Help for the Haunted: A Novel

by John Searles

  What more could I do but leave her to exhaust herself? I dropped that bone, wiped my fingers on my T-shirt, and turned toward the house. That’s when my hand went to my chest. That’s when my breath caught in my throat. Earlier, when those boys came and went, I believed I’d faced down the most frightening event of the night, but not once I understood the cause of the dog’s alarm. Down among the tangled branches of the rhododendrons, I saw it: the yellowy glow from the basement window. After all those months of darkness, whatever it was down there had turned on the light once more.

  Chapter 8

  Ghosts

  Maybe it was coincidence. But the books my mother gave me to read at an early age—Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, Pippi Longstocking, and so many others—were almost all about children who had been orphaned. Sometimes I wondered if those “feelings” she used to get allowed her to sense our family’s fate, and if so, maybe those stories were her way of preparing me. That night at the Ocala Conference Center, I had no idea about any of that of course. I simply kept busy with Jane Eyre—or tried to, anyway. I never would have admitted it, but, despite my smarts, the book was too advanced considering I was only entering the sixth grade. It didn’t help that Rose had left her bible back at the hotel, so she served up plenty of distractions.

  She paced the small greenroom. (Not green, but peach, by the way.)

  She picked grapes off the fruit platter.

  She bounced them off the ceiling and caught them in her mouth.

  The ones that missed, she mashed into the carpet with her sneaker. I didn’t say a word, figuring it would be easier to clean up after she finished entertaining herself. I’d taken to underlining passages in the book that stood out to me, the way my mother did in her bible, and was about to put a pen to the page when I glanced up and noticed that Rose had slipped out of the room. Let her go, I told myself, but that promise to my father in the pool nagged at me, and so I put aside Jane Eyre and wandered the hall in search of Rose. It didn’t take long before I found her standing in a large room filled with row upon row of chairs, all of them facing an enormous TV, all of them empty. The spillover room, I realized, but the weather had kept so many people away there was nobody to spill.

  On the screen, I saw my father. If the rainwater had made him appear boyish and less serious earlier that day, the stage lights did the opposite. Shadows fell across his face, carving his features into a jumble of sharp angles and deep wrinkles. His glasses caught the light in such a way that his eyes seemed to flash as he spoke, stiff voiced, to the crowd. “Well before this century, those in the medical community had begun to discard the idea of possession as an explanation for abnormal human behavior. Instead, experts resolved that specific conditions were symptomatic of schizophrenia and other psychosis. These afflictions were dealt with by putting the sufferer away in an institution, or with crude and harmful methods of electroshock therapy, and more recently, experimenting with medication . . .”

  “Rose,” I said.

  “Shhhh. I’m listening.”

  “ . . . Of course, it would be foolish to deny the importance of the myriad of advances in the treatment of mental disorders. But in the hurry to embrace the science of psychiatry, the medical field might have been a bit too eager to relinquish belief in evil forces, demonic oppression, and to accredit natural causes to all mental diseases of unknown etiology . . .”

  “Rose, we’re not supposed to be here. Let’s go.”

  My sister whipped around. “ ‘The mouth of a righteous man brings forth wisdom, but a perverse tongue will be cut out.’ ”

  “What?”

  “It’s a bible proverb, stupid. In other words, keep it up and I’ll cut out your tongue. Now shhhh. I’m trying to listen.”

  “ . . . While the majority of psychiatrists are satisfied to diagnose mental illness in terms of abnormal brain function, chemical imbalances, and personality disorders, there are those who admit that a tiny percentage of cases defy medical science. These cases do not allow for an easy explanation because they exhibit symptoms traditionally associated with demonic influence. . . .”

  “Rose,” I said, even though it meant risking my tongue. “Let’s go.”

  This time, she turned from the TV. “You know what? You’re right. Let’s go.”

  With that, she stepped out the door and headed down the hall. Where she should have hung a left into the peachy greenroom, however, Rose kept going. Through a set of doors. Up a flight of stairs. I followed until she slipped through one last door into the back of the auditorium where my parents were speaking. For a long while, I waited outside, wondering what she was up to and what, if anything, I could do about it. The entire time my father’s voice drifted into the hallway. He described how so often people came to them as a last resort, after all attempts at treatment had failed, and I thought of the people who showed up unannounced on our front steps, a look of desperation in their eyes. Then I heard my father say, “No doubt you came here expecting a ghost story. You’ll get plenty, I promise. But first, I’d like to start with a love story. I guess you could say it’s a Christmas story and a love story, because it takes place in December and it’s how I met my beautiful wife.”

  I didn’t know how my parents met, and my curiosity led me to tug open the door the tiniest bit. I spotted Rose crouched in the rear of the auditorium. When I slipped inside and joined her, crouching and pressing my back to the wall as well, she did not acknowledge my presence. My father continued, and as we listened, I looked around at the empty seats. The crowd of three hundred he’d been anticipating had dwindled to no more than seventy. I wondered if that’s why he seemed so distracted and uncomfortable up there. Talking in that stiff voice. Fidgeting with a stack of index cards, fanning and flipping them this way and that. Beside him, my mother stood, calm as could be, hands joined together, listening intently, as though she’d never heard the story before.

