Help for the Haunted: A Novel Page 6

  We both knew I was too afraid to go down there alone.

  As the days wore on, Rose’s scoffing chipped away at me. I began to wonder if it was just a matter of me hearing things. After all, a doctor should have been the one to remove the tube from my ear. Instead, I woke one night to find it resting beside me on the carpet like a small worm. Apparently, I’d yanked it out in my sleep. Perhaps I’d done more damage than I realized, I started to think. After nearly a month, when we no longer spent so much time in the living room, the rattling and shaking and all the rest grew silent, sudden as a needle lifted from a record. Part of me believed my hearing was improving, that someday the shhhh would fade as well. But another part couldn’t help believe that down below those things my parents left behind had made their peace. If that was the case, they’d done it much faster than my sister and me up above.

  For those reasons, for so many reasons, ours was not a house people should have visited on Halloween. Trick-or-treaters would have made better use of their time roaming the golf course, where oversized colonials were piled one on top of the other, instead of venturing down our street with its half-dozen cement foundations. Despite mosquitoes, puddles, and weeds rising from the cracks, Rose and I used to play in the one across the street when we were little. In pastel chalk, we outlined imaginary bedrooms for our imaginary children. We drew furniture on the floor, pictures on the walls, careful to stay away from the rusted steel rods on the far end that Rose speculated had once been the start of a fireplace. Our time down there was the closest anyone came to living in those structures, since they were abandoned years ago when the builder went bankrupt. The sole property he unloaded before trouble hit was the one my parents purchased.

  Still, trick-or-treaters walked right past the NO TRESPASSING! signs and made their way down our driveway. Some behaved so casually I could tell they had come only for candy. But there were others who came on a dare, who giggled nervously as they approached, who fell into uncomfortable silence the moment they stepped onto our porch. It used to be that what they wanted was a glimpse of my mother or father—to leave with a story to tell. How disappointed they must have been those years when the most they encountered was a basket of candy on the doorstep along with a note in my mother’s careful cursive telling them: Please help yourselves, but be mindful of other trick-or-treaters and don’t let greed get the better of you. . . . And the years when we were at home, they were met with still more disappointment when the door was answered promptly and my tall, pale mother smiled as she dropped Butterfingers into their pillowcases.

  But who knew how the details were altered in the retelling?

  No one answered for a long time and we heard chanting in the basement. . .

  When that woman opened up, she had dried blood caked around her cuticles. . .

  That moon-faced doll with the red hair was rocking in a chair all on its own. . .

  You cannot control the things people say. That much I had learned.

  Despite Rose blasting Lynyrd Skynyrd on her stereo upstairs, and despite the never-ending shhhh, I heard the initial group of trick-or-treaters drawing near that first Halloween after our parents were gone. More than other years, I had good reason to worry about who might show up at our door. But I tried not to think about that. When I opened up, three girls stood on the stoop. Short skirts rustling in the wind. Torn fishnet stockings. Glittery tops. Ample lip-gloss and eye shadow. At the mouth of our driveway, smoke plumed from the muffler of a station wagon, headlights illuminating the old well and the dirt patch where Rose’s rabbit cage once stood. Those girls couldn’t have been much younger than me, so my voice should not have sounded motherly when I asked, “And what are you young ladies supposed to be?”

  They burst into laughter, shrieking out their answer in unison so that it mashed into a single word, “Hookerscantchatell?”

  I felt relieved that they had come for candy and nothing more. As I dropped peanut-butter cups and mini candy bars into their sparkly purses, I noticed something shiny down by their heels. Before I could get a closer look, one of the girls began cooing, “Ooh, ooh, ooh! I’ll do anything for an Almond Joy! I mean anything!”

  I gave her extra. After all, it wasn’t every day a junior high student showed up on our step pretending to be a candy-addicted prostitute. After I watched them totter back to the station wagon, I bent and picked up a bowl covered in foil.

