In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,73

ask.

“Oh, about forty-one years and counting.”

Rob gets up. “Her family’s been here even longer. She’s a kind of encyclopedia about this place.”

“John’s collecting stories about the Sasquatch,” Corrina says to Glenna, excitedly.

“Sas-quatch?” Glenna says, unimpressed. “You mean like … Bigfoot? No, if there was anything like that here, I’d have heard about it.”

I turn to Corrina. “And you and Rob haven’t heard anything.”

“Sorry, we’ve got nothing,” she says, shaking her head before turning to look at Rob, who’s pouring himself a coffee at the waiters’ station. “Well, except for …”

“For what?” I ask. “Ghosts.”

Glenna smirks again.

“We haven’t actually seen them,” Corrina adds, looking a bit embarrassed. “But strange things have been happening here.”

Rob sits back down with his coffee. “When we closed after the first season, we left all the room doors in the lodge open,” he says. “We came back and found them all closed. And many of them were locked. That’s one story.”

Corrina runs a hand up and down her bare arm. “Look, I’m getting goose bumps,” she says.

“I’m not,” Glenna says. “If I can’t touch something, I don’t believe in it.”

Corrina leans over the table toward me. “Did you know that this lodge used to be a hospital?”

Glenna cuts in. “They made this building the new hospital in the 1970s after the old one closed. That driveway leading into the back was for the ambulance.”

Corrina’s voice tapers to a near whisper. “And behind me where the baking pantry is—that was the morgue.“

Rob sees me cringe, slaps his leg, and keels over, cackling. Corrina leans back into her chair and nods at me, eyes wide open.

“Well,” Glenna says, “maybe you ought to change the topic of your book.”

“No, no,” Corrina tells her. “All he needs to do is speak to a few more people. Who would you recommend?”

Glenna’s face goes stone cold. “No one.”

“Come again,” I say.

“Nobody here knows anything about this place,” she says. “People here invent stories. They make things up as they go along.”

“Are you calling the people who live here bullshitters?”

“With the straightest faces you ever saw. It’s the gospel truth coming out of their mouths.”

“But you don’t mean the original residents of Ocean Falls?” I ask her.

“Mister, I’m the only person originally from here. The rest are people who came after Ocean Falls was shut down, burned, destroyed. They’re the new people. This is their town now. And so their stories are whatever the hell they want.”

If I can’t touch something, I don’t believe in it. Glenna’s words echo in my mind. Could it be that what many people are seeing by way of a Sasquatch is not a rare, flesh-and-blood animal but instead some nonphysical, incorporeal entity? An apparition? After all, we know that there is a wider reality than what we can perceive through our specifically tuned senses. And that what’s “out there” is so different from what we feel and experience every day that we simply would not believe it if it were presented to us.

Discoveries in the area of quantum physics demonstrate that things are truly not what they seem, and that the universe, at the subatomic level anyway, operates far differently from how it is known to most people.

For instance, the world appears to be composed of separate objects with clearly definable boundaries, which we slot into categories of space and time. We evolved to see the world in terms of separate objects partly in order to distinguish the things that could either help or hinder us. But this view is more apparent than real. On a fundamental, subatomic level, nothing is fixed or separate. Objects that appear to us as solid, static, and separable—whether atoms, apples, or asteroids—are in fact made up of transient particles that are continually appearing and disappearing. They occur in no fixed time and space but only show tendencies to exist and occur. There are no objects, only processes—fluid bundles of energy, patterns of relationships, that ebb and flow in an ever-shifting web of interconnectivity. Fundamentally—and in total contradiction to what we know at our scale of day-to-day experience—all things meld into all other things. We just can’t see this. It’s an almost impossible thing to wrap our minds around.

Experiments conducted by the late Arthur J. Deikman, an American pioneer in the psychology of advanced states of consciousness, reinforced the above ideas. The ability of humans to perceive the full richness of life around them, he said, is constrained by an almost default state of mind he called “action mode” or “survival mode”—one