Wild Fell

by Wild Fell- A Ghost Story (retail) (epub)

  BRENDA LOUISE EGAN

  1944–1960

  Beloved daughter and niece, taken too soon

  The Sky is Brighter Tonight

  I had found the grave of the girl who had drowned in Devil’s Lake, near Wild Fell in 1960. Next to her stone was a larger, plainer one engraved Thomas Egan, with the dates of his birth and death, and next to it was the grave of Edith Austin Egan, Wife and Mother. The grieving family was gathered around their daughter, finally reunited in death. Farther behind were two more gravestones, these obviously belonging to Brenda Egan’s grandparents.

  As I turned away from the Egan plot to resume my search for Malcolm and Rosa Blackmore’s graves, a squirrel skipped past my feet. Startled by the sudden movement, I followed its grey trajectory across the ground toward the trunk of the oak tree up which it scampered.

  In doing so, I noticed that there was one more grave in the plot. I hadn’t noticed it before because, unlike the others which had been upright, this one was a flat stone set into the earth face-up.

  What I read on the tombstone, I read twice. Then I read it a third time. Then a fourth time. But even when I’d read it a fifth time, the initial chill I’d felt remained. The stone read, Velnette Audrey Fowler (1935–1962), Beloved Wife of Arthur Wallace Fowler and Devoted Aunt of Brenda Egan. And below that, Vengeance is Mine Sayeth the Lord.

  What kept my knees from buckling—the only thing—was the knowledge that what I was seeing must be a mistake, or a coincidence, or some sort of prank.

  When rational sense told me that there was no possibility of a “coincidence” like this in a town as small as Alvina, and that no one could be playing a joke on me with a gravestone that had lain undisturbed in a country cemetery for almost half a century, I shut rational sense down and instead focused on the details of Mrs. Fowler’s appearance: the distinctive way she drove her Chevy at a snail’s pace along the road to Wild Fell; the way she’d thrown the keys at my feet.

  Perhaps she had a sister who now ran the office? And yes, I had been in that office. Mrs. Fowler had handed me papers with written instructions on how to get to Wild Fell. I had the papers—where? Were they in the car? No, I had left them back at the house. I felt in my pocket for the iron keys. I located them easily enough. And yes, the iron ring was there. When I pulled the keys out of my pocket, it took me a moment to realize that the whimper I’d heard had come from my own throat.

  I did not buy Wild Fell from a ghost. No, a million times over. Ghosts were not real. People were real. Fathers were real and their love was real.

  Houses are real. Wild Fell was real.

  And yet, this grave.

  It was Mrs. Beams who came to the door in answer to my banging this time. Not her father. When she saw it was me, her face went white with rage. Her father might have been afraid of me, but she was not. She pushed herself into the doorway, elbowing me out of the way, onto the front step, using her own body to block the entrance to his house.

  “Get the hell out of here,” she said in a voice that was remarkably flat and calm, diametrically opposed to the protective fury blazing in her eyes. “Get the hell off this property or I’ll call the police. You may have conned my father into letting you into his house, at least before you sent him into hysterics, but you won’t con me. I’m not a lonely old widower desperate to talk to someone he isn’t related to. What are you, some sort of freak? Do you enjoy taking advantage of old men? Are you queer? Do you want to try taking advantage of me? Do you?”

  I heard the shrill whine in my own voice when I answered her, but I was powerless to speak any other way. “I don’t know what happened. We were talking fine, then I mentioned my house and the real estate agent who sold it to me. Mrs. Fowler—”

  Mrs. Beams slapped me across the face as hard as she could. My head snapped back as though it were on hinges. I heard the crack of her hand on my cheek even before I felt the heat and pain. I stumbled back from the force of the blow and nearly fell down the stairs. I stumbled backward down the steps, only righting myself on the banister just in time to keep myself from falling.

  “Stop it,” she hissed. “Stop it, you bastard. Stop saying her name!”

  I stared at her blankly. My cheek throbbed. “Stop what? Whose name? What did I do? I don’t know what I did!”

