The Haunting of Pitmon House (3 page)

In her hand was a tube of lip balm. Rachel reached forward
and took it from her fingers.

“What?” Eliza asked. “How’d you do that?”

“I didn’t do it,” Rachel replied. “It’s an object that’s
different in the River than in the normal world. You asked what was special
about the River? That’s an example.”

“I asked what it had to do with Shane,” Eliza replied. “I
don’t see the connection.”

Rachel sighed once again. “You’d get it if you understood
it.”

“Well, I don’t,” she replied, irritated. “It’d be nice to
have it explained. I feel stupid.”

“I gotta get back,” Rachel said, standing. “Whatcha doin’
tonight? If you’re free, why don’t you come by my place and we’ll have a few
drinks.”

“I would, but you know I have no interest in seeing Rodney.”

“I kicked that loser out weeks ago!” Rachel said. “You come
by, and we’ll have more time to talk. If we don’t get back, Lois’ll have a
conniption.”

Eliza rose from the table without accepting the invitation.
Rachel had always been a friendly but distant co-worker. The few times she’d
interacted with her outside of work, Rachel had some asshole boyfriend on her
arm, and Eliza hadn’t found the get-togethers to be very fun or enjoyable. She’d
turned down Rachel’s last few requests.

Visiting Rachel tonight, however, might be intriguing; if
there was some way to help Shane using what Rachel had shown her, she wanted to
know what it was.

“I thought you and Rodney were a serious thing,” Eliza said,
settling into a round leather chair in Rachel’s trailer. It was a double-wide,
parked on ten acres of land a couple of miles north of Dodgeville.

“None of the guys I see are serious things,” Rachel said,
standing behind the kitchen bar, preparing drinks.

Eliza didn’t know quite what to say, so she decided to remain
silent. She knew Rachel well enough to get along at work, but didn’t really
know her well enough to pry.

“Oh, you don’t gotta be all that way about it!” Rachel said.
“I was married when I was your age. Divorced the son of a bitch after three
years. Now it seems I have the very bad habit of hooking up with men exactly
like the bastard. I swear, sometimes I think I should see a shrink or
something.”

She walked two large glasses filled with ice and liquid to
where Eliza was seated, and handed her one of them. Before Eliza could take it
away, Rachel clinked her glass against hers in a quick toast. “Here’s to girl
power.”

“Girl power,” Eliza repeated, and took a sip. It was strong.

“How’d you get your gift, anyway?” Rachel asked, falling into
a chair opposite Eliza. “Your momma or your daddy?”

“My dad, I guess,” Eliza said. “He never really talked about
it.”

“Sure it wasn’t your mom?”

Eliza thought. Her mother had disappeared from their lives
when she was little; she had faint, fuzzy memories of her. Nothing she
remembered suggested to her that her mother was gifted. “No,” she replied, “I’m
pretty sure it was my dad. It seemed like there was always something unsaid
between us. I asked him about it once, but he shrugged it off.”

“Some people don’t like it,” Rachel said, followed by a big
gulp of the cocktail. “Some people think it’s a curse, and hate themselves for
having it. I think that’s stupid.”

“I don’t know if he hated it,” Eliza replied. “He just
wouldn’t talk about it. Or, at least, he said it was something we’d discuss
after I had children.”

“Probably so you didn’t use it,” Rachel replied, “and he was
gonna tell you how to suppress it in your kids.”

“Maybe.”

“How’s Shane? Any word?”

“Still sedated,” Eliza replied. “They said they’d call when
he became coherent enough to talk.”

“That’s a shame,” Rachel replied. “Still, I think it might
have had something to do with House on the Rock.”

“How?” Eliza asked, skeptical of the idea. “What do you suspect?”

Rachel looked at her. “How much do you know about the River?
Really?”

“Until today I’d never been in it,” Eliza replied. “So,
practically nothing.”

“No one else has ever explained it to you? Someone other than
your dad? He should have, by the way.”

“No.”

“Do you ever feel things? Sense things, like we were talking
about last week?”

“I sometimes feel like I know what someone is going to say,
just before they say it.”

“Interesting. Different people have different experiences of the
River. Some people get good at certain aspects of it.”

“You?” Eliza asked. “Is there something you’re good at?”

