Witch House (10 page)

“What then?”

“They left.”

I looked at Carlos. “You thinking what I’m
thinking?”

“Yeah,” he said, but then shook his head.
“No, what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking the three thugs weren’t
Hispanic. They were Indians.”

“Dot heads?”

“No! Tribal Wampanoag—from the casino.”

“Oh, Indian Indians.”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, I can see that.”

I said to the old man, “Did you hear any
names thrown around.”

“Sure,” he said. “I heard cock-sucker, mother
f—”

“No, I mean names: Tom, Dick or Harry?”

That seemed to amuse him. “I heard dick, but
I don’t think that was any of them’s names.”

“Right. Forget it.” I stood up and backed
away from the door, not wanting to let the old man know that his
stench was beginning to nauseate me. “Carlos, are you ready for a
drive?”

“Where to?”

“The Wampanoag Indian Reservation. It’s time
we saw the chief.”

The old man reached up for me, but by then I
was several steps back. “What about my hot meal?” he said.

“I haven’t forgotten,” I told him. “How soon
can you get to the Perc?”

“Thirty minutes if I walk, five if you drive
me.”

I could see the dread on Carlos’ face. I
thought I might play it up and pretend to give it serious
consideration. In the end, I just couldn’t do it. I said to Bart,
“Thirty minutes it is. Go to the take-out window. They’ll have some
hot oatmeal, toast and coffee waiting there. Will that work for
you?”

“Indeed, that’s mighty kind,” he said, and he
offered up a toothless grin. Later, I wondered if he washed his
hands before eating. Just the thought that he might not have was
enough to sour my appetite for the rest of the day. Of course, I
could not say the same for Carlos. When we stopped at the Perc to
prepay for Bart’s meal, Carlos made good on the opportunity to
order up a slice of hot apple pie to go.

“Dessert,” he said, when I asked him about
it, though in fairness, it had been several hours since we last
ate. “I figured this will hold me over until my mid-afternoon
snack.”

“Your midnight….” I checked my watch to
confirm my suspicion. “Carlos, it is mid-afternoon.”

“Yeah?” He gave me a look as though I needed
to finish that thought. In hindsight, I realized I should never
have formed it to begin with. I paid the tab and we headed out for
the Indian casino.

While Carlos and I were driving out to the
Wampanoag Indian Reservation to interview Daniel Mochohyett,
a.k.a., Chief Running Bear, Lilith and Ursula were busy conducting
a séance at an old farmhouse they found earlier that morning.

I suppose you can argue that they “stumbled”
upon the old house in their realty quest while new home shopping,
but with those two, one never knows. Lilith is as fond of haunted
house hopping as some women are of garage sales. She targets them
like a heat-seeking missile. I should point out, however, that her
fascination with spirits hardly supersedes her obsession for
witchcraft, the two nearly diametrically opposed, as they are. Yet
when she encounters forces of paranormal origin, she embraces it
with every curious fiber of her body.

“It’s rarer than you might think,” she once
told me after I thought I had seen a ghost. It turned out I had
only witnessed a light beam reflecting off a large spider web
swaying ghost-like up in a barn loft. “People think they see or
feel ghosts all the time,” she continued. “In most cases, the
phenomenon is easily explained after examining the elements in
question. Often, the laws of physics will provide the answers. Take
the movement of cold air, for instance, pushing warmer air up a
staircase after someone has opened a door and entered the room. The
warm air causes the wooden step treads to expand slightly,
prompting them to creak in succession, as if someone or something
is ascending the staircase. And then there are the ways certain
light properties play off reflective surfaces, causing convincing
manifestations of spectral emanations, as with your ghost on the
spider web.”

I asked her how often she thought people
mistake environmental abnormalities for paranormal activities, and
she said, “Always.”

“Always?” I had to challenge that.

“Yes, Tony, always, or very nearly. The true
reconstitution of imbued spirit energy to paraphysical form takes
incredible resources from both the spirit trying to reconstitute
and the individual hoping to facilitate it. It is a combined effort
of intense magnitude involving the will of the souls. In other
words, you don’t just see a ghost, you create one.”

