by Sean Munger
“I have no time for your nonsense. I was meeting with Mrs. Lucius Minthorn. She refuses to see me in society, so she arranged a meeting at a hotel in Long Branch where no one would see the shame of being in my presence.”
Julian looked up, caressing the tumbler of whiskey but not drinking it. “Oh, you were with Mrs. Lucius Minthorn? And what scandalous lies did she tell you about your husband? What have I been up to now? Tearing the wings off flies? Ravishing nuns? Torturing young children? Do tell.”
“You know perfectly well what she told me. I found out about the whole thing—about how you got this house and how you had Mrs. Quain beaten and thrown out. That’s the reason the women of New York shun me. It has nothing to do with me. It has everything to do with you.”
“Of course, blame it on me,” he shrugged, and finally did take a drink. “Mrs. Quain is a tired old woman. She’ll be dead in six months anyway. This house is a treasure. A block off Fifth Avenue, and for the price I paid for it—well, you don’t pass up a deal like that. Of course, I can’t expect you to understand. Women cannot grasp the concept of money.”
“I grasp the concept of $125,000. That’s what Mrs. Minthorn told me her husband is prepared to offer you to buy the house back. I have no idea what you paid for it, but I suspect it was less than that. Therefore you’ll make a tidy profit and we’ll repair our relations in society. If you accept their offer and apologize to Mrs. Quain, we might—I stress might—eventually be received in New York society.”
Julian’s face became a stony mask of anger. “You dare to lecture me on business affairs?” he said sharply. “You, a spoiled little princess who’s had everything in her life handed to her on a silver platter? The Minthorns turned to you to try to deal with me?”
Anine wasn’t intimidated by his rising anger. She was emboldened by it. Though she had kept the fact of Bradbury’s diary from him, she quickly realized that she would have to show it to him. It was the strongest proof that there was an evil presence in the house, and as it came from someone other than her, Julian was less likely to dismiss it.
“Julian, I want to leave this house. I can’t stay here. It’s not just the things I’ve seen. My maid found the caretaker’s diary in her room. He wrote it shortly before he hanged himself. He saw things here too, even more than I have. There’s a presence here, and that presence wants us out.”
“What do you mean, a diary?”
“Bradbury’s diary. It proves there’s an evil presence here. Since I learned about how you threw Mrs. Quain out I’m even more convinced that it’s wrong for us to stay here. The Minthorns’ offer provides us with the perfect escape. With $125,000 we can buy another house somewhere else. Then we can give our lives together, our marriage, a new start. I want that. I hope you do too.”
She expected Julian to respond with a blast of anger. He’d rage at first, as he usually did, but she was confident that she could talk him down; the Minthorns’ offer was ultimately quite generous, and eventually he would have to agree.
She was surprised that he didn’t rage. It seemed like he was going to explode, but he got the impulse under control. He took a sip of whiskey, got up from his chair and walked over to the fireplace. He took the poker from beside it and began to stir the crackling logs.
“We’ve been uncomfortably at odds since we moved into this house,” he said. “I do regret that. I really don’t want to quarrel with you all the time. I’m growing tired of it.”
At last. A little conciliation. “I’m tired of it too.”
“I believe there…is a presence in this house.” From the tone of his voice Anine knew it was very difficult for him to make this admission. “I can’t tell you what I’ve seen. It’s not important anyway. But I have seen something.”
Hope sprang within her. Yes! He understands! She almost melted with relief. “I’m so glad to hear you say that, Julian. If we accept the Minthorns’ offer—”
“I want no more talk of that,” he said frostily. With a clang he replaced the poker back in its rack and turned to her. “We will not sell the house. That’s out of the question. When you’re thinking straight you’ll realize what a dreadful idea that is. But we must do something about the presence in our house, and I intend to. This is what I wanted to tell you tonight.” He went back to the desk for the whiskey. “There’s a man who lives in Ossining. His name is Andrew Jackson Dorr. He is a noted…what’s the word…ah, medium. They say he communicates with spirits.”
