Help for the Haunted (8 page)

Thunder rumbled in the sky just then, startling us both. Seconds later, a flash of lightning.

“That's our cue,” my father said, climbing out of the pool. “Come on, tadpole. Let's head for dry land.”

I swam to him, feeling the urge to reach my arms up so he could lift me from the water like a much younger girl. On account of his back, I scurried up the ladder instead. As we made a mad dash for the room, our feet sounding a quick
slap-slap-slap
against the walkway, I thought of my mother's feelings about the night that lay ahead. To look at her waiting in the doorway of that second-floor room, no one would have ever guessed her concern. She smiled as we ran closer, then wrapped us in the scratchy hotel towels. While helping us to dry off, she kissed my forehead, my father's too, before shutting the door to keep out the driving rain and rumbling thunder and crooked branches of lightning that crackled in the daytime sky.

 

Chapter 7

Out There, in the Dark

I
t used to be that every Halloween my father was invited to give a lecture at Fright Fest in Austin, Texas. Those talks paid the best, though he liked them the least. “The audience lacks serious interest in the subject matter,” he'd complain while packing his brown suits, yellow shirts, and pills for his back, which acted up in the cramped airplane seats. When we were little, Rose and I reminded him to bring us something from the trip, and every year he arrived home claiming to have forgotten. He'd hold up his empty suitcase, shaking it to prove there was nothing inside, and only once we believed that he really had forgotten would he laugh and reach into a compartment, pulling out cowgirl statuettes, plastic cactuses, or some other surprise.

Still, the next year we reminded him all over again while he packed and leveled the same complaints to my mother: “Those crowds want nothing more than the cheap chills they get watching that phony Dragomir Albescu, with all those ridiculous rings on his fingers, as he carries on about the ghosts and goblins he encounters on his trips home to Romania. No one is interested in hearing from an
actual
deacon in the Catholic Church with
actual
knowledge and
years
of experience with the paranormal.”

My mother used her most soothing voice as she pulled clothes from his suitcase, folding them more neatly than he had, before putting them inside again. “If that was true, dear, the organizers wouldn't keep asking you back.”

“Yeah, well, maybe one of these years they'll realize their mistake. The experience is downright degrading. I'd make a request to appear with someone else, but I'm afraid I'll end up in what they call the ‘odditorium' speaking with Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Now
that
would truly be the bottom of the barrel.”

“Elvira who?” my mother asked.

“Never mind. You don't want to know.”

“Well, are you sure you wouldn't like me to come too? We're a team, after all.”

My father took a shirt from my mother and set it aside. He held her hands, looked into her eyes. “It's bad enough I have to share the stage with a man as legit as a sidewalk fortune-teller. I won't allow you, who is every bit authentic as he is phony, to play second fiddle to a fraud.”

After that, my father said he didn't want to discuss it anymore. They finished filling his suitcase as he joked that he better not forget to pack wax fangs and a tube of fake blood. Once he had left for the airport, my mother's mood lightened. She loved trick or treating with us, and even if there had been other houses on Butter Lane, I still think she would have made the twenty-minute drive into Baltimore every year and led us along the narrow streets of Reservoir Hill, where she and my father had a tiny apartment when they first married. The old women who remembered her carried on at the sight of Rose and me dressed as vampires or princesses or aliens. One ancient, heavyset woman with a name that sounded like it should be flip-flopped, Almaline Gertrude, insisted on inviting us in each year. Her kitchen smelled of spicy stews that I imagined came from the deli downstairs, since there was never anything but crumpled dollar bills and envelopes on her stove. While Mrs. Gertrude sat at the table with my mother, sipping microwaved tea from dainty cups that clanked against the saucers, she told us to help ourselves to her candy basket.

