Haunted (15 page)

That spring, however, I had noticed a plant growing up through the soil and I had wondered what it was. I thought it was the result of another buried walnut, forgotten by a squirrel. Mr. Ryan, the former owner, had been an avid gardener and most of the perennials and bushes on our property were the result of his green thumb. Still, I had only planted impatiens, and prior to that, the garden had been covered with grass.

This mystery plant had obviously been a rose bush, which was now bearing dozens of buds in various stages of growth. It was incredible that the small, barely noticeable plant had become an incredible flowering shrub in such a short period of time. It had grown as fast as the walnut tree, and the colour and fragrance of the roses were spectacular.

When Kammie came into the yard she mentioned that the flowers smelled the same as an aroma she had noticed in the house on several occasions when we had first moved in. She had often asked if anyone else could smell roses, especially on the second floor, but no one seemed to detect it but her.

I knew that when our two-week holiday was over the roses would no longer be in bloom, so I decided to cut some off and hang them upside down in the house, to dry. They were such an unexpected treat and so beautiful that I wanted to save the blossoms and use them to decorate our home. I snipped away with a pair of kitchen scissors and piled the stems into a basket. There were even more buds on the rose-laden branches than I had seen from the window above.

As I pruned the bush, I heard a tap on Donelle's kitchen window, and I turned to see our neighbour watching me as she talked away to someone on the telephone. I smiled and waved at the elderly lady and went back into the house to hang up the roses for drying. Later that afternoon, as I sat on the front porch and waited for Ted to get home so we could leave for the cottage, Donelle walked out her front door.

“Where did that rose bush come from?” she called over.

“I really don't know. It's beautiful though, isn't it?”

“Didn't you plant it?” the old woman asked.

I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head.

“I was on the phone with Mr. Ryan when I saw you clipping off the blooms. I told him you had some beautiful roses growing under that window, and he said you must have planted that rose bush when you moved in because he had grown nothing there.”

“I never planted it,” I said.

“Well, who did?” my neighbour asked.

“I have no idea. I just noticed it this spring, but I didn't plant it.”

“I'm surprised at how big it is. I just noticed it for the first time today, and I don't know how I could have missed seeing it. I'm always looking at your yard through my kitchen window,” Donelle went on.

“I just noticed myself that it had grown that tall and had all those roses on it,” I told her, although I realized it must have sounded impossible for me to have missed seeing a rose bush like that growing right outside my own back door.

When Ted got home I showed him the multitude of roses I had clipped off the bush. He was as surprised as everyone else that the beautiful plant had sprouted up out of nowhere. We left then for the cottage and did not give the rose bush much thought while on our holiday.

Upon our return two weeks later, I asked Matt to put the dog into the yard after the long car ride. When he and Piper had reached the family room, I heard him call for me.

“What is it?” I asked him from the foyer where I had dropped some of our bags from the car.

“Come and see all the flowers!” he said.

I walked into the family room and joined Matt at the window.

The rose bush was once again covered in buds, at least as many as I had pruned before we left. It was a gorgeous sight. Where the bush had come from and how it was able to produce so many lovely roses in such a short amount of time was a mystery to us, but it was a beautiful addition to our garden.

I tried to answer the many questions I had about the bush by researching roses on the Internet, but could not find the information I needed. I finally sent an e-mail message to one of the gardening sites, explaining how quickly the rose bush had grown and how it produced dozens of roses. I wanted to know how it was possible. I never received a response from the gardening site expert, who probably thought I had been joking. I came to accept and enjoy the roses as they were and put aside my questions.

Several days later Beverly called. She told me she had been talking with Dennise the night before. They had discussed our home and Dennise had repeated the information she had received regarding a message located on page five in the newspapers.

“She also asked how you liked your gift of flowers,” Beverly said.

“What?” I asked, surprised by the question.

“Dennise said that she had been told that the spirits had given you a gift of flowers, and she wondered how you liked them. I told her I didn't understand what she meant, but she said that you would know. Do you?”

Dennise could not have known about the rose bush as I had not mentioned it to Beverly. Yet thanks to her message, I now understood that the roses were meant as a wonderful gift, and the bush became even more special to me.

“Yes, I love the flowers,” I said. I could only shake my head in bewilderment as I stared out the window into the garden.

The bush bloomed repeatedly throughout the summer, and I continued to clip the rose-covered stems. I was running out of places to hang the flowers to dry but did not want to see them wither after they had bloomed. The dried rose wreaths soon adorned every room, and their presence seemed to add a peacefulness to our home.

The winter that followed was very severe, and more than half a metre of snow covered the ground by late December. On Christmas Day we happened to look out at the bush. Although most of it was buried in a drift, one branch poked out of the snow bearing a freshly bloomed rose. We thought it was a remarkable Christmas gift.

A few weeks later, Ted and I were out shovelling snow from our front walkway. While Matt was at a friend's house, Kammie was curled up on the love seat and Rosa sat on the floor beside the fireplace as they watched a movie together in the living room. A very heavy wood-framed mirror hung directly above the fireplace mantle, and I had loosely arrayed dried rose blossoms along the top of its frame. The mantle was decorated with family portraits in brass, wood, and ceramic frames and a large, fragile antique oil lamp.

While the girls were watching the movie, the nail came out from the picture hook on which the mirror had been suspended by a wire. When the mirror fell, landing a foot below on the mantle, it dislodged none of the fragile items around it, and it remained angled at the same thirty degrees from the wall at which it had been suspended on the wire.

If the force of the fall had not been enough to propel the mirror and most of the other fragile items off of the mantle to the floor below, then surely gravity should have caused the mirror to topple forward. And if that had occurred, Rosa, who was sitting directly beneath the mantle, would have been seriously hurt. The spray of shattered glass from the broken mirror, picture frames and the oil lamp would have harmed both of the girls.

