March 17, 1987

Dear Great-Uncle Carroll,

Thank you for sending me a birthday gift. It was nice of you to give me something, since we've never even met.

Sincerely,

Sara

March 28, 1987

Dear Great-Uncle Carroll,

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I just got back from the first of the Karate lessons you sent me for my birthday. I didn't think I'd like it at all, but I was wrong. It was really neat. Well, not what we did, actually, but what we saw. All we actually did was practice breathing and bowing and saying, "Yes, Sensei." (I had to make up a sign for "Sensei." I like him. Having me talk to him in sign language didn't seem to bother him at all.) Anyway, I saw these other people in there, practicing. They were really good, like the fighters in the movies. And the Sensei said that there are even ways to learn to defend yourself against someone who has a weapon, like a knife! If I could learn how to do that . . . I don't ever want anyone to be able to hurt me again. I promise I'll go to every lesson and practice lots and lots. I want to learn how to fight like that. Thank you so much for giving me the lessons.

Love,

Sara

P.S. I'm sorry about the last letter I sent you. Mom said I had to write to everyone who gave me something, so the letters were all kind of short.

November 11, 1987

Dear Uncle Carroll,

Thank you for your letter. Yes, I'm still enjoying my karate lessons. Most of the others in my class are tired of just learning how to block and to fall, but I know from experience that they're both important, too. I want to learn how to not get hit as much as I want to learn how to hit.

One of the boys in my karate class is named Sasha. We've become friends, and I'm trying to teach him a little sign language. He introduced me to his best friend, Kirsty, who's in the grade above us. She's really nice. She reads a lot, and she's lent me some of her books. The three of us play together a lot now.

Love,

Sara

March 20, 1988

Dear Uncle Carroll,

Thank you for giving me another year of karate lessons for my birthday this year. I'm starting to get pretty good (I'm better than Sasha, anyway), and I didn't want to stop them.

Are you ever going to come and visit me, instead of just sending letters and presents? I'd really like to meet you for real. After all, you're not that far away. I'm in New York and you're in North Carolina. We're on the same side of the country, so it can't be that hard.

Love,

Sara

June 4, 1988

Dear Uncle Carroll,

I didn't realize your job kept you so very busy. I asked my mom why I never saw you and she said that the work you did kept you from traveling at all. She said the last time she saw you was when she was just a little girl, younger than me. You couldn't even take time off to come to her wedding, or my dad's funeral.

I think you deserve a vacation. I go to school, and every Christmas we get a short vacation and every summer we get a really long one. You should tell your boss to let you take a vacation so you can come visit us. But, like Mom says, life isn't always fair, but we've got to live with it. Usually she means that it's not really fair that I can't talk, but I think it's even less fair to never get to take time off work.

Maybe someday when I'm older, I can come and visit you.

Love,

Sara

February 11, 1989

Dear Uncle Carroll,

I have a problem. I hurt my arm during my karate lesson the other day, and Mom has decided that it's dangerous. She wants me to stop doing karate. Please, please try to talk her out of it. I know she wants to protect me, but I'd rather be able to protect myself.

It's really important to me. Mom doesn't understand. I still have these nightmares where a man wearing a mask woven of shadows takes a long knife and touches it to my neck. I'm so terrified that I can't move, can't even breathe. The knife makes a small cut in my throat, just a couple of inches long, much shorter than the real scar on my neck. But the cut doesn't bleed, it glows. Then the man reaches down and pulls a glowing orb out of my neck. In the dream, I know he's stealing my voice. I try to scream, to yell for help, but only a tiny sound comes out. And it doesn't come from me; it comes from the glowing ball in the man's hand. About that time I usually wake up.

I don't want to have to rely on anyone else to protect me when I can't call for help if I need it. Please talk to my mom.

Love,

Sara

October 29, 1989

Dear Uncle Carroll,

I'm sorry I haven't written you in so long. I never thanked you for convincing Mom to let me keep doing karate.

School is going well, mostly. The class I'm having the most trouble with, suprisingly, isn't math, it's art. I can see in my head exactly what I want to make, or draw, but I just can't get it to reproduce itself. My teacher says I have an eye for art, but not the hands. Luckily, she grades based on effort, not artistic merit, so my report card looks okay, even though everything I make turns out awful.

I've started on a new research project, one that has nothing to do with school. Mom thinks I'm being silly, but I figure it can't hurt to try. What happened is this: My friends Sasha and Kirsty decided that they needed to find a new way to talk with me. My writing down what I want to say just takes to long, and Kirsty is hopeless at understanding sign. She says all the hand motions look the same to her. Anyway, she says that some of her books are about people who learned how to talk with each other just using their minds. It's called telepathy. She thinks we should learn how to do that. I know the book was fiction, but I want to the library and found some that weren't, and they say it's possible, too. Trouble is, they all disagree about how. I don't give up easily, though. I'll figure it out eventually.

