The Haunting (10 page)

She didn’t say, “and to me,” but the words were hanging there.

Mom shook her head. “Are you asking me to turn Graymoss over to your historical society?”

“That’s exactly what I’m asking.” Mrs. Lord beamed at Mom. “Taxwise it could be highly advantageous to you.”

“I’m not—” Mom began.

“Oh! I have such dreams! We could put a small gift shop in the kitchen area. Of course, we’d have to have a new water well dug and a rest rooms area built out in back. And then—”

“Absolutely not,” Mom interrupted. “We have other plans for Graymoss.”

Mrs. Lord turned pale and sank against the back of the sofa. “It’s Ray Merle, isn’t it? He got to you first.”

Mom opened her mouth to answer, but Mrs. Lord suddenly revived and struggled to her feet. “We’ll meet his price, even though it will be difficult. We’ll hold fund-raisers. We’ll do whatever needs to be done to raise the money. We can’t let him bulldoze this valuable contribution to history.”

“It’s not Mr. Merle,” Mom tried to explain.

“Mr. Tavey, then. Don’t even listen to Mr. Tavey! He’s dying to get his hands on the furnishings. You know, Tavey’s Antiques. But he must not have them. The furniture belongs with the house!”

“Please listen to me, Mrs. Lord,” Mom said. Her voice sounded tired. I don’t think she’d had any idea she’d spend her time at Graymoss arguing with people who wanted the property. “My husband and I plan to modernize the house and turn it into a home for at least a dozen unadoptable children.”

“But that’s impossible! You can’t!” Mrs. Lord insisted. “For one thing, Graymoss is a priceless piece of history and should be treated as such. The house was built in 1831 and survived the War Between the States. Through your family’s trust, Graymoss has been well cared for, and I can see that it needs relatively little in repair. I can give you a long list of very good reasons why Graymoss should be opened to visitors as a historical treasure.”

Mom looked cynical. “I suppose the first reason on your list is that we can’t live in this house because of some kind of after-dark hocus-pocus.”

“You mean the ghosts,” Mrs. Lord said. “Since you know about the ghosts, I don’t have to tell you about them. I assure you that the stories about the fearsome evil that takes place in Graymoss after dark are not exaggerated.”

Mom’s eyebrow slid even higher. Cynically, she asked, “You don’t think that the so-called ghosts will frighten visitors away?”

Mrs. Lord missed the sarcasm. “Oh, my dear, of course not,” she said. “They’ll be a fantastic selling point. The house won’t be open at night, which is when the terrifying things take place. And people love tours through haunted houses. They love knowing that ghosts appear—only not
in daylight hours. I know for a fact that when some of the plantation tours began including stories about the ghosts that haunt the premises, attendance rose dramatically.”

I quickly asked, “The ghosts—uh—what about when they show up during the day?”

“They don’t. At least not at Graymoss.”

I had to persist, because I knew she was wrong. “Are you sure no one has seen any sign of ghosts in Graymoss during the day?”

“No one has ever reported any unusual occurrences,” she said. “Believe me, as I told you, I’ve researched Graymoss thoroughly. Your mother,” she told Mom in a voice filled with awe, “even allowed me to read Charlotte Blevins Porter’s diary.”

“This conversation is absurd,” Mom said. “We’re talking about ghosts as though they exist. Mrs. Lord, we don’t believe in ghosts. We aren’t going to be frightened away by tales of things that go bump in the night.”

“But Charlotte’s diary—” Mrs. Lord began.

“Charlotte was under a great deal of stress,” Mom said. “She had recently been orphaned and lost her grandmother. She was terrified by the soldiers’ threat to burn her house, and you can imagine how traumatized she was when her grandfather was shot right before her eyes. Hallucinating during tremendously stressful situations is not uncommon.”

“It wasn’t just Charlotte who experienced the evil,” Mrs. Lord argued. “The workers Charlotte wrote about and her mother’s cousin Lydia all saw, heard, and felt the same things as Charlotte.”

