Help for the Haunted

by John Searles

  “Abigail,” my father said, his voice rising with alarm. “What happened?”

  I watched as she held out her palms, blood still drooling and dripping from each, as her mouth moved open and closed but made no sound. First my father, then my mother, rushed toward her. In a moment, they had whisked her off to the kitchen, where I could hear water running and my mother praying too.

  Meanwhile, Rose and I had been left alone in the living room. There was a little blood on her hand as well from when she ran it over her scalp. But nothing she couldn’t wipe away on her jeans, which she did just then. “Well, squirt,” she said. “I can see things have really normalized while I’ve been gone.”

  How could I tell her that in their own strange way, things had seemed normal—happy even—all those months? There was the ice cream. There were those late-night trips to the pond. There were the conversations Abigail and I had through the bedroom wall.

  Instead, I said, “I’m glad you’re back. Are they going to let you stay?”

  “They’re not happy about it, but I’m not giving them a choice. No way am I heading back to that place. And I’m not going back to school again either. I’m going to stay here through the fall and winter, save my money then get an apartment of my own.”

  I thought of that globe up in her room, the way she used to spin it, plunking her finger down on random locations. Warsaw. Buenos Aires. Sydney. “Get a place where?”

  “Don’t know. Haven’t figured that out yet. But it won’t be Dundalk or even Baltimore. It’ll be someplace a safe distance from this madhouse.”

  I stood there, saying nothing. All summer long, I had wanted the same things as my mother: for Rose to come home, for Abigail to be gone, for things to return to normal. But I realized then that things would never go back to the way they had been. When Rose left that morning months before, she may as well have left for good.

  “Sylvie,” my mother called from the kitchen. “Can you run to our bathroom upstairs and get some bandages and peroxide?”

  I turned away from my sister and did what our mother asked. When I stepped into the kitchen moments later, Abigail held her hands above her head to slow the bleeding. “Does she need stitches?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so,” my father answered, then looked to Abigail and asked her, “How did this happen?”

  Her mouth moved up and down again, but no words came. You’re good at this, I thought. If I didn’t know better, I’d have been fooled too.

  “You were with her, Sylvie,” my mother said at last. “Tell us.”

  Abigail’s eyes caught mine then. I thought of that morning when I spoke the truth for Rose and how badly that had turned out despite my intentions. Let them believe what they want, I decided before answering only with, “I don’t know what happened to her.”

  Abigail’s eyes were on mine still as my parents walked her to the basement door. Her mouth was no longer moving, though I could imagine words slipping out anyway, saying: “The money. Tonight, after I’m down there asleep, don’t forget to bring me the money.”

  “And then what?” Lynch said. He was not exactly leaning forward at the table, but he was sitting up at last, his spindly fingers pressed to the surface. “You went down there and gave her the money?”

  “Your turn,” I told him. “Tell me about the deal you made with my sister.”

  He balled his hands into tight fists and seemed about to drum them on the table, but shook them in the air a moment instead. “Fine,” he told me. “It’s nothing I haven’t said before. All that fall and all that winter, I kept searching for Abigail. I had ideas about where she might have gone. Back to the ministry in Oregon. Or off to find a friend of my ex-wife’s. Or to a town in the south where we once stayed for a few months, since she seemed to like the other children at the church there more than other places. But she never turned up anywhere. All the while, I kept calling your house, but your parents just let that stupid machine answer. I couldn’t go to the police, because of the way we had been living. Besides, I didn’t know if my ex had some sort of report filed against me. I found out from one of the lawyers after I was in here that she never did stop looking.

  “I started coming to your house again. That fall. That winter too. Eventually, your parents didn’t even bother to open the door. By then, I had read that book by Sam Heekin, which meant I knew about the Mustang Bar where he took your father after he apparently popped a few of those pills he liked to take when his back was hurting. The day of the storm, I went through the same routine: hammering away on your front door to no avail until I gave up and found myself sitting at the Mustang Bar too. It had been ages since I’d had so much as a drop of alcohol, never mind the few shots of whiskey I tossed back that night. As I sat at that bar, drowning my sorrows, some girl kept coming in and ordering drinks. Eventually, I realized she was sneaking them outside to the car. When I stood from the stool and made my way outside, who do I see but your sister? She looked different from that night I saw her in the parking lot in Florida, but I remembered her face.”

  “And that’s when you made the deal?” I asked.

  “Yes. Fifty bucks to call your parents and get them to talk to me. I told her that’s all I wanted to do and she believed it.”

  “Then what?”

  “She made the call from a pay phone right outside the bar. Meeting at the church was a detail she came up with all on her own. I was expecting to go by your house, but Rose told me that if your parents thought they were going to meet her, that if she was willing to pray with them to get things right in her head, they would venture out into the storm to see her.”