  Once, sometimes twice a week, Rose and I returned home to find foil-wrapped offerings on our doorstep. Casseroles. Lasagnas. Chocolate cakes. Never once did they come accompanied with a note, so we had no idea who left them. As a result, no matter how hungry or tempted, we felt too suspicious to eat them. Instead, Rose shoved all the food on the counter to take out to the trash later.

  I carried the bowl into the house and lifted the foil to find a Jell-O mold with walnuts and tangerine slices beneath the surface, like insects embalmed in amber. As usual, no note. I considered sticking my finger in and tasting it anyway.

  “What are you doing?”

  I turned to see my sister coming down the stairs. Black cape. Pointy hat. Face slathered with green makeup. I’d been so preoccupied with those make-believe hookers and the bowl that I’d failed to notice her music go dead above me.

  “Nothing.”

  “Doesn’t look like nothing.” Rose reached the bottom of the stairs, took the bowl from my hands, peeked beneath the foil. “What the hell is it?”

  Beef bourguignon, I wanted to say. “Jell-O.”

  “Did you see anyone leave it?”

  I shook my head, which made me think of Louise Hock, the haggard-looking assistant district attorney who attended our meetings with Rummel at the police station. Lately, Louise had begun telling me I needed to get in the habit of speaking my answers, since there would be no nodding allowed when I was questioned in the courtroom come spring. “I didn’t see anyone,” I told Rose.

  “Well, I hope you weren’t about to eat it.”

  “Seems like a lot of effort just to do us in. By now, whoever it is must realize it’s not exactly working, seeing as we’re still alive.”

  “Maybe it’s a slow poison. Or maybe the freak is waiting until we get used to stuffing our faces with these innocent ‘donations’ before sprinkling in Drano. All those goodies down the hatch then—wham!—the unsuspecting Jell-O mold does us in.”

  I stared at her, blinking.

  “What?” she said.

  “Or maybe someone out there feels bad about our situation and is being nice.”

  My sister gave the bowl a wiggle, then sniffed the slick red surface before holding it out to me. “Okay, then. If you’re so brave and determined. Help yourself, Sylvie.”

  I hesitated, waiting for her to retract the bowl. When she didn’t, I reached two fingers in and scooped out a blob. The walnut inside made me think of those embalmed bugs once more. I opened wide, my breath causing the Jell-O to wiggle on my fingertips, and then, at the last second, said, “I can’t do it,” and tossed it back.

  Rose set the bowl aside. “Thought so.” She fussed with the knot on the collar of her cape while telling me about a warehouse party she was going to two hours away in Philly. Normally there was something impenetrable about my sister’s face, but in contrast to all that green, her eyes looked red and tired, her teeth smaller, more yellow. The effect was not scary so much as gloomy.

  “You know, Sylvie, it wouldn’t hurt you to act fourteen instead of forty for a change. Throw a sheet over your head. Go out with your friends.”

  “I don’t have friends,” I told her.

  “Yes, you do. That girl with the weird name and the other one with the weird face.”

  “Gretchen moved when her dad got a job in Cleveland.”

  “And Elizabeth?”

  “She moved too.” That part wasn’t true, but I didn’t feel like explaining the way Elizabeth stopped sitting with me at lunch after I came back to school last winter. “Forget about them,” I told my sister, and then I thou
ght of what I’d overheard in the school library, the reason I felt nervous about who might show up tonight. “Besides, one of us needs to watch the place in case anyone decides to make trouble.”

  “Oh, don’t you worry, Sylvie. I’ve got us covered on that front.”

  A fist pounded on the door, startling me. When I opened up, it took a moment to place the driver, since her face was caked with witch makeup too. The extra features didn’t help: matted wig, fake eyebrows, rubber hands with noodly fingers. Instead of a “trick or treat,” she launched into an explanation of how she’d been listening to Rose and me until she remembered the doorbell was broken. “You really should put a sign up, letting people know the thing doesn’t ring. Lucky I figured it out, because someone el—”

  “All right, all right,” Rose said, cutting her off. “Come in already, Cora.”

