An assortment of toys—a hula hoop, a handful of naked dolls, a single roller skate—were peppered throughout the front lawn where Megan, my great-niece, had forgotten them. A black hose snaked through a patch of rough dirt that seemed to demarcate the boundaries of a garden not yet planted. “The lawn is enormous,” I said, stepping up onto the porch as Joseph fiddled with the front door. “You'll be able to plant quite the garden here. Your Aunt Constance was always in the garden. You remember, don't you—the garden back at my place?”
Joseph paused halfway inside the door, donning what seemed the first genuine smile since our meeting at the station. “Yeah, I remember,” he replied. “I came to visit one summer in seventh or eighth grade. She had me help her weed the whole thing, and then I got to pick some of the lettuce we used in our salads for lunch. You still keep up the garden, uncle?”
I nodded. “I do what I can. I don't have your aunt's green thumb, so a lot of the trickier plants have unfortunately been mulched. There are still roses, shrubs, asparagus... some rhubarb, I think. A lot of the trees she planted years back are towering now, giving the property a good bit of privacy. Some mornings, looking out the window, it almost feels like a nature reserve.”
We entered the house. To the right of the entrance was a living room, and beyond it there looked to be a kitchen of good size. The living room was home to a single sofa and a television left mumbling on a small table. To our left was a dining room, which would have been empty except for the square dinner table surrounded by folding chairs. The floors were a solid and rather pretty wood throughout. From this entry point, I could make out a stairwell ahead of me that led into the upper story, and it was from there that I first heard the shuffling of feet.
Melissa and Megan started down the stairs to meet us.
Wearing a baggy sweatshirt and grey leggings, Melissa combed a lock of raven hair behind one ear and bobbed her head in greeting as she descended. She wore something else, too—something I should have anticipated: A haggard countenance replete with dark circles under the eyes. Like Joseph, she looked worn out, older than her twenty-something years. Her features looked sunken, and as she approached I noticed a marked blotchiness to her skin.
Behind her came Megan, their daughter, who descended more guardedly. She looked like her mother in miniature, down to the dark circles and splotchy skin. Where Melissa came and wrapped me in a quick hug, the little girl remained half-way up the stairs, studying me from the heavy wooden bannister with suspicion. I wasn't surprised—I hadn't seen her in some years, and knew it unlikely that she had any firm memory of me.
Doing my best to mask my concern, I smiled and waved to the girl on the stairs. “Well, if it isn't Megan. How are you, my dear? Do you remember me? It's Uncle Marcel!”
Her dark gaze narrowed and her lips quirked in a curious smile. Finally, she shook her head.
Clutching at my chest, I groaned. “Oh, don't tell me you've forgotten all about me?”
This won me a grin.
I eased a small chocolate bar I'd purchased in the Amtrak dining car earlier that morning from the pocket of my messenger bag and proceeded to hand it to her.
Her smile widened, and she grew bold enough to come forward and take it.
“You have a lovely house,” I said, turning back to Joseph and Melissa. “I can see why you jumped on it the way you did. Great location, lots of space. This will make an excellent home for the three of you, I'm sure of it.”
Except for the crinkling of the chocolate wrapper there was silence. You'd have thought I'd been giving a eulogy for all the response I got. It was clear that the home's owners were of a very different mind.
Melissa, cradling her arms, spared a weak smile and glanced at Joseph. “Why don't you help your uncle get his things into the guest room and give him a tour of the upstairs? I'll put on some tea. What do you like?” she asked me. “We have a few different types.”
“Have you got any green tea? Otherwise, anything is fine, my dear.”
“Er... we have one with lemon in it, I think. Is that OK?”
I gave her the thumbs-up.
Both she and Megan disappeared into the kitchen. Already, the girl had a bit of chocolate on her cheeks. I supposed her next order of business was to spread traces of that chocolate onto every household surface within reach.
Like a reliable bellhop, Joseph picked up my valise and began treading up the stairs. “There's, uh... only one bathroom. It's up here. We've got a guest room set up for you. I'm sorry if it's a little... sparse,” he said.
