Chapter 2

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 6:40 P.M.

I stopped there for a while because all of this has made me think of Sarah.

I wonder if she were here whether she'd be telling what happened the same way. Not writing it down — "Not my thing," she always said. But I wonder if she would remember things differently.

I look back, I see warning signs.

Sarah looks back, she sees invitations.

I miss her.

I blame her.

I'm scared for her.

I'm scared of her. Not a lot. But some.

It was wrong of me to write "I blame her."

It's not like she tricked me into anything.

I went along willingly.

I was the one who put my life on the line.

Even if I didn't realize I was doing it.

I guess what I'm saying is that none of this would have happened if Sarah hadn't been around.

Now —

I do miss her.

And I do blame her.

And I'm sure her story would be different from mine.

But where was I? Oh, yeah — we began reading through the stack of newspapers. From 1947 to 1958, there had been a monthly paper for the 1200 residents. The paper had an uninspiring name — The Linkford Bi-Weekly — but it told us what our town had once been called. Linkford. It had a nice ring to it, or so I thought at the time.

The title of the paper became more interesting in 1959 when it was renamed The Skeleton Creek Irregular. (This was an appropriate name, for we could only find a handful of papers dated between 1959 and

1975, when the publisher fled to Reno, Nevada, and took the printing press with him.)

Linkford sat alone on a long, empty road at the bottom of a forested mountain in the western state of Oregon. It surprised us to discover that an official from the New York Gold and Silver Company had suggested the town name be changed to Skeleton Creek. Actually, we were fairly dumbstruck that anyone from New York would take an interest in our town at all.

"Why in the world would a big city mining company want to change the name of the town?" I remember asking Sarah.

"It's that monstrous machine in the woods," she answered. "The dredge. I bet that has something to do with it. They probably owned it."

The dredge. Already, we were headed toward the dredge. I'll bet Sarah was planning things in her mind even way back then.

Not knowing the consequences.

Just thinking about the mystery.

We pieced together the small bits of information we could gather from those who would talk (hardly anyone) and the newspapers we'd been given (less than thirty in all, none complete editions). We had gone as far as creepy old Gladys Morgan said we should go, and yet we kept pulling on the thread we'd taken hold of.

Of course, I was less enthusiastic than Sarah at first, knowing that if our parents discovered what we were doing, they would demand that we stop prying into other people's business. Privacy has long been the religion of our town.

But Sarah can be persuasive, especially when she finds something she wants to record on film. She could be consumed by filmmaking in the same way that I am with writing. Our creative obsessions seem to draw us together like magnets, and I had a hard time pulling away when she was determined to drag me along.

And so we kept digging.

Of course, I know where all of this is going.

I just have to get it down on paper.

One last time.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 8:30 P.M.

Remember.

I have to try to remember all the details. They could still be important.

It feels like midnight: it's only 8:30.

How did this happen to me?

Stop, Ryan. Go back.

Remember.

Even if you know how it's going to feel.

Even if you don't have any of the answers.

There were small announcements in four of the newspapers that alluded to something called the Crossbones. They were cryptic ads in nature, containing a series of symbols and brief text that seemed to have no meaning. One such message read as follows: The floor and 7th, four past the nine on door number two. Crossbones. Who in their right mind could decipher such nonsense? Certainly not us.

All of the advertisements came between the years of 1959 and 1963 and all appeared in The Skeleton Creek Irregular. Then, in 1964, they ceased altogether, as if they had never existed at all. But the same symbols could still be found in various places. One of the symbols — two bones tangled in barbed wire — could be seen above the door to the local bar, on a signpost at the edge of town, and again carved into a very old tree along a pathway into the woods. It made us wonder if the members of the Crossbones were still meeting. Who had been part of the society? What was its function? Were there still active members — and, if so, who were they?

Our trail dead-ended with the advertisements.

We searched relentlessly online for clues to our town's past. New York Gold and Silver was bankrupted over environmental lawsuits, and it seemed to vanish into thin air after 1985. But this didn't keep us from sneaking down the dark path into the woods to examine what was left behind.

Do I wish we'd never gone down that path?

Yes.

No.

I don't know.

It's too complicated.

Or is it? None of this would have happened if we'd stayed away from the dredge.

The dredge is a crucial part of the town's dreary past. It sits alone and unvisited in the deepest part of the dark woods. The dredge, we discovered, was a terrible machine. Its purpose was to find gold, and its method was grotesque. 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, the dredge sat in a muddy lake of its own making. It dug deep into the earth and hauled gargantuan buckets of stone and debris into itself. Nothing escaped its relentless appetite. Everything went inside the dredge. Trees and boulders and dirt clods the size of my head were sifted and shaken with a near-deafening racket, and then it was all spit out behind in piles of rubble ten feet high. A tail of ruin — miles and miles in length — all so tiny bits of gold could be sifted out.

The trench that was left behind as the dredge marched forward formed the twenty-two-mile streambed that zigzags wildly along the edge of town and up into the low part of the mountain. The gutted earth filled with water, and the banks were strewn with whitewashed limbs that looked like broken bones.

