Help for the Haunted: A Novel

by John Searles

  “Not unless you count these love letters from the electric and gas companies,” she told me last time. “What could you be waiting for anyway? An invitation from Harvard? Don’t get ahead of yourself, squirt.”

  I moved slowly around the room, unearthing a laminated prayer card from Saint Julia’s that I was surprised she had not thrown away, and a newspaper where she’d circled an ad: PARTY PLANNER WANTED: MUST BE DETAIL-ORIENTED & ORGANIZED. Even though Rose talked about going back for her GED, so far she had done nothing about it, instead taking random office jobs only to get fired because she lacked the exact skills listed in that ad. I gave her old globe a spin and thought of the way she used to do the same, planting her finger on random locations and bringing it to a stop, announcing Armenia or Lithuania or Guam.

  I was about to check out her closet when the Hulk’s chain rattled on the lawn.

  I went to the window. Outside, the dog’s bone must have thawed, because she gnawed frantically on it, causing her chain to make that clanging sound. Except for Rose’s truck, the driveway remained empty. Relieved, I stepped through the minefield on her floor and opened the closet. Since so few of Rose’s belongings were ever put away, the space was mostly vacant. Nothing from Howie, but I located a plastic bag labeled Baltimore County Police Department. Flashlight, road map, repair bills, oil change receipts—its contents included everything the police had removed from the Datsun before returning the car to us. I stared at my father’s signature on a receipt, imagining his hand moving a pen across the bottom. Finally, I pulled out the only remaining item: Help for the Haunted: The Unusual Work of Sylvester and Rose Mason by Samuel Heekin.

  Despite all the months that had passed, holding that book in my hands made me every bit as nervous as it had that night in the backseat. Some part of me worried about Rose coming home still, so I clicked on the flashlight and turned off the ceiling lamp, then sat down on the floor and flipped pages. My mother used to complain about Heekin’s convoluted way of stringing together sentences. Judging from passages that leaped out, I understood why:

  If you are a believer who has come to this narrative, there is nothing that I, the author, can do to prepare you, the reader, for what you are about to discover . . .

  . . . The Masons could very well open a museum of curiosities in the basement of their home, for that is where the remnants of their excursions in the realm of the paranormal live. I use the word “live” because, to this visitor at least, many of the things I encountered on my tour beneath their house did feel exactly that: alive. One of the very first artifacts I took note of upon entering the basement was a hatchet, which seemed to carry a life force all its own. This weapon was used in a tragic family slaying at what was once the Locke Farm in Whitefield, New Hampshire. But that, as they say, is only the beginning . . .

  . . . Perhaps the most infamous case that the Masons have spoken about in lectures and media outlets is that of Penny, the child-sized Raggedy Ann doll hand-sewn by a mother from the Midwest with instructions from a mail-order kit. A gesture of hope, it was a gift to her only child, a girl who lay terminally ill until she died with the doll at her side . . .

  “He writes like he talks,” I could still hear my mother saying as I sat in Rose’s dark bedroom, her humidifier puffing away like a sick old lady reading over my shoulder.

  “You mean a lot of hogwash?” my father said in response.

  “I mean too many words. Someone should take a vacuum cleaner to his sentences. No wonder the man’s a reporter for the Dundalk Eagle and not a big-city newspaper. We never should have let him into our lives.”

  “You’re right about that last part,” my father told her. “But his writing style is the least of our problems.”

  I skimmed the mess until I came to the photo section with the image I’d lingered on in the backseat of the Datsun. That night, it had been too dark to make out the caption, but I saw it now: THE VANDALIZED KITCHEN IN ARLENE TRESCOTT’S APARTMENT, DOWNTOWN BALTIMORE. 1982. Not a farmhouse after all, I thought, turning to the table of contents. The book was divided into three sections. The first detailed each of my parents’ childhoods and their early years together. The second consisted entirely of case studies, including only the briefest mention of Abigail Lynch. The final section was titled simply: “Should You Really Believe the Masons?”

