Help for the Haunted: A Novel

by John Searles

  When I opened my eyes again, morning sun shone through my window. My nightlight was still out, clock too. I lay there, surrounded by my father’s words, wondering how they had come to me. Before I could think too long, though, I remembered: Dot. I got out of bed and crossed the hall. My parents’ door was shut and locked. I slipped back into my room a moment. My mother and I had a tradition: whenever they were about to leave on their trips, she helped me pick out the clothes I’d wear to school while they were gone. I found the soft blue spring dress and simple white flats she had chosen for that day and put them on without bothering to shower.

  Downstairs, the antique clock ticked in the living room. I was running twenty minutes late, long enough that the bus was likely blowing past the end of the lane at that very moment. Inside the kitchen, I found Rose hunting down a fork, the toasty smell of something heating in the gas oven filling the room. “Where is she?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “Rose, you know who I mean.”

  “Oh. Her. Where do you think?”

  “After what you put her through, I’m hoping she’s in mom’s or dad’s bed catching up on sleep.”

  Rose pulled open the oven door, reached inside. Out came two waffles, which she tossed on a paper towel before blowing on her fingers. “Don’t you mean what we put her through? After all, you were the first one to scare the crap out of her.” As she spoke, I watched her slather butter on those waffles and dump on so much syrup that it drooled through the paper towel onto the counter.

  “You’re making a mess,” I told her. “Just put them on a plate.”

  “Won’t fit under the door if they’re on a plate.”

  “What door?”

  “The bathroom door.”

  “She’s still in there?”

  “Go to school, Sylvie. I’m taking the day off myself. Too much to do here.”

  “Rose, you have to let her out. It’s been almost twelve hours.”

  “Eleven, actually. And of course I’m going to let her out. I even told her I would last night, but that’s when Miss Mary Snatch said she planned to call the police as soon as she was free. So no can do just yet. The woman’s not getting out until we broker a deal. I guess you could say we’ve got a hostage situation going on up there.”

  For a long moment, I stood watching as she flattened each waffle with a fork so they’d slide more easily beneath the door. Finally, Rose looked up at me. “Sylvie, you don’t want to be a part of this. I promise she’ll be out by the time you get home. Now go on. Don’t you have to turn in your paper so you can prove how smart you are?”

  My paper. She was right that I needed to turn it in soon. But it wasn’t going to happen, I told her, since I already missed the bus and had no way of getting to school.

  “Just walk.”

  “Walk?”

  “It’s not that far. Not if you take that path behind the foundation across the street. Just follow it past Watt’s Farm, and it’ll lead you to the high school and middle school just beyond. I’ve taken it plenty of times when I bailed from school. Thirty minutes tops.” With that, she grabbed the paper towel with those flat waffles on top and walked by me in a whiff of maple syrup. The smell made me hungry, and I thought of that Mexican girl I’d imagined—or maybe dreamed of—my father speaking about, the way her appetite had vanished, the way she had turned violent before the village priest devised a plan for her treatment. As Rose headed up the stairs, I called to her, “Wait.”

  Rose stopped, looked back.

  “If I walk to school, do you promise to let her out soon?”

  With her hands still holding that paper towel, she made what was meant to be an X but looked more like a lopsided U over her chest. “Cross my heart. Now go.”

  After she disappeared upstairs, I went to the rickety curio hutch and pulled a map of Dundalk from the drawer. Rose’s path was not marked, of course, but I traced my finger through the woods and saw that what she said looked possible. I gathered my books and walked across the street, past the foundation, where a house had been started but never built. Behind it, I found the opening in the trees, a kind of wide-open mouth that swallowed me into those woods. Rose’s shortcut turned out to be not much of a shortcut at all, since so much of those woods was thicker than I thought, but eventually, I emerged by the athletic fields, the middle and high school waiting for me.

  For weeks, so much of what fueled me was the thought of placing my essay into Ms. Mahevka’s hands, but she was out sick so a substitute collected my paper. After that, I had to sit through an entire day of classes, unable to think about anything but Dot upstairs in my parents’ bathroom. Had she eaten those pathetic waffles? Had she promised not to call the police? Would she keep her word once she was free? By the time I stepped off the bus, those questions consumed my mind.

  In the driveway, Dot’s Yugo was parked where she left it. On the second floor, I saw that my parents’ bathroom window, which led out onto a slanted section of the roof, was wide open, the shade unraveled and flapping in the breeze. Nearby, shingles were missing, and I spotted them among the rhododendrons below.

  “ . . . There is the heat of summer and the cold of winter. Even a simple magnet demonstrates positive and negative energy. . . .”

  Even before stepping inside, I heard the faint sound of my father speaking again. This time, I realized how it was that he had come to me during the night. I walked through the door, listening to his words. When I flipped a light switch, no lights came on. I went to the kitchen, but no Rose. By the time I returned to the living room and reached the staircase, pausing to stare up at the darkened hallway above, my father had begun talking once more about that girl, Lydia Flores.

