Chapter 33 #2
“The girl’s bedroom was on the ground floor.
The window wasn’t tampered with, but the little girl had persistent nightmares about someone coming in the window.
She said it was the mailman. That was very odd, to be certain, but the girl always described it the same way, as if she was sure.
The mailman was coming through the window.
” She shook her head. “It could be written off as a child’s recurring nightmare except that the two other children in the house saw things, too.
And the parents heard scrabbling, thumps, something being dragged on the floor.
One of my colleagues investigated it. He was baffled, and he called me. ”
I waited. Despite my impatience, I could admit that she was a decent storyteller.
“I come across many hoaxes in my line of work,” Charlotte said, with a knowing look at me.
“It was possible that this was one of them. But before he called me, my colleague discovered that a murder had taken place in that very house, fifty years before the family bought it. The teenage girl sleeping in the main-floor bedroom was murdered one night, her body left on the floor. Whoever did it came through the window. The case was never solved.”
I wanted to make a scathing remark, but the words wouldn’t come.
Charlotte put the spectrometer down on my bed and opened her briefcase again.
“The case, alas, had to be left a mystery. I’m sure you’re familiar with the feeling.
Did a mailman commit the murder of the teenage girl?
No detective will reopen an old investigation based on the nightmares of a three-year-old child fifty years later, so we will never know.
Perhaps the little girl was simply having a recurring dream.
Perhaps she had seen the street’s mailman one day and her mind fixed on him.
Perhaps she had been coached by her family, or had picked up on a conversation somewhere about the murder.
Or perhaps, as she slept at night, she was witnessing the murder that had taken place in her bedroom before she was born.
And she was witnessing it over and over again. ”
Something moved on the edges of my mind, made a hollow sound like an elongated knuckle tapping on the glass of a skylight. A thought and a memory in one.
“The police wouldn’t look into the family mailman, but you would,” I said to Charlotte. “And you did.”
She nodded. “Of course I did. The mailman whose route included their home was nearing sixty and close to retirement. He lived alone with his wife because their grown children had moved away. He did not seem like a person who would sneak out at night to terrify a child. That’s all I know.”
“There are many possible explanations for what I saw in this room,” I said. “And one of the explanations is that I saw something that happened here. Something that happened to Ben.”
“And yet this isn’t Ben’s bedroom.”
Yes. It was. I was suddenly sure it was.
This had been Ben’s bedroom the first time.
I moved to the bed and sat down. I put my head in my hands, my elbows on my knees. I stared at the floor between my feet.
Where did you go, little brother? Where did you go?
It was fucking terrifying, but the first thing I felt was grief. I had spent my childhood in my little brother’s room before he was born. This stupid room, with the slanted ceiling that I banged my head on—this was Ben’s room. All these years, and I had never known.
What had he seen before he died the first time? Had he seen lights? Someone standing over his bed? Had he heard those words, “Wake up”? Was that why he wrote them on the wall?
Charlotte broke into my thoughts with her cool, crisp accent. “I recommend an exorcism,” she said.
I lifted my head from my hands. “I’m not exorcising my little brother.”
“Not him.” She waved a hand. “Please think clearly, Vail. You need to exorcise the other entity in this house. The one that grabbed you. The one that wrote on the wall downstairs.”
Now I was confused. “Ben wrote on the wall downstairs.”
“That does seem possible, but the evidence tells me otherwise. You said your little brother was six. Could he write?”
I stared at her, lost. “What?”
“Could he write?” Her voice was patient.
“He would have been learning at that age. Some children take to writing faster than others. But the words on the wall downstairs are perfectly formed, and they are written in a straight line. They don’t look like a child’s lettering.
And we’ve just established that Ben was never an adult. ”
I shook my head. “He could—he knew some of his letters. His name.” I didn’t add that Ben was a slow learner because he wasn’t enrolled in school. He learned reading and writing from his siblings, and the three of us weren’t exactly disciplinarians. We didn’t try all that hard to teach him.
The fact was that when he died, Ben was a slow, sloppy reader, and he could barely write at all.
I had been too blind to see it. But I would know Ben’s handwriting, such as it was. And his handwriting wasn’t on the downstairs wall.
Charlotte took a small, slim book from her briefcase and handed it to me without a word.
“What’s this?” I took the book from her.
“It’s from the attic. It was propped up against a box.”
The book was yellowed, its few pages bound between delicate covers. A children’s book called Fairfield Rabbit. On the pastel green cover was an ink illustration of a fat rabbit with chubby cheeks and kind eyes, his ears flopping. The rabbit wore a striped waistcoat. The book looked very old.
“This wasn’t in the attic,” I argued. “I’ve never seen this before.”
“And yet it was there today,” Charlotte said.
I opened the cover and turned to the title page. The book was published in 1904. Written in ink on the corner of the page, the words faded with over eighty years of age, was an inscription.
To Edward Whitten, from his sister Anne. On his fifth birthday. August 3, 1905.
The handwriting was neat and straight. Schoolroom handwriting.