Love,

Sara

December 2, 1989

Dear Uncle Carroll,

Thank you for the books you sent me. Maybe I'll find something in one of them that will help. Thank you especially for not telling me it's stupid. I have only read one of the books so far, the one about learning ESP. Sasha and I tried some of the clairvoyance experiments, but they didn't work very well. The part about seeing people's auras was very interesting, though. I'm not giving up; something is bound to work. I just have to find the right thing.

Love,

Sara

April 20, 1990

Dear Uncle Carroll,

I've been drawing information from lots of different places. I've read the entire occult section at the public library, everything from dream interpretation to reading tea leaves, from astrology to self-aware crystals. A lot of it seems to be complete nonsense. According to one of the books on dreams, what my nightmare really means is that I'm sexually repressed because I get tongue-tied in the presence of boys. Yeah, right. Just please don't tell my Mom about that. She'll just give me "The Lecture" all over again. (Anyway, how can I be tongue-tied when I'm mute?)

I've also been reading a lot of Kirsty's fantasy books. She's got books about people with telepathic bonds to dragons, white horses, big cat-creatures, alien beings, you name it. Also people who are telepathic because they're Homo Superior, or because they endured sensory deprivation, or because they just happen to have the talent and some relative who knows how to train them. None of those has seemed very helpful, yet. I doubt I'm likely to find out that I have a pet dragon, or that one of my relatives is secretly a magician.

Some of the stuff is really interesting, even though it doesn't have much useful to say about telepathy. For example, I had my horoscope cast, and it's exactly right in what it says about me. It was incredible. And both some of the occult books and some of the fictional ones talk about the energy that's in the land. I read a couple books talking about energy runs through the land in what are called ley lines, and that where they meet, they form pools of magical energy called nodes. If I close my eyes and concentrate really hard, I can almost feel it.

Well, Mom says I need to go do my homework now, so I have to end this letter. I promise to write again soon.

Love,

Sara

December 14, 1990

Dear Uncle Carroll,

I'm still working on my research project. I even used the stuff I've read as a basis for an English report I had to write. I don't think it was quite what my teacher expected from me, but it got a good grade anyway. I'm starting to find a few things that actually do seem to work. Kirsty gave me a little crystal point on a chain for my birthday (thanks for keeping up with my karate lessons) and I tried some of the stuff in one of the books on crystals I found at the library. I tried to feel the energy in it, and then to attune the crystal to me, so nobody else could wear it. I don't know if it worked, but it feels like it did.

The best of the new things I've tried is meditation. In one of Kirsty's books, this girl learns to through herself into a kind of trance and uses her alpha-brainwaves to communicate with a computer. I don't particularly feel the need to send my thoughts to a computer, since I can type just fine. But I figured I could try meditation, anyway.

The way the book explained it, meditation is a way of relaxing and focusing the mind, so we can do things that we normally can't because we're too distracted by everything that's going on around us. The hard part is the first step. That's to clear your mind completely and think about absolutely nothing. I haven't gotten very good at it yet, but it's really calming. Sometime I can clear my mind enough that I can see the energy that flows through everything. Sometimes I think I can even follow a ley-line with my eyes for a second or two before I get excited and lose my focus.

Actually, meditation seems very similar to the focus that Sensei says is vital to truly understanding karate, except what he's talking about is focusing the mind on the body and the surroundings, and what I'm trying is to focus on the spirit and the magic.

Have a Merry Christmas. I hope you like your gift.

Love,

Sara

February 13, 1991

Dear Uncle Carroll,

The book on meditation you sent me is really great. It makes a lot more sense than the one I found in the library. I figured out a lot from it, including what I was doing wrong. Thanks a lot.

I'm taking a class in photography this semester. It's really great. I think I told you once about how I really liked art, but nothing I ever drew turned out right. Well, photography is different. I don't have to be able to reproduce anything, I just have to recognize it. I just find the angle that makes some scene or object mean something, and take a picture of it. I'm enclosing a couple of the pictures I took. Tell me what you think.

What I really like the most about photography is that it's such a great means of communication. You know the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words." Well, I have trouble with words, but if I let a camera do my talking for me, I can say a whole lot. I'm trying to talk Mom into getting me a good camera, but she says she wants to wait and see if this is just a phase I'm going through, before she spends all that money. I guess I can understand.

Does it ever snow down there where you are? We got so much snow last week that we even got out of school for a couple days. I took some great pictures.

Love,

Sara

March 30, 1991

Dear Uncle Carroll,

My photography teacher told me she thought I should volunteer to work with the school newspaper, so I did. The newest issue came out today, and a picture that I took is on the front page.

