The Mystery of the Galloping Ghost (8 page)

Trixie
rubbed her hands together excitedly. It was working out exactly as she’d
planned.

Now
they’d relate the best part, which they’d saved for last.

Wilhelmina’s
reaction to the story of Gunnar’s cabin was not what they’d expected, however.
“Take me there immediately,” she said.

The
girls looked at the woman, then at the gathering gloom. If there was one thing
they didn’t want to do, it was to go back to that cabin in the dark.

“Come,
come,” said Wilhelmina “If the ghost were truly a destructive one, we’d have
had some sign of it by now. There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’d stake my
reputation as an investigator on that fact.”

Trixie
took some courage from Wilhelmina’s statement.
She never says anything she isn’t sure of,
she thought. “All
right,” Trixie said. “We’ll take you to the cabin.”

“But
we can’t stay long,” said Honey. “We have to be back at the house before anyone
misses us.”

Wilhelmina
checked to make sure she had paper and a pencil in the pocket of her shirt,
then
signaled
the girls to take
the lead.

The
girls had changed into sneakers and applied a lot of insect repellent before
setting off to find Wilhelmina. Those two things made the repeat journey
easier.

Before
long, Trixie was touching Wilhelmina’s arm and saying, “There it is.” Having
paused, she felt reluctant to start forward again. But Wilhelmina plunged
ahead, leaving the girls no choice.

Wilhelmina
pulled a flashlight out of her pocket. She held it ready but didn’t turn it on.
Then she pulled open the door and stepped inside. The girls waited outside,
listening to the drone of mosquitoes.

After
a few seconds the flashlight went on and Wilhelmina said, “Would you girls come
in here, please?”

Trixie
stepped into the cabin and looked around. As she did, she felt a shiver run
down her spine.

What
she saw was a dusty, dirty room with absolutely no sign of life!

Trixie looked around
frantically
for some of the clues she’d seen before. There were none. The food, cup, and
plate were gone. The bare table was covered with a thick layer of grime. There
was no hat hanging on the wall.
The cupboard door hung by one
hinge.
The bed was just bare and rusty springs.

During
the day, the cabin had merely looked dusty and neglected. Now, by the light of
Wilhelmina’s flashlight, Trixie could see
spiderwebs
in every corner and a film of dust covering everything. Two sets of footprints
on the floor seemed to be the only disturbances.

Trixie
cast a desperate look at Honey. The girls had already irritated Wilhelmina
because they’d played along with the comb-and-brush trick. Now, the woman was
bound to think this was another prank.
She’ll never listen to another word we say,
Trixie thought.
She certainly won’t bother to teach us
anything more about psychic phenomena.
She turned to Wilhelmina and
opened her mouth to apologize, but the woman interrupted her before she could
get the words out.

“Fascinating!”
Wilhelmina James exclaimed. Her eyes were shining
behind her huge glasses. “You girls may have stumbled onto a most remarkable
psychic experience.”

“W-we
may have what?” Trixie said, puzzled. She couldn’t believe it; Wilhelmina
seemed genuinely excited.

“This
has all the earmarks of
retrocogni-tion
,” Wilhelmina
said. Seeing the girls’ blank looks, she added, “It is a highly technical term
that means ‘
traveling
backward in time.’ ” The girls
let the statement sink in. “You mean, when we were here this afternoon the
place really
was
inhabited,
only it wasn’t really this afternoon?”
Trixie
asked
.

Wilhelmina
peered at her.
“If you find that a useful way of clarifying
it, yes.
As with all psychic phenomena,
retrocognition
isn’t well understood. All we know is that, occasionally, a person may suddenly
experience a place or event that once existed but no longer does. The incidents
are difficult to verify because it’s impossible to prove that the sights or
sounds are exactly as they would have been at that earlier moment in history.
But we can verify that the sights and sounds simply could not have occurred in
the present.”

“I’m
afraid I’m not following you,” Honey said.

“Hmm.”
Wilhelmina James cast about for an easier
explanation. “Okay, here’s an example. Recent tourists in the north of
France
have
reported hearing the entire Battle of Dieppe, which occurred there in 1942.
They describe the same kinds of sounds—cannon fire and people
shouting—beginning and ending at around the same times, though on different
nights. Now, nobody tape-recorded the Battle of Dieppe, so we can’t say exactly
what it sounded like. What we
can
say is that the battle did begin and end at approximately the times that these
tourists reported hearing the sounds. We can also say that no other, more
ordinary explanation is available. For example, the ocean doesn’t sound like
cannon fire, and there were no large groups of people around who were shouting
at one another. What’s more, all the tourists claim that they have no knowledge
of the Battle of Dieppe. That, of course, is impossible to prove.”

