“I’ll get hold of you. It will probably be in the spring. It would be silly to talk of moving anywhere in this type of weather.” She was hoping for sooner, but she didn’t want to tell Ethan that. “Good-bye, Ethan.”
If she could manage to convince Jeff to move right after the storm was over, they could find a nice cheap hotel to stay at until the cottage sold. Maybe they wouldn’t need Ethan’s help. It wouldn’t even have to be a nice hotel. Being in their line of work, they had slept with worse things than hissing cockroaches.
Waiting there behind a woman who had taken every last loaf of bread on the shelves, Chloe had the sudden desire to hurry back home. Jeff was lying there on the couch sick. A nauseous anxiety made her dizzy. The ridiculous but not-so-silly ‘feeling’ that Jeff was not alone in the cottage made her breathe a little faster. Something else was there, and it was most likely watching him. Digging into him. She tapped the back of her ring finger on the shopping cart handle. The line
had
to move faster. She had to get home now.
***
The road up Bad Luck Hill seemed steeper than usual. The winds pushed against the Jeep with greater intensity. Something, Chloe felt, was trying to keep her from Jeff. From their happy ending, much deserved. She always leapt to the most irrational of thoughts when threatened. She could hear her mother’s voice telling her “Stop being silly, girl.” And yet she felt the eyes around her. The shadows. Their gaze was intrusive, as if she were being studied or filmed. She just wanted to get back to the cottage. Everything had taken longer than expected. The checkout. The drive home. It was already dark.
When at last she reached the cottage, she sat in the Jeep for a moment, telling herself to move but unable to do so. The cottage seemed such an earnest place. So polite and welcoming. But it was a trap. The little insignificant place was chewing her and Jeff up. Her unease grew as she sat there. She gripped tight to the steering wheel and her breath came short and fast again. The darkness around the cottage was pushing inward at the light inside. Pouring in through the windows, Chloe saw there were strange forms—distorted as if in a funhouse mirror—seeping inside with it. She blinked and wiped her eyes.
Finally, she pushed herself from the steering wheel and rushed to the cottage door. If there was something seeping in the air around her, she did not try to see it. Inside, though dimly lit by the burning wood in the fireplace, Jeff lay asleep on the couch, balled up beneath a blanket. He stirred at her entrance but did not wake. She felt his forehead. Still sick and getting worse. She should call the doctor in Wicker before the storm arrived and cut them off from civilization. But would Jeff even go into town to see him? He had a stubborn streak like an oil slick.
Chloe looked around the room. There was a rattling going on. The lamp beside the television tremored as if it had been bumped into, but only slightly. The floors creaked.
She unpacked the Jeep of the groceries, put them in the kitchen, and then returned to the center of the front room. She gave a slow, watchful turn. A full circle.
“I feel you,” she whispered. Then, much louder and into the air, she said, “I’ll be back, Jeff. I have to take some things to Lana. Then we’re calling a doctor. I’ll be right back.”
She paused.
“Do you hear me?” This time she was not speaking to Jeff. “I’ll be right back.”
She heard a creak from the old rocker and looked in time to see it tip the tiniest bit forward. To let her know whatever it was, it would be waiting for her. She felt anger more than fear at that moment.
“I’ll be right back.”
***
Chloe had planned to quickly drop the groceries off and then head back to be at Jeff’s side. Lana showed her to the kitchen and Chloe brought the bags in and set them on the large center table, above which hung unused pots and pans. The kitchen was large and spacious, with utilities only a bit newer than those in the cottage. There was a large pantry opposite the doorway that Chloe could only guess stored piles of perishables.
Lana had never been a conversationalist and hadn’t really encouraged Chloe to be one either. She just seemed to require occasional companionship. But this time, Chloe saw a more anticipatory gleam in the actress’s eyes.
“Jeff’s very ill,” Chloe answered the unspoken plea. “I have to get back to him.”
“I think your husband is fighting for his life,” Lana said bluntly.