“The results of the power of suggestion can be amazing,” Mom told her.

“Oh, no, my dear,” Mrs. Lord said. “I can’t believe that the horrifying events Charlotte wrote about didn’t exist. There have been people who have come to Graymoss just to experience manifestations. And there have been those whose intent was to steal or vandalize. The evil came. It terrified them. It drove them away. Some of them actually died of fright. In a sense you might say that the evil protected Graymoss.”

Mom faced Mrs. Lord, eye-to-eye. “Can you give me the name of one single person who died of fright in this house?”

For just an instant Mrs. Lord stopped behaving like a commanding general. “In my research I was unable to find any documentation of the deaths. However—”

Mom wasn’t about to give up. “Then can you tell me the names of those who have seen or heard this evil and are able to describe it to me?”

Mrs. Lord sucked in her breath, her chest heaving like an inflating balloon, and a smug smile spread across her lips. She looked at her grandson. “Tell her, Jonathan,” she said. “Tell Mrs. Starling exactly what you went through.”

W
e all turned to stare at Jonathan, who didn’t seem to mind a bit. He even took a step forward. “I hope you understand I was just a kid when it happened,” he said. “I was ten—almost eleven—and some of the guys started daring each other about who was brave enough to spend a night in the haunted house … uh, Graymoss, that is. And, well, you know how kids are.”

Jonathan didn’t begin his story by talking to all of us, as most people would. He directed what he said to Mom, as if she were the only one who needed to be convinced. For a few seconds I sort of wondered why, but I soon forgot everything else but Jonathan’s story.

“Some of the guys came with me, but only as far as the gate. It was locked, so I climbed over and
walked up the road to the house. Twice, strands of moss hung so low from the oak branches that they swept across my face, and I jumped and yelped.

“Luckily I had a flashlight, because it was awfully dark, with the moon mostly behind the clouds. The flashlight kept me from catching a foot in some of the nits in the road.”

Jonathan paused and grinned, ducking his head. “I was glad I had that light in any case, because I was really scared. I mean, there’d been a lot of talk about strange stuff going on around the house at night, and my friends weren’t any help. They had a lot of fun scaring me before I left them to start up the road. As I came close to the house it loomed up like a monster. I stood just outside the veranda and almost stopped breathing as I stared into the windows for a long time. I just listened and waited.”

Jonathan stopped talking for a moment, and I couldn’t stand it. “What did you see in the house? Were there lights? Faces? What?”

“It doesn’t matter, Lia,” Mom said firmly. “I think we’ve heard enough of the story for now.”

“Please let him finish,” Mrs. Lord said. “Go ahead, Jonathan.”

“Sure,” Jonathan said, and glanced quickly at his grandmother. “It’s just that when I think about it … well, sometimes I …” He looked back at Mom, took a deep breath, and continued. “I walked up on the veranda, slow and careful. I didn’t want to make any more noise than I had to.

“I tried the front door, but it was locked. I knew it would be. So then I walked around to the back
of the house and tried the kitchen door. It was locked, too. There were dark shapes around me that I couldn’t figure out. I was really scared.”

He cleared his throat. “I almost gave up and went home right then, but I saw that a window next to the kitchen door was open about an inch. I tried it and noticed that the lock was broken. I pushed it open and climbed through.

“I used my flashlight to make my way through the kitchen into some of the other rooms. I looked around for something comfortable. I mean, if I had to spend the night, I didn’t want to be crammed into some hard chair. There was a big wing chair in a room with a lot of books in shelves along one side—”

“The library,” I interrupted.

“I guess you could call it a library,” Jonathan said. “I sat down and turned out my flashlight because I didn’t think the batteries would last all night long. I knew I’d better save them in case of an emergency. The house was dark and quiet, and I started getting sleepy. Then all of a sudden a book came flying out of nowhere and hit my leg.”

