Every House Is Haunted (17 page)

Wendy and Tara carried three babies each, while Thumper, using one of the bassinets, took the other four. They went back up the elevator, through Sub-Level One, and up the other elevator to the surface. It was coming on midnight by this time, and the moon was up.

They piled into Thumper’s Jeep Wrangler, taking a moment to arrange the kids safely and securely in the back seat with Tara. Thumper sat in the shotgun seat with the basinette in his lap, while Wendy drove.

She pulled Black Book out of her jacket pocket and handed it to Thumper.

“It’s not exactly Dr. Seuss,” he said, opening the glove compartment and jamming it inside.

“What are we going to do with it?” Tara asked.

“We’ll think of something,” Wendy said noncommittally.

“What are we going to do with these?” Thumper said, hefting the bassinet. “I mean, it looks like a family exploded in here.”

“Looks like it,” Wendy agreed.

“Where are we gonna take them?” Tara asked.

Wendy thought about it for a long moment. “New York?”

Thumper gave her a questioning look. “Do you think that’s a safe place to raise a child?”

Wendy looked at him, and started to laugh. Thumper’s face broke, and then he was laughing, too. Tara joined in. The babies, all ten of them, only stared and gurgled.

They were still laughing when they reached the Interstate.

They found him on the banks of the Black River, behind their clapboard house in Oxford. He lay facedown on the muddy shore, not sprawled out but curled up as if he were only sleeping. Bright bars of late-afternoon sunlight lay across him like a striped blanket. The three members of the Abraham family approached him slowly, warily, as if he were a slumbering bear.

“Is he drownded?” Trevor whispered. He was eight, and at a point in his life when death was something that fascinated rather than frightened him.

“It’s ‘drowned,’” said his twelve-year-old sister, Bessie.

“Is he?” Trevor sounded almost hopeful. “Do you think so?”

Bessie looked at her mother, but her mother’s eyes remained fixed on the tall man. Trevor goggled back and forth between them, like a spectator at a tennis match.

Claire Abraham knew that strangers weren’t common in this part of Nova Scotia. Oxford may have been advertised as the wild blueberry capital of Canada, but it didn’t attract many tourists. Even if they were used to seeing strangers in town, they wouldn’t have expected to find one passed out on the riverbank behind their house.

“Give me a hand, Bessie,” she said finally.

Together mother and daughter crouched down and rolled the tall man onto his back. It was not the first time they had performed such a manoeuvre. They had had to roll George Abraham over on more occasions than either woman cared to remember. It was not the drinking that pained them; it was the remembering. George had been a silly drunk, a stupid drunk, but never a mean drunk, and it was the least his wife and daughter could do to keep him from choking to death on his own vomit.

The tall man was wearing a denim jacket, a light blue chambray workshirt, and blue jeans—all of which were soaked through and clung to him like a second skin. His arms lay across his chest in an X, reminding Trevor of pictures of Egyptian mummies he had seen in his father’s
National Geographic
magazines. He looked like a man who knew death was near and wanted to make it as easy as possible on everyone involved.

As Bessie pulled him into a sitting position, she saw he had something clutched in his arms—a pair of old scuffed workboots. She pulled his arms away from his body, and the boots tumbled to the muddy ground. Trevor, wanting to be helpful, swooped down and picked them up.

With Bessie propping him up, Claire clapped the tall man on the back. The wet slapping sound, coupled with the deep mineral smell that seemed to roll off him in waves, made Bessie think of doing laundry in the summer. Scrubbing clothes in the Black River and wringing them out, flinging them against the rocks and leaving wet marks in great manta shapes on their long, flat surfaces.

The tall man let out a series of dry, wracking coughs; despite looking like a drowned rat, it seemed he hadn’t taken any water into his lungs. His face was waxy-white. He had sharp cheekbones, and his wet hair lay in ropy runners on his cheeks like seaweed. His lips were a thin blue line, and when he opened his eyes, they were blue, as well. A rich, pure blue like the heart of an ice floe.

