by Rick Hautala
Her mind was filled with echoes of the conversation she had had with Graydon three days before, and she couldn’t help but wonder if this was just a bizarre coincidence or if — somehow — that conversation and her aunt’s suggestion were connected.
“Well, I realize it’s a rather ... unusual thing to ask,” Junia said, “but I want to reassure you that I think she can help you. If you would like to speak with Caroline, that is. I know Claire would do everything she can to help.”
“Do I know who this ‘friend’ of yours is?” Elizabeth asked.
Junia shook her head. “I doubt it. Her name’s Claire DeBlaise. She lives up in Raymond and I met her only a few years ago myself. Actually, I’m not sure exactly when it was, but I do know it was long after you had moved away from home.”
Elizabeth shivered as she took her cup of tea and sipped at it. In her imagination, she was already following this conversation along the same lines she had followed with Graydon; but where
Graydon had been inconclusive, insisting he was throwing this out only as a therapeutic point of conversation, Aunt Junia was being very specific and very sincere, telling her exactly what she wanted to do. It came down to the same questions: Did she believe there was any possibility at all that it could be done? Could she — or anyone — contact Caroline? Or did she think that dead is dead, and that any contact with the dead had to be no more than woollyheaded wishful thinking, outright deception, or — perhaps worst of all — self-delusion.
“And this friend of yours — Claire ... she says she can do this?” Elizabeth asked, her face feeling as if it were chiseled out of ice. “Do you really think she can do what she says?”
“I can’t speak for you, dear,” Junia said, lowering her voice and leaning toward Elizabeth across the table, “but I know that when I’ve sat with Claire, she’s said things that she absolutely could not have known, things that could only have been known by me and ... the person I was contacting.”
Elizabeth wanted to ask her aunt who she had contacted, but thought better of it. She had always wondered why Junia had never married. Her mother had told her that, when Junia was young, she had had a lover who was killed during World War II. Elizabeth wondered if that was who Junia had been speaking to “on the other side.”
“And if I ... if I did want to give this a try,” she said softly, “is there — I mean, would it cost me anything?”
Junia let loose a short, braying burst of laughter. “Of course it wouldn’t! Claire doesn’t do this for money. She’s been given a gift, the gift of allowing spirits of those we say are dead to enter her and speak through her. To accept money for sharing such a gift would be ... well, it just wouldn’t do.” She shook her head, her eyes going momentarily unfocused. “No — it wouldn’t do at all. Would you like me to give her a call?”
Elizabeth hesitated as conflicting thoughts cascaded wildly in her mind. The reasonable thing to do, she knew, would be to put a stop to it right now — thank Junia for her concern and tell her that she didn’t want to dabble in anything occult. She had learned her lesson back when she had fooled around with the Ouija board, and the spirit of Max had told her and her sister to commit suicide.
She surprised herself when she nodded in agreement and said, “Yeah — I guess so ... Why not?”
“Okay, dear,” Junia said, pushing herself away from the table and standing up. “Let me just duck into the living room to check on Elspeth, then I’ll give Claire a call. You just sit here and enjoy your tea.”
With that, Junia hurried from the kitchen, the sound of her feet scuffing like sandpaper on the hardwood floors. Elizabeth smiled weakly as she shifted back in her chair and pretended to get comfortable. She couldn’t deny the thoughts that nagged at her, the feelings that, spurred by Graydon’s “theoretical” discussion, she was allowing herself to be suckered into some crazy-ass spiritualist stuff. The chances that Aunt Junia’s friend Claire — or anyone, for that matter — really could communicate with the dead were remote, perhaps impossible. Even if this Claire DeBlaise wasn’t an outright charlatan, Elizabeth figured she would end up sitting in a darkened room, waiting for the table to start tapping or something like that, and then would be told that the spirits, apparently, weren’t willing to communicate.
But what if it works? she thought, even as waves of gooseflesh rippled up her arms. If she put aside her intellect and searched her feelings, she could feel a slim ray of hope.
What if this woman really does have an ability, and what if I could speak with Caroline? What would I say to her?
