by Etta Faire
Somehow, I got it in my head that I wanted to touch it.
I’d long suspected the woman was a ghost. I never saw her coming or going. And she looked like she’d stepped out of a 19th century funeral home. But she was the most human-looking ghost I’d ever seen, if she was one. I needed to know. Plus, other people (people who did not have a strong mediumship like I did) could see her too.
When she was busy in the living room fluffing up the pillows on the settee, I pretended to be interested in the vase on the coffee table. But as soon as I got about an inch from her skirt, she practically flew away with such accuracy and dexterity I felt like I was moving in slow motion compared to her. I tried again in the dining room to touch her skirt and got a little closer that time. But once again, I was no match. It was like chasing a hummingbird.
“You slow me down,” she finally said. “I can be done in five minutes. Go.”
It was a silly game anyway. I threw open the cabinet in the pantry and yanked two keys from their hooks. “I’ll be in the library if you need me,” I said to the blur. I knew it was the one place Mrs. Harpton wouldn’t touch. Plus, I’d been so caught up in Bessie and solving her murder, I hadn’t had time to look through my new scrapbook yet.
I whistled for Rex on my way out to the veranda. But just like my ex, he usually hid when Mrs. Harpton was cleaning. He hated going to the turret, anyway, even before the incident with Brock. I couldn’t blame him. The main turret was one of the strangest parts of this house. Just off the veranda, it had its own entrance and lock. And, it had been designed on purpose to look like two turrets from the outside, one on top of the other, lopsided. It was just a small part of the oddities of Gate House, though.
My favorite oddity was the one just across from the creepy nursery on the second floor, a door that led to no place. Just a wall. There was another one of those down the hall near the basement too. The house also featured fireplaces with no chimneys. And chimneys with no fireplaces. And a weird dead horse art piece with its tongue hanging out in the nursery because what says “Good night, sleep tight, kiddo” more than that?
My ex-husband was waiting for me, legs crossed on the red sofa, when I got up to the third floor of the turret. “What took you so long? This is where I live on Mondays and Thursdays,” he said, laughing a little at the “lived” part. He was starting to gain more color, not nearly the amount that Bessie had, or Mrs. Harpton.
I nodded without saying anything else. I reached behind him, accidentally going through part of his shoulder, causing a cool breeze to shoot along my hand, as I grabbed my two scrapbooks from off the shelf. I set them on the coffee table in front of us.
Jackson turned to me. “Do you think you need the seance to figure out Bessie’s murder? I heard you cancelled.”
I shrugged. “I really wanted the money, though. But now, I want Bessie to stay as far away from that seance as possible. I’ve been replaced. And I want the seance to bomb.”
“Oh goody. More time with the suffragist.”
“I like her,” I said, raising an eyebrow at my ex.
“I’m just tired of hearing about it, that’s all. Did you know she was in charge of the women’s rights movement here in Potter Grove? I only know because she mentions it every other second like she’s expecting applause.”
“So you’re saying this house can only fit one large head at a time?”
“Precisely.” He cupped his own chin. “And this adorable head was here first.”
I thumbed through the new scrapbook as I talked, stopping on one of the 8x10 sepia photos of a large crow with thick, black, greasy-looking feathers.
“Your great grandfather was a loon. You know that, right,” I said. “What is up with all these pictures of birds?”
He didn’t answer. I didn’t really expect him to.
The scrapbook seemed oddly familiar. I could almost guess with astounding accuracy what the next photo was going to be every time I turned the page. But then, that’s not as impressive as it sounds when “another black bird” was a solid guess. But it became a bit of a game, only ending when I said, “The back of a woman’s head while she reads through her notes,” while turning the page. I gasped when I saw I’d been right. Down to the little glass figurine sitting on the stack of papers by her typewriter.
How could I have known that? I shook it off and moved on. I must’ve already looked through this book and hadn’t remembered. One of the pages caught my eye.
