What Eli Sees – Chapter 18
“The Others in the House”
With Edmund Harwick freed and the Pale Woman contained, Eli turned his attention to the other dead in the house — the ones he had been aware of since October but had not yet fully addressed. The cluster in the second-floor hallway. The presences on the stairs. The shapes that pressed into corners and stood at windows and went through the rooms at night like memories of themselves.
Agnes came back on the eighteenth and walked with Eli through the house, the two of them moving room by room while his parents stayed in the kitchen, and Eli described what he saw and Agnes listened and her face told him things her words sometimes didn’t.
There were eleven of them.
Seven in the house itself. Four in the barn, freed now from the worst of the Pale Woman’s hold but still present, still tethered by their own unresolved weight. Eleven souls, accumulated over a hundred and twenty-seven years of the Harwick house’s existence, each of them collected by the Pale Woman and held past their natural passing, each of them carrying some specific unresolved thing that she had used as a chain.
“One by one?” Eli asked Agnes.
“One by one,” Agnes said. “You have the gift. You can speak to them. You can find what they need. It may not be possible for all of them — some may be too far gone, too long held, to respond. But some will.”
“We’re selling the house,” Eli said. “We don’t have much time.”
“You don’t need to free them all,” Agnes said. “Each one you free weakens her further. Three or four more and she will sleep again. The salt lines will hold what remains.” She paused. “The important thing is the house needs to be sold before December, before the anniversary of Harwick’s death. That is when she is strongest.”
December fourteenth. Three and a half weeks.
Eli looked at the cluster in the hallway — the old man and two women from the school, he now understood, Dunmore teachers from the 1930s who had lived in this house briefly and died never knowing why they couldn’t leave. He looked at them with the full attention he rarely gave to the background dead, the ones he passed without engaging.
The older man looked back.
Eli raised his hand. Hello.
The man’s expression changed. The same thing Edmund Harwick had shown him: the slow, incremental change of something very old recognising the possibility of being heard.
One of the women in the cluster turned toward the wall and put her face against it and a sound came out of her that was not a voice and not a scream but something between them, a sound that was pure and concentrated sorrow, and the wall where she pressed her face began to weep — not metaphorically but physically, water forming along the baseboard, running in thin rivulets down the botanical wallpaper, soaking the old paper dark — and Eli watched the water run and understood that what he was seeing was not haunting exactly but the physical residue of an overwhelming human emotion, grief so large that it had pressed through a hundred years of wood and plaster and was still, still trying to get out.
“I hear you,” Eli said to the woman at the wall. “Tell me your name.”
She turned.
Her face was wet with something that was not water.
She told him her name.
It took four days to free three of them. Eli went to school during the days and spent his evenings in conversation with the dead — patient, careful, using the same instinct he used for everything, the instinct of a child who understood that listening was the first and most important act. He found what they carried. He found what they needed said or acknowledged or simply witnessed. He said the things. He witnessed the witnessing.
Three of them passed on in the golden way Edmund Harwick had passed on, with that sourceless warm light and that sense of something being properly completed that had been improperly stopped.
Three less for the Pale Woman.
The house became, incrementally, lighter.