The Haunting

by Joan Lowery Nixon

  “So these were just stories you’d heard,” Dad said.

  Charlie shrugged. “Everybody knows about ’em.”

  “I don’t believe anyone died of fright in this house, because I know that ghosts don’t exist,” Mom told him firmly. “Whatever local stories and legends have built up about Graymoss are simply imaginative hysteria.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Charlie said. “Except that the stories about the evil are for real, all right. Stay until after dark and you’ll see for yourself. Just don’t ask me to stick around.”

  Mom impatiently looked at her watch. “I’d like to take a look at the interior of the house, Charlie. Do you have a key?”

  “I sure do,” he said, and pulled a ring of keys from the back pocket of his overalls. He held it out to Mom, pointing at two of the keys. “Front door and back door. I woulda got May—that’s my wife—to come to dust and sweep if I’d known you was goin’ to visit. She cleans once a month or so just to keep things in order. The cleanin’s not too regular since people don’t live here.”

  Mom began walking toward the veranda. “I’d like to meet May. I’d be happy if she’d continue her help with the house, too. Do you think she’d be agreeable?”

  “Oh, May’s almost always agreeable,” Charlie said. “It’s just that she don’t like bein’ in the house, and she’d never stay past late afternoon.” He shrugged as Mom, Dad, and I began to climb the steps to the veranda. “It won’t matter anyhow, because if you stay here till it grows dark, you’ll change your plans in a hurry.”

  Before Dad opened the massive front door, he turned to look at Charlie. “Do you want to come with us? Show us around?”

  “No, thanks,” Charlie answered. “You ought to be able to figure out where you are and where you’re goin’ pretty well by yourselves. I’ve got to finish the work I started in the vegetable garden.”

  “Oh! You’ve kept up the garden?” Mom did that happy clapping hands thing again. I winced.

  “May and me have been growin’ our own vegetables here for quite some years,” he said. “I hope that’s all right with you.”

  “Of course,” Mom said. “I’m counting on a big vegetable garden—one that will feed a very large family.” She glanced at Dad and giggled.

  “Oh,” Charlie said. “You’ve got more’n one kid.”

  “We will have,” Mom said, and giggled again.

  I was totally embarrassed. I wanted to tell Charlie, “It isn’t what you think. She’s talking about adopting children.” But then I thought, Why should I worry about what Charlie thinks? We won’t be here anyway. No adopted kids. No living in this haunted house. So why bother?

  Charlie might have been puzzled, but he didn’t ask any more questions. “When y’all are through with seein’ the house, you can bring me back the keys,” he said. “I’ll show you the outbuildings. There’s the barn, which you probably noticed, and a root cellar, and the summer kitchen. All part of the property, except that the summer kitchen’s about to fall down. No fault of mine. It just wasn’t built to last, like the house was.”

  “What’s a summer kitchen?” I asked.

  Dad answered my question. “Cooking inside the house added a great deal of heat in the summer, so cooking used to be done outside in an outbuilding.”

  Mom was having trouble hiding her excitement. I knew how badly she wanted to see the house. “Thank you, Charlie,” she said, and turned to Dad. “Please open the door, Derek. Hurry!”

  The massive door swung open on dry hinges with a whining, grinding noise. It startled me so that I jumped back and grabbed the railing that edged the veranda.

  “Been meanin’ to oil those hinges,” Charlie called. “I’ll do that tomorrow.”

  I took a deep breath, rested my hand on the bag of gris-gris under my shirt, then followed Mom and Dad into the house.

  The entry hall was spacious, with a curving stairway that swept up the right side of the hall to a second-floor landing.

  “Oh, it’s beautiful, Derek!” Mom cried.

  “Some of the paint on the paneling is peeling,” I said. “And look over there. The wallpaper is curling up.”

  “That doesn’t matter. Paint and wallpaper are easy to replace,” Mom said. “Come this way. There seems to be a dining room on this side.”

