What Eli Sees – Chapter 2
The Harwick House”
The house on Cemetery Road had been built in 1847 by a man named Edmund Harwick, who was a mill owner and a deacon and who had, according to the town records that Eli would not read for another four years, hanged himself in the barn behind the property in the winter of 1863, while his wife and three daughters were asleep inside. Nobody in Dunmore talked about this.
Robert Crane had bought it for eleven thousand dollars in August of 1974, which was eight thousand less than it was worth by any reasonable assessment. The realtor, a sweating man named Gerald Pudge, had explained the price difference with words like motivated seller and needs some updating and had not, at any point, mentioned the barn or Edmund Harwick or the specific and persistent coldness that occupied the northeast corner of the second floor regardless of season.
Ruth Crane had walked through the house on that first visit and made lists. The kitchen needed new linoleum. The master bath needed caulking. The parlour wallpaper — dark green with a pattern of repeated botanical illustrations that might have been beautiful in 1890 and was deeply unsettling in 1974 — needed to come down immediately. She was a practical woman with a practical mind and she had applied her practical mind to the house and found it wanting in specific, addressable ways, and this had made her feel better about it.
She had not gone into the northeast corner of the second floor.
When Eli explored the house on the first day — his parents busy with moving boxes, his older sister Claire installed in the best bedroom with her record player and her explicit instructions not to be disturbed — he went room by room with the methodical thoroughness of a child who understood that new houses required careful inventory.
He found: four bedrooms, a sewing room, two bathrooms. A staircase that creaked on the third and seventh steps. A window seat in the hallway that was filled with old Reader’s Digest condensed books from the 1950s. A closet in the sewing room that was nailed shut with three nails, the heads rusted black.
He found the northeast corner.
It was at the end of the second-floor hall, past the sewing room, past the bathroom with the rust stains in the tub, past the window that looked out over the barn. It was not a room exactly — just a place where two walls met at an angle and the ceiling sloped down and the wallpaper was darker here, the botanical pattern obscured by some decades-old water stain that had dried into a shape that looked, if you let your eyes go soft, like a figure. A figure with its arms spread wide. A figure that might have been a man and might have been a tree, depending on how much you were willing to let yourself see.
The cold hit him four feet before the corner.
Not a draft. Not the chill from the window. A cold that had no source, a cold that existed in a contained volume of air the way a stone exists in water — with mass, with presence, with the absolute indifference of something that had been there long before he arrived and would be there long after he left.
He stopped.
He looked at the corner.
Nothing was there. Not yet. But the cold pressed against him and the wallpaper figure spread its arms and from somewhere below — from the barn, he thought, though he could not have said why — he heard a sound that might have been the wind in old wood or might have been something else.
He backed away.
He did not tell his parents about the corner. He did not tell Claire, who was fifteen and would have laughed. He wrote about it in his notebook — the small brown composition book he kept under his mattress, his private record of all the things he saw and heard and felt that no one else could verify.
October 4 1974. New house. There is a place at the end of the hall where it is very cold and the cold does not move. I think something lives there. I do not think it is a ghost exactly. I think it might be the place where something happened. Like how a glass still smells like what was in it even after you wash it. Something was in that corner. Something bad. The smell is still there even though the thing is gone. Maybe.
He would revise the last word later.
By November he would cross out maybe and write, in red crayon, a single word beneath it.
NOT.