My sister may not have been good at school, but she was a master at the art of moping. That's exactly what she started doing as the years went on and she grew into her teens. One Halloween night, we made the pilgrimage to the old neighborhood and found ourselves once again in Mrs. Gertrude's kitchen, where the air was thicker than usual with the smell of spices, though there was still nothing but money and mail on her stove. I was dressed as a scarecrow, stuffed with real hay my father picked up from Watt's Farm before leaving for his trip. Never mind that the straw poked and scratched my skin, never mind that I smelled like the livestock section at a state fair, I was thrilled to be wearing a genuine costume.

My sister, however, refused to wear any costume at all. “Not including her mope,” my mother joked when Mrs. Gertrude asked about it. Everyone but Rose laughed. And the more she moped, the more the old woman made an effort to cheer her up. “I don't understand,” Mrs. Gertrude said when all her attempts, from cookies and milk to free rein of the TV, failed. “No costume. No appetite for sweets. Something has changed about you, Rose. Why the long face?”

My sister looked up from where she was sitting at the table with the rest of us. I thought she was about to participate in the evening at last. Then she said, “Because I'd rather be at a party with friends my own age instead of being forced to spend the night in a stinky, disgusting apartment with a dumb old fatty bat like you.”

My mother's mouth dropped open. Her hand shot up and slapped Rose so hard across the face my sister slipped off the chair and crumpled on the floor.

“Rose!” Mrs. Gertrude shrieked, but she was not talking to my sister.

My mother jerked her hand back and brought it to her mouth, horrified by what she'd done. Neither of our parents had ever taken a hand to us, never mind with such force. The next thing I knew, my mother was ripping us out of the apartment, spewing trembled apologies to Mrs. Gertrude, Rose, me, and most of all, God.

N
ow, on the first Halloween without my mother or father, I looked away from the sight of Rose and Cora kissing and walked into our house, twisting the locks behind me. In some ways, my sister's behavior was no different from all the other surprises she delivered over the years, from that night with Almaline to the morning last year when she came downstairs with a shaved head, still nicked and bloody from the razor. But hadn't she done those things to antagonize my parents? What could be her reason now?

With the Hulk standing guard, I figured I'd seen the last trick-or-treaters. I helped myself to dinner—a handful of Mr. Goodbars—clicked off the lamps, and made my way upstairs. My sister didn't make a habit of telling me where she was going and when she'd be back, so I felt a sense of freedom as I pushed open her door. Squashed soda cans, scratched off scratch-off tickets, her old globe—those things and more littered the floor. A humidifier puffed away, mold gathered at its mouth. The tub of witch makeup sat on her dresser, the epicenter of a green fingerprint storm that moved from the window to the walls to the tissues scattered everywhere but the wastebasket.

It had been eleven weeks exactly since we heard from my uncle. After the courts rejected his request to be made my guardian, he promised to return to Florida, “tidy up his affairs,” then move closer and be part of our lives anyway. Instead, all spring we had received late-night calls with rambling explanations about leases, debts, and so many other reasons why things were taking longer than he hoped. When the calls stopped, letters arrived, claiming he had devised a plan to help us all if only we'd be patient. After that: no word at all. Good riddance, my sister said, though I'd taken it upon myself to finally write him without telling her, if only to make sure our sole living relative was okay. It would have been much easier if I could've checked our mailbox for a return letter, but when a car came by and kids batted it off the post, Rose set up a P.O. box in town. Carrying mail home from that box put her in an even worse mood than usual, so it didn't help to ask if anything was for me.

“Not unless you count these love letters from the electric and gas companies,” she told me last time. “What could you be waiting for anyway? An invitation from Harvard? Don't get ahead of yourself, squirt.”

I moved slowly around the room, unearthing a laminated prayer card from Saint Julia's that I was surprised she had not thrown away, and a newspaper where she'd circled an ad:
PARTY PLANNER WANTED: MUST BE DETAIL-ORIENTED & ORGANIZED
. Even though Rose talked about going back for her GED, so far she had done nothing about it, instead taking random office jobs only to get fired because she lacked the exact skills listed in that ad. I gave her old globe a spin and thought of the way she used to do the same, planting her finger on random locations and bringing it to a stop, announcing Armenia or Lithuania or Guam.

