The House of Lost Spirits: A Paranormal Novel

by Einat Shimshoni

  As the outline of the walls reappear at first light, I begin looking for Leah. She is not in her room, nor the rooms above. I prefer not to go into Helen’s room. Down below, I find Benny in the kitchen.

  “Where is Leah, do you know?”

  Benny shrugs and after a few seconds, says, “She’s looking for Helen; it seems you started her thinking matters over yesterday.”

  “Good, perhaps, she will put her in her place, at long last,” I reply.

  Benny lets out a bitter laugh. “I would not depend on that. She is looking for her to apologize.”

  “To apologize?” If I could tear my hair out, I would. Just then, Leah comes into the kitchen. I want to tell her everything I thought about her ridiculous need to placate Helen, which has no logical justification, but Leah does not give me a chance. She sounds panic-stricken. “I can’t find Helen anywhere. She has disappeared.”

  Benny isn’t disturbed.

  “She must be hiding somewhere.”

  “She never hides,” Leah says in a small, concerned voice.

  For a moment, I feel a spark of enthusiasm.

  “Maybe, she’s with Milka,” I suggest.

  Leah and Benny both stare at me as if they don’t know me and have no idea from where I have sprung. Just then, Oved enters through the ceiling and almost lands on Benny.

  “What’s going on here?” he asks.

  “Helen has disappeared,” Leah says in a shaky voice.

  “Disappeared?” Oved raises a brow in surprise.

  “Did you see her with Milka?” I ask. Oved also looks at me for a moment as if he isn’t sure that I exist.

  “I have just been with Milka. Helen isn’t there.”

  “Maybe she decided not to wait for us and left the house before the bulldozers arrive,” Benny says, though, from the tone of his voice, he doesn’t believe it to be possible.

  “It certainly isn’t reasonable,” Oved determines, “but please, explain the word ‘bulldozers.’” Benny explains to Oved what bulldozers are, while Leah paces back and forth in the kitchen.

  “It’s straightforward. Just watch and see how I get Helen to come out of her hiding place,” Oved says and begins calling out, “Hey, look what I found! Someone has carved a drawing on the wall of Helen dressed up like a man!”

  He winks at us with a smile, and we all tense up for the expected wave of screams, but there is no reaction.

  “She’s not in the house,” Leah says, her voice trembling.

  “She must have gone out into the night to look for somewhere else to stay.”

  “But it’s already morning,” says Leah.

  “She’s just upset by the confrontation with Noga yesterday,” Oved explains and casts an amused glance at me. “She’s wafting around here somewhere, trying to punish us. She will give it up by this evening.”

  But Helen does appear, not that day and not towards the evening. Despite Leah’s feverish searching, she wasn’t there. Oved and Benny did not appear to be particularly disturbed, and it seemed that the quiet that followed my row with Helen, quite pleased them. When I raise the possibility that Helen might have gone to Oved’s old mill near Tzipori to get there before him, a disturbed expression crosses his face. Still, he immediately dismisses such a possibility and says there is no chance of her locating it, considering that she has never left the house.

  “Perhaps she visited the mill before she died. Maybe, she remembers it,” I say.

  Oved scowls for a moment, then insists, “She’s here, in the house. She couldn’t have left.” But he sounds less convinced than he is trying to be, and the worried expression on Leah’s face isn’t helping the situation. I can’t understand why she is so concerned. After all, what can happen to Helen? It’s not as if she can die or anything like that.

  “I’m not worried that something will happen to her. I just don’t know how to find her if she has gone.”

  “But why should you ever bother to find her? If she chooses to go, it means that, as far as Helen is concerned, she has liberated you.”

  Leah doesn’t look at me, but her face is a heart-wrenching display of pain.

  “I can’t abandon her,” she mutters quietly and leaves to continue her search while there is still enough light in the house.

  “She doesn’t need Helen to release her,” Benny says to me. “She needs to release herself.”

  I know I have very little time before the house grows dark. Nevertheless, I go up to Milka. In spite of what Oved says, I still think that Helen might have taken my advice. Yet, I don’t find her there.

