Stories by Victor Epp

Heather Stone

Meagan had been down this path a thousand times, it seemed. It was her favorite place to go when she wanted to be by herself, and she wanted to be by herself quite often. Not that she was a “social-icer” as some people liked to call her. But she liked her own company. On this path she could daydream, or sort out her problems, or lick her wounds after having lost an argument.

Over the back fence and through a clump of willows just tall enough to hide her from view, beyond the tall mound of earth that had been dredged out long ago to make a pond for livestock, and there it was. The gentle breeze and brilliant sunshine brought wild flowers and grasses to life, waving softly to welcome her this afternoon.

Meagan felt better already. With the afternoon sun warming her back she made her way along the path to the giant granite boulder that sat in a clearing about a quarter mile ahead. That was her place, her thinking place – on top of the jagged ancient rock. If there was some sort of energy in it, maybe some magnetic force, Meagan couldn’t tell. But when she sat on it’s flat, warm surface after scrambling up, answers to her problems or questions seemed to appear in her head all by themselves. She thought of the great stone as a wise old grandmother telling her what she needed to know. She had even given it a name. Heather, yes Heather, mainly because of the little blue flowers growing around it. Their tiny pale blue petals would dance and sparkle, even in the shade whenever Meagan drew near. It was a lovely place that embraced her. Yes, that was it – it embraced her.

The only reason Meagan headed out today was because she just felt like it. Summer holidays still lingered, her chores at home were all done and, well, she just felt like it, that’s all. It seemed like a perfectly good idea to visit Heather and do some daydreaming and this was the very day to do it.

“Well, wise old grandmother,” she said right out loud once she had got settled comfortably on the stone, “tell me something I want to know that I didn’t know I want to know.”

She smiled. That was something different! Usually Meagan had some particular thing on her mind that she wanted to know answers to. Not today though. Heck, she didn’t even know what she wanted to know. Well, she supposed, that must be a particular thing she wanted to know, even if she didn’t know what it was.

As usual, Meagan stuck her elbows on the insides of her knees that stuck out sideways the way they do when you sit cross-legged. She made a couple of fists and poked them into her cheeks, propping up her face with the process. Then she closed her eyes and waited – and waited – and waited. Nothing was happening. Oh well, it was probably a dumb request anyway. Then something occurred to her. Where were her manners anyway?

“Please,” she said.

A sudden breeze came up out of nowhere and rustled the leaves in the trees. Was that some sort of a response? Naw, it couldn’t be. Meagan pinched her eyes shut even tighter and waited again. Still nothing. Well, this was certainly going nowhere, she thought after a while. Patience girl, she said to herself. She was here anyway and what’s more, was very comfortable, more comfortable than she would be anywhere else. Why not spend some time and think about – well, about nothing in particular, maybe even everything in general while she was at it.

Maybe the wise old grandmother was asleep or something that she didn’t respond to Meagan. Grandmothers did that sometimes, even ones that were not real. Meagan wondered why that was. Shoot, she had a grandmother she hadn’t even met. In fact she’d never even heard anything about her. That was Meagan’s mom’s mom. Strange, she thought. No one ever spoke about her. Just the very idea made Meagan curious about her real grandmother. It was as though she had never even existed.

Well, that was just wrong. Everybody had a right to a grandmother, even if she had passed away. All Meagan’s friends had grandmothers, except Marla whose grandmother had died of cancer. But even Marla had wonderful memories of her grandma that she would tell about. Meagan could only listen and wish she could do the same.

Out of the blue, Meagan’s eyes popped wide open to the size of saucers. Her chin dropped almost to her lap. She knew what she didn’t know she wanted to know! She wanted to know about her grandmother! The answer had just snuck up on her. Suddenly it became very important for Meagan to find out a few things about her grandmother. Not only that, she wanted to know why no one ever spoke about her. Was there some big secret or something? It was time mom gave her some answers.

“Thank you, wise grandmother,” she said putting both hands on the warm stone. “Thank you, Heather.”

Helen Dumas froze in her tracks. She had just heard Meagan ask about her grandmother – Helen’s own mother. No one had dared utter her name since Helen was ten and was told the terrible truth about what happened to her mother that awful night Helen was born. No one dared speak of it for fear of awakening the spirit that had consumed Maria Savage within an hour of giving birth to the tiny, fragile Helen.

“Don’t ask!” she screamed at her daughter. “Don’t ever speak of her again – in this house or any other!” She was hysterical and trembling like a leaf.

“But why, mom? What’s so terrible?” Meagan asked. She noticed her mother trembling. She’s never seen her like that before and it frightened her.