  “Do you know how badly you upset him? That you would use her name—to him—for whatever con game you’re playing . . . you’re disgusting. We loved her, all of us. She was like a second mother to Brenda. We all called her Aunt Nettie. She was the kindest woman in Alvina.” The fury in Mrs. Beams’ eyes was annihilating. “How did you get her name? The Egan family kept it out of the papers when it happened. How did you find out about Velnette’s accident?”

  “When what happened? I have no idea what you’re talking about. What accident? Please, this is like a nightmare. She’s not dead! I spoke with her yesterday. I want to understand. What’s going on? Please tell me.”

  “As if you don’t know!”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know what’s going on!”

  “You told him ‘Mrs. Fowler’ sold you Wild Fell, and that you were staying up there? Well, as you already know, that’s not a very believable lie. Aside from everything else, Wild Fell is a dilapidated wreck. And do you know how I know, Mr. Con Man from the city? Because I’ve been out there and seen it with my own eyes. I went there to put flowers on the place where . . . where she . . .” Tears came to Mrs. Beams’ eyes, but she stared me down through them. “It’s a wreck. It’s uninhabitable.”

  “No,” I insisted. “It’s not a wreck. The house hasn’t aged a day since it was built, apparently. Mrs. Fowler said so herself. If it was a ruin once, someone fixed it up. It’s a beautiful house. Mrs. Fowler”—here I flinched, but she didn’t strike me again—“said that a cleaning crew had worked on it. They must have worked very hard, especially if it was ruined, like you say. You have to believe me. There are candles, and paintings, and furniture. I slept in one of the bedrooms last night, in clean sheets. I slept in Rosa Blackmore’s bedroom. Look!” I took the iron key ring out of my pocket and jangled it in front of her. “These are the keys to the house. I’m telling you, you’re mistaken. Please, if I was lying, why would I have these keys?”

  At the sight of the keys, some of the fury left her face. She looked at the keys with confusion, even mild curiosity, then back at me with something not unlike pity. Her regard was still cold, but the hatred and loathing of a few moments ago had disappeared.

  “Mr. Browning,” Mrs. Beams said. “Look, I’m sorry I hit you. Truly, I am. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. I don’t know what your story is. I frankly wish you’d go back to wherever it is you came from. You people from the city come out to places like Alvina and we must all seem like rubes to you, just a bunch of dumb hicks who keep your ‘cottage country’ ready for you to come back to every summer. But we’re more than that, Mr. Browning. Things happen out here in these towns. People have lives. They are born here, they live here, and they die here. They suffer things, things you people never see. You throw around names like ‘Brenda Egan’ or ‘Mrs. Fowler’ to my father like they were nothing but plot points in a novel. Well, sir, they were more than that to all of us. They were people we loved.”

  “I saw the grave.” I was pleading, though I wasn’t sure what I was pleading for. Confirmation I was the butt of some monstrous joke? That I wasn’t insane? Even confirmation that I was insane would have been welcome just then. Anything real would have been. “I saw her gravestone in the Carlton Cemetery. But it’s not possible. I saw her. I spoke with her. She handled the sale of Wild Fell to me. I’m telling you, I followed her to Blackmore Island in my car—”

  “Just shut up, Mr. Browning.” Mrs. Beams sounded tired now. “Shut up and listen to me, because I’m only going to say this once, and then I’m going to close this door. And if I ever see you around my father again, the police may n
ot get here in time. Do we understand each other?”

  I nodded dumbly.

  She took a deep breath. “If you’re running some sort of scam then I hope you rot in hell. If you’re not, then you’re the victim of a cruel prank at best, or a fraud. You didn’t buy any house from any ‘Mrs. Fowler.’ There is a reason I know this: Velnette Fowler died in 1962.” Mrs. Beams let that sink in, then continued. “She was indeed a real estate agent. She and her husband ran one of the oldest real estate agencies in Alvina. They’d taken it over from her husband’s family. When he died, she tried to keep it up, but her heart wasn’t in it anymore. So you’re off by about fifty years.” There was no humour in Mrs. Beams’ smile. “Velnette had become deeply depressed after Brenda’s drowning, especially coming so soon after losing her husband. He was the first love of her life. They never had any children, so Brenda was like a daughter to her. Brenda’s drowning probably drove Velnette mad.”

