Riley seemed determined to give this approach a try, and Helen had to admit she was curious about the spirit circle: what it would be like, who might be there. What sort of people were desperate enough to talk to the dead that they’d come to something like this?
Me, she thought. I’m their target audience.
“Have you been before?” Helen asked Riley.
“Once or twice, but it was forever ago,” Riley said. “You just have to promise you won’t tell Olive we did this. She’ll think we’ve both totally lost it, and right now I think you and I are pretty much the only stable things she’s got in her life.”
“And you have to promise not to ever tell Nate,” Helen said.
“It’s our secret then,” Riley said.
Riley had handled Nate, telling him that she was whisking Helen away for a girls’ night out. “Come on, all work and no play makes Helen a dull girl. I’ll take good care of her,” Riley had said. “I promise.”
The three of them had spent the day installing the hardwood floor in the living room. It was salvaged maple, and Helen was thrilled with it: each scratch and nail hole gave it character—a warm charm that new flooring could never achieve. Even Nate agreed that the extra work to get the old boards fitting together and flush was worth it. And Riley had gotten them a great price on it. Riley had also found them a few hundred square feet of wide pine boards from an old silo that they were going to use for the upstairs floors. Nate was thrilled that they were now under budget on flooring.
Now Helen followed Riley up the hotel stairs (which didn’t feel all too sturdy) and down a carpeted hallway. They passed doors to old hotel rooms, most closed, but the open ones were packed full of junk: broken furniture, racks of moth-eaten clothing, rusting bedsprings.
At the end of the hall was a set of double doors. Above them, an old sign read: BAR AND LOUNGE.
Riley went through, Helen behind her.
The room was dark and smelled of scented candles, musty incense, and maybe marijuana. There was a long wooden bar just in front of them with a mirror behind it and a row of empty stools in front. To their right, a wall of windows that had been covered with heavy curtains. To their left, a group of people sat in a circle, candles burning all around them: on the floor, on the mantel of the fireplace they sat in front of, on tables and empty chairs. They were talking in low voices. Riley led Helen over. The floor was covered with a tattered throw rug. The furniture was beat-up, the upholstery full of holes. There were six people in the circle, and now all twelve eyes were on Riley and Helen.
“Hi, Dicky,” Riley said.
“Nice to see you, Riley,” he said.
“This is my friend Helen.”
The man she spoke to nodded, looked up at Helen, eyes locked on hers. The skin on the back of her neck prickled.
“Welcome,” he said. “Take a seat.” He was tall, Helen guessed in his early fifties, and had an angular, weathered face with small gray-blue eyes and a large mustache. He was wearing jeans, a button-down shirt, cowboy boots with pointed toes. Then Helen noticed his large leather belt and the holster attached to it. The man had a handgun strapped to his waist.
What did a man who talked to ghosts need with a gun?
She thought the best idea was to take Riley’s hand and drag her the hell out of there. But it was too late. Riley had taken an empty seat and was pointing at the last vacant chair, letting Helen know she should take it.
They’d been waiting with two empty chairs. Like they’d been expecting them.
Helen settled in, looked over at Dicky and tried to imagine him as the little boy who had lost his father to the woods, to the white deer. What had little Dicky seen that day? How long had he chased after his father and the deer, calling out, desperate?
The woman to Dicky’s left leaned over and whispered something to the old man next to her. He had large eyes and ears with tufts of hair growing out of them. Helen thought he looked like a great horned owl. The owl man nodded.
“Before we begin,” Dicky said, “let’s all take a minute to remember that the communication we all seek with those who have passed doesn’t begin and end here, in this circle.”
The owl man nodded, gave a low “Mm-hmm.”
Dicky cleared his throat and continued. “I reckon you could say learning to read signs from the spirits is a little like learning to speak another language.”
This got him more nods of agreement.
