The Legend of Annie Murphy.
The Cooper Kids Adventure Series.
Frank Peretti.
In 1885, the Murphy mine struck gold. According to legend, Annie Murphy killed her husband out of greed, but just before she was to be hanged for the murder, she escaped. Now, a hundred years later, there have been sightings of Annie Murphy"s "ghost." The Coopers unwittingly become involved in a mystery that finds them caught between the past and the present.
Chapter 1.
It took a dare-a double dare-for Pete and Jim to get Mannie and Kyle to camp overnight with them in the middle of the old graveyard. Pete was fourteen and had made the dare. Jim was thirteen. Mannie and Kyle, who were both ten, took the dare and were scared before they"d even finished hiking to the place. Spending the night in a graveyard was spooky enough, but this was the cemetery above the old ghost town of Bodine, Arizona. Every kid in that part of the country had heard the weird tales about what had happened there a hundred years ago.
"She cut him up into little pieces with a long butcher knife ..."
They were huddled around a campfire on the low, barren hillside above Bodine, surrounded on all sides by craggy, canyon cliffs that looked ready to fall in on them. The sun was long gone. The moon was just coming up. The moment was right for the retelling-and stretching-of Bodine"s scary legends. Kyle and Mannie sat motionless and wide-eyed as Pete leaned forward and spoke in hushed, secretive tones across the campfire.
"The next night she came back, and this time she wanted the sheriff. He woke up, and there she was, standing in his bedroom. She still had the knife."
Mannie moaned in fear.
"And n.o.body knows what happened to the sheriff that night. All they know is, they found his body the next morning on Annie Murphy"s grave. He was cold and dead and looked like he"d been scared to death."
Kyle made a face. "Did that really happen?"
Pete only gave a slight shrug. "Not too long ago, some people camped up here and accidentally camped on Annie Murphy"s grave. And the next morning, they were dead, just like the sheriff."
Mannie c.o.c.ked his head. "No way."
"Really."
"I don"t believe you."
Pete immediately threw it to Jim. "Just ask Jim."
Jim nodded grimly. "You know Tony Merritt? It was his uncle and aunt."
Kyle and Mannie bought it and then fell silent as gruesome images played in their heads.
"We"re not camping on Annie"s grave, are we?" Kyle wanted to know.
They heard a far-off sound.
"What"s that?" Mannie whispered.
Coyotes were prowling somewhere amid the rocks and cliffs. Their yaps and howls carried on the dry desert wind like the giggly scheming of demons in the dark.
Pete gave a sigh of relief. "Whew! I thought it was Annie Murphy! She"s been seen up here, you know. People say she"s still around, looking for somebody else to kill. Sometimes people can see her face in the cliffs. They say that late at night you can look up at those cliffs and see her up there, looking back at you, watching you."
"We"re not camping on her grave, are we?" Kyle asked again.
Pete spoke with the utmost concern as he glanced about. "Boy ... I don"t know. We might be."
Kyle took a look over Pete"s shoulder at the towering cliffs beyond and let out a m.u.f.fled cry. "I see her!"
Mannie was all eyes now. "Where?"
Kyle pointed. "Right there! Right up there in that cliff!"
Mannie started to whimper, his hand to his mouth. "I see her too! It"s her! It"s Annie Murphy!"
Pete turned around to look, glad they couldn"t see the smile he was trying to hold back. If he wasn"t careful, he"d burst out laughing and ruin everything. "I don"t see anything ..." His voice trailed off.
"Right there!" Kyle insisted.
Jim came close and muttered to Pete, "Maybe we should tell "em the truth. They"re getting pretty scared."
"Weird ..." was all Pete said, staring toward the cliffs.
"What ..." Jim started to ask, but then he saw it too.
"Can she see us?" Mannie begged to know.
"Man, it looks just like her!" Pete exclaimed.
In the light of the rising moon, the cliff looked cold, dead, and chalky white, its every crack and furrow starkly defined by black, sharply edged shadows. In the center of the cliff, outlined by the shadows and highlighted by glaring moonlight, was the shape of a woman.
Pete looked away for an instant, then looked again. It was still there, and it took no imagination to see it.
"You see it?" Pete asked.
"Oh yeah," Jim answered, achill in his voice.
She was at least a hundred feet tall, clothed in a long dress. Her hair reached past her shoulders, and she had her hands clasped over her heart. She was looking down at them, her face filled with sadness.
