Laura could smell the spices cooking from the porch when she got home that night. Cayenne, red pepper, ground chilies. Only one thing smelled like that. Doug’s homemade chili.
“Something smells good,” she said as she rolled in through the front door.
Doug stuck his head out from the kitchen doorway. “¡Si, Senora, la comida es muy bueno!”
The kitchen table was set for dinner. Laura dropped her bag at the door, walked over and gave him a kiss. For an instant it felt wrong. Something about his lips…the texture, the fullness…she couldn’t nail it down and then the feeling vanished. She wrapped her arms around Doug’s waist.
“Is that the famous chili I smell?” she said.
“You used to call it infamous,” Doug said.
“That was when we had it eat it every other night because it was all we could afford,” Laura said.
“And only through one hundred and eighty attempts in one year could such magic be perfected.” Doug dipped a wooden spoon into a pot simmering on the stove and put it to Laura’s lips. She blew across the top and then tasted. The inside of her mouth caught fire and her eyes watered.
“That’s the good stuff,” she said.
“Check out the fireplace,” Doug said.
“Wow!” she said as she spied the fireplace utensils. Doug had cleaned them after pulling them from the barn. The logo handles were now sprayed a gloss black. “Where did you get these?”
“Hidden down in the barn where we put in the filtration system.”
Laura grabbed the shovel. She underestimated its weight and nearly dropped it. “Are they heavy enough for you?” she asked.
“More than enough,” Doug said. “But they clearly belong here. Maybe we’ll buy a new set to actually use once the weather gets cold.”
“There’s an interior decorator in you screaming to get out,” Laura teased.
“Another cheap shot like that and those go back in the barn,” Doug said. “Are we going to eat dinner or are you going to keep insulting me?”
“Hey, why choose?”
Doug filled the dinner conversation that evening with as many details about the water filtration system as he could, but after a while that well went dry. Out of a combination of guilt and altruism (he was afraid to know the ratio) he had to bring up the Hutchington history.
“So,” he said. “I did some research today on the Hutchingtons.”
Laura stuck her spoon straight up in her chili. “And you waited this long to tell me? Let’s go, out with it.”
“Well, the patriarch, Mr. Candy Baron, died of old age and good living,” Doug said. “His two eldest sons lived here after that. One, William, was married with two daughters. One winter the girls went out skating on the pond. The ice was too thin. They broke through and drowned.”
“That’s an awful story,” Laura said. “The poor parents, they must have felt… How old were the girls?”
“Five years old.”
Laura flashed back to her dream the first night they were here. Two girls wanted her to come down to the pond, two girls who were about five years old.
“Were there pictures of them?” she asked.
“I didn’t find any.”
“What were their names?” Laura already knew the answer.
“Constance and Elizabeth,” Doug said. Laura recited the names along with him in her head, syllable for syllable. Her body made an involuntary shudder.
“Remember that night,” Laura said, “the first night after I was hired, when I got spooked in my room? I heard girls laughing.”
“C’mon, babe,” Doug said. “That noise was nothing but wind blowing through eighty-five-year-old siding. I knew if I told you about this, you would blow it up into something big.”
That condescending comment punched the wrong button in Laura. She knew what she heard that night. She knew what she experienced. Most of all, she knew what she dreamed. Twins names Constance and Elizabeth came in her dream and called her “Mother”. She was about to blurt that out to Doug but cut herself short. He’d made up his mind that what she’d experienced had been in her head. He’d just say that the dream planted the seeds for her hallucination or some such psycho-babble nonsense. She wasn’t in the mood for that.
“Never mind that,” she said. “So the girls are buried in that little cemetery?”
“Along with their parents,” Doug said. “By now it’s just gravestones out there. After over eighty years, what could be left? There’s no such thing as ghosts or spirits of the dead or cursed houses. It’s all just local superstition and bullshit. You should have read how much the townspeople resented the rich folks up here on the ridge. They would be quick to make up all sorts of nasty stories.”
