The Invited

by Jennifer McMahon

  “Oh no!”

  “I guess the old wood floor under the carpet is ruined, and when they started ripping it out, they discovered some structural rot underneath. Mary Ann says we can’t go back in until we get the all clear—insurance regulations. Fucking sucks.”

  “Okay, that’s okay. I’ll keep doing what I can online in the meantime.” Helen was nodding, rocking slightly to and fro like she couldn’t contain the energy buzzing through her mind and body. What if Jane had moved away, had kids of her own? What if there were living relatives, direct descendants of Hattie, who might hold important pieces of family history?

  “Wow,” Riley said. “I still can’t get my head around this. You actually saw her! What else did she say?”

  “Nothing. I called Nate over, wanted him to come see, but she disappeared.”

  “She didn’t want him to see her,” Riley said. “Not like that anyway—she appeared to him as the white deer. I can’t believe she came to both of you guys. This feels huge. Most people, they just get a glimpse of her out in the bog. I’ve never heard of anyone saying she spoke to them.”

  “Do you think it was the beam?” Helen asked. “I mean, do you think it’s possible that installing it, if it really was a piece of wood from the hanging tree, that maybe it helped her come back somehow?”

  Riley thought a minute, then said, “I’ve heard that sometimes objects act as conduits, you know? Like if you hold your grandmother’s wedding ring, you might call her back enough to be able to smell her perfume.”

  “I’ve always had this idea that objects hold history,” Helen said.

  Riley nodded. “But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe they don’t just hold it—maybe it flows through them, you know? Gives the dead a kind of…touchstone; something to pull them back to this world.”

  MECHANICAL

  CHAPTER 16

  Olive

  AUGUST 3, 2015

  Olive had never been inside the Hartsboro Hotel. It was a big, creepy three-story building with sagging porches and Gothic arched windows with leaded glass. The gray paint was peeling; the black shutters hung crooked. A hand-painted sign hung from a chain on the front porch: USED FURNITURE AND ANTIQUES. Olive and Mike stood on the other side of Main Street from it. The old hotel was a good half mile from the center of town, where the general store and post office were. There were some houses scattered here and there along this part of Main Street, and School Street ran off Main and curved back behind the hotel. School Street didn’t have a school on it. Not anymore. It’s where the old one-room schoolhouse they’d torn down used to be.

  “I don’t think this is such a good idea,” Mike said, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. There was a broken beer bottle there in the road and he kicked it, scattering the bits of brown glass.

  “So don’t come with me then.”

  The truth was Olive wasn’t sure it was a good idea, either, but she was going in. She’d put it off for weeks now, trying to convince herself she was waiting for a good plan, but really, she was just being a chicken. She’d even called Dicky once and asked when the next spirit circle meeting was, thinking she could just join in, pretend to be interested in the spirit world and see if anyone would say anything to her about her mom having been a member.

  “Who is this?” Dicky had asked, sounding angry, like his hissing voice was sending tendrils through the phone to identify her, to stop her.

  Olive had hung up without saying anything more.

  “It looks creepy as shit,” Mike said now.

  To Olive the hotel looked like a neglected old woman—someone who’d been popular and stylish once but was now slumped over and sitting in her own pee. “It looks more derelict than creepy to me,” she said.

  The kids at school all said the hotel was haunted, that Dicky lived there with the ghosts he’d called up with his spirit circle. That his dead father lived there with him—his father who’d gone into the woods years ago and disappeared. Now they ate dinner together every night. Kids said that if you watched the hotel from across the street at midnight, you’d see the place was full of the shadows of people, moving from room to room. Some said they heard music, the clinking of glasses, chortling laughter.

  “My mom came here once,” Mike said. “To one of Dicky’s gatherings.”

  “No way!” Olive said. “How come you never told me?”

  “She made me promise.”

  Olive gave him an appreciative nod. She knew Mike took promises seriously. Him telling her this? It was kind of a big deal.

  “Anyway, about six months ago, she went to try to talk to her sister, Val, who died back when they were kids. She drowned.”

  “Shit, Mike. You had an aunt who drowned? How come you didn’t ever tell me?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not like I knew her or anything. She was, like, twelve when she died.”