In her entire life, which spans considerable
years, I assure you, Lilith admits to seeing only three ghosts. In
every case, they made their presence known to her through
spontaneous energy transference. That is to say that the spirits,
perhaps sensing that Lilith possessed the charms of a sensitive,
discharged a cache of static energy within her intracellular core,
thus forging a quasi-dimensional bond, transcending the spiritual
divide between them. It should come as no surprise then to know
that once Lilith realizes a spirit soul is present and wants to
communicate, she will stop at nothing to establish contact.
Apparently, that is what happened when she and Ursula first toured
the old farmhouse with their less than intrepid realtor.

As Lilith explained to me later, the realtor,
Mrs. Eva Kinsley, herself an ardent believer in ghosts, simply
wigged out at the first sign of paranormal activity. “It was
particularly scary,” she admitted, adding that she shed no blame on
the poor woman for running out of the house as if her hair were on
fire. “I don’t know, maybe because Ursula was with me; I guess the
energy transference was exceptionally strong.”

She explained how they arrived at the house
earlier that morning after Mrs. Kinsley joked that the girls might
get a good deal on a haunted house. Naturally, Lilith wanted to
know more. Kinsley, an infectiously bubbly middle-aged homemaker
with no real need for a job, except to socialize three days a week
outside of her normal PTA and women’s club circles, took on the
assignment with zeal. To build suspense, she told the girls how the
derelict house had been deserted for nearly eighteen years. Over
that time, a number of potential buyers attempted to have the house
inspected prior to sale. In every case, the inspectors met with
unexplainable misfortunes, resulting in death for two and serious
injuries for three others. The inability to find additional
inspectors willing to take on the job, coupled with rumors of
ghostly inhabitation, has since made the house unsellable. Even as
Kinsley explained this, Lilith could see the woman working herself
up into a nervous wreck.

“Nobody remembers the combination number to
the lockbox on the front door,” she told the girls, “but that
doesn’t matter. None of the doors lock, anyway.”

Ursula found that peculiar. “Why then the
box?” she asked. “What sense doth make of two locks when not one
doth thou use?”

I could imagine Kinsley’s expression. “Excuse
me, Dear?”

“Oh, she talks like that,” said Lilith,
adding in a whisper, “She’s Welsh, you know.”

Kinsley smiled. “Is she? So is my family.”
She leaned around Lilith and asked Ursula, “Do you have more family
here in the States?”

Ursula shook her head, responding innocently,
“No, Miss. `Tis a goodly length of times past that my sisters wait.
Alas, whence I came they cannot follow.”

“Oh? Have they gone back to England?”

“Nay, methinks not, for they have all been
hanged.”

“Excuse me?”

“Can we get going?” Lilith pushed the front
door open and nudged the women inside. “It’s beginning to rain
again. I don’t want to get my hair wet.”

Once past the threshold and into the room,
the three sensed an immediate and drastic drop in ambient
temperature. Eva Kinsley pulled snug the fold in her coat and
cinched tight her lapels. “My, that is strange,” she commented. “It
must be twenty degrees colder in here.”

Lilith took Ursula’s hand and squeezed it
tightly. “Do you feel it, Urs, the energy?”

“Indeed,” she said. The two ventured further
into the room on feathered steps. “He is most agitated. `Tis an
angry soul these walls doth hold.”

“Angry?” said Kinsley. “Who is angry?”

Lilith said, “I’ve never felt such a strong
presence before. Could there be more than one?”

“Perchance many, for ought I know. Thou hath
met acquaintance with spirits more than I and they with thee.”

Kinsley shadowed the girls. “Spirits? You are
joking, aren’t you? I was only kidding about the ghosts. No one has
ever really seen one here.”

“Tell me if you feel something in your
bones.”

“Aye, `tis but a tingle, yet I know it is
there.”

“Yes, me too. Let it through. Receive
it.”

Kinsley tugged on Lilith’s jacket. “I feel
it, too!”

“Do you, now?”

“Yes. What is it, a ghost?”

Ursula, “`Tis getting stronger.”

Lilith, “It’s trying to reconstitute.”

Below their feet, the floorboards began
rumbling. Frost collected on the windows along the shady side of
the room, and steam marked their breaths as they spoke.

“I’m getting scared,” said Kinsley.

Lilith said, “Leave if you must, Mrs.
Kinsley. I won’t blame you.”