I held onto the carved bannister as I began my ascent. Made of hefty wood and impeccably smooth, I wagered it must have weighed nearly as much as I did. The stairs creaked slightly, but were in great order for a house once abandoned. “The house has great bones, I can tell,” I called up to Joseph as he arrived on the landing.
With what I could only classify as annoyance, he turned and shook his head. “Everyone who comes in here and knows about the house's history says that. 'Gee, this house must have good bones.' It's true, of course... but wouldn't it have been better if this house had fallen to bits like all the rest that used to stand on this street? The newer homes might be a little generic-looking, but I doubt any of them are infested with ghosts.”
I sighed. His stubbornness on the matter was grating. “How many bedrooms are there?”
“Three,” he responded as I joined him in the hall. “Melissa and I use this room nearest the stairs. Megan sleeps—or tries to sleep—in the next one. The one near the bathroom at the very end, the biggest one, we use as a guest room. Melissa and I don't have a lot of bedroom furniture, so we chose one of the smaller bedrooms for ourselves. I'm sorry if it feels empty in there...” Joseph waved me into this last doorway, which was situated near the bathroom.
The room was indeed quite austere. A twin-sized collapsable cot had been set in one corner and made up with fresh linens and pillows. There was a small chest of drawers on the other side of the window, a thrift shop piece, whose uppermost drawer sat askew. Lastly, a white folding table and metal folding chair sat against the wall immediately to the right of the door.
“Marvelous,” I said, dropping my messenger bag onto the table and stretching my back. “This will do nicely.”
“Are you sure?” asked Joseph, a little red in the face. He was ashamed at offering me such spartan quarters.
I hadn't made the trip to Detroit to seek out comfort, and told him as much. “Absolutely, this room is fine. It's got everything I need. You know me, lad. No frills necessary.” Strolling towards the window, I peered out onto the front lawn and gave a clap, adding, “And a wonderful view of that tree, to boot. I love it.”
It was at that moment, when standing before the window and preparing to follow Joseph back downstairs, that I took notice of our shadows spilling across the floor. Backlit by the daylight streaming through the glass, the two of us cast imposing shadows—nice and lengthy—but I saw nothing sinister in them. “Is this what you're talking about, with the shadows?”
Joseph peered down at the floor, gave his foot a little shake as if to test the shadow and ensure it was really his, and then nodded uncertainly. “Yeah. I mean, kind of. I guess it doesn't look all that long right now, but... after dark, it gets worse. They get longer, I mean.”
“It's possible,” I replied, “but this effect is clearly caused by the daylight striking us in just such a way.” I waved my hands back and forth, paced through the room a bit to demonstrate. “Any unnatural lengthening of the shadows, especially at night when light is low, could be due to a number of things.” I looked out the window again, scanning the street. “Could be down to street lamps shining through the window, or perhaps some quirk in the installation of the panes themselves—a trick of the light due to the angle of the glass or a gentle slope of the walls.”
Joseph was already standing at the door, arms crossed like a parent who'd had enough of their child's idling. Probably those explanations had already crosse
d his mind, and had proven insufficient to dispel his own closely-held theories. Hearing me tread old ground like this was only going to frustrate him, and so I dropped it and returned downstairs, where Megan and Melissa both awaited in the kitchen.
Accepting a mug of hot tea, I was guided to the dining room table, where I sat down and took in my pleasant and sunlit surroundings. Except for the three tenants of the house—all of whom looked completely out of place due to their haggardness—I couldn't single out a thing that struck me as “off”. Quite the opposite; despite the lack of furnishings, the house felt welcoming and wholesome to me, and I was reminded of the small house Constance and I had moved into shortly after our marriage, just outside of Chicago. It had been similar to this one in size, and at the time—as I'd been working through my residency and quite penniless—similarly bereft of decorations. I regaled the trio with my reminisces, and they were tolerated as favorably as one might expect the nostalgic ramblings of an old fart to be.
