Witch House

by Dana Donovan

  “Thirty minutes if I walk, five if you drive me.”

  I could see the dread on Carlos’ face. I thought I might play it up and pretend to give it serious consideration. In the end, I just couldn’t do it. I said to Bart, “Thirty minutes it is. Go to the take-out window. They’ll have some hot oatmeal, toast and coffee waiting there. Will that work for you?”

  “Indeed, that’s mighty kind,” he said, and he offered up a toothless grin. Later, I wondered if he washed his hands before eating. Just the thought that he might not have was enough to sour my appetite for the rest of the day. Of course, I could not say the same for Carlos. When we stopped at the Perc to prepay for Bart’s meal, Carlos made good on the opportunity to order up a slice of hot apple pie to go.

  “Dessert,” he said, when I asked him about it, though in fairness, it had been several hours since we last ate. “I figured this will hold me over until my mid-afternoon snack.”

  “Your midnight….” I checked my watch to confirm my suspicion. “Carlos, it is mid-afternoon.”

  “Yeah?” He gave me a look as though I needed to finish that thought. In hindsight, I realized I should never have formed it to begin with. I paid the tab and we headed out for the Indian casino.

  EIGHT

  While Carlos and I were driving out to the Wampanoag Indian Reservation to interview Daniel Mochohyett, a.k.a., Chief Running Bear, Lilith and Ursula were busy conducting a séance at an old farmhouse they found earlier that morning.

  I suppose you can argue that they “stumbled” upon the old house in their realty quest while new home shopping, but with those two, one never knows. Lilith is as fond of haunted house hopping as some women are of garage sales. She targets them like a heat-seeking missile. I should point out, however, that her fascination with spirits hardly supersedes her obsession for witchcraft, the two nearly diametrically opposed, as they are. Yet when she encounters forces of paranormal origin, she embraces it with every curious fiber of her body.

  “It’s rarer than you might think,” she once told me after I thought I had seen a ghost. It turned out I had only witnessed a light beam reflecting off a large spider web swaying ghost-like up in a barn loft. “People think they see or feel ghosts all the time,” she continued. “In most cases, the phenomenon is easily explained after examining the elements in question. Often, the laws of physics will provide the answers. Take the movement of cold air, for instance, pushing warmer air up a staircase after someone has opened a door and entered the room. The warm air causes the wooden step treads to expand slightly, prompting them to creak in succession, as if someone or something is ascending the staircase. And then there are the ways certain light properties play off reflective surfaces, causing convincing manifestations of spectral emanations, as with your ghost on the spider web.”

  I asked her how often she thought people mistake environmental abnormalities for paranormal activities, and she said, “Always.”

  “Always?” I had to challenge that.

  “Yes, Tony, always, or very nearly. The true reconstitution of imbued spirit energy to paraphysical form takes incredible resources from both the spirit trying to reconstitute and the individual hoping to facilitate it. It is a combined effort of intense magnitude involving the will of the souls. In other words, you don’t just see a ghost, you create one.”

  In her entire life, which spans considerable years, I assure you, Lilith admits to seeing only three ghosts. In every case, they made their presence known to her through spontaneous energy transference. That is to say that the spirits, perhaps sensing that Lilith possessed the charms of a sensitive, discharged a cache of static energy within her intracellular core, thus forging a quasi-dimensional bond, transcending the spiritual divide between them. It should come as no surprise then to know that once Lilith realizes a spirit soul is present and wants to communicate, she will stop at nothing to establish contact. Apparently, that is what happened when she and Ursula first toured the old farmhouse with their less than intrepid realtor.

  As Lilith explained to me later, the realtor, Mrs. Eva Kinsley, herself an ardent believer in ghosts, simply wigged out at the first sign of paranormal activity. “It was particularly scary,” she admitted, adding that she shed no blame on the poor woman for running out of the house as if her hair were on fire. “I don’t know, maybe because Ursula was with me; I guess the energy transference was exceptionally strong.”

