Diary of a Haunting

by M. Verano

  “What’s that behind them?” said Logan. “There’s something behind the pads.”

  “My God,” said Verano. The pool of light thrown by his flashlight swung around the room, casting us from light into darkness as he moved swiftly toward the torn cushion.

  “Letters,” he muttered as he dug his hand into the pile. “More letters.” He started to tug the neighboring pads free from the walls, and as he did, more ancient, yellowed envelopes spilled into his hands. Raph picked a handful up from the floor and, holding them under his trembling light, he picked one from the bunch, carefully folded back the flap, and slid the decrepit paper free.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” said Mom.

  “What’s it say?” said Logan.

  “I—I have no idea,” said Raph. I took a step closer to him and peered over his shoulder. The page between his fingers certainly looked like it had writing on it, but it was so tiny and crabbed that it was impossible to decipher. Here and there I could make out what appeared to be a letter, but I couldn’t be sure whether they added up to true writing or were just the scribblings of the deranged.

  “Try another,” I said.

  “Raphael, be careful,” said Verano. “This isn’t child’s play. These letters need to be catalogued, properly preserved.”

  Raph ignored him and slipped a trembling finger under the aged seal of another. This one was even odder. It came out as a giant sheet but of a very strange shape. As the light shone on it and we got a better look, I saw that the page was constructed out of dozens of little scraps of paper—bits of receipts, paper bags, note cards, matchbook covers—all glued painstakingly together. Some of the scraps had typed writing, others handwriting, others cartoonish pictures and abstract doodles. Again, I couldn’t tell if it added up to anything meaningful, though there were actual words at least.

  Raph put it down and picked up another.

  He flicked open the flap on the envelope and reached his long, thin fingers in to pull stationary out, but this time it stuck. He tugged on it, gingerly at first, careful not to cause any damage, but gradually with more force, as his eagerness to know what was inside overcame his fastidious instincts. At last the page came free and Raph withdrew it, but as it slipped out, a soft black mass fell out into Raph’s hand, followed by a collection of something small and dark that hit the floor with a delicate sound.

  “What is it?” I said. Raph held his hand to his face to look more closely, then grunted and dropped the object, letting the flashlight clatter to the floor as well so its spotlight rolled along the far wall.

  “Hair,” he said, holding his sleeve to his mouth.

  I grabbed the flashlight and focused it at the floor. In the middle of my beam lay a tangled black clump of human hair, like the refuse pulled from a hairbrush, while all around it were scattered an assortment of dark, crusted, concave disks. Logan put his fingers out and pressed them to the disks as if he was picking up crumbs from the kitchen table. He lifted his hand and turned it so we could all see.

  “Is that . . . ?” said Mom. I knew, but my mouth had gone dry and my tongue felt too thick and heavy to speak. Logan said it for me.

  “Fingernails,” he said. “Bloody fingernails.”

  TUESDAY, JUNE 16, 5:14 P.M.

  No one wanted to spend any more time up in that room. But we couldn’t just walk away from it either. Somehow without really discussing it, we came to the unanimous conclusion that we needed to get the letters out of there. For ten minutes or so, as fast as we could, we worked together in silence, tearing down the pads and tossing handfuls and armfuls of the aging letters into the trunk that held the other, more normal ones. When we seemed to have gotten them all, Raph squeezed the lid on the trunk shut, and he and Mom each took a side and hauled it back out through the broken door and the hole in the wall, down the stairs, and placed it on the coffee table in the living room.

  It was strange, though. The letters felt different sitting on the coffee table in the bright sunlight of a Tuesday morning in late spring. Very different from how they’d felt in that cold, dark room. Upstairs I was so shaken I wanted nothing to do with the letters, but now that they sat here like some kind of set dressing for a Restoration Hardware catalog shoot, all I wanted was to pore over them and examine every strange thing they contained.

  I reached for one and started to fold up the flap.

  “No way,” came Mom’s voice from the kitchen. “You put that down, Paige.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? How are you even asking that? You saw what I saw. There’s something . . . unhealthy in those letters, and reading them cannot be a good idea. What we need to do is get rid of them. Get them out of the house as soon as possible.”

  “We need to burn them,” said Logan in a low, intense voice. He hadn’t spoken since we came downstairs, and his voice came as a shock to me. I was still having some trouble reconciling this Logan with the one I saw last night, and figuring out which of the two—if either—was for real. The two versions blurred together before my eyes. “Mom’s right. There’s . . . nothing okay about these. We can’t read them.”

  Mom clapped her hands together as if efficiently solving a problem. “Sounds fine to me. Let’s just take them outside and burn them right now, and we can be done with it.”

  “No,” said Verano. “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that.”

  “It’s my house,” said Mom. “We found them here, so it’s my property. I can do what I want with them, and I want them destroyed.”

  Verano struck the floor firmly with his cane. “It’s my collection,” he said with severe authority. “I am the curator of the Pronoica collection for the University of Idaho. All the pieces of that collection are my responsibility, including these. If the content of these letters does not interest you, that’s your decision, but they must be exposed to the light of day. They have been hidden far too long. Repression of the unpleasant aspects of life is the root of the problem we face today. Williamson tried to silence these voices, but they were destined to return.”

