Waiting Spirits

by Bruce Coville

  The ghosts were playing “Bill Bailey” again. Lisa smiled. It was such a lively song. Almost against her will, she found herself heading for the stairway. Then she remembered the last incident and was afraid. Yet the music sounded so happy that it seemed nothing frightening could be lurking below.

  She made her way down the steps, stopping on the last one.

  Two figures were seated at the piano. One was a woman, the same one who had attacked her a few nights ago. The other was man, dressed in an elegant silk robe. They sat side by side, pounding on the piano, filling the room with the raucous notes of “Bill Bailey.” Lisa found herself smiling.

  Then she felt a hand on her shoulder.

  The music died at the sound of her scream. The spirits turned in shock, then vanished.

  Lisa’s grandmother put her other hand on Lisa’s hair and stroked it. “I’m sorry I frightened you, child. I just needed to touch something real.”

  “You heard it?” asked Lisa.

  Her grandmother nodded.

  “You saw them?”

  She nodded again, a distant look in her eye.

  Lisa felt as if they had switched places. She saw something childish in her grandmother now, something small and scared that needed protection.

  But Carrie needed protection, too.

  “Then let’s not play games any more,” said Lisa firmly. “You know what’s going on here. You know who haunts this place. Tell me!”

  Dr. Miles nodded, and Lisa could see a world of sorrow in her eyes. Tears rolling down her cheeks, the old woman whispered, “It’s my mother.”

  Chapter Ten

  The Madness of Myra Halston

  “So foolish,” said Dr. Miles, reaching out and brushing her fingers against Lisa’s cheek. “Young and foolish. Old and foolish. Each of us so foolish.”

  Lisa took her grandmother’s hand in hers. The skin was rough and dry, but the hand was filled with life. “What do you mean?” she whispered.

  “Both of us,” said Dr. Miles. “But mostly me. Foolish pride, foolish rationality. I don’t know what I was trying to prove, coming back here, bringing you all back with me. Is this house haunted? I guess it must be. I know it has haunted me for over half a century—nestled in my mind like a worm in an apple, hidden away and gnawing at the core of things.”

  Lisa shivered at the gruesome analogy. After a moment of silence she squeezed her grandmother’s hand.

  “Why?” she whispered. “Why does it haunt you?”

  Dr. Miles sighed. “Four of the people I loved most in all the world died here.”

  Lisa shivered again. It seemed to her that was reason enough for any house to be haunted. Putting her hand on her grandmother’s back she whispered, “Let’s go upstairs.”

  Dr. Miles walked beside Lisa docilely, like a child who has just been scolded. They went into the old woman’s room. “Get into bed,” said Lisa.

  Her grandmother nodded and sat on the edge of her mattress. Lisa was beginning to wonder if she would have to lift the old woman’s legs onto the bed for her when Dr. Miles seemed to come back to herself. She put a pillow behind her back, tucked her legs under the covers, then patted the spot next to her.

  Lisa went to the far side of the bed and climbed up beside her grandmother. She tucked her feet underneath her, cross-legged, and pulled the edge of the coverlet across her knees. “Tell me about it,” she ordered.

  Her grandmother looked small. Sitting up against the head of the bed, her unbound hair spread across her shoulders, she stared into the distance, her eyes blank and unfocused. Lisa had the feeling that even though she was looking across the room, she was not seeing the mirror on the wall or the fastidiously tidy dresser. She was looking into the past and remembering whatever it was she had tried so desperately to forget.

  Smoky wandered into the room and jumped up between them. Dr. Miles reached out and began to stroke the gray cat. For a moment there was no sound but Smoky’s rumbling purr.

  Finally, Dr. Miles began to speak. Her voice was small and tired sounding, and Lisa had to strain to hear her.

  “It happened in 1935, when I was twelve years old. We had summered here from the time I was about two. My mother, my father, myself—and my little sister, Carrie. Times were different then. We had managed to escape the Depression, and in fact were better off than you and your parents. We had servants to take care of things—a maid and a cook who came during the day. And a nurse who lived in, taking care of Carrie and me.

