The Tale of Halcyon Crane (30 page)

“The Thomas James I knew would’ve done the same thing,” I said to her.

“So.” Mira changed the subject as I loaded the last of the silverware into the dishwasher. “You’ve called me here for some ghost busting.”

I laughed nervously as we took our wine and moved from the kitchen to the dining room, where I had already lit the candle chandelier. It bathed the dark room in a soft flickering light that danced along the windowpanes. The three of us took seats around the table, and Mira sat up straight and cleared her throat. She was now taking control of the proceedings, a role I sensed she was very comfortable assuming.

“Why don’t we begin by you telling me exactly what’s been happening in the house,” she directed.

I took a deep breath and told her everything: the sightings of the girl in the white dress, the disappearing and reappearing jewelry, the television turning off and on, the shades opening and closing.

She nodded, looking from me to Will and back again.
“Sounds like a haunting.” I know that’s why I called her here, the word still sent a chill up the back of my neck. “There’s really no other explanation,” Mira went on. “You know that, right?”

Will gave me a look. “Actually, Mira, there is another explanation,” he began tentatively. I could see he wasn’t sure of whether to go on or not, but I nodded, giving him the signal to continue. “I had the idea that perhaps Hallie’s mind is delivering bits and pieces of memories back to her,” Will said. “You know, she was so traumatized by the death of her playmate that she didn’t speak until after she and her father built a new life away from here.”

“I do remember that.” Mira nodded. “You stopped speaking altogether. Your parents were frantic.”

“Considering that, I was thinking the very fact of being back in this house was triggering memories in Hallie’s mind,” Will continued.

“I’d go along with that theory if it wasn’t for the other things happening,” Mira said finally. “How can you explain the jewelry disappearing and reappearing? The shades? The television?”

“That’s why you’re here,” he admitted. “I
can’t
explain those things. If it was just Hallie seeing a girl in white around the house, I’d recommend a psychiatrist.”

I continued Will’s line of thinking. “The thing is, Mira, all these little happenings—a necklace gone here, a television turned on there—wouldn’t bother me too much if it wasn’t for some rather distressing information I’ve learned about my family in recent days.”

Mira squinted at me. “What sort of information?”

“I’ve learned that over the years there have been a number of—well, what I would call
suspicious falls
on this property and in this house, including—not incidentally—Julie Sutton’s fall out of a third-floor window thirty years ago.”

“Tell me more about these falls.”

I leaned in toward Mira and told her what I had learned from Iris.

Mira grimaced. “That doesn’t sound good,” she murmured.

“No.” My account was picking up steam, heading to its conclusion. “But the last straw came the other night when Will fell down the front stairs.”

Aghast, Mira looked at Will for an explanation. He told her how he thought he heard someone calling his name in the middle of the night and how he felt hands on his back, pushing him down.

“That’s the reason we called you,” I concluded. “It’s become dangerous. If there’s a malevolent spirit here, I want it out. I want to be able to live in my new house in peace.”

That was the full story. Now that Mira knew, she opened her bag, spread a deep-purple velvet cloth out on the table, and placed five votive candles on it.

“Do you have any idea who this ghost might be?” Mira asked, as she lit the candles one by one.

I exchanged a sidelong glance with Will. “I think it might be one or all of the little girls who died here in the 1913 storm: Penelope, Patience, and Persephone.”

She looked at me in the flickering candlelight. “I’m not familiar with that event. What storm?”

And so I told her all about it—how nearly a century earlier a freak November snowstorm had caught Penelope, Patience,
and Persephone unawares outside and how they died in one another’s arms at the bottom of the cliff.

“So you don’t think it’s the spirit of the girl who was killed here thirty years ago?” Mira asked.