“Just don’t,” said Helen, trying to calm herself. She would say no more.

What could be such a terrible secret that it wasn’t ever to be talked about? Usually she and her mom talked about everything, but this – this was something she wasn’t used to. Confused, Meagan went to her room. She stayed there until supper and went back to it the minute she had done the dishes. The last thing she wanted to do was upset her mother again, so she ate, washed up and returned to the quiet of her bedroom to think things out.

Somewhere in the middle of her thinking, Meagan must have fallen asleep. She awoke with a start, shivering on her bed. The light was on and she was still dressed, but it was dark outside. The clock on her dresser said three-twenty. She’d slept half the night away! She quickly undressed, brushed her teeth as quietly as possible and tiptoed back to her bed. Under the warm covers, Meagan was fast asleep again before she had time to think about anything else.

At breakfast, Helen was her usual cheery self again, as though yesterday had never happened. That was a relief because Meagan’s mind was still full of it. Not the part about her mom being upset, but the mystery surrounding her grandmother. She couldn’t let go of the idea. Perhaps uncle George had been right in describing her “one-way” brain as he used to call it when she would pester him with questions and not let up until she had the answer. He would laugh and say it was easy for Meagan to get something into her head, but impossible to get out until she was satisfied.

Maybe uncle George was more right than he’d imagined. What Meagan did today was a case in point. Unfortunately though, this was not going to be a good day to go for a picnic on the rock. It was pouring cats and dogs. How disappointing. Now what? She didn’t want to risk questioning her mother again, and it was too wet to go out on the trail. Well maybe, just maybe the game that she used to play with Gidge when they were younger would give her an answer. It was worth a try.

When Helen walked into the dining room she did a double take. Sitting at the table was Meagan – stone faced, eyes closed, and each hand grasping a pencil pressed to a blank sheet of paper. She looked as though she was under a spell.

“What in the world are you up to young lady?” she puzzled.

No answer.

“Meagan, I’m speaking to you.”

Still no answer.

Helen resisted the urge to grab the pencils from her daughter and just went back into the kitchen. That worked, as it usually did. Within minutes Meagan was in the kitchen.

“Sorry mom,” she started, “but I was concentrating. You can’t lose your focus when you’re doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Concentrating.”

“On what?”

“Automatic writing. It’s like a Ouija Board without a Ouija Board. When you do automatic writing you have to focus on what you’re thinking about and your subconscious sometimes makes your hands write something down without you knowing it. You remember. Gidge and I used to play it all the time. It’s a brain game.”

Of course Helen knew what was in her daughter’s mind, but she wasn’t going to go there. It was too horrific. She felt bad about yesterday, but Meagan had caught her off guard. She wasn’t prepared and kind of lost it for a minute. Now that she knew, she could dodge any question Meagan might have. She’d done it enough times. Better to let the girl play her little mind games and get it out of her system. “So what did your hands write then?”

“I don’t know for sure, mom. You interrupted me. I’ll have to start all over.”

“Oh.”

Meagan stared at the two pieces of paper. The pencils hadn’t moved. No, wait, the one in her left hand had started but then the lead had broken. ‘Rats,’ Meagan muttered under her breath and went to sharpen the pencil. When she sat down again she switched pencils in her hand, closed her eyes and strained her brain on her grandmother. It wasn’t until she had to go to the bathroom so bad she couldn’t wait any longer, that she opened them. When she got back to look at the paper, sure enough there had been movement in the left hand again. But the lead had broken again before anything legible could be made out. But there was definitely something there in the right hand. She was on to something. It would be foolish to give up now.

The third time Meagan replaced the pencils with ballpoint pens. She focused again, trying to visualize her grandmother – what she looked like, the clothes she wore and how her voice sounded. It was hard to tell how long she sat there, transfixed in a hypnotic state like that. It must have been a long time because her hands were cramped and aching. Meagan looked down at the pieces of paper. The left hand piece showed an absolutely straight line angled upwards. About two inches up it stopped like Meagan had pressed down very hard and broken the pen point. When she looked in her hand she found that not only had she broken the point, but the whole pen! There was ink all over her hands. No wonder they were so cramped.

The right hand paper was a whole different matter. There was writing, beautiful writing. Meagan was amazed at the even pen strokes. She was left handed and could never write so smoothly, even with her left hand. The only problem was that she couldn’t understand what it said. Oh, the alphabet was English all right, but the words certainly weren’t. Not only that, but there were so many of them that they ran right off the page and on to the table. When Meagan tried to copy them on to the other piece, her writing looked like chicken scratch against the automatic writing.