  “Was Helen here?” Milka doesn’t seem surprised by my question, but hesitates momentarily before replying.

  “No, Helen has never been here.”

  The way she answers me makes me think that she isn’t telling me all she knows. Milka’s responses always leave me with the feeling that she tries to say as little as possible without actually telling a lie.

  “But you have spoken to her, haven’t you?”

  “I have spoken to her a few times in the past,” Milka says.

  “But do you know where she is?”

  Milka does not answer directly. She looks at me intently, “She’s not here anymore.”

  “I think we all understand that now. The question is, where is Helen?” I ask.

  I do not doubt that she knows the answer, but she has not decided if and how to respond. Finally, as if she has lost the inner battle with herself, she says, somewhat defeated,

  “She’s not here anymore. She has moved on.”

  The house is almost completely dark when I leave the attic and look for Leah. I find her quite easily, standing in front of the massive mirror in Helen’s room.

  “Helen has gone,” I cry out enthusiastically, “she has moved on.”

  In her present despair, Leah cannot make sense of my enthusiastic outburst.

  “You no longer have to search for her, Leah,” I cry, perhaps a little more loudly than I intended. “She’s gone! Forever! She has left this world and moved there.”

  Aside from being happy to prove that the transition is possible, I am pleased for Helen, too. I don’t know exactly where she has gone or what she will find there, but I know with certainty that it will be better than it was for her here.

  Leah stares at me in confusion. Within a second, Oved enters the room, followed two seconds later by Benny, who has decided to follow him everywhere to be sure Oved doesn’t leave the house without him.

  “Young lady, please repeat what you have just said,” Oved asked.

  “Helen has departed this world. She has moved on,” I state emotionally.

  “And, what brings you to such an unreasonable conclusion?” Oved asks, openly mocking me.

  “Milka told me.” This answer immediately wipes the mocking expression off his face.

  “So, do you see now? It is possible, and it’s what all of us should do!”

  “I don’t believe it,” Oved protests and flies up to the attic. He returns after a few moments.

  “All right. That’s correct. Helen has moved on,” Oved confirms.

  “But how did she do it?” Benny asks. Most of him is in the room, while his right shoulder and ear are still inside the wall separating the corridor from the room. He doesn’t notice since the darkness has become thicker, and he is probably too shocked by recent developments.

  “How did she do it?” I also ask. Helen’s disdain for Milka, whenever she talked about her, made it clear that she had no interest or understanding of mysticism. In all her years in the house, she never tried to discover how to leave. So, how did she pull it off? And does that mean that it is simpler to do than I think?

  The dark added more drama to the silence that hung over the room. Now, thoughts of Helen leaving the house fill every space in my awareness, and I feel sure th
at the others are thinking this, too. It takes me until the following morning to understand my mistake. Not all of them give it a thought.

  ***

  Leah had returned to the house to seek forgiveness. It was only supposed to be a stopover, to settle unfinished business that would allow her to liberate herself from the burden of guilt that rested on her shoulders all those years. But Helen did not want to forgive, and Leah could not move on without that. The voices that had echoed in her head until then, now called to her from the walls of the house, and Helen’s reproachful eyes pierced her anew every day and took her back to that morning when she found Helen’s lifeless body in her bed. Her bluish skin, the vestiges of foam that hung in the corner of her mouth, and her eyes. Her accusing eyes were wide open and stared at her. Leah had been unable to move for a few minutes. She could not shift her gaze from the figure that stared at her with anger and condemnation, and then, when her nerves could respond once more, she noticed the empty tea glass that had stood on the bedside table all night.

  The guilt stuck to her then and accompanied her everywhere like a shadow. It bothered Leah less when she was happy, but blame was always there, hiding under the soles of her shoes, in the folds of her clothes, and the corners of rooms. In her darker hours, her guilt overshadowed everything, so that nothing was left uncolored by it.

