The Testament

The Book Of Michel

Rain spatters down my windshield. The wipers tap back and forth, out of sync with The Eurythmics. I'm going home, without her this time. It seems impossible. She's been all of my life for as long as I can remember, and now she's gone.

The rains shift from heavy to light, back and forth, playing games with the beams of sunlight that break through gaps in the clouds. Glinting through the evergreens and the prism of mist and rain; the effect transports me back to my boyhood home, the Dog River valley.

....

I am 16 again, driving up the valley, along the Dog itself. Sun, clouds, shadows, and rain gallop and dance beside me as my youth flies past unnoticed, through evergreen forests and hay fields. Gentle fields slope away from the road I'm on, ever more steeply down to a rocky gorge and then the tumbling cascades of the river. Before me in the distance, the glaciers that feed the river encase Mount Hood, the source of the Dog.

Just ahead on the downhill side, a small house with an attending collection of outbuildings juts up from the ever-present foliage. The structures are clearly visible in their huddle but seem to be ducking their heads, hiding nervously. A sign swings gently in the wet breeze. The Old Trunk.

The house and the building appear almost abandoned from the outside, just a tendril of smoke from a chimney, and a bit of light spilling through missed spots on painted windows. An ancient wooden fence attempts to surround a dirt and gravel parking area. 

Outside, a screen door screams like an alarm. Inside, through an old wooden door painted an unwelcoming sort of brown, a chaos of dusty bookshelves stares you down. Every book is here, among the smells of old paper and cinnamon and memories. Every book.

Motes of paper dust blur the air, illuminated by beams of sunlight and imbuing a sense of the ancient cathedral. Granted, these memories are over 30 years old, but I remember the place as feeling... timeless.

In an ancient, over-stuffed leather chair sits the Old Hungarian. He says his name is Michel. It's probably a lie. He seems to relish his mystery. Michel is always right there, gnarled wooden pipe in hand. He always looks up. He squints at you as you come through his door, assessing anyone who would disturb his own reading.

His hair is a nebula of thin brown-grey fuzz extending at least 5 inches out from his skull, and a bit of pipe smoke appears to stick to one nostril. His creaky voice says '...you are looking for something?...'. thick with accent.

Along with the smell of old leather, pipe tobacco, and body odor, a hint of marijuana suffused the small room. A giant stack of 'ready' books sits in a heap to the right of Michel's easy chair, as always. To his left, heat blasts from a small sheepherders wood stove.

Nine times out of ten, the book you are looking for is miraculously contained in his 'ready' pile. His hand places his pipe between stained teeth, his claw juts out and into his pile, fishes around, and like a devil offering your prize, he extends his claw towards you, with the correct book in hand.

'This is what you are looking for?.." It is a statement. Not a question.

Now when I say 'the correct book', it may not be anything you are looking for. But it will be something that captures you. Fiction or nonfiction, you would leave The Old Trunk with something that would capture your imagination.

Michel was an oracle of book selection.

I left that day, with two books, both of which would impact my life in an important way. Imagine my surprise now, knowing that both of those books would be instrumental in tonight's events...

The first book was 'The Visitors', a 1964 novel by Nathaniel Benchley, Peter Benchley's father. It was a a humorous tale of a family and a haunted house. The story took place at an old ocean-side manor of sorts. It sparked my imagination. It was haunted after all. After reading it, I knew that one day I would own a house like that, on the ocean. And one that dripped with history if at all possible.

Together, my wife and I purchased the beautiful historic home where we would raise our family. The Nettie House, something of a small mansion actually, was located on the rugged northern coast of the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, near the site of a now-gone mining town, Port Crescent. It had been the home of a mining supervisor and his family when built in 1921. It stood atop a majestic ocean bluff, rooted in granite and exposed to sea and sun with breakers slamming into granite cliffs hundreds of feet below, and the place dripped in history.

The second book was 'Between Two Worlds', another 1964 book, this time by Nandor Fodor, British-American parapsychologist and psychoanalyst, interestingly enough also of Hungarian origin.

I'll just quote the book.

"In this extraordinary book, you will encounter the marvelous and mysterious, the supernatural and the supernormal!

Here are case histories, from the files of the world's foremost psychic investigator, of truly extraordinary phenomena . . . poltergeists, demons, pyramid curses, telepathic messages, ghosts and much, much more.

In these exciting pages, you'll discover:

The Ghosts of Raynham Hall
The Baltimore Poltergeist
The Invisible Beast of Doarlish" and on and on...

I was already hooked. A fairly committed Southern Baptist already, but inquisitive about all things spiritual, this tome of tales from the edges of the spirit world was just what I was looking for. Another win for Michel.

Nandor Fodor, the author, was a man of his time. His book was curious in that it presented what would appear to be obvious fiction, in light of modern science, as stone cold fact. 

One chapter, "The 'Living Machine' Of Rev. John Murray Spear" was particularly interesting to my 16 year old mind,  a mind still trying to sort out a reality that was equal parts Baptist dogma, Fantasy novels, and 1980's era Science classes...

John Murray Spear was born in 1804, and by 1852 he was a Spiritualist leader of a small following in the area of Lynn, Massachusetts. Soon, he claimed to be receiving communications from a group of spirits including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson & John Quincy Adams, and they were providing him with instructions. He was to bring a new technology to mankind that would save us from toil and strife, a mechanical Messiah intended to herald a new era of Utopia.

In 1854, the former clergyman combined science and spiritualism in an attempt to build and birth an electro-mechanical god.

In 1986, Michel sold me 2 books that would affect the course of my life. One shaped my ideas of a proper house. The other led me to a hobby of admittedly some eccentricity.

It's now 202X. I've lost my wife. I own and dwell in the antique manor house of a manganese miner, itself rooted firmly in primordial granite. There is a storm coming tonight. And I have more to tell you before I'm ready.

"The world is to me a secret which I desired to divine." She's gone now, and the kids are far away. It's just me, an empty house, a collection of interesting artifacts, and an idea. And there's really no reason to NOT see what happens when I put all the pieces together.