House of Darkness House of Light (32 page)

Clasping her hands together, she implored God to help her endure whatever she might hear from her children. Carolyn felt defeated before it began. That a group discussion was even necessary was upsetting enough in its own right. Unprepared as she was to receive their news, reactions all around would be curious indeed. As her girls entered the kitchen from several directions, they all remained calm and quiet. Each child claimed her familiar spot at the table then waited for her mother to initiate the conversation; an apprehensive and awkward moment for all involved.

“Annie tells me you’ve all noticed strange things happening in this house.” Silence. “It’s important to tell me what’s been going on.” Silence. “If there is anything…if something is frightening you, then I want to know about it.” An ordinarily loud, rambunctious bevy of kids had fallen suddenly mute. “Well, I hadn’t planned on telling you about this, but I’ve seen a few things myself.” It was the key…unlocking the floodgates. Carolyn was blown back, swept in then swept away by the deluge: torrential information spilling into her mind.

“My toys move around all the time.” Cindy was perturbed. “I’ll set up all of my
Weebles
and the
Little People
in the village and the farm animals too, and they’ll all move around when I leave, even if it’s for a couple of minutes, like when I come down to go pee; the airplane goes up under my bed and the bus goes into the closet. It’s why I used to blame April, because that is where she plays all the time…but it’s
not
her doing it because the village gets set up all over again,
a whole different way
, and it happens
really
fast! Faster than any of us could
ever
do it. The farm and all the animals, too. It’s impossible! Mom. For it to happen that fast is…well, it’s impossible!”

“I keep hearing footsteps. Loud and heavy.” Nancy was unusually subdued. “In the closet…but also on the stairs to my bedroom…always coming
up
the stairs…but then it stops at the door. I keep thinking the door will open…the waiting…that scares me the most; not knowing who is on the other side of it. Sometimes when I’m in my room the closet door opens all by itself. When my stuff is missing I find it in weird places…where I
know
I didn’t leave it.”

“How
do
you know?
Stuff
is all over the place!” Chrissy had a valid point.

“Because I
know
! When that door thing happens it gets cold and it stinks!”

“The smell could just be a sandwich under your bed.” Chris was quick with the wit and so pleased with herself because of it. Nancy got instantly pissed! Her defensiveness drew nothing more than a coy, dismissive shrug from her not-much-younger sis. Letting it go, relishing the pure satisfaction of having said it at all, Christine decided to divulge her own experiences in their middle bedroom, quite similar to what Cindy described about the space they shared.

“My trolls and my glow-in-the-dark finger puppets move, too.” Christine had a pragmatic way about her; making a hands-folded-matter-of-fact statement, just like her father…as no apple falls far from the tree of life.

“It feels like I’m being watched all of the time!” Nancy said. “When I look there’s no one there but I know
someone
is in the room with me. It creeps me out…
especially
in the bathroom. I always make Cindy come in to guard me. I
never
go in the warm room without her!” Finally, a reference made.

“She does it for me, too.” Teasingly tugging at her guardian’s robe, Cindy added, “Unless she gets an
important
phone call…and then I’m on my own!”

“Yeah, the phone!” Nancy recalled what she’d seen. “I was running down my stairs and when I came around the corner I saw the telephone was off the hook, up in the air at least
this much
; when I walked in here it dropped down so quick the cord kept on swinging back and forth. I saw it just plop down on the hook…but nobody was in here to see it
with
me, so I didn’t tell ‘til now.”

“And the fridge opens by itself and stuff spills out of it!” Cindy chimed in.

“
All
the doors open whenever they want or slam in my face right when I’m trying to go through into another room!” Punctuating the previous comment, it was obvious Nancy was equally exasperated by the supernatural activity in the home. “I see shadows on the walls in my bedroom at night; a black cloud. I cover myself up with the quilt and pray to God to make it go away!”

