Eglantine (3 page)
Ray repeated his question.
‘I dream that I’m choking,’ Bethan mumbled. ‘And then I wake up.’
‘Just that?’ said Ray. ‘Nothing else?’
‘I don’t think so,’ my brother replied, vaguely.
‘And is that the only dream?’
‘Yes,’ Bethan admitted. ‘But I’ve had it every night since we came. And,’ he added, ‘I’ve never had it before.’
Choking, I thought. Yuk. But I didn’t let my sympathy get the better of me.
‘We’re each supposed to have our own bedroom,’ I remarked. ‘That’s why we moved -’
‘Oh, stop it, Alethea!’ Mum snapped. She was worried, I guess, but she made me jump. ‘Don’t be so selfish!’
‘
You
can sleep in this room, if you want to,’ Bethan said to me, but Mum informed him that no one would be sleeping in his room that night. He would be sharing my room until the mystery was solved – or until the writing stopped.
‘And I don’t want to hear one more word out of
you
,’ she told me, ‘or you’ll be sleeping on the sofa.’
Which is how I lost my bedroom, almost before I’d had time to enjoy it. Boy, was I mad. It was so unfair! But I have to admit that, if I hadn’t been so keen to get Bethan out of my room, the problem might never have been fixed. Because I might never have concentrated so hard on helping to solve it.
That night, Mum did three things.
First of all, she phoned her friend Trish. Trish is a masseur, and even more of a hippy than Mum is. They’re both into tofu, and yoga, and Feng Shui, but Trish has a much wider circle of vegetarian Buddhist astrologer friends. So it didn’t surprise anybody when Trish said that she knew a woman who was a member of a group called PRISM (Paranormal Research Investigation Services and Monitoring). If Mum didn’t mind, Trish said, she would ring this woman and see if they could all get together.
Mum replied that it was okay by her. The more help we had, the better it would be.
The second thing that Mum did was ask me to make a note of every word scribbled on Bethan’s wall. She explained that it would help us to determine whether anything was added overnight. She also asked me to underline every word on the wall with a red pen, for the same reason.
So I got out my journal, and copied down the mysterious script. Ray had to bring a ladder before we could work out what was written on the ceiling: it was more strange stuff about kings and sailors and seaports, and it didn’t make much sense. But I wrote it all down, and underlined it in red, and tried not to think about it again for a while (because I had to finish my homework).
I thought about it that night, though, when I was lying in bed. I thought about the writing, and about Eglantine Higgins, 1906. If there was a ghost in the house (which there probably wasn’t, but if there was), then it was almost certainly the ghost of Eglantine Higgins. During the daytime, this hadn’t worried me. After all, a bit of ghostly writing never did anyone any harm.
At night, however, I have to admit that it freaked me out. I didn’t like the idea of Eglantine Higgins drifting around in the next room while Bethan and I were dead to the world. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t sleep very well. I didn’t have bad dreams, but I kept waking up with a start. I think I was half-expecting to find Eglantine Higgins hovering over my bed.
The third thing that Mum did, that night, was to take a long red hair from her head, stick one end of it to the bottom of Bethan’s bedroom door, and stick the other end onto the base of his doorframe. She didn’t tell us what she had done until the next morning. But she warned us, before we went to bed, that
no one
was to enter Bethan’s room again before summoning her – and in the morning we found out why.
‘Look,’ she said, as we stood around Bethan’s bedroom door in our dressing-gowns. ‘See that hair?’ We didn’t, at first. She had to show it to us. ‘That hair is unbroken. Which means that no one went through the door last night.’
We gazed at her in admiration.
‘Wow, Mum,’ Bethan exclaimed. ‘That’s really smart.’
‘Good work, Mum.’
‘Clever,’ said Ray.
‘So if there’s anything new on the walls,’ Mum went on (pointing out the obvious), ‘whoever put it there didn’t come through this door.’
‘Unless you did it yourself,’ I volunteered, and she made a face at me.
‘Very funny,’ she said.
‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it?’
‘Come on,’ Ray interrupted. He sounded almost keen, though he doesn’t usually get very excited about anything. ‘Let’s have a look.’
He pushed at the door. It creaked slowly on its hinges, like something out of a horror movie, revealing Bethan’s light, bright, echoing room.
We saw the new writing at once. We couldn’t have missed it: there were new lines everywhere – twenty-four, to be exact. (I counted them afterwards.)
‘My God,’ Mum breathed.
