by Hailey Piper
Heather’s hand stuck out from her doorway and yanked Margaret inside. The door slammed shut. Heather and Margaret shoved against it, and it swelled against them. The presence outside insisted they let it in. Its growl rattled the doorknob, the hallway air. It didn’t try to break the door down. Maybe it only understood Natalie’s bedroom doorknob, not others. Maybe that was how Heather had kept it inside the house these past many nights.
The swelling eased a little, and then all the way. Heavy footfalls crossed the hall at the same deliberate pace as when Natalie first opened her bedroom door tonight. They stalked up the hallway, past Natalie’s bedroom, toward the upstairs bathroom.
Heather and Margaret didn’t move from the door in case their steps might give them away. Margaret could hardly see the door itself. Her spectacles had fogged a little near Natalie and been tussled when running. They needed cleaning. Margaret wished she could clean away the vision of Natalie’s reflective eyes and the abandoned hamburger meat. How close she had been to those things.
Natalie neared the door again. The floor cried, but she let the door be this time. She passed them, down the hall, back down the stairs again. Soon she would be on the floor, her hands quick to stuff raw meat in her mouth.
Heather eased away from the door, back to her chair by the window. An unlit cigarette awaited her in the crook of the ashtray.
Margaret knelt beside the bed and laid her head against the comforter. Her breathing rocked her chest up and down. “I have news, at least.”
“Good news?” Heather asked, hand on her heart. “Or just news?”
“Your daughter isn’t possessed by a demon.”
Heather paused. “Then she’s crazy?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, does she have a brain lesion? A disease? What is it? What’s wrong with her?”
“Please keep your voice down,” Margaret said. She could see relief in Heather’s face, not because of any diagnosis. It had to be comforting to know someone else was just as afraid as she’d been these last couple weeks. “The Catholic Church’s tests ruled out a demon. There’s still something inside her.”
“But you don’t know what?”
“I may need to run different tests.” Margaret’s hands trembled. Even the idea of getting near Natalie again in this state sounded insane.
Heather at last lit her cigarette. “Now you sound like a doctor.”
“Let me have a chance to think, Mrs. Glasgow. This isn’t the medical field. They wouldn’t have been able to help her.”
“Why not? Because you can? You say something’s inside her, but you don’t know what it is. It could be a growth they couldn’t detect before, or a sickness—” Heather stuck the cigarette between her lips and inhaled deep. There was something she wanted to say, a crazy idea of her own, that she was too ashamed to utter aloud. Or too afraid.
Sometime past midnight, Natalie shambled back to her room. She didn’t shut the door, but Margaret heard the bedsprings. She opened Heather’s door only briefly to see if the coast was clear. Unrelenting heat breathed from Natalie’s bedroom and filled the hall with that oppressive summer day air. Margaret crept through to close Natalie’s door. Even the doorknob was warm.
“I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon, after your bring Natalie home from her doctor,” Margaret said. “We’ll go over the recordings once I’ve had some sleep.”
“You’re going to drive this late?” Heather asked. “After what you’ve been through?”
“I’ll sleep better not being in this house.” Margaret adjusted her spectacles. “I didn’t mean that to sound rude. I never do. Just, keep your door locked in case she gets up again. I’ll try to learn what I can. You do the same, in your own way.”
“In my own way.” It was a funny way to say that she disagreed.
2
It took Heather over half a dozen handshakes until Dr. Liam Horne had introduced to her every brilliant man he’d gathered to himself today in his research facility at the Stamford campus. Heather couldn’t remember any of their names.
Dr. Horne then addressed the room. “If everyone would approach the glass, we’re about to begin.”
The brilliant men approached the glass, some dressed in black or gray suits, some dressed in white lab coats, most of them in spectacles that made Heather think of Margaret. She looked to have a keener eye than anyone present, but looks could be deceiving. These men were renowned in their fields, and Margaret? What exactly was Margaret’s field of expertise?