There were a few more things she wanted to know, but she knew she couldn’t stomach much of Doug’s dismissive attitude. He wanted to just glaze over this and move on. Like every major trauma they had endured. She threw her napkin at the table.
“Well, I have to get set for tomorrow. Those history tests won’t grade themselves.”
“Fail one of them for me,” Doug said, but Laura wasn’t in the mood for banter.
Later in her study, she was halfway through the stack of exams. She had tweaked the test Mrs. Matthews had left. The last two questions morphed from multiple choice to written answers in paragraph form. The multiple-choice section graded quickly, but reading the last two questions was like walking through a minefield of grammatical errors. That was okay. She also taught the kids English every day. By the end of the year, she would have them up to speed.
She caught herself again, treating her position as a permanent job. She was the substitute. Long-term substitute, but substitute nonetheless. Ms. Matthews would be back since broken legs are not fatal. She felt so guilty every time she caught herself rooting for complications to set in.
Her Student Sixth Sense flashed a warning and she dropped her red pen. The clock radio, which she had kept off since the night it went haywire, clicked on. No station came on, just a hiss of static. Laura felt her heart hammer in her chest. She got the same shiver she did before the room went Amityville Horror on her before.
She remembered the little girl laughter from last time. She recalled the smiling blonde twins from her dream. Her SSS told her this was Constance and Elizabeth visiting. These girls wouldn’t, couldn’t be evil. How could she be scared by them? She took a deep, cleansing breath.
After all, what had they done last time? Closed her books and shuffled her papers? That was hardly threatening. It wasn’t diabolical. It was a prank. Two girls playing a prank on the teacher.
The room temperature dropped like a blast from a freezer. Laura slowly turned to see the room. She kept her history tests in the corner of her eye. At the edge of her peripheral vision, a paper started to flutter. She spun back and slapped it down.
“Ha, ha,” she said. “I was too quick for you this time.” She was certain she was not talking to herself. She rolled open a desk drawer and pulled out a bright blue ball. It was the exercise squeeze ball St. Luke’s had given her as part of her hand rehab.
“You want something to play with?” she said. “Here you go.”
She tossed the ball against the far wall. It hit the floor and rolled to a stop.
“Go ahead,” Laura said. She would treat them just like two of her students. “You can make the papers move, so you can make the ball move. Or are you only good behind someone’s back?”
Laura stared at the motionless ball on the hardwood floor. “Go ahead. Let’s see you play.”
The ball rocked back and forth a few degrees.
“Very good!” Laura said. “Go ahead, show me what you can do.”
The ball took off like it had been swatted by a tiger. It raced a third of the way across the room and stopped as abruptly as if it had hit a wall. Then it rocketed back across the room and slammed to a halt right where it started. The soft, ethereal laughter of two little girls floated through the room.
; The next instant, Laura knew their presence had disappeared. The girls were gone, moved to a different location or even a different dimension. Laura broke into a smile. She wasn’t scared at all. It was just the twins. What a treat this would be, sharing her house with spirits. This was going to be fun.
She rose to tell Doug about this amazing experience and stopped herself short. She remembered his trivializing response to her last paranormal experience. This one wouldn’t be any different.
The hell with that. The girls came to her, not him. He didn’t want to believe, fine. She could have her own secrets.
Chapter Twenty
The next morning flew by before Doug knew it. From the end of breakfast until noon he sat in the turret room and wrote. Characters came to life so vividly he swore he knew them. The patriarch of the Southern family was austere and demanding. His two sons vied to run the plantation upon his death, each wishing they could hasten it. Intrigue begat intrigue and the Civil War loomed on the horizon. It was so good, even Doug wanted to know how it ended. He didn’t have an outline. He didn’t have character notes. The story just flowed out of him as if he picked up the words like radio waves.