The new waterway torn from earth and stone was called Skeleton Creek by a man in a suit from New York. Maybe it had been a joke, maybe not. Either way the name stuck. Soon after, the town took the name as well. It would seem that New York Gold and Silver held enough sway over Linkford to change the town name to whatever it wanted.

The greatest discovery — or the worst, depending on how you look at it — that Sarah and I made involved the untimely death of a workman on the dredge. There was only one mention of the incident in the newspaper, and nothing anywhere else. Old Joe Bush is what they called him, so I can only conclude that he was not a young man. Old Joe Bush had let his pant leg get caught in the gears, and the machinery of the dredge had pulled him through, crushing his leg bone into gravel. Then the dredge spit him out into the grimy water. His leg was demolished, and under the deafening sound in the dark night, no one heard him scream.

Old Joe Bush never emerged from the black pond below.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 10:00 P.M.

Okay. I think everyone is asleep now.

It's as safe as it's going to get.

Late last night, on my arrival home from the hospital, I was reunited with my computer. This may seem like a strange thing to write, but the already walloping power of a computer is magnified even more for people like me in a small, isolated town. It is the link to something not boring, not dull, not dreary. It has always been especially true in my case because Sarah is constantly making videos, posting them, and asking me to take notice.

One simple click — that's all it can take for your life to change.

Sometimes for the better.

Sometimes for the much worse.

But we don't think about that.

No, we just click.

There is a certain video she made fifteen days ago, a day before the accident. This video is like a road sign that says YOU'VE GONE TOO FAR. TURN BACK. I am afraid to look at it again, because I know that after I watch it, I'm going to have even more of a bewildering sense that my life has been broken into two parts — everything that came before this video, and everything that would come after.

As much as I don't want to, I'm going to stop writing now. There is a safety in writing late into the night, but I can't put off watching it again. I have to see it once more, now that things have changed for the worse.

It might help me.

It might not.

But I have to do it.

I have to.

I'm afraid.

It's so simple. Just go to Sarah's name online. Sarahfincher.com. Enter the password houseofusher. Then click return.

One click.

Do it, Ryan.

Do it.

SARAHFINCHER.COM

PASSWORD:

HOUSEOFUSHER

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 11:00 P.M.

Sarah went to the dredge without me that night. What was my excuse? Homework. She knew it was a lie, and I knew it was a lie, and instead of being mad, Sarah went ahead without me like she always did when I balked at an opportunity for adventure. Did I get any homework done? No. I just waited for her to get back, for her to send word she was okay.

Then the password appeared in my inbox. I was glad to know Sarah was safe, but I didn't know what to make of the creepy video she'd sent me.

I watched it about ten times that night. I sat at my desk wondering if it was something she'd concocted to scare the wits out of me. That would have been expected, since I'd refused to go with her into the woods. She was always doing that — hoaxing me into feeling guilty.

The next morning, I walked down to her house with the intent of congratulating her on giving me a good scare. I wanted to know how she'd gotten the effect of the scary face in the window. But the conversation didn't go as I'd expected.

"You think I made it up?"

She said it like she couldn't believe I'd even think such a thing. Like she hadn't done it to me a million times before.

I thought it was still part of the act.

"Don't get me wrong," I said. "It's some of your best work. You really scared me with those gear sounds and — what was that — a man at the window? You must have had help from someone. Who helped you?"

She shook her head. I can remember it so clearly.

"All I did was walk into the woods with my camera. No one helped me do anything."

"You're serious?"

There had been a long pause, followed by a familiar look of determination.

"If you don't believe me, let's go back tonight and you can see for yourself."

If this were a video, not a journal, I'd have to stop. I'd have to rewind. I'd have to play that line again.

"If you don't believe me, let's go back tonight and you can see for yourself."

And again.

"If you don't believe me, let's go back tonight and you can see for yourself."

I didn't know what it would lead to. How could I have?

She didn't even ask. It wasn't, "Do you want to go back tonight and see for yourself?"

No, she was smarter than that.

She didn't give me

a chance to say no.

"If you don't believe me, let's go back tonight and you can see for yourself."

We watched the video twice more on her laptop, and both times a chill ran up my spine. It seemed real, and usually when I called Sarah's bluff, she admitted it. Besides, I asked myself, how could she have created something so elaborate and so real? Even for someone of Sarah's editing skill, it seemed impossible.

I believed her.

"Tonight at midnight," she said. "Meet me at the trailhead and we'll go together."

"You're sure about this?"

"Are you kidding? This town is mind-numbingly dull. We're going to die of boredom if we're not careful. Finally, something interesting is happening. Imagine what a great story this will make! All this stuff we're digging up, and now this weird — I don't know what to call it — this phantom at the dredge. It's not a question of whether we want to go back or not. We have to go back."

This was Sarah at her most persuasive. She said it with such urgency — no doubt because it involved her filming, the main thing that took the edge off her boredom.

I have a theory about this. I think what I do is safer than what Sarah does. I can write about whatever I want — monsters, ghosts, arms falling off, people buried alive — and it doesn't matter what I write because it all comes from the safety of my own imagination. But filming requires that there be something to film, and that has a way of leading into real danger.

It certainly did for us.

I really need to sleep now.