Well, now what? She was no farther ahead than when she started. In fact, she seemed to be even more confused. First she had a mystery that she didn’t even know she wanted to know about. Then, discovering her own curiosity, she came upon an even greater mystery in the handwriting. Were the two even connected? That was a third mystery. When would the questions end and the answers begin? Meagan consciously tried to calm herself. She had worked herself up too much. This was no way to get answers. Calm down first, analyze the situation and then act. Of course, Meagan knew that. It was basic detective work. She carefully finished copying the writing that had spilled over onto the table, washed the ink from it and as much as she could get off her hand, and took the papers to her room out of her mother’s sight.

Too bad Gidge wasn’t around to help her with this. Oh well, she’d just have to make do, but where to start. With the pages laid out on the bed in front of her, and squatting in her favorite position, Meagan stared from one page to the other, unable to come up with even the faintest idea what they meant. What puzzled her most of all was the neat, fluid writing on the page to her right. She couldn’t write like that to save her life. Something or someone else must have guided her hand. Could it be that whoever the writer might be was trying to communicate with her? Meagan touched her fingers lightly to the paper and felt a chill go up her arm. She was really beginning to wonder if she wanted to know anymore about what she didn’t know she wanted to know.

But then, to give up in the middle of something was not in Meagan’s nature. There would just have to be another way to get answers. First she’d have to figure out a way to ask the questions without continually being cut off, like she was by her mom. It wasn’t likely that Uncle Walt would be anymore co-operative. Uncle Walt, he was mom’s older brother by twelve years and the only other child on that side of the family. Besides, he was kind of closed mouthed and uppity with them anyway. Meagan had a feeling that he didn’t like them much. Maybe that something that made them not want to talk about grandma had something to do with mom and Uncle Walt was holding it against her.

Well, that must be it. Something must have happened, something really awful. Hm, if it was all that bad, it must have been in the news, right - but when? That gave Meagan an idea. Old Sherman Rogers, he lived about a half mile down the road. He had retired from the RCMP a number of years ago and now spent most of his time gardening in the summer and traveling in the winter. He’d been around long enough to know if anything special happened in the last forty years or so. She’d ask him. Her mom was only thirty-six but Meagan figured if she rounded it off to forty, old Sherm wouldn’t suspect what she was after. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a start. All she needed now was an excuse to go see old Sherm.

It came sooner and easier than expected. Meagan was still puzzling over the automatic writing when he phoned. He wanted to drop off some of the new potatoes and cucumbers out of his garden for Helen. He did that sometimes. There was just him and Alice at home now and way too much produce for the two of them, so he’d go around the neighborhood giving it all away. As it happened, Helen had gone out that afternoon and Meagan was by herself at home.

“Oh, that would be great Mr. Rogers,” she said happily. “Mom’s out but I’m here. I wanted to talk to you anyway about a project I just started working on.”

“What I’m trying to do,” she said after she’d put all the stuff onto the kitchen counter, “what I want to find out is, well – um, you’ve been around here a long time and I was wondering if you remembered from your police work, some of the worst things that happened in this community over the last forty years or so.”

Well, so far so good. She hadn’t told a lie yet. And Sherm fell right in line. He loved to talk about his days on the force, especially to young people for whom he could set an example. He made himself comfortable on a kitchen chair.

“Doing a project eh? Well, lets see.” Whereupon he started randomly rattling off petty thefts, domestic disputes, fires and cattle rustling and you name it. There was a lot that had gone on, but nothing that interested Meagan.

“What about natural disasters?” she asked innocently. That brought on another bunch of events including snowstorms, floods, and heat waves.

“Oh wait,” he paused, rubbing his chin as if trying to remember. “I almost forgot. Yeah, there was one thing. You might call it an unnatural disaster. It was about thirty-five years ago. No, it would be thirty-six. I remember now because I had just had my tenth anniversary on the force.”

“Darndest thing,” Sherm muttered almost to himself. “Never heard of such a phenomenon before or since. A fire it was, but not a fire you’d normally see. Actually happened not far from here as I recall. Don’t remember all the details now but they called it spontaneous human combustion. Is that too scary for you, kid?”

“Oh no!” Meagan said, trying to hide her excitement. “That’s just the kind of thing to make a good story for my project.”

“Well then, here’s what I remember. Seems there was this young woman living by herself in a little cottage. She was expecting a baby and nobody knew who the father was. It was the gossip all over town. Those days it was pretty taboo to have a child if you weren’t married. Still should be, if you ask me.

