by Rick Hautala
The house was soothingly quiet.
Consciously breathing deeply and evenly, Elizabeth got up and went from the kitchen through the dining room and into the living room. She tried to open up her senses and let herself fully enjoy the tranquility. The clock on the mantel measured a steady, low tick-tock. The sound reminded her of those long-ago afternoons when she had sat in the living room, either doing her homework or else dozing on the couch. Long, yellow bars of sunlight angled across the floor and edged up over the faded wallpaper, casting long shadows of chair and table legs. Spinning motes of dust whirled like planets in her passing as she sat down on the couch, leaned her head back, and closed her eyes.
If she let herself, she could almost imagine that it was twenty years ago: that she had never grown up, never gone to college, never married Doug, and never given birth to ...
“Aww, shit!” she said, jumping to her feet as soon as she thought the name Caroline.
She spoke aloud so suddenly, so sharply, her voice sounded foreign to her own ears, as though someone else in the room had spoken. Pacing back and forth across the living-room rug, she felt her eyes widening as they darted back and forth, scanning the quiet house as though looking for an unseen presence she had dimly sensed.
‘‘Take it easy, there,” she muttered to herself, even as she looked almost frantically at the familiar furniture, seeking an anchor to hold down the sudden flood of panic she had felt rising inside her like a tide. She rubbed her hands together, noticing they were clammy. The veins on the backs of her hands stood out like thin blue strings against her winter-pale skin. A thick, salty taste filled the back of her throat, and tears began to roll down her cheeks.
Was it thinking about Caroline that had started this? she wondered. Or had Graydon said something — or dragged something out of her subconscious that had triggered this sharp, clear pain? Or maybe ... just maybe it was missing —
“ — Caroline,” she whispered, no more than a ragged, tearing sound.
Here it’s been a year and a half, she thought, and the grief and pain are still as sharp as the day it happened. The wounds hadn’t healed or even dulled, and Elizabeth knew the pain would never go away. She was going to have to learn to live with it and not let it turn her into an emotional cripple.
Without knowing why, Elizabeth turned and started up the stairs, but rather than going to her bedroom to lie down, she continued down the hallway to the attic door. Flipping the wall switch by the door, she undid the bolt lock, turned the handle, and started up into the attic.
The smell of stale air wafted down the stairway and sent her memories reeling. The attic had always been a special place for her; she used to come up here and hide whenever she was upset and didn’t want anyone to see her.
Elizabeth also remembered the many rainy or snowy afternoons when she and her sister Pam, or her best friends from school, Joanie and Barb, had come up here to play or to paw through the boxes and piles of accumulated junk. No, not junk — treasures! Old books and magazines. her grandparents’ musty old clothes, boxes of toys and jigsaw puzzles, a trunk of old family letters and photographs, and carton upon carton of old tools and useless gadgets, some of which she could never identify.
Elizabeth walked slowly up the stairs, trying her best not to let herself wonder how much Caroline would have loved to come up here and explore!
Feeling warm with nostalgia, Elizabeth started going through the boxes marked with her name and, for the next hour or so, the memories that came back to her were almost dizzying. One of the first things she uncovered was the dark blue dress and shoes she had worn the night Frank Melrose had taken her to the Junior Prom — the night they had driven out to Bristol Pond, instead of going to the post — Prom party, and “gone all the way” for the first time. The frilly lace was yellowed with age and seemed about to crumble to nothingness as she touched it; the shoes she remembered as being fit for Cinderella now looked chintzy and sad. The dress was almost as hopelessly old fashioned as her grandmother’s wedding gown had appeared to her. She shook the dress out and held it up to her shoulders in almost total disbelief that she had once thought it was the most gorgeous thing in the world.
“Why on earth keep stuff like this,” she muttered to herself as she refolded the dress and carefully placed it along with the shoes back into the box. Was it just so, years from now, as an old woman, she could come up here again and remember that she had once had a childhood? Or was it so someone else in the family could ...
