What Eli Sees – Chapter 30
“The Return, 1984”
Eli Crane was eighteen years old when he drove back to Dunmore for the first time since December 1974. He had his father’s car — Robert had moved on to a new car and given Eli the old Volvo — and his notebooks and three years of correspondence with Dr. Hooper who had produced, over a decade of research, the most comprehensive documented record of a single haunting site in the American parapsychological literature.
He had also a decade of his own accumulated knowledge. The seven freed in Hartford, two more in Providence when the family had visited Aunt Margery, one in a rest stop outside New Haven that had been, in 1941, the site of something he would rather not think about. Each one adding to the framework, each one refining the methodology, each one a small proof of something he had been working toward since an eight-year-old boy had stood in a cold barn and told a hanged man he was forgiven.
He drove down the county road in October, because October was when it had begun and it felt right to begin the ending in October. The tree line opened and there was Dunmore — white church, main street of old brick buildings, the gas station with its single pump. Different in the ten-year details. The same in the essential quality, that small-town weight of accumulated time and accumulated story, pressing against the surface of the ordinary.
He drove to Cemetery Road.
The Harwick house stood as it always had. White clapboard, red door — now actually red, recently painted, Dr. Hooper had kept the place up. The covered porch, the bare October maples over the drive. Dr. Hooper’s university van was in the driveway. Dr. Hooper himself was on the porch before Eli had the car fully stopped, his thick glasses and his briefcase replaced over the years by reading glasses and a cardigan but his expression of academic excitement intact and now, ten years seasoned, significantly less underinformed.
“Elijah,” he said.
“Dr. Hooper.” Eli shook his hand. “How are the lines?”
“Holding,” Dr. Hooper said. “Salt changed last week, as per protocol. The corner is quiet.” He paused. “Quieter than it was before you left, actually. It has been — anticipatory, for the last several weeks.”
“She knows I’m coming,” Eli said.
“Yes,” Dr. Hooper said. “I believe so.”
From inside the house, through the closed red door, clear and unmistakable: the voice from the northeast corner. Not his mother’s name. Not anyone’s name. Just the voice, speaking something low and constant. Eli listened to it carefully for a moment. It was different from the 1974 voice — different in the way a person is different when they have been waiting for something for a long time and the thing has finally arrived. There was in it something that ten years ago he had been too young to hear and now he could: not just hunger, not just malevolence. Underneath all of it, deep and old and almost buried under everything the centuries had piled on top of it: grief. Her own grief. The foundational grief of the thing she was made of, the grief that had created her before Edmund Harwick, before the house, before any human history of this place. Something that had died here, been unmourned, been left to accumulate in the dark under the ground until it had grown large enough and dark enough and old enough to become what she was.
Eli stood on the porch and listened to the voice and thought about Agnes. She cannot be unmade except the way she was made — through the proper mourning of what created her.
He thought about Edmund Harwick weeping in the warm light.
He thought about Walter Finch’s feet swinging on the porch railing.
He thought about Michael, dead at six weeks, who he had not yet met but would someday, in whatever form that meeting took.
He thought about what Agnes had told him. You’ll know when you stop being afraid of the answer.
He was not afraid of the answer.
“I need to go in alone,” he said to Dr. Hooper. “All the way. The corner.”
Dr. Hooper looked at him. “The salt lines—”
“I need the lines open,” Eli said. “A gap. Just enough.”
Dr. Hooper was quiet for a long time. Ten years of living in the Harwick house had given him a different relationship to the word enough. He understood, precisely, what a gap in the salt lines meant and what it cost.
“Are you sure?” he said.
“Yes,” Eli said.
Not a promise. A certainty. Earned.