The Ghost in the Machine Read online

  The Ghost in the Machine

  A young adult novel by

  Mary Woodbury

  Talkingstick Press

  The Ghost in the Machine is published by:

  Talkingstick Press

  #404, 10319 – 111 Street

  Edmonton, AB T5K 0A2

  Copyright (c) Mary Woodbury 2003, 2012. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior permission from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Originally published by Coteau Books, Regina, 2003.

  Edited by Barbara Sapergia.

  Cover by Aries Cheung.

  ISBN: 978-0-9868347-3-8

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  This book is dedicated to our son Peter, the pilot.He understood machines even when he was a small boy. Keep on flying!

  The author would like to thank the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for the writing grant that funded the first draft of this novel. Thanks also go to Robert Woodbury for the data about VW Beetles, and to Luanne Armstrong for her love of the Kootenays and sharing her place and her family with me for many summers. She was an invaluable resource. Thanks go to those at Coteau Books who first published this book. Finally thanks go to my husband Clair, my critic, booster, and first editor.

  This work is a work of fiction. There is a Kootenay Lake but no town called Benton. All of the characters and events are fictional.

  Chapter 1

  Tyler Graham was curled up on the ugly green chair reading a motor magazine, staring at a page that told him how to choose a second-hand vehicle. How he wished! He turned the page, folded it over, and settled his oversized bulk deeper into the piled-up cushions.

  Ty and his mom were alone in the house. Aunt Celia, his mother’s older sister, had gone back to the west coast that afternoon. Ty’s mother Grace lay on the couch in her pink chenille dressing gown, her tangled brown hair careless on the worn pillow. Her pudgy fingers were wrapped together like a praying saint’s. Her nails needed trimming. Her blue eyes were closed, hooded by long lashes and heavy lids. A faded pink comforter covered her and trailed on the floor.

  Ty picked up the dirty glasses, the saucer, and the half-filled cup of cold tea and carried them to the kitchen. Dad had gone to a meeting of the volunteer fire fighters, Ty figured. His little sister Veronica was over at Grandma’s house eating cookies and watching reruns of Funniest Home Videos.

  The faint smell of a distant forest fire or someone down the road burning trash drifted in the open window. Ty checked but could see no signs of fire or smoke. He started in on the pile of dishes in the sink.

  “Do you want to play crib?” Ty called.

  “No.”

  “Watch some TV?”

  “There’s only reruns,” Mom sighed.

  “Robin Nixon’s giving us new rhubarb plants seeing as ours died when Grandpa moved them last year. Silly old bugger.” Ty chuckled.

  “He told Celia he was broke and poor, so he wanted to plant more orchard to make money off of the likes of her in Vancouver. Said he didn’t need any dad- blasted rhubarb anyhow,” Mom said. “More pipe dreams. Like the real estate dealer that’s going to offer him a million for the farm and let him and Ida stay on in their house until they die.”

  “He’s full of hot air,” Ty called out, pouring a fresh cup of tea.

  “That’s what Celia said,” Mom added.

  Ty brought in a china cup of brewed tea and put it on the coffee table close to his mother. “Aunt Celia’s not afraid of Grandpa. She speaks her mind.”

  Mom nodded, lifted the hot tea to her lips and blew on the surface. “She got after me, too. Made sure I saw the psychiatrist and got my medication changed. She talked me in to going to see some blood specialist in Cranbrook. They ran tests.”

  Ty grinned. “That’s good. Maybe it’s not depression you’ve got, Ma. Maybe it’s some kind of blood disease, something they can treat.” He sat down in the worn-out green armchair. He wanted to say he was proud of her, but he didn’t.

  “We went for lunch in that new tea house on the main street. Ran into Robin Nixon coming out of the hospital. She doesn’t look good, does she? Being a famous writer doesn’t stop you from getting real sick. We laughed about going all the way to Cranbrook and running into your next door neighbour. I dressed up, Ty.” Mom pushed the hair out of her eyes. Ty could see they were filling with tears. “I wish Celia lived here. I’m not good at being alone.”

  Grace Graham wasn’t alone. She had Dad, Veronica, and him. But Ty wasn’t about to break the flow of words. He liked hearing his mother talk. So often she was silent or sleeping.

  He tried to keep the conversation going. “Probably because you were a twin,” he said. “My Social teacher is a twin, an identical twin. She says she and her sister have to talk on the phone every day. I told her about my Uncle Scott dying. She asked how you were.”

  Ma stared out the window into the dark night. “Scott was a great talker, better than me. Always took the time to find out how everyone was feeling. He and I talked everything over. He was a great brother. For a man, he was something real special.”

  Ty figured she was comparing his uncle to Dad and Grandpa Graham. Good guys, but not the most sensitive in the world. Ty tried, but he was half Armstrong and half Graham — sometimes he talked and sometimes he shouted. Sometimes he took off. He had the heavy-set Armstrong body but his dad’s black hair and brown eyes.

  His mother was staring at Scott’s painting that hung above the couch. She shuddered. “Life’s lonely whether you’re a twin or not,” Mom said quiet-like. “You’ll be lonely this summer with Nat gone to camp.” She looked at Ty hard, her eyes studying his face.