Megan, who'd made light work of her chocolate bar, and who still wore traces of it around her lips, sat to my right and examined me through narrow eyes. With a chocolatey hand, she tugged at the sleeve of my blazer and asked, “You're here to see the ghosts, aren't you?”
Where Joseph and Melissa bristled visibly at the question, I nodded and smiled warmly. “That's right. If, of course, there are actually any ghosts to be found. Your father tells me that you've all been frightened by things in this house. I'm here to see what it's all about.”
Not missing a beat, the child shrugged and looked to her parents. “He doesn't believe in the Cotton Man, does he?”
Melissa quietly dismissed her daughter, sent her into the next room to sit in front of the television while we adults discussed things. I gave her a little wave as she ran off to watch cartoons. Every now and then, when her interest in the program waned, I'd catch her turning around and listening in from the sofa.
Sensing that the time had come for me to discuss matters with more thoroughness, I invited Melissa to give me her take on the house, and her testimony proved similar enough to Joseph's. She attested to hearing the tapping from behind the walls, and to the occasional burst of footsteps issuing from an unoccupied upper story. When it came to the subject of disembodied voices, she claimed to have heard something that she associated with speech, but she did so with a good deal less vehemence than my nephew had, and on that particular “symptom” of haunting she seemed, too, less reticent to accept a natural explanation.
Melissa's opinions differed also on the subject of this so-called “Cotton Man”. Where Joseph had been willing to entertain the possibility of its existence, she asserted that the figure wasn't real; that it was a phantom dreamed up by her impressionable daughter and nothing more. Though she'd allegedly been frightened by shadows and noises in the house, she claimed never to have seen anything like what her daughter had described, and seemed more interested in having Megan seen by a clinician specializing in sleep disorders—a reasonable desire, and one that I shared, in light of the circumstances.
Though I couldn't ask Melissa outright for fear of rocking the boat, it seemed apparent to me that her unsettled state issued more from her husband's paranoid behavior than it did the goings-on in the house. As such, I tread very carefully thenceforth.
“Joseph tells me that a body was found in this house roughly ten years ago?”
“Yes,” replied Melissa, “but that's all we were told. I don't know who it was, or what the real story is. And honestly, I'm afraid to look into it. I did a web search a few days ago but couldn't pull up anything about it in the news. When the search came up blank, I decided it was for the best. Whatever's going on here has to be tied to that body, though. I mean, that's the only thing that makes sense, right? Someone died in this house and their soul is still trapped within its walls.”
“It's possible,” I replied. “And of course I plan to reach out to any spirits on the premises, should there be any. But when dealing with situations of this kind it's always better to keep an open mind. That means maintaining a healthy skepticism.”
“So,” prompted Melissa, “what will you do? Hold a séance? Did you bring ghost-hunting equipment with you? I thought about calling this local outfit that deals in parapsychology—like what you see on ghost-hunting TV shows. Your nephew here vetoed me...”
“I did,” interjected Joseph, clearing his throat. “I don't want a bunch of losers stomping through the house, putting things up on the internet for all to see. It's so fake, so gimmicky. I don't want this to become a media spectacle. That's the last thing we need—for this place to earn a reputation for being haunted! I just want it dealt with quickly and quietly. That's why I called you. You've dabbled in this stuff back in Illinois.”
I nodded. “Twice now. Both wrapped up very nicely. In recent years, I've begun studying the nature of the human soul and its potential for lingering after bodily death. Though I'm far from working out all of the details, I believe I've learned enough to effectively dispel spirits. One must only figure out what they want and give it to them. When that's through, they tend to move on from this world happily, and with little fanfare. It isn't like those corny TV shows, where grown men run through dark castles, shouting at dust motes.”
“How do you find out what they want?” asked Melissa. “Ghosts, I mean? Do you use a Ouija board?”