Anine was crestfallen. But she held her tongue, deciding to let Julian have his say, so long as he wasn’t shouting in volcanic anger.
“Roman Chenowerth told me about him. This man comes highly recommended among people who have had…troubles such as those we’ve seen in this house. It is said that he advised Abraham Lincoln in the White House and successfully communicated with the spirit of the Lincolns’ little son Willie, who died there. I’ve taken the liberty of sending him a letter and requesting his help. I expect a reply within the next few days. If anyone can cleanse this house of this presence, he can.”
She sighed. “A medium? That’s your solution to our problems? Some fool who talks to ghosts?”
“He’s not a fool. He’s a highly respected professor. He gives lectures on psychology and the inner science of the mind at colleges all over New York and New England. He can tell us what’s happening here and how to stop it.”
“Julian, we don’t need mediums. If we sell this house back to the Minthorns whatever presence is here will no longer be our concern. You’ll make money on the deal, we’ll be able to start over somewhere else and we can repair our relations with society. How do you not see that this is what we should do?”
Julian seemed unfazed. Leaning up against the desk, he drank from the tumbler of whiskey and then set it down. “My decision is final,” he pronounced softly. “We will go see Dr. Dorr in Ossining at his earliest convenience. Both of us.”
“What do I tell Mrs. Minthorn?”
“Tell her to bugger off. There will be no more talk of selling this house.”
She burned with frustration but she could say nothing. She could tell the discussion was over. Shaking her head, she turned and walked to the door of the parlor.
“And you are not to speak to Mrs. Minthorn again!” Julian called after her as she closed the doors.
She ignored him. What a child I married. What a stubborn, short-sighted, bullying child.
As she turned into the entryway she heard something above her, coming from roughly the same place where she’d seen the cat. It was laughter—the unmistakable sound of a woman’s laughter. The spöke was mocking her openly.
This made her angry. “Quiet!” she shouted at the stairs. The laughter abruptly ceased, but Anine still felt the presence of the spöke—hovering silently, watching her, and taking delight in her rage and frustration.
There were no illusions left: this was not some frightening but ultimately benign manifestation. The presence in the house hated her and hated Julian, as it had hated Erskine Bradbury. It wanted the house for itself.
In the morning Anine wrote a letter to Rachael Norton. She felt it was still probably taboo to address the Minthorns directly but Gertrude’s offer deserved an answer; the stony indifference Julian wanted to give her was simply unacceptable. Choosing her words carefully—fearing not to refer too directly to the truth, lest the letter fall into someone else’s hands—Anine wrote:
Thank you, my dear Rachael, for arranging the interview with Mrs. M. We had a very cordial visit and it was agreeable to get to know her.
Mrs. M. spoke to me of a possible solution to our mutual vexations. It was a very generous suggestion, and one for which I’m grateful. Please convey to Mrs. M. my deepest thanks for the suggestion and tell her that I still believe it to be highly desirable that we conclude it at once. Mr. Atherton is presently not of this opinion, but make it known to Mrs. M. tha
t I believe his mind can be changed and that eventually he’ll come around given a reasonable time.
She knew this letter was dangerous on several levels. She had no idea how long the Minthorns intended to dangle the offer to repurchase the house; if rebuffed once they might withdraw it in frustration and claim that Julian and Anine had exhausted all the chances they could reasonably expect to be given. Yet if any hint that she hadn’t spurned the offer out of hand reached Julian he would erupt in anger and quite likely do something rash that would make the conflict with the Minthorns irreparable and Anine’s ostracism from society permanent. She had no idea how she could hope to change his mind. But she would have to think of something.
The next afternoon Rachael’s reply arrived. Anine’s heart was pounding as she opened the seal. When she read the note her spirits fell even more.
