The Haunting of Pitmon House (7 page)

Eliza hung up, and they tried the new number. Dixon picked
up.

“Hello?” he said, his voice loud.

“Dixon?” Rachel said. “It’s Rachel. Rachel from Wisconsin.”

There was a pause on the end of the line before Dixon spoke
up. “Well, Rachel from Wisconsin! How nice to hear your voice! You sound good!”

“So do you, Dixon!” Rachel replied.

“Why, thank you! You’re one of the sweetest people I know.
What can I do for you?”

“I’ve got a pattern,” Rachel replied. “Was hoping you could
help me out with it.”

“Of course, of course I can!” Dixon said. “But I gotta admit
I’m a little surprised to hear from you. I thought you hung up your hat!”

“I did,” Rachel said, smiling at Eliza. “At least, I did for
a while. Something’s come up, and I put the hat back on.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Dixon said. “Glad to hear you’re
back in the saddle. Do you have a picture of the pattern you can send me?”

“It’s a Tapura image,” Rachel replied. “I can fax it if you
like.”

“Listen,” Dixon replied, “I’m on the boat near San Diego
right now, so don’t send it to my Seattle number. Send it to Shirley; she’s
down here, and I’ll be seeing her tomorrow. I’ll give you her number.”

Eliza reached for a pen. “Go ahead,” she said.

“Now, who’s that with you?” Dixon asked. “Lovely voice.”

Eliza could feel her cheeks blush.

“That’s Eliza,” Rachel said. “She’s who I’m helping.”

“Well, nice to meet you, Eliza!” Dixon said. “Any friend of
Rachel’s is a friend of mine!”

“Thank you,” Eliza said. “Nice to meet you too.”

“Eliza’s brother is in a jam,” Rachel said. “It’s pretty
serious. We’re trying to bust him loose.”

“Alright,” Dixon replied. “You send that pattern to me, and
I’ll get right on it. Make sure you include how I can reach you back, OK?
Here’s that number…”

Eliza wrote as he dictated. “We’ll send it right now,” she
said.

“Good, good,” Dixon answered. “I’ll get back to you as soon
as I can. Anything else?”

“Nope, that’s it, Dixon,” Rachel said. “We really appreciate
it.”

“Don’t mention it,” he replied. “It was good to hear from
you!”

“You too!” Rachel said. “Bye!”

“Bye!”

Eliza hung up. “Sounds like a nice guy.”

“He’s the single cutest guy I’ve ever met,” Rachel said. “Old
enough to be my dad, though.”

“Still, sounds like a great friend to have.”

“For sure,” Rachel replied. “Well, I guess now we wait.”

“Tell me again what Dixon is going to do, exactly?”

“He’s an expert on patterns,” Rachel replied. “On his boat he
has dozens of huge three-ring binders, filled with pictures of them, and his
notes. He’s got thousands and thousands.”

“Won’t that take him a long time to search though?”

“Not him!” Rachel smiled. “Somehow he’s got a little database
in his brain, and he’s got them all organized so he knows right where to look.
People all over the country use him to figure out shit.”

“And he’s going to tell us how that device infected Shane?”

“Well,” Rachel replied, “maybe not exactly that. But he can
usually shed some light on things, like who created the pattern, that kind of
thing.”

“How does that help us?”

“If we know who made it, we can track them down and find out
why they made it, and how it works exactly. There’s all kinds of dangerous
antidotes out there, but we have to know what we’re dealing with first. Once we
do, it might be as simple as a potion.”

“Could we give Shane some of your protection, now? Wouldn’t
it help him?”

“Not at this stage,” Rachel replied. “You remember how you
felt when it was trying to get in?”

Eliza thought back to the animatronic display. “Every time
that man’s hand passed over the lantern, it felt like something was pushing,
wanting to enter my mind.”

“The protection was what it was pushing against,” Rachel
replied. “If we hadn’t taken it, we might be in the same boat Shane’s in now.”

“It can’t help Shane somehow?” Eliza asked. “Drive it out?”

“No, it only protects you from things trying to get in,”
Rachel replied. “It’s already in Shane.”

“If that machine can do that to people,” Eliza said, “why
just Shane? Why now? You’d think there would be lots of people infected by it.”

“Well, gifted people,” Rachel said. “Remember, there was
nothing to feel when you weren’t in the River. I suspect Shane dropped while he
was watching it.”

“Still, wouldn’t it have happened before? Sometime?”

“For all we know, it has. We don’t know how old that
contraption is, or where it was before Alex Jordan collected it and it wound up
here. It might have been a proximity thing, too…Shane might have been standing
in exactly the right place. It’s hard to say. I do know several gifted friends
from the old days who said they never visit this place without protection, though.
All you have to do is look at some of the displays to know something’s off.”

Eliza thought of the riverboat…yes, Rachel was right. The
riverboat had always creeped her out. So had The Mikado, and the carousel. The
Organ Room, too.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Eliza said. “I didn’t realize it was so dangerous,
though.”

“Dangerous if you open yourself up to it,” Rachel replied.
“Most gifteds know better. Shane didn’t know better.”

Eliza suddenly felt anger toward her father. His secrecy and
reluctance to discuss the gift might be the reason Shane was now in that
Madison hospital, tied to the bed. She wanted to let her anger show and get
pissed, but she knew there was no point. Her father was in a grave in Spring
Green, not somewhere where she could sit him down and tell him how angry she
was. Even when he was alive, communicating with him had been difficult.

She sensed that Rachel could pick up on her confusion and
dismay.

“Come on,” Rachel said. “I’ll buy you a drink in town. You
could use one, and there’s nothing we can do until Dixon gets back to us.”

“No bars,” Eliza said. “Not in the mood for that.”