  I lagged behind as Mom and Dad hurried into the dining room. I tried to imagine the scary things that had happened to people in this house, but with sunlight streaming through the windows it was hard to believe they had actually taken place. I began to wonder if Mom was right and the stories were imagination or hysteria or whatever else a psychologist would call them.

  The dining room was immense, with a long mahogany table that had room for lots of extra leaves. Mom hugged Dad and squealed, “It’s big enough for a very large family! How perfect can it get!”

  An ornate, very dusty crystal chandelier hung over the table, and I leaned back to stare up at it. I couldn’t begin to count all the candle stubs that were still in their tarnished silver holders. How many, many years had it been since their light glowed throughout this room? Radiating outward from the spot where the chandelier was attached to the ceiling were ornate plaster vines and leaves and flowers. They spread across the ceiling to each corner, where they met the same kind of design that outlined the borders between the ceiling and the four walls.

  Mom and Dad took one look at me and stared upward, too.

  “That gorgeous chandelier must be the original one. I can’t believe it wasn’t stolen out of the house,” Mom said. She slowly turned around. “Or this beautiful highboy, or the rest of the furniture. Over all these years weren’t there thieves or vandals in this area?”

  “The evil in the house kept them away,” I explained.

  Mom gave me one of those looks, so I quickly added, “You read the diary. Charlotte wrote that no one dared to come near the house.”

  “I don’t want to hear another word about ghosts!” Mom practically exploded.

  But Dad smiled and put an arm around her shoulders. “Instead of feeling impatient about the house’s ghostly reputation, you can be thankful that everyone was afraid of it,” he said. “It looks as though the spooky stories kept people away. The house has waited all these years just for us.”

  A cold chill shivered up and down my backbone. What Dad had said made me think of Sarah’s words: “Graymoss is there. It’s waiting.” I didn’t want whatever was in this house to wait for us. I fingered the bag of gris-gris again. Just knowing it was there and I was protected made me feel a whole lot better.

  At least Mom’s good humor had been restored. I trailed along behind her and Dad as they walked through the kitchen, a storage room Mom called a butler’s pantry, some other rooms that had probably been parlors, and into a library.

  The library had been cut off from the full brightness of the sunlight by ancient, deep blue velvet drapes pulled partly closed. The drapes were not only badly faded, they were tattered, almost shredded in places as though cat claws had ripped through them. I didn’t touch them. I was afraid they’d disintegrate on the spot.

  The shelves that lined one of the walls all the way to the ceiling were mostly filled with books, but the leather and cloth bindings on many of them had rotted, and their yellowed pages had curled. I tried to read the titles and authors on the spines of the books that were still intact, but the gold lettering was so tarnished on some of them it was impossible to make out any words. On the books that were in better condition I didn’t recognize the names of the books or the authors.

  “I wish I could take all these books with me,” I said, but Mom and Dad weren’t there to answer me. I could hear their footsteps on the stairs. I wondered if Charlotte had read all these books. If I’d been Charlotte, I would have. If I lived here now …

  I glanced around the room again, holding tightly to my bag of gris-gris. “I suppose you can’t hear me, whoever you are,” I said to the ghost that haunted Graymoss, “since you’ve only been known to co
me out after dark. But in case you’re kind of hanging back, listening, I want you to know something. No matter what Mom and Dad keep talking about, we’re not going to live here. They want to fill this house with kids. Think about it. Kids yelling and fighting and running up and down stairs and shouting at the tops of their lungs …”

  I added, “I don’t want it. You don’t want it. We’ve got that much in common. Okay? So if I can keep Mom here after dark, just go ahead and do your scariest thing and make her want to leave. If you’re as terrifying as Charlotte wrote that you were, then Mom will be just like all the other Women Who Are Exceptionally Brave in our family and cop out.”

  The room was silent. Mom’s and Dad’s voices faded in and out from a great distance as they explored the upstairs bedrooms.

  No one answered me, but I wasn’t expecting an answer. I’d come to terms with whatever was in this house, and I felt a lot more relaxed. I let go of the gris-gris and reached on tiptoe for a volume that had once been bound in dark red leather. What was left of the title made me think it contained stories of King Arthur and his Round Table of knights.

