Three Incidents at Foster Manor

by P. T. Phronk

  I circled the room, the sound of claws on stone close behind, then headed back the way I’d come from. It was the only known route to safety. Door #1.

  The bobbing shadows had folded back ears and legs coiled back, ready to pounce. The darkness had eyes.

  Instinct sent additional motivation to my feet, making them sprint faster. I passed the door to the room with the bouncy castle in it and turned for just a moment to look inside.

  Maybe I just tripped. Maybe something clamped on my foot. I spotted grey, which was maybe the floor, or maybe it was the oozing, writhing bouncy castle reaching out for me. The flashlight left my grip as instinct prepared my hands to cushion the fall, but it happened too quickly. I fell sideways, then backward, and felt the sickening thunk of the back of my head against concrete.

  Footsteps approached, and soon the dog would be upon me, tearing at my windpipe. It didn’t matter much, because I already couldn’t breathe.

  The dog’s eyes glowed. No—no, those were not eyes; the light was too bright. It was not a dog upon me, but a woman standing over me with another flashlight. My head hurt so badly that my vision blurred. It had to be Jasmine, coming back to get me.

  I blinked very slowly. “Jasmine?”

  She leaned closer, so I could see her face. It was not Jasmine’s face.

  I could barely hear; the blow to my head had sent my ears ringing. Yet some part of me understood what she was saying, and that part was able to respond.

  “That’s your name?” I asked in response to her distant words. I felt pressure at my elbow as she helped me up, and got my stumbling ass to the stairs, where I had to sit down again.

  “Yes, Mae Carmichael. Marcus is an old friend. I came in through the cellar door in the basement.”

  Mae wore a hat like I’d never seen before. The green wool of its brim seemed impossibly stiff, and a knitted yellow flower at the side seemed to grow right out of it. A gun was strapped to her side, barely hidden by the thin, flowery blouse she wore. I could hardly focus on her features, but she had dark skin, and bright, kind eyes.

  “My my, what a big hat you have,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m … I’m a friend of the family’s too, I suppose. I’ve been helping with the security system. You’re the cop, aren’t you? The one Marcus mentioned. You got his email? His call for help?”

  “Yes, I am here to help. I didn’t expect to find a stranger in the basement passed out on the floor, however.”

  I thought of Trista. “It’s actually much worse than that.”

  “I know about Trista. Oh, poor Trista, my gosh.” Mae’s voice became sad as she told me a story about the family, which I wanted to pay attention to, I really did, but the back of my head killed, and when I lifted my ponytail to touch underneath, it felt like the surface of a fuzzy water balloon.

  “There was a dog,” I said, interrupting her. “A big one, looked more like a wolf. It was right in the other room. It’s aggressive.”

  “Oh, dear, there’s no wolf.”

  “I’m under quite a lot of stress. Perhaps I imagined—”

  “No,” Mae said. “Sorry to interrupt you, dear, but I think I know what’s happening here. It’s another haunting. The wolf you saw was a ghost.”

  My head cleared a bit. Nobody in the family had spoken so directly about the mysterious happenings in this place. “You know about all this?”

  “Oh dear, oh darling, it’s been like this forever. I don’t mean ‘forever’ literally, of course … though come to think of it, it may be closer to the truth. Maybe I do mean forever.”

  “Craig said he saw a dog before, in the ball room.”

  “He told me all about it. Father—their father—he keeps his head in the sand, maybe only to protect the kids. He sees these anomalies, but he won’t say anything, or do anything about it. Marcus is less tactful, and at least he has the decency to deny that anything is happening at all. We’re very different in that way, which is part of what I love about him. Regardless of what either of them say, this place is sensitive to spirits, like many other places in the world. Like me.”

  “Like you?”

  “I’m a police officer, and a damn good one.” She laughed heartily—an odd sound, given the circumstances. “Part of that’s because I’ve always been a bit … attuned, you could say. I’ve always been in touch with spirits.” She hovered around me like she was a nurse, checking me over. With one finger under my chin, I was able to lift my head, though it kept wanting to topple down again.