Rachel looked down into the ice in her glass. “No,” she
replied, suddenly melancholy. “I’m not good at much.”

“Listen,” Eliza said. “If there’s some aspect of this that
impacts Shane, I want to know.”

Rachel looked back up. “Alright,” she said, regaining some
energy. “Well, you know the River is where you can see ghosts.”

Eliza felt her body stiffen. “Ghosts?”

“Shit, that’s right, you don’t know anything…” Rachel muttered.
“Well, yes, ghosts. Some of them. Not everyone who’s died, just the ones that
are hanging around.”

A flood of childhood nightmares came crashing into Eliza’s
mind; fear of the dark, fear of the unknown. Words she thought she could hear
softly spoken in her room at night; the feeling of fingers at her feet, tugging
on the comforter. A wispy shadow that always lingered in the back room of the
library at middle school. The hands she thought she could see rising from the
grass-covered graves at Memorial Hill Cemetery. They had all been vivid
nightmares that plagued her, things she had learned to dismiss and hold at bay.
Rachel acknowledging ghosts as real — and as something accessible — released
all of these nightmares from the holding cell she’d sequestered them in.

“Ghosts?” Eliza repeated. “You’re serious?”

“As a heart attack,” Rachel replied. “Almost anyone who’s
gifted can see ghosts if they enter the River. It lets you look at all of the
unseen stuff that’s around us. Like how you could see what my lip balm was.”

“Ghosts…” Eliza repeated, muttering, trying to accept it.

“I used to spend a lot of time in the River, years ago,”
Rachel replied. “About ten years back, right around the time you came to work
at House on the Rock as a teenager, I gave it up. I decided to have nothing
more to do with it. I sold all my stuff, and I swore I’d never jump in again.”

“I’m guessing that didn’t happen?”

“Well, it did for a while,” Rachel replied, sticking a finger
into her glass to swirl the ice around. “I made it five, six years without
dabbling. Then parts of it came creeping back, like an old dog. I’m not as averse
to it as I was back then, but I don’t spend nearly as much time with it as I
used to.”

“What do you mean you sold all your stuff?” Eliza asked.

“Like the lip balm,” Rachel replied. “I used to have many
River objects. Just like that one, they looked one way in the normal world, and
like something else entirely in the River.”

“What’s the point of that?” Eliza asked. “What are they,
trinkets? Like collectibles?”

“Well, people collect them, yes, but they do it because each
object usually has some kind of power.”

“The lip balm?” Eliza asked skeptically. “It has power?”

“Not the lip balm,” Rachel replied. “The carved block. In the
River. That has power.”

“What kind of power does it have?”

“Every time I use the lip balm on my lips, I like to drop
into the River and hold the block up to my eyes, and look through the hole. It
improves eyesight.”

Eliza looked at her doubtfully.

“It’s true. Before that thing I wore glasses as thick as Coke
bottles! Now I hardly need them.”

“If you sold all your stuff, why do you have the lip balm?”

“I found it one day a few years ago in an old purse,” Rachel
replied. “Forgot it was there. Decided to keep it. I wasn’t as anti-gift by
that point, and I kinda liked having it around; it reminded me of the old days.
Not to mention the savings at the optician.”

“Sounds wacky,” Eliza said.

“Well, the block does a couple of other things, too,” Rachel
continued. “Some objects are nasty. You have to know what you’re doing with
them. Just like some people. There are some gifteds who are truly unpleasant.
We’re not all nice, like you and me.”

“And Shane? What’s the relevance of all this to him?”

“Well,” Rachel started. “I’ve had my doubts about that place
for years.”

“That place?”

“The place we work at, honey,” Rachel replied. “The House on
the Rock. I’ve walked through some of those exhibits while in the River. I can
assure you, there’s some very weird shit in Alex Jordan’s collections.”

“That’s obvious,” Eliza said. “The whole place is full of
weird stuff.”

“No, I mean River weird. Beyond what most people see.”

“Like what?” Eliza asked, becoming intrigued.

“Well,” Rachel continued, “you know that clown in the glass
case near The Spirit of Aviation?”

“Oh!” Eliza replied. “The one that looks like a hand puppet?”

“Yes.”

“That one has always creeped me out!”

“Well,” Rachel continued, “be sure to check him out in the
River next time you’re there.”

