Weiss' shaking continued, but the color had dripped steadily from his face so that I could no longer attribute it to rage. The man still looked like he wanted to kill me, but he looked scared, too.
“I've done my homework,” I added. “I know that your wife died in the house—that she struggled with mental illness. I know that your daughter ran off, too—that you guys didn't have a great relationship with her. I know that I have no business barging into your home like this, and believe me when I say I'm sorry to have done it. But until I get some answers... until I can understand what's happening to me... I don't have a choice. The way you're looking at me—the way you hung up on me before... why do I have a feeling that you know what I'm talking about? What can you tell me about the thing haunting that house, Mr. Weiss?”
There was silence as the old man leaned back in his chair. He smirked, lowering his gaze and giving his head a shake. When he finally looked up at me, his eyes had softened a touch, but his tone was as abrasive as ever. “Kid, you don't know what you're talking about. You don't know a damn thing.”
It was Weiss' turn to take the floor.
Thirty-Seven
“I wish you hadn't come here,” began Weiss, sighing. “I would have liked to live out the rest of my days without having to concern myself with this. That house was never meant to be lived in again—not after what happened there.” He looked wistfully to the living room, where the TV droned on, and for a second I thought he might make a break for it. The anger had gone from his face and there was only timidity there now. It looked out of place on his rough-cut visage. Dragging a palm against his smooth cheek, he fell into contemplative silence.
“What happened at the house?” I asked, crossing my arms. “There was a woman living nearby who told me some things about you and your family. She's lived in the neighborhood since the early eighties, and she shared some of the local gossip. I don't mean to be an ass, but the impression I got is that you left your wife to suffer in that house. She sounded like an ill woman, probably in need of psychiatric care. After your daughter ran out on you two, it seems she only got worse. I've heard tell that you weren't around much in those days—that you were sleeping your way around town. Be honest with me: Is that why Irma is still around? Does she have some kind of grudge that's keeping her spirit anchored to this world?”
I thought my explanation was pretty thorough and rational, but Weiss threw me for a loop.
He grimaced, massaging a tightened jaw. The anger was back for a moment. “You think you've got it all mapped out, eh? Then why the hell did you come here, you smartass?”
I didn't back down. “Well, it's the truth, isn't it? Or, do you have a different version of events? I mean, why else would your wife's spirit keep wandering the house?” It occurred to me that there were other spirits to account for as well. Perhaps dozens of them. For a while, I'd been hearing queer voices in the house. The croaking, demonic voice I'd come to associate with Irma was the one that most stood out to me, but there'd been others. The voices of two murderers—Ed Ames and Bradford Cox—had been heard in the ghostly throng as well. Rather than bombard Weiss with all of my questions about the various aspects of the haunting, I gave him time enough to answer the queries hitherto posed.
And he did, but not in the way I'd expected.
“You really have no idea what you're talking about,” replied Weiss. “The thing you're seeing... it speaks in a hundred voices, doesn't it? Terrible... monstrous voices...” He glanced up at me, cocking his head to the side. “It isn't Irma.”
“What?”
Weiss shook his head.
“Well, who is it, then?”
Licking his lips, the man took his time in answering. “You say you found a body behind the wall in the living room. What did you do with it?”
“I called the police, obviously. They carried it off,” was my reply.
Weiss glowered. “Of course you did, you fucking boy scout. And that's why you're finished. That's why you're seeing it. You let her out.” He planted his elbows on the table and folded his hands. “I can't believe you let her out.”
My head was splitting with questions, and the first one that made it out was, “You knew about the body, then? Who is it? Whose body is that, if not Irma's?”
With distance in his gaze, Weiss sighed into his clasped palms. “It's my daughter's. Fiona's.”