“Why does it get so cold only in one room; when that
creepy feeling
leaves it warms back up again. I saw a cat running through the bathroom door and it wasn’t
our
cat and the door was closed!” Cynthia was growing more anxious by the moment. Her voice began to tremble. “Sometimes my bed shakes and moves around. It wakes me up. Chrissy helps me put it back in the morning.” Cynthia began to cry as she spoke to her mother. “I know you always tuck us in at night but so does another lady, too. She leans over to kiss me goodnight. I never feel her touching me but I know when she’s there. It’s not you, mom. She smells different than you do…like flowers and fruit. Then someone else, another lady comes late when everyone’s asleep. She makes it stink
so
bad in the room…
really
bad…like something died. When she leans over me it feels so cold but when she leaves it gets warm again. That’s how I know when she is gone. I hide under the covers and pray. She looks at me for a real long time whenever she comes. I don’t know why…then there is a little girl who walks through my bedroom crying for her mommy. Her voice is so sad it makes
me
cry. Maybe
she’s
the one who plays with our toys. She can. It’s okay by me.”

Carolyn felt faint. In the midst of the visceral reaction twisting her stomach inside out, she could taste bile in the back of her throat. A mother stricken ill, head spinning; sickened by what she was hearing from her dearest daughters.

“That’s it! We’re selling this God-forsaken house!” Adamant: no discussion.

Instantly, the last thing Carolyn expected to happen did. A chorus of “NO!” rang throughout the kitchen; girls voicing one vehement protest after another, in unison. She could not hear who was saying what because all four of them, in concert, were whining at once. “No mom! We love it here! I don’t want us to move! I have new friends here, now! We don’t want to leave our farm! No mom, I love my room! We can make them go away; it will be all right, you’ll see. You promised we could have a horse! I love my teacher! I’m not scared! They won’t hurt us. We’ll be all right. Please don’t sell our house, mommy.” Carolyn was stunned by a collective outburst. Observing pained expressions, listening to their pleas, she knew this was entirely sincere; heartfelt from all. Awestruck, she couldn’t comprehend why they would want to remain behind in a farmhouse which offered them little else than a promise of numerous and unwelcome intrusions. She thought they’d want to leave a spooky old house. Quite the contrary, they were more than willing to make an unusual sacrifice; prepared to share; to co-exist with spirits to keep their place in the country.

“How long have these things been happening?” Awaiting a response, their mother suspected the answer as they glanced around the table at one another.

“Since the beginning, from the day we moved in.” Cindy confessed the sins of omission with some shame and regret; secrets kept: a failure to disclose.

“Six months! This has been happening for six months and nobody told me about it before now? Why didn’t any of you trust me? I am your mother!”

“It’s not that, mommy. We didn’t even tell
each other
for the longest time, you know; what we were feeling in the house or the barn. I guess we thought we were just seeing things.” Nancy’s explanation was not yet finished when her mother abruptly interrupted.

“You
were
seeing things…
things
you should have
told
me about!” Carolyn was persistently on point. “What about the barn; what happened in the barn?’ Her focus on Nancy; an immediate reply expected.

“Stuff…mostly up in the hayloft. It shakes and hums like it’s singing when we play up there. It makes me feel kinda queasy…like I’m falling down. The tools move around and jingle like bells and sometimes our things go missing; toys we bring out there to play with…then we find them later someplace else in the barn or sometimes we find them back in the house! It’s so weird!”

“Nobody goes up on the hayloft again; no one. Do you understand? In fact, I want all of you to stay out of the barn.”

“Aw, come on, ma…that’s not fair!” Nancy could whine like a steel saw in a Kentucky bluegrass band. “You
know
it’s my favorite place in the world!”

“Absolutely not, young lady.”

“Tell her about the chimney.” Cindy whispered these words to Nancy, as if it were still a secret kept; one about to be told. “Tell mommy what happened to you in the borning room…when you got stuck behind the chimney.”

“What happened in the borning room?” As disconcerting as it was to hear, Carolyn remained vigilant, in relentless pursuit of information. She needed to know everything. Clearly, Carolyn underestimated the dramatic impact these events were having on her family…they had only just begun.

“We were all playing hide ‘n seek, and I went to hide behind that chimney. Then, all of a sudden I got frozen stiff. It got
wicked
cold! I couldn’t move at all! It felt like something was squeezing in against me while I was standing there and I couldn’t breathe…like I was locked in a bubble with no air inside it and it was pushing on me from every side. I was stuck there for a long time and the bubble didn’t burst until Cindy came to find me. God! It was so cold and dark in there! It smelled so bad and I was being crushed and thought my bones were gonna break! I got really scared and started to cry…tears poured down my face but I couldn’t make a sound. I could hear myself screaming in my head but nothing was coming out of my mouth! But Cindy heard me!”