His throat felt dry and he glanced at the clock. One p.m.. What the hell happened to the morning? He straightened up from behind his keyboard. His brain felt like it had been through a wringer. He was done writing, but he wished he didn’t have to stop. In fact, he didn’t want to leave the room. He was certain this inspired energy he felt came from within these four walls. That initial attraction he had for the turret room had amplified. This space belonged to him or maybe that he belonged to it. Whichever way it was, it gave him what he needed to write.
He rose from his desk and noticed the locked door to the unexplored attic. A key protruded from the antique lock. Laura must have come across it and left it in there for him. That saved him a call to Dale’s locksmith pal, another chore he was now glad he had put off. His hunger abated immediately, replaced by an insatiable curiosity, a gravitational pull to that undiscovered country beyond that door.
The trefoil head of the iron key was warm. The lock turned grudgingly. A series of heavy clicks sounded inside the door. The door creaked as Doug pulled it open, as if the room were issuing a welcome. A set of rough wooden steps rose up into the gloom of the attic.
Doug crept up the stairs, hoping his eyes would adjust to the darkness. Unseen cobwebs caressed his face and he batted them away. The air smelled stale, mildewed with a trace of musk. The force that pulled him forward grew.
At the top of the steps, his head struck an exposed rafter. He ducked and turned right to where the roofline rose. A few feet in, a white string lamp pull glowed in the dim light. Doug grabbed it and yanked. A bare overhead bulb clicked to life and swung back and forth.
Dozens of eyes stared at him.
Doug took a startled step back, but he was surrounded. Taxidermied animals filled the room. On the floor, squirrels perched on logs. A bobcat crouched in the corner, ears back, yellow slit eyes blazing. A bear rug covered part of the floor to the right. The animal’s jaws were opened wide to display two sets of gleaming sharp teeth. Animal heads hung from the walls; a ten-point buck, antlers rising in perfect symmetry; a snarling boar, hair coarse as a scrub brush; an immense buffalo, black shaggy mane almost covering its eyes. Other smaller animals were scattered or piled around the room, a mummified Noah’s Ark.
Wax figures and mounted museum displays usually gave Doug the willies, but oddly these creatures didn’t. He examined some of the larger animals up close. They were old. Small patches of tan leather showed where fur or feathers had fallen out over time. A few eyes lolled askew in their sockets, giving the animal a panicked, crazed expression.
The dormer windows should have let the afternoon sun fill the attic, but they were boarded up, so hastily covered with cheap pressboard that many of the nailheads were exposed and bent at odd angles. Whoever did the work wanted out of here in a hurry.
Doug picked his way through the shadowy attic. The swinging light bulb made the long rafter shadows roll up and down the walls. Each dusky band swept across shelves of mismatched earthen jars, their tops sealed with mottled wax. The floorboards creaked beneath him with each step. That feeling he had in the turret room, that this was the place to be, was stronger here in this still-life zoo. He stroked the head of a horned owl as he passed it. The bird was so soft. A pin feather shed and fluttered to the floor.
At the far end of the attic, a cedar chest sat against the wall. Doug thought women used to call these “hope chests” but he had no idea why. He pulled up the lid and dust cascaded down it like a minor avalanche. The tray on the top of the chest held two matching ribbons, white with lace trim. Next to them lay a locket, silver with fine turn-of–the-century engraving. Its silver chain coiled around it in a precise spiral. Doug popped it open.
In the right side was a picture of a beautiful woman. He recognized Sarah Hutchington. Even miniaturized, the detail of the black-and-white photo was striking. She wore a close-fitting hat with an upturned brim. A long pattered scarf hung around her neck over a white blouse. In the picture, the locket in Doug’s hand hung just above her breasts. Her alabaster-white skin glowed in the photograph’s lighting. Soft brown eyes looked off to the left, searching for the face in the locket’s other half.