  Their childhoods—those were the chapters I turned to first, since what details I knew of their lives before me were fuzzy. I knew my father grew up in Philadelphia, and that my grandparents owned a movie theater with a candy store in the front. But I didn’t know that at age nine, he reported his first paranormal experience when he saw “a globule of energy among the seats” while sweeping that theater. When he told his mother and father, they laughed and suggested that his “globule” was probably a couple who stayed after the movie to kiss. Over dinners, my grandparents and their friend, Lloyd, who helped run the theater, coaxed my father into telling the story. When he described the lightless mass that shifted and reshaped in the shadows among the seats, the room exploded with laughter, filling my father with shame. For that reason, he quit mentioning the globules, even as they began to appear with increasing frequency.

  Maybe it was all the cavity-inducing sweets from the candy shop that gave him the idea to become a dentist. Maybe it was all the teasing and those persistent sightings that made him want to study away from home. Whatever his reasons, despite the fact that there were perfectly good dental schools in Philly, my father applied to the University of Maryland. Moving into an apartment in one of the old Pascault row houses for students, he reported a newfound sense of freedom, having left his family behind. But he soon discovered that not everything had been left behind.

  The ghosts—as he began calling them, plain and simple—had followed.

  At this point in the chapter, Heekin broke from his own tangled writing and allowed my father to describe the moment, referencing a quote from a lecture he gave to the New England Society for Paranormal Research. Reading my father’s words reminded me that when he spoke of the things he encountered, I felt no tug-of-war between believing and not believing. I simply believed.

  Not far from my bed in the dim light of that apartment stood a figure no more than four feet tall. Before that night, the things I’d seen had been shapeless, shifting masses. Their lack of a fixed form is what led me to refer to them as globules from an early age. But this figure was different: its body looked like that of a dressmaker’s dummy. No arms, but also no sliver of light between its legs, so it seemed to be wearing a dress. Although there were no eyes, no nose, no mouth to gauge her emotions, I sensed that she was studying me with great curiosity and need before she vanished . . . Just as some people forever attract stray animals, others tend to draw out the humming, peripatetic energies in this world. After that experience, I realized I was in the latter category . . .

  My mother reported no such paranormal experiences growing up in a tiny mountain town of Tennessee. Heekin said that her father had died in an accident on the farm, one she witnessed at the age of eleven, and the mere mention of it forever held the power to bring her to tears. He persuaded my mother into offering a description of the man: gentle, soft-spoken, scrupulous, devout. He took their small family of three to church each Sunday and to breakfast afterward. He built birdhouses in his woodshed and allowed my mother to paint them whatever colors she wanted before nailing them up in the trees. With binoculars, they watched from the second-floor windows as families of birds came and went with the seasons. Those birdhouses, those binoculars, were the loveliest pieces of her childhood, my mother told Heekin during their interview, but they also exacerbated the heartbreak she felt after her father was gone.

  Here, too, he allowed my mother to speak for herself. As I read her words, I couldn’t help feeling that in some way she was there with me in the dark:

  I remember waking in the mornings to hear those birds singing outside my window—a sound that once brought me happiness but no longer. I tried closin
g my windows. I tried putting a pillow over my head. But still that chirping found me. Finally, there came a day when I couldn’t stand it any longer. Desperate to make their singing stop, I waited until my mother went into town then pulled the ladder from my father’s woodshed and climbed into the branches of those trees in our yard. My intention was to knock the birdhouses to the ground one by one, but typical of my father, he secured them to survive even the strongest storm, never mind an eleven-year-old girl. That’s when I had an idea. I climbed down and went to the kitchen, where I located a bag of steel wool, which my mother used to keep mice from getting into our house. I made my way back up into the trees and stuffed the entryways my father had drilled, then snapped off the perches so there was no hope of birds getting inside. Sure enough, their singing stopped, or at least I didn’t hear it so close to my bedroom window after that. Those birds moved on and took my father’s spirit with them, I believed, because that’s when Jack Peele entered the picture . . .