“Anyway, she more or less withdrew for everybody and holed up in her cottage the whole time until she was due to have the baby. It just happened that old Mrs. Johnson who was a well known midwife in these parts – do you know what a midwife is?”

“No, tell me.”

“It’s one of them women delivers babies when there’s no doctor around.”

Sherm was warming up to the story now. “Well, Mrs. Johnson was one of those people who had an instinct about them things and I guess she figured she’d look in on this lady, whatever her name was, to see if she was alright.

“The timing couldn’t have been better. Right then and there the woman went into labor and Mrs. Johnson delivered a bouncing healthy girl within the hour.”

Meagan could hardly contain herself. “And -,”she indicated, wanting him to continue. The name Johnson rang a bell and there might be a clue.

“Well, this is where the mystery comes in. Mrs. Johnson was just busy cleaning and tidying up. When she’d done, she took the baby into the kitchen to clean her up and make sure everything was as it should be. Suddenly she smelled smoke. It was coming from the bedroom. It wasn’t like cigarette smoke or anything like that, but the kind coming from a smoke house, smelled like burning meat.”

Meagan give a little shudder, but said nothing.

“She rushed into the bedroom and nearly passed out at what she saw. When she showed up at the station with the baby in her arms she was hysterical. We could hardly make out what she was trying to tell us. We finally got her calmed down enough to tell us where she’d been and went there as fast as we could go.

“When we got inside the smoke had more or less disappeared, but nobody was ready for what we saw. There on the bed was what was left of the woman, almost completely burned to ashes. One hand and both her legs from the knee down had fallen off the bed and were just lying there on the floor. On the bed was a pile of ashes and just a bit of her hair and her teeth. Yet the bed was hardly even burned.

“Forensics couldn’t explain what had happened, but they needed to call it something so they labeled it spontaneous human combustion. And by the time the newspapers got through with all their write-ups they had folks around here all nervous and spooked. They figured there was evil spirits around and didn’t want anything to do with them. I’ll tell you just how spooked they were. They were so spooked they got a big front-end loader and bulldozed the whole cottage down until there was nothing left. And just to make sure nothing came out of the ground they hauled over a huge boulder and plunked it down where the house had been.”

“Wow!” Meagan was hypnotized by the story. “Do you know what happened to the baby?”

“Naw, I didn’t keep track. I think at least for a while, Mrs. Johnson took care of her. Say kid. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned any of this – police business, you know. But I kind of got carried away because it was so unusual. If it’s all the same to you, well just keep this between us.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” said Meagan, relieved that nothing was going to get back to her mom.

“Well, sweetie, I’d better get on my way. Was nice chatting with you. Say hi to your mom.”

“See you, and thanks – for everything.” she called after him as he drove off.

Meagan’s mind was racing now. She knew in her heart that Sherm had been talking about her grandmother, even though he didn’t realize it. He hadn’t even said her name, but Meagan knew. She just knew. He had said it was in all the papers at the time. All she had to do was find some of those papers. But how? Maybe if she phoned the paper, they might have some ideas. And then there was the automatic writing that she couldn’t decipher. What could she do with that? It was all piling up on her. There was only one thing to do.

Thankfully, the sun had come out again and it promised to be a bright, warm day. As soon as she could, Meagan took the papers with the automatic writing on them and headed for Heather. She wasn’t sure how that was going to solve anything, but she just did it. But this time nothing happened. She just had a warm feeling through her whole body when she perched herself on the stone. It was so comfortable she lingered there longer than she had intended.

What was it that Sherm had called it, spontaneous something or other? Human combustion - that was it, spontaneous human combustion. She’d look it up on the Internet. Once she did, Meagan wished she hadn’t bothered. It was grizzly. People would catch on fire for no apparent reason and just burn up, mostly just their bodies, leaving arms and legs untouched, sometimes even the heads. It wouldn’t have seemed as bad if they hadn’t shown pictures, but these were very graphic, sensationalized.

Well now Meagan was beginning to understand why her mom got hysterical when she was pushed for an explanation. Imagining her own mother being burned up like that sent goose bumps and shivers up Meagan’s spine. But she couldn’t give up now that she’d come this far. The newspapers, Sherm had said. It’d been all over the newspapers. Many of them operating at the time had closed, been sold or had become part of the main paper in town. That one had been around for nearly a hundred years. Perhaps there was a way after all.

It took a long time to explain exactly what she wanted to the Archivist at the newspaper because archivists seem to speak their own professional language, which doesn’t necessarily make any sense to a twelve-year-old. But bit-by-bit Meagan pieced it together. Yes they kept copies of each edition since the paper started, and yes she could look through them until she found what she was after, and yes, she could have a photocopy for ten cents a page. All she had to do now was figure out a way to get there without raising her mother’s suspicion.