Jonathan’s eyes widened and he leaned forward. “Nobody else was in the house, just like I said, but something threw a book at me.”

“What book was it?” I whispered. I held tightly to the gris-gris and to the
Favorite Tales of Edgar Allan Poe.

“I don’t know,” Jonathan said. “It doesn’t matter, does it? What I’m saying is that something threw that book, and then all sorts of things started happening.”

“I don’t think—” Mom began.

“Tell them, Jonathan,” Mrs. Lord said, looking even more pleased with herself.

“Okay. There was a kind of wind that blew through the room. I knew that there wasn’t even a breeze that night, let alone something stronger. Then I heard whispering, like someone was saying a certain word over and over and over.”

I gasped and managed to ask, “What word?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Mom said. “Let’s drop this story right now.”

But Jonathan acted as if he didn’t hear Mom. He said to me, “I don’t know what the word was. I probably could have figured it out if I’d listened carefully, but I didn’t try because I made the mistake of shining the beam of my flashlight up to the ceiling. That’s when I nearly dropped dead of fright, because there were all these horrible heads making faces at me—sticking out their tongues and whispering. I jumped up and ran back to the kitchen, and all the way I could feel something like fingers pulling at my face and hair.”

Mom’s nose and cheeks had turned pink, and her eyes sparked with anger. I knew she was having trouble keeping her feelings under control. She stepped up to face Jonathan, who gulped and stepped back. “Let me guess what comes next. You climbed out of the window and ran home.”

Jonathan nodded. “That’s about it.”

“And told your story to your grandmother.”

“And to my parents and my friends. I guess I told it to anyone who’d listen.”

I suppose Mom could see that Jonathan had
thought we’d be an eager audience because he looked puzzled and hurt that she hadn’t appreciated his story. She softened and even managed a smile. “Jonathan,” she said. “You were ten years old at the time.”

He sounded defensive. “Old enough to know and remember what I saw.”

“Of course you were,” Mom said. “But you had heard the stories about the house over and over before that night, hadn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I think you said that your grandmother had told you what Charlotte had written in her diary.”

“That’s right. Are you trying to tell me I imagined everything I saw and heard?”

“You were swept into your experience through the power of suggestion. You were frightened. You were receptive. You saw and heard and felt exactly what had been described to you.”

“It really happened,” Jonathan insisted.

“You
think
it did,” Mom said, firmly but gently.

Now it was Jonathan’s turn to get exasperated. “What’s the difference between
it happened
and thinking it happened?”

“One’s based in reality. One isn’t,” Mom explained.

“I still don’t—”

“Thinking it happened, when it didn’t, affects only you,” Mom said. “It means the experience won’t be repeated by others.”

“But there were others.”

Mom’s voice had a calm, patient tone. I hated it when she was deliberately calm and patient with me, and I knew Jonathan probably didn’t like it
either. “The bottom line, Jonathan, is that we don’t believe in ghosts,” Mom said.

She turned to Mrs. Lord, who had stopped looking smug, and told her, “We can’t be frightened away from Graymoss. We have great plans for it. When the house has been modernized, with new paint and wallpaper, and we’ve moved in with our daughter and new family of adopted children, Derek and I hope that you’ll come to visit.”

Mrs. Lord’s face twisted painfully. “This house could provide a treasure trove of history.”

Mom smiled broadly. “This house will provide a home for our wonderful children.”

How about me?
I thought.
Why doesn’t it matter what I think?

Mrs. Lord hadn’t given up. She got busy telling Mom something, so I nudged Jonathan and said in a low voice, “Would you please show me the window with the broken lock?”

We worked our way back to the kitchen, which was bright with noon sunlight. Every crack in the plastered walls and every smudge on the fireplace stood out in detail. The large room had cupboards on its outside wall, and three doors on the wall that faced it. “I wish there was food in this place,” Jonathan said. “I’m hungry.” He opened a door to a pantry lined with shelves, but the shelves were empty.