“And
nobody thinks they just made their stories up?” Trixie asked anxiously.

“That’s
exactly what most people do think,” Wilhelmina told her, “because they are not
prepared to believe in psychic phenomena. However, the serious investigators of
the claims have found reasons to believe them. The tourists usually report
their experience quite innocently, assuming that everyone else has had it, too.
It’s only when they learn that nobody else has heard the sounds that they
realize they’ve experienced something unusual.”

“Could
we talk about this outside, please?” Honey asked in a plaintive voice.

Trixie
looked around the cabin and suddenly felt that she, too, would be more
comfortable elsewhere.

“You
girls can wait outside,” Wilhelmina said. “I need to make a few notes from
direct observation.” She took out her notepad and pencil and lost herself in
her work.

The
forest outside was nearly as gloomy as the cabin, but it was fresher-smelling
and less frightening.

“Do
you really think we
traveled
backward in time?” Honey
asked.

“I
don’t know,” Trixie told her. “Until a minute ago, I didn’t even know there was
such a thing, outside of books and movies. Wilhelmina seems to think so, and
she ought to know.”

“Do
you think it could happen again?” Honey persisted. “Could we spend the rest of
our lives walking into places and things that happened hundreds of years ago?
Oh, how awful!”

Trixie
put her arm around her friend’s shoulder, wishing she could think of some
comforting words. Honey’s thought was a frightening one. It was one thing to go
looking for a mystery; it was quite another to stumble into an adventure in a
time and place you knew nothing about.
Especially if nobody’s going to believe you when you tell them about it,
Trixie thought, but of course, she’d experienced
that
before! “We’ll just have to find out more from
Wilhelmina,” she told Honey.

The
psychic investigator came out of the cabin a few minutes later. “Most
interesting!” she said with relish. She started energetically back down the
path, with the girls following behind.

“Are
there other examples of
retrocognition
?” Trixie
asked.

“Oh
my, yes,” Wilhelmina told her. “The most famous was at
Versailles
,
also in
France
.
Two well-respected British schoolteachers visited there on August 10, 1901.
They took a wrong turn, went down a little-used path— and appear to have spent
most of the afternoon in the year 1789. They saw people dressed in period
clothes, who seemed to be carrying out the duties of people of that time.
What’s more, the people were recognizable in old court portraits that the two
women later found. One of the women appears to have been Marie Antoinette,
Queen of France.”

“Did
the women ever experience
retrocog-nition
again?”
Honey asked Wilhelmina.

“No.
They went back to
Versailles
repeatedly, but they were never able to duplicate the experience. Instead, they
spent most of their lives trying to convince people of what they’d seen. They
grew obsessed with the experience, until it made them a little crazy— and
nearly ruined their lives.”

Trixie
and Honey exchanged panic-stricken glances.

Then
Wilhelmina realized that her statement had been upsetting. “Of course, those
women may have been somewhat high-strung to begin with. Many other people have
experienced
retrocognition
—without similar fates.”

Trixie
breathed a sigh of relief, but Honey’s main concern hadn’t yet been resolved.
“I still don’t understand what makes
retrocognition
happen,” she said. “I mean, why to some people and not others? Why in some
places and not others?”

“We
have only theories,” Wilhelmina told her. “The most popular one is that, at
times of crisis, some intense emotional energy is discharged which lingers
around an area. Not many places are the scene of such crises, so not many are
prone to
retrocognition
.

“As
for the people who experience it,” Wilhelmina went on, “they seem to be, for
some reason, receptive to that psychic energy. And they are in the right place
at the right time. The battle sounds at
Dieppe
are only heard during the exact times of the battle—the month, day, and hour.”

“I
get it,” Trixie said. “The French Revolution was in 1789, and that was a
crisis.”

“Absolutely
correct,” said Wilhelmina. “Marie Antoinette—and, presumably, many of the
nobles at the
Palace
of
Versailles
that
day—were shortly to be overthrown and beheaded. It was a time of sweeping
social change and radical upheaval.”

“That
would release some emotional energy, all right,” Trixie agreed, putting her
hand to her throat.