“It’s about picking up on patterns, learning to be more receptive to the signs we get from our departed ones every day. We’ve all gotta be on the lookout for those patterns. You all know the stuff I mean: dreams we have again and again, numbers that come into our lives over and over, a song on the radio, an image we can’t shake. Reality…it ain’t random.” He shuffled his feet in the pointy-toed boots. “The spirits, they have the power to manipulate the world around us. To send us signals. It’s up to us to keep our eyes open. To listen to what they’ve got to say.”
Was it Helen’s imagination, or was Dicky looking right at her when he said this?
“I keep seeing that pileated woodpecker in my yard,” a man Helen recognized from the pizza and sub shop said. “It was my brother’s favorite bird. I’m sure it’s him.”
There was a general murmur of agreement from the group, followed by more discussions of coincidences, serendipitous moments, and signs they’d all received: repeated license plate numbers that were actually a code, voices with important messages picked up on the static in between radio stations, recurring dreams.
Helen said nothing.
Dicky looked at her. “Tell me, Helen, have you experienced anything like this?”
She squirmed, looked at Riley, who gave her a little nod.
“Well,” Helen began, “I do find myself waking up at the same time in the night. Three thirty-three.” She didn’t tell them she woke up and saw ghosts. Though she was sure this was exactly the sort of crowd that would be eager to hear such a thing, she wasn’t willing to trust this detail to a group of strangers.
The old woman beside her nodded. “It’s the spirits waking you. That’s a powerful number. The number three is the number of communication. Of psychic ability. It’s the number of mediums.”
She looked at Helen, gauging her response. “What happens when you wake up, dear? Do you see any visions? Have any particular feelings?”
“No,” Helen lied. “I just go back to sleep.”
The woman nodded. “Stay up next time. Stay up, keep your eyes open, and listen. If they’re waking you up again and again, there’s a reason.”
More murmured agreement from the group. Helen felt everyone studying her.
“We can begin,” Dicky said. He reached out, took the hands of the two people sitting on either side of him, and then the whole circle joined hands. Helen took Riley’s hand in her right and held the old woman’s hand in her left. The woman’s hand felt light and fragile and fluttered slightly like a small bird in Helen’s hand. Dicky closed his eyes and bowed his head, and the others did the same. Helen tilted her head down but kept her eyes wide open, watching.
“We bring only our best intentions into the circle,” he said.
“We bring only our best intentions into the circle,” the others echoed.
“We open our hearts and minds to those we can feel but cannot see,” Dicky said.
“We open our hearts and minds to those we can feel but cannot see,” the group echoed.
“We ask the spirits to join us here in the room, to come forward.”
This time, there was no repeated refrain. The musty room was still. All Helen could hear was the others breathing.
“Are there any spirits here among us now? Give us a sign,” Dicky called.
There was a loud rap that came from somewhere behind Dicky, near the old fireplace. Helen jerked her head up
, searched the shadows.
“Welcome,” Dicky said, smiling, eyes still closed. “Come forward. Do you have a message for us? A message for anyone here?”
There had to be another person in the room. Someone hiding behind the wall, listening. Someone playing ghost. Giving these people what they’d come for.
Disappointment flooded through Helen. It was a sham. These people couldn’t really call the spirits.
The old woman sitting next to Helen squeezed her hand tighter. “I’m getting something,” she said, her voice a dull crackle. “It’s a message for Kay.”
A middle-aged woman in a red sweater leaned forward, said, “For me? Who is it? What do they say?” Her hair was a washed-out blond; her skin looked yellow and sickly in the candlelight. She had on thick blue eye shadow all the way up to her eyebrows.
“It’s your sister, Jessa.”
“Oh!” Kay said, eyes wide open, excited. “What does she say?”
“She wants you to know she loves you. And she says…she says she’s sorry.”
“Ohh!” Kay exclaimed, tears filling her heavily made-up eyes, running down her yellow cheeks. “Oh, Jessa! You don’t need to be sorry. I forgive you! Tell her I forgive her!”
She was sobbing now.
