The Energy Sinkpoint

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“There is a dangerous energy sink-point in southeastern Oklahoma,” said Dad. “It’s coming in clearly. It’s very detectable.” He paused and checked the equipment again. “And it is infinitely negative.”

Dad was looking into a transparent electric bowling ball that glowed with a million miniature lightning bolts zapping through it, crackling and hissing through the vast silence of Dad’s laboratory.

“Thinking about taking up bowling?” I had asked Dad when I first saw his new device. Dad ignored my feeble attempt at a joke. I knew it was not a bowling ball at all, but a high-intensity plasma generator. The electrical energy was augmented by a daunting set of magnets, chemicals, and charged metal.

To tell the truth, I was nervous. I wondered about the possibility of a grisly death by electrical shock, and if we did die, how long it would be before our bodies would be found down here in Dad’s basement lab. Mother was staying with her sister in Plano, Texas, for a week, and people would simply assume that Dad was in Nevada checking on his gold claims or on a treasure hunt, and that I had decided to take a trip somewhere.

The door was securely locked, as it always was when he did his experiments. It could be dangerous to have someone enter in the middle of an experiment. That wasn’t the whole story, though. Dad was worried about losing control of some of the processes he had perfected and the amazing equipment he had developed.

He just couldn’t take chances, he said. Further, he was not quite ready to let people know the things he had discovered.

“I can split the frequencies into bands. I know where they start and end, and I can triangulate,” said Dad, distractedly. “This is strange. It is just so absolutely negative. It almost makes waves – like a dark, terrible river flowing into a huge, pulsing lake of negative energy so off the scale that it measures infinitely negative.”

“Can you locate the exact location?” I asked. The laboratory held an aroma I had not smelled before – it was pungent and sweet, like cloves and chili pepper.

Dad nodded. “Yes. This new method is very precise. It doesn’t home in on things, it identifies, locates, and can even track different energies. I don’t have it very finely calibrated, though, so all I can really detect at this point are very big, massive energy fields.”

“Like the one in southeastern Oklahoma?” I asked. I pushed the sleeves of my light cotton knit sweater up toward my elbows, and as I did so, I noticed that the hairs of my arms were standing straight up. Static electricity, I supposed.

“Yes.” Dad put a wire from the base of the bowling ball stand onto a control box which had a small liquid crystal display. “This shows the coordinates of the energy field. The infinitely negative place is here.”

He leaned over a map of the state of Oklahoma and drew his finger down the longitude and across on the latitude. Light sizzled. The miniature lightning bolts continued to flash across the miniature sky within the plasma ball.

“Yahweh Springs.”

I took a breath. Dad had no way of knowing that Stanton had lived there as a young boy, and that we had been talking about going there this weekend.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“With something of this magnitude, it is impossible not to be sure. I’ve never seen anything so negative – at least not in the continental United States,” he said.

I walked over to the map and looked down. Yes, just as Dad had said, the points coordinated to Yahweh Springs.

“The only other place that has an infinitely negative reading of this magnitude is in Southeastern Asia. Somewhere west of Vietnam, but not as far west as Thailand or Burma,” he said.

“In a way, to say it is like a lake of negative energy is incorrect,” Dad added, thoughtfully. “It is a sinkhole. Or, a vortex.”

I looked at the map and looked at the measurements that displayed on the crystal screen when Dad tuned in to the negative frequency. They did seem equivalent in intensity. In fact, it was clear the were almost mirror images of each other. I felt a chill go down my spine. I thought of Stanton and his mother in Yahweh Springs, and the place where his dad had been shot down in Laos during the Vietnam War. My some clenched and I could not bear to think any more. My body was reacting violently to the thoughts, to the energy.

“Are you all right?” asked Dad, sharply. “Ophelia?”

My hand began to tremble uncontrollably and I felt my body clench itself violently, the muscles in spasms so intense I wondered if something could be sheered off. My tongue felt huge and intrusive in my mouth and I fought to force air into my chest.

“Ophelia!” Dad’s voice sounded very distant, muffled. “Ophelia! Hang on. I’ll get help. You’re having a seizure.”