Will and I exchanged glances. I hadn’t even considered this. “The reason I thought our spirit is one or all of the girls from 1913 is because of the family lore I’ve recently learned. My relatives have all assumed the girls were still around. Their mother especially was tormented by the thought that her daughters didn’t make it to heaven. She believed it until the day she died, and even tried to contact them once. And all the falls—”

Mira nodded. “I just wanted to be sure. If you think you know who the ghosts are, it helps. Whenever possible, it’s best to try to contact specific people on the other side.”

She explained what was going to happen tonight. She would spend a few quiet moments meditating—going into a trance?—and then we’d join hands while she called the girls, inviting them to join our circle.

Mira took a deep breath and closed her eyes.
Here we go
, I thought. But then she opened them again. Something had occurred to her. “Do you have anything that belonged to the girls? It’s really helpful to have something from the person I’m trying to contact.”

I shook my head. “It was nearly a hundred years ago, Mira. Their stuff might still be around here packed in a box somewhere, but I wouldn’t have the first idea where to look.”

As Mira collected herself, taking one deep breath after another, grasping our hands, squeezing them tightly, all I could think of was that perhaps it was a good thing we didn’t have those ribbons.

“Penelope, Patience, Persephone,” Mira chanted, in a voice that was not quite her own. “Penelope, Patience, Persephone. Girls, we are calling to you. We are asking you to join our circle. Come to us, girls. Join us here at the table. “Penelope, Patience, Persephone. Penelope, Patience, Persephone.”

Mira sounded just like Iris when she had said those same words, chanting, calling to the girls. Her voice was scratchy and oddly pitched, as though it wasn’t she who was speaking but someone else. I was beginning to feel something, an electricity in the room prickling at the back of my neck and running down my arms.

“Penelope, Patience, Persephone.”

I heard it first in a distant corner of the house, the rumbling of something awakening and coming to life. A century-old wind snaked its way into the room from where it had been lying dormant on the third floor, swirling around the three of us at the table, wrapping us like a python and constricting us. All the candles, those on the table and those in the chandelier, were extinguished in one collective
whoosh
. We were in total darkness. And then I heard it.

Say, say, oh, playmate, come out and play with me.

I tried to scream but my voice had no sound. I tried to open my eyes, but it was as though they were glued shut. I tried to let go of Mira’s and Will’s hands, but I could not un-clench my grip. Their hands had gone cold, stonelike, completely without feeling. It was as though I were holding the hands of the dead.

Somewhere in the distance, Mira was murmuring. “You’re cold as ice. You’re freezing. You’re frozen. You’re dead.”

I smelled it, then. Suddenly and immediately the room was filled with it. The scent of roses, overpowering and thick.

“Hey!” It was Will, his voice high and awkward. “Stop it!”

From Mira, in a whisper: “You’re cold as ice. You’re freezing. You’re frozen. You’re dead.”

“Ouch!” Will was on his feet, trying to wrench his hands free of ours. I opened my eyes but it was no use, I could see nothing but blackness.

The dogs burst into the room from the kitchen, snarling and barking. I could feel them circling the table and hear them panting. Finally—it must have been only a few moments but it felt like forever—Mira loosened her grip, pushed back her chair, and ran toward the wall. She flipped on the light switch, and the three of us uttered a collective gasp at what we saw.

The table was covered with white ribbons.

They were piled high between us, covering the velvet cloth, the unlit candles, and the tabletop itself. They spilled onto the floor. One lazily danced its way across the room as the dogs growled, soft and low.

Mira was standing at the light switch, her eyes wide, panting. Only then did I see Will’s face. It was covered in scratches. Little rivers of blood trickled down his cheeks from what looked to be razor-thin cuts. He just stood there, open-mouthed, unable to comprehend what had just occurred.

I tried to hide my terror and slid up to Will, resting my hand gently on his arm. “Let’s get you into the kitchen and
clean you up.” I led him into the other room and sat him down at the kitchen table, Mira following close behind us. I grabbed a clean dish towel out of a drawer and wet it down before gently and softly dabbing the blood from Will’s face. He was looking at me with the eyes of a frightened little boy.