  “Only it was you they would be seeing.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So then you went to the church?”

  Lynch glanced behind him at the clock again. I did too. Thirteen minutes. “Uh-uh,” he said. “Your turn.”

  I took a breath, thought of those pages in my journal, and began:

  Abigail never came back up from that basement—not that I was aware of, anyway. My mother, however—she emerged a few hours later to throw together a quick dinner for Rose and me. While my father took a tray down for Abigail, my mother said she was sorry that we could not eat together as a family, but that any day now, perhaps even the very next, Abigail’s father would return for her at last. A shame, my mother said, that after a perfectly fine summer, this is how he would find the girl. She said she had tried her best, but there were some haunted people she could not help after all.

  Once our mother made us two turkey sandwiches then returned to the basement, Rose told me that most nights at Saint Julia’s, she snuck her dinner back up to her room. That’s what she wanted to do then too. It had been so long since I’d seen my sister, I agreed to whatever she wanted. Inside her room, I watched as she shoved the bed back to where it used to be against the far wall, then stripped the sheets Abigail had been sleeping in and piled them, along with all the girl’s clothes, into the cinnamon-colored suitcase we once shared.

  “She can have the old thing,” Rose said. “It just brings back bad memories.”

  After I hunted down fresh sheets and helped make the room hers again, the two of us lay on her bed and picked at our sandwiches. It was then that I asked Rose more about Saint Julia’s, but she told me she preferred not to talk about it, except to say that she had left on her own and was never go
ing back. The worst experience of her life, that’s what she said, but also the best because it taught her once and for all who she was. There in that bed, lying side by side the way we used to in those makeshift tents in the living room, we fell asleep.

  At some point, I was woken by the sound of footsteps padding down the hall, and I looked to see my father, then my mother, slipping into their bedroom and closing the door. For a long moment, I lay there gazing over at Rose who, with her shaved head, looked nothing like herself. In some ways, it was like sleeping next to a stranger. And I couldn’t help but feel that’s what she was becoming to me. I lay there, wondering about her plan to stay in our house without returning to school and how many more feuds that would cause with our parents. Finally, I decided to stop worrying and instead do my part in making things better.

  I got up. I went to my room, where I stood on my desk chair and reached for that shelf full of horses. There was one in particular, a horse I’d named Aurora, that came with a small compartment inside its hollowed belly. I used a dime to pry it open and pulled out the wad of money I’d stashed inside over the years. Six hundred dollars—that’s what all my work on those essays had totaled up to.

  Despite Abigail’s presence in the basement, my mother had left that bare lightbulb on just as we’d agreed. When I made my way down the stairs, I saw Penny smiling inside Mr. Knothead’s old cage. I looked away and walked to that partitioned area where the light did not fall and where I found Abigail fast asleep on a cot with one of my mother’s knit blankets draped over her body. Some part of me thought to turn back and head upstairs, to forget about giving her the money. But as I stood there, staring at the moonlight shining on those bandages around her hands, I could not help but wonder what worse things she might be capable of doing to herself—or to my family—if she did not get her way.

  “Abigail,” I whispered.

  Her eyes opened. She sat right up. When she spoke, it made me think of earlier in the summer when it was still a surprise to hear her voice. “I’ve been waiting for you, Sylvie. Did you bring what I need?”

  “Yes. But I still don’t like the idea.” As much as I wanted her gone, I couldn’t keep from saying, “How will I know if you’ll be safe?”

  “It’s not your problem,” she told me. “I’ll be fine, though. Don’t worry, Sylvie.”

  There seemed nothing more to do but give her the money. All of it, because she’d need more than cash for a train ticket. Abigail might have been among the few haunted people my mother could not help, but in my own way, I could. With one of her bandaged hands, she took the wad of bills from me, not bothering to count any of it. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” I told her, noticing a foggy sort of expression move over her face as she lay back on the pillow. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. Well, no. Not really. I feel wiped out, I guess.”

  Who knew if this was just part of her act? I couldn’t be certain, but I put my hand on her forehead anyway. Like that time I had kissed my mother’s and found it cool, I was surprised to find hers felt the same. “Do you need food? Maybe something to drink?”

  “No. Your father brought dinner down to me a while ago. And there’s a glass of water right there on the floor by my cot.”

  We were quiet a moment, the two of us breathing in the shadows of that basement. At last, I asked, “When will you leave?”

  “Sometime tomorrow. But instead of following the path through the woods, I have a better plan. Since it’s Saturday, your mother will want to go grocery shopping. Let’s go with her, and I’ll sneak off when she’s busy at the register.”

  It seemed as good a plan as any, so I agreed to it. And then, although I meant to say good night, a different word slipped out, “Good-bye.”

  Abigail let out a weak laugh. “Sylvie, I just told you I’ll see you tomorrow, so it’s not time for good-bye just yet. But before you go back upstairs, can you do one last thing for me?”