“I appreciate your patience, Mrs. Glasgow,” Liam said. “By now, I think a woman of less fortitude, without her husband at her side, might’ve done something drastic.”
“Drastic?” Heather asked, as if to say, “Little old me? Drastic? Never!”
“You know, consulted a fortune teller, maybe the church, or worse, one of those smoke and juju healers. Forget I said anything. Not the kind of idea I’d expect would cross a sophisticated mind like yours, what with your husband being who he was. Damn, I miss that man.”
Heather should’ve said something encouraging, that Nathaniel spoke fondly of Liam Horne, that he always meant to invite him on another hunting trip. Those would’ve been nice things to say. They weren’t true. Nathaniel hardly gave Liam a second thought beyond that he was the family physician, but they were nice things. Heather didn’t have space in her mind for nice things. She only had space for Natalie.
So Heather said nothing and watched her daughter through the glass.
Natalie lay strapped to a white table, her head stuck in a white cylinder. Supposedly the room was too radioactive to step inside, yet not so radioactive that she was in any danger. Heather didn’t understand that, but she wasn’t about to ask.
“It’s mapping,” Liam said. An eerie glow crossed the room beyond the glass.
“How much did you sedate her?” one of the doctors asked.
“We didn’t. Part of her condition is sleep to a near-sedated extent.”
“And there’s nothing physically wrong?”
“We’ll learn soon enough.”
Heather found herself wringing her hands and lowered them to her sides, where they began to wring her dress. She had never hoped for a machine to find something wrong with her little girl before today. But today came after two hellish weeks of useless Dr. Horne, of befuddled specialists, of tests that all came back saying Natalie was perfectly fine. A basic mercury thermometer couldn’t even tell Natalie’s temperature was up. It was enough to make Heather scream bloody murder each time she returned to her car, while Natalie dozed away in the passenger seat.
Only Margaret seemed to understand.
It took an hour to have the results of the scan, a layout of Natalie’s brain. Who she was and what she thought, every piece of her mapped out on those scans. Liam and his brilliant men groomed the results with their eyes, their spectacles, and their magnifying glasses, the little ones that too many doctors seemed to carry in their pockets where men used to keep their pocket watches. They muttered to each other, a dull rumble of speculation.
“Well?” Heather asked. “What’s wrong with her?”
The murmur quieted in an instant. The men glanced at each other, glanced at Liam, as if to ask why he’d brought them here when he already had all the answers.
“Please understand, Mrs. Glasgow.” Liam held up his hands in a placating gesture. “These scans—the brain is the most complex organ in the human body, perhaps the most complex organ in all biology. It can take time to go over in detail and find exactly what’s causing the problem.”
“But you must have a hint.” The back of Heather’s neck burned. She wondered if a thermometer could detect that. “There must be something that doesn’t look right. Right? I could understand if it was just one little thing wrong with her, or even one big thing, but all these problems, all of it together, her brain should be the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree of problems, and you can’t find even one—”
Heather stopped all at once.
She stared at a room of ghastly faces, growing older and more obsolete by the moment. These were brilliant men? These men thought they could help her daughter? She couldn’t see it. All she saw was a look of shamed confusion that scurried in their eyes, every one of them. They were pitiable, almost children. Yes, that’s it. School children who didn’t know the teacher’s answer, each of them taking center stage in class only to be ridiculed, and then cry for their mothers.
She looked on them with motherly eyes and spoke in a motherly, doting tone. “You don’t know anything, do you? None of you do. None of you know anything at all.”
3
“And the horse he rode in on?” Margaret asked. She had just returned to the Glasgow house and heard an earful.
Heather covered her mouth and coughed out a laugh. “They didn’t want to help her. The doctor brought them to show off his unique find.” She kept her mouth covered through a yawn. “You’d think I would sleep through the day, being up these nights. I’ll get in an hour here or there, but it’s, you know.” She let her voice trail off.
