Fog Descending (House of Crows)

by Lisa Unger

  “Is someone going to tell me what’s going on here?” asked Samantha, her voice going up an octave.

  But Avery March had put her head in her hands and was now openly weeping, issuing an unsettling sound that was eerily like whale song.

  “Amelia March,” he said. He had hoped never to hear that name again. “She disappeared the summer I was sixteen.”

  “She was never found,” interjected Jewel.

  Matthew and Samantha both looked at her. “How do you know that?” asked Matthew.

  She widened her eyes, gaped open her mouth in that annoying way teenagers did to express mock wonder. Apparently she was feeling better. “Wow. Ever heard of Google?”

  Avery March seemed to recover herself, took a breath, and wiped at her eyes.

  “That’s right,” she said. “My sister disappeared and was never found.”

  “Oh my God,” said Samantha. “That’s . . . horrible. I’m so sorry.”

  “Several locals were questioned—the man who was caretaker here at the time,” said March, glancing at Matthew. “For a while, suspicion fell on a boy from town, Mason Brandt. My stepfather, Brad, was abusive and violent, so they looked at him. Finally, allegedly, there was an out-of-town stranger that Amelia was seeing, never identified.”

  They were all staring at March. “The case went cold,” she finished. “It remains unsolved.”

  Samantha shook her head, pinned Matthew with an annoyed frown. “When were you going to tell me about this?”

  “Um. Never,” said Matthew. “I was hoping to fix this place up and be long gone before it ever came up.”

  “Okay. Wow. You didn’t think it was important? That I needed to know this?”

  “Ancient history,” he said, making his voice flat.

  Samantha’s eyes widened. “Not for our Realtor, who lost a sister.”

  She directed an open palm toward March. “I’m so sorry for your loss. That must have been so painful.”

  “I should have told you,” said March to Samantha. “I’m sorry.”

  “So what do you want?” asked Matthew. “What are you doing here?”

  March shifted uncomfortably. “The rest of the world gave up on my sister. But I haven’t. I just wanted a chance to look around the house and the grounds. I begged your grandfather Justice Merle for access, but he denied me, all this time.”

  Matthew felt a lash of anger.

  “Because the house, my family—we had nothing to do with your sister’s disappearance. The case didn’t exactly go cold, right? The police, in the end, declared her a runaway.”

  “She was last seen walking into the woods on this land,” March said.

  “Lots of kids hung out back in the woods,” Matthew said vaguely. He was still hoping Havenwood wouldn’t come up. She must know about it. Everyone who’d grown up here went there at some point, or had at least heard about it, didn’t they?

  “Two of the men questioned—the caretaker, and your friend Mason Brandt—were connected to this place,” March went on.

  Samantha and Jewel were both watching her, nodding. Jewel looked like she was about to say something, but Samantha held up a finger.

  “Look,” said March into the awkward silence that swelled between the four of them. “When I’m satisfied that there’s nothing here that might help me understand what happened to my sister, I’ll help you sell it. I promise.”

  “And what if you do find something?” asked Samantha.

  March shook her head, looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. “I don’t have an answer for that right now.”

  The old man wouldn’t have liked this. He was not a big fan of strangers, and obviously he’d kept her away all this time. If she had any real reason for suspecting Amelia’s disappearance had something to do with his family, this house, this land, she’d have been able to bring it to the police.

  “You could have been honest with us,” said Matthew, peevish.

  March gave him a dark look. “Historically, the Merle family has not been cooperative. Anyway, I am being honest. I will help you sell this place, and no one else local will.”

  He was about to tell her to go fuck herself. He’d find someone to sell Merle House, or he’d sell it himself. It wasn’t rocket science, right? He’d just get online and figure it out.

  “Of course you can have access,” said Samantha.

  “Sam,” he started. But she held up a palm.

  “If the answers are here, you deserve to have them, Avery.”

  March gave a little bow, put her hands together. “Thank you.”

  Matthew felt the weight of fatigue press down on his shoulders. Why were things always spinning out of his control? The harder he tried to hold on, the less effective he was.