  Nobody ever accused her directly, but she didn’t need that. Leah knew it was her fault. She had secretly wished it, a silent prayer that was never even whispered, on nights spent in the narrow iron bed in the corner of the kitchen. Leah did not wish for Helen’s recovery. She never wanted her dead, but for as long as Helen was ill, the situation in the manor house was more bearable. Although the screams, complaints, and constant demands never stopped, they were, at least, more predictable. For as long as Helen kept to her bed, Leah could busy herself around the house without fear of Helen suddenly bursting into the room or belligerently spying on her work. When ill, Helen was like an aggressive dog, chained up behind bars, and for Leah, this was a relief. She preferred having smiling, pleasant mannered Sophie run the house, and in her heart of hearts, regretted that the doctor’s treatment was beginning to show results. Leah was not happy to see Helen leave her room. She hoped for a relapse and a further deterioration in Helen’s health. She was guilty.

  She tried to atone for her sin by being better, more obedient, and considerate, but that was also not within her power. She never visited Helen’s grave, she stopped praying, and as soon as the opportunity arose, she left her parents, who needed her help, and fled the settlement. But, the farm work, establishing a family, and raising children did not banish the voices that had made themselves at home in Leah’s head and repeatedly whispered in her ear Killer… murderer…

  When she lay in bed beside her husband, she thought, Helen did not get to share her bed with her husband. Murderer…

  When she nursed her baby, she told herself, Helen did not have the joy of caring for an infant. Murderer…

  Each time waves of bliss stole into her heart, they were accompanied by voices that accused her, You’re a murderer… a killer…

  Members of her family who gathered around her bed in the last days of her life, found comfort in her peaceful death at a ripe old age. They spoke in hushed voices of her quiet and gentle last breath. None of them guessed that neither peace nor quiet accompanied her when she departed the world of the living, besides the solace of knowing that at long last, she was going to atone for her sins.

  Now, Helen has gone, and with her, the possibility of offloading her burden of guilt. Leah was always hopeful. She was not a particularly joyful woman, but she did inherit something of her father’s optimistic spirit, and in her quiet and introverted way, she always believed that things would work out well. It was the first time that Leah despaired.

  It was midnight when she felt Milka’s presence beside her. Everyone thought that Milka never left her place in the attic, but Leah knew that she roamed around the house in the darkest hours of the night. This house was familiar with restless spirits that wandered around it at night, and Leah could sense them. The few, occasional conversations she’d had with Milka were always under cover of darkness.

  “Are you sure of it? Did Helen leave?” Leah asks. Milka’s silence confirms that she did. Such are always the conversations with Milka. She prefers to remain silent rather than say what she does not want to say.

  “So, what am I to do now?” Leah asks.

  “You came here to ask something of Helen that she is unable to give you,” Milka’s reply comes from the dark, “but the thing you desire so much is within yourself.”

  ***

  Leah disappeared the next morning. This time, I don’t wait until evening to confirm the fact with Milka, who verifies what I thought the moment I found Leah’s room was empty.

  “Do you see? Helen left when she understood that she had no reason to stay in a house that is to be demolished anyway, and now Leah has left because she stayed here all these years for Helen. That’s the reason. So, if the reason we stayed has disappeared, we can all move on,” I say and, at once, think about it and ask myself why I am here. There is no answer for me. My explanation is not convincing, certainly not to Oved.

  “So, are you saying that the reason Helen returned after she died was the house she never wanted to come to in the first place?” Oved makes a dismissive comment.

  “She was very possessive of this house,” Benny claims. “If anyone dared to say anything disparaging about the house, it enraged her.”

  “You’re right, Oved, she did not return because of the house. When you think about it, there has to be a more profound reason for returning, some inner motive. She wasn’t greedy enough to come back for something like property,” I say, but Oved does not react. He turns his gaze away and begins wandering around the room, walking through the furniture, as if to purposely annoy Benny, who stares at Oved uneasily, resisting his desire to stop him.

  “So, what do you think was the reason? Why did Helen come back?” I ask.

