What Eli Sees – Chapter 13
“Into the Barn”
They went in at ten o’clock on a Sunday night when the temperature had dropped to twenty-eight and the yard was hard with early frost and the barn doors were silver in the moonlight. Robert was with Eli — Agnes had been clear about this, had refused to allow the boy to go in alone, had assigned Robert to stand at the barn door and wait and not, under any circumstances, enter. This was the compromise between Agnes’s necessity and Robert’s refusal to let his eight-year-old son face a century-old haunting without backup of some kind.
Agnes was in the house with Ruth. The salt lines around the northeast corner were laid. The herbs were burning in a small dish on the hall table and the smoke of them moved up the stairs and down the hall and Agnes stood at the edge of the cold and spoke to it in a low, steady voice that Ruth could not make out, something old and rhythmic, something that had been passed down through the women of Agnes’s family the way recipes were passed down, generation to generation, practical and necessary and not spoken about outside the family.
Eli stood at the barn door.
His father’s hand was on his shoulder. Heavy and warm.
“If anything—” Robert began.
“I’ll shout,” Eli said. “But don’t come in. Whatever happens, whatever you hear, don’t come in.”
“Eli—”
“Dad.” He turned and looked at his father. “If you come in it’ll take you the way it almost took you last time. I need you to stay out.” He paused. “You trust me?”
Robert looked at his son for a long moment. “I trust you,” he said.
Eli pushed open the barn door and went in.
The cold inside was the deepest cold he had felt in the house, deeper than the northeast corner, a cold with physical weight, with presence, with the specific character of a place where something had ended badly and the ending had soaked into every surface. The moonlight came through the gaps in the boards in silver strips and the shadows between them were absolute. Eli clicked on his flashlight — Agnes’s instruction, bring a light, a real one, the dead respond to light differently than darkness — and swept it around the interior.
The rusted equipment in the corners. The ladder to the loft. The packed earth floor, darker in the centre. The main beam running the length of the roof, old growth oak, a hundred and eleven years of the barn’s history in its grain.
Edmund Harwick was there.
Hanging. As before. The terrible angle, the old-paper face, the feet two feet off the ground. But different this time — Eli could see him more clearly in the flashlight beam, could see the detail of him that the previous panic had not allowed. He was perhaps forty-five. He had been a large man, broad-shouldered as Mrs. Pearce had suggested. His clothes were mid-nineteenth century, a wool coat, work trousers, heavy boots. His hands — suspended at his sides, fingers loose — were large hands, working hands, the hands of a man who had built things.
His eyes were open.
They found the flashlight. Found Eli behind it.
The mouth opened and the sound began — that pipe-organ resonance, that deep hollow note that was less a sound than a physical sensation in Eli’s chest. It climbed in pitch and Eli’s flashlight shook in his hand and the shadows on the barn walls shifted and in the shadows things moved, the collected dead of the Pale Woman, glimpsed for a moment — the cluster from the school hallway, other shapes Eli had not seen before, layers of them pressed into the dark corners of the barn like leaves pressed into a book — and Eli gripped his flashlight and shouted, over the sound: “EDMUND. YOUR NAME IS EDMUND HARWICK. I SEE YOU. I HEAR YOU. STOP.”
The sound stopped.
The shadows stilled.
Edmund Harwick hung from his beam and looked at Eli with eyes that were not the eyes of a dead thing exactly, not the empty eyes of the Pale Woman, but the eyes of someone in unimaginable pain who has been in that pain for a hundred and eleven years and has been given, for the first time in all those years, the possibility of being heard.
“Edmund,” Eli said, quieter now, his voice steadier than he felt. “I know you can hear me. And I can hear you. Talk to me. Tell me what you need.”
The barn was utterly silent.
Then Edmund Harwick opened his mouth again, and this time what came out was not the pipe-organ sound.
It was a word.
“Forgiven,” Edmund Harwick said. In a voice like old wood creaking in wind. One word, a hundred and eleven years in the making. “Forgiven.“
Eli understood.