by V. J. Banis
She was still standing, undecided, when she heard the voices. At first she thought that the occupants of Kelsey House had come after her to carry her back. She had an urge to run, to hide herself in the darkness of the woods.
But it was not them at all. Two men emerged from the woods. They were hunters, judging from the bright plaid of their jackets. Sunlight gleamed on the barrel of the rifle as they made their way nearer, following the edge of the woods.
Strangers! Outsiders! With a cry of delight she started toward them, running as fast as her weak legs would carry her. She was saved at last. The thought echoed thunderously through her brain.
They saw her when she began to run, and stopped, watching her approach. She saw them exchange glances. Their guns were tilted down toward the ground. She thought their expressions, as they watched her approach, were strange, puzzled and even a little afraid.
There was nothing for them to be afraid of, after all. But she could not help realizing, as she ran up to them, how silly the entire scene was. The logical thing to do, the thing she had an impulse to do, was to run up to them and throw herself into their arms, but somehow she could not quite picture herself doing anything so, so emotional.
Anyway, they were not holding their arms open to her. They were just standing there, staring at her in that funny way. She stopped a few feet from them, panting from the effort of running, and swayed weakly back and forth.
“Thank God you’ve found me,” she cried breathlessly.
“Were you lost?” One of the men asked. They were older men, although nowhere near as old as Mr. Kelsey, or Wilfred. One, the one who had spoken, was gray haired, handsome in a tall gaunt way; the other was plump and had a cherubic face, round and pink.
“Yes,” she said, and then, “No.” She really wasn’t lost this time, but how did she go about explaining that. “I’ve been down there, in the house. They’ve kept me a prisoner for days.”
They followed the direction of her pointing finger and looked back at her doubtfully. But of course, she realized, they couldn’t see anything from here. Kelsey House was out of sight behind the hill.
“Kelsey House,” she explained, her voice rising a little. “My aunts have kept me there without any food. I’ve been sick, and I...I have a fever, and they took my purse....”
She was babbling rather hysterically, and she knew it, but strangely she could not make herself stop. If only they would not stare at her in that peculiar way, as though they were frightened of her. Frightened of her, for Heaven’s sake? What did they think she could do?
“Kelsey House?” the short plump one repeated. “Never heard of any Kelseys around here.”
“There were, Pete,” the other one said. He was speaking without looking at Jennifer. “There’s a graveyard down the woods a ways.”
“The graveyard, yes,” she exclaimed. At least this one knew the area. “And the house, Kelsey House.”
“The house burned down thirty years ago, as I remember it,” he said.
Pete, the one with the pink face, said, “Oh Lord, is that where we are?”
Burned down, Jennifer was thinking. Yes, Aunt Christine had mentioned the fire. But surely this man must know that the house was rebuilt
“The Kelseys have been around here for years,” she insisted, a sense of helplessness welling up within her. They acted like they didn’t believe her, like they didn’t want to help her.
“I grew up around here, lady,” the tall man argued, watching her intently, “and I haven’t known of any Kelseys around here since I was a kid.”
“Then your memory is very bad,” she snapped. “The house is just over the hill there.”
“Nearest place around here is Sam Williams,” the one called Pete said. “About ten miles over the hollow.”
Jennifer lifted a hand to her throat. Had she escaped one band of lunatics only to find another? Or was she truly out of her mind?
“Please,” she said desperately. “I’ve been a prisoner there, I know it exists, it’s as real as I am.”
The tall one seemed the most sympathetic. It was he who said, “Look, I’ll tell you what. You say the house is just over that hill?”
Jennifer nodded.
“All right. We’ll go up the hill and have a look.”
“Ben, I don’t know,” the other one started to object, but Ben silenced him with a gesture.
“Only take a minute,” he said decisively.
“I’ll come with you,” Jennifer said.
“No.” His answer was quick and sharp. “You stay here. Why don’t you sit down on that log there and rest, and we’ll go see if we see this house you’re talking about.”
“Well of course you’ll see it,” she said petulantly. “It’s there.” But she did as he said, and went to the fallen log and seated herself. She was tired, and wanted to get her breath back, and if it was necessary to humor them for a few minutes, she was willing to do so. She had been humoring her “family” for days now. She had been humoring people all her life. Two minutes more couldn’t matter very much.
They went up the hill. She could see them whispering to one another earnestly. It annoyed her. They were like schoolboys. They were being difficult. She would be patient.
They walked more rapidly than she had done. They came to the top of the hill. She saw them turning their heads, looking from right to left.
Now it will be over, she thought. They will come back for me, and take me away from here, and it will all be over. She closed her eyes for a moment, so tired that her head seemed to be spinning.
She opened her eyes and saw that they were still at the top of the hill. They were talking to one another, and looking back at her. They looked anxious.
The tall one called, “Look, you just stay there, okay?”
She stood up, frightened by something in their manner. “You see it, don’t you?” she called back, her voice echoing through the hollow. “You see Kelsey House?”
