Finding the Way Back

by Jill Bisker

  “You don’t have to prove yourself to anyone, Laney.”

  “Yes, I do. I have to prove it to me.”

  He started to speak several times then paused to reconsider. “I have a feeling I’m in trouble, I may never be able to say no to those eyes.”

  I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him again to thank him.

  “But you don’t have to do it alone,” he said, returning the hug.

  “Thank you for following me into the bathroom,” I said, smiling at him.

  He smiled back. “Any time.”

  We walked out of the bathroom to find every eye at the table watching us. Blithely ignoring everyone, I sat down with aplomb to pour another cup of coffee. One down, five to go.

  Once I had Emmett’s backing, it wasn’t too surprising that I could talk the rest of the group into allowing me to continue in the house with them. They all seemed to respect and trust him implicitly. We came up with some ground rules together and I agreed to follow them. First, never to go anywhere in the house alone; second, to speak up immediately if anything ever felt off; and third, no crabbiness. I might have had my fingers crossed when I promised the last one, but I was going to put my big girl panties on again so I planned to make every effort.

  As we drove up to the house I looked for any telltale signs that it wasn’t just an ordinary house. It was the same old, charming fixer-upper I had seen when I arrived only a few short days ago. It felt like I’d been here for months.

  Emmett got out of the truck first and ran around the outside to open the door for me. “By the way, nice outfit,” he whispered as I stepped out.

  “Thanks,” I replied.

  “Actually, I’m really missing the old one.” He chuckled.

  “I’m sure you are, but if you don’t watch it you’re not going to get another chance to see it.” Holding my head up haughtily, I tried to make my way daintily up the sidewalk. Unfortunately, dainty is difficult when your chin is in the air and I tripped on one of the steps.

  I caught myself on the handrail and proceeded more carefully. I was no longer dizzy but if I hit my head again I feared they would take me out of the game.

  My mother, Aunt Shelly and Connie were just pulling up to the curb when I got to the door. “Wait for us,” Connie yelled out the window.

  Dean and Glen were stopping to pick up some new gadgets and would be at the house soon, then the Scooby gang could get started planning our assault. I would be astonished if anything happened with such a large group descending on the house but at least if safety was to be found in large numbers, we were golden.

  Emmett and I entered the porch then waited. It seemed a little silly to me. I wasn’t alone if Emmett was with me. I peeked through the windows in the front door. The angled panes reflected rainbows of light across the walls and floor, but everything seemed still.

  When we all were perched outside the house on the porch, I slowly swung the door open. The air inside was still musty and old smelling but I didn’t feel any unusual vibes. I stepped into the front entryway and stopped. Everyone crouched behind me, waiting for me to get out of the way.

  Everything was exactly as we left it. The television and some lights were still on, but thankfully I couldn’t see anything out of order. Emmett pushed past me and advanced further into the house to check in the kitchen and study, then headed upstairs. We waited quietly near the door for the all clear.

  He came down the stairs, relaxed. “All is fine.”

  “Fabulous, I’m going to go take a soaking bath,” I said.

  “I’ll go up with you,” Connie said, following after me.

  Walking back into the master bedroom, I searched for signs of anyone present or something out of place. Everything seemed to be in order. As a matter of fact I felt a sense of peace in this room that I didn’t feel in the rest of the house. I wondered if Teoline was here watching me.

  Connie sat on the bed while I found something comfortable to wear. I leaned down and pulled out some sweat pants and a t-shirt from the drawer, feeling every battered and bruised point on my body as I moved.

  “I’m going to take an Epsom salt bath,” I said. “I’ll leave the door to the bathroom open. Just let everyone know they can’t come up.”

  I traipsed into the bathroom and looked at the claw footed bathtub. It would probably take ten minutes to fill the entire thing. I hoped the hot water held out, because I needed this more than I had needed anything in a long time.

  Connie yelled down to everyone on the first floor, not taking any chances on leaving me alone upstairs. Then she pulled a chair into the doorway of the room and sat it facing away from me. She found a book and seated herself to be my warden.

  I sat on the edge of the tub and turned on the water. Adding the Epsom salts, I leaned over to swish the water to help it dissolve. Undressing, I carefully stepped over the side and lowered myself into the water. It was as hot as I could stand and I leaned against the back to enjoy the sensation of warmth spreading through my muscles. I closed my eyes and started to relax for the first time in a week.

  After about five minutes I got the feeling someone was watching me and I slowly opened my eyes to peek. My grandmother was sitting on the toilet gazing at me. She was wearing the blue peignoir.

  My eyes flared open and I sat up quickly. “You have to help us. There’s another spirit in the house and we don’t know what to do.” I spoke quickly, trying to get to the point of our trouble before she disappeared. I leaned over the side of the tub and grabbed my towel, stood and wrapped it about my body.

  Her whole demeanor transformed as she sat up fully and her eyes got wide with fear. Connie turned around as I spoke.