“Not quite,” I replied. I wasn't comfortable with revealing the entirety of my process to them, but gave a brief explanation if only to maintain their confidence in me. “I hold a séance of a kind, but like I said it's a good deal less theatrical than what you might find in fiction. I call out to them after dark, at an hour when the psychical activity has reached its zenith. Then, I perform something like automatic writing in a notebook. That is, I allow the spirits to communicate through my pen—to guide it. I ask questions aloud, and if they're feeling chatty, they answer them through writing. When this dialogue is complete, I find I usually have enough information to go off of.” There was some misdirection and untruth to this, but the general gist was close enough.
Megan wandered back to the table and stood beside her mother. “Hey,” she asked me, “are you here to see the Cotton Man?”
“That's right,” I said.
“How long will you be here?” asked the girl.
“A few nights. I promise not to leave until I've shown that nasty Cotton Man the door.”
Megan mulled this over a moment. She turned slightly, glanced over my shoulder for an instant as if something behind me had caught her eye, before replying, “I wonder if he'd like to speak to your wife.”
This single comment threw the room into a commotion. Mortified at the child's frankness, and worried that an irreverent mention of my late wife might prove insulting to me, Joseph and Melissa were quick to scold her. “Aunt Constance was a very sweet woman who died when you were barely born, and talking about her in that way is very rude, Megan,” the girl's mother could be heard to say.
When this subject came up in casual conversation, things always played out the same way. I was not new to the mountain of apologies, the stream of well-meaning condolences, the awkward silence and the overall assumption that the topic was off-limits, lest I burst into tears or outrage. It was true that I missed my wife, and that the pain of her death would never fully leave me, but that wasn't the whole truth. Things were more complicated than that, because Constance wasn't gone—not entirely. I laughed off the girl's remark, asking, “I wonder, too. He may just get to.”
The girl fell silent and was about to march back to the television when, suddenly, there came a thump from the ceiling above.
Melissa startled, and Megan looked upward, but it was Joseph who reacted most violently to the noise. Sitting at attention, his face went grey and his eyes quivered as they bored into the ceiling. A second thump, timed shortly after the first, saw him shoot out of his chair on shaky legs.
Less bothered, I stood and offered to investigate. “Are these the foo
tsteps you've been hearing?” I asked, removing my blazer and draping it over the back of my chair. “Let's go and have a look, shall we?” I rolled up my sleeves.
Joseph answered the call, albeit with the utmost hesitance. Traipsing through his house as though he were a stranger there, he made it as far as the foot of the stairs before ceding the lead position to me. I started upstairs, Joseph close at my heels, and listened for any other noises. The footsteps had ceased just as quickly as they'd begun—a stutter-step on two heavy feet. That is, if they'd been steps at all. I wasn't yet convinced and began a survey of each bedroom. “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” I muttered under my breath.
We discovered the culprit in Megan's room.
At sighting it, Joseph's eyes nearly popped from his head.
“That's it?” he asked, pointing at the pair of dolls on the floor.
In the otherwise neatened room, two large dolls sat upon a pink rug, which was placed beneath a pair of wall-mounted shelves lined with still more dolls. The two toys on the floor, their accessories strewn about like the remains of suicide jumpers, had almost certainly been separated from their besties by the draft. As I started into the room and picked up one of the fallen dolls, the vibrations of my footfalls traveled through the walls and set a third doll, still perched, swaying perilously. Their position on the shelf was precarious, and the slightest disturbance was enough to send them falling. It was hardly a paranormal occurrence. The only thing it proved was that Megan needed to take more care in shelving her toys.
“You see?” I said, smoothing out the doll's clothing and returning it to its proper place. “It's just as I told you. What's happening in this house may not be supernatural at all.”
Though usually inclined to argue, Joseph, when faced with proof of his error and premature fright, admitted, “You've got a point.”
We had a good laugh about the tumbling dolls, Joey, Melissa and I, though what I sensed in the room shortly before my nephew and I returned downstairs I did not then disclose for fear of stirring up unnecessary concern.
Malefic Page 3