Within These Walls (15 page)

INVESTIGATION REPORT

Puget Sound Paranormal Group

CASE FILE:
PPW101

DATE:
January 6, 1989

RESIDENTS:
Hailey and Robert Yates, Trisha Yates

COMPLAINT:
Possible poltergeist activity. Items moving. Apparitions spotted outside by T. Yates, particularly in the backyard.

REPORTED PHYSICAL INCIDENTS:
None

INVESTIGATION:
Investigators Jesse Stern and Caleb Morrow conducted thorough tests, including three one-hour electronic voice phenomenon sessions, temperature readings, and electromagnetic field tests. There was a significant spike in EMF readings in the cherry orchard behind the home, as well as in the living room. Possible electrical problem in the home causing EMF spikes. Results were inconclusive. No EVPs. Temps were steady. No eyewitness accounts of items being moved as reported.

SUGGESTED ACTION:
House cleansing for the residents’ peace of mind; however, PSPG does not believe this property to be haunted.

SUGGESTED FOLLOW-UP:
None

20

Monday, February 22, 1982

One Year, Two Weeks, and Six Days Before the Sacrament

T
HAT MORNING, THE
rain clouds allowed the sun to touch the earth for the first time that year. Jeffrey and his family were quick to take advantage of the weather, racing against another rainfall as they gathered in the cherry orchard behind the house to worship the sun.

Avis was not invited.

Left to sip her morning coffee inside the house, she spied on the group through the kitchen window as they sat in a loose circle among the wild grass and trees, chanting something back and forth as if in song, laughing among each other. They raised their hands to the heavens, swaying back and forth like a bunch of earth-loving hippies. She supposed they had left her out because she wasn’t truly a part of the group yet. Whatever they were doing out there, it was a family matter, but her exclusion nagged her regardless. Jeff had taken her into his arms and asked her to promise herself to the group; when she had, things had changed even more.

The girls cleaned out the master bedroom closet and transferred Avis’s old clothes to one of the smaller rooms down the hall—clothes that, now, everyone shared. Nobody owned any one item. Everything was communal.

Jeffrey was granted the largest room in the house, while the remaining two bedrooms were allotted accordingly: one for the boys, and one for the girls. Nobody slept downstairs despite the extra space. When Avis had suggested she sleep on the couch to give the girls more room, Deacon explained that the luxury of space and privacy was reserved for those who did not have enough room in their heart for others. He equated cramped quarters with how close Avis allowed the others to come, how open she was to being part of Jeffrey’s clan. And so they all slept together on the tiny twin guest bed and on blankets they’d spread onto the floor, while Jeff indulged in the space and privacy he denied his loved ones.

Gypsy continued to burn her incense. The sweet-scented smoke was now regulated to the master bedroom, purging Jeff’s personal space of any darkness that may have tarnished his purity while he slept. Clover cut fresh boughs of pine and arranged them in a vase on his bedside table, then smeared sap onto her fingers and pulled her digits across the windowsills and his door.

The pine tree symbolizes love and birth,
she had explained while Avis watched her baptize the room.
It’s why we decorate pine trees on Christmas. It’s a symbol of Jesus’s birth, of enlightenment. The pine needles ward off evil spirits and negativity.

Avis found it amazing to see so many people dedicating themselves to loving one person. When Jeffrey caught her arranging pine branches on the entryway table in the foyer, he captured her face between his palms and pressed her mouth to his.
Love for love,
Avis had thought.
If I love them with my whole heart, this can last forever.

And yet, only a few days later, she found herself on the opposite side of the glass, exiled for a reason she couldn’t fathom. Why had they left her out? It felt like, within the handful of days that her new family had come into her life, she’d given them everything—her trust, her home, her long-standing routine. The drastic change had been
immediate. One morning, she woke to the silence of an empty house, made coffee, and watched her reruns with Shadow snoring beside her on the couch. The next day, the place was bustling with unfamiliar voices and filled with exotic scents. The record player replaced the television. There was no time for lounging on the sofa. Maggie stopped checking up on her the way she used to, and when she did come over, she spent more time with the group than she did with Avis. Within the whisper of a single week, she’d gone from Audra Snow to Avis Collective. Avis Togetherness. Avis One-For-All.

But it wasn’t enough.

