Out of the Mist (21 page)

It took Gillian a long time to fall
asleep in the blue bedroom. She was comforted by the presence of
Fanny Fluff curled up in the crook of her legs. Just before dawn,
she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. When she awoke an hour
later, chickadees were chirping merrily outside the open window.
Gillian stretched out lazily, breathing in the rich aroma of coffee
brewing in the kitchen. She slipped on her robe, and slowly made
her way down the stairs.

“What's for breakfast?” she asked.

~~~***~~~

My Booots!

Tom
Robson

When we moved to Nova Scotia in 1979, I met
a ghost.

My first 35 years had been
spent in England where, if you believe half the stories you were
told, every second dwelling is infested with ghosts. But I was one
of life’s skeptics. I never saw or heard of an apparition that
couldn’t be explained away. I simply did not believe in
ghosts.

I lived many of my English years close to
the ocean. I liked having access to salt water and shorelines.
After living for seven years in or near Montreal, my wife and I
decided to move. I wanted to return to the ocean. Our dream was to
become part of a small community beside the sea. Ideally, we would
find oceanfront property somewhere in the Maritimes.

There was the problem of finding jobs to
replace those which we knew were soon to vanish. We had some
Maritime contacts so, as soon as our summer vacation commenced, we
threw camping equipment into the car and headed east to explore job
opportunities.

Way out on the Eastern shore, within a rural
community, I accepted a teaching job. The same afternoon, we found
our dream home.

We had been driving
around, looking and asking about available properties until we were
seduced by a “For Sale” sign at the top of an overgrown driveway.
We pushed through tangled alders, and burst upon a storey and a
half house set against a backdrop of sunshine, with a sparkling
summer sea fronting offshore islands. The opposite bank of the wide
estuary shone spruce green on that glorious July day. The house was
empty but phone enquiries led to a quickly arranged meeting with a
bemused agent. We drove the 100 plus kilometres to Dartmouth. When
we marched into her office the next morning, set to buy this long
empty property, she must have thought it was Christmas in July. The
next day, she followed us down east and showed us round the house
and property, on which the sun was still shining. Though overgrown
and somewhat faded and neglected, we were still entranced by the
prospect of restoring and living in it.

We would be buying seven and a half acres of
land, with 500 feet of ocean frontage, set on the fringe of a
community where I was to work. Surely, we could gain acceptance and
then become integral components of that town.

We were novices in the
world of Nova Scotia real estate. The entire transaction took only
10 days. Good deals never happened this fast and easy. We
overlooked basic safeguards such as having the property
independently inspected. We simply thought we had hit the jackpot.
We convinced ourselves that any work that needed doing to make the
house habitable and comfortable could be done after we moved in.
We’d find any money needed as easily as the real estate agent had
found us a mortgage for this “gem”.

Three weeks later, with our belongings
following in the moving van a couple of days behind us, we hot
footed it back from Montreal, to our idyll.

It was raining and the wind was blowing
onshore when we saw it again. The faded, black painted house, with
grass, alders, weeds and bushes threatening to consume it, was less
inviting. Inside, the wind whistled through the shingled walls and
rattled the doors and windows.

We had two days to find
the necessary tradesmen to get the well water flowing and
electricity functioning. My real job didn’t start for more than a
month. We naively assumed that would give us ample time to make our
100-year-old dream house comfortable.

For the two nights before our belongings
arrived, we decided to camp out on the floor of our new-to-us
house. That first night we snuggled in our sleeping bags in the
living room, safe from a summer storm, dreaming our delusions and
planning to resurrect our estate.

With all our ever-changing schemes, and the
growing list of problems playing on our mind, sleep was
impossible.

My wife and I bedded down on the pine
planked floor of the dark and isolated house. Its silence
contrasted to the city sounds and lights outside our former
Montreal apartment window, with which we were so familiar.

Few lights worked in this
gloomy, distressed house. There were no outside lights. The
infrequent traffic noise and passing headlights were muffled by the
100 metres of scrub between us and the road. We even heard the
waves break on the shingle shore 50 metres in the other direction.
The diminishing wind still seemed to find cracks and crannies,
through, which it whistled into and under the house.

And then there were rustling noises and
scratching sounds that disturbed the wind-whistle isolation. The
house had been empty for two years. Other than a crawl space where
the well pump and furnace were housed, the post and beam building
rested on a beach stone foundation from which many stones were
absent. Who knew what wildlife was under our floor, in the walls,
or under our roof?

The new problem of identifying noises was
more fodder to stimulate our tired but overactive minds.
Eventually, exhaustion defeated my meandering thoughts and I
slept.

I was awakened from a deep, but too brief
sleep, by frantic whispers from my wife, her mouth mere inches from
my ear. My surprised, awakening grunt was quieted by the urgency of
Barb’s, “Ssshhhhh!” and her hand covering my mouth.

“
There’s somebody
upstairs! Listen!” she whispered.

She was right. There were shuffling
footsteps over our head; they weren’t from a stocking footed field
mouse or squirrel. Someone—or something—was moving in the empty
bedroom above.

My watch glowed 3:15. If
someone was up there, they must have known that we were in the
house. Our car was parked feet from the back door.

“
What do we do?” asked my
wife, clinging to me, with fear in her stifled voice.

“
I don’t know!” I
whispered back, clutching her tightly, as much for my reassurance
as hers. “We’ll wait to see what happens.” That was my decisive
plan of action.

Scarcely breathing, we waited. Even when the
footsteps began to shuffle down the stairs, we waited. They turned
down the hall towards us. The door from that hallway to the living
room was already open. We were on the floor to the right of it,
safely ensconced in our sleeping bags. I got ready to spring into
action if our visitor turned towards us.