  “My mother was a sick woman. I didn’t recognize it at the time. Oh, I did, I suppose. But it’s not something you admit to yourself easily. Even less so in those days. She was physically sick, frail and quickly exhausted. But her sickness was deeper than that, really. She was afraid—of almost everything. Afraid of dying. Afraid of living. God knows what went on in her own childhood to make her that way. But that’s the way she was.

  “I loved her anyway, without reservation, as children do.

  “Despite my mother’s illness, my early childhood was happy. That was before the depression arrived. A kind of giddiness seemed to infect the whole country then. We were mindlessly happy, it seems to me now. But it was wonderful at the time and when you’re at that age, what do you know about those things anyway? Happy is happy.”

  She gave Lisa a wan smile and squeezed her hand. “The time you’ve hard for growing up in hasn’t been quite so sweet,” she said sadly. “Oh, I don’t think it’s been all that bad for you. But the shadows are longer now than they were then. It all changed in 1945.”

  Lisa gave her a puzzled look.

  “Oh, study your history child. That was the year we blew up Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and learned that our planet was as mortal as we are. I always thought a great dividing line was drawn then. No one born after that time can understand what it was like to grow up without that shadow.

  “But that’s beside the point. We were here. And except for an occasional episode involving my mother, we were happy….”

  As Dr. Miles continued the story, Lisa felt herself drawn into the past, absorbed by the web of sorrow and despair that had wrapped itself around her grandmother’s happy childhood all those years ago.

  Myra Halston was beautiful. Pale and too slender, she nevertheless projected an air of elegance and vulnerability that attracted men, whether she wanted to or not.

  Her husband, Harrison, was a successful stockbroker, and she was the one great treasure of his life. In no sense was she a helpmate; she was far too frail for that. To Harrison Halston she was like a rare orchid, delicate and lovely and needing special care. So every summer he brought her to Sayers Island because the doctors had told him that sea air would do her good. He built her a house and hired servants to make sure she was not overworked. He did his best to ease her troubled mind.

  But his best was not good enough, especially when outside events came crashing in on them.

  Ellen McCormack was Carrie and Alice’s nurse, and the two girls loved her desperately. She was everything their mother was not: large and robust, she seemed to burst with good humor and was always ready for an expedition or to tell a story.

  Alice and Carrie love their mother in the way that children love something distant and precious. But she was too fragile for them to touch, and so they gave most of their affection, their boisterous hugs, to Ellen.

  Myra Halston saw this, and it hurt. She began to hate Ellen McCormack. That hatred festered like a growing infection until it poisoned her thoughts.

  The simple solution would have been to let the woman go. There were plenty of others who would have welcomed the job. But Myra Halston knew her children would mourn the loss of their beloved nurse, and she did not want that to happen. She was torn between her desire to regain what she thought she had lost and her eagerness to keep her children happy.

  She began to do small things to make Ellen McCormack’s life miserable. She concocted stories to turn her husband against the woman. She would call Ellen into social gatherings,
then humiliate her in front of the guests with carefully worded questions. At the same time, she tried to buy back her children’s affection with increasingly lavish gifts, not realizing she had never really lost their love to begin with.

  But it was when she tried to do what she could not, tried to take Ellen McCormack’s place, that the trouble really began. She was simply not able to handle the stress. She would play with the girls and end up panting and exhausted, lying on the sofa and fanning herself pathetically.

  The children came to dread these episodes. It terrified them to see their mother so ill.

  And then Carrie died.

  Myra Halston blamed Ellen McCormack for her daughter’s death because the child had drowned while the nurse was not watching her. Myra’s sorrow was made more bitter by the fact that Carrie had drowned in the small fish pond that Myra herself had begged her husband to install only a year before. Playing in the backyard, Carrie had tripped, knocked her head against a rock at the edge of the pool, and fallen in, unconscious.

  They found her at the pool’s edge, her golden hair floating on the water, the curious fish nudging against her open, staring eyes.