  “What have you seen?” I muttered.

  “Too much, dear. When Craig and Marcus weren’t around, I used to tell Caleb, Trista, and Jasmine stories all night long. And they’d tell me their own. It led me to research this place, and the nature of spirits.”

  “What … what is the nature of spirits?” I asked. It felt like the lamest question in the world, but I couldn’t properly put my thoughts into words at the moment.

  “It starts with Jack. There’s always a Jack, isn’t there? In folklore all the way back to England and Ireland, there’s always a hero, and he’s the one who protects everyone against the giants, the half-man half-monsters, or the wolves. There are always wolves. But when the stories came here to Canada, over in the Atlantic provinces where I’m from, Jack was fighting ghosts instead. New Brunswick was so full of ghosts that they had to transform their imaginary heroes to stand up to different foes.” She sighed. “But Jack couldn’t help himself; when he came over the Atlantic, he brought some of his companions with him. His wolves, for example. One gets so attached to one’s enemies.”

  I rubbed the sides of my head, willing the pain and the fog to go away, and Mae’s story wasn’t helping. “It kind of makes sense, but I don’t see how it explains what’s going on here, in this house.”

  “The ghosts were already here. They always have been, probably always will be, but they take many forms. The stories, and Jack, they told lessons for our ancestors about how to defeat them. Jack is the hero that takes charge and stands up to whatever shapeshifting evil he needs to stand up to. He takes action when others wouldn’t. Do you understand? That’s all it takes. This is what I always told the children, and I believe it made them feel better. Not only that, but I hope it made them better people.”

  I felt like the house was watching me carefully. Like the eye of the giant outside was piercing through the house’s many layers to see what my next move would be. “Tell me more,” I said. Because fuck it, I could take action if nobody else would. I could be Jack.

  So she told me, and I half-listened, about a simple ritual to come together and put forth a vessel to confront the spirits of the dead. It was the first time she’d described spirits as belonging to the dead.

  “Wait, what about Trista?” I asked. Mae stared at me from under the brim of her hat, waiting for me to continue. “She’s dead. If there’s something about this place that is making the dead restless … and this ritual can bring them forth … could we contact her spirit? Could she tell us who killed her?”

  “I … I don’t know if I spoke correctly. I suppose anything’s possible,” Mae said, though her voice seemed distant now.

  I felt overwhelmed by the possibilities. I couldn’t get in the room to find out who killed Trista and give closure—or perhaps even survival, if the killer wasn’t done—to this family. I’d failed at that. But if I were to confront this problem head-on, maybe trying something insane like contacting the spirits of the dead was the only way to bring this family some security, if only for the night.

  My head dropped no matter how much I tried to hold it up. I probably had a concussion.

  “Dear, you’re on the right path. Everything you’re doing is putting things exactly how they should be,” Mae said, and her soothing words seemed to deepen my trance.

  The next thing I knew, I was upstairs, Mae was gone, and the residents of the house were screaming at each other.

  Chapter 6

  Everyone fell silent and stared at me. They had gather
ed in the foyer, around the home’s front door. Craig coughed, out of breath from raising his voice. The others’ faces were in various stages of anger and frustration, frozen that way when I walked up and interrupted them.

  “What if it was her?” Ash said.

  “What if what was me?”

  Jasmine rushed forward and took my arm. “Of course it wasn’t Amy. She was in the basement this whole time. Are you okay? You’re pale.”

  “I fell on my way up. I’ll live.” I shook my head, which was quickly clearing up, the adrenaline starting to reach my brain again. “What is Ash trying to blame on me?”

  They each turned toward the front of the house and stepped to the side. Someone had written on one of the windows flanking the front door.

  OUR TURN

  The first R was backward, like a child had written it. It was written in red. It could only be blood. Another message, like the one Trista had written on the floor in her own blood, except this one was not locked away, inaccessible until morning. Lightning flashed as I approached, backlighting the message, making it glow crimson like it was another stained-glass window.