Elizabeth found herself already phrasing questions for Caroline in her mind.
“It’s all set for tomorrow night, if that’s all right with you.”
Junia’s voice burst suddenly from behind her, startling Elizabeth. She turned around and looked up at her aunt as she came back into the kitchen.
“Tomorrow ... Friday? Umm, yeah, sure,” Elizabeth said, not really thinking. “I don’t think I have anything planned for tomorrow night.”
“Good, then,” Aunt Junia said. “She’s expecting us around eight o’clock. I’ll have Helen Saunders stop by to stay with Elspeth while we’re out. Can you pick me up sometime between seven and seven-thirty?”
Still feeling numb, and thinking she was probably a complete fool for getting involved in any of this, much less for encouraging Aunt Junia’s belief in such nonsense, Elizabeth gulped down the last of her tea. She brought the empty cup over to the sink and then asked if she could use the phone to see if her mother would come and pick her up.
She walked down the hallway to use the phone in the entryway so she wouldn’t disturb the still-sleeping Elspeth. With each footstep, the unnerving sensation that she was being watched got stronger and stronger. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that it wasn’t Junia, watching her from the kitchen, but seemingly someone lurking in the darkened comers of the hallway, always just out of sight ... just out of reach.
As her nervousness steadily increased, Elizabeth paused by the bathroom, both tempted and afraid to peek in at the mirror over the sink. Who might she see reflected there? she wondered. Whose death-pale face would be looking out at her from the glass?
Finally, bracing her shoulders and sucking in a deep breath, she walked past the bathroom door to the phone in the hallway. As she dialed home and spoke briefly with her mother, who said she’d swing by within half an hour, Elizabeth could feel the almost physical contact of unseen eyes peering at her from somewhere in the house. No matter which direction she looked, it always felt as though there was an indistinct presence behind her, and cold, unblinking eyes were watching her ... staring at her ... drilling into the back of her head.
2.
Elizabeth decided to wait outside on the back porch for her ride while Aunt Junia helped Elspeth with her afternoon bath. When she heard the crunching of tires on the gravel driveway above the splattering sound of rain on the porch roof, she looked out expecting to see her mother’s car. Her throat tightened when, instead, she saw the rain slick two-tone blue of a town police cruiser. At first she thought it was Detective Harris, coming by to ask her or her aunt some more questions. Then the driver’s window slid smoothly halfway down to reveal Frank, looking up at her with a thin smile.
“Hi,” he said, with a forced cheerfulness.
“Hi, yourself,” Elizabeth replied, before turning to glance nervously at the kitchen door, as though expecting help to come charging out of the house. When none seemed forthcoming, she looked back at Frank and asked, “So what brings you around?”
Frank shrugged. “just passing by. I thought it was you I saw waiting out here. I just kinda wondered what was up.”
Elizabeth wanted to be mad at him for intruding on her like this, but there was something about his friendly smile that warmed her, and she couldn’t help but smile back. If he did give her a ride home, she thought she might ask him to fill her in on what Detective Harris hadn’t told her.
“I walked over here afte
r work,” she said, resenting that she felt she needed to explain herself to him.
“Rain kinda caught you, huh?”
“Yeah,” Elizabeth said, nodding. Her eyes kept flicking up and down the road, looking for her mother whenever she heard the hissing of tires on the wet asphalt, but Rebecca was nowhere in sight.
“I was just waiting for a ride,” she said at last.
“I can drive you home if you’d like,” Frank said brightly. His smile seemed warmer, more honest now, but there was still an edge in his voice that made Elizabeth think he was offering his help just a bit too fast.
“My mother’s already on her way,” she said, glancing at her wristwatch. “She should have been here by now. Thanks anyway. “
Frank nodded but made no move to back the cruiser onto the road. The engine idled smoothly, and, for a little longer than was comfortable, the only sound was the steady slap-slap of Frank’s windshield wipers and the splatter of rain on the roof and road.
Finally, unable to stand the silence any longer, Elizabeth asked, “Is there something I can help you with?”