  Olive nodded. She’d been younger than they were now. It was weird to think about.

  “So what happened at Dicky’s? Did your mom talk to her sister?”

  “Yeah. She says she did.” He rolled his eyes. “That Val told her she was all right, that she was watching over us, that she was never far.” He said this last bit in a warbling imitation medium voice. He shook his head, disgusted. “My mom told me all this after a couple glasses of wine—you know how she gets. But she seemed so, like, happy about it. Happy that this pack of quacks gave her this fake message from her dead kid sister.”

  “How do you know the message was fake?” Olive asked.

  He bit his lip, looked over at the old hotel across the street. “My dad says that Dicky and his friends, they offer this great service. They tell people exactly what they want to hear, then they pass a hat and ask for a few bucks to help keep the circle going. It’s a racket. He was real pissed off at my mom for going.”

  “But maybe it’s possible, right? Maybe there are some people who can actually talk to ghosts, call them back.”

  Mike blew out a breath. “Maybe. My mom sure believes it. And she told me half the people in this town have gone slinking into that old hotel at one point or another, trying to make contact with some dead friend or relative. But then, out in public, they all make fun of Dicky and his weirdo friends. No one ever admits to having gone. It’s a funny thing.”

  “Well, maybe we’ll get lucky in there and see a ghost.”

  “No way! Don’t wish for that!”

  “Come on, chicken,” she said, tugging on his sleeve, leading him across the street. Main Street didn’t have a whole lot of traffic—locals passing through, dairy trucks loaded with milk or manure from nearby farms. If you looked up to the left, you could see where Main Street intersected with Route 4—up where the bus accident had been months ago. Olive could make out the white cross someone had nailed up, the piles of stuffed animals and flowers and cards people had been leaving there since the accident.

  They got to the old hotel and climbed the steps. They walked up behind the USED FURNITURE AND ANTIQUES sign, which swung slightly from the rusty chains that attached it to the edge of the porch ceiling. There were three mannequins on the porch: pale plastic women with movable limbs like giant Barbie dolls. They’d been dressed in old-fashioned clothes—ratty mink stoles, pillbox hats, moth-eaten dresses, velvet coats. Their faces were flat, blank, and featureless—no eyes, noses, or mouths. Yet they seemed to stare at Olive and Mike, to emit a buzz from unseen lips, a warning that said, Go away. You don’t belong here.

  “Well, that’s not creepy at all,” Mike said, looking at them.

  Olive made her way across the warped and splintering porch floor to the heavy front door, Mike skulking along behind her. A crooked COME IN, WE’RE OPEN sign hung in the window of the hotel’s front door.

  Mike pointed to the sign above the door that said, THIS PROPERTY PROTECTED BY SMITH AND WESSON, and raised his eyebrows at Olive.

&
nbsp; “We are so gonna get shot,” Mike said.

  “Don’t be a wimp.”

  “You’re not scared of that big old gun Dicky carries everywhere?”

  “Guns don’t scare me,” Olive said. And that was true. She’d been hunting forever, had passed the youth hunting course and had her license. She’d gone to the range with her daddy and his friends and shot all kinds of rifles and handguns.

  “It’s not the gun you should be scared of—it’s the crazy man with the gun,” Mike said.

  Olive took in a breath, wondered if Dicky was even inside. Dicky lived in the hotel, on the top floor. People said his apartment was where the old ballroom had been. Olive thought it was strange that Hartsboro once had a hotel with a ballroom. But that was back when the passenger trains stopped here. Back when the lumber industry was big. Way back in Hattie’s time. The old train station building was still there, but now it was Depot Pizza and Subs, the one and only restaurant in town these days.

  Olive pushed open the heavy door of the old hotel. A bell jingled. She stepped into what was once the lobby. It was now crammed full of junk: a battered rocking horse missing one of the rockers, ugly lamps without shades, unidentifiable objects made of rusty metal. Surely no one would pay money for this stuff. To the right was a long wooden counter, which must have been the front desk back when the hotel was running. It was covered with haphazard piles of junk mail and folders spilling papers. On the wall behind it, a few rows of old room keys on diamond-shaped placards with room numbers hung from hooks. Some of the keys were missing. Olive wondered what all these rooms held now.