I let this sink in, and when it had, I chuckled derisively. “I don't have time for bullshit. The body behind that wall was aged—an old woman's. White hair, shrunken body. I saw her myself. The spirit that's been following me is slight and bent like an old crone. Your daughter ran off in, what, 1980? '81? That isn't possible. At this point she must be in her fifties—”
The old man struck the table with a beefy fist. “You're going to march into my house, claiming to be haunted by terrifying things, and you're going to tell me what's possible? Why don't you shut your mouth and let me finish. You might learn something.” He took a deep breath, reaching into the pocket of his sweatpants and pulling out an inhaler. His breathing had grown a bit labored, but after two puffs from the thing he was back to normal. “The body is Fiona's, yes. I know because I put it there myself.” There wasn't any remorse in his tone as he admitted to this. If anything, there was a kind of stubborn pride.
I didn't believe him, figured he was jerking me around, but I let him keep talking.
“It was a joint decision, actually. Irma and I had no choice, and after much debate we decided it was for the best. We couldn't let her live. Not after what she'd become... And after we did it, we made sure to spread that rumor—that she'd had it with us and had run off, like kids that age are wont to do. It was believable. No one questioned it. But in reality, Fiona hadn't gone anywhere. She'd been in the house all along.” He scowled at me again. “And she'd still be there, if not for your meddling ass. I don't understand it. Why would you want to live in that house? That neighborhood—the entire city—is a dump. You're young, you could live anywhere. Lots of houses to fix up in finer cities. Why the hell come here?”
I didn't have an answer at the ready. I shut up and took my lumps, waiting for him to start up again. When he was slow to do so, I egged him on a little. “So... you murdered her, then? Murdered her and hid her body behind a wall? That's sick. What could have driven you to do it? And you talk about it like it was a perfectly natural thing to do. Didn't you love your daughter?”
He snorted. “Stop running that mouth of yours. You don't know me, or my late wife. You don't know what we went through, either. Seeing as how you're looking for answers, I'll fill you in, but you'd better shut your trap.”
“All right,” I conceded. “I'm listening.”
Weiss sat up. “I'm a native of Maryland. Irma was, too. We tried for the first few years of our marriage to have children, but I was shooting blanks. We decided to adopt, instead. In 1970, we adopted an 8-year old girl, Fiona, from a Maryland orphanage just an hour from our home in Annapolis.”
“Annapolis?” I asked. The city name rang a bell—it was the place where Bradford Cox had killed a college student in 1952.
“That's right. The house had been my father's—and his father's before him. A gorgeous old German Colonial built on family-owned land in the 1800's. The plot it sat on, I guess, had once been a POW camp in the Civil War, but until we brought Fiona home, that had never meant anything to us.” He drew a deep breath, chewing on his lower lip. “Not a few days had passed since we'd brought Fiona home when she began acting strange. Adopted children—especially orphans who've been tossed around in the foster system—often have trouble adjusting to their new homes. But this... this was different.
“From the very start, that girl didn't like sleeping at night. I used to joke, early on, that she wasn't a girl, but an owl. You know what she told me? 'No, I'm not an owl. I'm a raven.' Well, we tried everything, but we couldn't get the girl to adhere to a normal schedule. She had dark circles under her eyes all the time. She looked ill, though the do
ctor couldn't find anything wrong. He gave us some sleeping pills for her to try. They didn't work, and Fiona remained nocturnal.
“My daughter—no, it doesn't feel right to call her that after what happened. That girl, she wasn't a normal child. We set her up at two different schools, but she had trouble fitting in. She lasted a week or two at each before Irma insisted we pull her out and homeschool her. That wasn't such a problem, since my wife was overjoyed at finally being a mother. Sitting with the girl, teaching her... I'd never seen Irma happier. But the girl, though she kept on with her studies, just behaved more strangely as time went on.
“I'd come downstairs at night to get a drink of water, and I'd see her sitting alone in the living room. Most kids at that hour, if they aren't asleep, they're watching television or sneaking a midnight snack. Not Fiona. No, that girl would be sitting in a chair, facing the wall, mumbling to herself. This behavior concerned us. We asked her why she was doing this, who she thought she was talking to. She insisted she had 'friends' in the house, and that she had to speak to them every night.
