Every House Is Haunted (22 page)

“Yes, I think I do,” Morningside said. “You’re talking about covering up what happened here.” She crossed her arms defiantly. “I don’t care if you’re here on behalf of an insurance company, the City of Toronto, or the King of Siam,
I
am here on behalf of these people.” She gestured grandly to Ted and Dawn Weston.

Charles clapped his hands together like a teacher calling the attention of his class. “Fine, okay, I didn’t want to do it this way, but here goes.” He cleared his throat in a theatrical manner. “Since Mr. and Mrs. Weston are deceased, the house is once again the property of the city. As representatives of the city, Ms. Wakefield and myself have more right to be here than anyone. Now while I wouldn’t dream of telling Ted or Dawn Weston to vacate these premises, I feel I must tell you, Ms. Morningside, that the Yellow Pages are full of psychics, and if you have a problem with us being here, then I’m sure we can find someone else in your line of work who would be more . . . accomodating.”

The psychic stared into Charles’s icy blue eyes for a long time. Her cheeks were very red. A thin glaze of sweat had formed on her forehead.

“I need to work in absolute silence,” she said finally.

Charles exchanged a look with Sally. “We won’t say a word.”

The psychic looked at them both steadily.

Sally ran an invisible zipper over her lips. “Not a peep,” she said.

“Fine,” the psychic said. “Let’s begin.”

They sat around the mahogany dining room table. No one said a word. They were all watching the psychic. They weren’t clasping hands, but Sally figured it was only a matter of time. The table was astringently bare under the glow of the single overhead light fixture. It made Sally think of old gangster movies, stool pigeons sitting in bleak interrogation rooms, while grizzled, chain-smoking cops paced back and forth.

The psychic stared around the table at them with dull, heavy-lidded eyes. She looked as if she were about to go into a trance . . . or maybe she was trying to remember if she unplugged the iron before she went out. Finally, she pulled a pen and a sheaf of blank paper out of a satchel bag on the floor next to her chair and placed them on the table before her.

“Clear your minds,” she intoned.

Sally thought,
That shouldn’t take you very long
, and the psychic’s head snapped back as if she had been slapped. She stared at Sally. Sally looked back with innocent surprise—an expression she had down pat. She practised it in front of the bathroom mirror in her apartment. A slight widening of the eyes, a rising of the eyebrows, a gentle tilt of the head.
Oh, goodness, is something wrong?

Charles gave her a sidelong look and kicked her foot under the table. Sally couldn’t help it. She had an impish side to her personality that seemed to embody that age-old maxim, the one that said you can dress them up, but you can’t take them out. She liked to think that was part of the reason she had been recruited. Besides her other, less tangible qualities.

A slight breeze blew across the table and rustled the papers in front of the psychic. “The spirits are with us,” she said.

Or someone left a window open
, Sally thought.

Charles was watching her intently. He shifted in his seat and the object in his pocket bumped against his groin. He groaned inwardly.

The psychic closed her eyes, picked up the pen, and began to draw a series of loops. When she came to the end of the page, she dropped down to the next line and began again, as neat and orderly as the copy from a teletype machine.

Sally had witnessed automatic writing on a few other occasions, and recognized this kind of behaviour. Drawing loops was a sort of psychic holding pattern; it was supposed to keep the writer in a trance-like state until they began to receive messages from The Other Side. The supernatural equivalent of a secretary taking dictation from her boss.

With her eyes still firmly shut, the psychic began to speak.

“I am addressing the entities residing in this house. If you are with us tonight, please give us a sign.”

The house was silent for a long moment. Then, from somewhere close by, there came a loud thump. It sounded as if something heavy—like a sandbag, for instance—had been dropped on the floor.

“Good,” the psychic said, satisfied. The pen in her hand continued to execute an endless series of barrel rolls.

She’s certainly the tidiest automatic writer I’ve ever seen
, Sally thought.
Much neater than the one who used crayons and construction paper.

“Please identify yourself,” the psychic said. “Tell us your name.”