“I’ve been meaning to give you a call,” Frank said, biting his lower lip.
Elizabeth looked away when she found she had nothing to say.
“Why not call home and see if your mother’s left already,” Frank suggested. ‘‘I’m heading out your way, anyway.”
Elizabeth opened her mouth to say she’d just as soon wait for her mother, but Frank cut her short.
“I really do want to talk to you. And no — it’s not about ... us.
After considering a moment, Elizabeth flashed Frank a “hold on” signal with her hand and dashed back into the house. She hurriedly dialed her mother on the kitchen phone and, luckily, Rebecca hadn’t left yet. Elizabeth told her not to bother coming out into the storm and hung up and went back outside. Pulling her jacket collar tightly around her neck, she ran down the steps and around to the passenger’s door and got into the cruiser.
“Whew!” she said, wiping streams of water from her face. “I wasn’t expecting this kind of weather.”
“Maybe we should change the poem to say, ‘May showers bring June flowers,’” Frank said, laughing as he shifted the cruiser into gear and, cocking his arm over the back of the seat, backed out into the road.
Elizabeth tried to settle down and relax. The steady rhythm of the wipers was almost soothing, but still, she felt wound wire-tight. The bunched-up muscles in her shoulders and neck just wouldn’t unwind.
Frank started driving down Main Street, holding the steering wheel loosely with both hands, and he was smiling gently, as though privately pleased with himself. But Elizabeth could sense that there was something bothering him in spite of his cheerful exterior; there was a held-in-check tightness about him that, try as he might to hide it, Elizabeth could feel. Maybe she knew him just a bit too damned well!
“So what is it you have to talk to me about?” she asked.
Frank was silent as he slowed for the left turn onto Brook Road. Elizabeth couldn’t help but notice that, in his silence, his eyes drifted up to the black iron gate of Oak Grove Cemetery as they drove slowly past. Low black rain clouds hung like funeral curtains over the tombstone-littered hill, and the twin-rutted dirt road was mired with running streams of rain water, and the grass that only yesterday had looked so green and spring fresh now looked gray and beaten, as though winter had never left.
“Well ... ?” Elizabeth said.
Frank grunted, cleared his throat, and took a deep breath.
“This doesn’t have anything to do with what Detective Harris was asking me about the other day, does it?” Elizabeth asked.
“Harris? When did he talk to you?” Frank snapped. His hands clenched the steering wheel so tightly the knuckles turned white.
“He came out to the house a few days ago and was asking me all sorts of questions. He said something else has happened. Tell me — what?”
Frank considered for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah,” he said, his voice low and resonant. “Something else has happened. Look, Elizabeth, I don’t quite know how to say this.”
“Well you’d better hurry up,” Elizabeth said with a grim smile, “because we’re almost to my house.”
“Let’s go around the loop once, then. This is important.”
“Does it have anything to do with Caroline?” Elizabeth asked. Her voice cracked on the last word, and she felt a passing wave of dizziness.
“It’s ... important,” Frank said.
“Just tell me! What’s so damned important?” Elizabeth said sharply.
They rounded a curve in the road. Straight ahead they could see the white siding of Elizabeth’s family home. Frank took a deep breath and said, “I think I know who was out at the cemetery that night.”
Elizabeth sagged back into the car seat and watched, almost helplessly, as they got closer to the house.
“Keep driving,” she said, surprised that there was enough air in her lungs to force out any words. When Frank drove past her parents’ house, the familiar, comfortable surroundings slid silently past her in the rain with the dissociated distance of a dream landscape. Turning and watching the front porch fall behind her, Elizabeth had the sense that the house, not she, was slipping away. In a momentary flash of fear, she could imagine a bent, withered figure standing in the darkened shelter of the porch as she held up a wrinkled shopping bag and slowly opened the top ...
“Want to see what I have in here now . .. ?”