The three Abrahams each took an unconscious step backward. Those eyes were not natural. They seemed almost to glow. Bessie felt a sudden warmth in her chest, like the comforting pressure of a hot-water bottle. Looking into those eyes was like standing on the edge of Edgar’s Cliff and looking down at the reservoir.

Claire helped the man to his feet, watching him cautiously as he took the hand she offered. His grip was cold and slippery—
like gripping a fish out of the river
, she thought. She felt the furrows in the pads of his fingers, the marks of one who had spent much time in the water; and when his jacket sleeve slid back slightly, she stared, transfixed at his marble-white arm shot with blue veins.

The tall man was able to walk on his own, with an arm slung around Claire’s slender neck to keep him steady and pointed toward the back of their ramshackle house. Bessie walked ahead of them, while Trevor trailed behind, swinging a boot gaily in each hand.

Bessie opened the screen door, and Claire led the tall man into the kitchen, depositing him in the straight-backed chair next to the wood stove. Trevor put his boots down next to him and, without needing to be told, started building a fire, wrapping the kindling in newspaper so that they looked like oversized party favours before sticking them in the black iron maw of the stove. He got the fire going as Claire and Bessie drew up chairs on either side of the tall man—partly to prevent him from falling over, but mostly because they sensed he was ready to talk.

“Thank you for your kindness.” His voice was thick and seemed to come from a distance. Like an echo floating up the stone throat of a well. “It’s been some time since I’ve been treated so well.”

The fire crackled pleasantly and began to suffuse the room with a heavy, somnolent warmth.

“Did the river carry you off?” Trevor asked. “Is that why you weren’t wearing your boots?”

“Yes.” The tall man nodded. “The river carried me off.”

“What’s your name?”

“Name?” he said, as if the concept was alien to him. “I’m a travelling man, son. Travelling men don’t have names.”

Trevor smiled. He liked the idea of a travelling man. He never got to go anywhere. “What do your friends call you?” he asked.

“Travelling men don’t have friends, either,” the tall man replied.

“Oh.” The boy looked perplexed. “Well, where do you come from?”

Claire gave the boy a reproving look that he pretended not to see. Normally she would have reprimanded him for such forwardness, but the questions he was asking were the same ones in her own mind. And she could see the answers in the tall man’s eyes, but she didn’t think he would give them over easily, if at all.

“Where I’m from doesn’t matter,” the tall man said dismissively. “Where I’m going doesn’t matter, either.” He smiled, and it was like an eclipse over an arctic wasteland. Cold and beautiful. “What matters, if anything does, is how I get there. Most travelling men ride the rails or the roads. I ride the currents. The rivers. The streams. The creeks. Far as I know, I’m the only travelling man who does.” Not proud or ashamed: a man simply stating an ordinary fact of life. “That’s why I took my boots off. My feet need to be immersed in water for me to ride the currents.”

“Why?” Trevor asked.

“Don’t know the why of it. But growing up I can tell you I took a lot of showers with my galoshes on.”

The boy smiled and the tall man leaned into the warmth of the stove. A puddle was forming under his chair from his dripping clothes. He picked up his boots and held them in his lap like a sleeping cat.

“It takes a lot out of me.”

“Then why do you do it?” Trevor asked.

The tall man stared at him reflectively. “Oh, it’s not so bad. Just tires me out some. Like a man who walks the roads gets blisters on his feet. ’Cept mine get me here”—he pointed to his chest—“and here.” He pointed to his head. “When I was a baby, my mother used to bathe me in the kitchen sink. One day I disappeared right before her eyes—or so she told me. Scared her something fierce. Said my father searched the whole house, muttering curses in Gaelic, which was the only time he used the old tongue.” His lips turned up again in that arctic-eclipse grin. “Found me in the basement, dripping wet and fast asleep next to the water heater.”

Trevor stood up and fed another stovelength into the fire. The flames threw dancing shadows across the tall man’s face. Claire and Bessie sat quietly on either side of him like bookends.