My dearest Anine—
I conveyed your thoughts to Mrs. M. She told me to pass on to you that the M. family wishes you, and particularly Mr. A., the greatest happiness in your new lives. Mrs. M. specifically stated that she wishes that you will be as happy in your new home as Mrs. Q. presently is in hers.
Anine felt the invisible blade twisting in her breast. Gertrude Minthorn could not have laden her reply with more venom or vituperation had she used the crassest language possible. Sometimes polite gentility could be more cold and brutal than outright cruelty. With this letter Anine understood that the offer was closed and Julian had burned his last bridge. The house was to be their permanent prison, and the spöke their jailor.
Chapter Twelve
The Medium
“Well,” said Dr. Andrew Jackson Dorr, through a cloud of smoke rising from his meerschaum pipe. “I must say that’s a very interesting set of circumstances—one I have never encountered before.”
Anine and Julian were sitting in the parlor office of Dorr’s bizarre wedding-cake house on the crest of a grassy hill overlooking the Hudson River. The weather outside was dreary, with rain pattering down the window-panes, but the parlor itself was warm and comfortable if slightly macabre. Amongst the many leather-bound books in the endless rows of bookshelves there were various other artifacts scattered here and there: a fierce-looking Japanese Kabuki mask, the skulls of apes (or ape-men), a hideous effigy of wood and straw that looked like some sort of voodoo doll and an ancient Trojan helmet with the skull of its last wearer still embedded inside.
Dorr himself was an odd character. His dark hair was brushed back from his forehead but somehow it managed to form a tall pile on the top of his head, like a haystack, before descending to his stiff starched collar. The lenses in his eyeglasses were the size of dimes. His mustache and beard were thick and bushy. He was missing the ring finger of his left hand. He spoke with a strange high-pitched voice, at once squeaky but also sing-songy. Anine was not sure she liked him.
“We hoped you might know what to do,” Julian replied.
“What to do? Why, young man, we don’t even know what we’re dealing with yet, much less what to do about it. I’m quite intrigued by the fact that everyone in the house claims to have seen something different. According to this”—Dorr tapped the Bradbury diary, which Julian had given him—“your caretaker encountered a child, most likely a young boy. You, Mrs. Atherton, have seen a woman and a cat. You, Mr. Atherton, claim you saw this—this person you recall from your Western travels. Actually I’m still rather unclear on that point. Exactly who was this person in real life and what is his significance?”
Anine had not quite understood it either when Julian laid it out to the medium. He said that in the house he saw a man “who I know is dead” and whom he’d seen in the West four years ago but he didn’t elaborate. Certainly he hadn’t mentioned anything about this man to her before.
Julian seemed uncomfortable as he answered. “It was a man I saw on a train in Wyoming Territory. I recognized him because of the characteristic hat and waistcoat he was wearing. I…later saw his dead body.”
“This man from the West, was he known to you?”
“No.”
“Did you ever speak to him?”
“No.”
“But you saw him dead.”
Julian swallowed hard. “I saw…I witnessed another man shoot him. From a distance. I was on a train and I saw it happen through the window. The man had gotten off the train by then, and he was attacked by some hoodlums.”
There’s something he’s not telling us, Anine realized. Or else it’s an outright lie. It occurred to her that perhaps Julian had killed the man in the West himself but she had nothing to back that up. Clearly it was an incident that caused him pain to recall.
“That man could not have ever physically been in your house in New York, much less died there,” said Dorr.
“Right. He died in Utah Territory.”
“I thought you said it was in Wyoming.”
“I don’t—it could have been either. I don’t know.”
Dorr seemed to understand he had strayed into difficult territory. He puffed on his pipe, then took it out of its mouth and pointed its stem at Anine. “And your investigations, Mrs. Atherton—they have consistently shown that no one can recall anyone dying in the house?”
“That’s right. By all accounts Mrs. Quain lived there with her husband and son happily for twenty years.”
“And she did not die there?”
“No. She’s still alive.”