  Which details am I recalling from that night and which have I filled in from things my parents told me when I asked questions later? And which, if I’m truthful, did I color in myself, lending their meeting a fairy-tale quality in my mind? Rather than attempt to separate those versions, I’ll tell the story I carry with me.

  When my father finished his coursework at the dental school in Baltimore, he spent a year working at the university clinic, clocking in the hours required to graduate. Although his career as a dentist had yet to officially begin, he had grown bored. The field lacked a sense of mystery, he said, and silly as it sounded, he despised the one-sided conversations with the people in his chair. (“How much can you learn when you’re the only one talking?” I heard him once say.) So while his days were spent drilling and filling cavities, he found a more satisfying activity to occupy his evenings: he began studying the paranormal to make sense of the unexplained things he had seen since childhood.

  As for my mother’s life, the events of her childhood led her to spend an inordinate amount of time in prayer. On her way home from school each afternoon, she stopped at her small brick church, slipped into a back pew, and spoke to the Lord. On Sundays, she arrived early and distributed prayer books to worshippers entering the service. Afterward, she taught in the Bible school, where the pastor overheard her singing to herself and found her voice so melodic he convinced her to join the choir. When she was nearing the end of high school, that same pastor helped her get accepted into a small Christian college in Georgia on a voice scholarship.

  One Christmas, the choir was scheduled to give a concert for inner-city children in Harlem. In the predawn hours of December 24, 1967, my mother boarded a bus with her fellow students and headed north. It began to snow on the East Coast that morning and kept up all through the afternoon. “Lift Jesus Higher,” “The Lord Is My Shepherd, I Shall Not Want,” “Amazing Grace”—with those songs and so many others, the girls sang away the miles until the choir director—out of genuine concern or, more likely, boredom—suggested it would be wise to save their voices. Except for the rumble of snow
plows and rattle of salt trucks rolling past on the highway, the bus grew quiet. Soon, the girls had fallen asleep. My mother slept too, though she woke before the others with what she first experienced as a headache. Those “feelings” she sometimes got about the world didn’t normally come to her in the form of physical pain, but the sensation was so intense she couldn’t help but wonder if it was a sign.

  By the time they reached D.C., snow spit frantically from the sky, blotting out the world outside my mother’s window as pain crept to the side of her face and bloomed in her jaw. Despite the agony, my mother (being my mother) kept quiet. Nothing anyone could do until they reached New York City, she told herself. Besides, if she did say something, those girls might lay hands on her. Not only did my mother dislike being the center of attention, she did not believe they had the kind of faith to make that sort of healing possible.

  Late in the afternoon on that same day, my father finished work and got ready to leave the clinic. In truth, he had seen his last patient hours before, though for once he felt no urgency to leave, since he faced the prospect of his first holiday alone. His final patient, a blowsy, red-haired woman doused with lilac perfume, whose oddly fanglike teeth he’d been capping and crowning for months, brought a Christmas gift to thank him for all his work. The gesture touched my father more deeply than he might have guessed, because it would be the only gift he’d be receiving that holiday. He peeled away the reindeer wrapping paper to find a leather-bound copy of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

  “There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”

  The fang-toothed woman hugged him too long, leaving him smelling of lilacs. After she walked out, my father allowed himself to lounge in a dental chair. Page after page he turned until the Ghost of Christmas Future appeared and he glanced out the window to see the sky had grown dark. He decided to finish the story at home.

  On the slippery drive back to his apartment, my father’s thoughts turned to the ghosts of his past. Not the ones that appeared to him as apparitions, but rather his family. His mother had passed from lung cancer a few years before. (Hadn’t he always warned her about all those cigarettes?) Since she’d been gone, his father and brother had done away with even the skimpy holiday traditions she once maintained and instead spent hour upon hour drinking from their freezer-chilled glass tumblers—getting good and sloshed in front of the TV. The year before, my father, who always shared one glass with them, had felt so gloomy during the visit that he vowed never to return. Even though he kept that promise, there he was on Christmas Eve, allowing those same old ghosts to haunt him anyway.

  Your parents are never gone from you. . .

  Perhaps those words flickered in his mind as he carefully navigated the slick roads that night. He’d already gone to an early mass—to his way of thinking, Christmas Eve mass was a candle-lit tourist trap, not meant for serious believers like himself—and now there was only dinner to think about. But he wasn’t much of a cook and all the decent restaurants he passed were closed. That must have been what led him to pull into a Howard Johnson’s off the highway.

