What Eli Sees – Chapter 10
“Agnes Birch”
Agnes Birch was seventy-four years old and had lived in Dunmore her entire life and knew more about its darker history than anyone currently living in the town, including the pastor and including the three selectmen and including Vera Pudge who ran the historical society and thought she knew everything. Agnes had a specific kind of knowledge that came not from books or records but from memory — her own and her mother’s and her grandmother’s, three generations of women who had watched this town carefully from their particular position near the edge of it.
She lived on Alder Street in a small Cape Cod that smelled of cat and mentholated ointment and the sugar cookies she kept in a tin by the door. She received Eli on a Saturday afternoon in mid-November while Thomas sat in the kitchen eating cookies and pretending he wasn’t listening through the doorway.
Agnes looked at Eli for a long moment after he sat down.
“You have the sight,” she said. Not a question.
“I can see them,” Eli said.
“Always?”
“Since I can remember.”
Agnes nodded. She poured tea that she had already made, as if she had been expecting him. She had, he gathered. Thomas had told her he would come.
“Tell me what you’ve seen in that house,” she said.
He told her everything. The woman with no eyes. The cold corner. Edmund Harwick in the barn. Walter Finch following him home. The face at the window.
Agnes listened without interrupting. When he finished she was quiet for a long time, her hands around her teacup, looking at the space between them.
“The woman with no face,” she said. “We call her the Pale Woman in the old stories my grandmother told. She was there before the house. Before Harwick. Before the town, my grandmother believed. She is what the land left behind when something happened on it long before anyone living can remember.” She paused. “Harwick built on her ground. She didn’t like it. The darkness in him — the despair, whatever drove him to the barn — she fed on it. It made her stronger. Every family that came after left something behind too, some grief or fear or darkness, and she fed on those too, and she grew stronger each time.”
“She’s been collecting,” Eli said slowly.
Agnes looked at him sharply. “Yes. That is the word. Collecting. The dead you see in that house — the cluster in the hall, Edmund Harwick in the barn, your Walter Finch — they are hers. She holds them. They cannot pass on because she will not let them.”
“And the woman with no eyes,” Eli said. “She is the Pale Woman.”
“She is.”
“Walter told me she was coming for my mother,” Eli said.
Agnes set down her teacup with a sound that was too loud in the small room.
“She collects grief,” Agnes said. “The darkness of a grieving person is — food to her. Your mother is grieving something?”
Eli thought about his mother’s face. The grey beneath her eyes. The shaking hands. Something his mother had carried from their previous house that nobody spoke about, a loss that had happened before they moved, something adult and buried that Eli only knew in outline.
“Yes,” he said. “I think so.”
“Then your mother is in danger,” Agnes said plainly. “The Pale Woman will work on her grief until the grief becomes something worse. Until it becomes — darkness. And then she will collect her.” She looked at Eli. “The way she collected Edmund Harwick.”
“How do I stop it?” Eli said.
Agnes looked at him for a long, assessing moment.
“You can see the dead,” she said. “Can you speak to them? Clearly, back and forth?”
“Some of them. The woman with no eyes heard me the first night. Walter talks to me. Edmund Harwick—” he stopped. “I haven’t tried with Edmund Harwick.”
“Edmund Harwick is the key,” Agnes said. “He is the first and the strongest of her collected dead. If you can free him — if he can pass on — it weakens her. Significantly. It may not stop her entirely. But it gives you time.” She paused. “But to free him you have to go back in the barn.”
Eli thought about the organ-pipe sound. About the hanged man with his arms spread and his face like old paper.
“I know,” he said.