What Eli Sees – Chapter 7
“What Mrs. Pearce Remembered”
Mrs. Pearce — her first name was June, though no one in Dunmore used it, she had been Mrs. Pearce since her marriage in 1959 and before that she had been Juniper Peel, which was the name that appeared in the 1952 Gazette article: Mr. Arthur Peel, treated at Dunmore General. Her father. She had been nine years old.
She made them both tea from the little electric kettle she kept behind the reference desk and she closed the library fifteen minutes early and she sat across from Eli Crane in the reading room and told him what she remembered.
She remembered the cold corner first. Her father had put a thermometer there one January morning — not because he believed in ghosts but because he was a practical man who believed in data — and the thermometer had read forty-one degrees while every other part of the hall read sixty-three. He had checked for drafts. He had checked the insulation. He had called a man from Hartford who knew about old houses. The man from Hartford had walked down the hall to the corner and turned around and walked back out of the house without speaking and driven away and not billed them.
She remembered the voice. Her mother had heard it first. A woman’s voice, reciting something. At first they thought it was a radio from outside, or a neighbor. It was only when they realised the words were sometimes their names — specific, personal, impossible — that her mother stopped sleeping.
She remembered the woman with no face.
Eli went very still.
“You saw her,” he said.
“I saw her,” Mrs. Pearce said. “In my bedroom. Exactly as I’ve described. Standing at the foot of the bed. No eyes, no face, just — smooth. Like an egg.” She looked at her tea. “I was nine. I thought I was losing my mind. Children don’t have the language for it. You think: I am imagining this, or: I am sick, or: this is a dream. You go through every rational explanation first because the irrational one is too terrible.”
“And then?” Eli said.
“And then my father had his episode.” She said this word with the careful neutrality of someone who had decades of practice. “He was in the barn. He went in to get something, I don’t know what, and when my mother found him twenty minutes later he was standing in the centre of the barn looking up at the beam with both arms raised above his head. He didn’t respond to his name. He didn’t respond to being touched. He stood there for four hours until the doctor from Dunmore General came and gave him something that brought him back.” She paused. “He never spoke about what he saw. Not once, not to anyone, not until the day he died.”
“But something was there,” Eli said. “In the barn.”
“Something is always there,” Mrs. Pearce said. “That’s what I’ve come to understand about that property. It’s not a ghost, exactly — or not just a ghost. It’s something older. Edmund Harwick hanged himself in that barn in 1863 and something about the act — the despair of it, the darkness of it — left something. A stain. In the wood. In the ground. In the air.” She looked at Eli. “Like your father’s shirts. The smell doesn’t always wash out.”
Eli thought of his notebook. Like how a glass still smells like what was in it.
“What happened?” he said. “After your father.”
“We left,” Mrs. Pearce said simply. “Within the week. My father never worked properly again. He had — spells. For the rest of his life, at certain times of year, he would stop and look at the ceiling with his arms raised. We learned to watch for it. We learned to bring him back.” She looked at Eli. “It followed him. Whatever it was, it followed him out of the barn and it stayed with him.”
Silence.
“How long have you been there?” she asked.
“Three weeks,” Eli said.
She looked at him for a long moment. “You can see them. Can’t you? Not just feel them. See them.”
“Yes,” Eli said.
“All your life?”
“Yes.”
She nodded slowly, as if a long calculation had just resolved. “Then you need to be very careful,” she said. “Because the thing in that house knows you can see it. And it has been waiting — I believe this, I have believed it for twenty-two years — for someone who can.” She put her hand briefly on his. Cold, he noticed. Like the corner. Then she stood. “Go home before dark. Always go home before dark. And do not, under any circumstances, go back in that barn.”
He went home.
He did not go back in the barn.
For eleven days.