  “I did see her,” said Jewel.

  A wave of sadness passed across March’s face.

  “No,” said Matthew firmly. “You knew about her. You gave yourself a nightmare, and you were sleepwalking.”

  “That’s not what happened,” said Jewel, getting angry, wobbly like when she was little—flushed, eyes tearing. “I wasn’t sleeping.”

  “I know that you believe it, kiddo,” said Samantha, putting a hand on their daughter’s leg. “But it’s just not possible. Our minds, in times of stress, they can play tricks on us.”

  Avery March caught Matthew’s eyes. In her gaze, he saw knowledge, accusation, fear. Matthew looked away quickly, back to Jewel and Samantha.

  “There are no ghosts here,” said Samantha into the heavy silence. “Or—anywhere.”

  Merle House seemed to wait a comic beat.

  They all looked up, startled, as the sound of something being dragged across the floor rang out loud and long.

  3.

  Ian’s assistant, Joshua, showed up around eleven, a full hour late. Millennials.

  “Yeah,” Josh said, reading Ian’s look, but not even having the decency to look flustered. “Sorry, man. I’m just so busy. My schoolwork load is epic. I just fell asleep at my desk, studying.”

  Floppy-haired, bearded, Josh was obviously stoned, eyes rimmed red, speech slow. Liz would have fired him on the spot. Ian was less exacting. Josh was just a warm body, someone to keep him company and make sure he didn’t fall asleep. Ian was less exacting about everything than Liz had been—the clients he took on, billing, paying the bills. The business, it must be said, was not doing well. Liz had a way of keeping everything going—moving this to pay that, delaying payment on that until cash flowed through from this. But Liz was gone. Her illness had all but cleaned them out. He was running on fumes in every sense.

  Once upon a time, they’d been flush. Before the recession, they couldn’t even take on all the people who wanted their services, which ranged from the very basic clutter clearing to the feng shui consulting that had been Liz’s thing before she and Ian had met. They’d expanded their business to “energy work,” as Liz had liked to call it, to space clearing, where they used the singing bowl to clean out stale energy after loss or tragedy—or a visit from the in-laws—to spiritual cleansing, which was more about what was living in your walls from the people who came before you. That was more involved, including prayer work, incense, and maybe a visit from a consulting medium.

  And then there was the outright exorcism. That was Ian’s thing before they’d met—paranormal investigator and, yeah, straight-up exorcist. Back then, there had been a waiting list for their services. Rich folks erecting McMansions, obsessed with success and convinced that Liz and Ian could help them by telling them how to arrange their furniture, or buying up historic properties and finding them already “occupied.” Sometimes whatever it was couldn’t just be nicely asked to move on. Some things had to be kicked out, hard.

  “Oh, sweet,” said Josh, eyeing the care package Astrid had left. “Are those snacks for us?”

  “Help yourself.”

  “Man, I’m famished.”

  Ian did the rounds.

  In the bedroom, he thought he might ha
ve felt a cold spot, took a couple of pictures with his camera. He’d develop the film himself old school in the darkroom they had back at the office. He moved through the hallways, peeking into the sparely but elegantly furnished rooms. Nothing. It was nearing midnight.

  He’d done an extensive search on the house, going back through the title history on the land. Sometimes it wasn’t the house. It was the plot on which the house was built that had the problem. On other projects, he’d discovered unsolved murders, missing persons, a graveyard, once the site of a mental hospital that had burned down. Each time, the original structure had been torn down, the land razed, recovered, eventually bought by developers to be built upon and sold at a profit. The new house built on the plot was clean.

  But the land, it held on.

  A haunting is not what you think, Liz would tell their clients. Places, like people, have memories. Trauma and pain disrupt and change the energy of the ground or the structures. Land, houses: they remember. And, for sensitive people, those memories are communicated in different ways.

  It all made a kind of sense, didn’t it? That houses and places remembered the bad things that happened to them. Like any troubled entity, they wanted to share their pain. Present themselves for healing, as Liz might say. Only the most sensitive people could feel this energy.