  I stared at Cora’s noodly fingers, thinking of that rainy afternoon when I first found her waiting for me in the living room, the way Rose had returned downstairs a few minutes later only to peek over her shoulder at the clipboard and ask us both the questions listed there: How many hours of sleep do you get a night? Do you ever feel anxious during the day? If so, how often and why? “I didn’t recognize you without your clipboard,” I told Cora now, as I remembered the reluctant answers she’d given my sister that day: Four or five at best . . . Yes . . . Quite a bit . . . I’m supporting my sister and me with this new job. . . . And I guess you could say I don’t have enough fun in my life. . . .

  She tilted her green witch face and said, “Really? Well, it would have been odd for me to bring it. I mean, witches don’t carry clipboards.”

  “That was a joke, Cor,” Rose told her. “It might come as a shock, but we do make jokes in this house. Even Great-Grandma Sylvie ekes one out now and then.”

  Cora pressed her fake fingers to her mouth and let out an “Ohhhhhh!” Then she smiled. “How are you doing, Sylvie?”

  “Fine.”

  “How’s school?”

  “Good.”

  “No problems?”

  “No problems.”

  “While I was waiting at the door, I heard you saying something about your friends. Is something wrong?”

  “One moved away. That’s all. I have plenty of others.”

  “Well, don’t forget if you ever need anything, how do you reach me?”

  “RIBSPIN,” I told her, repeating the acronym she’d worked out for her number.

  “Good. And do you have paperwork from your doctor visits like we discussed?”

  “All right already,” Rose said. “You’re off duty, so let’s skip the official business. We are supposed to be having fun, remember? And where the hell is your date?”

  So this was not an unexpected visit after all, I thought, as Cora informed us that “the Hulk” was waiting in the car. I went to the window and looked out to see an enormous rottweiler leaping from the front seat to the rear and back again, its tail a drumstick beating the seats.

  “The Hulk belongs to Dan,” Cora explained. “Dan lives upstairs from my mother. He let me borrow her for the night.”

  “Her? The Hulk’s a girl?”

  “Yeah,” Rose told me, thrill rising in her voice. “We’re going to tie her to a tree. She’ll scare the crap out of anybody who comes around to mess with the place.” My sister turned away and started rummaging through the closet.

  The news should have made me feel safer. But that dog would also keep away ordinary trick-or-treaters, like my happy hookers, spoiling what little fun I looked forward to. I didn’t bother saying any of that, though. “So are you going to the party with my sister?” I asked Cora.

  She gave a tight-lipped smile. “Guess that’s probably breaking some sort of code. But it’s just one party. You don’t mind, Sylvie, do you?”

  I shook my head then remembered Louise’s warning about speaking up. “No.”

  “Here we go.” Rose unearthed two brooms, buried so far behind the coats it made me realize how seldom we swept. One had a wooden handle and cinched straw at the base, the other, a lime-green plastic handle and stubby plastic bristles. Rose handed Cora the bad broom before opening our front door and stepping into the dark. On the top step she paused, adjusting her hat so it didn’t blow off in the wind. Then she stuck her broom between her legs and leaped off the stairs. She went so high that for a second it seemed she might actually keep on soaring before she landed on the mossy lawn.

  “Not bad,” Cora said, taking her place on the step.

  “Well, I did date a former track star. It’s how I learned everything I know.”

  “Come on!” my sister called to Cora. “Your turn!”

  As the wind whipped the dead birch leaves into a whirl, Cora hesitated. I could tell she felt nervous about jumping, even if it was just three measly steps. But then she surprised me by letting out a cowgirl’s “Yeeehaaaw!” and leaping off the step. She didn’t soar nearly as high as my sister, and she made a crash landing, stumbling as leaves spun around her feet. But she managed to regain her balance and danced around the lawn, cackling.

