Chapter 1

Finding the Amulet

Justin Ranstrom wasn't really looking for anything when he found it. And isn't that just the way of things? Whenever anyone lost something and was turning the house upside down looking for it, Granpa Ranstrom used to say, "Soon's you stop looking for it, you'll trip over the dang thing."

And so it often seemed, though this theory did not hold true for Grandpa Ranstrom himself. He sailed out of Ebbettsport one morning to go fishing and disappeared. He was never found, even when the Coast Guard stopped looking for him. But that's another story. That story happened when Justin, now 12, was only 6 years old and really has nothing much to do with this story about how Justin found the amulet.

On that late August afternoon, Justin was by himself, as usual, which was quite all right with him. Justin's dad was off driving somewhere up or down the coast, or over the mountains to the Sacramento Valley. Olie Ranstrom still thought of himself as a fisherman, from a family of fishermen, even though most of his income came from driving a truck for Nor-Pac Freight Lines. Sally, Justin's mother, was down at the Perko's on Highway One pouring coffee for the tourists.

Best of all, his evil big brother, otherwise known as Lars, was at football practice, one of the special morning and afternoon pre-season practice sessions the coach had scheduled. Justin liked that. It kept Lars away from the house most of the day. But it was nearly three now, and he'd be coming back soon, and probably he'd be bringing his buddies with him. What better place was there to hang out for a sixteen-year-old jock and his buddies, fresh from back to back practice sessions and pumped up on adrenalin, than an empty house with a full refrigerator and a kid brother to torment?

The kitchen clock marched steadily towards the end of peace and quiet. It gave Justin added incentive to finish the list of chores hanging by a magnet on the refrigerator door as quickly as possible. He'd gotten a good start on them before lunch and finished the last of them just as the clock hit three. He checked the list one more time to be sure, decided he'd done all that was required of him, dashed into his bedroom, and stuffed the latest book he was reading into his daypack. Sticking his nose in a book when the jocks were around invited trouble, so Justin planned on making a strategic withdrawl. Passing the fridge on the way out, he grabbed a can of soda, the first one that his hand encountered. He didn't play favorites. Into the pack it went. He made a quick detour into the pantry to snatch a small bag of chips and then he was out the kitchen door, letting the screen door slam behind him. He reminded himself for the umpteenth time not to do that, because the old wooden framed screen door always threatened to come down and take the back steps with it.

The Ranstrom's house was a low, rambling wood-shingled old farmhouse set on several acres of vegetable gardens and old farm sheds. Everywhere blackberry bushes seemed ready to take over the moment you turned your back on them. The house, the gardens, the sheds, and the blackberries all needed more tending than they were getting. The moist, salty sea wind that blew across the sea-carved terrace where the town of Ebbettsport sprawled made blackberries and redwoods thrive, but was hard on everything man-made.

Justin crossed the backyard to the old shed that had been cleared of enough clutter to allow storing useful things, got his bicycle, and wheeled it around the corner of the house. Mounting, Justin pedaled down the driveway and out the gate, turning left, away from town. The Ranstrom house was just about at that place on Chinquapin Road where it turned from a city street into a country lane, the city limits having stopped short of swallowing up the old farm. It was one of those country lanes that went straight, then turned at a right angle, went straight again, and turned at another right angle. That was because when the road was built it followed the farmers' fence lines, and the farmers liked their fences straight, with nice, neat corners.

In a few minutes, Justin came up to what everyone knew as the Haunted Farmhouse. He didn't really believe it was haunted, at least not during daylight. It was just an old abandoned farmhouse, slowly falling down. It leaned strongly to one side. The window glass was long gone. The front steps had collapsed. And the barn and chicken coops and other outbuildings were in even worse shape. Blackberry bushes were climbing over everything. A row of ancient Monterey cypress trees, in an "L" shape, lined the seaward side of the old farmyard. They were still alive, but showing their age almost as much as the buildings. Their broken limbs and gnarled trunks added to the overall sense of decay and, after the sun set, general spookiness.

Just an old farmhouse, Justin thought. Nothing haunting it but spiders and rats. But he still crossed to the other side of the road and started pedaling faster as he approached it. And he was glad he did.

Out of the corner of this eye, he caught movement among the blackberries. He turned to see what it was and had a brief glimpse of a man in a battered wide-brimmed hat and ratty coat poking about in the blackberry bushes. Then Justin was down the road and the house blocked his view. Just some old homeless guy, Justin thought, looking for blackberries. Probably harmless. Still, you never knew. He kept up his speed and looked back every now and then.

Within a few minutes, he came to the turn that would take him up to the mountain. The mountain actually had two names. The Indians had called it Pah-Tah-Poon-Ta-Hah, or something like that. The white settlers never found out what that name meant. The Indians could have told them, and added many interesting stories as well, but the settlers weren't interested and called the mountain Simmons Peak. After a while, no one remembered who the Mr. Simmons was who put his name on it, and some later residents started calling it Pah-Tah-Poon-Ta-Hah again. Justin thought that sounded much better than Simmons Peak.

