. 10-13

Chapter X

"Dad, what the hell is going on? The family is starting to talk! We've been here almost a week now and you are not acting right! You're normally pretty quiet, but this year it's like your heart has frozen over! It's almost like your best friend died a few minutes ago."

I winced in pain! "God dammit, Benjamin! That's way too close to home!" I pulled out my iPhone and found a message on it. I handed the phone to Ben.

"Okay... 'I'll see you in Heaven. I love you!' Who is Terri?"

I couldn't help it. I broke down in tears! "Dad! What the fuck! What's going on? What's wrong?"

I pulled a folded, partially crumpled, tear stained piece of paper out of my pocket and handed it to him.

"Huh? A copy of an email from 'utahmotorist'—that's a funny handle!?" Ben proceeded to read it out loud:

Dear Mr. Menzel,

Two days ago, I came upon an auto accident on Utah Highway 153. Both the truck and the pickup involved had gone off the road. The pickup looked to be in the worst shape

so I headed for it first. The driver, an attractive young woman, looked to be in very bad

shape and was not moving. I cleared enough wreckage so that I could check her pulse

and determined that her heart was not beating. As I closed her eyes I noticed that she

was holding her cell phone in a death grip and I was able to read what appeared to be

the last message she sent—to you, if I am not mistaken! FWIW, the content persuades

me that she sent the message after the wreck and before she died.

Not surprisingly, I have had nightmares the past two nights. What is unusual is that the

young woman who died is very much alive in the dream and insists that I send you an

email describing what happened. What is extremely strange is that she gives me this

email address over and over and over! To the best of my knowledge, I have never seen

this address in my life. The scary part is that she says that she will not go away until I

have sent it to you!

I apologize in advance if this is not an appropriate message to send to this address, however, I have gone two nights in a row without any sleep at all and if I am not already crazy, I soon will be if I keep having this nightmare, or visitation, or whatever it is!

Besides describing the accident, I was also supposed to pass on this message: "I know you are worried about it, but Daddy and I had a wonderful time after I got to Salt Lake!"

Just so you know that I am not some kind of a troll, you can find the official report of this accident in the Richfield paper. I have not checked, but I would expect that you can also find accounts of the accident on the Internet.

If, as I suspect, this is a serious loss for you, please accept my deepest condolences!

Sincerely, Gwynn

"Uh... so... uh, Dad. This is crazy impossible! You've checked it out, right? And it's hogwash... right?"

"My dear family engineer, please sit down. You are not going to like this!

"I went to town for groceries the day before you all started coming in. The text came in when I was about ten miles from town. I wasn't at all sure what the hell to make of it!

"The email came in after I found a wifi hot spot in town. I will confess that it scared the shit out of me!

"I was about crazy but I was able to check it out on the Internet ten ways from Sunday! It's fucking real! The fucking Universe has really fucked things up!

"I realize that life comes without any guarantees, but until this fucking shit happened, you and your brothers had a very good chance of having a stepmother who was younger than any of you!"

"Holy shit, Dad! Really?"

In reply to my sad nod he added, "Is there anything that I... or we, can do to help?"

"I've been waiting for all of you to leave so that I could say goodbye to her. But now I can't wait. I need to hike up the creek so that I can say goodbye to her tonight."

"Okay, we'll all come with you."

"Thanks, but no. I have to do this myself. Tonight I'll ask her to visit all of you in your dreams so you can meet her. I'll be back tomorrow."

"Uhhh... You're not going to do anything stupid are you?"

I gave him a rueful frown, "No, the day I got the news is as close as I have come to doing something 'stupid' as you so quaintly put it. As you know, about the only dependably effective way to commit suicide coming from town is by doing a head-on with another vehicle. That meant that I would have to kill a stranger in order to commit my suicide. Not only is that flat-out distasteful, it's just fucking wrong—and unbelievably selfish to boot!

"On the other hand, if one is driving from here to town, the road offers lots of opportunities to put the pedal to the metal on the steeper downhill grades and go out in a blaze of explosive and painless glory by slamming into a wall of solid stone on one of the hairpin turns.

"I presume that is why Terri paid me a visit the night after I got the fucking news! She made it very clear that she will not let me join her yet!