  Then Myra Halston went mad indeed. She threw herself at the nurse and tried to scratch her eyes out. Her husband had had to pull her off and hold her arms while the nurse fled to the house with the weeping Alice.

  For weeks after that, the cries of Myra Halston echoed through the night as she wept and wept for the lost Carrie. She shoved Alice out of her life; it was too painful for her to see the remaining child, reminding her so much of the one she had lost.

  She blamed the nurse; she blamed her husband for not being there when the tragedy had occurred; she blamed Alice for being in the kitchen instead of the backyard with her sister; and she blamed the cook and the maid and the gardener, all of whom she thought should have been there when Carrie met her doom.

  The doctor came twice a day to give her an injection to calm her. Alice watched with terrified eyes as he passed grimly in and out of her mother’s room, shaking his head.

  Each time he left, things would be quiet for a while. But all too soon Myra’s shrieks and curses would ring out once more.

  Everyone in the house walked quietly, every eye held a haunted look. They had all loved Carrie. She had been a golden child, as joyful and vibrant as her mother was sickly. Her loss affected each of them deeply—and continued to affect them because of Myra Halston’s madness.

  Then one day Myra stepped from her room, and though her eyes were larger and darker than ever, she was calm and beautiful. For a few moments it seemed that all was well.

  She crossed to her remaining daughter and took her in her arms. “I’m sorry, my darling,” she said. “I’ve been away too long. Did you miss me?”

  Alice looked at her with wide eyes. “Yes, Mother,” she said. “I missed you terribly.”

  “That’s good to hear,” crooned Mrs. Halston. “I missed you, too, Carrie.”

  Alice began to scream. She beat at her mother’s face. “I’m not Carrie! I’m not! I’m Alice! Carrie is dead!”

  Her mother slapped her. Alice staggered back against the wall. Her mother’s eyes went wide with recognition and with horror. “You’re not Carrie!” She cried. “Get away from me. Get away! Get away!”

  Myra Halston stood for a moment, her breast heaving, her eyes wild. Then she crumpled to the floor.

  She was carried back to her room, where her grieving husband sat by her bed for the days and nights that followed.

  “Oh, Gramma,” whispered Lisa. “I’m so sorry.”

  Her grandmother squeezed her hand. “That was a long time ago,” she said huskily.

  “What happened next?” Lisa asked, after a moment of silence.

  She could feel her grandmother stiffen beside her. “My mother sank completely into her madness. She began to hallucinate. She would imagine herself drowning as Carrie had drowned. I could hear her in her bedroom, gasping and choking and crying out for help. Then she would faint, and all would be silent for a while—until the next spell.

  “Sometimes she claimed Carrie was still alive but lost. Other times she claimed Carrie was dead, and her ghost was in the bedroom with her, haunting her, and would not let her rest. Sometimes she cried out that the walls were closing in on her, green and dripping with algae.

  “I was not allowed to see her very often. She wasn’t eating well, and she couldn’t sleep. She continued to lose weight. Her eyes grew darker and more sunken by the day.

  “And yet somehow she remained beautiful. It was as if her tormented spirit was a candle burning within her failing frame and the more it consumed, the more it illuminated her. There was something ethereal about her during that time, something unbelievably lovely.” Dr. Miles stopped, groping for words. “She was like a vessel that had been filled with moonlight,” she said at last.

  Lisa nodded. In some strange way she understood.

  “It always frightened me when I had to go in and see her,” continued Dr. Miles. “After that first episode I never knew how she was going to react to me. She never called me Carrie again. But sometimes she was delighted to see me and would throw her arms around me, and other times she would simply cry out and ask to have me taken from the room because I reminded her of Carrie.

  “Father kept Ellen McCormack on to care for me because he could not do it himself. All his attention was given to Mother. He never blamed Ellen for what happened, and he needed her help. But we had to keep Ellen’s presence a secret from my mother. Sometimes when she was having a spell, she would curse Ellen for letting Carrie die. I can remember seeing Ellen then, her face white, the tears falling. It’s doubtful Carrie loved Ellen as much as she loved our mother, no matter what Mother thought. But I’m certain Ellen loved Carrie every bit as much as my mother had.

