by Cindy Winget
Annabel looked like she was about to say something to him about his use of the phonograph but thought better of it. With a slight shake of the head she said, “We will all need to hold hands, and I want you to remain as still and quiet as possible while the séance is being conducted.”
They all took a seat and reached for each other’s hands. “Good.” Annabel nodded in approval and shut her eyes. She remained quiet for a time.
“Are there any spirits who wish to commune with us?” Annabel spoke to the room. Dr. Montague glanced at the planchette, but it remained stationary. “Are there any spirits who wish to commune with us?” Annabel repeated. Still no response.
“If there is someone in this room, please give us a sign.” On the last word, the window to his left flew open and a sharp, cold wind set the curtains in a whirl and rustled the paper on the table, which would have gone flying off the table if not for the weight of the planchette.
Dr. Montague made to get up to close the window, but Annabel cried, “Don’t break the circle!”
Judging by Theo’s wide eyes and Eleanor’s bottom lip trapped between her teeth, they believed that this was a sign they were no longer alone. That a ghostly visitor was in the room with them. Dr. Montague, however, thought that it very well could be a coincidence. There was no hard evidence that some supernatural force had opened that window. The wind itself could have blown it open.
“Dear spirit. If you can hear me, please indicate using the planchette,” Annabel was saying.
To Dr. Montague’s surprise, the thin heart-shaped planchette moved on its casters and traveled to the previously written word yes.
“Are you the ghost of the previous owner of this house?”
The planchette rolled backwards and then resumed its spot above the word yes.
“Do you wish to commune with us?”
The planchette moved over a few inches to the previously written no.
Annabel opened her mouth to say something, but before she could the planchette started moving again, writing out its own message with the pencil.
“This spirit is strong,” marveled Annabel.
When the planchette ceased its movement, they all leaned in to read what was written upon the piece of paper. Get out!
This was amazing! Actual contact. A message written from the beyond.
The table began to shake. As one, they all broke the circle of held hands and slid back from the table, watching in wonder as it floated up an inch or two and then slammed back down to the hardwood floor.
Just as suddenly as it began, the table sat still.
For several minutes, no one moved. “Let’s all form the circle once more and try again,” Annabel decreed, scooting her chair towards the table and holding her left hand out to Luke and her right hand out to Dr. Montague. He eagerly took it and moved in closer. The others followed suit.
“Oh, spirit who dwells here, why is it that you wish us to leave?” Annabel asked.
No movement came from the planchette. The wind, which had settled into a gentle breeze, moved the hair on top of Dr. Montague’s head, and he reached up to settle it back into place.
Annabel tried again, “Why must we leave this house? Are you afraid?”
A leather-bound book flew off one of the shelves and hit Luke in the back of the head. “Ow!” he cried out.
Another flew off the shelf next to it and hit the table with a clatter. Then another and another, faster and faster, began flying off the shelves, hitting Dr. Montague, Annabel, his three assistants, the table, or the floor. Shielding themselves with their arms, the group stood and sprinted for the door. Even when they were well away from the library, they could still hear books flying about the room.
“Well! I must say. I am glad you called me, John,” said Annabel.
“I’ll admit, I thought your methods superstitious and doomed to failure, but obviously we got a response!” said an elated Dr. Montague.
“I’ll go back in there later and perform a séance on my own. Apparently, having us all in there at once is too much for our resident ghost,” replied Annabel. “I would also like to perform one in the nursery since the cold spot has returned, which indicates a spirit who is drawing energy from the air in order to manifest.”
So she had noticed. Dr. Montague wanted to protest, citing the fact that it was too dangerous, but he knew that Annabel wouldn’t listen. She was going to do what she wanted, and he had no say in the matter.
Chapter Sixteen
Studious by nature, Egaeus sat in his reading chair in the library, as he did most nights. The fire crackled merrily in the fireplace, casting gloomy shadows upon the walls. A storm raged outside, causing the close-growing trees to bend and sway in the fierce wind, scraping along the windowpanes with an irritating tapping. The rain beat upon the rooftop, making the house groan and creak. Egaeus hardly heard this cacophony of sound as he took another sip of his hot tea.
His enjoyable pastime was interrupted by the entrance of his cousin, Berenice. It was only the two of them in this large, drafty house, and she made it a point to spend time with him every day lest they drift into their own corner of the house and never see each other. Afterall, they were due to be married soon, it having been the wish of both sets of parents to keep the fortune in the family and to keep the bloodlines close.
Conversely to her cousin’s whims, she was social by nature and talked endlessly to Egaeus on subjects that inevitably bored him: the latest fashions, what the new Season would hold as far as social gatherings and dinner parties, how to update and decorate their ancestral home.
As she started in on one such topic, taking a seat in the chair opposite him, Egaeus began to notice what large teeth Berenice had. Were they always so white? As she chattered on and on about the fabulous new bonnet she had just acquired, Egaeus’s gaze hardly left his cousin’s mouth.