“What?”

Rachel opened her eyes wide and took another sip of her
cocktail.

“What, tell me!” Eliza insisted.

“You’ll see,” Rachel replied. “Then walk around the rest of
the place and see what else you notice. All those figurines in the Circus Building?
Wait ’til you see those in the River. And The Organ Room? All those weird
trees? Yeah, freaky.”

“What about The Mikado Room?” Eliza asked. “Anything there?”

“It’s one of the worst,” Rachel replied. “All kinds of River
stuff worked into that contraption.”

“That’s where Shane lost it,” Eliza said. “You think it might
have caused what happened to him?”

“Very hard to know for sure,” Rachel said. “He had walked
through half the exhibit by that point. Could have been any of it before that.”

“Why him?” Eliza asked. “Why not his friends? Why not any of
the other thousands of people who walk through that place?”

“Hard to say,” Rachel replied. “I just thought you should
consider it. There’s lots of questionable stuff in there.”

“I mean, he’s just a normal fourteen-year-old,” Eliza said.
“When he walked in with his friends, he was acting like he always does. Then,
this. Now he’s in an institution. It makes no sense.”

“Maybe he’s susceptible somehow,” Rachel offered. “Is he
gifted, too?”

Eliza thought about Rachel’s question. She’d never considered
the idea; Shane seemed like an ordinary younger brother. There was enough
difference between their ages that he’d never really been a pest when they were
growing up. They spent most of their time apart, hanging with friends their own
age. Since she’d hardly ever pursued the exploration of her own gift, she’d
never really considered if Shane had it too.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He might. I mean, we’ve never
talked about it.”

“Some gifteds are more sensitive to certain objects,” Rachel
said. “That’s why I thought I should mention them, in case they’re to blame for
what happened.”

“Well,” Eliza said, leaning back and taking another sip of
the drink, “the doctors said they’d have test results by tomorrow.”

“When they come back inconclusive,” Rachel said, rising from
her chair to make herself another, “think about what I’m telling you.”

●

Eliza let the screen door hit her as she walked into the country
home. The house had originally belonged to her grandparents, who were buried on
the property in a shady spot a hundred yards from the house. There were a
couple of other gravestones there, too — relatives she hadn’t bothered to learn
about while growing up. She would have laid her father to rest there as well,
but the laws changed. No more private graveyards, even if you did have thirty
acres of relative solitude.

She stood for a moment in the entryway, listening. The house
was quiet.

She dropped her keys in the key dish and walked into the
living room, falling down on the sofa. She knew she probably shouldn’t have
driven home; Rachel’s cocktails were strong, and she might be pushing the blood
alcohol limit. The combination of booze and information from Rachel was
spinning around in her mind, making her thoughts race.

Rachel isn’t exactly reliable,
she thought.
She’s a mess,
personally. More than once she’s been talked to about alcohol on her breath
when she came to work. And men — boy, can she pick them.
Eliza could
predict exactly how the next man in Rachel’s life would look and act: he’d be
wearing a wife beater, have tattoos up and down his arms, and a sneer or a
smirk. They’d party a lot, and after a few weeks Rachel would show up at work
with bruises on her arms, complaining that she didn’t know the guy was a felon.
Eventually she’d kick the guy out. Sometimes a restraining order would be involved;
sometimes not. She went through three or four a year.

Eliza remembered asking Rachel once where she met the guys
she dated. Rachel mentioned a bar in Fitchburg she’d never heard of.

A single light was on in the living room, a standing lamp
that was set on a timer. It cast a warm glow through the room, beating back the
dark that was slowly enveloping the house. She felt Sponge jump up onto the
couch with her, his head pressing against her arm and sliding several inches
down it.

She absently-mindedly reached to pet the cat, stroking his
back. When the purring didn’t start up, she pulled her hand away and turned to
look at the animal. A foot-long garter snake was hanging limply from each side
of Sponge’s mouth. As she watched, the cat stepped forward and placed the snake
next to her. Then it looked up, expecting Eliza’s hand on its head.

“Oh, thank you!” Eliza said sarcastically, letting her
fingers drop to the animal’s fur and giving him a quick rub. “Just what I
always wanted, Sponge: another dead snake. I appreciate the lack of blood this
time.”

The purring started.