Help for the Haunted: A Novel

by John Searles

  I got up. I went to my room, where I stood on my desk chair and reached for that shelf full of horses. There was one in particular, a horse I’d named Aurora, that came with a small compartment inside its hollowed belly. I used a dime to pry it open and pulled out the wad of money I’d stashed inside over the years. Six hundred dollars—that’s what all my work on those essays had totaled up to.

  Despite Abigail’s presence in the basement, my mother had left that bare lightbulb on just as we’d agreed. When I made my way down the stairs, I saw Penny smiling inside Mr. Knothead’s old cage. I looked away and walked to that partitioned area where the light did not fall and where I found Abigail fast asleep on a cot with one of my mother’s knit blankets draped over her body. Some part of me thought to turn back and head upstairs, to forget about giving her the money. But as I stood there, staring at the moonlight shining on those bandages around her hands, I could not help but wonder what worse things she might be capable of doing to herself—or to my family—if she did not get her way.

  “Abigail,” I whispered.

  Her eyes opened. She sat right up. When she spoke, it made me think of earlier in the summer when it was still a surprise to hear her voice. “I’ve been waiting for you, Sylvie. Did you bring what I need?”

  “Yes. But I still don’t like the idea.” As much as I wanted her gone, I couldn’t keep from saying, “How will I know if you’ll be safe?”

  “It’s not your problem,” she told me. “I’ll be fine, though. Don’t worry, Sylvie.”

  There seemed nothing more to do but give her the money. All of it, because she’d need more than cash for a train ticket. Abigail might have been among the few haunted people my mother could not help, but in my own way, I could. With one of her bandaged hands, she took the wad of bills from me, not bothering to count any of it. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” I told her, noticing a foggy sort of expression move over her face as she lay back on the pillow. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. Well, no. Not really. I feel wiped out, I guess.”

  Who knew if this was just part of her act? I couldn’t be certain, but I put my hand on her forehead anyway. Like that time I had kissed my mother’s and found it cool, I was surprised to find hers felt the same. “Do you need food? Maybe something to drink?”

  “No. Your father brought dinner down to me a while ago. And there’s a glass of water right there on the floor by my cot.”

  We were quiet a moment, the two of us breathing in the shadows of that basement. At last, I asked, “When will you leave?”

  “Sometime tomorrow. But instead of following the path through the woods, I have a better plan. Since it’s Saturday, your mother will want to go grocery shopping. Let’s go with her, and I’ll sneak off when she’s busy at the register.”

  It seemed as good a plan as any, so I agreed to it. And then, although I meant to say good night, a different word slipped out, “Good-bye.”

  Abigail let out a weak laugh. “Sylvie, I just told you I’ll see you tomorrow, so it’s not time for good-bye just yet. But before you go back upstairs, can you do one last thing for me?”

  “What?” I said, but then I understood. “Oh. Yes. Sure.” I looked down at her head on that pillow, hair fanned all around as moonlight shone through the sliding glass door, making her face appear ghostly but beautiful. In that moment, she seemed like the spirits my father so often spoke of, an energy trapped between this world and the next. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I whispered, “The captain has turned on the Fasten Seat Belt sign. . . .”

  Abigail listened. She smiled. She closed her eyes.

  “Then what?” Lynch asked.

  “I was about to ask you the same thing. After you made the deal with my sister and drove to church, what happened next?”

  Lynch rubbed his face, glancing up at the clock. Eight minutes before our visit would come to an end.

  “Stop wasting time,” I told him.

  “I’m not wasting time!” he burst out. “You come here! You demand this story I’ve told a thousand times. You tease me with this information about my daughter! So I need a minute to clear my head!”

  Rummel’s heavy steps moved toward the table, but I held up a hand and they stopped, then retreated. “Okay, then,” I said to Lynch. “I understand. Take a minute. But we haven’t got long.”

  The man blew out a breath and rubbed his hands over his bald scalp. “I parked on the street behind the church. Your parents knew my van by then, so I figured if they caught sight of it, they would turn right around and leave. Your sister told me the key was kept in the window boxes at the church, a detail she recalled from your father’s days as a deacon. Sure enough, there it was. I let myself in.”

  “And you brought your gun along—the one I saw the day you showed up at the end of our street?”

  “Yes. But it was just to scare them. I promise you that was my only plan. I wanted the truth from your father and mother, instead of the silent treatment I’d been getting and the lies before that. My intention was to turn on the lights inside the church, but I couldn’t find the switch. All the better, I decided in the end, since the darkness might give me an advantage. I waited up front in one of the pews near the altar until I saw the headlights of your car pull into the snowy parking lot outside.”

  He stopped a moment, and although some part of me wanted to prod him to keep going, I knew better. Besides, my mind flashed on the three of us turning into the parking lot of that church, of my father getting out and walking through the snow toward the red doors before disappearing inside, of me asking my mother, “Do you ever feel afraid?”