"She also made it very clear that we had a date for the night after all of you had left or after you knew what the score was. There is no fucking way that I am going to miss that date! I will strangle Satan himself if the sonofabitch tries to get in my way!"

I paused while my central processing unit caught up with my tongue and then added, "Uh, Ben, on second thought there is something you can help me with."

"Okay Dad. What is it?"

"Don't mention this conversation to everybody right off the bat would you?"

"Uhh... Why?"

"I would have to cover this whole pile of shit all over again for the entire family. I know that I will get blowback from your Uncle and maybe from your Aunt Polly. That will set the stage for a whole cacophony of concerns and questions from the rest of the family. I can't take the chance that they would delay me enough to miss Terri!"

"Holy shit, Dad, you have really got it bad for this girl!" He paused to reflect on the ramifications of my request. I could almost see smoke coming out of his ears which almost prompted the first smile in a week to crack my frozen face.

"Oh, fuck and fiddlesticks, Dad!

"Yeah, I can see what you mean, at least with Uncle Carl." Ben took a deep breath, "Alright Dad, how do you propose to pull this off?"

"Oh, God! Thank you Ben!

"After supper let me slip back to the trailer and get my hiking gear together. Then, while everybody is gathered around the campfire I'll sneak away and get my butt up to the old mining camp alongside the big creek. Okay?"

"And what am I supposed to do when somebody asks where you are?"

"Oh, just tell them that I went to my trailer—probably just to use the bathroom.

"When I leave I will turn on a light in the trailer. After about half an hour come into the trailer to turn off the light. I will have left the email copy on the dinette under my battery lantern. Go back to the campfire, gather everybody together, and read the message to them. Go ahead and explain the situation as best as you understand it and when the questions get past what you know, you can tell them that I will answer any and all questions they may have in the morning when I get back."

"I dunno, Uncle Carl will most likely insist that we chase after you and make sure that you don't do anything," He smiled and finished the sentence, "Stupid."

"I'm pretty sure that your brothers will back you up. Aunt Theresa will most likely side with you too. I'm sure that all of your cousins will be on your side too after you tell them about the final warning that Terri left me with."

"And that is?"

I took a deep breath. "Anybody who walks that trail in the dark after I have set foot on it, will get hurt!" Ben gave me a startled look. "And no, I don't think that means that I will hurt them. Part of that trail crosses some pretty steep slopes above the creek. It would be real easy to miss a step in the dark and wind up in the creek with a broken bone or bones!"

Ben rolled his eyes a bit. "Okay, but in the future remind me to NOT agree to do favors for you without knowing what they are!"

I extended my hand to my normally staid and reserved engineer and said, "Thank you Ben! That means a lot to me!"

Much to my surprise, Ben brushed past my hand and gave me a big hug. "Good luck, Dad!"

Chapter XI

After supper, I was surprised at how easy it was to slip away in the twilight without anyone noticing. Crossing the sloughs and the creek was muddy and wet, but otherwise uneventful. After that it got more interesting than I really appreciated!

The steep spots were clothed basically in sage and rocks, so the waning Moon and the Milky Way provided enough light to navigate them safely, albeit slowly. The spooky part was hiking along the parts of the trail shaded by brush and trees! I didn't want to use my headlamp for fear of ruining my night vision for when I crossed the steep spots since the glow from the sky was much safer than the narrow and high contrast view that the headlamp provided on the more broken and narrow parts of the trail. Oh, and for whatever reason, I had totally forgotten that I could have used the red LED in my headlamp while in the trees and not ruined my night vision for crossing the steep spots!

My first encounter was with a coyote or a fox. The light was dim enough that I could only pick out a few characteristics. The snout was obviously canine, the body seemed too small to be a coyote, but the tail didn't seem bushy enough to be a fox. Whatever it was, it did not want to stick around and quickly seemed to dissolve into the sagebrush.

After that, there were a few more shadows that suddenly became mobile and scuttled off into the deeper shadows. The pièce de résistance was a deep shadow just off the trail that suddenly exploded with the sound of crashing wood and pounding hooves that, fortunately proceeded to recede through the woods away from me. My best guess was that I had scared a moose or an elk out of its bed. As for myself, the surprise almost made me pee my pants!

