“You are going to watch me grade spelling and math quizzes?” Laura said. “I though the nightlife in Moultrie might need a shot in the arm, but if you think test grading is entertainment, things are worse than I thought.”
Theresa sat in the recess of the bay window, her knees tucked up to her chin. Laura put a red marker to work against the stack of quizzes. The clock radio crept through ascending digits as the stack of tests diminished. A coyote howled somewhere far across the pond.
Suddenly, Laura gave a little shake and dropped her pen on the desk. She shot a quick glance to Theresa and mouthed, “They’re here.”
Theresa felt nothing, but she was sure Laura did. Even from across the room she could see the hairs standing up on Laura’s arms. The door to the room slammed shut. Tiny footsteps slapped against the floor outside.
“They’re gone,” Laura said. She jumped up and yanked the door back open, Theresa right behind her.
Two sets of glistening bare footprints led from the study to the front door across the polished hardwood floor. The prints were wet but evaporated before their eyes, prints closest to the study first, like the spirits rolled up their trail behind them as they left.
“Isn’t that amazing?” Laura said. “Have you ever seen anything like that?”
Theresa shook her head. She may have lived her life beset by paranormal visions, but she’d never seen ghosts manifest themselves.
“See,” Laura said. “They just play games. You were in the room with me waiting, so they just shut the door and ran away. Nothing to be afraid of. Did you feel threatened?”
“Not at all,” Theresa said. She really hadn’t. In fact, she felt no response as jarring as her visions engendered. She felt a bit spooked, but nothing like the flash of dread she got when she first shook hands with Laura that night. If there had been something dangerous about the girls, it would have tripped a premonition, wouldn’t it? Maybe her feeling of dread driving up to the house was just there because she expected it to be there. “I’m sorry to put you through all this. Sometimes these premonitions are hard to translate. I’ll stop intruding and head home.”
“First the ghosts leave,” Laura said, “and then you? I think not. I’m putting on coffee and we’re going to have a few cups. You are my first friend in town and I’m going to pump you for all the dirt here. Besides, we need to make a plan to get Dustin to the top of the class and this is the perfect time.”
Theresa’s embarrassment at her stuttering premonitions disappeared. She smiled. “That sounds like a plan.”
That evening, Laura told Theresa about teaching in a big city and Theresa told Laura about growing up on a farm. Together they laid out a plan to reinforce and reward Dustin in and out of school. By the stroke of ten they were friends for life.
Theresa left with a swirling mixture of emotions. She was happy to add Laura to her short list of friends. She felt confident that the two of them would turn Dustin from the dark place the divorce had led him. But she could not shake the oppressive feeling of dread that had first infected her back at Treasured Things. The twin ghosts seemed unthreatening, but Theresa was still not at ease. She calmed herself with a reminder that the house did not trigger any apocalyptic visions.
If only she had gone upstairs.
Chapter Thirty-One
The morning’s trip to WSEH had been as uncomfortable as Doug had imagined it would be. He was herded from reception to makeup to green room by a retinue of harried assistants who could not spend sixty seconds without checking their watch against a ceaseless march of approaching deadlines. He sat in front of a camera with an ill-fitting earplug spitting static-filled instructions into his brain. Then on came the voice of a New York anchor and he tried to stare earnestly into the black void of the camera lens as he chatted about his change in lifestyle.
And it was all crap. He spoke about how there was more to life than the pressures of the big city, but he didn’t tell them what that “more” was. He didn’t tell them about the fascinating attic full of animals with the gravitational pull of the sun. He did plug the novel he was crafting and drop a few tantalizing bits of the storyline, hopefully enough to get his agent some interest from publishers.
Five minutes after his segment, he was blasting down I-65 at twenty over the speed limit on a beeline home. He hadn’t liked staying in a hotel last night. It was five-star quality, but he felt alone and incomplete. It was like he left a part of himself back at Galaxy Farm. He told himself that he missed Laura but still went to sleep without calling her. Now all he wanted to do was walk through his own front door again.
He audibly sighed with relief when he saw the spire of Galaxy Farm’s turret room as he barreled up the driveway. Doug went straight upstairs, his fingers itching to type out a new chapter of the darkening love triangle between the brothers in the Old South. But he just stared at the blinking cursor, bereft of inspiration. His morning muse had pulled out of the station without him and all he could see were taillights. He stared at yesterday’s half-finished paragraph and couldn’t summon the first word to complete it. He uttered a quick curse for WSEH and shut down the computer.
The attic’s siren song sounded in his head. He looked across the room at the mounted bobcat. The glass eyes sparkled in the sunlight. He rationalized that he had abandoned hope of working, so he might as well play.
He settled in on the floor of the attic. The bright sun outside warmed the roof and made the attic a perfect temperature. He opened Methods in the Art of Taxidermy in his lap and thumbed through the yellowed pages.
The more he read, the more intrigued he became. A process he once thought abhorrent had an elegance to it, an inherent respect for the beauty of the subject and the desire to preserve that beauty. If only the creature understood the honor bestowed upon it. The taxidermist ended the animal’s life that it might be preserved forever.