  “With all due respect,” said Mom, clearly fighting to keep her calm, “I’m not exactly convinced of your expertise in this field. I’ve been a student and practitioner of the magical arts for more than half my life, and I’m descended from a long line of acknowledged mystics. You—you’re an academic kook trying to burnish your ego and your CV with this ‘discovery,’ and not thinking twice about the real lives you would ruin in the process. I know your kind, I deal with them every day. Big-name professors who say they want to help the environment, preserve the ecosystem, save the species, but all they really care about is winning the next grant so they can fund their sabbatical somewhere sunny. You come into my house with your academic credentials, but it’s possible I know more than you about the shadow realm. Prying into these letters—it’s unwholesome. They weren’t meant to be read. We weren’t meant to read them.”

  Professor Verano shook his head, a humorless smile on his face. “Ms. Blanton, it is very likely you who awakened this evil with your supposed mystical expertise. People have resided in this building for decades with no more than a slight degree of paranormal activity. Do you think it coincidence that you arrive in this town with your thaumaturlogical toys, some of them clearly far more powerful than you understand, and this house immediately begins its rebellion? The secrets, the grievances in these letters, must be exposed to the light, or they will fester and corrupt this place for generations to come.”

  For a moment, the two stood silent and bristling at each other, apparently at an impasse. Then Raph spoke. “You’re both wrong,” he said. “I’m sorry, Ms. Blanton, but you don’t own this house. You rent. The house belongs to me.”

  “To your mom,” I mumbled under my breath.

  “Actually,” he replied, “it’s my name on the deed. For tax reasons my mom didn’t want it in her name, and her lawyer suggested putting it in mine. So . . . legally speaking . . . the house is mine.”

  “Ra
phael,” said Verano, a tinge of triumph in his voice already. “You understand, don’t you? After all we’ve seen, all we’ve learned. You know how important these documents are. My work—our work. You won’t let it all go to waste. We are exactly who is meant to read them. They are in our hands, aren’t they? What better evidence could we ask for? A letter always arrives at its destination.”

  Raph hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Verano is right. The letters need to be preserved. And catalogued. Simply sitting down and reading them like some old love letters won’t get us anywhere. What we need is data. We need a system. Some way to manage all the information and bring it into view.”

  “Yes,” said Verano, growing excited. “Exactly, precisely right. Ah, Raphael, you are thinking like a historian now. We need to get the new documents to the library right away, where they can be—”

  “No,” said Raph. “Not yet. Like I said, they need to be sorted and catalogued. Monty—Professor. Who are you going to get to do that, some marketing major looking for a summer internship? What the hell are they going to know, or care, about this work? I’ve lived with Pronoica for more than a year now. I’ve scanned and catalogued every last piece of that collection for you, and checked it over twice. You said it yourself: No one knows this collection better than I do. Not even you.”

  “That’s correct,” said Verano. “But still, they belong at the library.”

  “Where I’ll have no access to them. Thanks to you.”

  Professor Verano held Raph’s stare for a long moment before looking away. “Yes, fine,” he said, as if Raph had just brought up a particularly distasteful subject. “You have a point. All right then, we’ll work on them here.”

  “No,” said Raph again. “That is . . . I’d rather you didn’t. It seems like a bad idea.” Verano didn’t answer, but his brow was furrowed, his expression dark. At last he nodded. Apparently deciding that this compromise solution was better than the likely alternative, he limited himself to giving some very precise instructions to Raph with regards to the database and its finer points, then grabbed his cane and swept out the door.

  As soon as Verano left, Mom jumped on Raph, repeating again how she didn’t want the letters in her house for one minute longer, etc. etc. I guess she thought Raph would be easier to break down than Verano, and . . . well, she was right, kind of. Because he brushed her off immediately, saying, “Don’t worry, Ms. Blanton. I have no intention of keeping these letters around. Logan was right—we’re going to burn them.”

  He explained that there was no way Verano would ever leave the letters with them unless he thought they were perfectly safe, so he had to let him believe that he would preserve them. But then he called Verano a “damned obsessive” who couldn’t see past his own ego. And it’s true that Verano knows the least of all of us what we’ve been living through these past months, so how could he possibly understand?

  Anyway, Logan was all set to dump the stuff in a pile outside and light a match to it right then and there—if not just start a fire right on the coffee table—but Arthur arrived just in time with a more sensible suggestion. Good old Arthur . . . He was driving up from Lapwai with dinner from CD’s barbecue restaurant for everyone, and walked in on what must have looked like a very strange scene. But he took it all in with his usual aplomb.

  “Hey, now,” he said, “you can’t start a fire here. There’s a burn ban on.”

  “A what?” I said.

  “A burn ban,” said Arthur. “Have you seen the conditions out there? It’s hot and dry and windy, and the slightest spark could set off a massive wildfire. Starting any kind of fire now would be—”

  Raph rolled his eyes. “Yes, I know all about the burn ban. Look, I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve been through a zillion fire seasons. It just means you have to be careful. And I know how to take precautions.”

  Arthur and Mom were silent. Worried.

