Wild Fell (27 page)

Perhaps she had a sister who now ran the office? And yes, I
had
been in that office. Mrs. Fowler had handed me papers with written instructions on how to get to Wild Fell. I
had
the papers—where? Were they in the car? No, I had left them back at the house. I felt in my pocket for the iron keys. I located them easily enough. And yes, the iron ring was there. When I pulled the keys out of my pocket, it took me a moment to realize that the whimper I’d heard had come from my own throat.

I did not buy Wild Fell from a ghost. No, a million times over. Ghosts were not real. People were real. Fathers were real and their love was real.

Houses are real. Wild Fell was real.

And yet, this grave.

It was Mrs. Beams who came to the door in answer to my banging this time. Not her father. When she saw it was me, her face went white with rage. Her father might have been afraid of me, but she was not. She pushed herself into the doorway, elbowing me out of the way, onto the front step, using her own body to block the entrance to his house.

“Get the hell out of here,” she said in a voice that was remarkably flat and calm, diametrically opposed to the protective fury blazing in her eyes. “Get the hell off this property or I’ll call the police. You may have conned my father into letting you into his house, at least before you sent him into hysterics, but you won’t con me. I’m not a lonely old widower desperate to talk to someone he isn’t related to. What are you, some sort of freak? Do you enjoy taking advantage of old men? Are you queer? Do you want to try taking advantage of
me?
Do you?
”

I heard the shrill whine in my own voice when I answered her, but I was powerless to speak any other way. “I don’t know what happened. We were talking fine, then I mentioned my house and the real estate agent who sold it to me. Mrs. Fowler—”

Mrs. Beams slapped me across the face as hard as she could. My head snapped back as though it were on hinges. I heard the crack of her hand on my cheek even before I felt the heat and pain. I stumbled back from the force of the blow and nearly fell down the stairs. I stumbled backward down the steps, only righting myself on the banister just in time to keep myself from falling.

“Stop it,” she hissed. “Stop it, you bastard. Stop saying her name!”

I stared at her blankly. My cheek throbbed. “Stop what? Whose name? What did I do? I don’t know what I did!”

“Do you know how badly you upset him? That you would use
her
name—to him—for whatever con game you’re playing . . . you’re disgusting. We
loved
her, all of us. She was like a second mother to Brenda. We all called her Aunt Nettie. She was the kindest woman in Alvina.” The fury in Mrs. Beams’ eyes was annihilating. “How did you get her name? The Egan family kept it out of the papers when it happened. How did you find out about Velnette’s accident?”

“When
what
happened? I have no idea what you’re talking about. What accident? Please, this is like a nightmare. She’s not dead! I spoke with her yesterday. I want to understand. What’s going on? Please tell me.”

“As if you don’t know!”

“I
don’t
know! I don’t know what’s going on!”

“You told him ‘Mrs. Fowler’ sold you Wild Fell, and that you were staying up there? Well, as you already know, that’s not a very believable lie. Aside from everything else, Wild Fell is a dilapidated wreck. And do you know how I know, Mr. Con Man from the city? Because I’ve been out there and seen it with my own eyes. I went there to put flowers on the place where . . . where she . . .” Tears came to Mrs. Beams’ eyes, but she stared me down through them. “It’s a wreck. It’s
uninhabitable
.”

“No,” I insisted. “It’s
not
a wreck. The house hasn’t aged a day since it was built, apparently. Mrs. Fowler said so herself. If it was a ruin once, someone fixed it up. It’s a beautiful house. Mrs. Fowler”—here I flinched, but she didn’t strike me again—“said that a cleaning crew had worked on it. They must have worked very hard, especially if it was ruined, like you say. You have to believe me. There are candles, and paintings, and furniture. I slept in one of the bedrooms last night, in clean sheets. I slept in Rosa Blackmore’s
bedroom. Look!” I took the iron key ring out of my pocket and jangled it in front of her. “These are the keys to the house. I’m telling you, you’re mistaken. Please, if I was lying, why would I have these keys?”