“No. I can’t leave you here alone.”

“Then close thy eyes,” said Ursula, “lest the
sprit move thee by will of fright.”

“There!” cried Lilith, pointing across the
room. “Did you see that?”

“By my word, I did. The clock upon the mantle
hath but one face and two hands, yet it walked on its own from
end-to-end.”

“Impossible,” said Kinsley, though she knew
it had. Following her words, the front door closed abruptly. Three
glass candleholders on a bookshelf toppled to the floor in quick
succession. A framed picture on the south wall jogged askew on its
own, followed by one on the east wall and another on the north.

“It’s happening,” said Lilith. “The classic
sinistral disturbance. Did you notice?”

“Aye, and the lantern above?”

Lilith and Kinsley cast their gaze toward the
ceiling where a hanging light fixture adorned with teardrop
pendants spun counterclockwise in a phantom breeze. Below their
feet, the rumbling floorboards began spitting nails into the air in
random popping like Chinese fireworks. Kinsley stepped back to the
door. Lilith and Ursula huddled closer in the center of the room as
bits of plaster fell from the ceiling around them. Pictures, once
skewed, danced on their hooks against pulsating walls, drumming out
in heartbeat rhythms.

“This isn’t natural,” Kinsley cried, swatting
at a cold wind teasing her hair about her face and neck. “We have
got to get out of here, now!”

“Not yet,” Lilith ordered. “Don’t you see,
he’s trying to reconstitute? Ursula, do you have anything more to
give him?”

“Upon my soul, sister, I am spent. What
energy he doth need I have not.”

“He wants something else then.”

“Mayhap so, but what be thy guess?”

Kinsley threw open the door and it slammed
against the wall. “I am out of here,” she cried. “I’ll see you in
the car,” adding only after crossing the threshold, “maybe!”

Immediately following her retreat, the door
again slammed shut. The deadbolt, which Kinsley said never worked,
fastened with a defiant click. The tattered yellowed shades over
the front porch windows pulled down to the sills on their own and a
curtain covering the dining room doorway sprang open as if snatched
back by rubber bands. Then abruptly, the paranormal activities
abated. The walls stopped heaving. Plaster stopped falling. The
rumbling in the floorboards quieted to simple groans of an
explainable nature due to temperature conversions. If it seemed
that the house had thrown a tantrum for an unwanted guest, then
expelling Eva Kinsley had soothed its temper. Lilith motioned by
pointing toward the dining room. “I think it wants us in there,”
she said. “Should we go?”

Ursula’s gaze followed. “What say you?”

“I don’t know.” Her smile widened. “It is a
clear invitation.”

“Aye, tis indeed, yet more welcomed
invitations I have refused.”

Lilith turned Ursula toward the doorway and
nudged her gently. “Yes, but this one we can’t. It would not be
polite.”

The two entered, stopping just beyond the
threshold. Lilith felt along the wall by the door and hit the light
switch. A fixture overhead came on, briefly illuminating the room
in a dull orange before going out. She hit the switch again. Once
more, it came on, burned a few seconds, and then died in a blink.
The third time she covered the wall switch with her hand, but only
made a clicking sound with her tongue. The light came on. She
looked to Ursula, her lips stretched thin and tight. “He’s not the
brightest firefly in the jar,” she remarked. “Is he?”

Ursula grinned similarly. “Aye, thou
perception is sharp, but thy wit sharper.”

In the center of the dimly lit room sat an
oval table with four wooden chairs spaced equally around it. A thin
linen cloth covering the table like a flag-draped coffin dripped
with tassels netted tight in matted cobwebs that had accumulated
over the years. On top, a hand-painted porcelain set consisting of
a sugar bowl with creamer and two matching candlesticks, were bound
likewise in webs of silken threads and dust made chains.

Across the room, a mirrored china hutch
scattered light from a dirty window upon a potted ficus, its dead
branches casting spiny shadows against the wall in petrified veins.
To the right, another doorway, also curtained off, led to the
kitchen where Carlos would later find a stash of canned pork and
beans and try telling me that they were still good for another
twenty years. Fortunately, Spinelli would talk him out of taking
them, citing their potential value as evidence in an active
investigation.