  “It’s written on the outside,” Jasmine pointed out, squeaking her finger against the glass.

  “Or between the panes,” Caleb said.

  Marcus sighed. “I told you, that’s stupid. This isn’t a slammed door in the night or a mirage in the dark. Your sister is dead and you still want to blame it all on fairy tales?”

  “I’m not stupid,” Caleb muttered, then cringed and backed away from Marcus.

  Craig inhaled and Marcus braced himself, all of them ready to start bickering again, but I held up a hand and they stayed silent, looking at me for guidance again. Their Jack. “Mae is here. I talked to her about what’s going on here, and it’s not the first time you’ve all encountered something unusual, is it? This place is special. What if this writing is Trista, reaching out to us? She tried it before. Maybe I’m the only one who noticed, but she wrote something on the floor of the safe room before she died. In red. I couldn't read it, but this could be her second attempt. Maybe the spirits need a turn to talk.”

  Ash smirked. “So Trista’s a ghost. Why not? It’s not the craziest thing you people have come up with tonight.”

  You people. He was the only one I wasn’t already thinking about as part of the family.

  “That’s an insulting idea,” Marcus said.

  Jasmine shot him a sharp glance. “Dad, we have to do something.”

  “We do have to do something,” Craig said softly.

  “Let’s give Trista a chance to speak,” I said, thinking about the instructions Mae had given me. The ritual.

  “A séance? Let’s be clear—is that what we’re talking about here?” Marcus asked, but didn’t give anyone a chance to answer. “I’m not messing with a damn séance. I’m making a damn casserole for everyone, because all this is making me damn hungry.”

  Jasmine looked like she wanted to say something, but I spoke first. “It’s fine. I’m hungry too, Marcus. A meal will do us all good.”

  This technique always worked with my family, and it was working with this one too. Whenever Wes was into some impossible project or investigating some new mystery, I’d back off, let him do his thing. Same with Todd, as long as he came home safe. I could see my family in this family—and Marcus’s adjacent family—each of them so different, together but going in different directions.

  Craig cleared his throat. “Where’s Mae? You said she was here? She must have gotten your email, Marcus.”

  “I’m not sure,” I said honestly. My memory was a blur since meeting Mae in the basement. She must have led me upstairs, but I couldn’t remember actually parting with her. “She said she was going to figure out what happened here, so maybe she’s checking the control room. She told me about how to do the ritual.”

  Ash laughed. “The ritual. Why the fuck not?”

  Craig was already heading back to the family room. He nodded, his poof of grey hair bobbing up and down. “Let’s do it, then.”

  “I’m up for a séance, if it can help Trista. I’ll try anything,” Jasmine said, her voice shaky. Ash shrugged, then told Caleb to grab more candles.

  Did I even believe in ghosts? Of course I didn’t. Probably. But if gathering around the family room holding hands could get these people through the night, kill a few more hours, maybe bring out more information about who killed Trista, then why not?

  And if a ritual could get rid of the feeling that the wolf was still there, licking its lips while it watched me from every shadowy corner, well, that would be nice too.

  A fine mist hung in the air, and the house smelled like onions. The candles had a layer of dust on them from being in storage for too long, so they gave off acrid smoke. Marcus’s cooking in the kitchen across the hall also contributed to the appropriately hazy atmosphere for the séance.

  We’d pushed the chairs and couch back so we could all sit on the floor in front of the fireplace. Candles surrounded us with more fire. I went through the steps that Mae had outlined, which I could only half remember. The other half I filled in with what I’d seen in movies.

  Sweat dripped down the back of my neck as I leaned over to grab the upside-down wine glass from the floor. “This is, uh, a spy glass.” That name hadn’t come from Mae. It’s possible I made that one up entirely. I pointed at the sticky notes we’d put on top of a cutting board—one with Y printed on it, and one with n. Ash had made it lowercase, probably just to be a dick. “You’ve seen Ouija boards before. First we’ll confirm that a spirit, or spirits, are present. Then we’ll start asking questions.”