I haven't forgotten about my research, either. One of the books I bought with my birthday money was full of case histories by a bunch of different parapsychologists. One of them told of this guy who could stare into a camera and when someone took his picture, they wouldn't get a picture of the guy, but of whatever he was thinking about. Kirsty and I went through an entire roll of film trying to make ourselves disappear and something else show up in the pictures. In some of the photos, we were really blurry and almost unrecognizable, but I'm not sure if that was because of our efforts or because the camera was out of focus.

Anyway, the other big deal about my birthday going by is that now I'm sixteen and I can drive. Mom took me to get my license yesterday, and then she let me drive home. Sasha gave me a really pretty scarf for my birthday. It's to wear around my neck. I usually wear high-necked shirts in the winter and a bandanna tied around my throat the rest of the year. Sasha said he thought I should start a collection of nicer scarves for more dressy occasions. Then he asked me to go out to dinner with him. Like a date! We're going on Friday. I need to find something to wear that will match the scarf he gave me.

Love,

Sara

March 18, 1992

Dear Uncle Carroll,

What is that book you sent me? It looks incredibly old. I try reading it a little every night. It's very hard to understand; I can't make much sense out of it. Still, as I read it, I get the feeling that it is trying to tell me everything I've ever wanted to know, if only I could grasp it. I know it's important, I just can't quite understand. Any suggestions?

Love,

Sara

July 15, 1992

Dear Uncle Carroll,

"Meditate on it." That's your suggestion? Okay, I'll try it, but I don't see what good that will do. I feel like I'm trying to read a physics book written in Middle English, I'm deficient in both the language and the vocabulary. I don't see how meditation is going to help.

I've been really busy lately, between photography and karate and school and trying to figure out that book, but I've got a new pastime, as well. Mom finally got a computer, and I've been learning how to use it to talk to people all over the place. It's neat, because I can talk to people without them having any preconceived notions about me.

Speaking of busy, I've got to go. I'll let you know how meditating over your book works out.

Love,

Sara

January 3, 1993

Dear Uncle Carroll,

Amazing. I meditated, just like you said. It took a while, but I didn't give up. All the advise and books you've sent me have made more sense than what I've gotten from any other source, so I figured you had to know what you were talking about. And it worked!

I'm working my way slowly through the book now. I can only read it after a period of meditation, but the further I get, the less meditation I need to get myself into the right mindset to understand it. My analogy from my last letter was fairly good, the book is like a college textbook, or it would be if subjects like this were ever taught in college. It treats magic like and accepted working phenomenon and explores what and how and why. I'm not sure I 'm ready to try any of the things in the book; I'm pretty sure I want to read it all first. Thank you, and wherever did you find this? Are there more?

Love,

Sara

November 14, 1993

Dear Uncle Carroll,

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to sound greedy or impatient. I know it will take me a long time just to understand everything in this book, without needing any others. I guess it's like meditation. Focusing concentration on one thing to make it possible to understand it more clearly than is possible when all the distraction of the waking world come into play. I promise to be patient, and to study hard.

I guess I can't ask you what you mean by saying I'm almost ready to meet you. If I do, you'll just accuse me of being impatient again. I know, I know. "Understanding will come in the fullness of time."

Love,

Sara

March 22, 1995

Dear Uncle Carroll,

It's been a really long time since I heard from you. Is everything okay?

I've been learning to read Tarot cards, and I did a spread for myself this morning. It said that great changes were in store, partly due to the loss of a benefactor. That's what made me realize that it's been almost a year since you sent me a letter. I hope this finds you well, and that I'm concerned over nothing. Letters do get lost in the mail, after all.

I'm kind of at loose ends just now. Most of my friend have gone off to college, and the karate school closed down. I keep practicing, even though I've had to stop taking lessons. I meditate and practice katas every morning. I'm also taking an Advanced Photography class at the community college. One of the assignments for the class is to enter a national photography contest the teacher knew about. Also, one of Mom's friends works for the local paper, and he got me a couple opportunities to take pictures for the paper.

In the evenings, I'm working on some of the ideas I got out of that book you sent me. The two main things I've been working on are projecting thoughts and sensing auras. I've started trying to strongly project what I'm trying to say to someone at them while I'm signing. I think it's working; people who don't understand sign seem to be figuring out what I mean more often than they used to. I can't wait for Kirsty and Sasha to come back for the summer so I can see how it works on them. (Sasha gave up on this project long ago, I'm looking forward to his reaction.)

I'm also exploring what that book said about the fields of energy in living bodies, and the possibility of viewing their auras. I can see auras, sometimes, but it takes a lot of concentration. I want to start experimenting with photographing them. There's a method, called Kirlian photography, where auras are photographed by using special developing techniques after the photo is taken. I want to see if I can just do it, by looking at someone and their aura through the camera, and taking a picture of it.