He suffered from a type of obsessive disorder, a monomania wherein a partial insanity takes over as a single pathological preoccupation in an otherwise sound mind. This disorder caused him to fixate on objects. Such was taking hold now as he stared at Berenice’s teeth. He wondered idly what they would look like unattached from her gums. He wished to hold them and gaze upon every angle of each tooth.
Over the course of the next several days, Egaeus’s mind returned time and again to Berenice’s teeth. His longing to see them became such that he would often steal into Berenice’s room at night, pull her lips away from her gums, and gaze at her teeth for several hours, until morning light or the stirrings of his cousin, forced him to leave Berenice’s bedchamber. He found himself trying more and more to make her smile and laugh so that her teeth were on display.
Far from understanding that Egaeus had become pathologically fixated on her teeth, Berenice was thrilled that the man she was soon to marry seemed so agreeable and lighthearted. She laughed at every joke he told and smiled at him across the dinner table as he seemingly listened raptly to her tales of gossip or admonished him to begin redecorating this mansion at once, as it was much too old-fashioned and brutish for her liking.
Berenice, who had once been quite fetching, had become rather homely over the years as she had suffered from a mysterious malady of the muscles. This degenerative condition was characterized by muscular rigidity and fixity of posture regardless of external stimuli, as well as a decreased sensitivity to pain. She was grateful to her cousin for taking on the responsibility of caring for her, and not having to suffer through another Season without her good looks.
A few weeks later, Berenice succumbed to one of her episodes, as Egaeus was want to call them, but this time did not come out of it in a few moments as she always had before.
A servant came to Egaeus as he sat reading in the library and told him the dire news. “She is to be buried in the morning,” the servant informed him.
At first, this did not duly alarm Egaeus. Although he was fond of his cousin, he did not relish living out the remainder of his days with such a chatterbox. The life o
f a lonely, old bachelor rather suited him. But as the night wore on, he realized with incredible force that Berenice’s teeth would be buried along with her. Those brilliant, dazzling teeth would remain forever hidden from him in the cold earth.
No. This couldn’t be. He couldn’t let it happen. But what was there to do? Berenice had to be buried. Her corpse could not decorate his home for long, for the smell would grow terrible, and the flies would begin to swarm and infest her body. But those teeth. How could he let them out of his sight forever?
He lay awake in bed that night pondering on what was to be done. He dozed fitfully and awoke often, Berenice’s teeth being the last things he thought of as he drifted off and the first upon waking. In time, he fell into a deep sleep and did not awake until early afternoon. As he went down for breakfast, the servant informed him that Berenice had already been buried in the catacombs below the house. The staff had not wanted to awaken him, for they knew what a dark and sleepless night he had passed.
But that meant the teeth were already gone! No last glimpse of them before the burial! Despair washed over Egaeus. He tossed and turned again that night, sleeping in fretful bursts between visions of Berenice’s teeth. When morning finally came, he didn’t feel at all rested.
He stumbled down to breakfast and was met by his valet. “Good morning, Sir. How did you sleep?”
“Not well, Wilbur.” Egaeus hung his head in exhaustion and grabbed a piece of bacon from the silver tray in front of him.
“I am sorry to hear that, Sir,” said Wilbur. “I am afraid I have some rather upsetting news to tell you.”
“Nothing could upset me after the night I’ve had,” replied Egaeus.
“Berenice’s grave has been disturbed and her body disfigured.”
What!?
Without a word, Egaeus left the table and hurried to his bedchamber. To his immense horror, upon closing the door, he discovered a lamp and a medium-sized black box sitting upon his bureau. He could not account for how they had gotten there. Indeed, the black box was entirely unknown to him. With trepidation, he looked for his nightclothes. Finding them in a bundle in the corner, he was alarmed to see that they were covered in dirt and blood.
What had he done?
Afraid that his suspicions were true, he tiptoed to the bureau upon which sat the ominous ebony container. With trembling fingers, he opened the box and found that it contained dental instruments, along with thirty-two small ivory objects. Picking one up, he shuddered.
Berenice’s teeth.
Theo sat up in bed with a gasp, feeling clammy and shaky. Finding that she had broken out in a cold sweat, she swiped the back of her hand across her forehead.
What was that sound?
She listened carefully and soon became aware of a presence upon her bed. She could feel the weight of it. The noise was emanating from that spot. Theo slowly turned her head, her heart beating fast, for she now recognized the sound.
Her suspicions were confirmed when she found that dreaded black feline curled up beside her, purring contentedly.
Chapter Seventeen
Theo leaped from the bed with a shout, ran to the door, and threw it open. Looking back to make sure the cat did not pursue her, she discovered that it was gone, vanished into thin air.
Glancing at the adjoining bed, she saw that Eleanor had already risen. Theo dressed quickly in a yellow long-sleeved shirt and blue striped skirt and then walked down to breakfast. She found Dr. Montague in his familiar chair drinking his coffee and reading the newspaper. Eleanor and Luke were both absent, having already eaten.
Theo greeted Dr. Montague with quiet pleasantries, grabbed a bagel from the sideboard, smeared it generously with cream cheese, and wandered down to the sitting room down the hall. She was surprised to find Luke already there, reading a book.