  Marcus stared at us from the kitchen. When he caught me looking, he quickly got back to his casserole.

  “In the first stage, it is important to test the spirit with counterfactual claims.” That line came directly from Mae. “I suppose that means we should see if it can distinguish truth from fiction.”

  All were silent for a moment. The flames all around me appeared so bright. If this ritual had even a chance of contacting the dead, what if a spirit other than Trista showed up? Could Todd’s mirage travel this far, from the burned-down husk of my former home? If he appeared to us, would his skin be pale, as it had been in life, or black, as it was in death?

  “I’ve got it,” Jasmine finally said to break the silence. She placed her fingertips on the edge of the wine glass’s base. Craig, Caleb, Ash and I did the same. It wobbled a bit on the cutting board, but remained between the two letters. Jasmine closed her eyes, perhaps to hide that she was tearing up. “Trista loved biology class. Is this true?”

  The glass remained stationary.

  Jasmine grimaced. “Come on Trista. If you’re there, we need you.”

  A slight wobble.

  A tear fell from Jasmine’s eye. “You can do this, girl.”

  The glass shot to the left, toward the Y. I didn’t exert any extra pressure. It didn’t feel like anyone else did either. The beauty of a wine glass is that it would topple before moving if anyone suddenly pushed from one side.

  “It’s saying yes,” Caleb said, smiling. “That’s right. She always loved animals.”

  Jasmine shook her head. “She does love animals, and she thought biology would be about animals, so she took all the classes she needed to major in biology at university. But …” She laughed shakily. “I think she was thinking of zoology, and besides, she was more of a writer than a scientist. She hated grade twelve biology. All cells, no animals.”

  “So this séance is bullshit,” Ash said. “Caleb thought it was a yes, so he rammed on the glass.”

  “I barely touched it.”

  Craig cleared his throat of what sounded like a large wad of phlegm, then looked down, addressing not just the Ouija board, but the basement below it. “Trista, honey, who did this to you? Who took you away from me?”

  “It’s a yes or no board, Dad,” Caleb said.

  Ash shook his head and looked at me. “You can probabl
y see why Trista’s plans to go to university bucked the family trend.” He tapped the side of his head. “Brains a bit lacking here.”

  “Jesus, Ash, really? Now?” Jasmine said.

  “She wasn’t going to university,” Craig said, seemingly oblivious to the insult.

  Jasmine opened her eyes, which were suddenly full of fire rather than sorrow. “Well, actually, she was.”

  “With whose money?”

  “She’s your oldest child. In a few months, you won’t have any use for money. Do you really need me to say it?” Jasmine held his gaze. As if to underline her implication, Craig unsuccessfully suppressed a cough.

  My jaw dropped and sweat beaded up on my forehead, but Ash’s smug grin implied that he was enjoying this. He pointed at Caleb. “That makes it a lucky day for number two in line,” he said, as if it was a casual, offhand comment.

  Craig stood up. The floor creaked. He pointed toward the hall. “Get out of my fucking sight, Ash. You too, Jasmine. I can’t have this discussion again, not now, not without …” He choked, cleared his throat again. “Not without her here.”

  Jasmine stood and muttered apologies to Craig, tears streaming down her face. Just when Craig’s face was about to soften, Ash made another biting comment, and it started all over again.

  “No no no,” I muttered, trying to keep them all together. It was now more important than ever. I’d been holding on to an odd hope that it wasn’t one of these people that killed Trista, but some freak Rube Goldberg-esque accident within the safe room. Now, I’d determined the entire security system was purposefully sabotaged, and their continual bickering was starting to reveal longstanding conflict that I could only half understand, making the nebulous family dynamics gradually coalesce into flickering shapes resembling motives. “Let’s finish this,” I said, but my voice felt small.