On the left side of the locket, a man stared straight out at Doug. He remembered Mabron from the porch picture in the library. In contrast to the perfectly coiffed queen to his left, this man was practically unkempt. A tangled mess black hair refused to be tamed. His moustache drooped over his mouth but still could not mask his prominent overbite. He had a strange, crooked half smile. His ill-fitting shirt left a large gap around his neck and made him look like a turtle peering from its shell. While the angelic woman on the right gazed adoringly left, the man on the left stared straight ahead, a haunting gaze that hinted at a mind as barely controlled as his hair. And while the background of the woman’s picture was a neutral photographer’s backdrop, what little background was visible on the man’s photo was busy and jumbled. His off-center head nearly filled the frame, as if the picture was cropped to force it into the locket half.
The pairing in the locket at first struck Doug as odd, but he shrugged it off. He replaced the locket in the tray. He followed an inexplicable compulsion and twirled the chain back into a symmetrical spiral. He removed the tray from the chest. Inside lay two books and a black canvas roll tied with a string in the center. The book titles were imprinted on the black leather spines in gold letters. The first read North American Fauna
The second book’s spine was coated in mildew. Doug licked his thumb and swept the spine clean. The title read Methods in the Art of Taxidermy
He untied the canvas bundle. It unrolled like a carpet runner. Inside a collection of bright silver instruments glittered in the overhead light. Each had its own custom sewn sleeve. The knives, scissors and scrapers had all types of edges from straight and sharp to sickle and serrated. Needles of all sizes pierced the last few inches of the kit.
One of the previous owners must have done all this taxidermy himself, Doug thought. Probably not Psycho Vern on the hill or all of this would be gone. Besides, the books were old enough to have hand-sewn binding and the instruments looked like props from a 1930s Frankenstein movie. From the level of dust on everything, no one had been up here in years.
What was this place? A last retreat for Mabron, the long-dead taxidermist, a secret place to practice his hobby, later forgotten? Or were these things forced into the attic and locked away by someone else, someone with the strength to collect these artifacts but too weak to dispose of them? Whatever it was, the last act was to nail the bookcase over the doorway. Trying to keep everyone out or trying to keep everything in?
Doug carefully replaced everything within the chest and closed the lid. He picked up a stuffed red-tailed hawk. The bird stood on a short branch, wings tucked up, as if surveying a field for prey. He brought it down t
o the turret room. The eyes of the bird sparkled, almost alive. As the bird passed into the daylight, the mounting base quivered. Doug put the bird on the corner of his desk, facing him. He stepped back and swung the attic door shut. He twisted the lock and pocketed the key.
The hunger Doug felt earlier returned with a vengeance. He left for the kitchen with a vision of a rare hamburger filling his mind. He hadn’t craved rare meat as far back as he could remember. With the slam of the turret room door, he missed the soft sound of feathers brushing together.
Chapter Twenty-One
It was the third week of her Tennessee teaching career when Principal Ken Wheedle stood in the doorway of Laura’s classroom. He’d left his ubiquitous jacket in the office and he was down to cuffed shirt sleeves.
School had let out twenty minutes ago and Laura was taking advantage of the calm to grade some pretty depressing essay answers. She caught the principal out of the corner of her eye.
“Principal Wheedle,” she said as she stood up.
“Do you have a moment?” he asked.
Her heart sank. Mr. Wheedle hadn’t been to her classroom since she’d started. She hadn’t given him reason to, of course. She handled her own discipline and hadn’t had any questions she couldn’t get answered by one of the less frosty teachers. There could only be one reason for his arrival. The sands in her employment hourglass had run out.
From her first day at the school, she had dreaded the inevitable final day. If she had been a daily sub, the everyday transition from one class to another or the unavoidable days between assignments would have been easy to take. But she had spent weeks with these kids. During the first day, she had pegged each one’s strengths and weaknesses. By day two, she had considered them hers. Every time it surfaced, she pushed the idea of her temporary status back underwater and hoped it might drown and never rise again. Now it looked like her time was up.
“Come on in,” she told the principal.
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