Spirit Mountain Read Online Free

jump out at us.
    Logan pulled out a stack of papers, articles and flyers. “I think we should separate these by articles about the legend and deaths reported in the town.” He handed me a stack.
    I took them and created two piles that we both built. Every so often, I’d glance up at him and he’d be staring at me with those brown eyes and curious face.
    “Look at this.” I shoved an article his way. “It says that the legend started one hundred years ago.”
    Logan scanned the yellowish, brittle paper, carefully holding it so it didn’t fall apart in his hands. “Wow,” he muttered.
    “What? What else does it say?”
    “The note attached is from...” He narrowed his eyes.
    “What? Tell me.”
    “How long has this house been here?”
    “I don’t know! How would I know that?” My aunt and uncle had never told me much about their own past, let alone the past of their weird old house.
    Logan glanced up at me and then back at the article. “Beth, this was written a hundred years ago by a woman who lived in this house.”
    “No way! Let me see that.”
    “Apparently, the boy—the one that appears in dreams—was this woman’s brother.” He handed me the paper, which I cradled in my hands.
    “Logan, this is old. The English is broken, but there’s a note stapled to the back from the owners who lived here before my aunt and uncle, but after that woman who wrote the article. The note states that they found this article in a box of things in their attic...” I glanced up. “In this attic.”
    Logan gasped. “So, read the article that the lady wrote.”
    I cleared my throat, fighting the eerie feeling swelling inside me. “I write to tell you about my brother. His story has been buried in a lifetime of foolish folklore, but I’m too old now and cannot see him the way I used to. I ask that you put this article in your paper, so that he may have closure.” A chill ran down my spine.
    “What else does it say?” Logan asked.
    I slowly lifted my head from the weathered article to the boy in front of me, tears at the rims of my eyes threatening to flood my face. “The poor boy was murdered by the townspeople.”
     
     

 
    Chapter Six
     
    “Can I see it?” Logan reached out and carefully slid it from my hands. He read: “We were ordinary folks who moved into these parts in 1872. My brother was the kindest soul you’d ever meet. On his seventeenth birthday, he told the town mayor that his daughter was going to die in twenty-one days. When it happened, they blamed him. Twenty-one days after my brother turned seventeen, the townsmen took him to the mountain east of here, and I never saw my brother again—not in the way that one might see someone in flesh and body anyway. But Ty would visit me in my dreams and share his aspirations with me. That is, until three years ago, when he stopped coming to me.”
    “Logan,” I interrupted, “when was the first dream reported by anyone else in this town?”
    “I’m not sure. Let’s find it and see if it matches up with this article.”
    As the clock struck ten, my aunt knocked on the door and tried to turn the knob. I had locked the door and managed to muffle a call out to her, “Sleeping.”
    “All right, I’m just making sure you’re okay in there.”
    “Thank you, Aunt Vine.” We heard the floorboards creak as she moved down the hallway toward her bedroom.
    Turning our attention back to the boxes in front of us, we dug through more sheets of old, faded papers. We became immersed for hours. As the night escaped and the light of dawn started to creep up over the horizon, Logan held up a wrinkled newspaper. “I found something.”
    I rubbed my tired eyes and glanced up at him. “What does it say?”
    “It’s dated three years before the old woman’s article about her brother. A woman checked herself into the town hospital and said she’d had a disturbing dream about a boy with dark eyes.”
    My eyes lit up. “That’s Ty!”
    “Right? But it