5
Cali carried the tray of coffee in and set it down on a side table. Conan followed her in, wagging his tail; but when Mira snapped her fingers he hunkered down and kept his muzzle to the floor, as if he’d been a bad dog.
“Decaf on the left, caf on the right. Very, very strong caf,” Cali said. She poured herself a mugful and then mixed in some cream and sugar. She turned and got everyone’s order: first Chet, who wanted regular with lots of cream, no sugar; then Mira, black. Jack Fleetwood came in the room and went to mix his own coffee, and then she turned to Frost. “You?”
“Me?”
“How do you like it?”
“Decaffeinated. Very blond,” he said. “Very blond and very sweet.”
“I bet.” Mira laughed, and then covered her mouth.
Frost watched Cali carefully. She had something, he could tell. He wondered how far her ability went. He wondered if it had turned off once she had entered the house, just like it had with him. All right, admit it: You want to fuck her. His mouth went dry as he thought it. You’re a man. You can think it. You want to open her up. She’s hot. She’s steamy. Inside, she’s probably like a moist suction. Then it came to him: What if she could read minds? Some people claimed they could. Damn. Anyone in this room might be able to, even the little bitch. “Thank you,” he said, his voice crackling slightly, as if he’d been filled with static. He took the pottery mug. For a second his fingers grazed hers, and it felt like a mild shock. Can you hear what I’m thinking?
“I put a ton of sugar in there,” Cali said, and then turned and went to sit next to Mira.
“Here,” Mira said, offering part of the comforter she’d dragged in. “It’s too cold in here.”
“It sure is,” Cali said, and drew the comforter over her shoulders a bit. It became a tug of war between them, and Mira finished with a laugh that almost spilled her mug out all over the floor.
“Now for the ghost stories,” Mira said.
“No stories,” Jack said. “Just a video.” He set his mug on the floor and went to switch on the small television that rested on the mantel. “Can you all see this okay?”
“If you’d move,” Mira said.
“Fine,” Chet said. “What’s the movie of the week?”
“It’s a ten-minute segment from a History Channel special,” Jack said. “It covered Harrow’s past quickly, and I figured before you got the tour and all head to your bedrooms, you might want a little preparation.”
“It might influence us,” Frost said. He glanced around. “I mean, if it tells too much.”
“I don’t know how much or how little any of you know about Harrow. You might’ve heard things. Frost, you’ve been through my library at the Foundation. Cali’s read my book,” Jack said. “This will give you a bit of background about the fire and the legend. I think it’s good to know.”
6
The TV monitor flickered on, and a shot of Harrow in daylight, parts of it still smoldering, appeared.
The voiceover of a narrator spoke as the camera moved around what looked like a bombed-out sector of some war-torn city. Still Harrow, the house, stood, even while the walls and rooftops near it had been burned and destroyed.
“A tragedy struck Harrow Academy a few months ago when part of the tower and upper rooms of the East Wing of the school burned during a candlelit fraternity hazing episode. Several boys died in the fire. A month later, with the school empty of students and faculty, another fire broke out, this one in what was once the caretaker’s house on the property. That fire spread to other buildings on the school grounds. What was probably most mysterious about the fires, beside their origins, was how they seemed to destroy much of what was not original to the house, known at times as Nightmare House to the locals of this sleepy hamlet called Watch Point.”
The camera had begun to move through the ruins, and the wavering lights of the camera crew flickered as they moved into the entryway to Harrow.
“In the spring, a local teenager was found dead here, apparently the victim of a heart attack at the age of sixteen…..” The camera moved to the walls, with the burned wallpaper. “Signs of some occult ritual were left here, and two other teens claimed that this was the site of a haunting.”
A cut to: a dark-haired and pimply but handsome boy whose eyes seemed too large for his face. Someone held a microphone under his chin; behind him, the woods near Harrow. “We went there as a joke. I mean, everyone called it the haunted house. Even my grandpa said bad things happened there. So we were just kind of camping out, only something happened to Quincy.” He turned his head slightly, looking off in the distance. “Something frightened her. That’s what I think.”