  “What?” I said, but then I understood. “Oh. Yes. Sure.” I looked down at her head on that pillow, hair fanned all around as moonlight shone through the sliding glass door, making her face appear ghostly but beautiful. In that moment, she seemed like the spirits my father so often spoke of, an energy trapped between this world and the next. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I whispered, “The captain has turned on the Fasten Seat Belt sign. . . .”

  Abigail listened. She smiled. She closed her eyes.

  “Then what?” Lynch asked.

  “I was about to ask you the same thing. After you made the deal with my sister and drove to church, what happened next?”

  Lynch rubbed his face, glancing up at the clock. Eight minutes before our visit would come to an end.

  “Stop wasting time,” I told him.

  “I’m not wasting time!” he burst out. “You come here! You demand this story I’ve told a thousand times. You tease me with this information about my daughter! So I need a minute to clear my head!”

  Rummel’s heavy steps moved toward the table, but I held up a hand and they stopped, then retreated. “Okay, then,” I said to Lynch. “I understand. Take a minute. But we haven’t got long.”

  The man blew out a breath and rubbed his hands over his bald scalp. “I parked on the street behind the church. Your parents knew my van by then, so I figured if they caught sight of it, they would turn right around and leave. Your sister told me the key was kept in the window boxes at the church, a detail she recalled from your father’s days as a deacon. Sure enough, there it was. I let myself in.”

  “And you brought your gun along—the one I saw the day you showed up at the end of our street?”

  “Yes. But it was just to scare them. I promise you that was my only plan. I wanted the truth from your father and mother, instead of the silent treatment I’d been getting and the lies before that. My intention was to turn on the lights inside the church, but I couldn’t find the switch. All the better, I decided in the end, since the darkness might give me an advantage. I waited up front in one of the pews near the altar until I saw the headlights of your car pull into the snowy parking lot outside.”

  He stopped a moment, and although some part of me wanted to prod him to keep going, I knew better. Besides, my mind flashed on the three of us turning into the parking lot of that church, of my father getting out and walking through the snow toward the red doors before disappearing inside, of me asking my mother, “Do you ever feel afraid?”

  “I waited there,” Lynch said at last, “bracing myself until the door opened and I heard your father call into the darkness, ‘Rose?’

  “ ‘No,’ I told him. ‘It’s me.’

  “ ‘Who?’ he asked in a confused voice. And then he took a few steps closer into the darkness and said, ‘Albert? I don’t understand. What are you doing here?’

  “ ‘I came to get answers about my daughter,’ I told him. ‘Once and for all.’

  “Your father turned to go then, but I raced after him, tugging on his coat and pulling that pistol from my pocket, making sure he saw the flash of silver in the dim lights of your car through the stained-glass windows. ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ I told him.”

  Lynch leaned back from the table. “There,” he said. “Your turn.”

  This time, I didn’t even look up at the clock. “I finished Abigail’s night-time ritual, then headed up to my bedroom an
d fell asleep. In the morning, I walked into the kitchen and heard my parents’ voices in the basement, so I went down the stairs again. That’s when they told me she was gone. Only the basement looked nothing like it had the night before.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everything was strewn about. The things from my parents’ work—a doll we kept in a cage was on the floor. A hatchet too. So many rings and trinkets and leftovers from their trips were scattered everywhere. It looked like—” I stopped, feeling an ache in my chest as I remembered the strained look on my father’s face when he knelt on the floor to pick it all up. Then later as he wrote out that sign—DO NOT OPEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!—and attached it to the front of the doll’s cage.

  “Like what?” Lynch prodded.

  “Like someone had done battle with a demon down there. At least that’s what my father suggested.”

  “Uh-uh, Sylvie. You told me you weren’t going to make the same claims as your father.”

  “That’s not what I’m telling you,” I said, thinking now of Heekin’s book and the tapes from the interviews and the things Howie told me too. “I think my father wanted it to seem that way.”

  “Why?” Lynch said.

  “It was one more story to tell. One more way to make people believe him.”

  “And what do you believe, Sylvie?”

  “For a long time,” I began, but stopped, thinking of all those words I’d put down in the pages of that journal, all the conversations I’d had over the last few days, the way certain details about my parents began to sift from the mess of our lives so that I began to see them differently than before. Again, I said, “For a long time, I wouldn’t let myself think so many things. But now, well, I have come to believe that, for one, Abigail did plan to leave that night. That she only told me about her idea to slip out of the grocery store to put me off for a while. Who knows? Maybe she worried I’d change my mind during the night. Anyway, I think that after I left she opened that sliding glass door and stepped out into the night. And then, the next morning, as we all stood in the basement looking around at the chaos, we heard the knocking coming from upstairs.”