Lates t story >>>The Magic Mansion (http://neuage.org/MM/ Maggie and Mabel's Magic Mansion will take them wherever they wish to go. The house used for this story is a model made by my father-in-law after visiting our house in Round Lake, New York and upon return to Australia he built this model based on his memory of our house. The page for this house is at http://neuage.org/house/ As of October 2015 there are three chapters and an introduction to these adventures.
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Leigh Neuage (July 6 1983 - August 16 2003) --
It was a hard hit ball. Probably the longest hit that
Leigh had ever hit. The ball lifted higher and higher then cleared the bushes
at the end of the park by several metres.
"Wow",
yelled Leigh. The other children just stood and stared in disbelief, as the ball went farther and
farther.
'CRASH' went the sound of breaking glass - somewhere on the other side of the
bushes.
The children ran to the bushes. They could see the old hotel
not far away. A window at the end of the building on the third floor was broken. How could a ball hit by an
eight year old travel so far? It was like a gust
of wind had carried it to the hotel, or a big vacuum had sucked it streight to
the window. But there was no wind and nobody
.~~
believed in giant vacuums. Or for that
matter - in black holes inside of abandoned hotels that would drawt ngs to
Y
it.
No one wanted to go to the old hotel to recover the ball. The place looked spooky. People had not stayed there for
a very long time. The front and back doors were boarded over and had several 'no trespassing' signs nailed on them.
The old hotel had a very unkept look to it~ The grounds around the place were
overgrown. The grass had not been mowed + or
years. Bushes, that had not been trimmed for decades
spread . ^`
out in several
directions - with most of them growing in a snarled form together - that at. night gave the
appearance of men fighting one
another. A stone wall that surrounded the hotel was crumbling. People stayed
away from there.
Possums and birds lived in the roof. The
animals all looked busy - the birds flying back and forth with sticks to build
nests, and possums carrying food to holes in the roof. The children had seen
bats before - flying in and out of the hotel through holes in the side of the
upstair's walls.
People in
town had said that the old hotel was haunted. Ghosts had been seen and noises
like gun shots and crying had been heard. The local police had investigated but
never found anything to explain the reported noises and sightings.
The
children discussed a resuce attempt for their ball. None of them had any money
to buy another one - and they all lived a long ways from a sports store even if
they did have the money for another ball.
One of the
children, Sacha, Leigh's older brother - said that he thought he had heard
someone say, "ouch" when the ball went crashing through the window.
Other children, including Leigh said they had heard the "ouch" too
but didn't want to say anything because the others would have thought that they
sounded nuts. And besides, the stories about the hotel being haunted were just
made up by adults to keep children away. Or were they?
After much
discussion - and even arguments - about how to retrieve the lost ball,
everyone, except Sacha and Leigh, said they had to go home and could not go
looking for a ball. Sacha and Leigh went home too, but just to get their dog -
Shaga, and a torch. After all, the ball belonged to them --and Leigh had hit
it, so it was pretty much their responsibility to get it.
When the
children got home they found their father in his office working at his desk. He was a writer of science fiction books.
They told him that they had lost their ball and now were going to look for it
over at the old hotel. Their father told them to be careful and then laughingly
said.
"It's haunted you know?"
But the children didn't want to hear that - so they basically didn't,
though they probably did some where in their mind. Their father was a writer of
make-believe worlds. What did he know about reality?
The children with their dog next to them walked the two blocks back to
the park where they had been playing ball. They walked around the park, climbed
through an opening in the bushes and went over the crumbling walls that surrounded the almost jungle-like gardens and lawns of the
old hotel. They both shivered, even though it was a hot day as they walked
around the hotel looking for the best way to get in. The downstair's doors were
boarded up and so were the windows.
They started wondering if it was worth getting their ball.
In the back of the old hotel, which was named The Crown, before it finally closed thirty years
earlier, there were stairs that led to the third floor. The stairs looked very
old and dangerous. Some of the steps were missing and the old wooden frame looked as if it would collapse with even the slightest gust of wind. Luckily, for now anyway, there was no wind - and
it appeared that there was none in the near future either.
It was a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon. A sort of day that one
would rather be at the beach than in some dumpy old building looking for a ball that was not worth much more than a week's allowance - or twenty-five empty
one-litre soda bottles returned to the deli.
Suddenly, Shaga ran up the stairs and
disappeared at the top of the steps. The children slowly began the climb up .
They could hear their dog barking - but it sounded like he was a long
ways off - and his barking was muffled like he was in a tunnel. The steps creaked and the staircase rocked back and forth as the children climbed.
They called their dog, "Shaga,
Shaga" - and off in the distance they could hear his barks. The dog's
sounds reminded the boys of fog horns they had heard on a stormy night recently
when they were going across the English
Channel to see Paris. That had been only a few months earlier.
