What Eli Sees – Chapter 27
“Dr. Hooper’s First Report”
In February of 1975 a letter arrived at the Crane house in Hartford from Dr. Franklin Hooper. It was addressed to Elijah Crane and it was three pages long and written in a precise academic hand on university letterhead and it was the most frightened document Eli had ever read, though it had been written by a man who was clearly trying very hard to produce an unfightened document and had not entirely succeeded.
Dear Elijah — I want to begin by saying that your protocols have proven invaluable and that Agnes Birch is a formidable woman whose instructions I have followed exactly, as you advised. The salt lines are maintained. The herbs are burned as prescribed. I have not gone into the barn after dark. I have respected all of it. What I want to report is the following, which I record in the clinical spirit of scientific observation and not in any spirit of personal distress, though I will admit that some of the following has been personally distressing. The northeast corner: exactly as you described. Cold, constant, salt-line boundary holding. I have taken temperature readings every four hours for six weeks. The cold is real and measurable and has no physical explanation. I have noted that on December 14 the cold increased significantly for a period of approximately six hours before returning to baseline. I have noted in my records: SIGNIFICANT ACTIVITY ANNIVERSARY DATE. The three remaining presences: I cannot see them as you can. I am not gifted in that way. But I have recorded physical evidence of their presence — temperature fluctuations, electromagnetic anomalies, on two occasions the sound of movement in rooms I can confirm were empty. Your notes on their identities and histories have been invaluable context. The barn: I have followed your instruction. I have not gone in alone. I have not gone in after dark. I went in once in daylight with a graduate student named Paul and we stayed four minutes and Paul resigned from the project the following morning. I have not gone back in. What I most want to tell you: on January 14, the middle of the night, I was on the second floor near the library I’ve set up in the former sewing room when I saw a woman at the end of the hall. Not in the corner — at the very end of the hall, near the corner, but outside the salt lines. She was facing away from me. I said, aloud, the words you gave me for exactly this situation. She turned. I saw her face. I want you to know that your description in your notes was precise and that nothing in twenty years of parapsychological research has prepared me for what I saw. I said the words. She retreated. The salt lines held. I believe everything you told me. I want you to know that I now believe every word. I also want you to know: she is patient. She is very, very patient. And she is waiting for something specific. I do not know what. I think you know what. Please write when you can. I have questions only you can answer. — Dr. F. Hooper
Eli read the letter twice. Then he got out his notebook and wrote back, three pages, answering every question Dr. Hooper had asked and several he hadn’t thought to ask yet. He wrote about the patience of the Pale Woman — that she had been there since before the house, that patience was her fundamental nature, that what she was waiting for was probably what she was always waiting for: the grief-laden, the vulnerable, the lost, anyone she could use as a door into the living world.
He wrote: Keep the salt lines. Keep the herbs. Do not sleep in the house alone. And on December 14 every year, leave the property entirely from midnight to midnight. She is strongest on that day and the lines are at their most tested. Don’t be there to test them.
He addressed it, sealed it, gave it to his mother to post.
Ruth asked who he was writing to.
“Dr. Hooper,” Eli said. “The man who bought the house. He has questions.”
Ruth looked at the letter. “Will he be alright in that house?”
“If he follows the rules,” Eli said. “Yes.” He paused. “Thomas Birch will check on him. Thomas takes it seriously.”
Ruth looked at him. At her eight-year-old son who wrote three-page letters of supernatural protocol to university professors. At the child she had spent eight years not fully seeing because she had been too deep in her own loss to look.
“Come here,” she said.
He went. She put her arms around him and held on and he stood in the Hartford kitchen in the February cold and was, briefly and completely, just a boy being held by his mother.