“You’re reading?”
Luke looked up. “Yes,” he said, drawing out the word while crooking one eyebrow. “Should I not be?”
“No. Go ahead and read if you want to. You just don’t seem the type to enjoy a good book by the fire.”
“There isn’t a fire, so you may be right.”
Theo rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean!”
Luke used a piece of paper to mark his spot and closed the book. “What is it exactly about me that doesn’t seem the type to read? Not intelligent enough?”
“No,” Theo defended. “I just can’t picture you liking to read. You seem more…athletic.”
“Athletic. Hmmm…what type? I do enjoy hiking, but I suppose you mean that I come across as a neanderthal whose sole purpose in life is to catch a ball?”
“Honestly, Luke, I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just surprised, that’s all. Can we drop it?”
Luke grinned. “You’re fun to rile up. That’s why I do it. Your face gets all red.”
“It does not!” Theo insisted, hating the fact that she could feel hot blood rushing to her neck and cheeks as she said it.
Luke laughed. “See?”
Theo slugged him on the shoulder and sat down beside him. “Don’t let me disturb you. Keep reading.”
“The truth of the matter is, I don’t read a whole lot. But there isn’t really much else to do here.”
Theo saw his point. “There’s the game room.”
“By myself?”
“No, you could always ask Eleanor or Dr. Montague to play with you. I’m sure they’ve both been dying to play a game of billiards.” She tried to keep a straight face but failed, letting forth a braying laugh that embarrassed her.
“I think you’re right. And I’ll bet Eleanor is a killer poker player.”
They both laughed. “You slay me!” proclaimed Theo.
They lapsed into comfortable silence and Theo’s thoughts began to wander back to her dream of this morning. Should she tell Luke about it?
“What are you thinking of so intently?” Luke asked.
Deciding to take a chance, Theo said, “I have been having some unsettling dreams lately.”
“Dreams? What about?”
“The first was about my brother. He drowned when we were young children.” She put her hand up before Luke could comment. “It happened a long time ago and I don’t like to talk about it.”
“Fair enough.”
“But then the dream changed,” Theo continued, “into a dream about a man whose wife died, and he remarried only to have her die as well. Before his very eyes, the corpse began to breathe and rise up, but when the death shroud came off, it was his original wife, back from the dead, not the second.”
“Strange. But then again, dreams often are. I mean most dreams make little sense. Besides, Dr. Montague told us that Hugh Crain had several wives die in this very house, so maybe your subconscious is simply mulling over the story you heard and then, like dreams frequently do, it morphed into something else.”
“This was different. I can’t explain it, but it felt like no other dream I’ve ever had. Too vivid and full of emotion. I actually felt like the people in the dream; I thought what they thought, felt what they felt. I have scarcely been able to think about anything else since.”
“What of the other dreams?” asked Luke.
“I had one this morning that was really unnerving. It couldn’t have come from anything that I know of. I haven’t read or heard a story about anything like it before. Nothing to explain why I would have such a terrible dream.”
“What was this dream about?” Luke prompted.
“Well, there was a man named Egaeus—a name I’ve never heard of, by the way—and he suffered from some sort of psychosis that made him fixate on things to the point of obsession. He became preoccupied with his cousin’s teeth, and when she passed away, he couldn’t stand the thought of them being buried down in the crypt below the house, where he couldn’t see them, so he desecrated her corpse and pulled out every single tooth! He kept them in a black box on his bureau.”
“Gee whiz! That’s awful!” Luke said.
“Tel
l me about it.”
As her mind went over the details of her dreams, she realized something with disturbing comprehension. “Luke, you may be on to something. It’s just dawned on me that each dream took place at Hill House.”
“So maybe your mind is conjuring up these nightmares because of the history of the house. Your psyche is trying to make sense of it all. This house is haunted, you know.” He waggled his eyebrows at her.
“Stop that!” she told him, pushing his shoulder playfully. “I know that Hill House is supposedly haunted, but—”
“Supposedly? Says the woman who has had specters knocking on her door at night.”
“You’re right. I’ve just been a disbeliever for so long that I keep thinking that there must be a logical explanation for what happened.”
“You often experience knocking on your door late at night?” He folded his arms.
“No. But—”
“And at a height no one can reach?”
“No. But anyone could grab a cane or pipe or stand on a step stool and bang on the walls,” Theo pointed out.
“Yeah, but why?”
“I don’t know why. Maybe Dr. Montague wants to frighten us.”
“Again. Why would he do that? That would ruin the credibility of his own experiment. He’s a scientist.”
“Yeah. But we don’t really know him.”
“I still don’t think that he’s the type.”
“I didn’t think you were the type to read books.” Theo threw her hands up. “Look, all I’m saying is that we don’t really know what type of man he is.”
“And the little girl laughing or being allegedly abused?” Luke asked.
“It could have been a recording.”
Luke crooked an eyebrow. “Do you honestly think that Dr. Montague dragged us up here to Hill House and paid us so that he could ‘scare us’?”
Theo paused. Her shoulders slummed before saying, “No. I don’t. I am just trying to make a point.”