“Edward Whitten,” I said aloud. The words hung in the air of my bedroom, seemed to bloom in the dusty emptiness. The knuckle in my brain tapped again, as if the name was a memory.
I looked up and locked gazes with Charlotte. “Who is Anne Whitten?” I asked.
Something screamed.
I dropped the book and gripped my temples. The scream wound higher, stronger, reverberating in my skull. Charlotte dropped to a crouch, her hands over her head. Her mouth was open. She was screaming, too, but it wasn’t her scream in my head. It was something else.
There was a footstep in the hall, heavy and angry. It was the thing that had grabbed me in the living room. It was screaming, and it was coming.
I grabbed Charlotte’s instruments and shoved them into her briefcase. Then I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her from the room, toward the stairs. She sagged in my grip, disoriented. I dug my fingers in harder and pulled her down the stairs behind me.
Another step sounded in the hall behind me, and another. The scream wound on and on, in no need of breath.
Charlotte stumbled, but I kept her moving, getting behind her and pushing her down the front hall toward the door. Gripping her shoulders, I sidled past her and twisted the knob, kicking the door open. Then I shoved her past the porch and into the front yard.
The scream went silent. Charlotte fell to her knees in the grass, gasping. I dropped her briefcase beside her and spun to look at the house.
In an upstairs window, a shadowy figure moved, brushing one of the curtains. Then it was gone.
I watched for another moment as the ringing slowly subsided in my ears, but nothing else moved.
“Vail.” Charlotte’s normally calm voice was a rasp. She stood, trying to brush the dirt from her knees.
“You need to get out of here,” I told her. “You need to run from this place. Right now.”
Her skin was ghastly gray, her eyes wild. “What was that?”
“I don’t know.”
“It was screaming.” Charlotte rubbed her palms over her cheeks, as if reassuring herself she was still here. “It was screaming, but it wasn’t. It was like it was screaming inside me. I could feel it. It was like it touched me.”
Could it follow us from the house? Could it come out here? Was it still in there, walking the halls?
It had started when I said the name Anne Whitten aloud, as if it had been waiting to hear its name.
“You need an exorcism,” Charlotte said sharply. I turned to see that she had regained most of her composure. Splotches of angry red splashed her cheeks. “Either that, or burn the house down to get rid of that thing.”
I shook my head. I would never burn the house down, no matter what lived inside. Not my little brother’s house, the only place he had ever lived.
“I’ve seen exorcisms work,” Charlotte said as she picked up her briefcase. “You can call it a banishment, if you prefer—it removes the religious aspect. But there’s a ritual.”
“Chants and burning sage?” My tone was harsh. “Ouija boards? Séance circles? You think those things will work on that?” I gestured to the house, which was unnaturally still now. Silent. The curtains in the upstairs window didn’t move.
I didn’t believe in exorcisms. I didn’t believe in séances, either, or tarot cards, or psychics. Bigfoot or cryptids. After a decade of chasing shadows, I didn’t believe in any of it.
I didn’t even believe in aliens anymore.
With the echoes of that scream in my head, it was all so fucking clear.
My voice was eerily calm when I said to Charlotte, “I think you should go.”
“You called me,” she reminded me, her voice icy. “But don’t worry. I have no desire to go back into that house.”
“Go,” I said again. “Leave Fell. Don’t even stay tonight at the motel.
No one stays at that motel.” I had never been to the Sun Down, so I shouldn’t know that—but of course I did, because why would this town ever leave me alone?
It was too much to ask. “Drive as far as you can, then stop and stay somewhere else. Just drive and keep driving.”
“Thank you for the advice,” she clipped out. “I intend to take it.”
“You aren’t much of a ghost hunter,” I pointed out.
Her shoulders straightened. “Vail,” she said, “kindly go fuck yourself.”
I heaved in a breath. “I’m sorry.” Of the people in my life who deserved an apology—and there were many of them—Charlotte topped the list. “You came when I called because you’re a good person. You gave your advice. Now you have to trust that I’ll do what I have to.”
She hesitated, her jaw working. Then she said, “You’re going back in there.”
“No,” I said.
“You’re lying.”
“Yes, I am.”
“You can’t.” There was a final note of pleading in her voice. “You’re a fool.”
“I know. But I’m not running away and leaving my sisters to go in there alone.”
Charlotte’s gaze moved uneasily to the house, then away again. “I can’t help you, Vail. I want to, but I can’t.”
“I know.” My voice was as gentle as I could make it. I was sorry I’d dragged her into this, sorry I’d put her in danger, but I had, and what was done was done.
I watched her get into her car, watched the driver’s door slam, watched her turn the key. Watched her leave the driveway. Watched her lights disappear down the street. And as I watched, I thought over and over, To Edward Whitten, from his sister Anne. To Edward Whitten, from his sister Anne.
I wondered if Edward Whitten had lived long past his fifth birthday, when his sister had given him a book as a gift.
I wondered why Anne Whitten was walking the halls of my family home, screaming when she heard her name. There was one way to find out.
I turned without hesitating and walked back to the house.