  I was on the urge of blurting out she’s not dead! again, but some inner compass of reason checked me before I did. I knew if I said that, Mrs. Beams would hit me again or, at the very least, stop talking to me at all.

  Instead, I settled for, “How did she die?”

  “She burned to death,” Mrs. Beams said simply. “I know my father told you those ridiculous stories about the Blackmore family this afternoon. Well, unlike my father and I, Velnette actually believed them. She was convinced that, somehow, something in the ruin of that house killed Brenda and Sean. She believed all those stories about Rosa Blackmore being something other than completely human. She was sure that something on Blackmore Island wanted Brenda and Sean’s souls.”

  “But Brenda Egan drowned,” I said weakly. “It happens. It’s a tragedy, but it’s not—”

  “Supernatural?” Mrs. Beams practically spat the word. “Is that what you were going to say? Well, I’m inclined to believe you, but many here in Alvina wouldn’t. When they pulled Brenda’s body out of the water, it was covered with moths. They say it was like she was wrapped in a sheet.”

  I had a sudden vivid image of the framed Lepidoptera display in the yellow bedroom at Wild Fell, and the marquetry box on the mantelpiece with the moth design, containing Rosa’s cameo.

  “Moths?”

  Mrs. Beams ignored me and continued. “In any case,” she said, “Velnette took a can of gasoline out there one afternoon in a boat. Her plan was to burn what was left of that house to the ground. But something happened. Maybe there was a sudden wind, or maybe she spilled some of the gasoline on herself by accident. In any case, her clothes caught fire. She and my parents had been close friends. My father is the one who found her that night—he knew where to look, because she’d spoken of almost nothing else in the week leading up to her death except ‘getting revenge on that place.’ When he found her, she was already dead. She had third-degree burns covering ninety percent of her body. Dad brought her charred body back to Alvina in his canoe.”

  “There’s a burned spot,” I said. “The beams are charred in one of the porticos off the main house. I saw it this morning. The wall is concrete. The fire couldn’t penetrate the house—”

  Mrs. Beams closed the screen door in my face. “Now please leave, Mr. Browning, or whoever you are. Or I will call the police. And don’t come back.” She was just about to close the main door, but something seemed to give her pause. Behind the screen, her face, backlit by the living room lamps, was indistinct and her voice was curiously flat when she spoke, as though she were deliberately masking any tonality that might alert me to what she was actually thinking. “Mr. Browning?”

  I waited.

  “Whatever you’re trying to pull here, I don’t know what it is, and I don’t want to know. I just want you to stay away from my father, okay?”

  I nodded. “I’m not trying to ‘pull’ anything, ma’am. Of course I’ll stay away from your father, but I—”

  Again she cut me off before I could continue, and I knew this would be the last time she and I ever spoke. “On the other hand, on the off chance you’re the real victim here, the mark in some swindle, and you’ve been sold a Brooklyn Bridge here in Alvina through no fault of your own—and if you are, again, I’m sorry I hit you—there’s something you should know. When they did the autopsy on Velnette, they found dead moths in her throat. Her throat was packed with them, just like Brenda’s was when they found her in 1960.”

  “Why are you telling me this, Mrs. Beams?” Now I was angry, in spite of my own confusion and shock. I had made myself vulnerable by telling her my bizarre stories—not ghost stories, but stories of actual events, however unexplained at that moment—and she had chastised me for it. Now she was telling me stories of her own. “I told you the truth about everything that happened to me and you called me a liar! You told me you don’t believe in any of this, but now you’re telling me this? What kind of a game are you playing? What are you trying to say?”