Someone else ...
“No!” Elizabeth said tightly, the dust in the attic choking her throat. “No!” She clenched and shook her fists, telling herself that there no longer was a Caroline to come up here and explore.
The line of trash and treasure-seekers ended with her!
Elizabeth decided that, if she was going to spend very much time at home, what she should do is come up here and ruthlessly winnow everything, removing anything that no longer had a use. Why keep old clothes and shoes and broken toys and junk that no one would ever possibly use? Why. accumulate all this — this trash that, once her parents and she were dead, would just have to be loaded up and carted off to the dump? Why spend any time thinking about the past when all it holds is suffering and pain and wounds that will never heal? Why go through the torture of looking through things she was never — never — going to share with Caroline? With tears blurring her vision, she turned to leave, but then, in the comer of her eye, she saw something. Fear choked her as she faced the stack of boxes over by the attic window.
The sun was touching the horizon in the west, and the light coming through the grimy window turned everything honey gold. A narrow shaft of sunlight, shining like an angled spotlight, hit a flat, rectangular box, and the single dust-filmed word it illuminated made Elizabeth’s blood run cold.
ouija.
Casting a quick glance behind her to dispel the sensation she had that someone was watching her from the doorway, she walked over to the window and looked down at the box. The cover, name, and illustration were hazy beneath a thick coat of dust, making it look almost illusionary. Elizabeth had the fleeting impression that her hand would pass right through the box if she reached out to touch it.
Maybe I’m just dreaming, she thought, even though she could hear the fluttery hammering of her pulse in her ears. Didn’t I get rid of this thing long ago?
Her hands were trembling as she stretched them out toward the box. She couldn’t dispel the thought that, no matter how hard she tried, she wouldn’t be able to pick up the box. Her fingers would glide right through it, through thin air. When her fingertips brushed lightly over the cover, leaving four thin lines in the dust, she almost convinced herself she could feel a faint tingling of electricity.
ouija!
The trembling in her hands intensified when she flexed her fingers and wrapped them around the stiff, dry cardboard and lifted the box. She tilted it a bit to one side and heard a hollow sound as the pointer shifted inside with an abrasive rasp.
Elizabeth couldn’t resist a shiver of fear and ... yes! she had to admit it — fascination.
It’s still here! she thought. The ouija’s still here!
Moving slowly, she sat down cross — legged on the attic floor and rested the box on her knees. She knew what she should do was just put it away and forget that she had even found it; but another part of her mind was stimulated, stirred up by the memories of using this.
Opening the box, she took out the board and pointer and sat there, studying them as though they were an immensely complicated puzzle. Her eyes darted back and forth across the fancy scrolled letters and numbers and the yes and no written in the comers.
“I’d get rid of that thing if I were you.”
Coming so suddenly from behind her, her mother’s voice made Elizabeth jump and scramble to her feet. The ouija board and pointer went flying and hit the floor with a clatter.
“Oh, God!” Elizabeth said, gasping as she patted her chest with the flat of
her hand. “You scared the living daylights out of me!”
“I’m sorry,” her mother said. “I thought you heard me coming up the stairs. I saw your car in the driveway and called out to you several times.”
“I must not have heard you,” Elizabeth said, still panting to catch her breath. The sound of her pulse pounding in her ears muffled and distorted her voice.
“Oh,” her mother said, letting her gaze drop to the floor, “before I forget; Doug called again, asking for you.”
Elizabeth started to reply, but all that came out of her was a heavy sigh.
“That’s twice he’s called,” Rebecca said, her voice taking on a hard edge.
“What did he ... did he want?” Elizabeth managed to say.
Rebecca shrugged. “Well, he says he’s worried — concerned for you — but if you ask me, he sounded more angry than upset. I told him not to call anymore; that you would call him when you wanted to.” She hissed with frustration and regarded her daughter with a pitying expression.
“I guess 1 should call him sometime, huh?” Elizabeth said softly.