Now they were here. And there would be no France at the top of an old hotel's staircase - though it all did seem very foreign.
At the top of the steps
they looked into the third floor of The Crown. There was not a door in the doorway so they could
easily look down the hallway. Their dog ran up to them, licked their hands then ran off again back to some mysterious, though
probably explainable, to a down-to-earth-person, place at the end of the hall
on the
third floor of the old hotel. His barking once again became more distant
sounding and muffled.
Lost Ball -Broken Window Terrell Adsit-Neuage p. 4s
On the third floor there were eight doors - no doubt leading to
eight rooms. On the walls between the rooms there were old pictures. Some of
the pictures were portraits of people that looked like people who lived in the
1800s. There was a large wanted poster of the Ned Kelly gang on the wall at the
end of the hallway. On one of the doors there was a railroad schedule - dated
June 1880. There were also pictures of the town - taken in the 1880s.
Sacha and Leigh looked at the 'posters, pictures and
railroad schedule, then went to the last room on the third floor.
"This
is the room where our ball should be", said Sacha.
Suddenly, Shaga came bolting out of the
room that they were about to enter. He yelped, whined, barked, and growled
- all at once - then ran at his fastest running speed ever, along the hall,
through the doorless-doorway, and down the creaking old steps. The children
listened as his barking, growling, and yelping - all at one time - faded off
into the distance.
"Dumb dog! - we brought him to protect
us, and he's probably home by now hiding under the car," said
Leigh.
"We'll
just go in and get our ball and get out of here," said Sacha.
The two boys pushed the door open to the room where their dog
had recently left - in such a hurry. As soon as they went into the room the
door quickly closed behind them. The air became chilly and a strong wind
swirled around the room. Sacha and Leigh no longer seemed to be where they had
been.
Then as quickly as the wind and cold began to
envelope them, it stopped - and there was a still in the room that sent chills
though the children's bodies. They stood, frozen in place, as the room clouded
up then cleared leaving them wishing that they were somewhere else than
wherever it was they were now.
¥ Lost____ Ball - Broken Window Terrell
Adsit-Neuage p. 56
They were in a
different place - or maybe it was the same place - how could someone be in a different place than where they were? But they were in a different something, though they didn't know what. In
front of them stood the Kelly Gang. It was June 28, 1880 all over again, though
the children weren't quite sure how they knew that.
The boys looked around the place they were
in, it was a room, but not the room - or at least the room they thought they should be in. There was a broken window. Something, like
a ball could have gone through easily enough. Sacha, trying to keep one eye on the strangers in front of him and at the same
time look around the room for
the ball was using another part of his mind to find an escape from the situation. Leigh, who just didn't believe any of what was happening had thoughts of, "maybe
someone is just playing a trick on us and these guys are just dressed up
to look like the Ned Kelly gang". He did
not know if he actually said that or just thought it. Then he thought - maybe
out loud, or maybe to himself, "dad is doing this - he said it was haunted
to
nfreak us out - maybe he's made a hologram.
But no, he couldn't do that, he wouldn't know how". But what was reality
and what was something else was not going to be
obvious in this particular situation.
Sacha asked the men if they were the Kelly
gang. Then he thought out loud, or maybe to himself - who could tell what they were doing anymore? "these dudes look just
like the ones on the wanted poster at the end of the hallway." Then
laughing he said "you guys are just dressed up - this is really a
joke and you're all stupid, just give us our
ball back and let us out of this dump or you will all be in trouble".
Lost Ball - Broken
Window Terrell Adsit-Neuage p.
7
One of the men, an unshaven and dirty man
with bad breath, went up to Sacha and looked him in the eye and said, "yep,
we're the Kelly gang, what are you children
doing here? Did the constable send you to trick us in to a surrender? He had
better not - we'll never surrender or stop until Ned is freed."
"Wow, what is this jerk going-on-about anyway," said Leigh.
"I don't know but he stinks," answered Sacha.
Sacha continued, "I don't know what is
going on or how we got into your world..." - then remembering
that it was June 28 - and in one of his
classes at school that he was half paying attention to and half reading a comic
book during, the teacher was going on about June 28 being the day the Kelly
gang did something. Sacha, standing in this place he was now in, had a thought
slip by him, real quickly, that maybe he should pay better attention at school
in the future, but it was a fleeting thought - nothing to be concerned or
change one's way over. But
there was something
here. It
was best to go along with the
gets filed away. That was what his father once said, and maybe it made
sense.
Sacha continued
speaking to the men who were now grouped around the children. "What was it
I was saying? Right! O.K. if we're in your stupid world I will tell you creeps
what is going to happen - you're all going to die, NEW SITE = JULY 2014 - http://neuage.us/2014/July/ - Today. This is your last day
of freedom. And in the future, a hundred years from now, or is it then? people
will treat Ned Kelly as a hero - but I don't or won't, whatever - he was a
rotten old thief and murderer and
0 deserves to die."