  “I’m saying it,” Mrs. Beams said with suffocating patience. It was as though she were speaking to a recalcitrant fifth grader who refused to understand why he wasn’t allowed to talk in her library. “Listen to me say it, Mr. Browning. I don’t believe in witches—alive or dead—or ghosts. I believe in terrible accidents like the one that killed Velnette. I believe that teenage girls out swimming with their boyfriends get cramps, and drown in cold water. But the fact is, what they found in Velnette’s throat had no business being there. Maybe whatever Velnette went to Blackmore Island to kill didn’t want to be killed. Maybe it stopped her from killing it, and it punished her for trying to kill it.” She paused again, carefully marshalling her words. “I’m not saying that’s what happened, or even that it’s what I believe happened. But if you’re involved with some swindle to do with that place, even if you’re the mark, maybe you should think twice about what you’re playing around with. Now, get off my father’s property. Leave us alone. Last warning.”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts, Mrs. Beams.”

  She shut the main door. I heard the lock turn, and the porch light was switched off. I stood on the sidewalk in front of Clarence Brocklehurst’s home and watched the lights turn off in the living room until the house was blind.

  I spent an hour cruising slowly through Alvina’s darkened streets searching for the place I’d turned off the highway and onto Main Street—the mid-century Main Street I’d seen yesterday afternoon, the one with the brass lampposts and the boxes of geraniums, not this new Main Street of convenience stores and souvenir shops.

  At one point I was sure I recognized the corner down which I’d turned to Mrs. Fowler’s office. But when I found what I thought was the place, there was only an office machine repair shop. The storefront was dark; the door locked tight, the street empty.

  Later in the bright moonlight on the edge of town, I pulled over to the side of the road and tried to call Hank again. The line rang and rang, but again, no one picked up. There was likewise still no answer at the MacNeil Institute. The mechanical whirring of the ringtone in my ear seemed to go on forever.

  Then, already knowing what the outcome would be, I stood in the road beneath the moon—that bright autumn moon which shone on everything but illuminated nothing—and dialled again.

  Chapter Eight

  JAMESON IN THE MIRROR

  If necessity really is the mother of invention, then perhaps desperation is the father of memory.

  The only proof of my sanity was back at Wild Fell, in Rosa Blackmore’s bedroom—the manila envelope from Mrs. Fowler with her handwritten list of services and contractors, and her written instructions on how to drive between Alvina and Blackmore Island. When I went to turn on the GPS to find my way back to Wild Fell, it refused to boot up. As I had neither instructions nor a working GPS, I would have to find my way back to Wild Fell relying only on my own memory and the moonlight, which was now, at least, very bright. The place at which the road leading to Blackmore Island began, was at the turnoff nea
r the supermarket where I’d bought supplies this afternoon.

  I found the turnoff and began to drive back toward the house.

  In the light of the moon, the roads were easy to follow and I was able to navigate them with relative ease. One road led to the next in an organic way. My subconscious had clearly recorded more in the way of recognition than my conscious mind would ever have thought possible.

  As I drove, I replayed the events of the past twenty-four hours in my mind trying to make sense of them, but of course, none of it made sense. There was only one way it would ever even begin to make sense, and it was the one thing on which I pinned all my hopes for sanity.

  I realized that even if I left Alvina that night and never came back, I would still need to see and touch Mrs. Fowler’s envelope. I’d left it in my bag, on the floor of the yellow bedroom. I needed it. When I had the folder, I would leave and never come back. It was that simple.

  That the house had been repaired and tended was not a question: I had been there. I had built fires in the fireplaces. I had slept in the yellow bedroom. I had gone downstairs to the cellar and I had seen the oil portraits of the family—portraits whose likenesses had matched the photocopies I had seen in the bright daylight of the Alvina Town Library.

  Photocopies I had been handed in a file folder by Mrs. Beams herself.

  This last thought cheered me immensely. Whatever was in question here, it wasn’t my sanity. If all of this had been in my mind, if I had been suffering some sort of psychotic break or other, I would not have recognized the faces of the individual members of the Blackmore family in the copies of the photographs retrieved from the burned church. But I needed the file folder. It was the only concrete evidence I could show Clarence Brocklehurst that proved I had met and spoken with Velnette Fowler or, at the very least, someone pretending to be Velnette Fowler with the intention of swindling me out of a great deal of money.