“I think he has a lot of nerve, calling like that, trying to upset you!” Rebecca snapped. “Does he have any idea what you’ve been through?”
Elizabeth shrugged helplessly.
“Well, enough of that,” Rebecca said. “What were you doing up here, anyway?”
“Oh, I was just going through some of ... of my old things,” Elizabeth said. She forced a tight laugh. “I’m surprised you saved some of this stuff.”
“Well, I surely didn’t mean to keep that old thing,” Rebecca said, indicating the ouija box in Elizabeth’s hands. She made no attempt to hide the disgust in her voice. “When I think of how you and Pam got yourselves so worked up, playing with that game.”
“It’s not exactly a game,” Elizabeth said, somewhat defensively.
“No, I imagine it isn’t,” her mother replied. “Who was it you two used to say you were ‘communicating’ with?”
Feeling a flush of embarrassment, Elizabeth knelt down and picked up the board and pointer. She made a tight little laughing sound and said, “Oh, it was some guy named Max, remember? We were so convinced we were actually talking to him. What was it? He supposedly lived someplace in Texas — Dallas, I think. He told us he had killed himself.” She shook her head and smiled weakly.
“I guess it was pretty stupid the way we got so involved with it, huh?”
“I didn’t think so at the time,” Rebecca said sharply. “You had me scared half out of my wits the way you and your sister would go on and on about how you were trying to help Max ... what was the phrase you used? Help him ‘move on to the next plane.’ Wasn’t that it?”
Elizabeth nodded.
“And then, when you said he told you he couldn’t move along until he got someone else to kill himself, God, you had me so worried!”
Again, more sheepishly, Elizabeth nodded. “Yeah. He told us the only way he could get out of the ... the limbo state between being alive and dead was to get sort of crowded out by someone else who committed suicide.” Biting her lower lip, she shook her head. The ouija board felt suddenly heavy in her hands. She wanted to put it down, to get rid of it, as her mother said, but for some reason she felt like she wouldn’t be able to let go of it. She had the crazy notion that if she tried now to put it back on the shelf, it would stick to her hands as though it were covered with flypaper.
“Well,” Rebecca said, shaking her head with disgust, “I would think, if this Max was a ‘good’ spirit, the best way for him to be released would be to help prevent another suicide, not cause one.”
Elizabeth shrugged. “I think that’s when Pam and I decided he was an evil person, and that he was trying to trick us.”
“Into killing yourselves? Some trick!” her mother snapped. “Look, I’ve got a trunk full of groceries to unload, and I could use a bit of help putting them away.”
“Sure,” Elizabeth said, but even as her mother turned and started toward the attic door, Elizabeth couldn’t bring herself to put down the ouija board and follow her. It was almost as if the childhood game —
... No, it’s not exactly a game!
— didn’t want to be left up here in the attic. Elizabeth couldn’t stop the wave of goose bumps that rose up on her arms when she thought of trying to get in touch with Max again. Would he still be there after all this time? Was Max real, or had he been nothing more than a fabrication of her and her sister’s childish imaginations?
“Are you coming?” her mother asked from the doorway.
“Sure,” Elizabeth said. She quickly slipped the board and the pointer back into the box and followed her mother down the stairs. Excusing herself for a minute, she dashed into her bedroom and placed the game — not exactly a game — on top of her bureau and then went down to the kitchen to help her mother unload the groceries.
All the rest of the afternoon, though, and through supper and into the evening, Elizabeth couldn’t stop thinking about the ouija board. At times, she even considered that maybe it was the reason she had come home so suddenly and why she had gone up to the attic this afternoon — maybe the ouija board had called her because Max was still around, and he had a message for her.
Finally, though, she pushed such a ridiculous notion out of her mind and, after watching a bit of TV with her folks, went up to bed when her parents retired a little after ten o’clock. She dozed but hadn’t yet drifted off to sleep when she heard her mother and father talking in their bedroom, next to hers. Their voices were no more than muffled buzzings coming to her out of the darkness, but then her father’s voice rose a bit louder than usual, and she clearly heard him say, “I don’t see any reason for that!”