  “Mother took to wandering the house at night, searching for Carrie. She claimed she could hear her, that Carrie was calling her to come and rescue her.”

  Again Dr. Miles tightened her grip on Lisa’s hand. Lisa looked at her grandmother, whose eyes were focused on the past once more, wide and bright with remembered horror.

  “She would mimic Carrie’s voice. I would hear her roaming around, crying out in childish tones, `

  ‘Mother? Mother where are you? Come and rescue me, Mother.’

  “Then she would switch to her own voice and call back, ‘I’m coming, Carrie. I’m coming for you.’”

  Dr. Miles shuddered. “I would lie in bed, shaking with terror that she would come into my room and think I was Carrie. But she never did. Once she opened my door and peered in. But when she saw me lying there, she began to scream. She slammed the door, and I could hear my father come running up the stairs. They scuffled, and then I heard a little cry that let me know she had fainted.

  “I think Ellen McCormack and my father grew closer than they should have in that time. He was so weary with caring for my mother, and they were both so burdened by the loss of Carrie that there was a natural sympathy between them. But Mother never knew about this; she didn’t even know Ellen still worked for us.

  “It was Mother’s midnight wanderings that caused the final tragedy.” Dr. Miles paused. “Fire and water. Those were the things that took my family. Carrie by water; the rest by fire.”

  Her hand lay limp in Lisa’s, as if the telling had exhausted her.

  “That last night, Mother was wandering the house, calling out first in Carrie’s voice, then in her own. I was in bed, quaking in fear, as usual; afraid that my door would open and I would see her again, the person I most loved and feared in all the world.

  “She was carrying a candle, I was told later, and she was too lost in madness to be careful. She stopped to stare out a window, I believe. Perhaps she thought Carrie was out in the yard waiting for her. Anyway, the candleholder was later found on a windowsill.

  “The curtains caught first.” Dr. Miles’s voice sank to a whisper. “The curtains caught, then her nightdress. She began t
o scream, which was not unusual. But there was something different in her voice this time, something that terrified me in a way I had not felt before. I jumped from my bed and threw open my door. I saw my mother standing in the hall, her clothes blazing around her, her skin blistering. Her long hair looked like some hellish halo, a crown of flame around her face.”

  Dr. Miles stopped for a minute, and Lisa was not sure she would be able to go on. She was panting, her breast heaving as if she were not merely telling the story, but reliving it.

  “The last thing I remember of my mother was her looking me in the eye, her own eyes glazed with madness, and crying out, ‘You let your sister die!’

  “Then Father came hurtling up the stairs and knocked her down. She screamed and screamed as he tried to beat out the flames. By this time the hallway itself was on fire. I was screaming too.

  “Ellen McCormack had come out of her room and was trying to help Father.

  “‘Get Alice!’ he cried to her. ‘Take care of Alice!’

  “But the smoke overcame Ellen and she toppled down herself.

  “I went and hid in my closet, as children sometimes do during a fire. I was lucky. When I woke up two days later, I found that the fire department had come in time to save the house and me. But that was all. My father, my mother, and Ellen were all dead.

  “I was utterly alone.

  “There was some money, fortunately. Father had established a trust fund for me in his will. A friend of the family was appointed my guardian. The house was sold, as was our home in the city. I was sent to a boarding school, and… well, you pretty much know the rest. But that’s the story of this house, Lisa. And if there is any place that has a right to be haunted, I think this is it.”

  She swallowed heavily. “I don’t know why I brought us all back here. Maybe I thought somehow I could finally get it out of my head. You don’t know how it has haunted me, Lisa; how it waits in the back of my mind, past all my science, all my walls. You can’t imagine it how hur… hur—”

  Suddenly the old woman began to shake. Her tears burst forth, streaming down her cheeks.