Kyle was crying and tugging at Pete"s arm. "Let"s get out of here!"
Pete wanted to say there was nothing to be afraid of, but he couldn"t. He was afraid.
"Hey guys," said Jim, his voice a little shaky, "it"s just a natural rock formation. It"s ..."
Was that the cry of a coyote? It had to be.
Kyle and Mannie started wailing in fear.
"Quiet!" Pete scolded.
There it was again. But it wasn"t a coyote. It sounded like a woman crying, calling. It sounded faint but seemed close. Somewhere just up the hill to their right- They all saw it at the same time: a dim, bluish shape moving toward them over the top of the hill, a woman with long hair and a long dress blowing in the wind. She was running, moving in eerie slow motion, her arms outstretched. Her face was etched with fear, her mouth forming words they couldn"t understand but could hear ever so faintly. The image wavered, dimmed, brightened, floated over the ground.
They were halfway down the hill before they even realized they were running, before they even tried to think about what they had seen or where they were going. Mannie was in a blind panic, screaming one long, endless scream. Pete was carrying Kyle, who had fainted. Jim was the only one who looked back, and each time he did, the woman was still there, still reaching toward them, still crying out.
In the pink light of early morning the canyon did not seem spooky at all, but beautiful. Like a Grand Canyon in miniature, its deep, jagged gorge stretched several miles long, carved out by an ancient river through rust-colored rock. Sagebrush and cacti carpeted the gently rolling canyon floor. Overhead, hawks and eagles soared on the updrafts against a blue, cloudless sky.
Professor Richard MacPherson"s jeep looked like a tiny insect in this setting, bouncing and rumbling along the dusty road that ran up the floor of the canyon.
"The boys" parents were camping just below the hill, but they didn"t see anything," he was explaining over the noise of the jeep. "They figured the boys had gotten themselves so worked up with ghost stories that they were imagining things. They checked out the boys" story the next day. Needless to say, things looked a lot different in the daylight."
Dr. Jacob Cooper, his wide-brimmed hat securely in place to shade his eyes, was riding in the pa.s.senger seat. He listened to his friend "Mac" finish the story of the terrified campers. "So the parents weren"t convinced?"
Mac smiled with amus.e.m.e.nt. "No, not at all, and that"s the way it"s been with folks around here. As far as they"re concerned, the ghost town of Bodine is full of legends. But that"s all they are, just legends, stuff for outsiders and kids to get excited about." Then he added with a glint in his eye, "But now I"m not so sure."
Dr. Cooper looked at Mac and raised an eyebrow.
Mac responded, "Jake, I tracked you down because I need another opinion. You"re an archaeologist. You"ve worked with stone carvings, hieroglyphics, patterns, and images carved in rock by ancient civilizations. I know you can tell me if I"m right, or crazy, or what."
Dr. Cooper"s two kids were riding in the back, and they"d been listening. Fourteen-year-old Jay shouted a question over the roar and rumble of the jeep. "You mean, there might really be something carved in the cliff?"
Professor MacPherson called over his shoulder as he kept driving, "If the angle of the light is right and you"re standing in just the right spot, you can see something-at least, that"s the way it looks to me. I want to know what you think."
Jay shot a glance at his thirteen-year-old sister Lila. She gave him that funny little half-smile that showed she was intrigued, just like he was. An old ghost town with a real ghost? A mysterious image carved in a cliff? They"d interrupted their vacation in the Grand Canyon to be here, but this was starting to sound more exciting.
"How much farther?" Lila asked.
"We"re almost there," said Mac. "Bodine"s just around that bend."
Jay and Lila began to study the weathered cliffs above them with different eyes. These cliffs had been around a long time, through eons of driving rain, sand-blasting wind, and scorching sun. Their tired old faces bore a myriad of different shapes and patterns that could look like any number of things if you used your imagination. Was the mysterious image of a woman just another random stone shape that a human eye could make into something?
The road made a lazy turn around a tower of rock and brought them to a wide, level spot on the canyon floor. A dry creek bed ran through it.
Mac drove slowly. "This is it."
Jay and Lila looked in every direction. To the right they could see a dismal pile of gray, weathered boards that could have once been a cabin. On the other side they saw a squarish pattern of stone and concrete amid the sagebrush, possibly an old foundation.
"Where"s the town?" Lila asked.