The pause before he answered was long. “Yes, sure,” he yelled a minute later. “Look, you stay there, we’ll be right back.”
“Don’t leave me,” she cried, starting to run toward them. She didn’t want to be alone again, not ever.
“You stay there,” the plump one cried, and when she looked, she saw that he had lifted his rifle. He had it aimed now at her.
My God, she thought, he’s going to shoot me with that thing.
“You stay there,” he said again, brandishing the gun menacingly.
“We’re going to go down the hill and have a look at the house,” the tall one said. “We’ll be back later. You wait here for us.”
Then they were gone, over the hill, disappeared as surely as things had disappeared at Kelsey House, and she was alone. She was frightened and bewildered. The woods near her suddenly seemed dark and threatening. She thought she heard someone or something moving in the brush. Everything seemed unreal.
Despite their instructions to remain where she was, she began to walk, and then to run, toward where they had been standing. Out of breath, she clambered to the top of the hill.
She had just a glimpse of them. They had not gone down the hill toward Kelsey House, but had circled back around, and were running. She saw them disappear into the woods down from where she had been waiting.
“Wait,” she yelled, but they were gone; the woods seemed to have swallowed them up.
Running. They had been frightened of her. She thought of how she must have looked to them. Her hair was matted and tangled. She was filthy with the dust and dirt of Kelsey House, and her suit was a tattered rag. She was thin and pale, with hysteria in her eyes and her voice.
“They thought I was mad,” she said aloud. “Mad or something worse.”
She sank into the weeds. Maybe they were right. Maybe there was no Kelsey House. Maybe she was really mad.
But no, there it was, she could see the roof from here. Or was that an illusion too.
And if there is no Kelsey House, then there’s no
thing to escape from, she thought.
She was tired, very tired.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ben Lester was not a cowardly man. Granted, the woman that he and Pete Davis met in the woods was an odd one. He had to agree she looked like a wild woman, like she was touched in the head. She was dirty and unkempt; but it wasn’t just that. It was the wild look in her eyes and the way she kept waving her hands, and jabbering away about things that didn’t make any sense. She was enough to unnerve anybody, he had to admit that.
Still, there was something about her that bothered him, something almost sad, but not quite. He tried to express his opinion to Pete.
“She looked, I don’t know, sad,” he said.
“Sad my eye,” Pete replied, hurrying on as fast as his short thick legs would manage. “She’s like nothing I ever saw before or want to see again. Crazy at the very least. No sir, I ain’t going back there now or ever. I’m going to get me in my car and start for home, and you can come along if you want to or you can stay behind and walk back by yourself, it’s all the same to me, but I won’t wait for you.” In the end Ben had given in to Pete’s feelings on the matter. They had climbed into Pete’s old Buick and Pete had driven home, faster than was his usual style. But the incident stayed on Ben’s mind.
Later that evening, sitting in front of the fireplace, Ben discussed the matter with his wife, and hinted for her to say if he had done the right thing or the wrong thing by leaving that woman there.
“I suppose Pete was right about her being crazy,” he told his wife. “She was a strange-looking thing, that’s the truth.”
His wife was a short, pink creature, once rather pretty, although she had grown too plump too fast. She was working now at her mending, her hands moving rapidly and skillfully over one of her husband’s shirts. She only nodded her head silently, meaning, to her husband, that she had not yet made up her mind just what she did think about the incident, and was still considering it.
“Wonder where she came from?” he mused.
“If she was even real,” she said. She glanced at him once over the rim of her glasses, and then looked back at her sewing.
“You think I was seeing things?” he asked. He was trying out this suggestion, rolling it around like a taste of something new on his tongue.
“There’s been a lot of stories about that land over the years,” she said, not answering him directly. “You and Pete ain’t the first two to say you saw people out that way. Not two years ago Joe Clyne’s wife told me that Joe said he saw a whole flock of them out there, dressed funny and kind of dancing around in the weeds. She said she thought Joe was going crazy, but I said there’s no accounting for all the things in this world. There’s stranger things, as the good book says, than is told of.”
“That’s true,” he said, puffing on his pipe. He tilted his chair back so that it was resting on just two legs. “Most folks shy away from that place altogether. Why, I don’t think there’s a one of the men that hunts as close to it as Pete and me. Seems a shame too. It’s good hunting up there.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment, and the silence was broken only by the sound of a log settling on the fire.
“Funny thing,” Ben said a little later. “The way she kept talking about that old Kelsey House. That’s what made me realize she wasn’t right in the head, talking about that old place, and it not standing all these years. You know, I stood there and watched it the day it burned. Not a timber left standing that was worth anything but kindling.”
“Good land, they used to say.” His wife was noncommittal.
“That it is,” he said. “My old man talked for a time about buying it, but it all went to some relative in some other part of the state. He wrote to her, but he never got an answer. Figured maybe she was going to rebuild the house or something. But whatever she wanted it for, she never got around to it, I guess, and never put it up for sale. My dad finally stopped writing to her. Then when the stories started around about it, I guess everybody lost interest in wanting it.”