Cut to: a local policeman. Chunky and balding, with a nose like a ski slope and eyes that seemed to get smaller the more he spoke. “It was the strangest thing. She had drawings all over her body. Like crop circles almost, or tattoos, but it was drawn with charcoal or something. And stuff written on her. She was dead. But no one killed her. Her heart just went out. We thought the boys might’ve killed her, at first. But it wasn’t that. I guess when your number’s up, it’s up. These kids—they get into all this ritual. This Satanic crap.”
Cut to: a close up of the wall, with shredded wallpaper. Written in crayon on the wall, the word Mercy.
“But the history of Harrow goes farther back than this.”
A series of still images came up, mixed with old documentary footage. A photo of a car stranded on a dirt road. A gatekeeper’s house leading into a tree-lined lane. An early view of Harrow, while it was still being constructed: The towers were just going up. A view of the front door, with some unusual Mayan or Incan godhead above it. A minute or so of what looked like a stance from a silent movie—a young woman with beautiful locks of hair and luminescent skin touched hands with a large man who looked handsome and threatening at the same time. Another photo: Lizzie Borden, the alleged ax murderess. Over these images, the narrator told a history of the house that included visitations by the rich and notorious: Borden, Alistair Crowley, a Vanderbilt heiress, and several famous spiritualists. A still picture again: Isis Claviger. The beautiful woman from the silent movie portion; this was the author photo from her book. “The disappearance of the famed medium was only one of the mysteries of Harrow, including the madness of the grandson of Justin Gravesend, the creator of the house. In the mid-1920s, the man who was then known as Ethan Gravesend committed atrocities that shocked the conservative area, and sent ripples of terror up and down the Hudson River.”
Another still picture: a wide-eyed, long-haired boy in a coat and tie: a school picture. “A boy committed suicide at the school that Harrow became. He left a note indicating that he’d found a door in a wall at Harrow and went through it and found that goblins were after him, although he did not elaborate further.”
A final picture, this of a sweet-looking boy of fifteen or sixteen with neatly cut dark hair and some kind of deep sadness to his features. “Jim Hook was among the boys who dabbled in a secret fraternity at Harrow. But did they act alone, or was some supernatural agency involved?”
Then Jack Fleetwood came on screen.
Cali clapped, and Mira whistled.
The subtitle under his throat read: JOHN FLEETWOOD, FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT OF THE PSI VISTA FOUNDATION.
“Harrow has always fascinated me,” Fleetwood said (Mira said these words as her father spoke them on the television). “Very little has been documented about the hauntings there, but I have no doubt that it lives up to the epithet given to it in 1926: Nightmare House. It was built by Gravesend to be haunted. And the recent events may be a senseless tragedy, or, in fact, may be one in a long line of aftereffects from the original haunting that was born there in the late 1800s by Justin Gravesend himself.”
Cut to: a professorial-looking chap wearing a tweed overcoat and a bright red tie against his crisp white shirt. His eyes seemed owlish behind his round spectacles. A hint of hair crested his otherwise bald scalp. The subtit
le read: PAYTON WINSLOW, PROFESSOR OF PARAPSYCHOLOGY. THE HUDSON INSTITUTE.
“If Harrow is haunted.” Winslow said, “then I’ve never felt it. Yes, that horrible event occurred with the students. And a girl died there recently. So what? These events and tragedies occur daily, everywhere. But because there’s some old story about a structure like Harrow, it’s a haunting? I thought this kind of foolishness went out with table-rappings. A ghost is merely an electrical recording—a mirage of a previous life, if you will—that some human beings see now and then. Ghosts can’t harm anyone. It’s the living who are the problem, and I know the entire history of Harrow, and none of it leads me to believe it is anything other than a place where a few nasty incidents occurred over a hundred-year period. I would imagine the White House would be the site of more hauntings than that run-down place in Watch Point.”