  She explained how they arrived at the house earlier that morning after Mrs. Kinsley joked that the girls might get a good deal on a haunted house. Naturally, Lilith wanted to know more. Kinsley, an infectiously bubbly middle-aged homemaker with no real need for a job, except to socialize three days a week outside of her normal PTA and women’s club circles, took on the assignment with zeal. To build suspense, she told the girls how the derelict house had been deserted for nearly eighteen years. Over that time, a number of potential buyers attempted to have the house inspected prior to sale. In every case, the inspectors met with unexplainable misfortunes, resulting in death for two and serious injuries for three others. The inability to find additional inspectors willing to take on the job, coupled with rumors of ghostly inhabitation, has since made the house unsellable. Even as Kinsley explained this, Lilith could see the woman working herself up into a nervous wreck.

  “Nobody remembers the combination number to the lockbox on the front door,” she told the girls, “but that doesn’t matter. None of the doors lock, anyway.”

  Ursula found that peculiar. “Why then the box?” she asked. “What sense doth make of two locks when not one doth thou use?”

  I could imagine Kinsley’s expression. “Excuse me, Dear?”

  “Oh, she talks like that,” said Lilith, adding in a whisper, “She’s Welsh, you know.”

  Kinsley smiled. “Is she? So is my family.” She leaned around Lilith and asked Ursula, “Do you have more family here in the States?”

  Ursula shook her head, responding innocently, “No, Miss. `Tis a goodly length of times past that my sisters wait. Alas, whence I came they cannot follow.”

  “Oh? Have they gone back to England?”

  “Nay, methinks not, for they have all been hanged.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Can we get going?” Lilith pushed the front door open and nudged the women inside. “It’s beginning to rain again. I don’t want to get my hair wet.”

  Once past the threshold and into the room, the three sensed an immediate and drastic drop in ambient temperature. Eva Kinsley pulled snug the fold in her coat and cinched tight her lapels. “My, that is strange,” she commented. “It must be twenty degrees colder in here.”

  Lilith took Ursula’s hand and squeezed it tightly. “Do you feel it, Urs, the energy?”

  “Indeed,” she said. The two ventured further into the room on feathered steps. “He is most agitated. `Tis an angry soul these walls doth hold.”

  “Angry?” said Kinsley. “Who is angry?”

  Lilith said, “I’ve never felt such a strong presence before. Could there be more than one?”

  “Perchance many, for ought I know. Thou hath met acquaintance with spirits more than I and they with thee.”

  Kinsley shadowed the girls. “Spirits? You are joking, aren’t you? I was only kidding about the ghosts. No one has ever really seen one here.”

  “Tell me if you feel something in your bones.”

  “Aye, `tis but a tingle, yet I know it is there.”

  “Yes, me too. Let it through. Receive it.”

  Kinsley tugged on Lilith’s jacket. “I feel it, too!”

  “Do you, now?”

  “Yes. What is it, a ghost?”

  Ursula, “`Tis getting stronger.”

  Lilith, “It’s trying to reconstitute.”

  Below their feet, the floorboards began rumbling. Frost collected on the windows along the shady side of the room, and steam marked their breaths as they spoke.

  “I’m getting scared,” said Kinsley.

 
Lilith said, “Leave if you must, Mrs. Kinsley. I won’t blame you.”

  “No. I can’t leave you here alone.”

  “Then close thy eyes,” said Ursula, “lest the sprit move thee by will of fright.”

  “There!” cried Lilith, pointing across the room. “Did you see that?”

  “By my word, I did. The clock upon the mantle hath but one face and two hands, yet it walked on its own from end-to-end.”

  “Impossible,” said Kinsley, though she knew it had. Following her words, the front door closed abruptly. Three glass candleholders on a bookshelf toppled to the floor in quick succession. A framed picture on the south wall jogged askew on its own, followed by one on the east wall and another on the north.

  “It’s happening,” said Lilith. “The classic sinistral disturbance. Did you notice?”

  “Aye, and the lantern above?”