At the sight of the keys, some of the fury left her face. She looked at the keys with confusion, even mild curiosity, then back at me with something not unlike pity. Her regard was still cold, but the hatred and loathing of a few moments ago had disappeared.

“Mr. Browning,” Mrs. Beams said. “Look, I’m sorry I hit you. Truly, I am. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. I don’t know what your story is. I frankly wish you’d go back to wherever it is you came from. You people from the city come out to places like Alvina and we must all seem like rubes to you, just a bunch of dumb hicks who keep your ‘cottage country’ ready for you to come back to every summer. But we’re more than that, Mr. Browning. Things happen out here in these towns. People have lives. They are born here, they live here, and they die here. They suffer things, things you people never see. You throw around names like ‘Brenda Egan’ or ‘Mrs. Fowler’ to my father like they were nothing but plot points in a novel. Well, sir, they were more than that to all of us. They were people we loved.”

“I saw the grave.” I was pleading, though I wasn’t sure what I was pleading
for
. Confirmation I was the butt of some monstrous joke? That I wasn’t insane? Even confirmation that I
was
insane would have been welcome just then. Anything real would have been. “I saw her gravestone in the Carlton Cemetery. But it’s not possible. I
saw
her. I
spoke
with her. She handled the sale of Wild Fell to me. I’m
telling
you, I followed her to Blackmore Island in my car—”

“Just shut up, Mr. Browning.” Mrs. Beams sounded tired now. “Shut up and listen to me, because I’m only going to say this once, and then I’m going to close this door. And if I ever see you around my father again, the police may not get here in time. Do we understand each other?”

I nodded dumbly.

She took a deep breath. “If you’re running some sort of scam then I hope you rot in hell. If you’re not, then you’re the victim of a cruel prank at best, or a fraud. You didn’t buy any house from any ‘Mrs. Fowler.’ There is a reason I know this: Velnette Fowler died in 1962.” Mrs. Beams let that sink in, then continued. “She was indeed a real estate agent. She and her husband ran one of the oldest real estate agencies in Alvina. They’d taken it over from her husband’s family. When he died, she tried to keep it up, but her heart wasn’t in it anymore. So you’re off by about fifty years.” There was no humour in Mrs. Beams’ smile. “Velnette had become deeply depressed after Brenda’s drowning, especially coming so soon after losing her husband. He was the first love of her life. They never had any children, so Brenda was like a daughter to her. Brenda’s drowning probably drove Velnette mad.”

I was on the urge of blurting out
she’s not dead!
again, but some inner compass of reason checked me before I did. I knew if I said that, Mrs. Beams would hit me again or, at the very least, stop talking to me at all.

Instead, I settled for, “How did she die?”

“She burned to death,” Mrs. Beams said simply. “I know my father told you those ridiculous stories about the Blackmore family this afternoon. Well, unlike my father and I, Velnette actually believed them. She was convinced that, somehow, something in the ruin of that house killed Brenda and Sean. She believed all those stories about Rosa Blackmore being something other than completely human. She was sure that something on Blackmore Island wanted Brenda and Sean’s souls.”

“But Brenda Egan drowned,” I said weakly. “It happens. It’s a tragedy, but it’s not—”

“Supernatural?” Mrs. Beams practically spat the word. “Is that what you were going to say? Well, I’m inclined to believe you, but many here in Alvina wouldn’t. When they pulled Brenda’s body out of the water, it was covered with moths. They say it was like she was wrapped in a sheet.”

I had a sudden vivid image of the framed Lepidoptera display in the yellow bedroom at Wild Fell, and the marquetry box on the mantelpiece with the moth design, containing Rosa’s cameo.

“Moths?”

Mrs. Beams ignored me and continued. “In any case,” she said, “Velnette took a can of gasoline out there one afternoon in a boat. Her plan was to burn what was left of that house to the ground. But something happened. Maybe there was a sudden wind, or maybe she spilled some of the gasoline on herself by accident. In any case, her clothes caught fire. She and my parents had been close friends. My father is the one who found her that night—he knew where to look, because she’d spoken of almost nothing else in the week leading up to her death except ‘getting revenge on that place.’ When he found her, she was already dead. She had third-degree burns covering ninety percent of her body. Dad brought her charred body back to Alvina in his canoe.”