What was really unnerving was the feeling that I was being watched! Not only that, the feeling got stronger and stronger the closer I got to the mining camp. I swear that by the time I got to the mining camp my skin was an endless field of horripilation and all of my hair, not just at the nape of my neck, was standing at full attention! By the time that I saw a glow in the ruins, I was entirely ready to turn about and run full tilt back to camp!

I approached the glow cautiously and discovered that it was the little glade where Terri and I had gotten to know each other intimately. The major difference was that it was now illuminated with starlight and a gentle glow from the Moon instead of bright sunlight.

"Stefan?" came a thin voice from behind me and I could have jumped completely out of my skin with the surprise! Instead, I instinctively jumped into the air with a twist and landed facing the sound with my hiking stick now at a spear-pointed ready!

I was confronted with something approximating a gently glowing cylinder of light. Frankly, I wanted to run, not just away, but everywhere, if that makes any sense. However, my feet seemed to be frozen in place—at least I think that I sent them running instructions, but I'm not sure! While I stood and stared and shivered in place, the cylinder got slowly brighter and more solid looking. The cylindrical glow slowly resolved into a humanoid form and then into the size and shape of a human female—a naked human female form that looked oh so familiar!

The face of the apparition was the last thing to resolve, and when it did the spear dropped from nerveless fingers and I crumpled to my knees in tears! "Oh, Terri. Terri! Why did you have to go? Come back to me or take me with you! Pleeez!"

I felt a soft but cold hand gently caress the scar that the stubble of my hair was slowly growing to hide. "Stef, there are limits to what the Universe will allow. I think that I have already broken a bunch of the rules and I am almost exhausted! I am so happy that you are wearing the exact same clothes that you wore that magical day when we were together here in the sun. Also, thank you for bringing the cape that I requested. Please warm me up with skin to skin contact so that I will have enough energy to cuddle with you for as long as possible."

It was the work of but a moment for me to strip off my clothes, unroll the cape, shake it out and wrap the two of us in it! Terri wasn't kidding; she was cold as ice and seemed to warm up at a glacial pace. I concentrated on trying to warm her up, but soon I was shivering and starting to feel like I was losing ground!

"Oh Terri, please don't leave me alone! I love you!" Suddenly, Terri was warm to my touch!

"Omigod! Thank you Stef! I love you too!" She gave me a fairly chaste kiss and then said, "Stef, I want you to know that I want you to love me, but we only have enough energy to cuddle. I hope that's all right."

"Terri, no, that is NOT all fucking right! But if cuddling is really all I can get out of the Universe, then I'll take it. I want to cuddle with you for the rest of my life!"

"Stef, I don't think that I can pull this off anyplace other than here and at night." My disappointment must have been written all over my face because she quickly added, "I think I have found a path that will let us stay together, but it will take time to bring it all together. There is one danger point that I cannot see beyond. Do you trust me and are you willing to let me try it?"

"Anything Terri! Anything, as long as it doesn't hurt you!"

Terri got a faraway look. "No... If it falls apart, it will not hurt me directly. It... just won't work. To me, this particular nexus in the probability tree is just sort of a black box that I cannot see into. All I am sure of is that of the probability threads coming out of this nexus, the thickest thread has us together. The next biggest thread is that we get together for a short while and then go our totally separate ways. In order for you to actualize the biggest thread about all I can offer is that you must never give up!

"Do we have a go, Stef?"

Without a moment's hesitation, I gave Terri a kiss and replied emphatically, "Yes!"

Terri smiled, "And I understand that you want me to visit your sons tonight?"

"Yes! Please! Can you do it? I want them to know what a beautiful person you are!"

"Well, Zeke is not here this year, so I think that he is out. Ivan should be pretty easy now that Ben has primed him." Terri smiled. "Your engineer is open to me, but I will try not to shatter his sense of reality too badly. I'm not sure if I can get to Taylor, but his wife, Amber is wide open. Will that work?"

"Like a charm, my love!"

"Good!