That gave Chloe pause, Lana’s intended effect. She stood motionless in the middle of the kitchen, searching behind the meaning of the words. At last, she gathered herself and made her way to the front door without saying a thing. She opened the door to leave and could hear Lana bustling up behind her.
“He’s in danger. And so are you. We all are.”
“What do you mean?” Chloe asked, still in the doorway. The cold air blew in around her.
“When your husband pulled Michael’s body up from the earth, I understood that my instinct to keep away from the cottage had been right all along. You felt it too. The recoiling. Like there is something crouched in the corners of that place.”
Chloe shivered, though not from the cold. “Yes. I’ve felt it. Since the day we came here.”
Lana turned for her library. “Follow me.”
Chloe re-entered and shut the door behind her. “But I need to get back to Jeff.”
Lana faced her. “And do what exactly? You can’t do anything unless you know what you’re up against.”
“Do
you
know what we’re up against?”
“No. But I’m searching.”
Lana opened the library door. The room was lit by candles even though the power had not failed that night. There were candles on bookshelves, tables, and desks. On the center table there were five candles burning in a half circle around the large leather volume that held such prominence in Lana’s collection.
Lana gestured for Chloe to sit. “I need your help,” Lana said. “And you need mine.”
Chloe hesitated but eventually complied as Lana sat opposite her. “What are we doing?” Chloe asked.
“Research. Answers for us both, hopefully.”
“I—I don’t know about…”
Lana held up her hand to silence Chloe. She gripped the edges of the table and began to hum. Coming from the stoic actress and seemingly no-nonsense woman, anything melodic sounded abnormal and a bit disturbing. In the moment, Chloe noticed, to her relief, that the darkness around her did not seem polluted with spiritual debris as it did now at the cottage. There were no malformed shapes hiding in these corners. No. Those remained down the hill. With Jeff.
The thought of her husband made her want to go to him again, and she nearly rose to do so when Lana, in as commanding a voice as she had spoken, said, “Come out of the dark, come out of the past, come out of the corners, those who lived here last.”
A séance!
Chloe’s eyes widened.
She was calling forth spirits!
Chloe, stricken with fear, rose at once. “No! Lana, we shouldn’t do this!”
“Hush, child! She comes!”
“She? Who? Who’s coming?” She trembled and chased shadows with her eyes.
In the flicker of the candlelight, Lana’s eyes fixed on Chloe.
“Who comes?” Chloe repeated.
“A mother,” Lana whispered. “She will speak through another’s tongue.”
“You’re going to let a spirit possess you?”
“No, my dear.” Her voice expressed apology. “She will possess you.”
Chloe’s blood turned to ice, and she felt an unbearable itch beneath her skin that she could not scratch. She was pulled off her feet and out of her skin, then stuffed back in so far down she couldn’t react. It immobilized her and forced her to collapse back into her seat. She could but let out a whine in protest. What occurred next Chloe saw as if she were watching a film. A film starring Lana Pruitt and an unknown, faceless woman. The victim. They conversed in the dark.
“Who are you?” Lana asked.
Out of Chloe’s depths climbed the answer like a drunken climber, as if she was learning to speak after a stroke. The tongue wagged and was heavy, but the words were still understandable.
“I am his mother. He has me trapped.”
There was bitterness and sadness to this mother. Chloe felt every bit of it and it made her eyes roll to the back of her head.
“Whose mother are you?”
“He’s a rascal.” The mother looked around her. “Where am I? What am I doing here? This is not my cottage.”
“I’m confused. Who is the rascal?”
“He is my boy. I tried to stop him. I tried to save him. To keep him. But always he tried to get away. Just like his father. His father I was able to see off on my terms, but… If I had known… if I had known what the starving would cause…”
The mother noticed the book and screeched.
The mother began to wail, causing the house to shake. Lana stiffened in her chair.
“I thought I could starve the devil out! Starve him out! Starve him out!”
The mother beat at Chloe’s form with limp appendages. “You must put me back, and you must all die. It’s the only way to be sure.” Lana stood at once and searched her book for what she should do.