It was another photo of what looked like a classroom, the girls in curls and white dresses, the boys in black uniforms, hair perfectly combed to the side. I’d seen a similar photo in the other scrapbook.
I threw the first scrapbook open, the one I found the night I solved the stripper murders, and scanned its pages until I found the picture of the classroom.
The photos had to have been taken on the exact same day because the two adults standing off in the back of the room were the same. A man with a handlebar mustache that I now heavily suspected was Jackson’s lawyer, Ronald, and a woman who looked a lot like Mrs. Harpton. The photos weren’t exactly the same, though. The one in the new scrapbook was taken from a different angle.
And from that new side angle, I could see that the door in the back of the schoolroom was open. And, a horse sculpture hung on the wall of whatever room was across the hall from it. I studied it a second, my mouth falling open when I realized what it was.
Creepy bugged-out eyes and a tongue flopping out of an opened mouth. It had to be the same horse from the nursery upstairs. I squinted again. It had to be.
Could the schoolroom in this photo be located directly across from my own creepy nursery?
A chill went up my spine, making me aware of every hair on my neck when I thought about what was currently located across the hall from that nursery. The crazy door that opened to nothing. It didn’t seem so crazy anymore. I wasn’t sure how I was going to break into whatever secret room was hiding there without tearing open the drywall, but I was going to figure it out. This was proof that there used to be a room there. Maybe.
I closed the book so quickly I almost caught my finger in its heavy binding, realizing it also had an ominous title in beautifully scripted cursive scrawled across the cover, just like the other scrapbook… because it’s perfectly normal to title your scrapbooks in Old English script. “Upon a Crooked Stile.”
Jackson had disappeared long ago when I was thumbing through the bird photos, but I was pretty sure he was still here. “A stile’s like a passageway, right?” I yelled into the air to my former English professor who was now my dead ex-husband.
He appeared in front of me, throwing me a dimpled smile. “Well, actually,” he began, his voice thick with arrogance. “It’s usually a specific passageway, like steps or a ladder that would allow humans to pass through to an area while not allowing animals to pass. I believe the word itself is German in origin, but I could be wrong…”
I knew I should’ve just looked it up. He enjoyed spewing knowledge way too much, the know-it-all.
He sat back down next to me, and I almost expected to feel the warmth of his body once again. The smell of his sweat. I took a deep inhale, but smelled nothing. I was getting used to nothing.
Was the door that led to the wall the crooked stile? A room boarded up so humans couldn’t pass, but other entities could? I felt an electric spark traveling up my body. Was I figuring out clues?
The only other items in the scrapbook were equally as confusing, a few obituaries clipped from newspapers and some bird photos. The man sure liked his birds and his obits.
I thought about it. Maybe Henry Bowman suspected Bessie’s passageway to death had been crooked too.
I shook my head. I was probably reading way too much into a dead guy’s scrapbook. But, I was one-hundred percent sure there was a boarded up room on the other side of the nursery now. And I was going to break into it, as soon as my housekeeper left.
Chapter 12
A Messy Situation
> Rex took off down the hall as soon as he saw me peeling away at the paint and wallpaper.
“Go big or go home, huh?” I yelled to him as I peeled another chunk from the wall in the hall across from the nursery. It lifted like a dry, brittle fingernail. There was no turning back now.
Each layer of wallpaper seemed to reveal another layer, a different pattern, like a rotten onion.
Sweat dripped from my forehead even though it was ten degrees cooler in this hall than in any other place in the house. I closed the door to the nursery as I worked so I wouldn’t accidentally see the weird horse or the doll that looked just like me. Or maybe, it was so they wouldn’t see me.
The outer layer of paper in the hallway had been painted plain white. At first, I hadn’t even noticed it was wallpaper. My original plan was to bust through the wall one whack at a time, yelling “Here’s Johnny” as I went. But, just as I was about to swing away at the wall with the only thing I could find to do it (one of Jackson’s old golf clubs), I noticed a crack in the paint up in the corner of the door frame that looked like a folded piece of paper screaming for me to pull on it.