“Hmm,”
Honey said thoughtfully. “Actually, I can feel something in the air whenever
somebody I’m close to is upset. If a whole lot of people were terribly upset,
that something might
stay
in the air—for years, even.”

“Exactly,”
Wilhelmina said with an approving nod. “That kind of sensitivity may have
enabled you to experience the
retrocognition
.” Honey
didn’t look grateful. “What I don’t understand,” she continued, “is why Trixie
and I had the experience back at the cabin. There wasn’t even anybody there.”

“Ah,
but there had been,” Wilhelmina said, pointing a finger at the sky. “My guess
is that you visited the cabin moments after old Gunnar
Bjorkland
had fled to escape the lynch mob.”

After
that announcement, there seemed to be little more to say. The girls left
Wilhelmina and returned to the house.

Honey
looked pale and drawn. She said almost nothing until Trixie reached up to turn
out their light that night. Then she wailed, “Oh, Trixie, I’m scared!”

“Of what?”

“Of going backward in time again.”

“It
wasn’t that scary.”

“That
was before we knew what it was.”

“Well,
there’s no need for us ever to go back to the cabin again.”

“That
isn’t the point! I feel as though it could happen to me again anytime,
anywhere. I feel so helpless!” Honey had pulled her blanket up under her chin
and looked truly frightened.

Trixie
didn’t know what to say. Honey was, indeed, more sensitive to others’ feelings
than most people were. That might make her more prone to
retrocognition
.
Maybe the only reason I had the
experience is that I was with Honey,
Trixie thought.

“I
wish I knew why it happened,” Honey said. “And if it was just because of me.
Then I might not feel as though I were going to—to fall through a hole in the
clock any minute.”

“We’ll
figure it out before we leave
Minnesota
,”
Trixie said. “I promise.”

The
girls put up a good enough show that morning at breakfast to keep anyone from
asking questions. Trixie could tell that Honey was pale and withdrawn, and she
thought Regan was looking at both of them suspiciously, but nothing was said.

Before
breakfast was over, the telephone rang and Bill Murrow answered it. As he
talked, his responses grew shorter and louder. His last sentence, before he
hung up with a crash, was, “I’ve known you for twenty years, Lars Anderson, and
I’ve known you to have some pretty dumb ideas, but this is the dumbest!”

Bill
came back to the table, pulled out his chair, and set it down with enough force
to splinter it. Then he picked up his coffee cup and set it down with a bang.
He looked around the table to make sure that he had everyone’s attention before
he said, “Lars Anderson has company coming in next week. They’re from the big
city, and he doesn’t know what to do that’s exciting around here. So he wants
to bring ’em out some evening to see our ghost.” Pat Murrow let out a burst of
laughter,
then
lowered his head to stare at the table.

His
mother wasn’t amused. “That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard!”

“That’s
what I told him,” Bill Murrow agreed.

Just
then the phone rang again. This time, Charlene went to answer it. She came back
looking like a thundercloud. “That was Mark
Onsgard
.
He wanted to know if his scout troop could have their overnight camp-out here—
‘because everyone wants to see the ghost.’ ” She mimicked her caller’s
enthusiastic tone. Needing to do something to take her mind off the call, Mrs.
Murrow began clearing the breakfast dishes, without even trying to force second
and third helpings on anyone.

The
others hurriedly went outside to get out of her way. Bill Murrow remained
angry. But Pat said to the girls, “It isn’t that I want the place overrun with
ghost-hunters. But it’s just amazing how fast news travels around these parts.
Anything that happens is everybody’s business, because we’ve all got such a
sense of ownership here.”

“It’s
kind of nice, when you describe it that way,” Trixie said.

“Do
you want to explain that to Mom and Dad?” he asked, grinning.

“No way!”
Trixie said firmly.

The
young people were still laughing when they heard someone in the driveway. It
was Burke.

He
swung down from his truck and strode over to the corral. “My phone’s been
ringing off the hook,” he said with a beaming smile. “Word of the ghost has
gotten out, and people are asking about it. They want a view of the ghost from
their unit! Isn’t that great?” He looked around at a circle of sullen faces.
“Oh, hey, wait—I didn’t explain. This means the deal is back on! If people want
ghosts, I’ll give ’em a whole ghost town. I won’t change a thing after you
people move out. Just let the cobwebs grow, maybe set up a little souvenir
stand in the stable. It’ll be great. People will come from all over the state
to see—”