  On hearing my question, Oved stops and turns to stare at me with his lofty air, like a palm tree in a huge clay pot, of the kind you find in any lobby of an office tower. Such trees are supposed to grow to a height of twenty meters if they are outside. But in their decorated pots, with the questionable benefit of artificial neon lighting and conditioned air, they remain like dwarfed pet trees that feel substantial and important in their metal and concrete wasteland. What wasted potential for these subdued and conquered trees. I always feel sorry for them.

  “You don’t have to be an expert personality analyst to understand why Helen came back to the house. She returned to take revenge on her husband and sister. But she found out that she was helpless to do anything to them.” His tone of voice is an unpleasant mixture of bitterness and malicious gloating. “Noga, do you think that Helen was angry that they tried to kill her? No. She was angry that she couldn’t kill them back.” Oved fires that last sentence at me with more powerful emotion than I found him capable of before. Oved’s arrogant and indifferent façade drops and disintegrates like old plaster falling off a wall, revealing the rough gray concrete beneath. He is aware of having exposed himself, is unfazed at having done so, and makes no attempt to retreat. He continues staring at me defiantly, waiting for me to capitulate, admit I am wrong and give up.

  “So, what changed from her point of view? What has changed now?” I ask. But I don’t expect him to answer, nor am I sure that he knows more than I do. Helen’s departure is no less puzzling for him than for me. The only difference is that he shows no interest in solving it.

  It is Benny who comes up with an answer for me.

  “You should know what changed. You were the last person to speak to her before she left.”

  I try to reconstruct my last conversation with Helen again and again. Could Benny be right? Was it something I said? But, even if that is so, if my re
marks influenced Helen’s wish to leave and move on, it still doesn’t answer the question of how she did it.

  “Perhaps, one has to want to leave, let go, and then it happens,” Benny tries to suggest.

  “I do want to,” I say, and it’s true. I have taken all I can from this gloomy house, unable to do anything, and frightened of being torn apart if I venture outside the walls of the house. I know that I can never regain what I have lost with my life, and what awaits me in the world beyond is a mystery. Yet, I prefer any surprise that awaits me there to spending eternity as a lost and disconnected, meaningless, and powerless soul, as Oved describes it. But my will has not been strong enough to get me out of here.

  “You want it, but not badly enough,” says Benny, and that’s about the most irritating thing anyone can say. It’s just like the fallacious mantra, ‘Our life is what we make of it,’ also the exaggerated credit we attribute to the power of our will is a fraudulent kind of trick. Life and it seems death, too, are not like a listener’s choice radio program, and the fact that we want something specific doesn’t mean that we will get it, even if we want it very much. And, anyway, what does it mean to want something badly enough?

  “What about you? Don’t you want to be a good father to your son, badly enough?” I know that my remark hurts him. I make it because I want him to understand how limited our will is, and also to get an admission of error and a small apology out of him.

  To my surprise, Benny sighs as he drops his already drooping shoulders and admits, “Yes, I didn’t want it badly enough. I wanted to be a better father, sure I did. But, more than that, I wanted fame, money, women, cars…”

  His response only makes me angrier, but he doesn’t notice this because he has already sunk into his doldrums, and occupies himself with his depressive insights.

  “You know, at first I was angry with all those who thrashed me and trashed me, those who called me names, like ‘traitor,’ and ‘deserter.’ I was furious with the newspapers that refused to give me credit for my success. I would call my mother—and who even thought of making long-distance phone calls here? I would ask her if the newspapers were writing about me. She would reply that there was nothing. Abroad, all the songs from my movies were broadcast on the radio, but here? Nothing. Just because I hadn’t been in some well-known army entertainment troupe and didn’t grow up on some kibbutz of beautiful people, or go to battle in a tank, and because I sang in English. I was enraged. I said, ‘What? Does it hurt you to see someone succeed?’ but, I’ll tell you what,” and he doesn’t even pause for a reaction from me, he is riding a wave, “It’s not only their fault. Now, I know. The truth is,” and this he says with a bitter smile, “I didn’t wholeheartedly want them to accept me. Not really. It gave me an excuse to run away from here, and from everything else, from my mother and my son.”