“I think they play their own kind of hide ‘n seek…now you see them…now you don’t.” Cindy was so perceptive…out of the mouths of babes; she knew there was more than one spirit afloat. “I felt her…I
knew
she was in trouble.”

“Jesus Christ.” Carolyn hung her head, whispering a holy name as a prayer; another call for help, spoken with reverence, unlike her husband’s pleas.

“Remember when you yelled at dad for pulling a chair out from underneath me when I tried to sit down?” Cynthia triggered a bad memory. “It happened right here! We came in from sledding and I still had my hat and coat on and I went to sit down in my chair and then, all of a sudden, it got pulled out from underneath me…straight away from me…and you blamed it on daddy.”

“I remember it. I was
furious
with your father!” Her grimace confirmed it. “Well, it was a stupid thing to do! A nasty rotten trick. You hit your head!”

“Daddy didn’t do it, mom. I was sitting here, too. I saw what happened. He didn’t do that.” Nancy felt obliged to state the obvious. “You were
so
mad!”

“I had my hat on. It didn’t hurt. Well, it hurt my bum a little. I was okay.”

“Mom.” Andrea’s turn to interject. “I was standing over there…” pointing toward the alcove near the entrance of the bathroom. “I saw what happened. Dad didn’t do it. The chair pulled away from Cindy. It moved all by itself.”

“Mommy, haven’t you noticed how we hold our chair when we sit down?” Christine, the problem-solver in the family: devising a solution after she too, had become the unwitting victim of the terrible taunt…or haunt.

“It has happened to all of us since we moved in; a rotten trick but it wasn’t dad who did it. He wouldn’t do that, mom.” Cindy felt the need to defend her father. “Maybe it’s the man who stands over there; in that corner. He watches us all the time.” Cindy’s comment was subdued; it almost got lost in the fray, though it was heard…followed up by another one of Nancy’s outbursts.

“Yeh! Maybe it
was
Manny who did it! I saw him, while Mr. Kenyon was packing, on the day we moved in. He stood right behind the door with his leg up and he has a funny smile.” Competitive in every way, Nancy
had
to claim credit for the first official sighting. He lurked in darkened doorways, moving as shadow throughout the house from the moment they crossed the threshold. “Cindy saw him, too! We both looked at each other when we saw him but we didn’t say anything about it. You saw him too, right?”

“I did…but I don’t think he’s the one pulling the chairs out. He’s not mean like that. I think he was there to say goodbye to his friend. He didn’t look at us at all but he smiled at Mr. Kenyon.” No false accusations allowed.

“I named him Manny ‘cause he’s a man! I think he’s cool. He’s not scary!” Far be it for Nancy to dislike a man, in this dimension or any other.

A lethargy which plagued Carolyn suddenly dissipated, replaced by panic: wide-awake and fully alert, her mind reeling with images and fresh insights into what had been going on in her home, with her children. Though she said nothing further about selling their house, she remained determined to do so; resolute. As they discussed a variety of outrageous episodes occurring within those walls, Carolyn refrained from divulging her own experiences. Nobody used the word “ghost” to describe or assign an identity to any apparition. The ladies were relieved, having disclosed something so unusual; having shared secrets kept too long. It was getting late. Carolyn suggested she escort them to bed. All her children were tired yet their mother felt an inexplicable rush; kinetic energy pulsing through her temples, as if her mind had absorbed more than it would hold and was throbbing…about to burst through her cranium.

Tucked in with kisses, their mother asked four of the five to keep her well-informed; immediately notified if April should say anything to anyone about this, requesting they not discuss it with her unless she says something first. It was Carolyn’s fervent hope that her youngest be spared the sights and sounds the others had endured. It would be another thirty-eight years before Carolyn learned the full extent of the impact on her youngest daughter; the truth about a haunting which touched her baby girl; what April revealed broke the hearts of everyone who learned of a secret kept for decades.