  “I wouldn’t have minded having a twin.” Ty’s laugh was deep. His voice had changed and it still surprised him how low it sounded, how easily it filled a room. “I wouldn’t mind at all, especially when it comes to chopping and hauling wood for the fire.” A shiver went through him. Grandpa Graham said that happened when someone walked on your grave. “Hey, any kind of a brother would do.” He paused. “Maybe little Veronica feels the same way. There’s no kids her age around here.”

  Ty’s mother’s teacup slipped from her fingers, struck the coffee table leg, and bounced onto the tiles by the wood stove. The sound of breaking china echoed through the house. Ty leapt from his chair to wipe up the spill and pick up the shards. His mom sat with her palms open, her eyes upwards, her eyes filled with pain and panic.

  Ty could have kicked himself for setting her off. Every time he opened his mouth he stuck his foot in it. What had he said this time?

  “It’s all right, Ma,” Ty said. “No harm done. It was cracked already. I used a cracked cup. I know you don’t like the good china in the living room. Not unless there’s company. Did the tea hurt? Was it still hot?”

  Without another word she picked up her crossword book and mad
e her way up the stairs to her and Dad’s bedroom at the back of the house.

  Ty pounded the worn surface of the sink counter with his fist. It jarred his arm. He felt the instant pain race through his body like a high-speed train until it crashed into his chest.

  Outside, the old black dog howled.

  Chapter 2

  Ty finished the dishes and tidied the kitchen before he went outside. He needed to calm down. He kept hoping that his mom and he might have a normal conversation like his friend Nat Ferris and his mom. Trouble was, he could never predict what would set Grace Graham off.

  He shouldn’t have started talking about twins. Ever since her brother Scott died in that car accident four years ago, she had been in bad shape. Partly it was because Veronica took a full day getting born. Partly it was because she lost her only brother, her twin brother, on the same day. That’s pretty depressing. Ty had been the eleven-year old kid, waiting for a brother or sister, waiting for his favourite uncle to come and stay for a week to help out because Dad was hauling logs somewhere up north.

  Tyler Graham had lost a lot that day too. But he had been just a kid. Kids get over bad stuff quickly. That’s what Ty’s dad, Lyle, told him.

  He wasn’t convinced that was true.

  Ty took a deep breath, drawing in the clear, clean night air from the valley. He loved standing in their backyard just by the back stoop. It was a wonder he didn’t take root like one of the sprawling apple trees that grew in front between the house and the highway. He loved the smell of the ripening Gransteins in his nostrils, heavier than perfume, the sky dark blue with no stars, only a smidgen of smoke over the far hills, the warm air caressing his cheek, the comfort of everyday life surrounding him. The wonder of being alive amazed him.

  There had been a meteor shower the week before. Ty had stayed up long enough to see a few shooting stars before he went to bed. He had stood at the edge of the half-acre of mowed back lawn watching the display. If only all of life could taste so good. Like the safety and security of this yard, the Graham place. The Kootenay valley was a good place to live, to leave, to launch out from. That’s what his Uncle Scott used to say. Ty could hardly wait to be older, to be able to get away so he could come back now and then like his Uncle Scott had done.

  But Ty would need some real get-up-and-go, as Grandpa called it. Grandpa said all Tyler’s get-up-and-go had got up and went, or sunk to his lardy thighs. He called Ty a fat slob. He laughed at Ty because he was pitifully useless and tied like a lame hound dog to this place. To be really independent in these mountains, a guy had to have wheels, a little money in his pocket, and a place to go.

  Not that Ty complained. His life was pretty good. It was great when his mom felt okay. That was the best. When she smiled, her whole face lit up.

  The dusk felt thick, heavy like a cloud of bees. Was he intruding into some mystery, something benevolent and massive that owned the early summer night by the still, deep lake? Or was it gearing up for a storm? They could use some rain. Real drought conditions, Grandpa said. Ty had to water the trees and the garden every other day. They were in for a long, hot, dry summer.

  Less than a mile away, down the hill, Kootenay Lake lay black and deep and filled with too many memories of overturned boats, drowned people, and bodies never found — bodies sunk so far they’d never surface.

  The lake was Ty’s favourite place. A bat swooped overhead; a sliver of a moon climbed above the mountains on the other side of the lake and shone through the haze. Must be a small forest fire over there. Probably started by heat lightning.

  Crickets sang in the garden. The hulk of Great-grandpa’s ancient tractor crowded the tall bent clover by the side of the path. Grahams had lived and died on this land for a hundred years. The ghost of the former owner of the farm, who had died in a kayak accident on the lake, was supposed to haunt the place. Ty had never seen him, but Veronica had said she did once.

  He’d stood at the end of her bed one night — a tall man with wet clothes, shivering and cold. He’d smelled of seaweed and fish. So little Veronica said. Maybe Granny Graham had told her about him. She’d probably dreamed it. But her room did feel awful cold some nights.

