What Eli Sees – Chapter 12
“The Plan”
Agnes Birch came to the house on Cemetery Road on the sixteenth of November and walked through every room with the careful thoroughness of a woman performing an inventory she had been preparing for all her life. She carried salt in a leather pouch and a bundle of dried herbs that smelled like something from a church and a small Bible, though the Bible, she told Robert, was more psychological than functional — it was the salt and the intent that mattered.
She walked the second floor hallway and stopped at the northeast corner and stood in the cold for a long moment with her eyes closed and her lips moving and when she opened her eyes she said, very calmly, “This is worse than I thought,” which was not what any of them wanted to hear.
“Can you fix it?” Robert said.
“I can help,” Agnes said. “But I am seventy-four years old and I have bad knees and I am not the instrument required here.” She looked at Eli. “He is.”
“He is eight years old,” Robert said.
“I know how old he is,” Agnes said, with the patience of someone who had explained difficult things to resistant people many times. “I also know what he is. The sight is not common. I have known three people in my life who had it clearly and reliably. One was my grandmother, who used it well. One was a man in this town who had it and refused to acknowledge it and died badly.” She looked at Robert. “Your son has it more strongly than anyone I have known. And the Pale Woman knows it. That is why she has announced herself to him. She is —” she paused for the right word, “— recruiting.”
“Recruiting,” Eli said. “She wants me to work for her.”
“She wants you to see for her,” Agnes said. “The dead she collects — they cannot see the living the way she needs them seen. A person with the sight, bound to her service — he would be her eyes in the living world.” She paused. “She has been waiting for someone like you. That is what Walter Finch was trying to tell you.”
Eli felt cold in a way that had nothing to do with the northeast corner.
“So what do we do?” he said.
Agnes set out the plan over the kitchen table while Ruth Crane sat pale and silent, having been told everything, having moved through the stages of disbelief and terror and arrived, with the practicality that was her fundamental character, at grim acceptance.
The plan: Eli would go into the barn. He would speak to Edmund Harwick. He would find out what Harwick needed — what unfinished business, what unresolved thing kept him bound to the Pale Woman — and he would help Harwick resolve it. A freed ghost was a weakened Pale Woman. One freed ghost would not defeat her but it would reduce her power enough to perform the second step: the salt lines Agnes would lay around the northeast corner to contain what remained of the Pale Woman’s presence in the house.
“And then?” Robert said.
“And then you sell the house,” Agnes said, “and you move somewhere flat and new and full of light, and you grieve properly, openly, together, so she has nothing to feed on even if she finds you.” She looked at Ruth. “Which she won’t. Salt lines hold for the property, not for the person. The grief is the vulnerability. Once the grief is properly grieved, she loses her purchase on you.”
Ruth was looking at the table. She was crying, very quietly, in the way of someone who has been not-crying for a long time and has run out of the energy required to continue not-crying.
Robert put his arm around her.
Eli looked at his parents — at the shape of the thing they were carrying, the dead child he had never met, the wound that had never fully closed — and he felt, alongside the fear, something else. Something that was not quite determination but was adjacent to it. The feeling of a person who has been watching something from the outside and has decided it is time to step in.
“When?” he said.
“Tomorrow night,” Agnes said. “The conditions are right. And the longer we wait, the stronger she gets.”
Tomorrow night.
Eli thought about Edmund Harwick hanging from the beam with his arms spread and the sound like a pipe organ coming from his open mouth.
He thought about what Mrs. Pearce had said. She has been waiting for someone who can see it.
He thought: then let her deal with what she gets.