  Just one thing: it was pure bullshit.

  He had believed once, a long time ago. But Liz was right; he’d lost his faith. Not a good look in his line of work.

  He stopped into the room Astrid had confided she hoped would be the nursery, if her husband ever came around to the idea of children. We can’t just live our whole lives for ourselves, can we? Astrid had said, echoing something Liz had said once. Ian and Liz had tried for children. After two miscarriages, they’d given up.

  He finished the rounds, moving from empty room to empty room.

  Back in the kitchen, Josh had his books open, and it did in fact seem like he was studying, after having made a significant dent in the goody basket.

  Josh was a premed student, planning to become a psychiatrist and a Jungian analyst. He had an interest in the paranormal and psychic phenomenon, as Jung himself had, and was exploring the field for his senior thesis. If we know more about space than we do about our own brain, and researchers estimate that we’re only using 3 percent of it, as I see it, there are more questions than answers about what’s possible. That was the sentence that had gotten him hired; Liz had adored Josh, and they’d spent hours talking about his classes, his research.

  Ian sat across from him and opened a bottle of vitamin water, took a few sips.

  “How are classes going?” asked Ian.

  Josh nodded with his usual affability. “Good. Good. Just a lot, you know.” He massaged the back of his neck with a big hand. “How goes it here?”

  “Nothing so far.”

  “What about the house history?”

  “I traced ownership of the property back to 1950, then did some searches on the owners’ names. I didn’t come up with anything.”

  “No murders or burned-down mental hospitals?”

  “Not even an ugly divorce.”

  “Shame.”

  “Hmm.” Ian rummaged through the basket, came up with some chocolate-covered cashews.

  “Hey, can I ask you something?” said Josh, rubbing at his forehead.

  “Sure.”

  “Have you ever encountered something truly unexplained? Something really—just off the charts?”

  “Well, there was that place upstate.” He popped a cashew in his mouth, a nutty explosion of dark chocolate. “You were there.”

  Josh nodded. “Yeah, that was wild. Remember that howling?”

  “I’ll never forget it.”

  The owners had bought the old house in foreclosure, and moved in to start fixing it up. Every night around three, they’d wake to heart-wrenching howls of despair. At first they’d thought it was an animal trapped in the attic. Professional pest removers, plumbers, architects were called. No one could identify the source of the sound.

  The wife, a schoolteacher, had struggled with depression for the first time in her life. The house had been underwater financially; they couldn’t afford to move. Finally, the husband, referred by a friend, had called Liz and Ian.

  “If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be making this call, I’d have laughed out loud,” he’d told Ian. “I need you to clear this house.”

  A historical search on the home revealed that fifty years earlier, a young woman suffering severe, undiagnosed postpartum depression had killed her newborn and herself.

  “I never heard the actual wailing, though. Just the recording they had. Did you?” asked Josh now.

  “No.”

  They’d spent the night in the house with a psychic medium, prayed; Liz had walked the space with a singing bowl, chanting. The medium offered the young mother forgiveness, asked her to release herself from agony. There had been some strange noises in the house, and near dawn what might have been the slamming of a door. But no, they never caught anything on film. And more than that, he’d never seen anything, felt anything.

  Liz had been moved to tears. Ian—not so much.

  But according to the homeowners, it had worked. They had gone on to live happily in the house, had even been interviewed for a podcast about supernatural phenomena.

  “Other than that, though? Have you ever experienced anything that you didn’t understand? Anything that—you know—really scared the shit out of you? Something you knew was real.”

  The question sent a chill through him.

  “Yeah,” Ian admitted. “Once. When I was a kid.”

  “Was that at Merle House?”

  The name was like a little electric shock. Josh had serious eyes on him.

  “How do you know about that?” asked Ian. Would Liz have told him? Josh and Liz had talked a lot. Maybe. It wasn’t a secret. It was all out there, like everything, for anyone with a computer and a little bit of curiosity.

