The Invited (ARC)

by Jennifer McMahon

  “There’s an office set up in that blue trailer back there,” he told her, gesturing with his thumb. “You can pick up information and an application for the condos, apartments, office spaces.”

  “Actually,” Helen said, “I was just hoping to have a look around. I’m interested in local history and I understand the mill was once an important part of the town.”

  He nodded. “It sure was. Until the fire anyway. I suppose you can look around, if you want. Just steer clear of the work areas, okay? It’s not safe.” He started to turn away.

  “Do they know what caused it?” Helen asked. “The fire?”

  “I’m not sure they ever found out,” he said. “The worst of the damage was down at the north end.”

  “Where’s that?” Helen asked.

  “Here, I can show you,” he said. “I was heading down that way anyway.”

  She followed him down the walkway to the right. On their left, the massive old brick mill loomed. It was a beautiful building, three stories tall with large windows, a big bell tower over the front entrance. There were men on the roof, and she could hear power tools and hammering inside. Beyond it, she heard the murmur of the river. The man in the white hard hat walked quickly, speaking as he went along.

  “The story goes that management was tired of the girls sneaking out for smoke breaks or to meet their fellas or whatever it was they were sneaking out for. So they took to barring the doors from the outside once all the workers were in. Let ’em out when the bell rang for lunch, then at quitting time.”

  “They locked them in?” Helen was horrified. Her eyes fell on the tall doors leading into the mill, imagined fists pounding on them, the crushing weight of all those women trapped inside pushing, desperate for escape.

  “That’s what folks say. The ones who remember. The ones who made it out of the fire. I’m from right here in Lewisburg, so I grew up hearing the stories. That day, maybe someone was having a smoke inside because they couldn’t go out anymore? I guess we’ll never know how it started, but they say the building went up fast. Dry timbers, all that cotton.”

  They got to the end of the building, and Helen could see that the whole last quarter of it was redone in new brickwork, the bricks a more vivid red, the mortar more pale.

  “This whole end of the building was gutted. We had to tear it down, rip everything out, and rebuild.”

  Helen looked over to the right, down along the river where a massive amount of rubble had been bulldozed into a pile: burned and snapped boards and timbers, rusted machines and gears, a small mountain of bricks with black fire marks.

  “Since they couldn’t get out the doors,” he said, “they broke windows, jumped through. Some made it. A bunch didn’t.” He shook his head, the hard hat shifting a little. “Hell of a way to go.”

  Helen imagined what it must have been like to be trapped inside, lungs filling with smoke, the heat from the fire growing stronger, screams and chaos all around you. Hopefully it was the smoke that got them, not the flames.

  “You know,” he said, “between you and me, it’s probably a good thing you’re not interested in a condo.”

  “Why’s that?”

  He looked around, lowered his voice. “You couldn’t pay me to live here.”

  The skin on Helen’s arms prickled.

  This was it, she thought. This was why she’d come.

  “Yeah, I just had a whole crew, the HVAC contractors, quit on me last week. These weren’t wimpy guys, and they weren’t stoned teenagers—not the sort to get spooked easily, if you know what I’m saying.”

  “What happened?” Helen asked.

  “They were down in the basement, the lower level, working where the turbines used to be. They came tearing up the stairs, screaming. Three big dudes—they’d dropped their tools, they were pale and shaking and totally flipped out. They said they’d seen someone down there—a woman. Her face and arms were all burned up, skin just hanging off like loose wallpaper. That’s what they said.”

  Helen said nothing, just waited. He went on.

  “We went down to look, me and some other guys. There was no one down there of course. But you could smell something. Kind of like burnt hair . . . or burnt flesh. No reason for a smell like that down there.”

  “Wow,” Helen said. “Incredible.”

  “Yeah, that HVAC crew never came back. And lots of other freaky stuff has happened. Guys seeing and hearing things. Tools going missing. Lights turning on and off. The place is haunted. No doubt.” He looked at the building long and hard. “I mean, when you think about it, how could it not be?”

  Helen looked, too, then her eyes moved from the newly rebuilt section to the junked materials from the original mill.

  Helen took a few steps forward, picked up one of the discarded bricks that hadn’t made it to the large pile. It was old and worn, most likely made from red clay and kiln fired, and one side was stained black. She could almost smell the smoke. Feel the heat. Hear the screams of the women as they beat on the latched door.

  “What are you going to do with all this?” Helen asked, gesturing at the rubble, still clutching the brick, not wanting to let it go. It felt almost alive to her: alive with history, alive with the things it had seen and heard, the tragedy it had been a part of.

  He frowned, surprised by the change of subject, or maybe by the stupidity of the question.

  “Have it carted off to the landfill.”

  It seemed terrible to her, to have materials with such history just thrown away. They should be in a museum. Or used to build a memorial for the people who died in the factory fire. Not just thrown in the dump.

  “Even the bricks?”

  “All of it.”

  “Mind if I take some? My husband and I, we’re building a house, trying to incorporate local materials—things with history. These bricks would be perfect.”