I obliged, realizing immediately, it wasn’t drywall, but wallpaper covered by white paint. It peeled away easily and almost completely, revealing an odd kind of scene underneath. Black bears in a weird dark pattern where some bears were upside down and twisted this way and that, falling through a forest of patterned trees. They weren’t cute bears. These bears’ mouths hung open and their backs appeared flattened, more like hollow skins used for rugs.
Something told me not to hack away in a hurry but to take each layer like a surgeon would, carefully removing it. Underneath the bears was a golden colored wallpaper with nests and baby birds. Mother birds flew toward the nests at varying angles. They appeared to be feeding their babies very large bones.
Another layer was gargoyle-looking griffin beasts sitting next to dolls with curly brownish-blonde hair. The doll from the nursery?
I knocked on the wall. It seemed hollow. And when I pulled back the wallpaper and saw white drywall underneath, I knew it was time.
I paused, holding the golf club high above my head.
I’d lived in this house for seven years when I was married to Jackson and it never occurred to me to tear this wall open. Any wall, for that matter. But something was compelling me to do it now, and with certainty, as if I knew it was meant to happen. Just as I was certain there would be a photo of a woman drinking tea while reading notes. How could I have known that? Who was I?
With as much force as I could muster, I swung away at the wall, one blow after another, right at the doll’s head that looked oddly similar to my own. Drywall crumbled into my hair, falling along my face. The sound of thwacks echoing off the other walls filled my ears as dust covered my vision. I coughed, and wiped my nose, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. This was just the beginning.
After a few minutes of whacking away, my arms felt like they wanted to bolt from my body, and my eyes were filled with so much dust, I probably could’ve planted seeds in them.
I hadn’t thought to use safety equipment like goggles or gloves. I tried not to think about the fact that this was a hundred-year-old house, and my lungs were probably filled with lead or asbestos or something equally as deadly.
I squinted through my dusty vision, smiling when I saw a hole was finally forming along the bottom of the wall. At least I had something to show for the mesothelioma I was probably giving myself.
I kicked my new boots along the crumbling plaster, surprised when I saw my foot go straight through with a crash that shook the floor a little. I pulled it out and kicked the wall again. This time it stuck, and I almost lost my balance trying to yank it free.
“Carly doll,” a calm voice beside me said as I hopped around like a wounded animal. “You’ve been very busy this afternoon.”
I coughed on the dust falling from my hair and looked over. I could barely see my ex hovering in the hall, watching me tug a foot awkwardly out of drywall. My black jeans were covered in plaster and wallpaper bits. “There’s a room back there, Jackson.”
“Well, it certainly looks like you’re creating one,” he said.
I picked up my phone and shined it into the hole I’d made with my foot. “It’s too dark. I can’t see anything.”
“What are you hoping to find?”
“Answers,” I said, grabbing a hold of a piece of the wall and yanking another chunk off. And another. Jackson didn’t say anything. The only sounds came from me and the crunching of the wall breaking into bits. “I want answers. I know there’s something in here I’m supposed to find. Probably. And after I’m done here, I’m going to Indianapolis. I’m no longer waiting for my mother to tell me what she knows about my adoption. I’m going there and I’m going to demand she tell me.”
“Sounds like a fool-proof plan. She won’t be able to say ‘no,’ poor thing.”
I hated it when he was right. It was a stupid idea.
The plaster came off pretty easily now. I gave it another kick, my foot crunching out more of a hole. I wiped my brow with the back of my hand, blinking away the dust falling along my lashes. “She probably thought she was helping me by sparing me the details of my adoption, by giving me the right education and nagging me to make traditional choices in life like career, marriage, and kids. It was a good plan…” I tossed another chunk of wall onto the huge pile forming in the hallway. My breath was heavy as I tried to talk and do hard labor at the same time. “But nothing ever works like you plan it to in life.”
“Unless your plan is to make a mess.”