“Stop!” Lana screamed. “Stop it!”
“This one is open,” the mother said. “She’s open and she has to die!”
The mother continued with her flagellation of Chloe’s body. Chloe, deep inside her own being, felt the beating and began to force her way out of the haze. She climbed up until she could feel her own voice once again. The film she was watching flashed bright, and she felt her own mind push back through. Finally, it was she who was now screaming in the chair, clinging to its armrests. She inhaled deeply, as if she had been holding her breath for an extended period of time. Lana stood across from her against a bookshelf, her face a hideous mask of terror, even in the darkness, pale and regretful.
Chloe stood and stumbled. “Did you get what you wanted?” she screamed. “You fucking crazy bitch! Did you get what you needed?”
“I had to try. For both of us. Now I know. But there are other ways—”
“Fuck you! Keep away from me, you psychotic cunt!” She made her way to the front door, seizing at the walls. Her legs were coming back slowly and the itching had nearly dissipated. Lana followed her with trepidation.
“I’ll keep looking. We both have to keep looking. It’s what we must do.”
“Try looking into your own soul rather than raping someone else’s.” Tears burned down Chloe’s cheeks. Lana stood at the door, holding her hand out as if to pull Chloe back. To embrace her. But Chloe fumbled down the steps.
Chloe climbed into the Jeep and momentarily broke into raging sobs at the wheel. This was what she and Jeff were up against: some crazed ghost mother and her son. And to top it off, a crazed actress playing Glinda the Good Witch on the hill.
She pulled herself together and backed away from the big house. Lana stood in the doorway, her arm still stretched out and her pain as dark and apparent as her silhouette.
***
Jeff was faintly aware that Chloe was there. And then she wasn’t. She had said something about taking groceries to Lana Pruitt. He had fallen in and out of consciousness so much during those minutes—barely twenty, but stretched by restless sleep—that he couldn’t be certain of anything that had actually transpired. The only relief he felt from his illness was that the intolerable itching had seemed to stop, if briefly.
He heard the creak of the rocking chair and opened his eyes. There sat a boy, or what remained of one. If Jeff had his wits about him, if they were not being suppressed by the illness, he would certainly have jumped up in surprise. As it was, however, he lay there and examined the smiling figure. There was something familiar about him. Like Jeff had seen him before. His eyes were large and round, protruding from their sockets like a victim of starvation. Yet the smile was continuous, as if the facial muscles had frozen just so, exposing two rows of yellowed, crooked teeth, some broken, some missing. The boy wore only a dirty pair of white underwear. His skin was stretched so tightly across his rib cage as to be transparent. A broad floppy hat rested on one knee. His hair was bushy and unkempt. He simply stared at Jeff with those eyes. Unblinking. Smiling.
“Who are you?” Jeff mumbled. He wondered if he could even be heard.
“Me?” the young voice said with a recognizable giggle. “I’m the ghost of a mad dog.”
“A ghost? You’re the one that’s been keeping us awake.”
Another giggle. It made Jeff the tiniest bit more aware of his situation. He grew a trifle apprehensive and struggled to sit up. The cottage seemed to move around him. It too was uneasy.
“You’re a ghost
now
. Fine. Who were you
then
?”
“I was just a boy looking to leave here at first. But Momma wouldn’t let me. She’d a kilt me first, like she did Daddy. I don’t know if she tied me up in the barn to keep me from runnin’ or to keep me from killing my brother.”
“Jesus.”
“That’s what she thought.” The ghost giggled and slapped his be-hatted knee. “She thought she could starve the devil out of me. Bring me to Jesus. But there ain’t no devil. The position is open for the filling. You find that out soon enough when you die or get kilt. There’s only want. And I had a lot of want. You’d be surprised what you’ll eat to stay alive. Any little rodent. Any little rock. I gnawed off a finger after two weeks. Momma went all hysterical when she saw what I done to myself. She untied me, and that was stupid of her. I knocked her down and I ran out the barn door. I forgot all about the well.”