A still picture came up. A forensics picture? Subtitle: QUINCY
ALLEN, 16 YEARS OLD, DEAD OF A HEART ATTACK AT HARROW.
Across her back, a charcoal drawing of what looked like an H with several lines through it, and a small circle within it.
The narrator said, “Still, it is hard to ignore the fact that something is terribly wrong at Harrow. Something is within its walls.”
The video ended with a picture of static, and then a blue screen came up.
7
‘That show still sucks,” Mira said, talking as much to the television as to her father, who switched the TV off.
“I didn’t know someone died here last spring,” Chet said. “That’s morbid.”
“And I can see that the ghosts here are harmless,” Cali said archly.
Mira nearly spilled the last of her coffee on the comforter but made a quick save. “That documentary was a piece of crap, Dad. I don’t know why they needed to see it.”
Her father stood at the mantel and glanced at the others. “Well, it’s your first night. I don’t want to make you think that this will be a vacation. The Foundation is paying you well, but for payment, there’s a further price.”
“Quincy Allen had a heart murmur, and her family knew about it for years. Plus, she was into some kind of bizarre made-up occult religion,” Mira said. “She died because she had a very weak heart, she’d drunk too much cheap rum that night, there was some crystal meth found nearby, and she probably scared herself with her own rituals. A ghost didn’t get her. And those boys.” Mira was fuming, and Frost chuckled a little, watching her tirade. “Those preppies were high and had a ton of candles around and did their little frat hazing bullshit. They had nearly a hundred candles in the tower room, and they were drunk. It would’ve been more shocking if a fire hadn’t started.”
Frost grinned. He felt good. “So there are no ghosts here?” Mira looked down at him. Then up to her father. “I didn’t say that. I just think that documentary was like a ... I don’t know.” She glanced down at her hand. “It was like a splinter from this place. It wasn’t what it’s about here. Dad—can we play them the tape?”
“I guess now’s a good time,” Jack said. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a small handheld device. He went and sat down next to Frost, folding his legs in front of him.
“Chet, come sit over here,” Mira said, patting the edge of the sofa. “You’ll hear better.”
Chet rose from the chair near the door and loped over toward the sofa, sitting on the arm.
“The thing with EVP is, sometimes it’s soft as a whisper,” Jack said. “Still, it’s pretty clear.”
Jack clicked on the small recorder. A sound like whirring came up.
“Shit,” Mira said after a few seconds. “You erased it.”
“I didn’t erase it. The file’s right here.”
“Oh, well,” Mira said. “That was a lot of nothing.”
“What’s on it? I didn’t hear anything.”
Jack Fleetwood sighed and shut off the machine. “Well, it’s gone. Damn.”
Frost snickered. “I bet there wasn’t anything there in the first place.”
Jack glanced at him with the fatherly concern that drove Frost nuts. It was contempt; that’s what Fleetwood had for him. Contempt. He thinks I’m crazy just because I told him too much when I was at his place. Just because his daughter caught me doing that thing. If only the God of Snapping Jaws would come down and tear his face off.
“There was,” Fleetwood said, shaking his head slowly. He grinned, but it was not the grin of a happy man.
“You sure it was the right one?” Mira asked.
“What’d it say?” Cali asked.
Jack said, “They’re playing with us already. I can tell.”
Frost looked over at Chet. The farm boy looked skeptical. Good. Don’t believe in this stuff, kid. Frost said, almost to Chet alone, “Maybe the ghosts don’t like us.”
“Look, Frost,” Mira said, “I heard it.”
Answering Cali’s question, Jack said, “It was a girl’s voice. She said a word over and over again. ‘Mercy.’”
8
They sat in silence, and Cali felt as if she were around a camp-fire on the edge of some ancient savannah—as if Harrow were not a house after all, but some wilderness outpost. It was hard to believe there was a town just down the road from the house. They were beyond reach—that’s what it felt like to Cali. As if they had isolated themselves from the entire world just by stepping into the house.