  “I waited there,” Lynch said at last, “bracing myself until the door opened and I heard your father call into the darkness, ‘Rose?’

  “ ‘No,’ I told him. ‘It’s me.’

  “ ‘Who?’ he asked in a confused voice. And then he took a few steps closer into the darkness and said, ‘Albert? I don’t understand. What are you doing here?’

  “ ‘I came to get answers about my daughter,’ I told him. ‘Once and for all.’

  “Your father turned to go then, but I raced after him, tugging on his coat and pulling that pistol from my pocket, making sure he saw the flash of silver in the dim lights of your car through the stained-glass windows. ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ I told him.”

  Lynch leaned back from the table. “There,” he said. “Your turn.”

  This time, I didn’t even look up at the clock. “I finished Abigail’s night-time ritual, then headed up to my bedroom and fell asleep. In the morning, I walked into the kitchen and heard my parents’ voices in the basement, so I went down the stairs again. That’s when they told me she was gone. Only the basement looked nothing like it had the night before.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everything was strewn about. The things from my parents’ work—a doll we kept in a cage was on the floor. A hatchet too. So many rings and trinkets and leftovers from their trips were scattered everywhere. It looked like—” I stopped, feeling an ache in my chest as I remembered the strained look on my father’s face when he knelt on the floor to pick it all up. Then later as he wrote out that sign—DO NOT OPEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!—and attached it to the front of the doll’s cage.

  “Like what?” Lynch prodded.

  “Like someone had done battle with a demon down there. At least that’s what my father suggested.”

  “Uh-uh, Sylvie. You told me you weren’t going to make the same claims as your father.”

  “That’s not what I’m telling you,” I said, thinking now of Heekin’s book and the tapes from the interviews and the things Howie told me too. “I think my father wanted it to seem that way.”

  “Why?” Lynch said.

  “It was one more story to tell. One more way to make people believe him.”

  “And what do you believe, Sylvie?”

  “For a long time,” I began, but stopped, thinking of all those word
s I’d put down in the pages of that journal, all the conversations I’d had over the last few days, the way certain details about my parents began to sift from the mess of our lives so that I began to see them differently than before. Again, I said, “For a long time, I wouldn’t let myself think so many things. But now, well, I have come to believe that, for one, Abigail did plan to leave that night. That she only told me about her idea to slip out of the grocery store to put me off for a while. Who knows? Maybe she worried I’d change my mind during the night. Anyway, I think that after I left she opened that sliding glass door and stepped out into the night. And then, the next morning, as we all stood in the basement looking around at the chaos, we heard the knocking coming from upstairs.”

  “Knocking?” Lynch said.

  “Yes,” I told him. “It was you. You had come for your daughter.”

  “But what—”

  “The church,” I said, cutting him off.

  Just then, the guard announced, “Time’s up.” From somewhere in the prison came a loud buzzing sound. I could hear the rumble of footsteps outside the walls of that room where we sat.

  “The church!” I said. “Finish telling me about the church!”

  The guard came up behind Lynch and put his hand on the man’s arm, all but lifting him from the chair. When he was standing, Albert leaned forward and told me, “Your father gave me the same excuse he did that day I showed up knocking on your door. Demons had driven her away. He apologized. Oh, believe me, he apologized. I told him I didn’t buy it. I had wanted to come earlier in the summer, but every time I called, he insisted that he and your mother wanted—needed—to keep Abigail longer in order to help her. And I just let him fleece me, sending money and apparently giving him one more story to tell in his lectures.”

  “The church,” I said again. “Stick to the church.”

  “He said all the same things that night, but I still didn’t believe him. And then your mother came inside. Your mother—she was different, Sylvie. You should know that much by now. Maybe she and your father were a team, but they were not the same. Somehow, and I’ll never know exactly how, she managed to calm me down. She sat with me in a pew. She prayed with me while your father lingered in the shadows by the altar. And then I saw the person I had become: a man wielding a gun, making idle threats, looking for his daughter who had never wanted to be with him in the first place.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I tossed down my gun and fled the church through the front doors. I got in my van and drove toward the highway, faster than I should have in the snow. And then I stopped at that Texaco, where I saw that old man in the restroom and helped rescue his wife’s dogs out in the parking lot. That’s the truth, Sylvie. So help me, that’s the truth.”

  As the guard pulled him back toward that door where he had entered, toward the sound of all those footsteps, I sat watching, thinking of that song my mother used to hum and trying my best to sense the truth inside him the way she believed I could. The moment the door clanged shut, Rummel and I were left in a vacuum of quiet. He approached and put his hand on my shoulder again. I stared down at his heavy black shoes a moment before getting up. The two of us were led by another guard back the way we came, through the series of doors and gates, until we were outside in the car.

  As we drove away, I stared at all the barbed wire and thought of Dereck telling me to keep my fingers off the fence that first day we met in the field. For all I knew, he was slaughtering turkeys at that very moment, since Thanksgiving was only a few days away now.

  “Are you okay?” the detective asked.