  He gave her a puzzled, slightly amused grin. “Sure, Madame Historian. Knock yourself out,” he said. “Take ’em all if you want. I guess they are a one-of-a-kind item.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  . . .

  Nate came out of the house to meet her when she pulled into the driveway. He looked excited. “Look what I found in the hunting area at the general store,” he said, holding up a box. “I walked into town to grab a sandwich for lunch and spotted this.”

  Helen looked. “An outdoor wildlife camera?”

  He nodded enthusiastically. “It’s got night vision! It’s motion activated. And I can set it up so that it sends the images and videos right to my laptop.”

  Helen looked at the orange price sticker: $110.

  “Great,” she said, thinking that she could only imagine the rumors going through the town now. Witchcraft books, night-vision cameras—she could almost understand why people were freaked out by the two of them.

  “Oh, and I got most of the plumbing finished in the downstairs bathroom,” he said. “All that’s left is the flange for the toilet.”

  “Fantastic,” Helen said. She’d been amazed by how fast Nate had picked up working with the copper pipe. He had a real knack for soldering—all his joints were perfect every time. “I think maybe you were a plumber in a past life!”

  He grinned at her. “How were your errands?” he asked.

  “Look what I got for us,” she said, showing him the pile of bricks she’d loaded into the back of the truck.

  “Wow! Where’d they come from?”

  “An old mill. They’re renovating it, turning it into condos and offices. I got the bricks for free.”

  “Cool,” Nate said. “How’d you find them?”

  Hattie sent me.

  “Craigslist,” Helen said without missing a beat. “I thought we could use them for the hearth for the woodstove.”

  “I thought we were going to use slate from the quarry in town,”
Nate said, frowning a little. They’d visited the quarry, and Nate had loved the texture and gray-green color of the stone.

  “We can still get that and use it for something else. Maybe the kitchen floor?”

  “I think that might be a little pricey,” Nate said. He was already worried that they were over budget. The money they’d inherited from Helen’s father had seemed like so much at first, more than enough to build with and live on for at least a year. But there had been unexpected outlays: the price of lumber up here was higher than they’d originally budgeted for; the professional furnace and water heater install took a huge chunk of money; the ongoing expense of all the beer, wine, and take-out food because cooking in the trailer was depressing and difficult. The money was going fast. Faster than they’d imagined and planned for. Helen looked at the accounts and was sure they’d have more than enough to finish the house, but she worried that Nate might be right—if they kept going at this rate, they wouldn’t have much left over to live on. They hadn’t thought much about what they were going to do for income when the time came—it seemed so far away.

  Of course, it didn’t help that Nate was splurging on hundred-dollar night-vision cameras. She shook the thought away, told herself she was being petty.

  “Maybe we could get the rejected slate pieces for cheap, you know? The weird shapes that broke and aren’t square. I think it could work. We could do like a funky mosaic thing.” Her dad had done a floor like that for an artist friend of his and it had turned out beautifully.

  “Maybe,” Nate said.

  “These bricks—they were just so cool, and I love knowing that they came from a real mill up the road. Think about it. It’s like I pick one up and feel this instant connection to the past. I can practically smell the grease, hear the hum of the looms, feel the cotton dust in the air.”

  Smell the smoke of the fire, she thought.

  If installing the beam had helped Hattie come back, would installing the bricks draw one of the mill workers back? The burned woman with skin hanging off that the contractors had seen in the basement, maybe?

  She shivered.

  Nate smiled at her, kissed her nose. “I love you. I’m not at all sure that cotton dust is a thing, but I love that you imagine it is. And saving these bricks from the landfill by reusing them in our house—can’t really complain about that.”

  “Cotton dust is definitely a thing,” she said. “Wanna help me unload these?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  She moved the truck up closer to the house, pulled down the tailgate, and they started pulling the bricks out, putting them in a stack next to the house.

  “These are in pretty good shape. They’ll have to be cleaned up,” Nate said. “All the old mortar scraped off.”

  Helen nodded.

  “Some of them look like they’re from a chimney stack or something. They’re all black on one side.”

  Helen said nothing, feigning ignorance as she continued to stack the bricks. At last, she said, “You were up and out early this morning.”

  “Went out for a walk. That heron was in the bog again. Such a beautiful bird.” There was that wistful look he got again, the one that reminded Helen of his deep love and respect for nature. “I got some good shots of it. I was thinking I’d print the best one, maybe have it framed? We could start a sort of gallery up in our library with photos of the local wildlife. Maybe even some of my sketches as I get better at it?”

  “I love it,” Helen said, gathering an armload of bricks to bring to the house. “Did you see your white deer?”

  He hesitated a moment, then said, “No.”

  He was leaving something out, she was sure of it. And she felt oddly comforted, knowing that she wasn’t the only one who wasn’t telling the whole truth.

  “But I do wonder if maybe there’s a group of them. I’ve been reading about these white Seneca deer in New York. It’s really interesting—there’s a population of about two hundred of them living on a protected reserve that was once an old army depot. They’re white-tailed deer, but they’re leucistic, which means they lack pigmentation in the hair. They’ve got brown eyes, not pink like true albinos.”