She turned away from the window, her stomach sour with burned coffee, her tongue fuzzy with its heat.
Maybe this was a mistake.
The voice in her head was familiar—it was the one used to getting its way.
Worthless,
it said.
They’ve figured out you’re a waste of time.
Just a big fat zero living in her daddy’s house, a sad, insignificant nothing that can’t offer them anything but a roof that doesn’t even belong to her.
She narrowed her eyes as self-deprecating insults coiled noxiously around her heart. Perhaps that voice was right. She was stupid to have thought someone like Jeff would see something special in her. Because how can a person see uniqueness when it doesn’t exist?

Abandoning her coffee cup on the kitchen counter, she drifted through the empty living room. The silence she had so wholeheartedly loved was now disquieting, reminiscent of some sort of ill-­favored doom. The cynic inside Avis urged her to open a window, to yell out at them to get their things and get lost.
Forget it! I’ve made a terrible mistake!
Get off my property, now!
But the weight of that silence kept that defeatism pinned down beneath her newfound hope. Her father had always told her good things don’t come easy. Perhaps she wasn’t trying hard enough. Maybe this was one of those things you had to fight for, dignity be damned.

She plucked a dirty shirt off the back of the couch, climbed the
stairs, and began cleaning the rooms. Folding blankets that were strewn across the floor, she stacked them one on top of the other in rainbow-colored piles. She pulled back curtains and opened windows, letting the rooms breathe with sunshine and the scent of moist earth. Stepping into the room that had once been hers, she surveyed the new living quarters of the man that had her smitten. Her hand drifted across her old bed, her mind tumbling over thoughts sensuous enough to make her blush. By the time she had the window open and the bed made, the sound of voices cut through the quiet of the ground floor, but Avis refused to falter. She continued her work in earnest, reminding herself that if she only proved her worth, they would gift her with the thing she wanted most: inclusion.

Jeffrey didn’t announce himself. When Avis turned away from arranging the pine branches on his bedside table, she found him watching her from the threshold of the open door. A quiet gasp escaped her throat. She pressed a hand to her chest, then gave him a small smile. “I was just cleaning up,” she explained, awakened to the fact that, perhaps, she shouldn’t have encroached on his privacy.

He said nothing, only watched her with intense eyes. She had to turn away from his gaze, its severity making her feel smaller than she already imagined herself to be. But rather than excusing herself and slinking out of the room, that sense of triviality gave spark to anger. Because who was
he
to look at her that way? Hadn’t she done enough to assure him she wanted to please him? Hadn’t she surrendered enough to prove that she was worthy of his friendship?

“I saw you outside.” She fluffed his pillow and carefully placed it at the head of the bed. “You and the group.”

“Nice day, finally,” he said. “We’re all planning on taking a walk later, if you want to come along.”

Avis frowned. So she was free to walk with them, but when it came to conversation, she had yet to win her way in? “Is that what
you all were talking about out there?” She flashed him a skeptical glance. “A walk?”

Jeffrey gave her a thoughtful look, as though allowing the knowledge that she’d been spying sink in. He raised his shoulders in an easy shrug. “Something like that.”

“I don’t believe you.” Surprised by how quickly the confession slipped past her lips, she felt her muscles stiffen. Her nerves were suddenly alive, squirming just beneath her skin. For half a second, she was stunned by her own audacity. She’d never had such bravado before. It both energized and terrified her.
Finally
she had stood up for herself, but it was misguided courage. Jeffrey wasn’t deserving of her rebuttal. It was Avis’s father,
Audra’s
father, who should have been on the receiving end of her simmering ire.

But it was Jeffrey who was standing in front of her now, not Congressman Snow.

She stared down at the ground, trying to weave an apology earnest enough to keep him from throwing up his hands and calling it all off himself.
I’m sorry. I’m just upset. I thought . . .

“There are a lot of people out there that need someone to guide them, Avis,” he said, stalling out her thoughts. She looked up from the floor and searched his face—was he going to let her indiscretion go, or was this the end? Jeffrey’s expression was calm, but the ferocity in his eyes had intensified. “People who are lost,” he continued, even-voiced. “Struggling to navigate through the wasteland that is the world. If you
like
living among the desolation that has eaten away at society, nobody is asking you to compromise yourself. Nobody is forcing their way into your life.”