“There’s a burned spot,” I said. “The beams are charred in one of the porticos off the main house. I saw it this morning. The wall is concrete. The fire couldn’t penetrate the house—”

Mrs. Beams closed the screen door in my face. “Now please leave, Mr. Browning, or whoever you are. Or I
will
call the police. And don’t come back.” She was just about to close the main door, but something seemed to give her pause. Behind the screen, her face, backlit by the living room lamps, was indistinct and her voice was curiously flat when she spoke, as though she were deliberately masking any tonality that might alert me to what she was actually thinking. “Mr. Browning?”

I waited.

“Whatever you’re trying to pull here, I don’t know what it is, and I don’t want to know. I just want you to stay away from my father, okay?”

I nodded. “I’m not trying to ‘pull’ anything, ma’am. Of course I’ll stay away from your father, but I—”

Again she cut me off before I could continue, and I knew this would be the last time she and I ever spoke. “On the other hand, on the off chance you’re the real victim here, the mark in some swindle, and you’ve been sold a Brooklyn Bridge here in Alvina through no fault of your own—and if you are, again, I’m sorry I hit you—there’s something you should know. When they did the autopsy on Velnette, they found dead moths in her throat. Her throat was
packed
with them, just like Brenda’s was when they found her in 1960.”

“Why are you telling me this, Mrs. Beams?” Now
I
was angry, in spite of my own confusion and shock. I had made myself vulnerable by telling her my bizarre stories—not ghost stories, but stories of actual events, however unexplained at that moment—and she had chastised me for it. Now she was telling me stories of her own. “I told you the truth about everything that happened to me and you called me a liar! You told me you don’t believe in any of this, but now you’re telling me
this?
What kind of a game are
you
playing? What are
you
trying to say?”

“I’m saying it,” Mrs. Beams said with suffocating patience. It was as though she were speaking to a recalcitrant fifth grader who refused to understand why he wasn’t allowed to talk in her library. “
Listen
to me say it, Mr. Browning. I don’t believe in witches—alive or dead—or ghosts. I believe in terrible accidents like the one that killed Velnette. I believe that teenage girls out swimming with their boyfriends get cramps, and drown in cold water. But the fact is, what they found in Velnette’s throat had no business being there. Maybe whatever Velnette went to Blackmore Island to kill didn’t
want
to be killed. Maybe it stopped her from killing it, and it punished her for trying to kill it.” She paused again, carefully marshalling her words. “I’m not saying that’s what happened, or even that it’s what I believe happened. But if you’re involved with some swindle to do with that place, even if you’re the mark, maybe you should think twice about what you’re playing around with. Now, get off my father’s property. Leave us alone. Last warning.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts, Mrs. Beams.”

She shut the main door. I heard the lock turn, and the porch light was switched off. I stood on the sidewalk in front of Clarence Brocklehurst’s home and watched the lights turn off in the living room until the house was blind.

I spent an hour cruising slowly through Alvina’s darkened streets searching for the place I’d turned off the highway and onto Main Street—the mid-century Main Street I’d seen yesterday afternoon, the one with the brass lampposts and the boxes of geraniums, not this new Main Street of convenience stores and souvenir shops.

At one point I was sure I recognized the corner down which I’d turned to Mrs. Fowler’s office. But when I found what I thought was the place, there was only an office machine repair shop. The storefront was dark; the door locked tight, the street empty.

Later in the bright moonlight on the edge of town, I pulled over to the side of the road and tried to call Hank again. The line rang and rang, but again, no one picked up. There was likewise still no answer at the MacNeil Institute. The mechanical whirring of the ringtone in my ear seemed to go on forever.

Then, already knowing what the outcome would be, I stood in the road beneath the moon—that bright autumn moon which shone on everything but illuminated nothing—and dialled again.

If necessity really is the mother of invention, then perhaps desperation is the father of memory.