They all watched as the pen jerked in the psychic’s hand, dropping down to the bottom of the page. It spun around in a double-loop and made a cursive letter B. This was followed by an R . . . I . . . T . . .

“Jesus . . .” Ted muttered.

Dawn crammed a fist against her mouth, stifling a cry.

Charles and Sally stared expressionlessly.

The psychic seemed oblivious to what her hand was doing; her eyes were still closed and her brow was wrinkled in deep concentration. Her hand paused for a moment, then began again, writing with a flourish, leaping from one perfectly executed letter to the next. It was like watching a spider spin a web in fast-forward.

When she was finished, the psychic dropped the pen and let out a gasping breath. The others at the table leaned over to read the final message. Charles shot Sally another sidelong glance, while Ted and Dawn looked on with matching expressions of consternation.

Charles looked up from the piece of paper to the psychic’s own startled face and said, “If this is some sort of joke, Ms. Morningside, I don’t think anyone at this table finds it very funny.”

Four pairs of eyes bored into the psychic. She seemed to shrink under their collective glare. In her voluminous orange sarong, she looked like a gas planet undergoing some catastrophic gravitational implosion.

Finally, she looked down at the words on the paper. Her eyes sprang open and she gave out a small squeak.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “I . . . I . . .”

“I think your work is done here,” Ted said, rising out of his chair. “Please leave.”

The psychic’s chubby cheeks turned red again, out of embarrassment this time rather than anger. “N-no! This isn’t right. I’ve . . . I’ve consulted on dozens of police cases—
police cases!
Hundreds of them!
I have an eighty-five percent accuracy rating!”

Whatever
that
means
, Sally thought.

The psychic looked at Sally again as if Sally had spoken aloud. “It’s not my fault,” she protested. “There was interference. Yes,
interference
!” She latched onto the word like a drowning woman latching onto a life preserver. “Interference from the
house
!”

The psychic reached out to Dawn, but Charles was suddenly there, gripping the psychic’s upper arm and lifting her out of her chair. She tried to pull away and the strap of her sarong slipped off her shoulder. Her chair screeched across the hardwood floor and fell over.

“You heard Mr. Weston—your work here is done.” With his free hand, Charles picked up Morningside’s satchel-bag. The psychic glowered at them each in turn as he directed her toward the door.

“
Sneaks!
” she hissed. “You’re all a bunch of dirty, rotten
sneaks
!”

“Thank you for coming out tonight, Ms. Morningside,” Charles said as he stuck the psychic’s bag in her hand and ushered her out the door. “Your insight was most educational. Good night.”

The psychic opened her mouth to reply, but Charles had already closed the door on her. He went back into the dining room, experiencing a momentary sensation of déjà vu as he saw Sally standing over Dawn and patting her hand. The difference was that Sally was the real deal.

“I’m so embarrassed,” Dawn fretted. “I can’t believe I brought that woman here, into my parents’
house
! I feel like I’ve polluted this place.”

This place was polluted long before your parents moved in
, Charles wanted to say, but didn’t.

“You had questions,” Sally said, “and that woman claimed to have the answers. There’s nothing embarrassing about wanting to know the truth.”

Dawn wiped her nose on her sleeve and nodded reluctantly.

“But sometimes you have to come to terms with the fact that the truth may not be altogether satisfying.”

Dawn looked up at her with rheumy eyes. “What truth?” she asked.

“That there is no mystery.” Sally gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. “As much as you might hate to admit it, your parents were the victims of a terrible accident. But accidents don’t have reasons; they just happen.”

“But I’ve heard stories about this house,” Dawn said. “I’ve heard—”

Sally squeezed Dawn’s hand again, cutting off the other woman’s words. “I know,” she said. “We’ve heard them, too. That’s why we’re here, remember? Every neighbourhood has its haunted house, the one where bad things happened, the one kids cross the street to avoid. Even in a place like Rosedale. But they’re just stories. There are no secrets here, no hidden truths, and no answers.” She picked up both of Dawn’s hands and placed them in her lap. “You don’t need to like it. It’s a shitty deal. But you need to try and accept it.”

Dawn nodded, but it was a perfunctory gesture. She wasn’t going to be accepting this, not today or tomorrow, maybe not ever.