“I’ve always been able to find the currents.” He raised his hands and spread his fingers wide. “Some people can see the future in people’s palms. I see maps.” He lowered his hands to the cracked leather hide of his boots. “Some people can find water with a forked stick. I can, too, except I don’t need a stick. Mine’s up here.” He tapped the side of his head. “It’s like having another set of eyes in my head. Shows me things sometimes. Some of ’em beautiful, some . . . some I don’t ever want to see again.”

“Like what?” Trevor asked, a little timidly.

The tall man stared thoughtfully at the stove. “There was one time—I don’t remember dates. All my stories start the same:
There was one time
. I woke up on the edge of a great lake. Not
the
Great Lakes. I’ve never ever ridden the currents off the coast of Nova Scotia. Never stepped foot in the Atlantic—too scared of where it would take me. This was a great lake, though—the Bras d’Or. I recognized it, but only for a moment. I started to see it differently, like someone had opened a door into hell. I saw hands, thousands of hands, each one as white as a salmon’s belly, reaching up out of the water. And I could see through them, like they were ghosts. I think that’s what they were. The spirits of those who have died in these waters.”

The tall man closed his eyes. His hair was still wet, but his clothes had dried considerably. The water had darkened the colours, and now they looked faded. With his eyes closed, the tall man looked faded, too.

“Are you a ghost?” the boy asked.

“Nar. But I think we walk some of the same back roads. Close enough to see each other from time to time.”

Claire started to speak, but her voice came out in a croak. She cleared her throat and began again. “My husband—their father—died at sea.”

“Was he a fisherman?” the tall man asked.

“Yes,” Claire replied, “but he wasn’t on a fishing boat when it happened. He was out at Horsehead Cove, fishing off the end of the pier, and it chose that particular day to collapse. It was an old, rickety thing, but it must have been there sixty years or more. My Da used to take me and my sisters out there when we were kids. George, my husband, was alone that day, so we didn’t find out what happened for a few days. The police went out to Horsehead and saw the pier was gone. George washed up on the breakwater near the lighthouse. He was a good swimmer, but they figure he hit his head and was knocked unconscious when the pier collapsed.”

They sat in silence for a long time, staring at the stove. The heat from the fire was like another presence in the room.

“They found his creel, but his pole was gone,” Claire added, as if this was an important detail.

The tall man craned his head around and looked out the window above the sink. The somber late-afternoon light had turned the rich azure of early evening. The shadow of the old pump house stretched across the back yard.

“I’ve stayed too long.”

“No,” Trevor said, almost desperately. “You have to stay!”

“Nar.” The tall man’s voice was gentle but firm. “A travelling man is like a shark. Has to keep movin’ or else he’ll die.”

“But I want to hear more about the currents.”

The tall man looked at the boy, and Claire saw something pass between them. There were more stories he could have told them, of that she was sure, and while some of them were probably quite wonderful, she also knew there were plenty that that would give Trevor nightmares for weeks to come. Tales that would have made the ghost stories her grandparents used to tell her seem like nursery rhymes. That story about the white hands reaching out of the Bras d’Or was only the tip of the iceberg. She knew that to be true, in the same way she knew the tall man was leaving for their sake as much as his own.

“Listen to the river,” he said, and rose from his chair. Trevor expected him to tousle his hair as other adults did after giving him some piece of instruction, but he didn’t. He just looked at him for a moment. It was only a brief meeting of their eyes, and yet something seemed to spark between them. Trevor didn’t understand what happened, and the tall man didn’t say anything. He just stood up, gave Claire a strangely formal half-bow, and walked out the back door with his boots cradled in his arms.

Trevor stood up so abruptly he almost knocked his chair over. He started to follow the tall man, but Claire grabbed him and told said, “Let him be. You can’t go where he’s going.”

The boy pulled free and bumped into the chair where the tall man had sat, knocking it over. The puddle of water underneath it had evaporated. He went past his sister, giving her a wide berth although she made no move to stop him, and out the back door.

Outside the twilight was segueing quickly into night. The wind had turned cold and feral, nipping at Trevor’s bare arms. He ran past the pump house and down the steep bank to the river.

The tall man was gone. Back to the currents. Trevor walked along the shore until he came to the spot where they had found him earlier that day. Nothing left but two impressions in the muddy riverbank.

Footprints.