‘This is so unbelievable.’ I was the first one over the threshold. Timidly I advanced, clutching my journal and my blue fountain pen.
I am the proudest of
my line
was new; it was inscribed at eye level, above the chest of drawers. I didn’t recognise
I have the
wherewithal to defend myself
, either. Quickly I opened my journal, and began to copy out these most recent messages.
Ray went to the window. He rattled it. The catch was firmly in place. ‘No one could have come through here,’ he declared. ‘Not without leaving the catch open when they left.’
‘What’s happening, Ray?’ Mum asked quietly.
‘I don’t know.’
‘It doesn’t seem possible, does it? I mean, it doesn’t make any sense unless – well, you know what I mean.’
‘I’m sure there’s some chemical explanation,’ he replied – but not with any conviction, I thought.
Bethan asked when ‘that ghost woman’ was coming.
‘I’m not sure yet,’ said Mum. ‘Trish has to ring me.’
‘Well, it had better be soon,’ Bethan grouched, with a wary, sidelong glance at the walls. ‘Because I want my bedroom back.’
Happily for all of us, Trish called Mum soon afterwards, bearing good news. The PRISM woman (whose name was Sylvia Klineberg) would be visiting us that very evening. Sylvia had suggested half past eight, so if Mum had no objections, Trish would ring Sylvia back and confirm the arrangements.
Mum had no objections.
‘Come to dinner, won’t you?’ she pleaded with Trish. ‘Early, at six. Then we can be finished and cleaned up by the time she appears.’
I hate it when Trish comes to dinner, because she eats macrobiotic food – which is rice and not much else. It’s a bit bland. It also has a bad influence on Mum, who always starts talking about black bread and herbal teas and grinding her own grain. Personally, I like the food that she cooks for us now (except the risotto). I’d much rather have mashed potato and lamb cutlets than soy-and-birdseed rissoles.
Fortunately, however, at this particular dinner there were more exciting things to talk about than macrobiotic food.
‘It seems to me,’ said Trish, after much thought, ‘that your house must be sitting on the intersection of a lot of ley lines.’ When asked what ley lines might be, she explained that they were lines of energy, or life force, flowing over the earth. ‘Ley lines connect all the world’s sacred sites,’ she assured us. ‘And those points where ley energy paths converge are always prone to strange manifestations, because of the energy surges.’
‘Too much earth energy,’ Mum interjected, and Trish agreed that there was, indeed, a risk of imbalance.
‘What kind of sacred sites are you talking about?’ I asked, whereupon Trish began to reel off a list of them: churches, temples, stone circles, holy wells, burial grounds . . .
‘Burial grounds!’ Bethan exclaimed, his mouth full of food. ‘Oh, no. You don’t think this house was built on an Aboriginal burial ground, do you?’
Bits of rice sprayed all over the table as he spoke. Politely, Trish ignored them – or perhaps she didn’t see them. She’s a vague sort of person when it comes to things like electricity bills and table manners. Though she can be quite sharp about people’s feelings.
She looks a little like a ghost herself, with her pale, skinny face and floating hair and layers of drifting shawls and scarves and Indian cotton skirts.
‘I don’t think it’s likely, Bethan,’ she responded, with the utmost sincerity.
‘In America, haunted houses are always sitting on top of Indian burial grounds,’ Bethan went on, in a glum voice. Mum said something about dispersing the negative energy – with wind-chimes, perhaps? At least they would moderate the
chi
flow where different energies converged.
‘I don’t know,’ Trish replied. ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t start moderating energy flows until Sylvia takes a look at the place. She’s had a lot to do with manifestations like this. She may help you to identify the problem.’
‘How?’ Ray inquired, and Trish said that she wasn’t sure, exactly. She didn’t know Sylvia very well. Sylvia was a naturopath who had treated Trish’s friend, Alice. In her spare time, Sylvia went about investigating reports of paranormal activity for PRISM, which was a large organisation based in Adelaide. Trish had no idea what a paranormal investigator actually did.
‘But I’m sure it will be very interesting,’ she added brightly, and I could see that she had high hopes. Perhaps she was expecting that we’d all have to sit in the dark, holding hands and waiting for the spirits of the dear departed to communicate with us. I was expecting much the same thing myself.
As it turned out, we had the wrong idea entirely. When Sylvia knocked at the door and we went to open it, we were all very surprised at how
normal
she looked. There was no fluttering black cloak. No crystal ball. She had short grey hair, and neat pearl earrings, and she wore a pale linen jacket over navy-blue trousers. She was carrying a green gym bag.
