These were questions for another time. All I needed then was for Constance to tell me more about what she'd encountered in the house. With more information, I'd be able to better follow this track and see about resolving the issues that kept spirits anchored here. Waiting for her to write, I decided to stretch my legs.
I began to pace throughout the house, inspecting each of its rooms. I found at every turn that I was not alone in this nocturnal watch, for I had my shadow to keep me company. Like a living Rorschach test, it was sculpted into all kinds of peculiar and absurd shapes depending on my placement in relation to the lights, and its disquieting tendency to expand into the room allotted left me wishing I could flee it. No matter how I quickened my step, the inky thing tagged along as shadows are wont to do, and I decided the only thing for it was to put it out of my mind completely.
My ambling brought me into the upstairs, where I walked laps through each of the rooms. The outside of the house was surveyed through every window. I stepped into the bathroom and washed my face with cold water, giving my stubbled cheeks a quick slap and summoning a little vigor. Then I followed the track, returning downstairs, to begin my dozenth survey of the living room, dining room and kitchen.
All was still.
That is, until I heard the tapping.
I had paused in the kitchen to refresh my tea when I heard a light rapping from elsewhere in the house. It was a very quiet sound, innocuous in its way, but it spoiled the silence all the same and I sought it out with a mind towards investigation. I left my mug on the counter and stepped out into the living room, where the tapping grew both in volume and rapidity.
Standing in the middle of the room and listening closely, I determined it was coming from the walls—specifically, from the wall that bore the wounds of Megan's hammer-blows. I approached and placed my ear to the drywall, trying to get a better sense of the noise, but backed up as I rediscovered the tiny crater that had been left there. Sure that mice must be the culprits for this noisiness, I struck the wall with my palm in the hopes of scattering them.
The tapping ceased, only to be replaced by another sound which I not only heard, but felt through the drywall.
Something thrashed behind the wall, and I heard its body bump and scrape about as it prepared to flee. There were impressive vibrations and a doubling of extant cracks as the thing was felt to scurry upward. Whatever it was, it put no little strain on the drywall as it slipped up and out of the room. I heard confused rustlings and clumsy plodding above my head.
Then, silence.
It must have been quite large, judging by the racket. Only a monstrous rat could set the wall shaking in that way. I considered following it upstairs, knocking on certain of the walls to see if I couldn't draw it out, but the ensuing quiet made me wonder if it hadn't fled the house altogether through some gap in the siding. It might have been a mole, possum or even a raccoon. I wasn't sure whether the exterior of the abode offered any points of ingress for such creatures, but would urge Joseph to call pest control to appraise the situation and seal off any such routes.
When I finally left the living room and got back to my tea, it had gone cold.
I enjoyed a handful of dry roasted peanuts as I resumed my rounds. The hour was half-past midnight, then quarter till one. The disturbance behind the wall did not make a reprise in that time. I was sure now, surer than I had been in the moment, that some animal was living behind the walls, and that a quick visit from a specialist would set the matter right.
I'd been about to begin another perusal of the upstairs when a flash of light brought me to the dining room window. Thinking that it must be a pair of passing headlights, I neared the pane and saw in fact that it was shining much closer. The light was coming from the outside of the house, near the porch.
Thinking it strange, I walked out onto the porch in my slippers to have a look around, and there discovered a fixture I hadn't earlier noticed. There was a light mounted to the right of the door—seemingly motion-activated—and its bright glow filled the entire front yard. I wasn't sure how I'd overlooked it. I meant to go back inside, until it occurred to me that something had to have set the light off in the first place, and I suddenly froze, glancing over my shoulder in furtive search.
Panning up and down the moonlit road, I saw nothing out of place. The scenery was overwhelmingly tame and suburban. Streetlamps were placed at regular intervals; most every house in view had left a light shining on their porch or outside their garage; the driveway was empty and the yard was clear of—
My gaze jumped to the tree several yards to my left.
Glowing eerily in the darkness, its flowers jittering in the breeze like so many white, waving hands, I saw that the tree's dark trunk was sheltering something. My study of the street had ended when I'd glanced over at the Callery pear and sighted someone lurking behind it. They weren't in view now, but the vague impressions of a white face, of a human form, held fast in my mind.
“Who's there?” I barked. “Come out, I've seen you!”
I counted to ten, waiting for the figure to step out of the shadows, and at the end of my count realized they had no intention of showing themselves. I wondered what kind of person had nothing better to do than to mess with an old man on a quiet night; it was the behavior of a degenerate. Perhaps the neighborhood's rehabilitation had been only superficial, and thugs still walked these streets after dark. The paleness of the face I'd glimpsed had been more like that of a china doll than a hooligan however, and this detail left me grappling with an ill-defined fear.
“Come out! I've seen you, so don't try anything funny. This is private property. Leave, or I'll be calling the police.” Who could it have been? Some rough looking to break in? Some sort of pervert trying to peek in through people's windows? “This is your last warning!”
There was no response.