In the darkness, his voice sounded close to Elizabeth’s ear as she waited, listening. Then her mother replied but, because she was keeping her voice low, Elizabeth couldn’t quite make out the words.
“I say just let it be,” her father said. “There’s no reason to tell her about it. It’ll just get her more upset.”
Elizabeth had no doubt they were talking about something to do with her, and her father, at least, didn’t want her to know. Lying there in her dark bedroom, she tensed up as she wondered what her father was keeping from her. After everything she had been through, what could possibly bother her so badly?
Her bedroom windows were open a crack to allow the warm night breeze to enter, and she watched the gauzy curtains waft gently in and out like bellows as she ran through several dozen “worst-case scenarios” ...
Someone had died or was dying; one of her parents had inoperable cancer; Doug had told them something terrible when he had called this afternoon; or something terrible had happened to Doug; one of the aunts was seriously ill and wouldn’t live long ...
Whatever it was, Elizabeth was convinced something horrible had happened or was about to happen.
2.
No matter how many new houses and stores went up around Junia and Elspeth’s house, Elizabeth knew that the aunts’ family home would always stay pretty much the same, at least as long as the aunts were alive. The house was located on a three — acre triangle of land formed by the intersections of Old County Road, Saco Street, and Beech Ridge Road — right in the middle of what passed for downtown Bristol Mills. It was a century-old, three-story Victorian that had been weathered to the color of granite and was steadily falling into disrepair. Even back when Elizabeth was young, there had been rumors, especially among the younger children, that the place was haunted, but Elizabeth had always felt comfortable there because of the close relationship she had with her father’s spinster sisters. She considered it her second home.
Whenever she entered the aunts’ house, Elizabeth felt as though she had stepped back into the previous century. Antique furniture, dulled and worn by age, filled every room. One of Elizabeth’s favorite pieces was the couch with curved wooden legs that looked like the hooves of some bizarre animal. In the living room were cherry-wood
end tables and padded chairs. Lace doilies decorated every table and the backs of the couch and each chair. Faded but still beautiful handmade rugs were scattered around and did much to remove the chilly drafts that snaked along the floor. Paintings that were cracked and yellowed with age hung on the walls; and although the wallpaper in each room was old and faded, it seemed perfectly appropriate to the mood of the house.
The kitchen was a study in how life was lived at least fifty years ago. It gladdened Elizabeth to see that the aunts had still made no concessions to the twentieth century; they didn’t have an automatic dishwasher or an electric stove, much less a microwave oven. Some of Elizabeth’s fondest memories were of the times she had stayed overnight at the aunts’ and sat up late, talking at the kitchen table with Junia.
If the house was aging but well-preserved, a survivor from another time, then the aunts themselves were approaching the miraculous. Of course, Elizabeth knew, if she compared them to photographs from twenty years ago, she would easily see that they had indeed aged; but both Junia, the youngest of the two, who was approaching seventy, and Elspeth, who would turn eighty-two on her next birthday, seemed to age one year for every five in the real world. Elizabeth toyed with the idea that, by surrounding themselves in an environment that didn’t acknowledge the outside world, they somehow kept it — and aging — at bay.
It was late in the morning, and Elizabeth was sitting in her aunts’ parlor with a steaming cup of tea and a few Fig Newtons on a plate on the table beside her. She had walked the four miles to their house because the day was sunny and warm; but even such a beautiful spring morning had trouble penetrating the gloom of the aunts’ house. The curtains glowed with dull orange light, begrudgingly allowing the sunlight to enter.
Aunt Junia had just finished describing what had happened to her brother Jonathan’s grave out at Oak Grove Cemetery the night before. Elizabeth’s father, being Jonathan’s younger brother, had also been notified about the incident yesterday morning by the investigating detectives. At last, she knew what her parents had been talking about last night that they didn’t want to tell her.