“But you have nightmares?” Margaret pulled a checkered notebook from her bag and sat in a tall chair, cushioned with red leather. It was Nathaniel’s favorite chair, with the tall back to cradle the ghastly height of him. “I had one, too.”
Heather seated herself on the sofa across the coffee table. “What was it?”
“I’m not sure.” Margaret adjusted her spectacles and crossed her legs. She came off as much more confident in the daylight, without having to toy with her machine or escape an eleven-year-old. “Usually my dreams are visual. I’ll remember images of them, like my brain takes a vacation through them and keeps a photo album. This was different. It was all feelings. I remember it was hot and I was afraid.” Her eyes were wet behind her spectacles. “And angry. The kind of angry that makes you upset, like you’d never wish to have something worth being so angry about.”
Heather couldn’t have put her nightmares into those words, but Margaret described them almost exactly. “I have seen things, at least the past three nights. I can’t tell what. There’s a tree, but not like the pines we have outside. It’s a strange tree. And there’s meat on the ground. A shadow.”
“You’ve been exposed longer.” Margaret’s pen danced along her notebook. “If we wait even a few more days, we might get a clearer picture.”
“We can’t wait.” Heather’s nails scraped at the sofa. She wished she could smoke down here. Part of her almost had yesterday. Nathaniel was gone, and so was Natalie, it seemed. No, she had to hope Natalie was coming back. “She needs to get better.”
“For that to happen, I have to know what happened to her. What was the start of this? Before the first night, I mean.”
“Oh, there was a morning she was at the fridge, asking for meat. I told her I’d make her breakfast and she only ate her sausage. I thought she was being picky.”
Margaret tapped her pen against her notebook. Asking a client what happened was much like a doctor dealing with a patient. A patient could already know what they’re doing wrong and just needed the right questions to pry it out.
“I’m having a rough time breathing, doc.”
“Well, are you still smoking?”
“Yup, two packs a day. Why do you ask?”
Heather was a proud client. Margaret expected she and her husband were similar in that sense, but her husband died long before Natalie’s condition set in, and so never had to experience his resolve being whittled away night after night. Experiences like these could break anyone eventually. Sooner if it was your own child. Right now, Natalie slept upstairs, where she couldn’t hurt anyone. That would change by nightfall.
“Heather, I want you to really think hard, back to before it got bad. Did anything strange happen earlier that day? That week? Something out of the ordinary. A place Natalie wouldn’t normally go, a person she might’ve spoken with? Something new or different. It would’ve given you pause.”
Heather sat quiet for a moment. Then her eyes lit up and her mouth twitched. There was an unpleasant thought inside her that demanded it be unleashed, it was plain to see on her face. She worked her lips past it. “The study.” She left the sofa.
Margaret hurried to catch up with her at the end of the first floor hall.
“I only open it up when I’m cleaning.” Heather reached a set of double doors, so thin you could punch through them. “I keep it the way he left it. It didn’t seem right to move anything.”
“Of course.”
She reached over the doors and retrieved a small iron key. “We only took a couple things from inside to bury him with, like his favorite hat, a photo of us, you know. Other than that, his study stays locked. Sometimes I dust and vacuum. No one else sets foot inside.”
Margaret stepped closer. “Except?”
“I must’ve forgotten to lock it after I vacuumed last month. I don’t know. It’s been a rough time. I don’t even remember if I closed the doors.” Heather slid the key into the lock. “When I passed through the hall again, Natalie was in there.” The flimsy doors swung open without a touch.
The air hit Margaret before the sight of Nathaniel’s study. It carried a man’s stink, even after all these months. It also carried scents of dirt and must and preserving chemicals, of animal hair and wood finish.
And there was a weight in the air. Margaret didn’t consider herself any kind of medium, but she expected that after last night’s encounter, her body would at least recognize a similar sensation. There was foreboding here, a presence that lived in the space of a dead man, so obvious and disquieting that even a layman like Heather could feel it. It was obvious in the way she shuddered when the doors finished opening. She led the way inside.