“There's nothing weird about a kid having an imaginary friend or two, but this quickly got out of hand. It wasn't just a quirk with her—she kept doing it to the point where it was uncomfortable for visitors to the house. We disciplined her, warned her to stop, but she'd still do it. From dusk till dawn. She'd stand in corners sometimes, or in the basement with the lights off, just whispering with people that no one else could see.
“Therapists told us that this was just Fiona's way of coping with stress; that she'd stop on her own time. But those therapists never listened in on the conversations the girl was having with these 'friends'. Irma came up to bed one night, in tears, because she'd heard Fiona mumbling to herself about murder. She used to recite rhymes—strange, disturbing ones—that she claimed to have learned from her special friends. Ravens figured into a lot of them. It was getting to be too much. Irma was at wit's end. We even considered taking her back to the orphanage, figuring we weren't cut out to be parents.
“But, no. We kept her. We pressed on. Because that's what you do, right? You can't just send the kid back like a defective appliance or something. That's not how parenting works. It's supposed to be hard. If it isn't difficult, you aren't doing it right.”
“So, you didn't take her back. You decided to raise her, despite the challenges. That's an admirable thing,” I said, trying to soften the grave mood.
Weiss was of a different opinion. “If I could go back and do it over again, I'd have slit the girl's throat the moment I laid eyes on her.”
Stunned by this admission, I let him continue.
“Like I said, we were at the end of our tethers, Irma and I. I mentioned earlier that the house was built on a POW camp, right? Well, I got it into my head that—just maybe—there was something in the house that the girl was particularly sensitive to. Spirits... ghosts. An old place like that, where a war was fought, is as likely a place as any to host some otherworldly things, and some people, I think, are more sensitive than others. I loved that old house, had grown up in it myself, but because I wanted to be a good father and to separate this girl from whatever spirits might have been on the property, I decided to sell it and move far out of Maryland.
“At that time, Detroit was a fine city. Lots of cheap houses, not nearly so much crime. It was a good place to raise a family, I thought. Taking the money I'd made in the sale of the old house, I bought a plot of land there on Morgan Road, built the house you've been fixing up. It was 1975, and I was damn proud of it. I felt like I'd really made a good decision, like this was the start of a new chapter for us. Maybe it would have been, if only we'd adopted a different little girl.”
“What happened when you moved to Detroit?” I asked. “Why didn't things work out as planned?”
“Because the girl brought her friends with her,” Weiss replied flatly. “Like ticks that'd hitched a ride on her skin, the spirits—whatever they were—followed her to Detroit, to the new house.”
I nodded, but was having considerable trouble understanding how such a thing was possible. “I don't get it. How could she bring spirits along? It's not like you can pack them in a bag, you know?”
“I couldn't properly explain it at that time, but I've had a lot of time to think since then, and there's one obvious explanation.” He arched his feathery brows. “She let them inside,” he said, patting his breast. “Invited them in.”
“Fiona... allowed herself to be possessed by the spirits in your old house?” I asked.
“To put it simply, that's exactly what she did. But when you let something like that inside, you find it isn't keen on leaving. Hold it in long enough, and it begins to change you. Damage you. A human body is made for one soul, young man. Have you ever stopped to consider what might happen if you inserted a second? A third? What about ten? Twenty?” Weiss cracked his knuckles. “Fiona began to change—slowly at first, but then radically. She was thirteen years old when we moved to Detroit, a notoriously difficult age as it is, but her moods got more and more wild. Rude or outright obscene outbursts were not uncommon, and sometimes they were even delivered in interesting new voices. That is to say, Fiona began speaking in voices besides her own—masculine voices, elderly voices... and then voices wholly lacking in human character.