Please, please write back soon.

Love,

Sara

February 8, 1996

Dear Uncle Carroll,

I don't know why I'm writing this letter; I know you'll never get it. I'm just so confused. A very strange man came to the door yesterday. He was dressed all in green, right down to the tint of his sunglasses. His name was Niall Thompson. He said he was an old friend of yours and he had come to tell me that you had died that you left me your house and a lot of money. Mr. Thompson told me that everything had already been transferred to my name, and that things like taxes were already taken care of. He said that I could move into the house anytime I wanted to; that things like phone and electric bills were automatically deducted from a bank account, so I didn't need to worry about setting anything up. Then he gave me the keys to the house and an ATM card with my name on it.

It was all very strange. I'm pretty sure that's not how these things are supposed to work. Who are you? Who were you? Where did you get friends like this, and access to magical textbooks like that last one you sent me? I'm going down to your house soon to try to figure it all out. I wonder if I can find a job in North Carolina?

I'm going to burn this letter. Maybe it'll get to you that way. In case it does, Thank you Uncle, for everything. And wherever you are now, I hope it's a good place.

All my love,

Sara

March 26, 1996

Dear Mom,

I'm all settled in down here now. It took a little while to get some stuff rearranged. I cleared out the walk-in closet in one of the bedrooms and converted it into a darkroom. There's a really huge library taking the largest room in the house. It's going to take me years to make my way through it. Other than the books, though, there aren't a lot of possessions here. Uncle Carroll lived very simply it seems. There are a few decorations on the wall, mostly oriental artwork. No television set, but I can live with that.

There's a big practice mat set up in the basement. Obviously, Uncle Carroll was a martial artist himself. I guess that explains why he was willing to pay for my karate lessons for all those years. I wonder if maybe he used to teach it himself.

There is a computer set up in the bedroom. It looks brand new, so I'm wondering if the Green Man set it up for me. It's hooked up to a modem, and has emergency keys to call for police , fire, or an ambulance. I didn't know such a thing existed, not that I'm complaining.

I had an appointment to show my portfolio to a rep from that advertising firm your friend told me about. I'm supposed to hear back from them later this week. All in all, I think I like it down here. I'll write again when I have more news.

Love,

Sara

January 11, 1997

Dear Kirsty,

You're not going to believe this. I've learned telepathy. I've been going through the books in the library my Uncle left me. He's got books on everything, and unlike the ones we spent so many Saturdays poring over, these actually make sense. Apparently Uncle Carroll really was a magician. From what I've read, there are some real ones out there, but they keep quiet about their existence. you've got to come visit me on your next vacation so you can see this for yourself!

In the meantime, how's school going? I can't believe you ended up majoring in political science. I remember that competition we got in one election year to see which of us could make it through November with the least idea of what any of the candidates stood for. Ah, well, things change, I suppose. Please write back.

Sincerely,

Sara

May 22, 1997

Dear Kirsty,

I really wish you could come and visit me. I'm learning so much stuff out of my uncle's library, but it's hard to test some of it without another person, and I need it to be someone I know I can trust. So far, I've just experimented in uncontrolled situations, like asking for something in the grocery store, and seeing that the people catch on to what I mean faster than normal. I'm sure it works though. Some of the pantomimes I use aren't very descriptive, but people are understanding me immediately anyway.

One thing I've noticed, though, is that there's a price to be paid for using telepathy too much. I start seeing peoples thoughts, or hearing whispers in some foreign language, or just being unable to concentrate. It's always just for a few seconds. According to my uncle's books, it's caused by something called paradox. I don't really understand it. All of the books I've read seem to assume that the reader already knows what it is, so they don't actually explain. I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually.

On a more mundane note, I'm getting some commissions for freelance photography work, from an ad agency run by a friend of a friend of my mom's. It doesn't pay the bills, but since I could probably live most of my life off my inheritance form Uncle Carroll, it doesn't really matter.

Sincerely,

Sara

August 7, 1997

Dear Mom,

Wow. I guess that answers the question of how Uncle Carroll died If he was actually my great-great uncle, I'd say it was probably old age. I guess maybe he retired out here. This place is so peaceful. The house is hidden from the road by a line of trees, but there's an open field to one side of the house. I've been trying to reclaim the flowerbeds; they're rather overgrown. It seems like the place was deserted for seasons before I came down here. But I came only a month after the Green Man visited. How long had Great-Great Uncle Carroll been dead? I know it had been over a year since I'd heard from him. I tried to find the Green Man to ask him, but he's not listed in the phone book down here.

Love,

Sara