Then the realization struck him. He could do this. He could bestow that immortality on a creature. He had the tools, he had the instructions. There was a box of wire and excelsior in the corner. He would need to buy modeling clay and some chemicals, but that was all available at Randolph’s Hardware. He had the time in the afternoons, so why not?
Laura, that’s why not. He’d kept the attic discoveries secret for a reason. This collection of critters would send his animal-loving vegetarian wife over the edge. And the idea of her husband adding to the frozen zoo would go over like kazoos at Carnegie Hall.
Well, she didn’t have to know. There was enough room up here in the attic to do the work, and all the tools were here. He could experiment during the day while she was gone. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.
Doug just needed a subject to immortalize.
He closed the book and stood to look out the window. Two rabbits sat in front of the house, munching grass.
He smiled. Perfect. Soft, small. And he had seen cage traps in the last stall in the barn. One hundred percent under Laura’s radar. The idea caught fire within him. He made a mental list of the things he would need for this project.
He left the attic, double checking the lock on the door as he closed it. He felt the same thrill he did when he began to write, that euphoric rush of energetic adrenaline. He checked the clock and figured he would have time to set the traps before Laura got home. Then tomorrow would be something special.
That evening, Laura told Doug that Theresa had dropped by the night before. She left out the ghostly encounter. Doug told Laura about the morning at WSEH. He left out his afternoon attic exploration.
After dinner Laura retreated to the nursery to review her TCAP sample test. Instead she stared into space and wondered where her ghostly girls were that night.
At the same time, Doug returned to the turret room, ready to embellish his tale of doomed Southern aristocracy. Instead he stared at the locked attic door and wished tomorrow was already here.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The next morning, Doug rose minutes after Laura left for work. He ha
d set two traps in the high grass behind the house, baited with a medley of fresh vegetables, at least some of which would be irresistible to a rabbit, if his weaning on Bugs Bunny cartoons taught him anything. He dashed out the back door before he even poured himself coffee.
The wire mesh traps were about the size of a gym bag. A door snapped shut behind the prey when it tripped a pressure plate in the enclosure. Doug had spent the previous afternoon scraping rust and oiling hinges to get these aged models working again. They didn’t look old enough to have trapped the animals in the attic, but they still looked vintage 1970s.
Doug’s heart pounded as he approached the first trap, and then stopped when he saw it. Empty. Even the bait food was gone, so something had eaten it and escaped. He picked up a stick and stuck it through the cage wall. He pressed down on the pressure plate and nothing happened. The broken trigger spring dangled from the trap door.
“Shit.” Maybe these traps were just too old.
He walked to the next trap with low expectations. He might have to go to town and buy a new trap, which would be another trail Laura might follow to uncover his clandestine activity. As he approached the next trap, the cage thumped against the ground.
He made the last few steps at a bound. Inside the cage, a brown rabbit huddled in one corner. Panic bulged in her soft brown eyes. Her whiskers rowed the air as she sniffed with machine gun rapidity.
Doug slipped a pair of work gloves from his back pocket and put them on. He blocked the trap entrance with his body and lifted door. His pulse quickened as he reached in and gripped the panting bunny. It offered no resistance as he extracted it. In fact, it huddled up against his chest.
Realization dawned. He had to kill the rabbit. Doug hadn’t killed anything bigger than a cockroach in his life. Worse, this was a mammal, one of the good guys. This defenseless doe-eyed creature would be his first victim.
He hadn’t even thought about how he would kill it without damaging the skin. The thing would twitch too much to suffocate it. He could break its neck. Just a little twist and it would be over. Simple and quick.
The rabbit looked up with pleading eyes. Doug felt the power Roman emperors must have felt determining gladiators’ fates in the arena. He considered releasing the bunny.
But the pull took hold again. The pull that made him buy the house. The pull that drew him into the attic each time. The pull that made his fingers itch to pull the rabbit’s skin tight over a wire frame and set glassy eyes into its darkened sockets.
He gripped the rabbit, one hand on its head, one around its body. The feel wasn’t right. The gloves muted his sensation. He slipped one off. The rabbit’s pulse hammered against his fingertips. He smiled. A vision of a hooded executioner wielding a battle ax flashed through his mind. He held his breath.
Twist. Crunch.
Tiny bones crushed between his fingers. The rabbit’s eyes bulged and went still.
Doug lifted the rabbit by its ears. Its limp body hung like becalmed sails.
The remorse did not come. Instead of empathy, Doug felt empowered. He had held life in his hand and snuffed it out. He pushed a creature from one realm of existence to the next. What a rush! Mounting the rabbit would not be an homage to its existence, as he thought before, but a tribute to the power Doug exercised in its execution.
The rabbit’s body was still warm when Doug laid it on the attic floor. He rolled out the taxidermy tools and the overhead light made stars along the sharpened edges. He had laid out a plastic drop cloth to contain the mess. He flipped the taxidermy instruction book open to the third chapter. He picked up a small knife. He reviewed the instructions, but somehow he already knew where to cut. He could see the whole process, the bleeding, the gutting, the delicate inch by inch skinning process. He had read the procedure over many times, but now he understood the steps in more detail than the book related, as if someone had played a movie of the process in his head.