After she’d been invited into the kitchen for coffee, she took a notebook and a tape-recorder out of the gym bag before she sat down.
‘Trish tells me that you’ve had unexplained writing on the walls of a bedroom,’ she said, once everyone had been introduced to each other and her coffee had been poured. ‘I guess you’d better tell me the story from the beginning. You’ve only just moved in, is that right?’
Mum said yes. She explained about the squatters. She described her improvements: the new kitchen, the new paint, the new window glass. She showed Sylvia the book from under the stairs, and – with many interjections from me and Bethan – related the strange tale of Bethan’s bedroom. It all took a long time. Sylvia made notes as her tape-recorder whirred quietly away. She didn’t say much. She just listened, and I couldn’t tell from her expression what she was thinking.
‘Do you reckon it’s a ghost?’ Bethan finally asked her, and she gave a half-smile.
‘That’s what we have to establish,’ she answered.
‘If it
is
a ghost,’ I said, ‘it must be the ghost of Eglantine Higgins. Because it’s got the same handwriting.’
‘Perhaps,’ Sylvia replied. She shut her notebook and turned off the tape-recorder. ‘I suppose I’d better see the room, now,’ she added, rising, whereupon we all trooped upstairs to look at Bethan’s bedroom. The door was shut, of course; it had been shut all day. No one had been in there since nine o’clock that morning. When Ray clicked on the light switch, I couldn’t see any evidence of further unexplained activity. Every word on the wall had been underlined in red, by me, at Mum’s request.
‘I think it only happens at night,’ Mum remarked. ‘Which is what you’d expect, really, isn’t it? With a ghost.’ She gave an unconvincing little laugh.
Sylvia didn’t reply. She took out of her pocket a funny thing the size of a calculator, and began to pace the room with it.
Bethan asked her what it was.
‘An electromagnetic field detector,’ she replied.
Everyone – except Sylvia – exchanged glances.
‘And what does it do?’ Ray wanted to know.
‘It identifies anomalies in electromagnetic readings.’ Sylvia stopped, her gaze fixed firmly on her gadget. ‘High volumes of electromagnetic activity are usually associated with poltergeist reports and so forth. Hmm.’
‘What?’ said Mum.
‘Well . . . you do have a very high reading in here. Anything over point nine is a problem, and this room is registering point twelve.’
‘Oh, dear,’ said Mum.
Trish nudged her. ‘You see?’ Trish whispered. ‘What did I tell you? Intersecting ley lines.’
‘So there
is
a ghost in here?’ Bethan inquired, but Sylvia wouldn’t commit herself.
‘Not necessarily.’
‘Then what’s happening?’ Mum demanded. ‘Who’s doing this?’
Sylvia raised her eyes from her gadget. She surveyed us all in a way that made me feel uncomfortable.
‘At the moment,’ she said at last, slowly, ‘we can’t rule out a human agent.’
‘What?’ Mum cried, and Ray said, ‘Who?’
‘That is what we’ll have to determine.’
‘Well, it isn’t me,’ I announced. ‘
I
don’t want Bethan in
my
room.’
‘And it isn’t me, either!’ Bethan cried. ‘I don’t want to sleep with Alethea. I want my own room back!’
Sylvia looked at me long and hard. Then she looked at Bethan. Then she said, with a hint of apology, ‘We have to rule out the possibility of human intervention before we can accept that any strange activity has a paranormal cause. It’s standard procedure.’
‘And then what?’ asked Mum. ‘If you rule out human intervention, what happens after that? How can you get rid of this thing?’
Sylvia blinked.
‘Get rid of it?’ she echoed.
‘Yes. That’s what you do, isn’t it? You’re a kind of ghost-buster, aren’t you?’
‘Well . . . no,’ said Sylvia. ‘Actually, I’m not.’
‘You’re not?’
‘My job is to identify what the problem is – if it’s paranormal or not. If it is, and you want it stopped, well . . . we can make some suggestions -’
‘Like what?’ Mum sounded quite cross, and Ray put a hand on her shoulder.
Sylvia watched them both cautiously. ‘It depends on what you have here,’ she said at last. ‘And what your religious beliefs might be. You may want to talk to Laurie, in fact – he’s our president. He may be able to help you. But really, nothing can be done until we establish exactly what it is we’re dealing with.’