The old woman beside Helen smiled. “You’ve made her so happy, Kay. She’s so relieved.”
Jesus, thought Helen. What a complete crock of shit. It seemed cruel, heartbreaking, really, taking advantage of people like Kay, people in grief who didn’t know any better, who clearly had unfinished business with the dead. She imagined that if she had stumbled into this group right after the death of her father, when the rawness of her pain had left her ripped right open, these people would have had a field day with her. And she probably would have bought it all, too. Because she was so desperate to talk to her father one more time, to say the good-byes she felt she’d been cheated out of.
“There’s another presence here,” Dicky said.
“Oh yes, there is,” said the old woman beside Helen. She turned to Helen. Her face was etched with deep wrinkles. “It’s a message for you, dear.”
“For me?” Helen asked.
The old woman nodded, closing her eyes. She held tight to Helen’s hand, giving it a squeeze. “Oh! She’s a strong spirit, this one.”
This was too much. Too goddamned much. She should never have listened to Riley, should never have tried this. She wanted to stand up and walk out, but politeness kept her there, holding hands, eyes closed, thinking, This will be over soon and then I can get the hell out of here and never come back.
Her head was starting to ache. The incense and candles were too sweet and cloying, the scent filling the back of her throat, making it feel like it was closing, getting tighter and tighter.
“It’s a woman, but she won’t identify herself. She says you know who she is. She says…she says there’s someone you’ve got to find. I think it’s someone related to you? No, no, that’s not it. The person is related to her. That’s who you’ve got to find.”
Riley gave Helen’s hand a hard squeeze.
“She says you have to hurry. You’re running out of time,” the old woman said, tightening her face into a grimace.
“Is there more?” Riley asked. “Does she say how to find this person?”
“Wait! She’s got another message,” the old woman said, opening her eyes, giving Helen’s hand another squeeze. “This one’s just for you and you alone. Close your eyes, dear. Close your eyes and listen with your whole self. She’s trying to come through to you.”
Helen closed her eyes, took in a breath, tried to forget where she was, how much her head was throbbing. She felt a breeze, imagined she was outside, near the bog.
She heard one short sentence, one command, spoken clearly in the grinding glass voice she’d come to know: Save her.
Helen nearly opened her eyes but kept them clamped shut, concentrated on breathing in and out.
The room, and everything in it—the smell of the incense, the breathing and shuffling of the people around her—seemed to retreat. Helen was in the bog. She saw a white deer—Nate’s white deer, so elegant and strange—then something shifted, and suddenly she was the white deer. And she was being chased, hunted. She ran through the woods to the bog, and where her hooves struck the ground, pink lady’s slippers sprang up. Dragonflies circled around her, the hum of their wings a song, a terrible warning song that turned into Hattie’s ground-glass voice: Danger. You are in danger.
Then she was in the center of the bog, and there was the sound of a gun going off. And she felt the bullet hit her chest, her white deer chest, and she sank into the bog, going down, down, down.
Helen’s eyes flew open, heart thumping madly, mouth dry and cottony. But she could smell the bog all around her. Hear the buzzing song of the dragonflies. Danger. You are in danger.
Her eyes locked on Dicky’s gun.
“I have to go,” Helen said, standing, letting go of the old woman’s hand, pulling away from Riley, who was giving her a worried look.
“You can’t break the circle,” Dicky warned.
Helen moved away on shaky legs. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Please,” the old woman called. “You can’t be afraid of what they show you.”
Helen hurried out of the room, bumping into chairs, banging through the door and down the stairs, Riley behind her, calling, “Helen, wait up!”
* * *
. . .
The lights in the trailer were off, so they sat in Riley’s car, smoking a joint.
“You gonna tell me what happened in there?” Riley asked, face full of concern. It was eerily similar to the way Nate had been looking at her lately. Helen kept her eyes fixed on the dark windows of the trailer, thought it was a damn good thing Nate hadn’t seen her big freak-out at Dicky’s.
