Help for the Haunted: A Novel Read online

  “When our parents go on these trips,” Rose interrupted, “they are asked to confirm the presence of unwanted spirits. Sometimes they are asked to drive them out too. Usually from places, but once in a while, from people. I’m talking about children, pregnant women, the elderly, even animals and inanimate objects too.”

  This information bothered Dot—that much was obvious by her pinched expression—but she shrugged. “Well, I want to get my laundry done then settle into the tub and finish my book. I’m just getting to the juicy part. Sylvie, could you pick up my laundry basket like a good girl? Old Dot’s back hurts.”

  “The spirits need somewhere to go after they’ve been driven out of the host,” Rose told her as I lifted the basket. “More often than not they end up— Well, I’ll give you one guess where they end up.”

  Dot pushed her owl glasses to the top of her nose and grabbed her copy of The Thorn Birds—a priest dominated the cover, far more handsome than Father Vitale from Saint Bartholomew with his drooping skin and sagging shoulders. “Here?” she said in a quiet voice.

  “Here,” Rose told her, lowering her voice too. “In this house. Tell her, Sylvie. Tell her about the terrible things we’ve seen.”

  There were times when Rose’s terrorizing of the nannies was, I confess, fun to watch. But this felt too easy somehow. “Let me show you the washer and dryer, Dot.”

  Dot ignored my suggestion, asking, “What do you see?”

  “Sylvie won’t tell you because we are not supposed to talk about it—forbidden by my father to talk about it, actually.”

  “So why are you talking about it then, Rose?” I asked.

  My sister manufactured a creepy, distant voice. “Because Dorothy seems like a nice lady, and since she’ll be staying here for the next five nights, I feel I should warn her.” Rose looked at Dot. “Ours is not an easy house to sleep in. Some nights they’ve even—” She stopped, as though snapping out of a trance, returning her voice to normal. “Well, never mind. Don’t worry. Mostly they mind their own business. Mostly.”

  Dot stared at her a moment, pinched-faced still, before pushing back her shoulders and squeezing the handsome paperback priest tighter. “I don’t buy into that nonsense. Tell you what. Sylvie, I’m gonna let you put the laundry in since you’re familiar with the machines. Meanwhile, if anyone needs me, I’ll be in the tub.”

  For a while at least, Rose left her alone. I took care of the laundry. Slipped into my pajamas. Spent time completing a paper I’d been writing for the first ever Maryland Student Essay Contest—a two-hundred-dollar cash prize would be awarded to a student in each grade from fifth through twelfth and the deadline was the next morning. My topic was inspired by a documentary my mother and I had watched about the aftereffects of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. When I mentioned it to Ms. Mahevka, my pasty, yawning English teacher, she told me it was “overreaching” considering my age. I kept at it for weeks anyway, my electric typewriter conking out before I did, since the last of my ink cartridges ran dry that night. The letters of my final sentence were so faint I backspaced and typed over them again and again.

  “Boo!”

  I glanced up to see Rose lurking in my doorway. “Stop it.”

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Just homework.”

  “What kind of homework?”

  The kind you never do, I thought. “A paper. I’m finishing the last line.”

  “Read it to me.”

  “The entire paper?”

  “No. The last line.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Guess I’m curious what goes on inside that egghead of yours.”

  Why I did not simply refuse her request, I don’t know. Maybe the pride I felt clouded my judgment. I cleared my throat and, rather than read, recited: “Only by entering into the most crystalline of consciousnesses and by raising our voices vociferously enough to be heard by those in power will the citizens of this great but troubled country of ours send such bigotry and phobia tumbling toward obsolescence.”

  Rose stared at me, blinking. “Now that you’re done speaking in tongues, what are your plans tonight?”

  I tugged the sheet from the machine and placed it beneath the others on my desk. My parents had given me that typewriter, a brand-new Smith Corona Spell Right, for Christmas, and even though other students were getting pricey word processors, I treated it like a favorite pet, wiping down the keys and fitting the dustcover over the top after unplugging the cord. Rose kept her eyes on me, smirking. So many things she’d been given ended up neglected, like those mahogany horses, gifts to each of us from Uncle Howie on one of his rare visits. I’d given mine fairy-tale names that suited their looks: Esmeralda, Sabrina, Aurora, Megra, Jasmin—and arranged them on my shelf according to color and height. Rose’s had long been banished to a dark corner of her room.