  “Leucistic, huh?” Helen said. She loved how excited Nate got when he learned something new like this, like he couldn’t wait to share it. Mr. Science in action.

  “Wouldn’t it be amazing if we had something like that here? A whole population of white deer! I was thinking I could do a study, write a paper.”

  Nate had been talking about one day writing articles and papers for scientific journals since she’d met him, but back in Connecticut he’d never had the time or found a subject inspiring enough.

  “Sounds great, hon,” she said, only half paying attention because her mind was on other things. She was working out the best way to get the bricks into the house as soon as possible, to test out the theory and see who, or what, they might call back.

  . . .

  She was dreaming about the fire. She was in the factory beside other women who had to shout to be heard over the deafening thrum of the looms, the machines making the walls and floor vibrate, turning the mill into a living thing.

  “Fire!” someone shrieked. “Run!”

  And then she smelled the smoke, turned and saw the flames, how they licked up the far wall like the tongue of a great demon, gobbling the dry wooden beams, the painted floor and ceiling. She ran to the front doors, her and a throng of women and girls in their plain dresses with work aprons over the top, hair pulled back. They pushed, they pounded and clawed and screamed, but the heavy wooden door did not budge.

  Trapped. They were trapped.

  She thought of the windows. Thought that if they were calm, if they could all get to the windows and break through them, they could escape. But the women, in full panic now, screaming, choking on the smoke, which had grown black and thick, kept pushing at the doors, at the women between themselves and the door. She was pinned there, pressed tight by the bodies around her. She could not move.

  Helen opened her eyes, took a gasping breath of cool air.

  She was not in the factory being crushed against the locked door while flames overtook the building.

  But where was she?

  Who was she?

  I am Helen, she told herself, taking a deep breath, trying to slow her racing heart. I’m married to Nate. We used to live in Connecticut where we were both middle school teachers. Now we live in Vermont and are building our own house.

  She reached for Nate beside her, but he was not there.

  She rolled over, realized she was not in her bed but on the plywood subfloor of the unfinished house.

  Her head ached and felt foggy.

  It was the smoke. The smoke from mill.

  But that was only a dream.

  There was a little pile of half a dozen bricks from the mill beside her, one side of each stained black. There was a flashlight beside them, turned off.

  She’d snuck back up to the house after Nate had gone to bed and brought the bricks into the house, hoping that they might trigger something, that they might pull someone back. But after sitting in the dark with the bricks for a while, she realized her mistake. Hattie had come back not just because of the beam, but because she had a connection to this place. What reason would one of the mill workers have to show herself to Helen? To come back to a little half-built house at the edge of a bog in Hartsboro, forty miles from where the mill once stood. She’d been debating going back down to the trailer but decided that she’d stay a little while in case Hattie decided to show up again. Maybe Hattie would give her a sign about what she was supposed to do next. She must’ve dozed off on the floor, waiting in vain.

  She sat up, pushed the button on her watch: 3:33 a.m.

  She was in the opening between the kitchen and the living room, under the hanging tree beam, facing into the kitchen. She
studied the corner where she’d seen Hattie three weeks ago. She looked up at the beam, at the dark shape in the dim moonlight that filtered through the windows.

  There were voices behind her. Whispering. Talking so low, it sounded more like radio static than human voices, but she knew that’s what they were. She could recognize the ebb and flow of conversation, of two people trying not to be heard.

  Was Nate here?

  She had an absurd thought then: that she would turn and he’d be there, talking with his white doe; that the deer was actually Hattie, just like Riley said. They’d be sitting together, and the deer would be whispering to him, speaking perfect English, singing him a little song maybe . . . Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy. Or maybe something else. Something strangely romantic—Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me—as she looked up at him with her big, glossy doe eyes.

  She heard a giggle, but it was all wrong—low and crackly, like it was coming through a far-off AM radio station. She didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know what was there, behind her.

  Slowly, she forced herself to turn her head and look, to see who, or what, was behind her.

  There, sitting in the living room in the place the new brick hearth would go, was Hattie. She was on a stool. Where does a ghost get a stool? Helen wondered. Hattie was wearing the same white dress she’d had on the last time Helen had seen her, but there was no rope around her neck. She was smiling, laughing. And at her feet, a young woman sat, having her hair braided by Hattie. The woman shared Hattie’s dark hair and eyes. Helen saw the young woman wore a plain blue dress, but it was tattered and burned, stained brown and yellow from smoke. And she carried the smell of smoke on her; Helen caught a whiff of it in the air.

  This must be Hattie’s daughter, Jane. The one no one knew what had happened to.

  But Helen knew.

  The pieces clicked into place. She didn’t know the details yet, but she was sure of one thing: Hattie’s daughter, Jane, had died in the fire at the mill.

  “Jane?” Helen said, and the woman looked up at her, opened her mouth to speak, to tell Helen something, something important, Helen knew, but no sound came out.