What Eli Sees – Chapter 23
“The Sale”
Robert listed the house on December first. He had called Gerald Pudge — the sweating realtor — and had the conversation with him that Agnes had scripted, a conversation that did not use the word haunted but used words like disclosure and liability and the specific phrase we know about the previous occupants in a tone that made it clear they were not bluffing. Gerald Pudge had been pale by the end of the call and had agreed to list it at a price that acknowledged its history and to find a buyer who, as Agnes put it, was buying with eyes open.
There was, it turned out, a market for this.
A man named Dr. Franklin Hooper contacted them on December fifth. He was a professor of parapsychology at a Connecticut university, recently funded for a research project, looking for a documented property with a substantial history. He had read the newspaper accounts. He had contacts who had told him about the Cranes. He was prepared to pay full asking price and to sign a disclosure statement acknowledging the property’s history in specific and detailed terms.
Robert brought Eli to the meeting with Dr. Hooper, which was held at a diner in New Haven. Eli shook Dr. Hooper’s hand and looked at him and saw nothing except a living man with thick glasses and a briefcase and an expression of academic excitement that seemed, against the backdrop of everything Eli had spent the last two months doing, slightly underinformed about what he was getting into.
“There are still three in the house,” Eli told him, at his father’s prompting. “In the northeast corner, on the stairs, and in the second bedroom. And the barn has one. Agnes Birch has the salt lines and the protocols. You’ll need her number.”
Dr. Hooper was scribbling notes. “Can you describe their characteristics—”
“I’ll write it all down,” Eli said. “Everything I know. All of them, all thirty-three years of documentation I found in the library, everything Agnes told me, everything I saw.” He paused. “But Dr. Hooper. The Pale Woman. The one in the corner.”
Dr. Hooper looked up from his notes.
“She is not a research subject,” Eli said. “She is very old and very dangerous and she has not been defeated, only reduced. The salt lines will hold her as long as they’re maintained. Agnes will show you how to maintain them. You need to do exactly what Agnes says. Exactly.”
Dr. Hooper nodded seriously, in the way of a man who was serious in the abstract and had not yet had the specifics of the situation applied to him personally. Eli looked at him and thought: he will learn. The house will teach him.
He hoped it would teach him gently. He did not think it would.
“One more thing,” Eli said. “The barn. Don’t go in the barn alone. And never go in after dark.”
“The hanging?” Dr. Hooper said, consulting his notes.
“The hanging happened there and the psychic residue is significant,” Eli said. He was eight years old and he was using the phrase psychic residue with complete unselfconscious accuracy and Dr. Hooper looked at him for a moment with an expression that was, for the first time, something other than academic excitement. Something more like respect.
“Alright,” Dr. Hooper said. “I’ll follow your protocols.”
The papers were signed on December tenth. Four days before the anniversary of Edmund Harwick’s death. Agnes had said this was important — be gone before the fourteenth, before she woke to her full annual strength.
They moved out on December twelfth.