  “We must not speak of him,” my grandmother quavered. “He’ll hear us.” Then looking towards the door, the image of her entire body trembled and began to fade. She looked at me one last time and she whispered, “Find the clock.” Then she vanished from my sight.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Before I could say anything to Connie, I could feel an unearthly presence coming up the stairs, and then the footsteps in the hall confirmed it.

  “I saw her too,” Connie began, but I cut her off.

  “No time for that now. He’s coming!” I gasped, grabbing my clothing and pushing past Connie’s chair as I took her hand and pulled her down the hallway with me. I ran for the master bedroom, not daring to look at what was coming, more afraid now after the thing I saw in the basement. I slammed the door behind me as soon as we got inside and I began hurriedly throwing my clothes on.

  “I don’t think a closed door is going to stop him,” Connie said worriedly, holding the doorknob tightly. She heard the footsteps too.

  “Emmett!” I started yelling then Connie joined me.

  It was only a few seconds later when we heard Emmett pounding on the bedroom door. Connie let go and the door burst open as Emmett arrived looking concerned.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, breathless.

  “That was fast! How did you do that?” I asked.

  “I heard your voices talking in the bathroom excitedly then I heard a door slam. I ran up here as fast as I could.”

  “Did you see it?” Connie asked.

  “I thought I saw a dark shape as I rounded the landing at the top of the stairs, but by the time I got here it was gone.”

  “We saw Grandmother again,” I said. “Then she vanished and I could feel the other coming.”

  “We’re fine,” Connie said to our mothers, Dean and Glen who had joined us upstairs and were just coming down the hall.

  “We can’t seem to let you do anything without getting in trouble,” Dean teased as he walked into the room to look out the front windows.

  I quickly explained what happened and my mother walked toward the bathroom to look inside while the rest of us tried to calm down. She returned momentarily and asked plaintively, “Is she still here? Can you feel her? I would so love to see her again.”

  I looked at my mom with sudden,
sad recognition. Of course, she missed her own mother terribly. I tried to sense if there was another being present. “I don’t think so. I’m so sorry, Mom. I can tell her you’d like to see her.”

  “That’s okay. It’s probably for the best,” she said, but not very convincingly. She sat on the bed dejectedly. “I hate to think of her trapped here for all these years.”

  Aunt Shelly sat down next to her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “We’ll figure out a way to fix this, Tess. I don’t know how, but don’t worry. We’re not leaving until this is resolved.”

  That was one thing that I had always loved about my mother and aunt. They had nerves of steel and when they made up their minds to do something, it was going to happen. It was a family trait I needed to encourage more in myself.

  “If you only heard footsteps this time maybe he’s not strong enough in daylight to manifest,” Glen suggested. “That could be an advantage for our side.”

  “I wonder,” Connie said, hefting herself onto her favorite perch, the dresser. With what little room there was I was tempted to join her. “Is anyone interested in having a séance? We could try to find someone who could help us.”

  “That seems a tad dangerous,” Emmett said, pacing in the small space at the end of the bed. He accidentally knocked into me as I tried to slip past to the closet. “We don’t want to provoke anything.”

  “That’s exactly what we want to do,” I said, opening the closet door and walking into it. I took a dress down and walked back into the room. “Think about it. Maybe one of the reasons that thing has interacted with me is because I’ve been wearing grandmother’s clothes and living in her bedroom. On some level it may be confusing me with her.”

  When no one said anything I felt self-conscious, after all what did I know about ghosts? “Forget it, I’m probably way off.”

  “Actually, I think you might be on to something,” Emmett said. “For one thing, who or what is the other entity? It seems like an intelligent haunt, like it’s interacting with you, but if the house was always haunted then who is it? It was haunted long before you got here, and before your grandparents passed. Maybe it was responsible for your grandmother’s fall on the stairs and now it just keeps reliving that moment. Or perhaps it just wants to keep her here with it.”

  “Sounds like we need a séance,” Dean said.

  “I think we should try it,” Aunt Shelly added enthusiastically. “Let’s get it all out on the table.”

  Everyone looked at each other and nodded. For some reason I felt a deep sense of dread but the die was cast. Now all we could do was see what we would roll. One way or another, we had to get to the bottom of it.

  With our next ghostly mission ahead of us, Emmett assumed the role of commander, giving orders and making plans. I found it quite sexy in a military campaign sort of way.

  “If we’re going to do this tonight we need to make sure we have everything ready and in place,” he began. Motioning to his companions, he directed them. “Dean, you and Glen can stop by my place and pick up some extra cameras and microphones I have. We should think about where we want to hold the séance and how we want to maximize use of the equipment. We also need to find out everything we can about this house and the previous owners, names, occupations, relatives, anything we can get. It might help us ask pointed questions and provoke a response.”

  “The land belonged to a farm before it was parceled out,” my mom said, getting up off the bed. “Maybe it had a house on it once upon a time even before this one? Come on Shelly, we haven’t made it to library yet. Let’s see if we can find land records or anything. We’ll check old city directories and anything else we can find.” Turning as she headed out the door she said, “We’ll be back before dark. Don’t leave Laney alone.”