The mountain itself was a big, irregular lump that rose up quite suddenly from the coastal plain. It was covered with a thick blanket of forest so that you couldn't really see the mountain itself, just the mixed redwoods and Douglas firs, tan oaks, madrones, and pepperwoods, each with its own particular outline and shade of green.

As the road approached the mountain, it grew steadily worse. It was old and no longer maintained. The pavement had broken into irregular blocks, faded to pale gray with the years and winter rains, and veined with thin strips of grass and weeds. Then, as it started to climb the slope, the pavement ended altogether and the road became just two tire tracks with a strip of weeds between them.

Another hundred yards, and Justin came to the gate. Two vertical pieces of large pipe, each almost as tall as Justin, had been set in concrete on either side of the road. A length of pipe, hinged to one upright and padlocked to the other, blocked the road. The entire thing had once been painted a bright yellow. Now it was equal parts very faded yellow and rust.

Justin had never seen the gate open, though it must have been opened sometimes. There were shiny bits of bare metal on the hinges. And, once or twice when he was back in the woods, he'd heard the sound of a truck or a Jeep engine.

Justin got off his bike. He ducked under the gate, then pulled the bike along after him. He mounted the bike and started pedaling, shifting it into a lower gear because the road started climbing steeply almost immediately after the gate.

A small creek, with just a trickle of water defying the late summer dryness, came down from his left and dove into a metal culvert. This was Justin's landmark. The trail uphill started just a little past the culvert. He dismounted from the bike and pulled it up the steep, two-foot bank. He walked the bike a short distance from the road to where a ring of young redwood trees sprouted, marking the circumference of a long-gone forest giant. In the center of the ring, where a massive trunk had once been, was a hollow. It was where Justin usually stashed his bike, out of sight and chained to one of the slender young trees. He secured the bike as usual and started up the trail.

He had discovered the trail late last summer, during his frontiersman period. He'd found a Young Reader's copy of The Last of the Mohicans at the used book store. For a while he had become "Hawkeye Justin" or "Justin the Deerslayer", roaming the woods with his brother's castoff BB gun. For a tomahawk he carried an old shingling hatchet he'd found in one of the sheds. He'd had no success in interesting any of his friends in playing the game. They were all obsessed with the latest modern heroes. But that was all right. Frontiersmen were solitary sorts.

He continued up the narrow trail on foot, puffing a little because it was a stiff climb. But then it leveled out, wandered back and forth a few times through stands of Douglas fir and redwood, rose again, and then came out on a sort of shelf on the side of the mountain, roughly triangular in shape. On two sides of the triangle, the land sloped downward. On the third side, the mountain rose up even more steeply, almost a cliff. Oaks, madrones, and pepperwood trees covered most of the level ground

An oddity occupied the center of the shelf, a circular depression or bowl, thirty or forty feet across and three feet deep. The sides of the bowl were steep, but the bottom was flat, thickly covered with dead leaves, twigs, and fallen branches. A low, irregular rim rose all the way around it. Trees grew up to the rim and even on the rim, crisscrossing their branches over the bowl, but none grew within the bowl itself. After showing it to some of his friends, he exercised his right as discoverer and named it the Witch Ring. It had been near Halloween at the time, and witches were on his mind. It seemed like the sort of place witches might meet in the dark of night to cackle and dance around their boiling cauldrons.

The name hadn't caught on. Mikey and C.J. thought it was a suitable place to play soldiers, though it was a long way to come and they could play just as well in the old orchard behind the Ranstrom place. And his friend Jessica informed him, rather snippily, that, according to her mother, witches were really mostly nice people who never boiled cauldrons or cast spells on people. And they never, ever cackled.

On this afternoon, Justin crossed over the rim at a place where he and others had worn a low spot into the gravelly soil. He picked a spot where the light was good and settled down to read. There was a convenient flat rock exposed there. He cleared it of the latest layer of fallen leaves and twigs. He set up his daypack to form a backrest, after, of course, removing his book, the soda, and the chips.

The Witch Ring was a good place to read. It was quiet and somehow seemed appropriate, since so many of the fantasy stories Justin read involved heroes trekking through wildernesses, enchanted forests, and the like. The book Justin brought with him, The Goldenbeard Saga: Return to the Fjordlands, was no exception. After many perilous adventures, the Viking Hildr Gullskeggr, Goldenbeard, had returned to have it out with his archenemy, the evil and devious Grymr Blacktooth. Grymr had challenged Hildr to a fight to the death. The match was to take place on an island in the middle of the enchanted lake. Justin fully expected Grymr to pull some dirty trick. He always did. But Hildr was no fool. No Viking who'd traveled in as many lands as Hildr had and lived to return to the Fjordlands would go down easily. Justin was looking forward to an entertaining battle.