  Once they released the Hulk and hitched her to a tree, Rose and Cora climbed into the car. The engine started, and I noticed that one of the headlights was out. Isn’t that a game for some people? I wondered. When you see a car with one missing, you punch the person you’re with. Or maybe you kiss them, I was never sure of the rules. Either way, I realized they’d forgotten to leave water for the dog. I went to the kitchen and filled a bowl. Before taking it outside, I opened the freezer and dug out a bone behind my father’s glass tumbler that I saw every time I reached for a Popsicle. My mother had frozen that bone to make stock for her beef barley soup.

  When I put both the bowl and the bone by her paws, the Hulk didn’t growl or bark. She didn’t drink or bother with the bone either. She just sniffed my toes and slobbered on my flip-flops before rolling on her back in an invitation to scratch her belly.

  “You’re real fierce, aren’t you, girl?” I said, kneeling and rubbing her velvety fur.

  It was early enough that we had hours ahead. I stared off into the woods, thinking of Albert Lynch in a holding cell not twenty miles away, because of the answer I’d given Rummel that day in the hospital. And then I thought of what I heard those boys talking about while I’d been tucked in a study carrel at the school library days before.

  “What would it take?”

  “You’ve seen the dude’s picture.”

  “It’s not like I’ve jerked off to it. I didn’t memorize what the hell he looks like.”

  “I guess we need a skullcap to look bald. We definitely need his weird ’stache. I could grow one. But you might need help, pansy. Use burned cork. Plus there’s those glasses. Little round things that make him look like a bug. Then all we need is a weapon.”

  “A weapon?”

  “Not a real one, moron. But you know, like a rubber hatchet.”

  “Dude, a hatchet isn’t what he used to do it.”

  “Okay, so now you’re the expert. How the hell did he do it?”

  “He blew their—”

  Shhhh . . .

  That day in the library, I pressed my hand over my good ear and shut out their voices. Now, just as I’d done then, I pushed the thought away. I quit petting the dog and stood to go inside, which was when I glimpsed the brake lights down the street. Cora and my sister had come to a halt by one of those cement foundations. As the car idled, the moon shone down, making it possible to see their pointy-hatted silhouettes. Funny how I’d been thinking about that game with the missing headlight and what you were supposed to do when you see one, because this is what I witnessed: two witches who had just completed their first successful broom flights of the night and were stopping a moment.

  They were stopping to kiss.

  Chapter 6

  Thunder, Lightning, Rain

  Ocala, Florida—of all places, that turned out to be the first we visited with our parents. They were scheduled to give a lecture at
the city’s conference center. The event was going to draw their biggest crowd to date—more than three hundred tickets sold, my father informed us, reading from a fax that came as we were stuffing our suitcases. Even though the auditorium only held two hundred, the coordinators were setting up a spillover room where people could watch on a monitor. My father was thrilled, though my mother never cared one way or another about those sorts of details. She was too busy making sure Rose and I packed our toothbrushes and plenty of underwear.

  Kansas. California. Texas. Pretty much any location they’d traveled to interested me more. Still, I was grateful for the chance to see something outside of Maryland for a change. Mostly, I couldn’t wait to splash around the hotel pool, even if that meant having to sit next to Rose on the fifteen-hour drive south. Ever since that night with Dot, my sister had developed an obsession that made her even less fun to be with. She’d been carting that bible around from the moment she pulled it from my parents’ nightstand. Flipping pages. Underlining passages. Scouring the text in search of ludicrous scripture that she recited to my parents as evidence that the book was “nothing more than an outdated fable.” So while other families we passed on I-95 might have been playing I Spy or Twenty Questions, the Masons kept busy listening to Rose.

  “ ‘And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night,’ ” she read from Genesis before pointing out, “First of all, the moon is not a light; it only reflects light from the sun. And why, if God made the moon to ‘rule the night,’ does it spend half its time moving through the daytime sky?”

  Sometimes my parents ignored her—the best tactic as far as I was concerned, since it led to her quietly staring out the window, a faraway look on her face. Other times, my mother or father offered an explanation, which almost always led to an argument. Every once in a while, they’d try some version of: “It’s nice to see you taking an interest and using your intellect, Rose. Perhaps all your questions will lead to a newfound faith.”