  Dean and Glen left to pick up the extra equipment and Connie and I went in search of her computer. I was sure we could find some historical records online. We first checked the items Connie had put on eBay and we already had some bids. I would have liked to sit and watch the items receive more bids but the auctions didn’t end until later in the day so we moved on.

  We decided to look at one of the well-known ancestral sites that Connie was familiar with. You could enter relatives’ names and find records that were associated with them. We started our family tree with our mothers and their parents. Neither one of us knew birth dates so we guessed approximate years. Our excitement began to build when little leaves popped up on the screen indicating that there were additional documents found with their names on them.

  Dean and Glen returned with more gadgets and were working at getting them set up. It looked like playing to me. I wanted to tell them to go somewhere else but everyone had agreed to look out for me and not leave me alone, and apparently Connie didn’t count as a bodyguard.

  “Bzzzzz!”

  “Perfect!” Dean exclaimed. Let’s try it from a different angle,” he said to Glen.

  “What is that annoying noise?” I finally had to ask. I didn’t like my own fun interrupted by someone else’s.

  “It’s a laser-powered motion detector,” Glen said, pointing to a small box that was pointed toward the stairway. “If anyone or anything breaks the laser field the alarm goes off.”

  “I noticed,” I said. I was virtually ready to take a baseball bat to the device when they decided that they finally got it set correctly.

  Connie and I spent the next several hours looking up our ancestors, but we didn’t find much relevant to our present situation, mostly military records, census information, employment histories. Hearing my mother and aunt come through the front door, I left Connie at the computer and went to see if they happened to think of anything for lunch. I was overjoyed to see their arms were laden with packages from a nearby sandwich shop. I rushed over to help but Dean intercepted me. I hadn’t realized I was hungry until I saw the bags, but my breakfast was a distant memory. We needed to keep our energy up for the evening’s events.

  Looking down at the coffee table I had flown by I noticed the clock still sitting there waiting to be fixed and remembered my grandmother’s last words. Find the clock. I wondered if this was the clock she was referring to? What was it I was supposed to find out?

  I decided to try to decipher that cryptic message after lunch. I called everyone to the kitchen while my mom and Aunt Shelly laid out a spread of sandwiches, chips and drinks. I selected a roast beef sandwich, then grabbed a small bag of sour cream potato chips and took pleasure in the luscious sin of grease and salt.

  As we sat finishing our lunches I brought up the most recent episode with our grandmother. “Connie, did you hear our grandmother’s last words before she disappeared?”

  “No, it mostly sounded like a hiss,” Connie said, popping a chip in her mouth. “It all happened so fast and I had only seen her that one other time so I was pretty discombobulated.”

  “Right before she disappeared she whispered what I thought was ‘find the clock.’”

  “Yeah, it could have been ‘clock’ but I’m not sure.”

  “Well, I am sure,” I said, crumpling up my chip bag and throwing the bag in the middle of the table.

  I went to the living room and lifted the clock. The pendulum inside swung a little and I remembered that you weren’t supposed to swing old clocks around that much. I clutched it to my body and tried to walk slowly and steadily into the kitchen for all of us to study it. “I don’t know if she meant this one but I thought I would look. The attack happened right after it came back in the house.” I turned it so the back was facing me. The little door in the back of the clock had a catch and I pushed it back, pulling the flap towards me and exposing the clock’s innards.

  “See anything?” my mother asked, coming to stand behind me.

  “I don’t know anything about the workings of a clock but I don’t see anything that looks unusual to me. The sides, top and bottom are bare wood,” I answered, pushing at the sides to see if there were any secret doors and finding everything
secure and solid. The front glass panel opened as well so you could change the hands on the face, but nothing obvious was there either. “There are probably other clocks in the house,” I said, gently turning it back to face me.

  “Maybe she just wanted to see it working again,” Aunt Shelly said. “You may think her words and all of this is connected, but what if it isn’t? What if it’s just coincidence?”

  “I don’t believe in coincidence,” Connie and I said together.

  “Jinx!” We both tried to scream first.

  Dean raised one eyebrow. “You two are how old?”

  Connie and I smiled at one another, remembering our childhood game. It was astonishing how people could fall back into old habits after so many years.

  Glen turned to my mother. “So did you two lovely ladies find out anything at the library?”

  “No, but to be honest we really didn’t look that hard. It was just too difficult to sit and look through old microfiche and newspapers when we knew you all were still back here in the house getting ready for the big night. We were just too nervous,” Aunt Shelly said.

  “I’m not sure it would solve anything anyway. If there were a different house here originally what difference would it make? Even if we figure out who the other entity is, how do we get rid of it?” my mother asked.

  No one answered but everyone at the table turned to Emmett.

  “Beats me,” he said. “You know, I only do this as a hobby. I have never run into a case as involved, dangerous and active as this one. We tried smudging, and I’ve seen that work in most of the cases where people really want to get rid of something. A lot of people don’t mind the hauntings as long as they’re harmless. Sometimes they even relish them so they don’t try to do anything. I really think that in this case there is something that needs to be solved. I even doubt tearing down the house would be effective.”