We were there, and the people living there could see us.’

Doctor Harrison’s kindly smile broadened and he shook his head.

‘No, Emily, they could not see you,’ he assured her. ‘What they saw was you in a previous life. All of us have lived before and all of us will live again. You did not see the past through your own eyes: you saw the past through the eyes of your previous lives.’

* * *

19

‘Reincarnation,’ Cas said out loud. ‘My father wrote that in his diary.’

Doctor Harrison nodded. ‘I very much expect that he did, Cas.’

‘I want to know everything,’ Cas’s mother demanded. ‘And I want to see my husband, right now.’

General Winchester spoke again.

‘You can, but first you must understand what has happened and why. That will make it easier to bear.’

‘Make
what
easier to bear?’ Karen asked, sounding afraid for the first time.

Doctor Harrison gestured to the facility around them.

‘For all of history, mankind had seen ghosts, Mrs Ryan. We have television programs about people hunting for ghosts and endless books on the subject of hauntings. People witness ghosts walking about wearing old-fashioned clothes, yet all have always assumed that we’re seeing something that is somehow not real, not a part of our world. In fact, ghosts are as much a part of our world as we are and it’s all to do with time.’

Doctor Harrison gestured up at the big screen.

‘This image is of the Earth as it is now,’ he said. ‘You can see the time at the bottom right of the screen.’

Cas noticed for the first time a digital clock ticking away at the bottom of the screen.

‘As I was saying,’ Doctor Harrison went on, ‘ghosts are seen all the time, and it was learned by our scientists that it is our planet itself, the earth, that allows time to sometimes play back before our eyes. The planet is so big that it acts like a dynamo, twisting space and time around it and causing the effect we know as gravity. As it orbits our sun, it repeatedly passes through the same spot that it passed through last year, and the year before that, and like a giant aerial it detects the signals of last year and replays them.’

‘Like a television,’ Emily said spontaneously, ‘picking up a broadcast?’

‘Exactly!’ Doctor Harrison said. ‘So we see the past sometimes playing like a shadowy reflection of history: but how come we never see the ghost of a dinosaur, or a caveman? The reason is that at the same time as our planet revolves around the sun, the sun also revolves around our galaxy, the Milky Way. It takes the sun two hundred and fifty million years to go around our galaxy once, it’s so big. As it does so, the Earth is pulled along with it and gradually loses the signal from events in the past as its position changes. We only ever can see ghosts from the past few thousand years.’

Cas’s mother pieced together what had happened.

‘So you were trying to replicate that effect and use it to your own ends.’

‘We were,’ General Winchester replied. ‘We built a device that used electrical energy to mimick the earth’s ability to replay the past. The idea was that we could use it like a lens to look at the past as it unfolded. But the device required too much power to remain stable so we tried to shut it down.’

‘That’s a lie!’ Emily snapped. ‘Captain Ryan tried to shut it down – you were trying to stop him!’

‘What happened?’ Karen asked Doctor Harrison.

‘The device started to fluctuate,’ the scientist explained, ‘running out of control. At first the ball of energy was very small but then there was a sudden blast and it grew huge, so we tried to shut it down because there was a danger that it would escape its containment field and produce a truly enormous explosion. It was then that Cas and his friends were unfortunate enough to fall into the energy field.’

The mothers drew a collective gasp of horror. Cas spoke up again.

‘We were in the past for twenty-four hours, yet we never vanished from this room except to fall through the energy field. Now we’re seeing the past all the time around us. What’s happening?’

Doctor Harrison’s expression became grave, his voice heavy with regret.

‘As I said, you did not travel in time: instead you saw the past through the eyes of your previous selves. Likewise, your father. The reason that you were able to do this is because our human brains are not what people think they are. We assume our brains are part of us, our sense of self contained within them, but the brain is a receiver, an antenna just like our planet. It detects signals from the outside world and translates them into something that we can understand. Did you know that your eyes actually see the world up-side down, just like when you look at the surface of a spoon? It’s our brains that flip the image over to make sense to us.’

Doctor Harrison stepped down off the platform and looked at Cas.

‘Moving through that ball of energy changed the frequency of your brains,’ he explained. ‘It allowed you both to see and interact with the past through the eyes of your previous lives. We should have realised that there was no need for us to build machines to see the past with our own eyes, that it was our brains that were the key. So many people see ghosts without the need for huge machines to help them. Now it is too late to change what has happened, but at least we know how it is possible to see the past – by changing the frequency of our brains.’

‘And reincarnation,’ Jude said. ‘So because we lived before we therefore can exist in that previous time if our brains can be made to detect our previous selves?’

‘Yes,’ Doctor Harrison confirmed. ‘Your physical body never leaves the present, but your brain tunes in to the past. Have you ever heard of something called a
Doppelganger
?’

‘A
what
?’ Jude asked. ‘Sounds like a bad name for a rap group.’

‘It’s a legend,’ Cas’s mother said, ‘that people sometimes see themselves standing right in front of them. Supposedly it was a sign that they were about to die.’

‘It’s a real phenomenon,’ General Winchester said. ‘Part of the reason for starting this project was to investigate whether some people could naturally see their previous lives, as they had often claimed. The results for a lucky few people were astounding: they really could see the past. But when they did so, sometimes they could not resist looking for themselves, and the reaction of their previous selves was often one of shock or confusion. Contrary to the legend they never died as a result of the encounter, but it changed their perception of life profoundly.’

‘No kidding,’ Jude said. ‘Imagine, two of
me
. How awesome would that be?’

‘Not very,’ Emily replied tartly.

‘However, there is a problem,’ Doctor Harrison went on. ‘If people spend too long in the past it becomes harder and harder for their brain to return to the present. Stay too long, and they never return.’

‘Never?’ Cas echoed.

Emily’s voice reached Cas from what felt like a long way away.

‘Crazy Jo,’ she said. ‘Your dad. For him to have lived and haunted that shack, he can never have come back from the past.’

Doctor Harrison nodded.

‘Worse than that, the sudden isolation in a time that is not our own can cause people to lose their minds entirely.’ He sighed. ‘People who get stuck in the past eventually go insane.’

Cas stood rooted to the spot as his mother stalked closer to Doctor Harrison.

‘Take me to my husband,’ she snarled, ‘right now.’

* * *