“These things happen,” Jack said, weariness in his tone. “Crash course in recording a haunting: Ghosts are tricky. This is why it’s hard to prove anything outside of direct experience.” He brightened and then said, “Here’s how we categorize manifestations: noise, movement of an object, physical contact, odor, and actual appearances. That’s not something I made up—it’s from one of the oldest investigative groups—England’s Society for Psychical Research. Some of those things can be recorded; some can’t. Be open, but keep your skepticism intact. No one wants anyone to see something that’s not there. I will say that one of the blocks to a lot of ghost research—at least from my own understanding of it—is that the people looking for the phenomenon were not necessarily portals themselves.”
“We’re portals,” Chet said. “Seriously?”
“I believe you are, Chet. Each of you has provided some opening of contact. Contact seems to me to be the key. None of you went seeking this. None of you has actually claimed to believe in ghosts as such. Frost, you believe your ability is from some shift in reality—the river theory, basically. You think that there’s some continuum and you tap farther up the bend. And Cali, you’ve always stated, on your radio show, that it’s purely a different level of intuition, and something of an inherited trait. Chet thinks it’s sort of spontaneous—it happens, and I’d guess that maybe he’s not even sure what it’s about. And then there’s Ivy. Ivy, I have no doubt, is the catalyst for what will awaken Sleeping Beauty.”
“Sleeping Beauty?”
“The house. It’s dormant. It awoke last year with a student named Jim Hook, another catalyst. He had some ability to open the portal a bit. Perhaps not all the way, but he got it unlocked; and then it snapped shut again. In 1926, Esteben Palliser, then known as Ethan Gravesend, the grandson of Justin Gravesend, also opened the portal. And again, it closed, with only glimpses of it afterward. Now each of you are keys of sorts. Ivy, too.”
“When do we get to meet our mysterious hostess?” Frost Crane asked in an overly solicitous tone.
“Sometime tonight, I’d guess. I try to give her every privacy. She has been more than generous with this project.”
“It’s nearly eleven,” Chet said, a yawn in his voice. “I hope we meet her soon or I’ll have to wait...”
“Til tomorrow night. She’s a kook,” Mira said. “But she’s smart and she’s pretty and she’s rich, so she can get away with it. If it were me, I’d be in a straitjacket.” Then she asked if she could be excused. As she pushed her chair in, she looked right at Chet and said, “I can show you where your room is. if you want. And it’s
really cool to wear the night goggles. Takes some getting used to, but you can see a lot in the dark with them.”
“Now?” Chet responded suddenly, and then, “Yeah, sure.”
“We’ve got to tour the house a bit before everyone goes to sleep,” Jack said, a touch of paternal caution in his voice.
“Okay,” Mira said. “Follow me.” She went over to the doorway with a bit of a saunter in her stride.
Mira, you minx. You’re after Chet. He’s too old for you. Cali watched Mira transform fairly quickly into a fairly pretty young girl who was trying to show that she was mature for her new crush.
After the two of them had left the library, Chet with a bit of an apologetic look on his face, as if he was leaving too early. Frost returned to the topic of Ivy Martin.
“What’s her ability?”
Jack Fleetwood said, “She is obsessed with Harrow. At the expense of all else. She wants something from Harrow, and I suspect that whatever fuels the hauntings of this property needs someone to want it. Badly. Unfortunately, in her time here, overseeing the renovation of Harrow, Ivy Martin has begun to believe that she was always meant to be mistress of the house.”
9
Some feeble jokes were made, as if it was the only way to break the ice further than had already been done; Frost kept asking about Ivy, and Cali was getting bored with sitting on her butt so much. And then the cell phone began beeping.
‘That’s me,” she said, reaching for her shoulder bag. She unzipped the top and dug down beneath the tissues and her purse, until, there, she grabbed the small phone. She lifted it up and pressed its ON button. “Hello?”
10
“It’s me,” Det said.
Cali glanced at the others in the room. Fleetwood and Frost had gone silent. She mouthed to them: “One second.” Jack Fleetwood nodded; he understood.
Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite) Page 48