What Eli Sees – Chapter 26
“Hartford, December”
They moved to Hartford. A new house — new as in built in 1962, new as in no one had died in it, new as in the cold in the corners was just cold and the sounds in the walls were just pipes and the shadows were just shadows. Eli walked through it on the first day and felt nothing except the ordinary blankness of a place not yet lived in, waiting to become the record of its occupants rather than the record of everyone who had come before.
He liked it immediately.
His new school was larger than Dunmore Elementary and felt, at first, like a great deal of sensory information — many more children, many more hallways, many more rooms that could contain any number of things. He walked in on his first day and catalogued carefully: three dead in the building. An old woman in the cafeteria who sat at a table in the corner and appeared to be waiting for someone. A man in the gymnasium hallway who moved very slowly and whose clothes were from the 1940s. A teenage boy near the library whose presence had a lighter quality than most, the recently dead, someone not long gone.
Three. In a school of four hundred students.
Not twelve. Not the accumulated mass of a house with a hundred and twenty-seven years of collected dark. Three, and all of them the ordinary, uncollected, unthreatened dead — people who had not yet found their way, not held by anything, not weaponised by anything, simply present.
Manageable.
He sat at his new desk in his new classroom and felt the ordinary strangeness of a new place and thought about Dunmore and Thomas Birch’s gap-toothed grin and Agnes Birch’s leather pouch and Mrs. Pearce’s cookies and the way the warm light had come for Edmund Harwick.
He thought about Walter Finch, no longer on any porch railing, in whatever light had received him.
He opened his notebook — a new one, the Dunmore one full and complete and kept carefully in his desk at home — and wrote at the top of the first page:
Hartford, Connecticut. December 1974. New house. New school. Three here, all quiet. I think I understand what I am now. Not just someone who sees them. Someone who can help them. Agnes calls it a gift. I used to think it was just the way I was made, like being left-handed or being bad at baseball. Now I think maybe there’s a reason for it. Maybe the reason is this: somebody has to be able to hear them. Somebody has to be the one who sits still long enough and pays attention well enough to hear what they’re saying. Most people can’t. I can. So I will.
He closed the notebook.
The teacher came in.
Class began.
Outside the Hartford winter settled over the city and somewhere a hundred miles northeast the Harwick house stood on Cemetery Road with its red door and its cold corner and its remaining dead and Dr. Franklin Hooper’s research equipment in the parlour where the botanical wallpaper was still faintly damp at the base, and in the northeast corner the Pale Woman turned in her salt-line boundary and felt the absence of the boy with clear eyes and waited, with the patience of something that had been waiting since before anyone could remember, for his return.