The only proof of my sanity was back at Wild Fell, in Rosa Blackmore’s bedroom—the manila envelope from Mrs. Fowler with her handwritten list of services and contractors, and her written instructions on how to drive between Alvina and Blackmore Island. When I went to turn on the GPS to find my way back to Wild Fell, it refused to boot up. As I had neither instructions nor a working GPS, I would have to find my way back to Wild Fell relying only on my own memory and the moonlight, which was now, at least, very bright. The place at which the road leading to Blackmore Island began, was at the turnoff near the supermarket where I’d bought supplies this afternoon.

I found the turnoff and began to drive back toward the house.

In the light of the moon, the roads were easy to follow and I was able to navigate them with relative ease. One road led to the next in an organic way. My subconscious had clearly recorded more in the way of recognition than my conscious mind would ever have thought possible.

As I drove, I replayed the events of the past twenty-four hours in my mind trying to make sense of them, but of course, none of it made sense. There was only one way it would ever even begin to make sense, and it was the one thing on which I pinned all my hopes for sanity.

I realized that even if I left Alvina that night and never came back, I would still need to see and touch Mrs. Fowler’s envelope. I’d left it in my bag, on the floor of the yellow bedroom. I needed it. When I had the folder, I would leave and never come back. It was that simple.

That the house had been repaired and tended was not a question: I had been there. I had built fires in the fireplaces. I had slept in the yellow bedroom. I had gone downstairs to the cellar and I had seen the oil portraits of the family—portraits whose likenesses had matched the photocopies I had seen in the bright daylight of the Alvina Town Library.

Photocopies I had been handed in a file folder by Mrs. Beams herself.

This last thought cheered me immensely. Whatever was in question here, it wasn’t my sanity. If all of this had been in my mind, if I had been suffering some sort of psychotic break or other, I would not have recognized the faces of the individual members of the Blackmore family in the copies of the photographs retrieved from the burned church. But I needed the file folder. It was the only concrete evidence I could show Clarence Brocklehurst that proved I had met and spoken with Velnette Fowler or, at the very least, someone pretending to be Velnette Fowler
with the intention of swindling me out of a great deal of money.

I had to speak with Mr. Brocklehurst again. But if he still wouldn’t speak with me, I would push the envelope through the mail slot in his front door on my way out of Alvina as I drove home to where I belonged: the city, with my father and Hank.

At the edge of Devil’s Lake, I untied the Bass Tracker from the dock and climbed into the bow. I turned the key in the ignition and guided the boat back into deeper water. When I’d reached a good depth, I opened it up and pointed it towards Blackmore Island.

A full sturgeon moon had risen, large and low and red-tinged in the night sky behind Blackmore Island. As the Tracker swept to the rocky beach, I felt I could see every stone, every shimmer of the shallow water that had pooled around the larger boulders and recessed areas of the beach.

I tied the boat up, then found the stone staircase leading from the landing beach to the house and I began to climb, using the flashlight I’d bought earlier that day at the supermarket as secondary illumination, though it was a poor substitute for the moonlight.

A thought occurred to me as I climbed, a wild thought. It was not a thought that would have occurred to me yesterday, perhaps not even as recently as this afternoon.

At the summit, I crossed the overgrown tangle of ruined lawns and trees, playing the flashlight across the copse of pine I’d seen struck by lightning last night, searching for the branch I’d watched burn and the place where I’d seen the figure of the woman standing in the rain. I kept my light trained on the ground until I found it, found what I realized I knew I’d find there.

Two gravestones, each the twin of the other, rose out of the flinty soil of Blackmore Island in the protective shelter of the white pine grove. I shone the light on the first stone and read
Malcolm Alexander Blackmore 1833-1928.

The second stone, his sister’s, read
Rosa Amanda Blackmore 1833-1928
. Inscribed beneath it was the motto,
I will always find you.

Rosa Amanda Blackmore. Rosa
Amanda
Blackmore.

“Amanda,” I said aloud, suddenly nine years old again. “Amanda.”

The front door stood open.

I walked up the wide cement stairs of the veranda, and then crossed the threshold of Wild Fell.
My
house. Of
course
it was my house. Of course it was real; of course it was solid. This was no ruin. I felt the hardwood floors and Oriental carpets beneath my feet, the wood panelling beneath my fingers. I could even smell the house: mahogany, silver, camphor, and dried violets.