Margaret closed the doors of the study behind them. There was a risk that they might lock on their own, perhaps if the Glasgow house was haunted, but she thought not. Only one person here was haunted. Besides, they really were flimsy doors. She didn’t want the atmosphere here to go floating around the halls and up the stairs. Better to be mired in it. Let it get to know her.
To the left of the door, she found Nathaniel’s desk, where he displayed a fisher that had been handled by a taxidermist. He had also displayed a photo of a hunt. Margaret leaned in for a closer look.
It was a photo of Nathaniel himself, and he looked exactly as his study suggested him to Margaret, the spitting image of an archaic great white hunter, some relic of an imperial century past. He was a stiff-necked, bald-headed man with a sharp, hawkish nose. Margaret half-expected to see a generic safari hat in one hand, but instead he held a hat sewn of golden fur. He wore a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, brown khakis, and leather boots surely made from some creature he’d killed. Margaret didn’t know anything about guns, but Nathaniel’s looked big enough to bring down a rhino. Under his boot lay a dead wildebeest.
The man enjoyed his hunting.
The animals of the study told their own bloody story. They were impossible to ignore, with their glass orbs staring from where eyes once stared. There were typical remains that Margaret expected to see in the trophy room of a hunter, like the mounted head of a North American deer, a red fox, a stuffed mallard with its green head and white collar. Then there were more unusual trophies, such as the head of a black bear, the standing fisher on the desk, a wolverine.
And there were exotics, like elephant tusks, a rhino’s horn, and the heads of a giraffe, a dingo, and others. Margaret wasn’t sure all of these were legal, but the hunter was beyond the law now. Nathaniel Glasgow’s pride gazed glassily from the center of the wall that faced opposite the door, where he mounted the heads of a timber wolf, a lioness, a boar far larger than Margaret had ever seen, and a crocodile skin that stretched from wall to wall just beneath the ceiling.
“I know what it looks like,” Heather said. “A man this violent out in the world, he must’ve been violent at home. I shouldn’t have told you about his coming home drunk. It paints an unfair picture. He never h
urt us. Nate was a hard man, but not a cruel man.”
Margaret didn’t know enough about him to say she was wrong, but cruel or not, he was merciless. “Where was Natalie?”
Heather pointed to the center of the room. “Right there, on the floor. She was sitting and staring. I didn’t pay attention. I just stormed in, grabbed her, and hauled her out.” She pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. “Jesus, I gave her an earful. And for what? She didn’t deserve it, just for that. She misses her father. Christ, what’s wrong with me?”
“Mrs. Glasgow.” Margaret pulled Heather’s arms to her sides and looked over her spectacles into Heather’s eyes. “It’s not worth beating yourself up over. We can’t change the past. Believe me, there are plenty of little things I let eat at me at night, but when it comes to helping someone, we have to put all that shit away, pardon my English. Let’s help Natalie now, yes?”
Heather nodded. That other thing that was bothering her hounded her eyes and carved her skin into a wrinkled map of countries and states and counties. She lowered her face into Margaret’s shoulder and loud sobs quaked through her body.
Margaret held her. “Mrs. Glasgow, did you ever go with your husband on these trips?”
Heather shook her head.
“Besides the animals, did he ever bring anything else back with him? Coins, dolls, masks, the kinds of things—” Margaret cut herself off before she could say, anything that a spirit might attach itself to, as if Heather would know. As if Heather was in the right place of mind to hear such a thing.
“In the desk,” Heather managed through a sob. She pulled herself away from Margaret and covered her face. “I’m sorry.”
“Please don’t be.” Many people looked to Margaret for comfort, often after delivery and especially when things went wrong. She never seemed to get any better at it, but she supposed if they kept looking then she couldn’t be doing too badly either.