  I managed to get a grip on the book and gave a tug. It didn’t budge, but suddenly, from out of nowhere, a thin book fell, zooming past my head and whacking me on the shoulder.

  “Ouch!” I said. I let go of the book I’d been trying for and rubbed my shoulder.

  Cautiously I glanced around the dimly lit room. No one had entered it. I was alone. It was foolish to think that ghosts had dropped this book on me. It was daylight, not dark. There were no stories that recorded strange goings-on in Graymoss in broad daylight, so it couldn’t have been a ghost. Somehow, in trying to pull down one book, I’d accidentally dislodged another. It was as simple as that.

  I tried to make myself believe it.

  Bending down, I picked up the book, took a good look at it, and nearly dropped it again. The cover was a soft leather, stained, with one corner singed. It seemed impossible, after all these years, but the book smelled faintly of smoke. I was positive that in my hands was the book Charlotte’s grandfather had given to her—the one with the answers to her questions. It was the book that Cousin Lydia had taken away from Charlotte and hidden. The title gleamed up at me: Favorite Tales of Edgar Allan Poe.

  My knees began to wobble, and for a moment I had trouble breathing. I backed up and landed in a wing-backed chair, sending up a puff of dust. It wasn’t an accident that I’d been hit by this book. Somebody—or something—wanted me to have it.

  “Why me?” I asked aloud. I’d read some of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories in American lit—“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Gold Bug,” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” and they were creepy because such awful things happened to the characters in the stories. Somebody throttled and stuffed up a chimney, somebody’s skull nailed to a tree, and somebody walled up inside a wine cellar and left to die.

  No one answered my spoken question. But the memory of what Charlotte had written in her diary jumped into my mind. “The answers to your questions are in these pages,” her grandfather had told her. I well remembered.

  Another thought struck me. Supposing I’d been given this book for a reason, and the reason was that I should find the answers that Charlotte hadn’t been able to find. What answers? The Civil War was long over. Morgan Slade had disappeared with the Blevins family treasures. I examined the book carefully. Both endpapers had peeled back from the binding enough to show me there had been no secret notes pasted inside. There was nothing in the book that would tell me where Slade had gone or what had happened to the Blevinses’ treasures.

  “Why give this book to me?” I asked aloud. “I don’t think you just want me to read it, so what am I supposed to do with it?”

  A breeze broke the stale air in the room, ruffling the hair that hung around my face. Closing my eyes, I enjoyed the coolness and the soft fragrance of cut grass and summer sun.

  But my eyelids flew open, and I gasped as I realized that I couldn’t have felt a breeze—at least not a real one. All the windows in the dimly lit room were tightly closed, with the drapes partly drawn across them.

  I clutched Favorite Tales of Edgar Allan Poe to my chest and ran out of the library. I’d asked a question of my own, and something had given me its answer.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I raced upstairs and found Mom and Dad standing in one of the bedrooms. Mom was holding a measuring tape, intent on the width of the windows, so neither of them paid any attention to my sudden appearance. I leaned against the wall for support while I caught my breath.

  The furniture was heavy and massive, with thick, carved spindles holding up what was left of the canopy over the tester bed. The sheer, once-white fabric must have covered the canopy and hung down the sides to protect the sleeper from mosquitoes, but now it hung from the framework in long, stringy tatters. It made me think of the horrible, gray strings of moss that hung from the oaks outside the house. Deep upholstered chairs flanked the fireplace with its black marble mantel, and in one corner sat a large cat cut out of polished black stone.

  Mom was saying, “Since this is the largest bedroom—”

  I interrupted. “If this was the largest bedroom, then wouldn’t it have belonged to Placide Blevins, Charlotte’s grandfather?”

  “It might have,” Dad answered. “The furniture looks like something a man would find comfortable.”

  I glanced again at the bed. A muted green-and-gold brocade spread covered the mattress and the pillows; sheets and blankets, I guessed, were underneath. This must have been where the workers had brought the body of Charlotte’s grandfather. She had washed and dressed his body here, and she had sat with him until the horror in the house had frightened her away.