  When I was finished shutting down the typewriter, I pulled back the covers on my bed, climbed in, and turned off the light. “Good night, Rose.”

  “Come on, Sylvie. It’s early! Why turn in when Dot the Twat is soaking her lazy bones in the next room? The woman’s just begging for us to mess with her.”

  “Seven-twelve.”

  “Enough with the seven-twelves already. It’s like some pathetic police code. Ten-four good buddy.”

  “Good buddy is more of a trucker saying than cops.”

  “Whatever. The point is, I’m not a baby. So therefore, I don’t need a babysitter. Especially some fart-face who comes around here claiming she’s going to take care of us when all she’s doing is taking care of her own fat ass. You mean to tell me a substitute nurse at a children’s hospital is smarter than me? I don’t think so. And even if she is, there’s no way she’s smarter than you, Sylvie. Listen to that sentence you wrote. That is not the sentence of a person who requires a babysitter. That’s why I’ve taken the liberty of locking Dot in the bathroom.”

  My eyes, which had fallen shut, snapped open. “What?”

  “I locked Dot in the bathroom.”

  I reached over and switched on the lamp. Got out of bed. Slipped on my slippers. Walked across the hall to my parents’ room. On account of our father’s back trouble, they had slept separately for as long as I could recall. Their room resembled one in a roadside motel: two full-size beds, a nightstand between, even a bible tucked in the drawer. On this particular night, a bright yellow rope stretched from my mother’s heavy wooden bedpost to the bathroom door. Behind that door, Dot hummed away, making bubbling sounds in the water, oblivious to her predicament.

  “Pretty cool, huh?” Rose whispered.

  “I don’t think it’s pret—”

  Rose yanked me into the hall. “Don’t blow this with your big mouth. Whether you like it or not, you’re going to help me, Sylvie.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  But Rose ducked into my room, returning with the pages of my freshly typed essay in her hands. “ ‘The Aftereffects of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Assassination on American Society,’ by Sylvie Mason,” she read. “Bet you’d hate to see all your hard work go tumbling toward obsolescence too.”

  I reached for the paper, but she pulled back.

  “Careful.” Rose gave a little tear to the title page, the sound causing me to wince. “Oops. Are you sure you don’t want to help me?”

  I looked away, into my parents’ room. Their beds perfectly made, their bedspreads the swirling colors of a leaf pile. That rope, stretching between my mother’s bedpost and the bathroom door. From the other side, the sounds of Dot splashing about, making those hapless bubbling noises. I turned to Rose. “What do I have to do?”

  The question was as good as a yes—we both knew it. My sister did an about-face and headed downstairs without answering. I followed until we were standing in the kitchen at the door to the basement. Our parents had only recently moved their workspace from the living room to below, so the place didn’t hold the same fear that would come later. Even so, I avoided it. B
ut Rose pulled open the door and descended the wooden steps. Again, I followed, breathing in the musty air and gazing around at the cinder-block walls. In one corner, the beginnings of a partition separated a small area by the sliding glass door. My father had long ago begun constructing those walls, only to give up on the project. Through the sloppy cage of two-by-fours and snarled wires, I watched as my sister navigated among the heap of bicycles, a forgotten dental chair, and on deeper into the shadows.

  While she did who knew what over there, I studied my father’s new desk and file cabinet, a compact TV and VCR on top. A hulking bookshelf had been positioned in front of the cavity in the wall that led to the crawl space, the shelves filled with boxes they’d yet to unpack, a basket of cassettes and a tape player, a few stray videotapes. My mother never cared for sitting at a desk, so she kept a wooden rocker there. The cushions tied to the seat and spindled back were worn thin, her knitting basket situated nearby so she could occupy her hands whenever they discussed their work.

  Darkness cannot put out the light.

  It can only make God brighter.