“No bars,” Rachel said, smiling.

●

Eliza woke in the middle of the night. She’d been dreaming
about living in a tent under a freeway overpass, trying to keep the rain and
the cold from getting in, but unable to. She could hear inebriated panhandlers
walking past her tent, wailing and rattling on nonsensically, making it
impossible to sleep.
This is what happens when you’re homeless,
she
dreamt, and when she woke, feeling the mattress under her and the fresh sheets
against her skin, she allowed her body to relax, muscle by muscle.

It was as horrible a nightmare as any she’d ever had. Monsters,
death, falling — none of the classics scared her more than the fear of being on
the street without a roof over her head, penniless.

The moonlight was streaming in her upstairs bedroom window,
and she felt the urge to slide out of bed for a moment and look down into the
yard. The house was so quiet without Shane. Staring down at the driveway that
led beyond the trees to the main road, she felt a sense of responsibility to
make sure the homestead stayed safe and protected. It was her job now; her father
was gone. Shane was too young. It fell to her.

A slight wind moved the large trees outside, and she wondered
if another storm was coming. It was too dark to make out the nature of any
clouds, but there weren’t enough to obscure the bright moonlight that lit up
the yard, casting faint shadows.

Something looked odd in the windows of the barn; it was an
unusual pattern of reflected moonlight. She stared at it, watching as it resolved
in her mind. When she realized what it was, she felt the hair stand up on her
arms and neck. It was a face! Someone was in the barn, staring up at her through
the window.

The face pulled out of the moonlight and disappeared into
shadow as she felt more anxiety and fear pump through her system. She continued
to stare at the barn window, waiting to see if it would return.
Should I go
down again?
she wondered.
Confront whoever it is? Whatever it is? I have
a duty to protect the place. It could be a trespasser, robbing the barn.

No,
she told herself.
It isn’t. It’s the same thing you saw the night
before, the thing that scared you. It’s down there, still in the barn. It’s not
robbing the place. It’s waiting.

She kept staring at the window, wondering if it would come
back. After what felt like an hour, she gave up, her feet beginning to get
cold. As she crawled back into bed, she noticed the clock on her nightstand.
3:30 — way too early to get up. She tried to close her eyes and go back to
sleep, trying not to worry about Shane, or what Dixon might have to say, or the
face in the barn window.

●

“What number did you give him?” Eliza asked as she passed
Rachel on her way to lunch. Lois always staggered their lunches, so they didn’t
have much time to talk.

“My number at home,” Rachel said. “He’ll probably leave a
message on my machine. Why don’t you come over after work and we’ll see.”

“Call me when you get home if he did,” Eliza said. “If not,
I’m going back into Madison to see Shane.”

“Alright,” Rachel replied. “I better get back.”

Rachel turned to walk back to the gift shop, and Eliza
continued on to the break room. She removed a frozen dinner from the freezer
and popped it into the microwave. Her dreams of the previous night were
weighing on her, and she was anxious to hear from Dixon. Waiting made her feel
powerless, and she hated that.

She also wasn’t happy with how she’d reacted in her bedroom.
She felt a little ashamed that she hadn’t marched downstairs and out to the
barn like any property-owning Midwesterner would do. Even though she knew that
she’d find the barn empty, she still felt she’d let her family down by not
being sure, by not going down and seeing for herself that no one was really
there.

I could have drifted down in the River,
she thought, sitting at a table to
wait for the microwave.
I could have stayed upstairs in my bedroom, and just
travelled down to the barn in the River and poked around. Why didn’t I?

She knew the answer to that question, but didn’t want to
admit it: the barn had always scared her. Even as a little child she hated
being in it, with all of its strange smells and dark corners.

I wonder how long it’s been in there?
she thought, as the microwave began
to beep.
Maybe a lot longer than I think. Maybe it’s been in there for
years, even when I was young. Maybe before I was born.

She pulled the plastic from her lunch and let the smell of
the previously frozen food hit her nostrils. It looked a bit slimy, so she used
a fork to stir things a little, blending the pasta into the sliced vegetables
and the thin wedges of meat.
I’ve got to stop eating this crap,
she
thought, sitting down with it and taking a bite. It was still too hot to eat.
I
say that all the time, but I keep eating it.

As she shoveled it into her mouth, she had the odd thought of
how the tasty crap she fed Sponge smelled better than the tasty crap she was about
to swallow.

●

“Ready?” Rachel asked, her finger over the button on her
answering machine.

“Just tell me, is it good news?” Eliza asked.

“Well,” Rachel said, shrugging her shoulders a little. “Eh.”
She pressed the button.

The machine beeped, followed by Dixon’s voice. “Hello,
Rachel, it’s me, Dixon. Listen, I’ve matched up that pattern. It’s from someone
named Yessler. I think it’s an alias. The pattern has shown up a few times in
the Midwest, but a lot in Europe, too. I identified it for someone about a
decade ago, and they gave me an address for Yessler, which I’ll pass along to
you. There’s no guarantee it means anything, but it’s a start at least.”

Eliza listened while Dixon rattled off a street address in
Middleton, a suburb of Madison. It was an older part of town, known for fancy
mansions that housed the rich people of the past century. The machine beeped
again, and Rachel looked up at her.

“So, that’s the good news,” Rachel said.

“The good news?” Eliza replied. “How is that any help at
all?”

“Well, normally, we’d track down this address and go from
there. You know, hopefully find out something that leads us somewhere. That’s usually
a good thing. In this case, however…” She paused.

“What?” Eliza asked.

“The address,” Rachel replied, beginning to pace back and
forth in her trailer. “Not good.
Not
good.”

“Not good? What, it doesn’t exist?”

“No, it exists, it’s not that. I mean the place is bad.”