Since Justin had discovered fantasy books, he'd developed an interest in almost any story that involved knights, warriors, or wizards. But he particularly liked stories about Vikings. Ater all, the Ranstroms had come from a long line of Vikings. For hundreds of years, ancestral Ranstroms had buckled on their swords, picked up their battle axes, slapped on their horned helmets, and sailed off in their longships to raid England and France and occasionally discover America. They were West Vikings, Vikings from the fjords of Norway.

Once, when Justin had gone on a little too long talking about the family Vikings, his father, a practical man who had never been known to read fiction, tried to point out that most likely the Ranstroms were descended from the Vikings' neighbors and cousins. They were the people who stayed behind to farm the stony fields, pull cod from the icy fjords, and raise up succeeding generations of Ranstroms so eventually there'd be one to emigrate to America. And those horned helmets? Archeologists had never, ever discovered a horned helmet in a Viking grave, or so his father claimed.

But Justin wasn't going to buy that. Why, you just had to look at his brother, Lars. If Lars, who was tall, blond, fair of skin, and well muscled, wasn't a young Viking, then who was? He even played on a high school football team named for the Vikings. As much as Lars picked on him and made his life miserable, Justin had to admit that watching Lars and his teammates battling down the football field it was easy to picture them in armor and horned helmets, swinging battleaxes, a Viking war party on a rampage.

And those horned helmets, well, there had to be a reason they'd never been found. Maybe Vikings just treasured them so much they didn't put them in the graves. They were way too cool for the Vikings not to have worn them. There was probably a secret cave where old horned helmets were stashed, like a Viking hall of fame.

Last Halloween Justin had dressed up as a Viking, complete with plastic horned helmet. The result had not been what Justin was attempting to achieve. For several weeks he'd had to endure jokes about the "little horned toad."

It just wasn't fair. Lars took after the Ranstrom side of the family, like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Justin took after his mother's side. Sally Santucci Ranstrom was a petite woman. From her ancestors in Sicily she'd inherited glossy black hair, which she'd passed on to Justin. It had a tendency to curl in a very un-Viking manner. She'd also passed along her height. Or rather, lack of height. Most of Justin's classmates had started spurting upwards. But not Justin. What was really vexing about it was that he used to be able to look Jessica, his best friend, eye to eye. Now it was more like eye to chin. Her chin, his eye.

And Justin got his name from his mother as well. Olie Ranstrom had claimed the right to choose the name for his first-born son and had, properly, given him a name borne by many Ranstrom ancestors. Sally had then claimed the right to name her second son and, for no logical reason, had come up with "Justin." The Ranstrom family tree was full of Svens and Gunnars and Leifs. Good Viking names. Leif Ranstrom. Now that was a cool name. But never, ever in history had there been a Ranstrom, or a Viking for that matter, named "Justin." Hildr Gullskeggr. That was a real Viking name. Not Justin Gullskeggr. As Justin settled back, found his place in the book and started to read he idly wondered what he'd have to do, once he was grown up, to officially change his name from Justin to Hildr. And then he let that thought evaporate as the story drew him in.

Those were the days, Justin thought. They knew how to handle bullies back in Viking times. Pull out your sword and lop their heads off. If only, he sighed. For, sitting in the back of his mind like an ugly toad, was the knowledge that summer vacation was ending, and he was one day closer to going back to school. But he wasn't going back to the school he'd spent the last six years at. He was starting at the Morton Elbridge Middle School. Not only would he have the usual bullies to deal with, but he'd have a whole new crew of bullies from the other elementary schools to face. They were all probably having strategy meetings at this very minute, plotting how they would torment their chosen victims. But, at least, for the time being he could almost forget about that and concentrate on Hildr's adventures. Nobody ever gave Hildr a wedgie. Not more than once.

Absorbed in the story, it took awhile before Justin noticed it. At first he had only a vague feeling something was there in the trees above him. It was just a glimmer or flash that caught the corner of his eye when the sun hit it just right or a breeze wiggled the treetops and it started shaking.

At first Justin just looked around, a bit confused about what was distracting him. It took awhile but he finally noticed the small patch of reflected light on the leafy floor that sometimes stood still and other times wobbled back and forth as if it were a living thing.

That's strange, he thought.

He looked around for the source. There was nothing. For a moment he thought someone was hiding behind the trees at the edge of the depression, playing a trick on him with a mirror. Instinctively he picked up a rock to chuck at whoever it was. But he saw no one. Watching the glimmer and then looking at the sun, he tried to figure out where the reflection came from.

Finally he looked up and there it was, hanging from an overarching branch a good twenty feet up. He chucked the rock at it and missed. He followed the first rock with a second and a third. They all missed. For the next ten minutes Justin threw rocks at the branch from different positions until one finally connected. The branch shook, and a shiny brass-colored object plopped onto the dry leaves at his feet.

And that was how Justin found it. Or perhaps that was how it found Justin.