I had no path left to me but that of confrontation. I marched to the tree without stopping to further puzzle over the trespasser's identity, for even then I was perilously close to losing my nerve and retreating to the house. Cool blades of grass slipped over the edges of my slippers as I did so, and like little green fingers they tickled my ankles and left them itching. A cool wind rushed past and chilled a sweat on my brow that I couldn't remember accumulating.
I whipped around the trunk of the tree and found my way into a tight southpaw stance, fists ready to fly at the slightest bit of movement, teeth bared. I hadn't thrown a punch since my days in the schoolyard, but wasn't going to let that stop me from trying to lay out a potential intruder. “All right, I—”
The breeze died out suddenly and I froze, fists drooping.
There was no one behind the tree, nor any sign that anyone had been there. Frankly relieved, I made a slow circuit around the trunk and looked up into its popcorn-colored foliage, panting. Adrenaline coursed through me, set my legs shaking as I leaned against the thing and took stock once again of my surroundings. I'd been seeing things from the porch—had let the moonlight play tricks on me, it was now clear. Like a senile old fool I'd run across the yard to tilt at windmills. I was just happy that no one had been around to witness my idiocy.
But then, perhaps there was someone in the yard with me, because as I braced myself against the tree I heard a sudden outburst of rustling to my back. Jerking with fright, I hobbled a few steps towards the house and watched as the row of bushes between my yard and the next began stirring vigorously, as though someone or something was crawling frantically through them.
I had very little nerve to spare, but invested what remained on exploring this flurry of activity in the hedge. I would have been overjoyed to find a stray cat or dog—but the fury with which the bushes shook told me it was something larger. In the moments before stillness reigned again, my ears registered the snapping of twigs, the crashing of leaves and another noise, especially alarming, which struck me as the sound of something being dragged against the ground with no small effort.
I stood at the end of the hedge in
the new silence, staring into the mass of knotted foliage, which still jerked and settled for the disturbance. Carefully, I knelt down and reached to my left. There, a small chunk of concrete had been left sitting beneath the end of the gutter as a support. Armed with this hunk of stone, I paced up and down the line, ready to meet the culprit with violence if necessary.
The moonlight proved sufficient to penetrate the tangled branches, and by my second pass I grew confident that no one skulked within the hedge.
But my search did bear fruit of another kind.
I returned the chunk of concrete to its proper place before squatting beside the hedge. There was something white, set aglow by the moon, left wrapped around the trunk of one squat bush, and I stuck my hand in to examine it. The material gave at once, felt scratchy against my palm, and in taking a closer look I found it was precisely what I'd judged it for at first glance.
A mass of knotted cotton.
The material was fluffy and coarse, the kind of thing one might find within a cheap pillow. Further, for litter that might have blown in from afar, it was surprisingly clean, giving it the impression of something only recently—and perhaps deliberately—discarded. I squeezed the stuff in my hand; though I was surely mistaken, the fibers seemed somehow warm to the touch. Almost as if it just came out of somebody's mouth...
Horrific visions of Megan's phantom, the so-called “Cotton Man”, flashed through my mind. I dropped the cotton and wiped my hands furiously against my pant legs.
“You're a doddering idiot, Marcel. You've really done it to yourself now.” Disgusted with myself for being so easily shaken, I strode back to the house, bruised ego and all, and locked myself in. The porch light went off like a camera flash, blinding me as I sped inside.
Having returned to the house, I found no solace. In fact, the silence felt mocking now. If houses could laugh, this one would have done so heartily at my frightened antics.
At this point, I was getting desperate. Unable to differentiate the shadows and strange coincidences about the property from bonafide spectral phenomena, I yearned to hear something from my wife. I trudged over to the table, picked up the notebook.
Despite the late hour, there was no word from Constance, however.
I tried to remember the last time she'd gone this long without checking in, and when I found I couldn't remember such an instance in all these years, my apprehensions were doubled. “Why haven't you written me?” I asked the pen sitting on the table. “I need your help. This house is giving me the runaround.”
Though I'd promised Joseph that I could cure his house of whatever ailed it, it dawned on me—for the first time—that success was not guaranteed. I'd been arrogant to think I could walk in and immediately purge the house of spirits despite my beginner's luck in other instances. Looking back, my early dismissive talk when presented with his testimony felt especially inappropriate in light of recent events. I'd doubted my nephew, told him to keep an open mind, and assured him that his house was not likely to be haunted. Perhaps I'd made him feel like an idiot for even thinking it. Further, I'd promised him that if there were ghosts here, I'd take care of them like I'd done in my previous cases.
But as Constance had written—this wasn't like the other times.
If she didn't write me with more details, soon, I wasn't sure I'd be able to do a thing for this house. I was jumping at every shadow, letting the place mess with me. It was getting harder and harder for me to stave off paranoia, and I now had some sense of what Joseph and his family had lived with for the past month.
I prepared for bed, though sleep was the furthest thing from my mind.
I kept the bathroom door open while brushing my teeth so that I could keep an eye out for anything unnatural. The shower curtain fluttered in the draft, and a few times I peeked behind it, sure that I was about to glimpse something horrific lurking in the tub. Save for a little soap scum near the drain, there was nothing there worth getting worked up about.