I looked around at the mess beside me. Chunks of drywall, paint, and wallpaper cluttered the entire hallway from the maid’s quarter’s to the nursery.
My back muscles spasmed and my head throbbed. I sat down by the pile and rested my head against the good part of the wall.
Jackson sat down beside me, brushing my hair from my eyes, which felt a lot like a fan blowing it. “You know what’s funny,” he said, turning his head to the side so I would catch his eye. “It’s only after you die that you realize there are no real answers in life.”
“Oh good. The meaning of life is that it’s meaningless.”
He went on. “Sometimes, the walls you’re in, the ones you apparently feel like kicking down, are the very ones you put up yourself. Maybe that’s the answer you’re looking for.”
He left before I could tell him it wasn’t. “Sorry, professor,” I yelled after him. “Not everything’s a crappy metaphor.” Somehow I got the energy to trudge down the stairs to grab the emergency lanterns, leaving a trail of plaster wherever I stepped, something I was sure Mrs. Harpton was not going to let me forget anytime soon. But the hole in the wall was large enough for me to crawl through now, and I was determined to see what was inside that secret room.
The secret room was apparently hiding mildew and mold. That was all I could smell as I stood in the darkness. I couldn’t see a thing, even with the lanterns on, only tiny dust sprinkles dancing in the stream of light. My skin crawled in the thick, stagnant air as I thought about what else could be in here. Black widows, bats, Mrs. Harpton’s rotting corpse from 1885, the one the house kept locked up in this hell hole so her ghost would have to clean twice a week.
But thankfully, and unfortunately, there was nothing. Nothing but bare walls and an empty room. I tried not to feel disappointed, like Geraldo Rivera right after blasting into Al Capone’s vault after two hours of hyping it. But there was nothing here. “F-ing metaphors,” I muttered under my breath.
I tried to let my mind be still. Maybe I could connect with the beings that were trapped in here. There had to be a reason this place was sealed and forgotten. I could picture where all the desks were, the children sitting with their perfect curls and slicked-back side parts.
“Hello,” I said to the air. “You’re free now. You can go.”
A loud flapping sound, like wings, lots of wings, came straight for me. Sc
reaming, screeching birds that sounded almost human. The lantern slipped from my hand and crashed to the floor. I could hear the back of the battery compartment falling off, batteries rolling somewhere around my feet. I didn’t have time to search for them. The bird sound got louder, and I shielded my eyes and head because I’ve seen The Birds and that’s pretty much the only defense strategy you need to remember in a bird attack. I didn’t feel beaks pecking at my skull like I expected, only wind blowing from far away, so far away I could barely feel it.
I got up after a moment, realizing I was being crazy. I wasn’t in danger after all. I was just hallucinating, which was one of the signs Rosalie told me to look out for from the channelings. A sign I probably needed a break from it all.
I ran my hands along the dusty planks of the floor where the batteries had fallen. It was too dark to see, but somehow I managed to pick them up and locate the spring in the battery compartment, popping them back in correctly. I turned the light on again, searching the empty room. Maybe Jackson was right. Maybe nothing was my answer. Empty, meaningless nothing. I made my way back over to the hole, light streaming through, guiding my way.
Something was stuck to the bottom of my shoe. I could just see the small, rectangular paper peeking out over the toes of my boot. I tugged it off and brought it out with me. A postcard.
The hallway seemed eerily quiet as I turned the card over and over in my fingertips while sitting on a pile of wall.
The front of the card was very plain by today’s standards, marked only by the words: Private Mailing Card addressed to Henry Bowman of Langley Street in Landover, WI. It didn’t have a photo of a vacation resort or even a return address for that matter. I flipped it over.
May 4, 1901
Dear Mr. Bowman,
As I have told you before, you must not send for me again. I am not who you think I am, and if I come, you will no longer have a choice when I leave. Your fate will forever be sealed. Think of your own children, and their children’s children. This deed shall cost thee all thou art worth. Do not choose this crooked mile.