The Haunting at Grays Harbor (The River Book 8) by Michael Richan

Steven said, still holding his
hands. “And apparently I can’t use it.”
    “Maybe you have to have a certain skill to see through it?”
Roy asked, examining the edges of the trivet for anything unusual.
    Steven walked around the table, looking for anything on the
legend shelf that might offer a clue to the trivet’s use.
    “Dad,” he said, pointing to the back of the slate. Roy walked
around to join him, and saw a thin slit in the back of the shelf, about the
length of the glass plate. “I think it goes in there.” They dropped back into
the River, and Roy raised the plate to the slit, sliding it in gently until it
disappeared, like a CD player sucking in a disc.
    All of the lights on the legend shelf went dark. Steven
panicked, thinking they might have broken the device. Instead, they heard a
light humming coming from inside it. After a minute passed, an edge of the
glass appeared out of the slit, and the lights returned to the top of the
shelf.
    “Now it looks like glass, outside of the River,” Roy said.
“Should I take it?”
    “I guess so?” Steven said back, unsure.
    Roy delicately grabbed the edge of the glass plate and pulled.
It slid from the slit, and as it emerged, they saw that it had become opaque.
He held it up for Steven to see.
    “It’s warm,” Roy said.
    “Can you see anything in it?” Steven asked.
    Roy turned it over in his hands. The plate looked as though a
cloudy white liquid had been baked into the glass. “Nope,” Roy said.
    “Well, what do we do now?” Steven asked.
    “I don’t know,” Roy said. “Maybe we should have asked Eliza
for more directions.”
    He handed it to Steven, who took it and turned it over in his
hands. “You’re right, it’s warm. Doesn’t hurt,” Steven said, examining it, a
little skittish that the searing hot pain might return to his palms.
    “Great, it’s an Easy Bake oven,” Roy said. “And about as
useless.”
    As Steven held the plate, he began to see movement. He
stopped turning it over, and held it still – the baked-in swirls of white began
to move and twist inside the glass. “Whoa,” he said. “It’s not done.”
    “Maybe you should…” Roy began, but stopped as he saw the
plate begin to grow in Steven’s hand.
    Steven placed the plate on the floor and stood back. They
watched as it slowly grew in size, and the colors of the fluid inside it
shifted. When it grew past two feet in diameter, Steven and Roy took another
step back.
    “It’ll stop at some point, right?” Steven asked.
    “How should I know?” Roy replied.
    As it continued to widen, it also became thicker. It crossed
three feet in diameter and the edges of the disc rose up off the ground, nearly
ten inches. It began to bump into the legs of the table holding the legend
shelf.
    “Help me move this!” Steven shouted, running to one end of
the table and waiting for Roy to take the other end. They lifted it gently and
slid it carefully away, giving the disc more room to grow. Soon its other edge
was bumping into the legs of another table, and Steven and Roy moved to
relocate that table as well.
    As it crossed six feet in diameter and the edges rose to
almost three feet high, Steven began to wonder if it would ever stop.
    “Incredible!” Roy said, staring down into the surface of the
giant disc as it continued to expand.
    “This room is only so big,” Steven said. “It might take it
all!”
    They moved another table out of the way and soon the disc
grew to almost ten feet in diameter. Its vertical growth had slowed, stopping
at around four feet tall. The top surface of the disc had become translucent,
and they could make out movement under it. As the growth of the disc came to a
stop, the surface cleared and then disappeared, revealing a detailed three
dimensional map of the pacific northwest.
    “You know, I like to have something fun happen every day,”
Roy said. “This counts for the next month.”
    Steven approached the edge of the huge disc. He reached