  Ghosts, a little voice told her. Which made it the perfect place for the ghost club to gather.

  She thought she heard something, faint footsteps, a tinkling sound like glass breaking.

  “Hello?” she called, her voice timid and lost sounding in the clutter. “Mr. Barns?”

  She pictured him watching from the shadows, his gun trained on her.

  “I don’t think we’re supposed to be in here,” Mike said. He was about two inches behind her. She could feel his breath on her neck. She waved him back impatiently.

  “It’s a store, Mike. Of course we’re supposed to be in here.”

  There was another sound from upstairs. A dragging sound.

  Mike grabbed her hand, squeezing hard, his fingers warm and sweaty. “Let’s go, Olive. Please?”

  She pulled her hand away and moved through the narrow aisles, between dusty tables covered with old postcards and towers of stacked plastic buckets, and came to a massive, curving staircase on the left. The banister was loose, hanging from the staircase at a funny angle, like a broken limb.

  Had her mother really come here? Had she climbed these stairs, wary of the broken banister?

  “Hello?” she called again, slightly louder this time. She heard a noise from the floor above her, that dragging sort of sound again. Furniture being moved, maybe. Or something shuffling, dragging a limp limb (or entire body) across the floor.

  “Sometimes a vivid imagination is a curse,” her mama used to tell her.

  “For real, though. Let’s get out of here,” Mike pleaded, voice low, desperate.

  Olive crept up the stairs, staying to the left, next to the wall and away from the failing banister.

  “Olive, don’t!” Mike called from the bottom. “What’re you doing?” But she kept going.

  There was a loud thump from up above them.

  Mike bolted back to the entry. Olive heard the jingling bells of the front door.

  “Chickenshit,” she muttered.

  She hoped the stairs were not rotten like the boards on the porch floor. It made her so sad, to see all this beautiful wood in such terrible shape. If she lived here, she’d fix it up. Turn it into something special. Maybe a fancy hotel again. Something that would really draw people to Hartsboro. And Aunt Riley could help her fix it up, find all kinds of vintage materials for it. Her dad would have something to renovate besides their little house. And Mama, Mama would definitely come back then, if she learned Olive had a whole hotel…

  Sometimes a vivid imagination truly was a curse.

  She got to the second floor. The wall-to-wall burgundy carpeting was stained, worn through in places, exposing floorboards. She held still, listening. “Mr. Barns?” she called again. “Are you here?”

  This seemed like a bad idea. Maybe Mike had been right to run. But if her mother had been here, if Dicky knew something that might help, she had to find out.

  She moved down the hallway, passing guest rooms on the right and left. Some of the doors were closed. The ones that were open revealed rooms full of furniture, paintings, old clothes hung on racks. Boxes and trunks. An old piano with a water-stained top and peeling keys. Light passed through the leaded-glass windows; shadows stretched across the floor with fingers that seemed to reach for her, to pull her in.

  The hallway ended with a set of heavy wooden double doors, one of which was propped open like a gaping mouth, musty darkness behind. BAR AND LOUNGE, read an old, faded sign above the doors.

  She crept into the room, thinking she should call out again but afraid to make a sound in this place. Afraid because she had the strong sense that she wasn’t alone. That someone, something, was watching her.

  The lights were out, but dim sunlight filtering through the dusty windows gave the room a hazy glow. There was a bar along the back wall, long and made from a dark wood coated with dust and grime, decades of neglect. Behind the bar, shelves. On the shelves, a random assortment of objects: a baseball, Christmas ornaments, old cigar boxes, and a bottle of tequila still half full. The bottle of tequila felt sad to Olive somehow, like the bar was longing for the old days, beckoning for one more customer to come up and have a drink.

  She turned from the bar, went over to the other side of the room, which was dominated by a massive old fireplace surrounded by bricks and a crumbling hearth. There was a mantel above the fireplace littered with candlesticks and half-burned candles. There were little brass bowls full of ashes. Above the mantel, a black cloth was draped over something that hung from the wall. A mirror, maybe? Didn’t people sometimes cover mirrors when a person died? Olive thought she’d seen that in a movie once.