“I need some air,” she said, springing out of her chair and almost knocking it over. “I’m going for a walk. Then I want to leave this place and never come back again.”

Sally nodded and looked over at Ted. He stepped forward, took his sister’s arm, and led her outside.

When they were gone, Sally took out the psychic’s business card. “Tanyanka? Is that Russian?”

Charles said, “If she’s Russian then I’m Winnie the Pooh.”

Sally tore the business card in half and dropped it on the floor.

Charles wandered over to the table and turned the pile of papers around so he could read the psychic’s message.

“Britney Spears?” he said dubiously.

Sally shrugged. “Projecting at that woman was like throwing rocks at the side of a barn.”

“She gave you a look.”

Sally shrugged. “I goosed her,” she said. “To see if she was a receiver.”

“Was she?”

Sally tilted her head from side to side. “Yes and no.”

“Yes and no?” Charles said, pretending incredulity. “The psychic is giving me a yes-and-no answer? What a scam!”

“Fuck you,” Sally said amiably.

“So was she?”

“Eighty-seven percent of the world’s population are receivers, Charles. But less than point-zero-one percent are tried-and-true psychic. This particular woman was a receiver, of that I have no doubt, but beyond that, it’s hard to say. I suspect she has something, or else I wouldn’t have been able to influence her automatic writing. But she doesn’t have much, and she doesn’t know how to use it.”

“An unschooled talent,” Charles said, staring thoughtfully out the window at the darkening street. “Is it worth informing the Group?”

“Couldn’t hurt to put her on the watch list,” Sally said, “but she’s too old to train. You’ve got to get them when they’re young.” She fluttered her eyes coquettishly.

“That just leaves the house, then.” Charles went out to the foyer. He looked down the central hall to the kitchen, then up the stairs to the second floor. “Do you pick up anything?”

“Nope,” Sally replied. “Safe as houses.” She raised her eyebrows devilishly, but Charles ignored the comment. One time she had asked him if his sense of humour had been surgically removed as a child. Charles had looked at her blankly and said he would have to get back to her on that one.

“But I probably wouldn’t feel anything anyway,” she went on. “These places have triggers, right? Something that sets them off and makes them go all Amityville on people?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Charles said. “Things are winding down. No one’s going to live here ever again.”

“No one should have been living here in the first place.”

“Check.” He went over to the window to see if Ted and Dawn were coming back, but the street was deserted. The arc-sodium streetlights had come on, washing Ashley Avenue in a sickly jaundice colour. “Matters are being corrected as we speak. The agent who sold the house to the Westons will be found.”

Sally pictured an overweight, unshaven man in a piss-yellow suit with dark circles under his eyes and sweat stains under his arms. A man on the run . . . and with good reason.

“They’re going to string that bastard up by his balls when they find him,” Charles said. “For starters.”

“If they find him.”

“They will,” Charles said confidently. “They put the snoops on him, and they’ve never come back empty-handed.”

Sally hugged herself, thinking of the snoops but not picturing them. She had never seen them and never wanted to.

“So you don’t pick up anything?” Charles asked. “From the house?”

Sally placed her hands against the small of her back and stretched. “I don’t know,” she said. “I could take a quick look around before we leave.”

“No way,” Charles said firmly. “Once the Westons get back I’m locking the door and we’re out of here. And if we never see the inside of this place again, we should count ourselves lucky.”

“Come
on
,” Sally cajoled, “this is one of the Eight. I’ve never been in one before. Have you?”

“No.” Charles licked his lips. “There’s a reason no one lives in any of these places. You’d do well to remember that this is not a house. It’s a slaughterhouse masquerading as a house.”

Sally wandered into the living room. It had been decorated in a style she thought of as “Toronto Trendy.” Imitation antique wood furniture, Robert Bateman prints on the walls, and an honest-to-goodness wood-burning fireplace that looked as if it had never been used. A living room straight out of the Country Living section of the Pottery Barn catalogue. Designed for those who had not spent any significant amount of time in cottage country but who wanted visitors to their home to think they did.