  Once he stepped inside, his eyes caught sight of a row of pay phones. Would he regret the call? Probably. But he walked to a phone anyway, fished out a fistful of change from his pockets, punched in the 215 area code and number he knew by heart. The phone rang and rang and he was about to give up when a craggy voice came on the line. “Hi, Dad,” my father said. “It’s me, Sylvester. I just called to wish you a Merry Christmas.”

  After a silence, “Same to you, son. Same to you.”

  “Some storm, huh?”

  “Guess so. But it’ll melt. Always does. Nothing to get upset about.”

  “I’m not getting up—” My father stopped, took a breath. “So I imagine you and Howie are spending the night together?”

  “Nope. Howie’s gone off. Here with Lloyd having a drink.”

  “Howie’s gone off where?”

  “Joined the navy. You know that.”

  “Well, how would I know that, Dad? I never hear from either of you.”

  “Phone rings both ways, son. Phone rings both ways.”

  Perhaps that was the moment my father first shifted his gaze toward the window and saw the idling bus in the parking lot. Emergency flashers blazed, turning the snow red then white then red again. Perhaps that was when a matronly, gray-haired woman stepped inside and approached the row of pay phones, opening the phone book and flipping pages. “I’ll try to call more often in the New Year,” my father said, putting his back to the woman since he didn’t like people knowing his business. “But, well, there never seems to be anything to say.”

  Silence. More silence.

  “Dad? Are you there?”

  The tinkling sound of glass and ice. The sound of a sitcom laugh track. Finally, his father’s voice: “Your mother was the talker. Not me.”

  What his father said was true, though his mother’s conversations were limited to gossip: which neighbor was having trouble paying rent, whose husband was screwing another woman. Things that held little interest for my father. “Well,” my father said, “Merry Christmas.” Those bus lights blinked outside and he thought of the artificial tree his mother used to assemble. The angel on top wore a white dress splotched with yellow from all her time spent in the attic. Year after year, her blank face stared down at the four of them before she was stowed away once more. At last, my father pushed the thought of that angel and that tree and his mother and even his father who was still on the line from his mind. It had been a mistake to call, he decided. It always was.

  “Same, same,” his father said, then fumbled with the phone in a clunky good-bye.

  Whatever appetite my father felt had vanished. He made up his mind to head home on an empty stomach. But as he walked out to the parking lot, he came upon a young woman with long, raven-black hair and impossibly narrow shoulders sitting on a suitcase outside the bus. She held the thick end of an icicle against her face. Her skin was so translucent, her features so delicate, he thought she might very well be an apparition.

  “Ghost of the Future,” he exclaimed, “I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I hope to know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear your company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?”

  The woman glanced up at him, and my father heard himself asking, “Did someone sock you?”

  “Sock me?” Her voice was like the rest of her: soft, fragile.

  “You know, hit you? I’m wondering on account of the icicle.”

  “Oh. No. I have a terrible toothache. I’m on a choir trip, and the director is inside looking through the phone book, trying to find help. I thought I could bear the pain until we got to where we are going, but now that the bus is having problems, I just don’t know.”

  My father stepped closer, reached out a hand, and lifted the icicle away from her face. “If it’s a toothache, the pain you are feeling is in your nerves. So you can put all the ice in the world on your face, and it is not going to make you feel better.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No. But I can help you.”

  Did that broken-down bus and the rest of the choirgirls make it to Harlem? How did my mother convince that matronly choir director to allow her to go off with a man she met in the parking lot? Or was the pain so severe that she made one of the few rash decisions of her life and simply picked up her suitcase and got in his car without telling anyone? I don’t know those answers. However it came to be, less than an hour after he lifted that icicle from her face, my father was back at the clinic with my mother. X-rays revealed her need for a root canal. He was far from a specialist, and he couldn’t
perform one on his own that night, but he gave her a pulpotomy, removing the dead tissue to alleviate the pain and pressure until she could be properly treated.

  That night in Ocala, after my father shared a modified, less personal version of those events with the crowd, my mother spoke up for the first time. In her lilting voice, she said into the microphone, “Since my mouth was stuffed full of instruments, Sylvester got to do all the talking. What better way to make a man fall in love with you?”

  Not the funniest joke ever told, but something about her mild-mannered delivery ignited a burst of laughter from the crowd. All at once, the feeling in the air of that auditorium shifted. People had been won over, I sensed. They were on my parents’ side now. Even my father relaxed, placing his index cards on the podium and putting a period on their how-we-met story by saying he and my mother spent that Christmas together and every one since. One of the things that drew them to each other, he explained, was their belief that the world consisted of more than just what we see and understand. And when he first confessed to her the strange things he’d witnessed starting as a child in his parents’ movie theater, she did not laugh like so many before. Instead, she asked questions. She tried to make sense of it all.

  “In this way, together over time, my wife and I began to investigate ‘the otherness’ of this world we live in,” my father told the crowd. He pressed a button on the podium and the screen behind him filled with an image of an institutional hallway with a light in the corner that looked amorphous until you stared long enough and an elongated face emerged, its mouth open in a ghoulish howl.