I put out the bathroom light, not daring to look at what it had done to my shadow in the interim, and returned to my room, where I closed the door and locked it. It struck me as a silly thing to do—why lock a door when I was the only person staying in the house? The reasoning was perhaps disgraceful, but a closed door brought me a modicum of comfort. I was not alone in the house, and the powers that dwelt there with me were not likely to be hampered by a mere bedroom door, but closing it and throwing the lock with gusto almost lulled me into the false belief that they would.
Before shuffling into the cot, left unmade and looking rather unappealing, I paused at the desk and scribbled out a short note for my wife in the journal. I prayed that she would read it, and that I'd get a reply sooner, rather than later.
Constance, I'm at wit's end. I hope you're all right, darling. Your silence has me on edge. I have spent the bulk of the day inside, watching and waiting for things to manifest. There have been sounds behind the walls, and a curious episode in the front lawn. Last night, too, I heard things that I cannot readily explain. You tell me that there are spirits here, and I don't doubt it. But I must know more about them. I long for your insight.
Feeling defeated and still haunted by a nebulous unease, I put out the light and dropped into the cot.
Falling asleep was much easier than I'd expected—behind all my anxiety I'd been courting real exhaustion. Within minutes I was snoring.
It was staying asleep that would prove to be the hard part.
Eleven
I jolted awake. The sound of a fountain pen digging into paper had burst onto the scene, jarring me from sleep. I glanced up from my pillow just in time to see the pen drop against the table. It proceeded to roll onto the floor with a clatter that set my teeth on edge.
“What the...” I mumbled, sitting up. That gouging of the paper I'd heard brought a good deal of menace with it. I'd gone to bed hoping that Constance would write me, but now that she had I wasn't sure I cared to see what message she'd left. A note scrawled so hastily and angrily as this could hardly be expected to contain good news.
I was about to creep out of bed to read it when I felt a sudden tug against the sheet I still had draped over my lap. The thing was nearly ripped from the bed in a single pull, and it was only by grasping its retreating edge that I kept it from hitting the floor. Then, by the meager light issuing from the window, I watched a shadow cross the room. It stayed low to the ground, seemed to slither, before vanishing near the dresser. The air went cold then, and I heard the pages of the notebook fluttering in a sudden shift of the draft.
My heart slammed against my sternum and I felt suddenly short of breath.
There was someone in the room.
The floors creaked tentatively as something in the room shifted its weight. Eyes darting about in the darkness, I could find no sign of the one that had grabbed at my bedclothes, but could feel them biding their time. Like a modest bride on her wedding night I clutched the sheet to my chest and tried to find the courage to investigate further.
Finally, I rose from the bed. Gaze divided this way and that, I strode towards the light switch, the iciness of the floors torturing my soles with every step. I gave it a flick and lit up the room so that it could be studied in more favorable terms than the darkness had earlier imposed.
Now, having chased out the darkness, I saw that the room was empty and that I'd been taken—for the umpteenth time—for a fool. There was no figure lurking behind the dresser after all, no horror crouched in wait at my bedside. Old wooden floors sometimes settled in the night due to changes in temperature; half-asleep, I'd probably snagged the sheet on some metal edge of the cot and merely felt it had been tugged away. As usual, the reality was far less insidious than what my imagination had conjured up.
I felt ashamed, silly, but not wholly relieved, because there was one thing I couldn't yet explain—the urgency I'd heard in Constance's newest scribblings.
I peered down at the notebook. My ears hadn't misled me; the paper had indeed been
gouged. The few letters she'd scrawled had been sliced into the next few pages of the journal.
She had written only three words, which I struggled to read for their erratic and violent script.
On second glance, squinting, I deciphered them. I tried reading the words aloud, but my heart jumped into my throat and cut me off.
UNDER THE BED.
The room came alive with the clanging of metal. The twin-sized cot lurched upward as something concealed beneath it began to shift. The springs and frame creaked horribly, and from the space underneath there came a single burst of laughter—loud and croaking.
I backed up immediately, struck the door with my back.
The cot fell into its normal, resting position with a sustained creak. And then the room was still once more.
From my spot across the room I knelt, toes digging into the floorboards and knuckles white, to peer under the bed. I couldn't breathe, felt like the oxygen had been vacuumed out of the room. The thin mattress sagged slightly, and the bottom sheet hung over the side of the metal rail. Easing myself lower still, I explored the dark space beneath.
I found nothing but dust bunnies.
There was no relief to be had; the spook had done what it had set out to do. Whether it intended to tax my old heart and kill me I couldn't say, but it was clear that the presence in this house was having a field day with me.
I sat down on the floor cross-legged while waiting for my pulse to calm. I was thankful, at least, that my wife was still keeping an eye on me. She'd been silent for some time, but knowing that she'd dropped in to warn me, to act as my guardian angel, made me feel less alone. “Thank you, darling,” I said, seeking out the fallen writing instrument.
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