But, still in the pitch dark, our visitor
turned right, into the kitchen, a 25-foot long add-on to the
original storey and a half. As the footsteps shuffled the length of
the kitchen, across the worn, linoleum floor, I thought I heard a
male voice say just two words: “My boooooooots!”

“
Boots” was drawn out into
a long, plaintive enunciation, as though he was so emotionally
attached to them that he was mourning their loss.

Then there was a metallic creak as a door
opened, followed by a clanging noise.

Again: “My boooooots!”

At the far end of the kitchen was a door
leading to the outside. It was closed, and we had no key for its
lock. I’d been unable to move it earlier in the day. But, in the
dark hours of that morning, we heard it open. And then it closed.
The shuffling footsteps were no more.

Barb and I breathed again. We were still too
scared to move, even though both our bladders beckoned us, most
urgently, to go up those stairs to the bathroom.

I quietly scrambled for a flashlight that
I’d laid somewhere near my pillow. “Don’t turn it on yet!” urged
Barb. “It may still be outside!”

“
It?” I whispered. “Didn’t
you hear the voice? That was a man!”

“
Sssshhhh!! Let’s wait
five minutes. Then you can check things out!” volunteered Barb.
“What do you think that clanging noise was?” she asked. Her
nervousness was making her more talkative than usual.

I’d already speculated that it was one of
the doors on the very old wood stove and range that stood at the
far end of the kitchen.

A while later, full bladders, insatiable
curiosity, and a wife who wanted me as a super hero compelled me to
turn on first the flashlight and then the few house lights that
worked. The front, back, and the jammed door at the far end of the
kitchen were all locked tight.

There was one open door. The wood stove had
an oven door hinged at the bottom. The clanging and the metallic
creak had been the result of that door being opened. I closed it.
The door had been securely fastened with a latch. There was no way
that it could’ve fallen open on its own.

There was a joint expedition to the bathroom
where we flushed with water from a bucket, hauled earlier from the
well. Both bedrooms were empty, as were the closets. There was
nowhere for anybody to hide.

We didn’t check the dark outside.

Back in our welcoming sleep spot, we lay
there forever, speculating on what we’d heard. It was so country
dark that we had seen nothing. But what were those sounds? Who had
been in our house? How did he get in and out? Had he been hiding
upstairs? What exactly had he said?

The questions were stilled as we snatched a
little more sleep.

There were no answers for the mysterious
noises when we woke to sunshine a few hours later. We searched the
dilapidated shed and newer barns. We even checked the two-seater
outhouse, a building we would probably have to employ until we
could get water flowing from the well.

But there was much work to be done and many
people to find before our belongings arrived the next day.
Investigating our mysterious, wee-hours visitor was a low
priority.

Of necessity, we met many new people that
first full day in the community. Without exception, they identified
us as the people who’d bought that house on the road to Temperance
Island. It was variously identified as “the Crozier property”, or
“Mrs. O’T’s house” or “The Strawberry Farm”. The confused
chronology and history of its previous owners was not clarified
until late in the afternoon.

The local plumber, Frank,
an elderly, garrulous fellow, arrived late afternoon to assess the
well and pipes. After he’d checked the pump to see what parts were
needed, he said he’d be back the next day but first suggested that
we pour a jug of Javex down the well.

He was a keen conversationalist. When asked,
he told us that the family that had long occupied the property was
named Crozier. They had eventually sold it to a retired sea captain
who grew strawberries there in the sixties. The last owner, Siobhan
O’Toole, was a local teacher. She’d rented the place to people who
had neglected and abused it before leaving. It had been empty for
at least two winters.

He added, “You’ve got a load of work ahead
of you here!”

We’d already come to that realization. We
enquired about the age of the house.

“
I don’t know, but Isaac
Crozier runs the local store. Ask him. He was born here so he
should know,” volunteered our friendly plumber.

“
We thought someone was in
here last night,” Barb told him. “About three o’clock, we heard
someone come down the stairs and go out the kitchen
door.”

Our talkative and
knowledgeable plumber was, for the first time, silent. Eventually,
he suggested we mention that event when we talked to Isaac at the
store.

Before settling down on our hard, floorboard
“bed” that second night, we thoroughly checked doors, windows and
closets: upstairs and down. Earlier in the day, we’d even scrambled
up into the uninsulated attic. Nothing there, either, except a
primitive bootjack. Our first, sleepless night, followed by a
hectic day, meant that we should sleep soundly, kept safe by the
child’s night light we’d bought. The only working power point where
we could plug it in, though, was in the kitchen.

By 10:00 p.m. we were both
sound asleep. I woke, with a start, to a voice whispering, “It’s
back!”

He was!

Again, he was shuffling down the stairs,
though Barb had already heard him moving above our heads, as I
snored. As before, he came towards our sleeping place, then turned
away into the kitchen, moaning “My booooots!! My boooooots!!!!”

I sneaked a look past the door into the
nightlight lit kitchen. I saw a man in a long sleeved shirt and
coarse woolen pants tucked into his socks. He stopped at the stove
and opened the oven door, which again creaked and clanked.

“
My booooots!!!” he
uttered. He turned, easily opened the jammed tight door on the
ocean side of the house, and left.

Barb, too, had glimpsed this man, though
neither of us could distinguish his features. “Was that a ghost?”
she asked.

When I didn’t respond, she added,
insistently, “It must be!”

“
Unless someone has a key
to that door!” I replied; as always, I was looking for a logical
explanation to discount a ghostly apparition.

The oven door was still down. The door
through which our visitor had left was, again, jammed tight when we
checked.

We lay there between 3:30
and 4:00 o’clock, trying to make sense of the strange events of the
successive nights. Barb was too scared to sleep. I racked my
skeptical brain for the explanation that continued to escape me.
Perhaps it was a ghost. Was it time to change my belief?