Frank turned left onto Nonesuch Road, named after the river it crossed, then turned right onto Mitchell Hill Road. For an uncomfortably long time, the only sounds in the cruiser were the wipers slapping back and forth and the steady whir of the heater. In spite of the heat in the car, Elizabeth felt cold, steely fingers wrapping around her throat and squeezing ... squeezing ever so slowly.
“So ... tell me,” Elizabeth finally said. Her voice croaked, like the old crone in her nightmares.
“This isn’t official ... in any way,” Frank said. “And I’m only telling you this as one friend to another. “ He was sawing his front teeth over his lower lip, and there was a tightness, a distance in his eyes that Elizabeth found unnerving.
Getting a grip on herself, she straightened up in the car seat and said, “Okay — fine. I won’t hold you to it in a court of law. Will you just tell me what the hell is going on?”
Frank flashed her a harsh glance and said, “I wouldn’t joke about it if I were you. I think you’re in trouble — a lot more trouble than you realize!”
“You told me that before.”
“Well,” Frank began haltingly,”: after the first incident ... you know, I wasn’t so sure, but now —”
“Cut through the bullshit, Frank, and tell me!” Elizabeth said, her voice threatening to break with every word. “First Harris and now you are saying something else happened. What the fuck was it?”
“Yeah ... there was something else,” he said. He eased over onto the dirt shoulder on a stretch of road with no houses on either side and slipped the shift into park. Twisting around and resting his arm on the back of the car seat, his fingertips just touching Elizabeth’s shoulder, he faced her.
“Last Monday night,” he began, his voice low and halting, ‘someone was out by your Uncle Jonathan’s grave again. We’re pretty sure it was the same person, because of what we found.”
Elizabeth was just about to ask what it was they had found, but then, with a jolt of horror, she realized what it must have been. She gasped and then said, “His ... hand?”
“Yeah,” Frank said. “Whoever it was left your uncle’s severed hand out there.”
“Oh, my Christ!” Elizabeth whispered.
“There’s more,” Frank said. “A lot more. He didn’t just leave it on Jonathan’s tombstone, you see. He was doing some kind of … of magical ceremony or something. Norton and I almost caught him, too, but he got away. Do you know what a Hand of Glory is?”
Floodin
g with fear as she stared out at the rain-drenched trees, Elizabeth numbly shook her head and rasped, “No.”
“I did a bit of research on it. It’s got something to do with certain magical rituals. Usually, at least in the old days, when people actually believed in this kind of stuff, the Hand of Glory had to be that of a hanged man. It was used to get control of someone so the person using the Hand could ... I guess sort of hypnotize him so he could then rob his house.”
“If someone was using my uncle’s hand for something like that, then I’d guess at least one person still believes in this stuff,” Elizabeth said. She almost said something about Aunt Junia’s arrangements for her to meet with a spiritualist friend of hers, but then she thought better of it.
“There’s more,” Frank said grimly.
“Jesus Christ — what is it?” she said, even as she wished to heaven none of this was really happening.
“The magical ritual, at least as far as he got, was done at —” Frank stopped and took a deep breath, but before he could continue, Elizabeth interrupted him.
“ — At Caroline’s grave!” she said.
Frank nodded and slid his hand firmly onto her shoulder. He could feel her trembling, and his heart went out to her. Elizabeth let out a sharp gasp, only distantly aware of the tears that were flowing from her eyes. Frank’s words drove into her ears like a sledgehammer.
“No ... did he ... “
She couldn’t finish the terrifying thought she had, but Frank knew what she meant. Shaking his head, he said, “No — he didn’t ... dig her up. But you see, the hand was stuck into the ground over Caroline’s grave. He had soaked the fingertips in something flammable because they were burning, like candles.”
“Oh, Jesus!” Elizabeth gasped. A sudden gust of wind blew some wet leaves against the cruiser’s windshield, where they stuck like fat leeches.
“I haven’t figured out exactly what was going on,” Frank said, assuming a commanding tone of voice if only to keep from feeling too deeply what Elizabeth was feeling. “I mean, you can bet that Harris and Lovejoy are working on it, but still, you’ve got to understand, what happened out there is not that serious a crime —”