Lost Ball Broken Window Terrell Adsit-Neuage Pita
¥ The man with the bad breath that was
staring eye-to-eye with Sacha gave him a slight shove and said, "how's a
couple kids going to stop us?" And just to show he was not kidding he took
out his gun and waved it around.
Then there were the
sounds of gun shots outside of the old hotel. Leigh and Sacha saw several
police dressed in the clothing of the 1800s outside the window. They quickly got away from the window and ran to the other side of the
room. The Kelly men began shooting back at the police outside. One of
the men grabed Sacha and started dragging him
toward the window. 'Sacha pulled out his torch and shown it into the man's
eyes. The man, never having seen a torch before - as they hadn't been invented, or at least one like Sacha had, yet in
the 1880s seemed terrified and let go of Sacha. Sacha shown the light, and it
was a powerful six battery one that flashed on and off, into the eyes of
the other men. He told them that he could turn
them into stone with his torch. The frightened men dropped their guns and ran
out of the room.
As soon as the men left the room the air cleared and the old
( room reappeared. There
was a big old dresser with a cracked
mirror. Spider webs
coverd a large portion of the room. A calendar on the wall showed
the date as June 28, 1880. "Exactly
one-hundred and ten years ago," Leigh said. There was a bed
with out a mattress. And several
broken chairs lay on the
floor. Plaster
was coming off of the ceiling and there was a
large crack in the wall.
Instantly the children
knew what had happened. Though once again they were left to wonder how they
knew something that no one had told them about - but they knew.
Lost Ball - Broken Window Terrell Adsit-Neuage P. %1
The Kelly gang had been trapped in the old
hotel - even though it was a thousand kilometres from where they really were
trapped a hundred years earlier.
The old hotel that the children were in had
been built the same week as the one that the Kelly gang had once been in and
had died in. The hotels looked the same. They probably felt the same, though it
would be impossible to compare the two as the other one was long gone.
Even the materials that the hotel was built
of were from the same place. The doors of the two hotels were made from the
same tree. The floor boards, cupboards and bed posts in the two rooms were from
the same tree. That is the same room that the Kelly
gang had been in in 1880 and the one they were in with the children in
1990.
The Kelly gang's hotel had been set alight
by the police. As they burned in the flames,
they became trapped in a time bubble. The police had also become trapped
in the same time bubble and the Kelly gang
and the police reinacted, though they didn't know it., the event every
year on June 28.
When Sacha had shown his torch into the
eyes of the gang, the men were so startled that they broke through the time
bubble that they had been in and were finally freed of their earthly prison.
When they left - the original police left with them.
The boys looked at the broken window. The
ball had gone through it, that was for sure. And there it was under the bed.
Leigh crawled under the bed and retrieved it. The two boys ran out of the room, down the hall, through the
doorless doorway and down the wobbly and creaking, crackling stairs.
Lost Ball
-Broken Window Terrell Adsit-Neuegw to
As Sacha, running behind Leigh, stepped on
to the ground the whole staircase shook then collapsed in a pile of dusty
rubble behind them. Then with a loud crash the third floor of the old hotel
caved in. The boys ran to the street in tront of the hotel and watched. As the
third floor, and it seemed like it was happening in slow motion, crashed
through to the second then first floor, the whole building rocked then exploded
with boards and furniture flying in all directions. The two boys quickly went
across the street and went home without once
turning to look back at where they had been.
They never told anyone, accept me, not even their father what
had happened. They told me the story one day many years later, actually it was on June 28, while we were sitting next to
each other on a plane trip that was headed overseas. I was just a stranger to
them and they said they had to tell someone the story that they had kept secret
all these years.
/--Th
) The boys,
who were grown-up when they told me the story, said that the local council had
set the ruble of the old hotel alight three days after it had collapsed. The
land then was cleared and a three storey department store was built on
the sight of the old hotel. On the third floor, strange as it may seem, is the
sporting goods section. Balls are displayed
on the floor in the exact location as where the bail that Leigh hit then
found, was.
And looking out the window as we fly over the town far Delow can
still see the old hotel that the police set alight in 1800 and there I am,
running through the flames
Sacha and Leigh never found out what became of the man they
sat next to on June 28. He got up
from his seat while the plane flew over Stringybark Creek in Victoria to go to the bathroom but never returned to his seat. When they
landed Sacha and Leigh asked at the ticket counter where the man that
was sitting next to them had gone too. They were told that the seat had been reserved by a Mr. Kelly but he had missed the flight and therefore no
one had sat next to them on their
flight.
our first video clip 'going for a bit of a shop in Lahore'#DailyThoughts as of 11 December2021
#OurCurrentLifeWithCovid as of (DST) - 11 December2021 Lahore PakistanHAPPY 74TH BIRTHDAY TO ME one-hundred-twenty-four days ago