  But why?

  Maybe so you wouldn’t see the dead person looking back at you.

  The thought, which came from nowhere, gave her chills. She looked away from the cloth-covered mirror, then back again. Had the cloth moved? Rippled slightly as though something was pushing from behind it?

  This place was giving her the big-time creeps. She hated to think of her mother lurking around here with a bunch of weirdos, looking for dead people in the mirror, maybe.

  Half a dozen chairs had been pushed back in a rough circle in front of the old fireplace. The chairs were in bad shape: broken arms, stuffing coming out in places, covered in dark mysterious stains. Olive thought she’d have to be pretty darn worn-out before she’d sit in one of those.

  Then she noticed the floor.

  The stained and worn maroon carpeting had been pulled up, cut out in this part of the room. The bare wooden floor was exposed: old wide pine boards held down with rusty nails. But there, on the floor in front of the fireplace, someone had done a drawing in yellow chalk. Olive saw the piece of thick chalk resting on the mantel with the candles—it was like what kids used on the elementary school playground to draw courts for hopscotch or foursquare.

  But this hadn’t been done by a kid playing hopscotch.

  The design on the floor was a large circle. Inside the circle, an equilateral triangle. In the center of the triangle, a square with another circle inside it. And in the center of the final circle, an eye.

  The same design as Mama’s necklace!

  I see all.

  This was proof! Proof that Mama had been here. Had she done the drawing?
/>   Olive stepped toward it, then back again. She had a really bad feeling that if she stepped into the circle, something terrible would happen.

  It was a door, maybe.

  A door to the mirror world.

  Jeez, she told herself. Enough with the crazy thoughts.

  “What are you doing up here?” a voice barked behind her. She jumped like an idiot, like a girl in a movie who is easily frightened. She nearly stumbled into the chalk drawing (doorway) but stopped herself.

  She turned.

  It was a man with a little potbelly that hung over his too-tight jeans, which had been tucked into shiny black cowboy boots with toes so pointy they looked dangerous. His salt-and-pepper hair was pulled back in a greasy-looking ponytail. He wore a denim shirt with silver snaps that was tight over the bulge of his belly. He had an angular, chiseled face with a big cowboy-style handlebar mustache. And strapped to his waist was a fancy tooled-leather holster holding a single-action revolver. He put his fingers on it now, just resting there, just making sure the gun was there, and making sure Olive knew it.

  The infamous Dicky Barns.

  CHAPTER 17

  Helen

  AUGUST 3, 2015

  “You’re going to do what?” Nate said.

  “Riley’s bringing her Ouija board over. We’re going to bring it up to the house and try to contact Hattie.”

  Nate was crouched over his laptop, reading about deer and albinism. He’d had a couple more sightings of his white deer in the last two and a half weeks but still hadn’t managed to get a picture of her. His nature journal was open to the spread where he’d drawn the deer and taken notes. The shiny, heavily penciled-in eyes of the doe gazed up at Helen.

  Nate stared at her. “This is a joke, right?”

  Helen laughed. “I know, it’s a little crazy, isn’t it? Riley suggested it. You know she’s into all that occult stuff.”

  Even though Nate had seen his deer several more times, there had been no more ghost sightings. Helen went up to the house almost every night to sit below the beam, looking at the corner where Hattie had once appeared. But nothing ever happened. When she’d expressed her frustration to Riley that afternoon, Riley had suggested the Ouija board. Riley had come over to help them with plumbing. All the windows and doors were in, the house wrap was on the exterior walls, and the tar paper was on the roof. Last week, Riley had talked them into outsourcing the installation of the propane furnace and hot water heater and they’d called in a friend of hers—Duane, who owned Ridge View Plumbing and Heating. He’d not only installed the new units for a fair price, but he’d helped them get started with roughing in the plumbing. Between Duane, Riley, and Olive, they were done with the basic work in the kitchen and upstairs bathroom, the copper and PVC pipes all in place, ending in stubs where they would eventually connect to a sink or a toilet or a bathtub. Only the downstairs bathroom was left to finish. Then they’d move on to the electrical work. Once all that was in place, they’d be ready to drywall. It seemed so close and yet so far.