I was about to check out her closet when the Hulk's chain rattled on the lawn.

I went to the window. Outside, the dog's bone must have thawed, because she gnawed frantically on it, causing her chain to make that clanging sound. Except for Rose's truck, the driveway remained empty. Relieved, I stepped through the minefield on her floor and opened the closet. Since so few of Rose's belongings were ever put away, the space was mostly vacant. Nothing from Howie, but I located a plastic bag labeled
Baltimore County Police Department
. Flashlight, road map, repair bills, oil change receipts—its contents included everything the police had removed from the Datsun before returning the car to us. I stared at my father's signature on a receipt, imagining his hand moving a pen across the bottom. Finally, I pulled out the only remaining item:
Help for the Haunted: The Unusual Work of Sylvester and Rose Mason
by Samuel Heekin.

Despite all the months that had passed, holding that book in my hands made me every bit as nervous as it had that night in the backseat. Some part of me worried about Rose coming home still, so I clicked on the flashlight and turned off the ceiling lamp, then sat down on the floor and flipped pages. My mother used to complain about Heekin's convoluted way of stringing together sentences. Judging from passages that leaped out, I understood why:

If you are a believer who has come to this narrative, there is nothing that I, the author, can do to prepare you, the reader, for what you are about to discover . . .

. . . The Masons could very well open a museum of curiosities in the basement of their home, for that is where the remnants of their excursions in the realm of the paranormal live. I use the word “
live
” because, to this visitor at least, many of the things I encountered on my tour beneath their house did feel exactly that: alive. One of the very first artifacts I took note of upon entering the basement was a hatchet, which seemed to carry a life force all its own. This weapon was used in a tragic family slaying at what was once the Locke Farm in Whitefield, New Hampshire. But that, as they say, is only the beginning . . .

. . . Perhaps the most infamous case that the Masons have spoken about in lectures and media outlets is that of Penny, the child-sized Raggedy Ann doll hand-sewn by a mother from the Midwest with instructions from a mail-order kit. A gesture of hope, it was a gift to her only child, a girl who lay terminally ill until she died with the doll at her side . . .

“He writes like he talks,” I could still hear my mother saying as I sat in Rose's dark bedroom, her humidifier puffing away like a sick old lady reading over my shoulder.

“You mean a lot of hogwash?” my father said in response.

“I mean too many words. Someone should take a vacuum cleaner to his sentences. No wonder the man's a reporter for the
Dundalk Eagle
and not a big-city newspaper. We never should have let him into our lives.”

“You're right about that last part,” my father told her. “But his writing style is the least of our problems.”

I skimmed the mess until I came to the photo section with the image I'd lingered on in the backseat of the Datsun. That night, it had been too dark to make out the caption, but I saw it now:
THE VANDALIZED KITCHEN IN ARLENE TRESCOTT'S APARTMENT, DOWNTOWN BALTIMORE. 1982.
Not a farmhouse after all,
I thought, turning to the table of contents. The book was divided into three sections. The first detailed each of my parents' childhoods and their early years together. The second consisted entirely of case studies, including only the briefest mention of Abigail Lynch. The final section was titled simply: “Should You
Really
Believe the Masons?”

Their childhoods—those were the chapters I turned to first, since what details I knew of their lives before me were fuzzy. I knew my father grew up in Philadelphia, and that my grandparents owned a movie theater with a candy store in the front. But I didn't know that at age nine, he reported his first paranormal experience when he saw “a globule of energy among the seats” while sweeping that theater. When he told his mother and father, they laughed and suggested that his “globule” was probably a couple who stayed after the movie to kiss. Over dinners, my grandparents and their friend, Lloyd, who helped run the theater, coaxed my father into telling the story. When he described the lightless mass that shifted and reshaped in the shadows among the seats, the room exploded with laughter, filling my father with shame. For that reason, he quit mentioning the globules, even as they began to appear with increasing frequency.