What Eli Sees – Chapter 11
“What Robert Saw”
Robert Crane was not a man who believed in ghosts. He was a history teacher who believed in documented evidence, primary sources, and the principle that extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence. He had heard the house creak. He had felt the cold in the hall. He had been told, twice, by Ruth, that she was sleeping poorly, and had attributed this to the adjustment of moving, to the new house sounds, to the general disruption of relocation.
He went to the barn on the fifteenth of November.
Not because he felt anything particular about it. Because he had been planning his workshop since August and he needed to measure the space and decide where the workbench would go. He went on a Saturday afternoon while Eli was at the library and Claire was out and Ruth was at a neighbor’s for coffee.
He went in with a measuring tape and a notepad.
He came out twenty minutes later and sat on the back step and stared at the dead grass for a long time.
When Eli came home he found his father on the step and his father’s face was wrong in a way Eli recognised immediately — the greyness of it, the specific vacancy of someone whose mind had been somewhere it should not have gone and had not fully returned. Eli sat beside him on the step and waited.
“Dad,” Eli said. “What happened?”
Robert turned to look at his son. His eyes focused, slowly, as if from a distance.
“I don’t think I’ll be using the barn for the workshop,” he said. His voice was very controlled. “I think I might build a separate structure. On the other side of the property.”
“What did you see?” Eli said.
Robert looked at him. In the look was a long calculation — a parent deciding how much truth a child could hold.
“Nothing,” Robert said. “I saw nothing.”
“Dad,” Eli said quietly. “I need to know. Because I think it’s important. What were you doing when you came out?” Robert was quiet for so long Eli thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then: “I was standing under the beam,” Robert said. “With my arms up. I don’t know how long I was standing there. I don’t remember going to stand there.” He looked at his hands. “I remember going in. I remember starting to measure. And then I remember — nothing, until I was standing under the beam with my arms raised.” He looked at Eli. “That hasn’t happened to me before. I have never lost time before.” He said this with the careful precision of a man who is frightened and does not want to be. “It won’t happen again. I won’t go back in there.” He stood up. “Don’t tell your mother.”
Eli thought of Arthur Peel. Mr. Arthur Peel, treated at Dunmore General, 1952. Standing under the beam for four hours. The spells that followed him out and stayed with him the rest of his life.
“Dad,” Eli said. “I need to tell you something.”
Robert looked at him.
“I think we need to talk about this house,” Eli said. “All of it. I know things. From the library. And I need you to listen.”
Robert looked at his eight-year-old son for a moment. Then he sat back down on the step.
“Alright,” he said. “Tell me.”
Eli told him. All of it. The property records, the previous families, Mrs. Pearce and her father, Agnes Birch and the Pale Woman. He told him about the barn and Edmund Harwick and the beam. He left out the woman with no eyes and Walter Finch, not because he didn’t believe his father could handle it but because he had learned to manage the amount of truth he delivered at once.
Robert Crane listened to his eight-year-old son with the focused attention of a man receiving information he did not want and could not dismiss. When Eli finished Robert was quiet for a long time.
“How long have you been able to see them?” Robert said.
“Always,” Eli said.
“And I didn’t know,” Robert said.
“I didn’t tell you,” Eli said. “I didn’t know if you’d believe me.”
Robert looked at the barn.
“I believe you,” he said. Quietly, utterly. “I believe everything you just told me.” He paused. “What do we need to do?”
“I have to go back in the barn,” Eli said.
“No,” Robert said immediately.
“Dad—”
“No.” His father’s voice was final in the way only frightened fathers’ voices were final. “You are eight years old. You are not going back in there. I am going to call someone. A pastor. A — someone. Someone who handles this kind of thing professionally.”
“There isn’t time,” Eli said. “She’s working on Mum.”
Robert went very still.
“What do you mean,” he said carefully, “she’s working on your mother.”
Eli told him about the grief. About the Pale Woman and what she fed on. He watched his father’s face as he said it and he saw the moment his father understood what Eli was saying about Ruth’s grief — the specific loss that was not spoken about in the Crane household, the shape of which Eli knew only by the space where it wasn’t.
“Your brother,” Robert said. His voice was barely above a whisper. “She knows about your brother.”
Eli nodded. He had a brother he had never met. Michael. Dead before Eli was born. The family’s oldest wound, carefully wrapped and put away. He knew about it the way children knew about such things — through the texture of silences, through what wasn’t in the photographs.
“She knows,” Eli said. “And she’s using it.”
Robert stood up.
“I’m calling Agnes Birch,” he said.
It was a start.