  Jack Peele. A man my mother never once mentioned to me, but whom my “practical, plain-speaking” grandmother had apparently married without her daughter present. One night, she simply set a third place at the dinner table and introduced him by saying, “Rose, I’d like you to meet your new daddy. Now let’s eat.” My mother expected this new daddy of hers to have the sinister qualities of a wicked stepparent in a fairy tale. But Jack pulled coins from his floppy ears. He recited the alphabet backward. He built towering card houses and let my mother blow them down. Instead of going to church, Jack lingered in his pj’s and watched cartoons, busting a gut each time the Road Runner escaped a free-falling anvil. One Sunday, they skipped cartoons and went out in the yard, where he kept spinning my mother by the arms and letting her loose into a leaf pile. When he grew dizzy, Jack lay on the grass, my mother beside him. Staring up into the branches of the trees, he asked, “What do you suppose is going on with those birdhouses?”

  Reluctantly, my mother told him about her father securing them up there, about the binoculars and the notebook and the songs that filled her with melancholy after he was gone. And then she told him about the steel wool and the snapped-off perches. Jack’s face grew serious. “What time of year did you do that, darling?”

  “Spring,” she answered.

  Jack stood and climbed one of the trees. He didn’t need a ladder; he was tall and lanky and moved chimplike through the branches. Slowly, his fingers tugged out the steel wool from one of the birdhouses before he peered inside, shaking his head and letting out a dive-bomb of a whistle.

  “What?” my mother asked from down on the ground. “What? What? What?”

  “Nothing,” Jack told her.

  But that night, after he and my grandmother spent a long while whispering in the kitchen, they sat my mother down. In their most somber voices, they asked what had caused her to kill the baby birds inside those houses by making it so their mothers could not feed them. Horrified at the realization of what she’d done, my mother had trouble finding words. “It’s like I told Jack,” she stammered, tears leaking down her cheeks. “I did it . . . I did it because Daddy went away, so I wanted the birds to go away too.”

  A fist pounded on the door downstairs.

  My head jerked up, and I dropped the flashlight. My mother, or at least the feeling of having her right there with me, vanished at once. I looked for a clock to figure out how long I’d been lost in those pages, but saw none. Outside, the Hulk’s chain rattled, though she did not bark.

  The pounding stopped then started again. I reached for the flashlight, which had rolled beneath the bed. When I pulled it out, I found a letter written to Rose—the return address on a random street in Baltimore. The fist pounded on the door again, so I slipped the letter in my pocket to read later, then tossed the book and all the rest in the plastic bag from the police station, returned it to the closet, and hurried downstairs. A laugh—deep, male—came from the other side of the door, followed by another, which made me certain those boys I’d been waiting for had arrived.

  Astonishing the thoughts that can fill a person’s mind in a single instant. For one solitary second after I put my hand on the knob and pulled, it was them standing before me. Not those phony Albert Lynches. Instead, I saw her in an ash-gray column dress with pearly buttons. I saw him in a rumpled brown suit and smudged wire-rimmed glasses. All my reading about their childhoods had summoned their spirits, the same way my father drew out those leftover energies late nights in the theater and in the dark of his university apartment.

  That’s what I first believed anyway.

  But those thoughts gathered in my mind only for a moment. In the next, I noticed my mother’s necklace, gold instead of silver, tight around her neck. The loose bun she wore to church not held up by bobby pins, but staples. My father’s blazer may have been brown, but his pants were black and torn beneath one knee. His shirt, white rather than the mustard yellow he favored, was splattered with a substance meant to look like blood but too bright to be the real thing. The lenses of his glasses were popped out; without the usual smudges, I had a clear view of the cold, unfamiliar eyes beneath.

  No longer was it enough to call me names in the halls.

  No longer was it enough to knock down our mailbox.