  I looked up at the ceiling, half closing my eyes as Charlotte had. The flowers and leaves and ornate scrolls turned to small faces, and for just a moment I could feel their eyes staring back at me.

  Shivering, I forced my glance away and wrapped my arms around myself. Mr. Blevins, I thought, you aren’t the terrifying evil in this house. You loved Charlotte. You would never have done anything to frighten her. But I wondered about the evil. It hadn’t been in the house before the grandfather’s death. So where had it come from? Why was it here? What did it want?

  Mom and Dad walked into the hallway. “I like the idea of two children to a room instead of a dormitory plan,” Mom said to Dad. “That means we won’t have to remove any walls. But if we eventually adopt more than a dozen—”

  She began talking about bunk beds, but I stopped hearing her because before my eyes the center of the mattress seemed to sink. I could see the indentation a body would make if someone had been lying on his back, right in the middle of the bed.

  Someone was lying on the bed! Someone I couldn’t see!

  I tried to move, but couldn’t. I seemed to be stuck to the floor. But my mouth must have opened because Mom and Dad ran into the room.

  “Lia! Why are you screaming?” Mom cried out.

  With my left hand I grabbed my bag of gris-gris, wadding up a fistful of shirt. I didn’t let go of the book I held in my right hand as I pointed to the bed. “Look! You can see the depression in the middle of the bed! Someone’s lying on it!”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know!” I shouted. “He’s invisible!”

  Mom’s voice was soft and controlled. “Lia, dear, there’s no depression on the bed,” she said.

  I blinked and looked again. She was right. The bed looked just as it had when I first entered the room.

  Dad put an arm around my shoulders and gave me a playful squeeze. He picked up my right hand, turning it so that he could read the title of the book. “Edgar Allan Poe? Lia, my little book lover, you’re letting your imagination run away with you. You’re reading too many ghost stories.”

  Mom said, “I never should have let you read that awful diary.”

  I leaned against Dad, my knees wobbly. “It doesn’t matter what I read. A body was lying
there,” I told them. “It wasn’t my imagination. I saw it.”

  “You just think you did,” Dad said.

  “I know I did.”

  “Your imagination can play tricks with your mind,” he told me. “Under the right circumstances it can make you think you see things you don’t.”

  Mom looked at me strangely. “Why are you clutching the neck of your shirt like that?” she asked. “It’s going to be full of wrinkles.”

  As I looked down at my hand I realized what had happened to change things. It was the gris-gris. When I had it under my hand everything was normal. But when I let go of it … I had let go to reach for the book, and that was when Favorite Tales of Edgar Allan Poe had been dropped on me. I wasn’t holding the gris-gris when I saw the indentation on the bed, but when I grabbed it the indentation went away.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Mom said.

  I wasn’t about to. Just try telling Mom and Dad about gris-gris!

  I flattened my hand and tried to smooth out my shirt, careful to keep the bag under my fingers. “Sorry,” I said. “I got excited.”

  Dad looked at his watch. As he spoke to Mom, he gave me a quick glance, which I wasn’t supposed to see, and said, “I think we’ve spent enough time in the house for now. We can’t make definite plans until we’ve received the engineers’ report. Let’s find Mr. Boudreau and take a quick look at the outbuildings. Then we’ll go back to Baton Rouge and have lunch.”

  “And come back to Graymoss this evening,” I said. I’d invited the evil in the house to do its best with Mom. She and Dad had to drop their plans before they went too far. I wasn’t going to like whatever would happen, but it had to be. Mom and Dad had to be convinced that we couldn’t live at Graymoss.

  Mom shook her head and said, “We’re not going to come back here this evening, Lia. Those stories in the diary have you frightened even in the daylight. Just think what your imagination might do to you after dark.”

  “But …” I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell her why it was important to me that she and Dad see and hear and feel the full fury of the evil. I blurted out, “Don’t you want to prove to me the stories are just that … stories? Make-believe?”