Avis opened her mouth to protest.
I don’t think you’re forcing ­your way—
but Jeff lifted a hand to silence her. “I’m a patient man, Avis. I’m always watching, always listening. I’m waiting for you to choose the life you want for yourself. But I won’t wait forever. If I did, there
would be nobody left to take care of those who can’t take care of themselves. These people . . .” He motioned toward the upstairs hall, the jubilant voices of the group coiling up the staircase and into the room. “They need me. Half of them would be dead of an overdose in the towns they’d grown up in had I not plucked them from the rubble. They had no one, and now they have everything. But it appears that for
you
, everything may not be enough.”

She shook her head mutely.

No, no, it’s enough
 . . .

But the words didn’t come. She found herself breathless, unable to find the courage to speak. Too much of what Jeff had said sounded like a good-bye. He was abandoning her. She’d failed him, and now he would leave her to live the lonely life she’d come to know. But the isolation would no longer be a comfort. She’d gotten a taste of companionship. Solitary confinement would be tarnished by the fact that it was no longer self-imposed.

“Is it fair to wait for the reluctant when the eager are struggling to live?” he asked. “The healer has to attend to the willing. If you aren’t willing, Avis, then I’m wasting my time here.”

“I don’t understand.” She spit out the words. “What did I do?”

“What did you
do
?” Jeffrey canted his head to the right. His mouth quirked up into a ghost of a smile. His expression was tinged with a hint of irritation.

“Yes.” She struggled to swallow, her throat suddenly chokingly dry. “I . . . surrendered.”

“Surrender requires honesty,” Jeff shot back. “And you’ve been lying this entire time.”

Avis gaped at him. Lying? She shook her head again.
I haven’t lied about anything.
But her silent denial only expounded Jeffrey’s annoyance. He pushed off from the door frame and stepped deeper into the room. Grabbing her by the wrist, he spun her toward the
master bathroom with a rough hand. A sickening sense of realization hit her as he pushed her into the tiled room. She stumbled toward the sink, catching her reflection in the mirror that hung above it. She hadn’t slept well since the group had descended upon her home. They kept wild hours, slept in erratic patterns, woke her with their laughter regardless of the hour. The dark circles beneath her eyes were proof of sleep deprivation. She was exhausted; she’d just been too preoccupied to notice until now.

But her lack of sleep wasn’t Jeffrey’s concern. With Avis standing at the sink, he reached out and pulled open the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet. A row of orange prescription bottles winked at her from the middle shelf.
Those aren’t mine,
she thought.
Those belong to Audra, and Audra is gone.

Except that was a lie. Despite the group’s presence, she hadn’t stopped taking her medication. She was afraid that if she went off her meds, the darkness would creep back into her thoughts. Afraid that, despite the company, she’d run off the rails and slit her wrists the moment she was faced with adversity—a quandary just like this one.

Jeff shot his hand across the cabinet’s shelf and sent orange bottles rattling into the sink. “What are these?” he demanded, shaking a bottle of lithium in her face.

Shame.

She stared into the sink’s basin, then burst into tears, not wanting him to know how broken she really was. She was moving away from that hopelessness thanks to the group, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t scared of regressing to her previous state. One day, hopefully soon, she’d feel confident enough to stop taking her pills. But that would come after her initiation period. When she was truly a part of the group.
Except that might not happen now. You screwed everything up. Leave it to the useless nobody to destroy her only chance at belonging to something bigger than herself.

Audra turned away from the sink, sat hard on the closed toilet lid, pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes, and sobbed—­something a strong girl like Avis would have never done.

She heard Jeff drop the bottle of lithium pills into the sink along with the others. For a moment, she was sure he’d leave her in the bathroom to cry it out. Perhaps, by the time she got up the nerve to set foot outside the master bedroom, she’d find their things gone. Empty rooms and haunting quiet. Her old life and old identity would be back just as quickly as it had disappeared.

She gasped for air between sobs, tried to compose herself. Eventually gaining the upper hand on her emotions, she smeared tears across her face and let her hands drop to her knees. But Jeff hadn’t left. He was standing in the same spot, one hand on the lip of the sink, his gaze fixed on her shuddering shoulders.

“Doctors who prescribe pills are paid to flatline your thoughts,” he said. “They’re paid to brainwash you. Who’s paying your doctor, Avis? You?”

“My father,” she whispered.

“The enemy,” he corrected. “The man who is responsible for breaking your spirit. Do you truly believe he has your best intentions in mind? He’s a politician, Avis. He’s a
liar
.”