“She knew things that she shouldn't have known. Started talking about news items—murders—that had taken place before she'd even been born. Talked about the killers themselves as if she knew them personally, in fact. And it turns out that she did know them, better than anyone else on this Earth, because she'd invited them in. Allowed herself to become seeded by them, infected. That's what she became—an infection, a walking disease. And it showed.
“She'd always looked tired, sickly, like I told you. It only got worse the more of them she allowed in. Her hair started to change—got whiter than my own,” said Weiss, tugging on his thin hair. “At some point, probably before the move, she'd been terrified at the prospect of losing her friends at the other house. So, in order to keep from losing them, she invited them into her own body. And it slowly killed her. She came to look so monstrous, so aged by the end, that she was unrecognizable.”
“Why would she do that?” I asked. “Why invite spirits into her body? Why bring them from Maryland?”
Weiss shrugged. “I've thought about that. I might have asked her outright, but by the time we realized what was happening, only they would respond to us. I think that Fiona's early childhood was probably hard. She spent a lot of time alone, had always wanted friends. Peculiar child that she was, she could see and communicate with things that the rest of us are usually fortunate enough to overlook. Having finally made a connection with someone, she didn't want to part with them when the time came to move. And when she became possessed by them, I think she liked the fact that they'd never leave of their own accord. They'd stay with her forever. It felt secure.
“But the ghosts she brought with her weren't enough after awhile. She started looking for more 'friends'. Though we kept her under lock and key, she'd run out some nights and go exploring. Sometimes, she'd go into the crawlspace and we'd hear her scurrying under the floors like an animal, chattering with the spirits. Other times, Irma and I would spend hours driving around the neighborhood looking for her, only to find her sitting in the old graveyard down the road, talking to the headstones. She found other restless souls there and brought them along. I don't know how many she absorbed into herself before all was said and done, but...”
I knew the tottering graveyard on Morgan Road very well. I'd woken up there that very morning, confused and soaked. Fiona had been drawn there, too—for the purpose of swallowing up new spirits. That was why I'd heard the voice of Detroit killer Edward Franklin Ames in the house. Fiona had spent time at that grave and had invited him in. She'd likely encountered Bradford Cox's spirit under similar circumstances, back in Maryland.
“Not that we didn't try a few things over the years,” continued Weiss. “Wh
en our terror outweighed the shame we felt at having a monster for a daughter, we did seek help. Two Catholic priests came to the house under the cover of night. An evangelical minister from Louisiana, too, who had a reputation for casting out demons. They did their best to rid our daughter of the spirits that had taken hold, but they got nowhere. And as they left, they all told us the same thing. They couldn't cast out things that had been put there willingly. The girl was holding onto them, and as long as she did that, they'd stay put.
“By the time she was about sixteen, we'd come to accept that Fiona would remain our private burden. When men of God couldn't help us, we did the next best thing and kept her hidden. She wasn't allowed out of the house. We kept her in her bedroom, the one with the lock on the outside of the door, and only went inside to deliver meals. Not that she ate them, mind you. By then, the girl was being nourished by something else and had no interest in worldly food or drink.
“On occasions where she'd get loose, we'd find her stalking around the property like an animal, staring into the windows of neighboring houses. The others along the street didn't know what we were going through. They thought the girl was homeschooled and that Irma was overprotective, yes. I think a lot of them thought that she must have been sick. They seldom ever saw her, except at a distance, and so it was easy enough for us to maintain those illusions. We stopped having company, stopped talking to our families once we got to Detroit. As out-of-towners, it was easy enough to keep to ourselves.
“We knew that we weren't going to live forever. That's why we decided that something needed done. We were afraid that she'd do something to us—she'd sometimes enter our bedroom and stare at us while we slept—and then escape into the world. We couldn't let that happen. We installed a padlock on the door to our bedroom to keep her out at night, but a person can only live that way, in constant fear, for so long.
The House of Long Shadows Page 22