  Lilith and Kinsley cast their gaze toward the ceiling where a hanging light fixture adorned with teardrop pendants spun counterclockwise in a phantom breeze. Below their feet, the rumbling floorboards began spitting nails into the air in random popping like Chinese fireworks. Kinsley stepped back to the door. Lilith and Ursula huddled closer in the center of the room as bits of plaster fell from the ceiling around them. Pictures, once skewed, danced on their hooks against pulsating walls, drumming out in heartbeat rhythms.

  “This isn’t natural,” Kinsley cried, swatting at a cold wind teasing her hair about her face and neck. “We have got to get out of here, now!”

  “Not yet,” Lilith ordered. “Don’t you see, he’s trying to reconstitute? Ursula, do you have anything more to give him?”

  “Upon my soul, sister, I am spent. What energy he doth need I have not.”

  “He wants something else then.”

  “Mayhap so, but what be thy guess?”

  Kinsley threw open the door and it slammed against the wall. “I am out of here,” she cried. “I’ll see you in the car,” adding only after crossing the threshold, “maybe!”

  Immediately following her retreat, the door again slammed shut. The deadbolt, which Kinsley said never worked, fastened with a defiant click. The tattered yellowed shades over the front porch windows pulled down to the sills on their own and a curtain covering the dining room doorway sprang open as if snatched back by rubber bands. Then abruptly, the paranormal activities abated. The walls stopped heaving. Plaster stopped falling. The rumbling in the floorboards quieted to simple groans of an explainable nature due to temperature conversions. If it seemed that the house had thrown a tantrum for an unwanted guest, then expelling Eva Kinsley had soothed its temper. Lilith motioned by pointing toward the dining room. “I think it wants us in there,” she said. “Should we go?”

  Ursula’s gaze followed. “What say you?”

  “I don’t know.” Her smile widened. “It is a clear invitation.”

  “Aye, tis indeed, yet more welcomed invitations I have refused.”

  Lilith turned Ursula toward the doorway and nudged her gently. “Yes, but this one we can’t. It would not be polite.”

  The two entered, stopping just beyond the threshold. Lilith felt along the wall by the door and hit the light switch. A fixture overhead came on, briefly illuminating the room in a dull orange before going out. She hit the switch again. Once more, it came on, burned a few seconds, and then died in a blink. The third time she covered the wall switch with her hand, but only made a clicking sound with her tongue. The light came on. She looked to Ursula, her lips stretched thin and tight. “He’s not the brightest firefly in the jar,” she remarked. “Is he?”

  Ursula grinned similarly. “Aye, thou perception is sharp, but thy wit sharper.”

  In the center of the dimly lit room sat an oval table with four wooden chairs spaced equally around it. A thin linen cloth covering the table like a flag-draped coffin dripped with tassels netted tight in matted cobwebs that had accumulated over the years. On top, a hand-painted porcelain set consisting of a sugar bowl with creamer and two matching candlesticks, were bound likewise in webs of silken threads and dust made chains.

  Across the room, a mirrored china hutch scattered light from a dirty window upon a potted ficus, its dead branches casting spiny shadows against the wall in petrified veins. To the right, another doorway, also curtained off, led to the kitchen where Carlos would later find a stash of canned pork and beans and try telling me that they were still good for another twenty years. Fortunately, Spinelli would talk him out of taking them, citing their potential value as evidence in an active investigation.

  “I feel it,” said Lilith, circling the room slowly, dragging her fingertips along the tops of the chairs as she walked. “He wants us to make contact, here in this room, but he doesn’t know how.”

  “Then he is with good company,” Ursula replied. “For matters such as this I am most uncertain.”

  “There is nothing to it, Urs. All we have to do is get his attention and help him focus. Watch.” She looked up at the ceiling and traced the edges along the walls. “Hey, spirit, what’s your name? You want to talk?”

  Ursula smiled at Lilith and teasingly. “Oh yes, Sister, methinks that shall work. Doth not his manners owe thee now an answer?”

  “What?”

