What Eli Sees – Chapter 9
“November Comes Hard”
November stripped the last of the elms and the temperature dropped twenty degrees in a single week and the cold in the northeast corner spread. This was how Eli came to understand that something was escalating: the cold that had been contained in its corner, bounded like a weather system, began to move. By the fifth of November it had reached the bathroom door. By the tenth it was at the top of the stairs. By the fifteenth Eli could feel it from his bedroom, a cold pressure against the closed door, patient and constant, like something leaning.
His mother was not sleeping. He could see it in her face — the grey beneath her eyes, the way she jumped at sounds, the way she poured her morning coffee with hands that were not entirely steady. She had not told his father. He could see this too. She was managing it, or trying to, in the way she managed most difficulties: alone, methodically, applying rationality like a poultice to something that did not respond to reason.
Claire was the only one seemingly unaffected.
This surprised Eli until he understood the reason: Claire was never in the house. She had found, with a teenager’s unerring instinct for social escape, a friend group that kept her occupied six evenings of the seven. She came home to sleep and left before the house was fully awake. She moved through it like a weather front — brisk, loud, shedding coats and scarves and the smell of cigarettes she thought nobody noticed — and she did not linger anywhere long enough to feel the cold or hear the voice or see the things that stood in the corners.
The dead were afraid of Claire in the way that confident, loud, living things sometimes pushed back against the presence of the dead by sheer force of vital energy. Eli had noticed this. The dead receded slightly when Claire was in a room. He had begun timing his movements to coincide with hers.
Thomas Birch came to the house once in November.
Only once.
He stood in the front hallway and looked up the stairs and his round face went white in a way Eli had never seen it go, and he said he had forgotten he was supposed to be home for dinner, and he left. He called Eli that evening.
“There’s something on your stairs,” Thomas said.
“I know,” Eli said.
“More than one.”
“I know.”
“Eli.” Thomas’s voice was very quiet. “My grandma wants to know if your family can leave.”
“My dad bought the house,” Eli said. “We can’t just leave.”
A long pause.
“My grandma says sometimes you have to leave things regardless of what you paid for them,” Thomas said.
Eli thought about this. He thought about the property records in the library. Six families. Every one of them gone within two years.
“Thomas,” he said. “What does your grandma know about this house? Specifically.”
The pause this time was longer.
“She says there’s a woman,” Thomas said finally. “A dead woman. And she’s been in that house since before Edmund Harwick built it. She was there first. The house was built on top of her. On top of where she died.” He paused again. “She’s not Edmund Harwick’s ghost. She’s something else. Something older. And she was sleeping until someone built a house on top of her and she woke up and she’s been angry about it ever since.”
Eli was standing in the kitchen as Thomas said this, the phone cord stretched to its limit, and he turned as he listened because the feeling of being watched was suddenly overwhelming and the kitchen window was dark with November night and there was a face in the window — pressed against the glass from outside, features flattened by the pressure, a woman’s face with smooth blank skin where the eyes should have been, so close to the glass it had fogged it with a breath that should not exist — and Eli dropped the phone and it swung on its cord and Thomas’s voice came tinnily from it saying Eli, Eli, are you there, Eli, while Eli pressed himself against the opposite wall and the face at the window tilted its head slowly, deliberately, the way something tilts its head when it is examining something it finds interesting.
Then it was gone.
Just the dark window and the fog of the impossible breath already fading from the glass.
Eli picked up the phone.
“Thomas,” he said. His voice was remarkably steady. “I need your grandma’s phone number.”