  “You’re not the only one who does their research,” said Josh, ripping into some vegan “cheese” puffs. “Can you talk about it?”

  Ian checked the monitors by flipping open his laptop and ticking through the images being broadcast from the various rooms. It was going to be another long, quiet night. He’d really only ever talked to Liz about what had happened, how it had formed him in a way, driven many of the choices that followed that summer he turned sixteen.

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  And just like that, he was back there.

  4.

  Summer didn’t start until Matthew Merle showed up at Ian’s door—usually about a week after school ended. Matthew would stand on the front stoop with his flop of dark hair, smattering of freckles, and a kind of glint in his eye. The kid was a laugh waiting to happen, a climbed tree, a built fort, fireflies in a jar, a swing from a rope into the cold water of the lake.

  They might message occasionally during the year, or see each other over the holidays. But their friendship really belonged to summer—to the heat and the long days, not a parent in sight most of the time. Matthew’s grandfather, Justice Merle, or “the old man,” as they used to call him, dwelled somewhere in the recesses of his giant house. He was practically a myth. They rarely saw him. If they did, he looked more like ghost than man. During the summer, they were the ultimate free-range kids—before that was even a thing.

  Once Matthew showed up, they’d go get Claire. She was the girl they both loved, though neither of them would ever acknowledge it, or even know what to do if she loved either of them back. Which of course she didn’t.

  They dwelled in a space of almost presexual innocence, or at least Ian did—though plenty of kids their age were getting high, getting laid, running amok. Not that he wasn’t looking at girls, thinking about them; he just had no idea what to do with them. It had to be said that he was pretty dorky, a decent student, a rule follower. Mostly. Ian thought about that time a lot, the freedom, th
e innocence of it. He wouldn’t lose his virginity until college.

  Eventually, usually when they were out in the woods at the old shack they called the fort, Mason would show up. He was the uninvited fourth of their group, but they were all too nice to kick him out. Plus, he always had . . . stuff. Sometimes money. Most often candy, cigarettes, dirty magazines, comic books.

  “Hey.” Mason was late to show up that summer. No one had said anything, Ian, for one, afraid to mention his name in case it conjured him.

  “When did you get into town?” he asked Matthew.

  “Just got in,” Matthew said vaguely. It had been about a week—a week of long days by the pool, traipsing through the woods, flashlight tag, cleaning out the fort, which had filled with leaves and other stuff that let them know they weren’t the only ones out there—cigarette butts, used condoms, an old sleeping bag.

  “Cool,” said Mason. He stood slim and unkempt by a tree, his skinny calves the same color as the white birch bark.

  “Saw you at the game,” Mason said to Ian. “Nice goal.”

  In spite of being a bit of a nerd, Ian did all right on the soccer field. “Thanks,” he said.

  Truth was, Mason was a pretty nice kid. It was just that there was something about him—his clothes were dirty and ill fitting, too big or too small. He looked out at the world from under bangs that needed trimming. As an adult, Ian got that Mason was a kid who was neglected at best, abused at worst. He was hurting, awkward and shy.

  The adult Ian had compassion for Mason. The kid Ian wanted to punch him for reasons he couldn’t explain. Maybe boys want to hurt weakness because it makes them feel stronger, because they’ve already internalized the cultural message that might makes right. Still, they all treated him with kindness, let him join the group. They all knew what it was like to feel left out. None of them were the kind of kids to hurt someone else’s feelings on purpose.

  “Did you hear about the missing girl?” Mason asked.

  “I heard she ran away,” said Ian.

  Amelia March was older, a just-graduated senior who wasn’t going to college and who worked at the pizza place. She’d smiled at Ian once, and her long black hair, her tight T-shirts and ripped jeans, occupied his thoughts some. She was a burnout—someone who smoked and did drugs and who was widely regarded as “cool.” There was gossip about how she’d run off. She wasn’t quite legal, still seventeen. But there hadn’t been a search and a media circus the way there had been years ago, when a much younger girl had disappeared and been later found safe at the bottom of a well.