Yet the mirror remained frozen at that impossible thirty degree angle on the mantle and not a single petal of the dried rose blossoms atop its wooden frame had stirred when Ted and I came into the house a few minutes later. The girls met us at the door and excitedly told us what had happened. When I understood what they were saying and looked into the living room to see the huge mirror on the mantle, I raced over, thinking it was about to fall. It remained suspended until I reached my hands up to grab it. Then, as I was about to touch it, all of the dried rose blossoms fell from the top of its frame and it started to fall forward. I caught its sides in my hands, but Ted had to lift its heavy weight down from the mantle.

He leaned the mirror against the wall and inspected it while I gathered up the rose petals scattered all over the mantle and floor and listened to the girls talk about what had happened when it mirror had fallen.

“I don't know how the things on the fireplace didn't get knocked over when the mirror fell, especially that big lamp,” Kammie said, and Rosa nodded in agreement.

“I thought that mirror was going to fall on my head!” Rosa said. “But it just stayed there until you came in.”

Ted immediately installed a new and more secure picture hook into the wall above the mantle and was readying to hang the mirror once again over the fireplace. I asked him to wait until I had given it a good dusting. I figured that would be a good time to clean the hard to reach mirror, and went into the kitchen to get the glass cleaner and a cloth. Just as I was about to begin spraying the glass, I noticed some marks near the top of the mirror. Two tiny hand prints, the same size as the little ones we had seen on the bathroom mirror, could be seen. I wondered if I was only imagining them due to the stress I felt over my daughters' close call, but Ted and the girls could also see them.

Kammie and Rosa told me that it had looked as if someone were holding the mirror in place after it fell from the wall. With what appeared to be a toddler's hand prints on the glass of the mirror, I wondered if that had been exactly what occurred. I shuddered to think of what might have happened to my girls. If someone's hands had left those marks when holding back the mirror, I was very grateful for the intervention.

ANGELS IN THE DOORWAY

M
att's
room was no longer the centre of any unusual activity. It had been some time since he had mentioned seeing or hearing anything at all out of the ordinary, and he had been able to sleep undisturbed. One night, however, he woke me when he called out in a loud, anxious voice.

When I hurried into his bedroom, I found him sitting up in bed with a worried expression on his face.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“There was a boy in my room,” he said.

“What did he look like?” I asked, as I sat down on his bed. I wondered if it had been the same young blond boy I had seen some time ago, running down the stairs.

“He was bigger than me. He was maybe about twelve,” my son estimated.

“What was he doing?” I asked.

“He was just standing right there.” He pointed to a spot beside his bed, near the door leading up to the attic. “He was standing there watching me,” he added.

“What did he look like?” I asked again.

“He was sad,” Matt said quietly. “His clothes were like rags and really dirty, like he was poor or something. And his head looked funny.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I don't know,” he struggled to explain. “It was a funny shape, like it had been hurt. His hair was really short, even shorter than Daddy's. I think it was blond, but it looked all muddy and dirty, like his clothes. And his skin was a funny colour, kind of blue and gray. He looked at me like he was so sad. Why would he be so sad?”

“I don't know, honey,” I said as I held him close to me.

Matt seemed more concerned about the reason for the boy's unhappiness than frightened or upset by the sighting.

“I'm okay, Mommy,” he assured me as he lay back down under his covers and prepared to go to sleep.

“Do you want to sleep in our room tonight?” I offered.

“No, it's all right,” he said.

I kissed my son goodnight and went back to our bedroom. I lay awake thinking about what Matt had seen and the possible reasons that the haunting was still occurring. We had put back everything from the backyard that had been found there. What else could we have done to stop that activity in our home?

It was dawn when I suddenly had a thought. I got up and went into Kammie's room, but I could not see the object. Before I returned to my bed, I went to check on Matt to see if he were sleeping soundly. When I walked into his room, I saw what I had been seeking. Displayed on his dresser, not far from the attic door, was the large piece of pyrite Kammie had found in the backyard. We had placed all the items we had found back into the ground except that one. Because he enjoyed looking at the quartz and gold coloured minerals, Kammie had allowed Matt to keep the sample overnight in his room.

I wondered if there could be a connection between the sad-looking boy in the ragged clothes and the piece of pyrite. Perhaps he had been brought to that area by his father, who had been lured by the promise of gold that proved to be worthless. Could the boy have felt some connection to the piece of Fool's Gold similar to the young girl's seeming attachment to the ink-well, jar, and button?

That morning, as Ted and the children ate their breakfast, I carried the heavy piece of pyrite outside and laid it on top of the buried items beneath the family room addition. It would serve as a marker for those articles, but it was also very near to where it had been discovered. Kammie had agreed when I explained we had to return it too. Now everything was back in its proper place, and I hoped that would give the spirits and our family some peace.

Soon after Matt had seen the sad boy in his bedroom, Rosa began to talk about angels. I thought she might have overheard a discussion about what her brother had seen, and I was concerned that it may have frightened her. Some subtle questioning, however, revealed that Rosa had no idea that Matt had seen a spirit by his bed, nor did she seem afraid at all of the thought that angels, as she called them, were in our home. After seeing the hand prints on the bathroom and living room mirrors, she seemed to accept their reality all the more.

“I know what angels look like!” she exclaimed with great excitement to me one morning.

I smiled at her, but felt slightly uneasy.

“How do you know that Rosa?” I asked her.

“Because I saw two angels in my room last night!” she announced happily.

“Where were they?” I questioned.

“They were standing in the doorway waving to me!” she said.