  “Yes,” I told him.

  “You know, Sylvie, when you work long enough doing what I do, you begin to develop a sixth sense about people and whether or not they are guilty. But I’ve learned that no matter my feelings, I have to put them aside and look at the evidence and listen to the testimony. So that conversation in there, you shouldn’t let it sway you too much one way or another. The facts are the facts.”

  “I understand,” I said. And then at last I told him, “But I didn’t see Mr. Lynch that night in the church.”

  The car wheels spinning on the pavement. The wind whistling through Rummel’s partially opened window. The crackling static of his police radio. Those were the only sounds for some time. “Are you sure?” the detective asked finally.

  “I’m sure,” I said. “So what now?”

  “We need to talk to Louise Hock. Like I told you, Lynch will be released. Since it’s gotten so late in the day, all that’s going to have to happen tomorrow. If you like, I can pick you up myself first thing in the morning.”

  That was the plan we made. And when he dropped me off at home, my gaze went to the empty front step. Emily Sanino was likely all done with those gifts, for a while anyway. Rose’s truck was gone, and that yellow glow from the basement window shone even in the daylight.

  Inside, I went to my parents’ room where the red light on the answering machine was blinking away. I ignored it for the time being and went about finding my father’s old cassette player tucked in his nightstand with an empty prescription container, and oddly, a wrench wrapped in a towel. I put that aside and, from my pocket, pulled the cassette tape that had been in Rummel’s car. Since it was evidence, I figured he wouldn’t let me keep it overnight. That’s why I’d slipped it from the recorder when he let me back in the car at the prison and went around to the other side. Now, I popped in the tape and pressed Play. For a moment, there was nothing but static, and I thought perhaps this side of the tape had become warped after so long. But just as I was about to hit Fast Forward, a voice came alive in the room. Not my father’s, but Heekin’s. I turned the volume as loud as it could go.

  HEEKIN: As I’ve been writing the book, I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with some discrepancies in your narrative.

  MY FATHER: (woozy-voiced) You are beginning to sound like my brother and some of our other critics. I thought you had become a friend, Sam.

  HEEKIN: I am a friend. But I am also trying to do a job here. My job is to report the truth.

  MY FATHER: The truth is that a lot of the people who come to us are lost causes.

  HEEKIN: Lost causes?

  MY FATHER: Yes. I guess you could even say they’re not all there. Crazy even. You know how I first started? By placing an ad in the back of a newspaper. “Help for the Haunted” it read then offered our services. Tell me, what sort of sane person answers an ad like that?

  HEEKIN: So what are you saying?

  MY FATHER: I’m saying write the book, make it appropriately scary and you’ll have done your job. That’s what people want, isn’t it?

  Heekin cleared his throat, and I had the sense this conversation had gone in a direction that left him flustered. He rambled and sputtered the way he did when he was nervous until there was a loud click and the tape went silent. And then, a moment later:

  HEEKIN: Can I ask about your children?

  MY FATHER: Sure.

  MY MOTHER: I’d rather you not.

  MY FATHER: My wife likes to keep our work and home life separate.

  HEEKIN: And you don’t?

  MY FATHER: These things have a way of melding. Besides, I said you could ask, I did not say we would answer.

  HEEKIN: Well, then. Allow me to try. What do your daughters make of what you two do?

  MY FATHER: We don’t talk too much about it.

  His voice sounded clear, not at all woozy, and I realized the tape had cut to another conversation from some other time when my mother was present.

  HEEKIN: And do you find, Mrs. Mason, that either of your daughters shares your gift?

  MY MOTHER: I do, but let’s leave it at that.

  HEEKIN: So they are accepting?

  MY FATHER: As much as any children are accepting of their parents. (Laugh) I guess what I am trying to say is that we are like any other parents. We are trying to raise our daughters with good Christian values in a world that is increasingly secular. It i
s not easy with all the immorality out there. Take our daughter, Rose—

  MY MOTHER: That’s enough, Sylvester. We don’t need to go into that.

  MY FATHER: (after a pause) My wife is right. See how much I need her to keep me in line? I guess I’ll just say we’ve had more than our share of trouble with Rose. My wife and I have done a lot of praying that she will come around to our values again.

  HEEKIN: Values?

  MY MOTHER: I think we’ve gone as far as I feel comfortable on this topic. If you don’t mind I’d like to conclude the interview for the day. Thank you very much.

  This time when the tape went silent it stayed that way. A dull, empty hum filled my parents’ bedroom. I sat there watching the wheels of the recorder spin round and round until I heard the sound of an engine and screechy music moving closer down the lane and coming to a stop in our driveway.

  Instead of looking out the window, I went to the answering machine and pressed Play. “Sylvie, it’s Sam Heekin. After you left that message last night, I did some digging. I uncovered some things you should know about. Call me right away.” While that played, I pulled the newspaper article Dereck had given me from my pocket and stared at that picture again, my father’s words about values ringing in my mind.