What Eli Sees – Chapter 4
“The Barn”
The barn behind the Harwick house was the oldest structure on the property. The house itself had been substantially rebuilt in the 1920s — new roof, new windows, a furnace installed where there had been fireplaces — but the barn was original, 1847 timber, its boards grey and silver with age, the wood dried to the consistency and colour of old bone.
Robert Crane had plans for the barn. Storage, first. Then, eventually, a workshop where he would do the woodworking he had been promising himself he would take up since 1968. He mentioned the workshop every Sunday dinner with the specific enthusiasm of a man describing a version of himself he intended to become.
He had not been in the barn yet.
Eli had.
He’d gone on a Saturday morning in early October, while his father was raking leaves and his mother was running errands in town and Claire was asleep until noon as was her custom. He told himself he was exploring. He told himself it was just a barn. He went through the back door of the house and across the dead grass of the yard and stood at the barn door, which was ajar, hanging slightly off its rusted hinges, and he pushed it open and went in.
The light inside was grey and thick, coming through gaps in the old boards in long dusty shafts. The smell was ancient hay and rust and mouse and something beneath those smells — something organic and dark that had no immediate category. The floor was hard-packed earth. Old equipment rusted in the corners: a harrow, a hand plow, things Eli couldn’t name. A ladder led to a loft where hay had rotted to black dust.
In the centre of the barn, the main beam ran the length of the roof. A thick beam, original timber, old growth oak. It was from this beam, Eli would later learn, that Edmund Harwick had suspended himself in December of 1863.
He didn’t know this yet.
He only knew that when he looked at the beam, he felt sick. Not the slow, creeping cold of the northeast corner — this was immediate and physical, a wave of nausea that hit him the way a smell hits you, sudden and total and impossible to reason with.
He looked away.
He looked at the ladder to the loft.
He looked at the walls, at the gaps in the boards through which the autumn field was visible in silver strips.
He looked at the ground, at the packed earth, at the way it was darker in the centre of the barn than at the edges, as if something had been spilled there long ago and had soaked deep into the soil.
He looked back at the beam.
Edmund Harwick was hanging from it. Not a memory, not an impression — he was there, solid and awful and present, his feet two feet off the ground, his head at the terrible angle of a hanged man, his face the colour of old paper. He had been a large man in life, broad-shouldered, and in death he looked heavier, as if gravity had pulled something more than just his body down. His eyes were open. They found Eli’s. His mouth opened. What came out was not a word — it was a sound, a long hollow resonant sound like wind through a pipe organ, and it went on and on and did not stop and Eli ran.
He ran across the yard and through the back door and up the stairs and into his room and he got under the bed — not on the bed, under it — and he pressed himself flat against the floor and he breathed in the dark and the dust until his heart stopped trying to escape his chest.
His father found him there twenty minutes later, coming upstairs for something and hearing the breathing.
“Eli? What on earth—”
“I was playing,” Eli said from under the bed. “I was being a soldier. In a foxhole.”
Robert Crane accepted this. He was not a man who looked hard at the things his son said. Not yet. Not until later, when looking hard would be necessary and by then it would be almost too late.
“Dinner in an hour,” his father said, and went back downstairs.
Eli stayed under the bed.
He opened his composition notebook, lying on his stomach in the dust, and wrote very carefully:
I will not go in the barn again. There is a man in there. He has been dead for a long time. He is the worst one yet. He is not quiet like the others. He wants something. I don’t know what. I am not going to find out.
He was wrong about the last part.