  A truck rumbled by on the winding highway in front of the house. The air smelled of compost, vegetables, apples, cow patties, and fresh basil. Ty picked a stalk of grass and sucked on the fresh green shoot. It tasted sharp as a needle. His free hand reached out to the berry bushes by the side of the path that led to the big garden that ran south along the front of their land. A coyote howled. Grandma’s dog yipped in answer. Night sounds, rich earth smells, sharp pebbles beneath Ty’s worn sneakers, the taste of a ripe strawberry fresh from the patch in his mouth. Ty loved it all. This was his valley at its best.

  He paused, surveying the farmyard; the chicken roost, the tool shed, the ramshackle garage with shingles missing, the abandoned trailer where his mom and dad had lived when they were just married, a deserted quarter-ton truck with both front tires and wheels removed, up on jacks. It had been there since before Ty was born.

  The air was charged the way it had been earlier in the spring when a cougar perched in one of the apple trees in the front yard. The wild cat had been young and frantic. Ty’s dad Lyle had wanted to shoot it. So had Grandpa. Ty’s mom hid beneath the blankets. Grandma said, “Wait! Give it a break.”

  Two Wildlife officers came with a gun. Finally, with the women crying after them, they left. By morning the cat had gone back up into the mountain, carrying all their secret fears with him. All the time it was in the yard the air felt heavy. Breathing had been a chore.

  They didn’t want cougars, coyotes, or fire coming down from the mountain. It loomed across the road from the farm like a hunched and sleeping mammoth, covered with tall pines. The dark hills that rimmed the valley were home to both predators and timid woodland creature. It was the job of Leo, the old black dog, to chase the deer away from the garden and the fruit trees.

  To Ty’s left sat the old car graveyard and to his right the path that led to Grandpa’s place. His dad and grandpa didn’t believe in getting rid of anything. There was an ancient Graham rule that said you never knew when you might use some part from one machine to fix another. Sure as shooting, if you sold a relic, the next week you’d need it. Too bad there wasn’t a whole car in there — the body, the frame, or the engine were toast on every vehicle. Ty chewed his lip. He kicked the tire of an old Chevy Nova, bent out of shape, windows out, mouse nests, bird shit, stuffing pulled from the upholstery, engine block fried. Grandpa Graham, bless him, said it was a good car in its day. Grandpa found hauling big things to the dump “a real pain in the proverbial.” So Ty’s family’s past was spelled out behind clumps of elderberries and bush maple, or rusting quietly beside an outcrop of jagged rock.

  Ty remembered watching a TV show once about the ruins in Rome — the modern city street filled with traffic and noise, a black iron fence around an excavation in the centre of the square, down below crumpled pillars and the rutted paving stones of an ancient street. Stray cats stretched in the sun cleaning themselves. The archaeologist had stood, elbows leaning on the wrought-iron fence, describing the wonders of that earlier civilization. Computer graphics showed what the city had looked like 2000 years before.

  Ty had wanted to go to Rome right then, to walk the streets himself. He had always been fascinated with the past. But part of his mind ran into the future, and he laughed at the image of someone years hence standing at the front of their farm, pointing to the hulks of ancient tractors and the shells of old milkers. They didn’t write books, the Grahams. They inscribed their lives into their land and onto their vehicles.

  If you traced the roots of the family, you’d go way back to the border between Scotland and England. According to Robin Nixon, their neighbour, the Grahams, Armstrongs, and Nixons lived, farmed, fought, and raided in the hills. The Reivers, as they were called, farmed all summer and rode their wild horses on raiding parties in the winter. They had been very
clannish people. They still were. Sometimes Ty thought the ghosts of old brigands haunted his grandpa and most of the other old men in the valley. Grandpa Graham was a real tyrant, shouting at everyone as if they were deaf or stupid. Strong as an ox, wiry as a cat, spry as a chicken, that was Grandpa. In the old days he would have been the clan chief. Instead he was just a grouch.

  Maybe Ty would walk down to the lake to clear his head.

  Small lights flashed near by, on and off, on and off. Just beyond the mowed back lawn to the left of the dirt road down to the lake. Was something or someone out there? Ty stood stock still, listening. His fingers twitched. He slid his eyes to the left slowly, slipped his hand in his pocket, and tumbled his Swiss Army knife in his fingers. Its smooth surface, sharpened blades, gave him a secure feeling. What was there to be afraid of in your own back yard?

  The lights were coming from the middle of the unruly clump of dogwood bushes. Uncle Scott’s old Volkswagen Beetle should be in there. Ty could just make out its curved shape. The turn signal on the passenger side, the side closest to the dirt road, flashed. It startled him. Ty knew that the old red 1972 Volkswagen was all rusted, its front fender crumpled, the driver’s side door smashed in. Why would the turn signal be blinking?

  Should he run or stay put? Was he seeing things? Was it a figment of his imagination? That’s what their language arts teacher at Benton High said about any fantasy Ty dreamt up. Mr. Sawchuck hated Ty’s science fiction and horror stories. No blood or violence or rough stuff for him. Not unless it was during wrestling practice. He was their coach.

  But Ty wasn’t making this up. He gulped night air like an asthmatic inhaling oxygen. His ears popped. His heart flung itself against his ribcage like a trapped bird. A mixture of fear and curiosity raced through his body.