  The words were engraved on a paperweight atop a pile of snapshots. I lifted it and flipped through the photos. A dingy hall in an old hospital. A hillside cemetery, names and dates worn from the stones. Only one photo had I seen before: a run-down theater with an empty marquee. In each, a stray sliver of light or odd shadow turned up. I tucked the photos beneath the paperweight and opened a drawer, where I found a bundle of tarnished dental instruments bound by rubber bands. Probes and explorers, bone files and orthodontic pliers—I knew all their names, because I’d once asked my father.

  “Damn it!” Rose shouted from beyond the skeletal partition. “I stepped in a glue trap.”

  That should slow you down, I thought, listening to her foot scrape the floor. “What are you doing over there anyway?”

  “Just hold your horses, Sylvie.” She kept scraping. “You’ll see soon enough.”

  I wandered to the bookshelf. Something made me pick up a video, push it in the VCR. A grainy nothingness filled the screen, then my mother appeared. On that fuzzy TV, it felt the way it must glimpsing an image in a crystal ball. She stood outside a brick house in a beige raincoat I’d not seen before, the belt tight around her slender waist. My father’s voice could be heard saying, “Okay. We’re rolling. Go ahead.”

  My mother gave a nervous smile. “Go ahead, what?”

  “Go ahead and explain where we are and what we’re doing here.”

  “I feel . . . silly.”

  “Just give it a try, Rose.”

  She let out a breath. “All right then. My name is Rose Mason. I’m here with my husband, who is holding the camera. Isn’t that right, husband-holding-the-camera?” My father nodded so that the frame moved up and down. “We are at the home of—” My mother stopped, looked at the ground. “Oh, I don’t like this, Sylvester. Can’t we just record the details in a notebook or on a cassette like we used to do?”

  “Here,” my father said. “You hold the camera. I’ll give it a—”

  From the far side of the basement, there came a loud snap before the lights went out, the TV along with it. In an instant, the basement was enveloped in black. Apparently, it was the same throughout the house, because two floors above Dot called from the tub: “Girls? Hello? Girls?”

  “Not funny,” I told Rose.

  “Girls? Anybody hear me? Yoo-hoo! Girls?”

  Rose clicked on a flashlight and shined it at her face, transforming her features into something ghoulish. She handed me a flashlight too. “First of all, who the hell says, ‘yoo-hoo’? Second, it is so funny and you know it.”

  “Sylvie? Rose? Hello?”

  “Dick Van Dot is calling,” my sister said. “We better go see what she wants.”

  By the time we stepped into my parents’ room again, I could hear her splashing around in the dark, like some oversized, floppy fish washed ashore. The sound made me want to put an end to whatever more Rose had in mind, but, ashamed as I was to admit it, the thought of my essay and how much I wanted to win led me to keep my mouth shut. I sat on my mother’s bed, where Dot had discarded her uniform with the tiny bears. Since the rest of her clothes were folded in the laundry basket downstairs courtesy of me, I knew she had nothing in the bathroom except a towel.

  Rose went to the door. Scratched at the wood.

  “What the devil?” Dot said.

  Scratch. Scratch. Rose kept at it, which brought on another onslaught of, “Girls? Hello? Girls?” At last, she gave up on that too. The woman sighed, followed by a splash, loud enough that I knew she was standing up in the tub. I listened to her feet pad across the linoleum. Her hand found the knob, and I watched the rope tighten. The door did not budge. Dot banged on it, crying out more frantically. “Girls! Can anybody hear me?”

  Rose walked to my mother’s bed and sat on top of Dot’s uniform. Leaning close, she whispered in my ear, “Do The Scream.”

  I should have figured that’s what she wanted. I shook my head.

  “Do it,” she insisted.

  The Scream was a talent—if that’s the word for it—I had stumbled upon a few nannies before when Rose lured us into a game of indoor hide-and-seek. We were actually having fun until my sister decided to hide where neither of us could find her. After an hour of searching, we gave up and got ready for bed. When I climbed into mine and turned off the light, Rose reached out from where she had jammed herself between the wall and the mattress and grabbed my neck, which caused me to release the most bloodcurdling scream. From that night on, Rose begged me to do The Scream in all kinds of places: store parking lots, outside of church, the library. Since it felt good to have her appreciate me for a change, there were times when I gave her what she wanted. But that night with Dot locked in the bathroom, I kept shaking my head.