  “I’m not talking about hosting a barbecue, or starting a bonfire just for fun. This is important. What do you want to do, throw all this creepy shit in the Dumpster outside? Bring it down to the recycling center? Do you really think that’s going to solve the problem? We need to purge this stuff. Purge the house. Fire is the only way we’re going to do that.”

  Mom looked to Arthur, who hesitated before giving a nod. “We do it on the rez sometimes—get special dispensations for ritual fires. There are some things only a fire can cleanse. But Jesus, you have to be very, very careful. Will you at least wait until tonight, and let me do it with you?”

  Raph agreed to this, so I guess we get to put off our big creepy bonfire a few more hours.

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17, 12:43 A.M.

  Raph was right. I am so glad we did burn them.

  God, I . . . I feel better than I have since . . . well, since before we first moved into this house. It’s crazy how different everything feels just as a result of that one act. Suddenly I can walk around this house without feeling like I’m carrying a heavy load all the time. I didn’t even realize until now how much it was affecting me, but right now I just feel so light and free and . . . peaceful. At last. This house, which has brought us all so much trouble and pain, it is just a house now. It’s old, and it still has a lot of history, but . . . that’s all it is now. History. It’s not living with us and feeding on us and fucking with us anymore.

  But I should back up and describe what happened. We waited until dark, which felt like forever. But finally the sun set, and Arthur and Raph went about digging a deep hole in the gravel driveway outside. I’d invited Chloe to sleep over, since I knew she would want to see this story through to the end. Once she got here, she, Logan, and I wandered around the fields just past the property, looking for large stones and bringing them back to the hole by the armful. We made a ring of big stones around the pit, and cleared the area of any dry, inflammable objects—twigs and leaves and stuff. Then at last we lugged the big, overstuffed trunk outside, and started tossing the unread letters into the pit by the handful. They didn’t all fit easily, so we decided to do it in batches. Arthur lit another branch of patosway and held it in the air a few moments, humming the same song his grandfather had sung the other time. He seemed a lot less comfortable with it, though, as if it were something he only half remembered. Then he dropped the patosway into the pit, and almost instantly the old, dried-out envelopes began to blacken and smoke. Before long, small flames erupted and the pages started to curl, and then the fire started in earnest, curling the letters into ash. The wind was picking up, but we were very careful to control the ash and keep it from drifting up into the air on a gust. We had covers we could put on it if it seemed to be getting too big, and we kept it very controlled.

  Even so, this carefully tended fire had a feeling of purging about it. The pungent smell of the patosway drifted through the air, and the black smoke curled into the sky to meet with the terrible cloud of fire debris already hanging over the city, almost as if it was returning home. Periodically we threw more letters onto the fire and allowed them to burn themselves out into ash. While we waited, Mom went inside and got blankets and lawn chairs so we could be a bit more comfortable. Lying on a blanket with Raph, staring up at the orange moon, it was almost possible to forget what we were actually doing. It was more like we were all on a summer camping trip than trying to rid our house of demonic possession.

  Toward midnight, the final batch of letters was at last settling down into a heap of slightly smoking ash, and Arthur began covering it with dirt and gravel, to smother the remains of the fire and make sure it couldn’t spread.

  At that point Mom caught my eye and nodded toward Logan, and . . . it was the most amazing thing. He was sleeping! Deeply and peacefully. I think that, more than anything, convinced me that this time our ritual really worked and that we could all go back to normal. It made me so happy that tears sprang to my eyes. But Mom just smiled and put her fingers to her lips. She got up and scooped him into her arms like she used to when he was a little kid. He did really l
ook like a little kid again, his face innocent in the dim light shining from the house windows.

  Mom went inside to carry him up to bed. Arthur lingered a bit longer to make sure there wasn’t the slightest trace of smoke, and then he followed her in with only a wink and a word to us not to stay up too late.

  Chloe was the next to go. She had been sitting almost on the opposite side of the fire, and I could hardly pick her out of the shadows except for the glittering of her eyes in the firelight. She hadn’t spoken in a while, but as Arthur disappeared into the house, she stood up and looked at us, saying she was going to turn in too. But she didn’t leave right away—she just stood there, looking at us, her brow furrowed in that puzzle-solving expression of hers.

  “Are you going to be okay?” she said at last.

  “We’re fine,” I said, but she didn’t move. She was looking really intensely at Raph.

  “I’ll be okay,” he said. At this, she finally left us alone.

  Honestly, I was so sleepy and exhausted by this point that I almost joined them and went up to bed. But another part of me didn’t want this beautiful moment to end—the stars, the light wind, the warm night, the sense that I was finally safe and free from all that negative energy. And Raph lying beside me, sharing it with me . . .

  Raph.

  I sensed a nervous movement at my side, and suddenly Chloe’s comment made more sense to me. In a blink the past 24 hours came flooding back to me. The spiders, my freak-out, Raph offering me his couch, me getting into his bed while he was sleeping . . . and then the horror that came after, the blood and fear and I still didn’t know exactly what had happened. Had he told her?

  I felt Raph shift again beside me, and wondered if he was trying to leave. Trying to escape politely. If he was scared to be around me.