What Eli Sees – Chapter 34
“Dunmore, After”
He stayed in Dunmore for three days. He had not planned this — he had expected to come, do the work, leave. But the house was finished and October was beautiful and Thomas Birch was still in Dunmore, twenty-two now, working at his grandmother’s old Cape Cod which he had inherited and which he had converted, with his characteristic combination of practical competence and old-town knowledge, into a very small informal archive of Dunmore’s stranger history.
Thomas had Agnes’s records. Forty years of them — the leather pouches, the journals, the annotated maps of the town with its specific locations of interest marked in the careful hand Eli recognised from three years of childhood correspondence. He had kept them meticulously. He had added to them. He had, over the last five years since Agnes’s death, picked up and continued the work of protecting the town with the particular gift Agnes had identified in him: not sight, but stubbornness, and love, and the willingness to take the old knowledge seriously even when the world increasingly wanted to categorise it as superstition.
They spent the evenings at the kitchen table in the Cape Cod with the old records and the new ones and the cookie tin refilled with a different recipe because Thomas had not been able to find Agnes’s original and had substituted his own, which were, Eli told him, genuinely excellent.
“The rest of the town,” Eli said on the second evening. “Not the Harwick house specifically. The cemetery. The school. The other sites Agnes marked.”
“Manageable,” Thomas said. “Nothing with the weight of the Harwick corner. Small presences, mostly. I check them.” He paused. “Mrs. Pearce died in 1981. She’s in the cemetery. I visit sometimes.” He said this with the matter-of-fact tenderness of someone for whom the dead were not a source of fear but of continuity. “She seems — peaceful. Whatever that means.”
“It means she passed on properly,” Eli said. “That it was completed.”
“Good,” Thomas said.
They were quiet for a moment.
“The school,” Eli said. “The desk in the corner.”
“Walter Finch’s desk,” Thomas said. “Empty. Has been since — well. Since he left, in 1974.” He paused. “The kids still don’t sit there. Some things pass on faster than the memory of why.”
Eli thought about Walter Finch swinging his feet on the porch railing. About the warm light and the brief gift of the properly-ended thing.
“That’s all right,” Eli said. “Some things deserve to be remembered even when the reason is forgotten.”
On the third morning he drove to the cemetery. Not because he needed to — not for any of the work, which was done — but because it was October in Dunmore and the cemetery was beautiful in October, the old stones under the bare elms, the light coming in flat and golden through the gaps in the branches, and because Agnes was there and Mrs. Pearce was there and because it seemed right, having finished what he had come to finish, to spend some time with the people who had helped him know how.
He stood at Agnes’s stone for a while.
The dead in the cemetery moved around him at their distance — the background population, the ordinary ongoing business of those who hadn’t yet passed on and weren’t in any particular distress, simply present in the place that held them loosely, going about whatever it was the dead went about in their long interim.
None of them were the Pale Woman.
None of them had that quality anymore, that ancient pressing malevolence, the cold with its purpose and its appetite. Just the ordinary dead, going about their business, in a town that had carried one very heavy thing for a very long time and was now, finally, carrying only its own ordinary weight.
He drove out of Dunmore that afternoon, south on the county road, the trees on both sides in full October burning — orange and red and the particular amber of the golds, all of it doing what it always did, the annual extraordinary act of letting go.
He did not look back at the town in his rearview mirror.
He didn’t need to.
He knew it was there.