  Still, Rose went right on whispering: “Do it. Do it. Do it.”

  “If I do it, can I get my essay back and go to bed?”

  “Girls? I don’t know what the bejesus you’re up to, but I don’t like it one bit.”

  Rose ignored her, mulling the deal. Finally, she whispered, “Okay. Give her one good one, and I’ll take over from there.”

  I knew exactly the kind of performance my sister expected, so I stood and went to the bathroom door. “Dot,” I said in my quietest voice. “It’s Sylvie. Can you hear me?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. Not really. Can you speak louder?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “If you call freezing and dripping in the dark okay, then yeah, I guess I’m just dandy. Now what is going on? And talk louder for cripes’ sake. I can’t hear you.”

  “Press your ear to the door,” Rose told her, joining me at my side.

  Dot shifted around in the bathroom. “Okay. What is it?”

  “I warned you about the spirits,” my sister said in a hushed voice. “Now do you believe me?’

  “Not really. More likely your parents didn’t bother to pay the electric bill.”

  Rose poked me with her flashlight. I took the deepest of breaths and out it came: a scream—The Scream—so sudden and shrill it would put the best horror movie actress to shame. In the silence that followed, I clutched my throat, since it always hurt afterward.

  When she was done fumbling, Dot called out, “Sylvie, dear? Are you okay?”

  From the tremble in her voice, I could tell she felt genuinely afraid now. I opened my mouth to let her know I was fine, but the thought of my essay being handed back to me as confetti made me close it again. Rose forked over the pages, and I stepped away from the door. Before leaving the room, I glanced back to see my sister making herself comfy on our mother’s bed. She pulled out the bible from the nightstand, flipped the thin pages and in a slow, methodical voice began reading a random passage from Revelations: “And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon . . . And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast
out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him . . .”

  “Let me out of here!” Dot screamed. “Please! Let me out! Help!”

  I should have helped her.

  I should have shredded that essay myself and untied the rope.

  Instead, as Dot kept pleading, as she kept pounding her fists against the door and Rose kept right on reading, I crossed the hall to my room. I climbed into bed, pulled a pillow over my head, and squeezed my eyes shut.

  For centuries humans have believed in God, Buddha, Yahweh, and so many forms of a higher power. And yet, not one can be seen. Why do the same people who believe in those deities doubt the existence of darker spirits? I ask all of you, how can a person believe in the light but not the dark? How, when all evidence points to the basic facts of dualities? There is the light of the sun and the dark of the moon. There is the heat of summer and the cold of winter. Even a simple magnet demonstrates positive and negative energy. So when people ask for proof, I know they want stories about things my wife and I have encountered, and I can tell plenty. But first, I point out that they already have all the proof they need. Any of us here has only to observe the opposing energies of the world we live in, and it’s proven time and again: If there is good, there is bad. If you believe in one, you must accept the existence of the other.”

  I opened my eyes. The house was dark, silent. My nightlight and digital clock were still dead, which meant the electricity had yet to be turned on. My pillow had fallen to the floor. I retrieved it and rolled over, staring at the wall. Those words I’d heard before coming fully awake, they had been spoken by my father. In my drowsy haze, I imagined them taking shape, drifting across the hall into my room, surrounding me in my narrow bed and filling my head. But then I remembered: my father was not home.

  “There are times when people of confused faith misinterpret a psychological or medical disorder and carry out barbaric methods to rescue the sufferer. There are many such stories, but this evening I’d like to talk about a girl named Lydia Flores from a village in Mexico. When Lydia was fifteen, her mother—a widower—noticed a change in her daughter. Where she had once been affable, outgoing, she became sullen, withdrawn. Simply leaving the house became an act she resisted. According to reports, the girl’s appetite vanished; her weight loss was drastic. Nights, she spent awake in her room, thrashing in bed. Days, she slept with such stillness it disturbed her mother. As things worsened, her behavior became violent toward others and herself. She spoke of voices and the horrible things they told her to do. Now any of us might contact a psychiatrist. But Lydia’s mother lived all her life in that village, where people held antiquated beliefs about what was to be done in such a situation. Unfortunately for Lydia, her mother sought out a village priest with the same beliefs. This priest devised a plan for her treatment.”