"Oh, and before I forget, please see if you can get proficient in meditation. The farther you can get from the clutches of what you call physical reality, the easier it is for me to touch you."

"Meditation, ay? What am I trying to connect with? For example, exactly what are you now?"

"Generally speaking, I am just like you, a package of sentience that has free will. In English, I suppose you can call me a spirit or a soul. A sloppy metaphor that we can use to explain the world or the Universe within which we move is a computer program or computer game. At the moment, and unlike you, I do not have a formal or recognized link into the subroutine of the Universe that you call reality. I lost that link when the craziness happened on Highway 153. We are together here and now because I have found and am exploiting what appears to me to be a bug in the program.

"Normally, I and other spirits can directly affect your reality only at the quantum level and only so long as our perturbations stay below the threshold of random expectations. Thanks to the butterfly effect, sometimes this can be quite powerful.

"At the moment, I am creating more than a quantum level stir in your reality by injecting information directly into the you that is a subroutine in your reality. If this is actionable information, and you choose to act on it, you might be able to make significant changes in parts of your probability thread or timeline.

"There are other flaws, or maybe they are Easter eggs, in the program of the Universe that other spirits seem to discover, or hack into, or even get trapped into, that enables them to affect your reality directly, but usually, very locally and almost always not in situations where actual, recordable measurement is being performed in your reality.

"Does that help?"

"Whew! That is quite a chunk of data to chew on—but thank you very much for the clarification!

"And now, all I really want to do is cuddle up with my favorite spirit!"

"That works for me, Stef! All I really want is to cuddle up with my favorite subroutine and find out what a bivouac is all about."

We stayed curled up on the grass and cuddled up in the cape while we whispered sweet nothings in each other's ears. Somewhere along the line, we both fell asleep. Well, maybe I should say that Terri seemed to be asleep and warm just before I slipped into dreamland.

Chapter XII

The sun was just starting to peek through the trees when I woke up to cold feet. I was surprised that they didn't feel even colder when it registered that there was a thin glaze of frost on all the grass. I sat up and pulled my feet under the cape and proceeded to rub some warmth into my feet and lower legs.

To say that I was disappointed that Terri was no longer with me was a classical stiff-lipped British understatement! There was also disappointment that there was no sign that Terri had ever been with me—that is, until it registered that all of my clothes had been neatly folded and stacked at my head, my pack and gear belt were neatly placed at my left side and my hiking staff was lying alongside me on the right side. In contrast, my fuzzy memory said that I had essentially piled all of my clothes and gear right where the hiking stick had fallen. Coupled with that was the certainty that Terri and I had cuddled up in the grass at least one or two steps away from the pile! I guessed that Terri had picked up a few poltergeist tricks while she was on the other side.

After my feet started feeling cozy, I reached over to my pack and dug out a roll of homemade pemmican. The pemmican filled me up quite nicely and when dipped in garlic powder and/or salt, tasted positively delicious!

The sun was above the trees and the frost had become dew by the time I was motivated to get dressed and organized to hike back to camp. It was a beautiful cool Rocky Mountain morning and I was able to pace my hike so that I stayed comfortably warm without getting overheated.

As I approached the creek crossing, I was pleasantly surprised to see that some of the family were sitting there waiting for me. My little brother, Carl, looked to be totally uptight. In contrast, Ivan and Amber looked to be totally relaxed—indeed, to the point of nonchalance! Ben and Taylor appeared to be somewhere in between the two extremes.

Carl spotted me first. "Stefan! There you are! What kind of games are you trying to play here?"

Amber got off the next shot before I could reply, "Oh Dad, is she really that pretty?"

I grinned and replied, "I've been sleeping with a ghost, and yes, she is beautiful!"

Amber and Ben shouted simultaneously, "Holy shit! He smiled!" Everybody broke out laughing at their identical outbursts; well, except for Carl who did at least manage to muster a smile.

Suddenly I was overwhelmed with hugs and a cacophony of "We were so worried!" "Are you all right? "Were you scared?" "Have you had breakfast?"

"Whoa! Whoa gang! Real quick, my heart is not completely healed, but I no longer feel like a broken man! Why don't we get back to camp and I'll answer any and all questions that you want to ask, okay?"