He flipped the rabbit on its back and, without hesitation, punctured the animal just under the chin. He slit the corpse open down to the tail.
Doug smiled an odd, crooked smile. Not one of his smiles. It was more like the one on the face of the man in the hope chest locket, the man with the unkempt hair and the wild look in his eyes.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Laura had been distracted through the day at school. The whole experience with Theresa and the little girl ghosts was two days old, but many facets of the whole event kept filling her mind.
Her interactions with the staff at Moultrie Elementary had worried her. In New York, she had made lots of friends among the staff, but the cold shoulder she got at work made her afraid she’d spend the semester alone in the crowd. Add in the unnerving isolation of living out in the country, and Laura feared she wouldn’t have the opportunity to make friends at all. So the ease with which she hit it off with Theresa dispelled a dark cloud that had settled in over Laura’s future.
Then there were the girls. Her only contact with the supernatural before this had been though the gaps between her fingers at bad B-movies. The idea of living in a haunted house was as appealing as a bucket full of rats. But the girls’ playful presence was more like Casper than something from The Shining. Theresa’s assessment further convinced her that the permanent residents of her new home were no threat.
During her afternoon prep period, she sat alone in the Teacher’s Lounge. A file of practice math quizzes downloaded from the common computer to her USB drive. When the process blinked that it was complete, she let her curiosity take over. Laura wanted a better way to communicate with the girls, to make them feel at home in the house, to trust that she would not hurt them. She logged on to the internet and Googled Ghost Investigations.
Thousands of hits lined up for her attention. Professional paranormal investigators, amateur groups, ghost hunting outfitters claiming to be the REIs of the paranormal world. The list seemed endless. She found an informational website and hit the link.
The reading was fascinating. The theory was that spirits were a type of leftover energy the deceased left behind. Most hauntings were residual, just an echo of someone that played back over and over, like when people saw a figure walk across the room and through a wall every night. The second rarer, and more powerful, type was an interactive haunting. One hundred percent of whatever energy that person had was still bound here on earth, likely in a specific location.
Want to send the pesky spirit packing to the great beyond? The site didn’t recommend using a creepy short woman and a rope like in Poltergeist. Instead, Find the remains of the ghost, salt them and burn them. The spirit now has no anchor tying it to the location, think of a hermit crab without its shell. It would be pulled off to the other side without a replacement home.
The site explained that malicious hauntings were the exception rather than the rule. Spirits had some sort of electrical attribute, causing them to drain batteries or disrupt electrical appliances when they were near. That explained the clock radio going haywire when the girls manifested. Laura scrolled down to the section on communication.
Apparently, visual and auditory manifestations weren’t as common as the movies would lead people to believe. But there was a way to hear them speak using electronic voice phenomenon, or EVP. The theory held that the enormous amount of energy needed for spirits to speak across whatever void separated us from them was more than most could summon. But their voices could be heard on audio recordings, soft and irregular, like the spirit was miles away.
That idea made her pulse quicken. Perhaps she could talk with the girls. She owned a digital audio recorder she had used to record events at school. That would be the proof she needed to convince her skeptical husband. Maybe one night while Doug was working upstairs…
Patrice burst into the Teacher’s Lounge like Wonderland’s Red Queen entering court. She gave Laura a contemptuous look. Laura snapped the internet browser shut.
“I knew you’d be here.” Patrice practically hissed as she said it.
Laura was ready to praise her Holmes-like deductive skills that let Patrice find Laura in the break room on her break, but Pat didn’t look receptive to sarcasm.
Patrice stomped over to the computer. She stared down with a gaze that could ignite dry timber. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Laura tried to think how to explain her ghost research without admitting to a having a haunted house. She pointed to the screen. “Well I just…”
“Just what do you think your little tutoring sessions are going to accomplish?”
Tutoring?
“You know you won’t get paid for those hours.”
“I never thought I would,” Laura said. “Some of the children were behind grade level. I thought if they had some practice, got comfortable with the test format…”
“That then you could make Mrs. Matthews look bad,” Patrice said. “Probably try to squeeze her out of her job while she’s home recuperating. Well forget that plan.”
“I didn’t want to make anyone look bad,” Laura said.
“No, you wanted to make everyone look bad. There are other grades that take TCAP exams. Are all supposed to put our lives on hold and join your little crusade?” She pointed an index finger in Laura’s face. The red nail polish had a few chips around the tip. “Listen, dear. You keep this up and you won’t even sub in this district after this little show comes to a close. I guarantee it.”
Patrice had worked herself completely red-faced with rage. She snapped her chin up in disdain and stormed out of the lounge.
Laura was at the point of tears. Her interactions with the other teachers had been restrained, a shade frosty maybe. But she knew they would thaw once they got to know her, saw that she shared the same passion for teaching that they did. But if this is how they all thought…well, even if it wasn’t, she was sure Patrice would make sure it was the way they thought.
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