  “The priest put the child in isolation. She was allowed no visitors except her mother. Her food and water were rationed. The priest spent hours each day, placing feathers between her toes in belief that it would enable the evil spirits to take flight. . . .”

  At the top of the stairs, I turned and walked down the hall to my parents’ door.

  “ . . . After a month of feathers and shouted prayers and the girl’s cries for help, Lydia began to speak of her desire to die in order to atone for her sins. That’s when doubt stirred in her mother, and she wondered if this priest was helping her daughter after all. She went to the city and spoke to people there. That is how she learned of my wife and me. And when she was told that our approach to these situations was more gentle, more humane, unlike the clichés we see in movies and books, she made contact with us . . .”

  When I reached their door, I expected it to be locked. But it opened right up. The first thing I saw was Rose passed out on our mother’s bed, mouth open in a lopsided O, bible facedown on her chest. On the nightstand: the tape recorder from that basket in the basement. The wheels turned inside, and I looked at my father’s cramped writing on the cassette: Sylvester Mason, Light & Dark Lecture at The Believers Circle. 11/9/1985.

  “ . . . When we arrived in that village, it was immediately apparent to my wife and me that this was not a girl in need of our help, but one who desperately needed a doctor to address her medical issues, a psychiatrist to treat her emotional problems. You are probably all wondering how were we able to tell the difference. Let me explain—”

  STOP.

  When I hit that button, the air inside our house fell silent. On the other side of the bathroom door, things remained eerily quiet. I waited for my sister to wake, but when she didn’t, I went to the door. “Dot? Are you okay in there?” She did not answer, and my sister remained dead to the world. I went to work, attempting to undo the rope around the knob. When it wouldn’t give, I moved to the bedpost, where the knot came loose more easily.

  When the rope fell to the floor, my sister’s eyes opened. Groggy voiced, she asked, “What are you doing?”

  “What do you think, Rose? She’s been in there for hours.”

  I expected her to argue. Instead, my sister rubbed her eyes and got out of bed, then found her flashligh
t and strolled out of the room. I grabbed the other flashlight off the dresser and pointed it toward my parents’ pink-tiled bathroom. Inside, I found a slumped and shivering figure, huddled in the corner on the floor. Except for a towel wrapped around her waist and another around her shoulders, she was naked.

  “Dot?”

  Slowly, she lifted her head. One hand shielded her eyes from the glare of the flashlight. I moved it away. Asked if she was all right. Not a word in response. Quickly, I went to the bed, grabbed her uniform with the bears, and returned to hold it out to her. Dot stood, legs shaking, towel slipping from her body so that her skinny legs and sagging breasts and drooping pouch of a stomach, even the thatch of gray hair at her crotch, were exposed. I saw that her legs and arms were scraped and realized she must have tried, unsuccessfully, to crawl out the window onto the slanted section of our roof.

  Before I could look away, Dot reached out and snatched the uniform. She began to clumsily dress, gripping the towel rack for support. In the end, her shirt wound up inside out and backward, the tag in front, the V of her neckline dipping down the wrong side. It didn’t seem to matter: Dot picked her bloated paperback off the floor and walked past me, bumping my shoulder so that I stumbled back. She felt her way down the hall in the dark as I regained my balance and trailed behind, doing my best to light our path. When we arrived in the living room, she grabbed her laundry basket off one of the wingback chairs right where I’d left it.

  “I washed and folded your clothes just like you wanted,” I told her.

  She did not respond, though the house seemed to, because all at once the lights came on and Rose clomped up the stairs. She paused when she saw Dot at the front door.

  “Dot,” I called when she pulled it open. “You don’t have to go.”

  Those words caused her to pay attention at last. She whirled around, eyes wide behind crooked glasses, more spittle on her lips than ever before. “Oh, yes, I do,” she told us, pointing a trembling finger between Rose and me. “I don’t care if I ever work for this service again! You girls are horrible! Horrible! You say your parents travel the country searching for demons. Well, I can save them the trip. Because they’ve got two of the most wicked little girls right here in their own home!”

  With that, she stormed out into the bright daylight, leaving the door open behind her. I walked to the steps and watched her climb into her mud-splattered Yugo. As the engine turned over and she rolled backward up the driveway, Rose joined me at my side. We watched as Dot narrowly missed one of the birches before reaching the road. And when she shifted again, grinding the gears in a terrible grating noise, before sputtering away down Butter Lane, my sister actually put her arm around me.

  “What if she calls the police?” I asked.

  “She won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do,” Rose told me. “And anyway, the good news is, it looks like it’s just you and me until Mom and Dad get home at the end of the week.”

  Once and for all, my sister had made her point. After that visit from Dot, never again would we have another nanny. But Rose did and didn’t get what she wanted, because from that day on, whenever our parents went on their trips, they took us, their two daughters, their two very own wicked little girls, right along with them.