It was weeks before the opportunity finally came, but at last she was there. Meagan had expected some sort of museum or something but instead it was just a room with a lot of file cases and files and viewers to look at the microfiche slides. It took a bit of experimenting to get the hang of it, but it wasn’t long before she knew how to find what she was after. Now then, she thought, down to business. Let’s see. Mom’s birthday was June 12^th. That was a Thursday that year. One by one Meagan went through every page with no results. Strange, she thought, until it occurred to her that it wouldn’t be reported on the same day. She started to get discouraged when she had no more luck on Friday.

Meagan was getting a little worried. Maybe the whole thing was a hoax and she would find nothing. But when she opened up Saturday’s front page, there it was! The headline literally screamed at her; ‘Fire Destroys New Mother And Little Else’! Meagan’s eyes froze on the page! She couldn’t move her eyeballs! That was it! She knew that was it! But she couldn’t make herself read on. Seeing that headline staring up at her was like fifty thousand volts shooting through her body. Suddenly she understood how her mother felt. Meagan sat there staring at the headline on the screen for what seemed to be an eternity before she was able to move again.

“Are you all right?” the archivist asked, tapping Meagan on the shoulder. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Startled, Meagan sputtered a moment, and said, “yeah – yeah I guess so.”

“Did you find what you wanted, dear?”

“Yes. Could you make me a copy to take home, please? And could you put it in a big envelope.”

“That’ll be four dollars and eighty-three cents with the tax,” said the lady.

Meagan paid her, taking the envelope without looking inside and headed straight home. She was able to spirit the envelope to her room without her mother noticing.

“Did you have a nice time downtown honey,” Helen asked absently as Meagan breezed past her.

“Yeah, it was okay, I guess.”

“That’s nice. Do anything special?”

Naw – just kid stuff – you know.”

Everything was in Meagan’s hands now, but she didn’t have the nerve to look at it, not for another three days. Even then the only way she felt she could manage was to take the package with her to the giant rock and open it there. Somehow that gave her confidence. And it built too as she got closer to the ancient stone. The sun was bright and the little blue flowers sparkled more brightly than usual.

“Well wise grandmother,” she said out loud, clambering up to take her place, “now that I know what it is I didn’t know what it was I wanted to know, maybe I’ll get to know about it altogether.”

Then she opened the package. The headline jumped out at her again, just as stark as it had at the newspaper office. This time though, Meagan was able to read the article beneath. Most of the things in the article she already knew, either from what Sherman had told her or from the internet – until she came to the last paragraph:

‘The twenty-six year old woman was finally identified as a Heather Stone, a recent arrival from Jordan via Ireland –‘

“Heather Stone!” Meagan was so shocked that she yelled out the name. She was sitting on the stone she had named Heather. She was sitting on Heather Stone! She was sitting on her grandmother! This must be where it happened. Didn’t Sherm say it wasn’t far from their place? Didn’t he say that the people were so spooked that they demolished the house and put a huge boulder in the place where it stood to make sure the spirit that burned the woman didn’t return? Of course he did! And this was the place, and this was the stone, Meagan knew it – knew I for sure! She thought she heard the tinkling of beautiful laughter, or did she just feel it? Meagan returned her eyes to the page.

‘The newspaper has learned from documents at the Immigration office that the woman was a native Jordanian who married Irish electrical engineer Bertram Stone while he was working in Amman, Jordan. Fearing reprisals from her family for marrying other than the husband chosen for her, the couple fled to Belfast. From there they made application for immigrant status in Canada following further death threats from her father. Tragically, her husband was electrocuted in a freak accident while on board the S.S. Minnedosa on the voyage to Canada. In her statement to the immigration officials a distraught Mrs. Stone said that she would rather not live than parted from her husband. Ironically, she seems to have gotten her wish.’

The article went on with – well, Meagan’s eyes didn’t see any more. She was too awe struck. She put the article down absently.

“Wow!” she sighed. “Just wow.”

Meagan lay down on her stomach, spreading her arms and legs wide apart to take in as much of the energy as possible. She had a grandma after all. Not only that, her spirit was right here inside this boulder that people had put there to block out any spirits. They had obviously failed. Meagan had been talking to her own grandmother all this time without even knowing it – well, to her spirit anyway. That amounted to about the same thing, didn’t it? And imagine, she had even called the stone Heather. That had to be more than coincidence. And the automatic writing – if she ever got it translated, would probably contain a message. Suddenly Meagan had a warm feeling all over. For now, that was enough.