Dorr did a double-take. His eyes widening, he leaned slightly closer. “She’s still alive?”
“Yes. She lives in Newport with relatives.”
“You’re absolutely certain she’s still alive?”
Why is that of particular importance? Anine shrugged. “That’s what I’ve been told.”
“She’s an invalid,” said Julian, with a tone that sounded slightly annoyed. “Since she moved out of the house she’s been quite ill, so they say, rarely leaving the cottage where she lives.”
“Have you ever actually met this Mrs. Quain?”
“No.”
Dorr turned to Anine. “Have you?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know she’s still alive?”
Julian’s mouth opened and closed a few times. Finally he said, “I guess I don’t.”
“But she has to be,” Anine spoke up. “I talked to her sister. What reason would she have to claim she’s still alive if she isn’t?”
Dorr puffed on the pipe again. “Perhaps to conceal the manner in which she died—or the identity of the person responsible for her death.”
Julian seemed to have an epiphany. “You mean to tell us that Mrs. Quain was secretly murdered in the house, and it’s her ghost that’s haunting us?”
“It’s a possibility. In order to foreclose it we must establish whether or not she is still alive.”
“How do we do that?”
“You said she lives in Newport?”
“Yes.”
“I could go there and speak to her,” said Dorr casually. “If she’s alive, in any event we need to ascertain what she knows of the history of the house, whether she saw any manifestations there, and if so, how she would describe them.”
“I don’t think you can do that,” Anine said.
“Why not?”
“She doesn’t speak. I heard that from Rachael Norton, and then Mrs. Quain’s sister told me the same thing. Since she’s been ill she hasn’t uttered a word. Her illness is said to be—” she searched for a diplomatic way to put it “—an illness of the mind.”
“An illness of the mind? Really?” Dorr’s odd mustache curled upward, indicating that he was smiling. “I’m rather well-trained in treating illnesses of the mind. Perhaps I could do something for her.”
“The treatment of Mrs. Quain’s illness is not the issue,” said Julian sharply. “I want to know what we’re going to do about the spirits in ou
r house.”
Dorr paused a moment. Then he got up from his chair and began to pace between the desk and the bookcases. After doing so, silently, for nearly half a minute—and beginning to make Anine quite uncomfortable—finally he began to speak, never looking at the Athertons, occasionally punctuating his speech by waving the end of his pipe.
“A threshold question in this case is whether Mrs. Quain is still alive. If she is not, there must be a reason why her family promotes the illusion that she is. Determining that Mrs. Quain is dead would make your case rather a straightforward one. The active presumption would be that she died in the house and the spirit that you, Mrs. Atherton, and your maid claim to have seen would be hers. If Mrs. Quain is dead, from the evidence you’ve presented to me I would hypothesize not that she was murdered, but that she committed suicide. The suicide of the caretaker may have been a psychic reenactment of that event and possibly for a similar reason. From the caretaker’s diary it seems he was conflicted about the death of his own daughter, Alice, at his own hands, evidently by accident. Yet he had lived with the guilt of killing her for thirteen years. Why should he suddenly decide thirteen years later that the burden of guilt was unendurable and kill himself in your house? The answer must be because his psyche was deeply affected by another presence in the house—that of Mrs. Quain, and perhaps of a child she may have had there, and who must have died in similar circumstances to his own daughter. That would be the straightforward answer. But that hypothesis leaves certain elements of your story unexplained.”
“Such as?” said Julian.
“Such as the other apparitions that have been reported and the lack of any evidence of deaths connected with them. If Mrs. Quain is dead—if she died in the house—it’s reasonable to hypothesize that her ghost haunts you, and is the spirit that you, Mrs. Atherton, saw. Those are already two ifs. Then we have the child seen by Bradbury—another mystery death we must account for, and explain why it’s been unknown until now. That’s another if heaped upon the top of the pile. But what about the dead man from the West? Even if all our various ifs hold true, how do we account for him?”