“Nothing,” Helen said. “Just my fucked-up imagination. God, that place gave me the creeps. And those people, it’s like they’re feeding on other people’s needs and misfortune, you know?”
Riley said nothing, then at last said, “I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have gone. I didn’t know it would be like that.”
“It’s not your fault. But doesn’t that Dicky guy give you the creeps? I mean, why does he carry a gun everywhere? Was he expecting civil unrest during the spirit circle?”
Riley smiled. “You’re right. He’s kind of a yahoo. We’re just used to it, I guess.”
They were quiet as they finished the joint. The windows in the car were down, and Helen could hear frogs calling in the bog, smell the dark rich scent. She looked at the trailer, thought of Nate sleeping obliviously inside, surrounded by his nature guides, his carefully rendered drawings of their dream house. She knew she should go in, crawl into bed beside him, find comfort in his warm familiarity.
But that’s not where she wanted to be.
She turned back to Riley. “I heard Hattie’s voice,” Helen said.
“At Dicky’s?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d she say?”
Danger. You are in danger.
“She said, ‘Save her.’ ”
“Save who?”
“This relative I’m supposed to find, I think. The one the old lady was talking about.”
Riley frowned at her, bit her bottom lip. “Anything else?”
“She said…I’m in danger.”
“Helen, maybe you should stop, you know?”
Stop? Helen couldn’t believe that Riley, of all people, might suggest such a thing.
“I can’t. I don’t know how to explain it, but I can’t. Hattie wants me—no, she needs me to do this.”
Riley was silent, staring at Helen. “But did you ever stop to think that maybe she doesn’t have your best intentions at heart? Or maybe she’s just fucking with you.”
“I don’t know, Helen. Because it’s fun. Amusing. Because she can.”
“No.” Helen shook her head. “She’s not, Riley. I know it—she hasn’t led me astray yet. She needs me, I can feel it.”
Riley studied Helen for a moment.
“All right. Whatever you say. Just be careful, okay? Just remember that things aren’t always what they seem.”
* * *
. . .
Helen turned off the computer, rubbed her eyes, and closed her little notebook, the notebook she’d come to think of as the “Mystery of Hattie” notebook. She’d been searching online for nearly two hours, and all she had to show for it was a name for Ann’s daughter. Samuel Gray and Ann Whitcomb Gray had had two children: Jason, born in August 1968, and Gloria, born in April 1971. She found a copy of Gloria’s birth certificate—her middle name was Marie, and she was born at 3:40 p.m.—but nothing beyond that. There were hundreds of hits for both Jason Gray and Gloria Gray, and she didn’t have any other information to narrow things.
Nate was still out cold in the bedroom and hadn’t so much as stirred when Helen had come in and turned on the lights in the trailer.
She looked at the table in the corner where his laptop was set up. It was open and showing the green-tinted images from the three outdoor cameras set up in the yard. Helen went over to look at them. There was nothing out there, no movement at all, only the trees, the trailer she and Nate were tucked safely inside, and the dark unfinished house looming above it.
The windows of the trailer were open and all Helen heard were the usual night sounds: the occasional croak of a frog from down by the bog, a lone barred owl, crickets.
She noticed Nate’s wildlife journal tucked against the laptop and opened it up. There was the first entry: the great blue heron in the bog. And then the porcupine, a male and female cardinal, a red squirrel. Then the sketch Nate did of the deer after his first sighting of her, the day he fell in the bog back in July. His drawing was remarkably lifelike—his art skills seemed to be improving with each sketch. She turned the page and found more drawings of the white deer and copious notes about his observations. She continued to flip through and felt her stomach harden into a knot. Page after page was full of sketches of the white deer and messily scribbled notes that seemed to make less and less sense as she went along. The notes said things like “Her eyes change color—tapetum lucidum?”; “went out into the middle of the bog and vanished”; “tracks disappeared.”
The Invited Page 28