"We"re driving through it right now." Mac brought the jeep to a halt on a flat, straight stretch of road, shut off the engine, and set the parking brake. The quiet and solitude settled over them like a warm blanket. "This, dear friends, is the town of Bodine, Arizona, after eighty-some-odd years of neglect, harsh weather, souvenir hounds, dirt bikers, backpackers, and such."
Jay and Lila stood in the jeep, hoping to see something, anything. Not one building was left standing. Not even a single wall remained. There was one lone chimney jutting above the sagebrush about a hundred yards away, but half of it had fallen and the rest was crumbling, soon to disappear like everything else.
Jay muttered to himself, "Well ... I guess we"re a little late."
"Sorry to disappoint you," said Mac, pushing his cowboy hat back on his brow. "There are a few ghost towns still standing, of course, but I"m afraid most look like this: a hundred years past their prime and only a few decades away from disappearing altogether."
"Take heart, kids," said Dr. Cooper. "What we"re seeing of Bodine is much more than we"ve seen of a lot of biblical cities."
Lila shrugged, playing with a braid of her long, blond hair. "At least these ruins are still above ground."
"Try to see the town as it was. That"s the challenge."
Jay took a moment to gaze at an old ore car standing next to a crumbling foundation. "I understand they were mining for gold."
Mac nodded. "The biggest gold strike occurred in 1880, and within two years the town"s population grew to more than 3,000. They dug mines into these cliffs and dredged ten miles of the old creek bed. A lot of people got rich, at least for a while. Around 1910 the gold ran out, the mining company went elsewhere, and the people left. Another eighty years went by, and now here we are, standing in the middle of a memory."
Dr. Cooper c.o.c.ked his hat back a little and explained to his kids, "This is Mac"s kind of place. He"s not only a professor of astrophysics at the University of Arizona; he"s also an Old West history buff."
Mac gazed in all directions, surveying the cliffs, studying the ground. "There"s more here than just the ruins or the history."
"There are the legends!" Lila hinted.
"Indeed, and the question of what natural forces may have given birth to those legends." Mac pointed to a compa.s.s mounted on the dashboard of the jeep. "I"ve been waiting for someone to ask me about this."
They all looked at the compa.s.s. And then they looked a second time.
Its needle was moving, rocking to and fro, swinging toward the north, then toward the south, then back again. Sometimes it paused, then it moved again for no apparent reason.
"The compa.s.s is moving even when we aren"t," said Mac. "The earth"s magnetic field is severely disrupted in this area. The aviation charts even make mention of it."
"Iron deposits in the cliffs?" Dr. Cooper asked.
Mac shook his head. "No, nothing like that. My theory is that it"s tied in with a bend in gravity, a sort of dip in the time/s.p.a.ce fabric."
That got Jay"s full attention. "Say again?"
Mac smiled, his white teeth gleaming under his mustache. "This particular point on the planet is ... oh, let"s say it"s kind of mixed up. It"s like a spot in a river where the water gets turned aside and swirls around in circles instead of flowing steadily downstream. Gravity, time, and s.p.a.ce don"t move in a straight, fluid line through here, but get snarled up like a traffic jam. So weird things happen."
Dr. Cooper"s eyes brightened and he gave a knowing nod. "So that"s what you"re up to! You"re developing scientific theories to explain the legends."
Mac nodded right back. "Whatever happened to those boys the other night could be more than just a ghost story. It might actually tie in with everything else that"s been going on in this canyon for as long as people have been here to record it."
Both Jay and Lila leaned forward to hear more.
Mac continued. "I"ve been doing some research. For almost a century, people have called this canyon haunted. The Indians who lived here said it was Big Medicine. A few of your modern-day mystics think it"s a landing site for UFOs or a center of psychic power. The kids all have their wild stories about seeing ghosts here.
"But I think it has to do with gravity. Sometimes, gravity goes haywire in this place. A marble on a level table might roll south one day, roll north the next day. Well, you see that pond over there, just beyond that stone wall?"
They stood in the jeep and could see the murky water lying in a chalky hollow.
"Sometimes it"s deepest at the north end, and sometimes the water shifts and it"s deepest at the south end. You"d never notice it unless you measured it from day to day-which is what I"ve done. Oh, and this jeep ..." He reached down and released the parking brake. "Hm. Today it won"t move. Last week it rolled from here to ..." he pointed out a large boulder almost a hundred feet away "... that boulder over there."
Jay was puzzled and curious. "So how does this explain the ghost those boys saw? What do you think caused that?"