  Chapter 5

  The Car with One Headlight

  Those first few weeks after our parents died, I heard noises in the basement. A kind of rattling, things breaking and smashing. This was back before that bare bulb went dark. Back when its yellowy glow still oozed from the filmy casement window by the dirt, illuminating the lowest branches of the rhododendrons. I felt certain of what the noises were: down below, the things my parents had left behind were lamenting their untimely deaths—no different from what Rose and I were doing up above.

  Those were the nights and days we spent shipwrecked in the living room. Together, though not really. I lay on the worn Oriental carpet, staring at the ceiling like there was something up there, a world of constellations that might spell out an explanation instead of just a vast white space with dust in the corners. Rose took up residence on one of the wingback chairs, dragging a second so close it formed a cradle. Her legs hung over the sides, covered by a blanket our mother had knitted years before.

  “I don’t understand,” I said again and again. “Why would you make a deal like that with Albert Lynch?”

  When Rose answered, her voice held none of its usual bark. Instead, she sounded as dazed and faraway as me. “I made it . . .” she began then stopped, before starting again, “ . . . I made it because I had no idea what it would lead to, Sylvie. He told me he just wanted to talk to them. He told me he wanted to set things straight about what happened with Abigail that summer she came to live here. He told me—”

  I waited for her to finish. When she didn’t, we both fell silent. Time had a funny way of moving in those early days and weeks after they were gone. An hour might have passed, or maybe just a few minutes. It all felt the same. Finally, some part of my consciousness rose up to prod her. “He told you what?”

  “I don’t know. He just made it sound simple. Like if I got them to meet him, he’d be happy and would leave them alone. Even though I was in a fight with them, I thought it might be a good thing. You know, for them to be finally rid of the guy. So I went to the pay phone outside that bar, dropped a dime in, and made the call.”

  “And Albert gave you the money before he left?”

  She did not respond, but I remembered the way my mother once tried to teach me how to understand a person’s silence. And though I had never been good at it before, for the first time, I thought I understood Rose.

  “How much?” I asked.

  My sister stayed quiet for a long time. At last she said, “I’m tired, Sylvie. So tired you have no idea. And I’ve been forced to answer questions over and over for that detective and all those lawyers. It’s gotten so I can’t think straight. What does any of it matter? Nothing I say will bring them back or undo my part in it all. But you know who you saw inside that church. And the police found his fingerprints and footprints all over the place. So let crazy old Lynch keep telling Rummel and the rest of them that I made the call. It’s our word against his. And all along we’ve both said the same thing: that I was here at home, nowhere near that pay phone. Now, please can we take a break from talking about it?”

  I gave her the break she wanted.

  If our parents were alive, our slothlike behavior never would have been allowed, and they would not have tolerated the endlessly blaring television. The Price Is Right. Tic-Tac-Dough. General Hospital. Phil Donahue. Cheers. Family Ties. So many shows came and went with applause and tears and dramatic music and canned laughter, while Rose and I remained immobile and numb, barely sleeping before waking and repeating the cycle. Neither of us said much else until I started asking if she heard the sounds coming from the basement.

  “Huh?” she responded each time, lifting her head in the fog of that room.

  Inevitably, there it would be again: something shifting beneath us, something shattering. “I said, ‘Did you hear that?’ ”

  “Hear what?”

  “That noise, Rose. Those noises. Down in the basement.”

  My sister dug out the remote, lowered the volume. I wanted her to mute it altogether so we could listen properly, but she never did. After lifting and tilting her head, she said, “Nope. I don’t hear anything. You should have that ear checked, squirt.”

  She was right. I should have had my ear checked. Foolishly, I still believed it was her responsibility to make that happen—at least that was the understanding when the hospital released me into her care. The gaggle of nurses and administrators at the discharge counter made a fuss over me: the girl with bandages on the left side of her head, a tube snaking into her ear, all because she walked inside a church on a snowy night to see what was keeping her parents. They plied Rose with forms to be signed. They plied her with papers listing doctors I needed t
o visit. They told her about appointments already made in my name. After we left the hospital, however, the dates came and went.

  Clatter. Clang. Crash. Another night brought no movement or sound from us, but a cacophony from below. I began pressing my ear—the good one—to the floor, picturing Penny, that toddler-sized doll with the moon face and vacant black eyes, rattling the walls of her cage. If I pressed my ear to the floor long enough, I could swear some moments I heard what sounded like something breathing. Sucking in air, blowing it back out. Lifting my head, I spoke to Rose in a quivering voice, near tears, “You’re crazy if you don’t hear those things. They’re pissed off. They’re sad. They want them back. I can tell.”

  Rose turned down the volume once more. With less enthusiasm each time, she did the lift-and-tilt motion with her head. “I’m sorry, Sylvie, but I really don’t hear anything. And why would I? There’s nothing down there except some rag doll and a bunch of dusty crap. You’re the crazy one if you believe the stuff Mom and Dad claimed to be true.”

  “I’m not crazy.”

  “Well, neither am I. And if you’re so convinced, go see for yourself.”