“There’s a first-aid kit under the sink in there.” I pointed Mira in the direction of the bathroom off the kitchen. She returned with the kit and I opened it to find an antibacterial cream for cuts and scratches, which I rubbed on Will’s face. Luckily, none of the cuts were very deep. Scratches from tiny claws. Or a child’s fingernails. I wondered if they’d leave scars.

Meanwhile, Mira’s hands shook as she opened another bottle of red wine.
Good thinking
. She poured three glasses of it and downed one immediately, pouring another in its place. Then, we all started to talk.

“I’ve experienced a lot of things in my life, but nothing like that,” Mira said.

“I couldn’t let go of either of your hands,” I reported.

“Something was in that room with us,” Will murmured, touching the scratches on his face.

“Tell me exactly what happened to you,” Mira said to Will. “When did you start feeling the scratches?”

Will thought for a moment. “It was right after I started to smell the rose petals. You smelled them, too, right?”

Mira and I nodded.

“So the scratching began as soon as they came into the room,” Mira murmured. “Does either of you know the significance of the ribbons?”

“Family lore has it that, a long time ago, another medium called the girls with ribbons. They used to wear them in their hair every day.”

Will’s eyes were wide, but Mira did not seem at all surprised by this news. “Sometimes that’s how the spirits of the dead come to us,” she murmured. “They’ll place something significant to them around us, so we’ll notice they’ve been there. It’s quite common, actually. Sometimes it’s a butterfly hovering close by for an unusually long period of time. One woman I know sees an eagle perched on a tree outside her window and knows it’s her dead son sending a message of protection. Another family finds pennies in strange places—in their shoes, in the bottom of a bowl of pasta, frozen into a compartment in an ice tray. It’s how the dead tell the living they’re still around, still watching.”

Neither Will nor I said anything. We both just sat there, holding hands, shaking our heads in disbelief at what had just occurred. If only all we had to be concerned about was pennies or hovering butterflies.

Finally, Mira said, “Well, at least we accomplished one thing tonight.”

“What’s that?” I wanted to know.

“It’s absolutely clear that you’ve got a ghost. Three of them, actually. Penelope, Patience, and Persephone.”

“So now what?” I asked her. I was truly at a loss. I had no idea what came next. And I was suddenly very, very tired. All I wanted to do was to fall asleep in Will’s arms without any worry about mischievous, murderous ghosts.

“We go on to Phase Two tomorrow.” Mira smiled.

“Which is?”

“Getting them out of here,” she said. “I’m assuming you still want to stay in this house, right?”

“Right.”

“And I’m assuming you want the girls gone?”

“Definitely.”

“Well, there are ways to take care of that,” she promised, pushing her chair back from the table. “But I think we’ve all had about enough for one night.”

I didn’t want her to go, I’ll admit it. I was afraid to stay in the house. Suddenly, I had an idea. “May Will and I come with you and stay in a room at the inn tonight? I’m really not excited about spending the night here.”

“You can have your old room.” Mira smiled, patting my hand.

“We could go to my house, you know,” Will offered, as he dabbed at this face.

I shook my head. “You live clear on the other side of the island and Mira’s just down the road. Plus, Tundra and Tika won’t fit in your buggy and I’m not leaving them here alone.” I turned to Mira. “We
can
take them to your place, right?”

She nodded quickly. “I don’t usually allow pets, but I can make an exception tonight for these girls.”

And that’s how the three of us came to leave my house together that night. In retrospect, I see it was a mistake. Hindsight can be particularly cruel when one goes down a wrong road. Perhaps if Will and I had braved the night in that place—faced the girls head on—we would have been spared what happened the next day. On the other hand, I
don’t have any way of knowing what might have befallen us if we had decided to spend the night in the house after those spirits had been called, awakened, and stirred up. Who knows what manner of horror we might have experienced?