  No longer was it enough to toss rag dolls on our lawn.

  Where would it end? I wondered. What would it take for them to leave us alone? Scream, slam the door, crumble to the floor—any of those reactions seemed possible until all that I’d read about my parents’ childhoods returned to me. I thought of the way people mistreated them each time they offered a glimpse into their inner worlds. What good did it do my father to let his family know of the things he saw? What good did it do my mother to confess her ties to those ruined birdhouses? And then I thought of the kindness they always showed people, and I resolved to do the same. Those boys may as well have dressed as bums or superheroes, I offered the candy basket no differently.

  “Go ahead,” I said as they stared at me, expecting something more.

  After some hesitation, the boy dressed as my mother reached out his large, knuckley hand and foraged through the basket, coming away with a couple of Charleston Chews. The boy dressed as my father did the same, grabbing Milk Duds and Sweet Tarts. My gaze shifted over their shoulders to the end of the driveway, where reflectors moved round and round, glimmering like the eyes of a demon out there in the dark. More boys on bikes, I realized. All the while, the Hulk licked and chewed her bone, not bothering to offer up so much as a growl.

  “Can we see the doll?” my father, or the one dressed like him, asked.

  “No,” I told him.

  “Where is she?” This question came from the one dressed like my mother.

  I thought of Penny in the basement, slumped inside her cage, the sign written in my father’s handwriting attached to the door: DO NOT OPEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES! Abandoned down there all these months, the spiders had likely made a home out of her, crawling across her moon face, stringing webs between her floppy arms. “She’s at the bottom of the well,” I told those boys, a lie hatched out of old wishes.

  “The well?” this version of my father repeated.

  “We put it down there with all the others you and everybody else throw on our lawn. Go get it and the rest of them if you want.”

  With that, I slammed the door. Standing there in the dark, flashlight in hand, I listened to their feet thump down the steps. I went to the window and watched as they shoved off the plywood, same as I’d done a few nights before. I knew from experience they’d never see a thing in the absolute blackness below. Soon, the boys realized it too, because they gave up and headed to the street, where their friends still pedaled in figure eights. The boy in the dress tugged off his wig and dropped it among the cedars before picking up a bike by the curb. The boy in the blazer climbed on the back before they pedaled away into the night.

  Once they were gone, my hands, my body, all of me began to shake. In an effort to make the trembling st
op, I roamed the living room, dining room, kitchen, moving aimlessly through the shadows. I pictured my parents the last time I saw them. Snow gathering on the shoulders of my father’s wool coat as he stepped from the car. Wind gusting my mother’s hair when she got out too. Then I remembered stepping inside that church, where the air was so still, so absolutely frigid, it stung my lungs with every breath. Something smoky mixed with the faint trace of incense. It took time for my eyes to adjust, but once they did, I made out three silhouettes near the altar.

  “Hello,” I called out, the word pluming in the air like a question: Hello?

  To distract myself, I located the diary Boshoff had given me. I forced myself to think of some other memory, to put it down in order to keep so many others at bay. That night in Ocala came to mind, and I started writing and did not stop or bother to even look up until the Hulk barked outside.

  Once again, I went to the door. Daylight had yet to come, but the electric blue tinge in the air told me it was imminent. I had been writing for hours. Now, I spied the dog out there, lunging on her chain in the direction of the house.

  “It’s okay, girl,” I said, stepping outside, moving across the lawn. Afraid to get too close, I stopped at the edge of her reach, missing the way my mother had of calming, not just people, but animals too. Above us, streams of toilet paper rippled. While I’d been lost in that journal, someone had come by and tossed those rolls into our trees, soaped the windows of Rose’s truck too—pranks that seemed quaint by now. As the dog kept at it, I found the courage to make my way around to her bone, slick and shimmering with saliva. No matter how much I waved it in her face, the thing held no interest for her anymore. All she wanted was to bark and growl and lunge on her chain.