“Just as well it worked out that way,” she said. She had finished sewing on the pocket that had been torn loose from her husband’s shirt. She held it up to inspect it with a critical eye.
“Guess you’re right,” he said. “Wouldn’t want it now, with a bad name hanging over it.” He thought for a moment before saying, “Good hunting up there, though.”
She bit the end of a thread loose. “I’d say you and Pete ought to find yourselves another spot for your hunting. Doesn’t seem right to me, meeting strangers way out there in the middle of nothing. Even if she was for real, what was she doing out there? There’d have to be something odd about her, wouldn’t there?”
She began to gather her sewing gear together, returning everything neatly to its place in the sewing box on the floor beside her. “As for myself, I don’t think I’ll even say anything about it to anyone,” she said. “Knowing Josie Davis, I don’t guess it’ll stay a secret, but I don’t want any credit myself for spreading that kind of tale. Let someone else do it, I say.”
Ben slept easily that night.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The graveyard was larger than she remembered it. The stones were closer together than was usual, crowding quite a number of graves into the area enclosed within the fence. Jennifer made her way carefully about the stones, trying to avoid stepping on what she thought might be a grave; that was bad luck, or so she remembered from her childhood.
She did not know just why she had come back here, except that she had a sense of utter futility about everything else. Here at least was a sense of peace and calm. Ironically, though, that tranquility came not from freedom, as one might suppose, but from captivity. From here there was no escape, and its very certainty made you feel at ease with it.
It had been like that with her mother and herself. She had been confined within the strong walls of her mother’s personality, and within those confines, she had been calm; not happy, perhaps, but without the confusion that attends the illusion of freedom. And it had been an illusion. She had thought herself free with her mother’s death. But in fact she was more confined than before. Without her mother’s strong will to guide her, she had been confined by her own ignorance and fear, confined by her mistakes, confined by her longing for love and acceptance. She was trapped here, at Kelsey House, and yet there were no walls, no weapons had been raised against her. No one had spoken less than lovingly to her.
She looked at the grave markers about her. The names inscribed upon them meant nothing to her. If she knew more about the family history, she might be able to identify some of them, but as it was, they were only so many names cut into stone. Names of people who were, in some way or another, relatives of hers. A family. All of her life she had wanted a family, like other people had, with aunts and cousins and grandparents. And here it was: the strange people at Kelsey House, and the rotting graves around her. These were her family.
She was about to leave the graveyard; it had no meaning to her. But one name caught her eye, and she stooped to see the stone more clearly.
Marcella Brandon, it said. An aunt, obviously, some distant relative for whom the Marcella she knew had been named.
She scraped away a covering of dirt and moss to read the rest of the inscription:
Born 1850
Died 1865
She had died at the age of fifteen; how tragic that sounded. Fifteen. That was Marcella’s age now, the live Marcella.
Her thoughts went to the girl in the house. This, of course, was where that Marcella had gotten her strange notions about herself. She was fifteen, and she was named for another Marcella who had died when she was fifteen. It was a striking coincidence, one that would easily spark the imagination of an impressionable young girl.
Jennifer guessed, even before she had scraped away some more moss and read the rest of the marker, that the first Marcella had drowned. She stared at those words for a long time, trying to ignore the awful thought that came u
nbidden into her mind. She closed her eyes and shook her head, as if she could dislodge that thought, but it held fast to her consciousness.
Something flashed before her eyes, a memory of her mother reading a letter. She had learned of the death of Aunt Lydia. Aunt Lydia had died in some way too violent or unpleasant to explain to a child of Jennifer’s age.
“We had hoped Lydia would be with us, but she was delayed,” Aunt Christine had said. “She’ll join us in a little while.”
Surely that must be another Lydia. After all, there could be two Lydias in one family, just as there were two Marcellas.
Half walking, half crawling, she clambered to the next stone and began to rub away the dirt and moss that covered the inscription. Christine Kelsey. Died, 1829.
The one next to that was Abbie Longworth, who died in 1870.
“God in Heaven,” Jennifer whispered, staring at the stones around her. They were all here, all of them. There was a large stone for Helen and Maggie Kelsey, who had died, the stone said, in the burning of Kelsey House.
Kelsey House. A house that wasn’t there, and people in it who ate no food, needed no clothing, or cars, or cleaning....
But Kelsey House was there. She had lived in it for days, she had walked on the wooden floors, opened and closed doors, touched its walls.
“Those who went—naturally never returned....” No, that was not the way Aunt Christine had said it. She had said, “Those who went naturally—never returned....”
“A curse on the house...women of the line joined in a common bond of possession...they will remain together for all eternity....”
Women...possession...together for all eternity.
Suddenly she knew. She knew the truth about Kelsey House, and its inhabitants. She knew that Kelsey was not here, not really, not so that ordinary people could see it. Nor were the inhabitants. They were dead, all of them, spirits. Echoes of what had once been life, echoes sounding through the corridors of time.