  “Surely I know not the spirit ways, yet I know where questions fail, commandments rule.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, wish not what thee demand, but demand what thee wish.” She crossed the room and ushered Lilith back to the doorway. “I have seen this done but once in the circle of witches.” She returned to the table and placed her hands over the two candles, and with a snap of her fingers, lit them both. Next, she broke off a twig from the dead ficus and placed it across the candles, spanning the two flames like a bridge. As the two ends of the twig began burning toward the center, she fell into a whispered utterance of ancient speak. Slowly, the trembling in the floorboards returned, marginal at first, but stronger as the flames drew closer to one another along the twig. Lilith approached the table from the opposite side and joined in the mantra, the words seemingly less familiar to her, but no less effective. With her voice added, the vibration below quickly grew to a shuddering rumble that shook the walls, windows, and everything in the room.

  Ursula broke the rhythm of the mantra and pronounced a spell while Lilith looked on.

  “Hear ye, spirit, announce thine name, come show thy self upon this flame; come hither thou where light burns yonder; embrace what fires now make thee stronger.”

  At once, the creeping flames erupted into a curtain of fire several feet high. The girls leaned away from the heat, but did not lose concentration. They reached below the twig and coupled hands, and then Lilith joined in the recitation.

  “Hear ye, spirit, announce thine name, come show thy self upon this flame; come hither thou where light burns yonder; embrace what fires now make thee stronger.”

  Outside the room, the sound of slamming doors and broken glass filled the halls. The clock on the mantle chimed for noon, yet it was still only morning. Overhead, the light flickered in irregular pulses. Dishes in the old china hutch chattered upon the shelves before hopping to the floor in shattered pieces. Behind them, the branches of the dead ficus erupted in spontaneous flames, scorching wallpaper and blackening the window above. Lilith flinched at a shadow that had come up beside her, teased her hair and then faded in the light of the fire. Across the table, something cold ruffled Ursula’s blouse, lifting it over her breasts and scoring her bare stomach with lines resembling fingernail scratches. She fell back in a startled jolt, breaking her handhold with Lilith. A loud pop as that from a blown tire snuffed out the candles, the twig and the burning ficus, but did not halt the tremors shaking paint and plaster off the walls. The table, bucking bronco-like, began hopping across the room, mowing down chairs and crowding the hutch into a corner with enough force to crack its mirror.

  “I think we should go now!” said Lilith.

  “Aye,” said Ursula. “Wither thou
go, I shall follow. Hasten and be done!”

  They fled across the living room, past the fireplace with the clock on its mantle still chiming for the noon hour yet to come. Objects large and small sailed across the room, crashing at their heels. As they neared the front door, Lilith feared that she would find it locked, but that did not happen. The house, though protesting in upheaval, seemed more eager to expel its guests than to consume them.

  Just after setting foot out the door, a sucking rush of air followed them onto the porch, dragging with it all measureable volume of air from the living room, resulting in a structural decompression of the house substantial enough to blow the windows in on the entire north side. With that last breath of defiance, all paranormal activities ended; the rumbling floorboards, the flickering lights, even the clock on the mantle ceased. Telltale scars pockmarked the walls where nails and glass pelted the room. The girls poked their heads inside once more to look around. They turned to one another, smiles pulling at their cheeks with pushpin dimples.

  “`Tis an angry one, that one” said Ursula, “is he not?”

  “He does have issues,” Lilith replied. “That should make this all the more fun.”

  Ursula drew a scolding bead down her. “Lilith?”

  “What?”

  “Thou art smiling as a serpent smiles. Methinks you wish to return, yes?”

  “Oh yes, sister, we shall return. I’m not letting this one get away.”

  They accepted a ride back to the apartment from Eva Kinsley, who had seen the flickering of firelight through the dining room window and could not resist asking about it. Lilith said to her, “He didn’t want us there.”

  “Who?” Kinsley asked.

  “Why, the ghost, of course,” said Ursula. “Give us but his name and we shall tell thee. For aught I know, `tis an angry soul indeed that death hath spite, for ner a spirit more possessed as he with anger hath such a knave soul embraced.”

  I could imagine the poor woman’s face. “What?”

  Lilith leaned in. “She said he’s pissed.”