Ruin, my ass. Fuck you, Mrs. Beams.

When I flipped the light switches back and forth, nothing happened. I waited for my eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. Once they had, I turned the flashlight back on and walked slowly down the hallway. I played the light on the carving of the Blackmore coat of arms on the soaring archway. From outside, the full moon lit the stained glass windows in the hallway, casting it into a lurid jewel-toned diorama.

I climbed the stairs to the yellow bedroom.

Now and then came the fluttering of moths. When I shone my flashlight in the direction of the sound, they descended in small clouds, attracted to the light. Then they fluttered away to the higher, darker recesses of the house.

Like the front door had been, the door to the yellow bedroom—a door that I’d closed before leaving the house that afternoon—was wide open.

The moonlight through the windows was bright enough that I didn’t need the flashlight to see the contours of the room. I could clearly make out the furniture: the dressing table, the bed, and the full-length mirror reflecting the room behind it. It was in the glass of that mirror that I was able to see that the marquetry box, which I’d replaced on the mantelpiece that afternoon, was now sitting open in the middle of the bed.

I walked slowly to the edge of the bed and sat down. I placed my hand inside the box to see what latest gift I’d been offered by my invisible hostess. I found something cold and dry, like finely dressed leather.

From inside the box I withdrew the torn and mangled body of a tiny midland painted turtle. In the light of the flashlight, I was able to make out the yellow plastron with the butterfly markings. Two of the turtle’s legs had been torn off. Its carapace was punctured with deep bites and the neck dangled from a greenish tendon, or perhaps just a stringy strand of the turtle’s neck. It had been dead for a very, very long time.

Since 1971, I guessed.

It was Manitou, of course, the turtle I’d stolen from its home and brought back to the city, to its brutal death in the jaws of the neighbour’s dog—a death that had been aided and abetted by my mother. All of which was shown to me on that terrible night when I had been nine and had returned to my bedroom from emptying my bladder only to find a candle lit beside my bed and Amanda, my secret friend, the little girl who lived in the glass, ready to show me any manner of horror, to threaten any manner of violence. That is, until I’d smashed my mirror, driven her away and erased the memory of an entire part of my childhood in the process.

Like everything else I could now remember, I recalled Amanda’s parting words to me, the same words I’d found carved into the grave of Rosa Blackmore almost a century before I was born:
I will always find you.

From the shadows of the yellow bedroom I heard, or imagined I heard, a soft, cruel giggle.

My hand stank of pond carrion. I dropped the turtle’s tiny body on the floor. It landed on the carpet with a soft, tragic little
thud,
and lay there in the moonlight beside my bag. Furiously, I wiped my hand on my thigh, desperately trying to scrub away the stench.

Then I saw the edge of Mrs. Fowler’s manila envelope extruding from the unzipped opening.

The relief I felt at that moment wiped away every other fear and made my senses swim.
Oh, thank God
, I thought.
Proof!
Whatever the rest of this madness was about, here at last was proof that someone real had sold me this house and brought me here to this island. At that moment, I didn’t care if I’d been the victim of a world-class real estate swindle. I would have paid the money a hundred times over for the relief of knowing I was not insane. Nearly weeping with joy, I plucked the envelope out of the bag and shone the flashlight at the papers I had withdrawn. Then I looked closer and tried to make sense of what I was holding.

It was a sheaf of perhaps twenty closely handwritten pages tied with purple ribbon, a sprig of dried violet tucked beneath. The flower was so old that the very act of bringing the paper up into the light of my flashlight caused it to crumble away to dust before my eyes. The paper was likewise ancient, parchment-thin, browned with many, many decades of exposure to the air. The ink had likely been deep blue once, but it was now pale and faded. I tugged at the ribbon; it, too, turned to powder at my touch.

The document was written in a feminine hand, the letters small and beautifully formed in the way young ladies from good families had been taught to write a hundred years ago.

I want to teach you about fear.

I want to tell you a ghost story. It’s not a ghost story like any ghost story you’ve ever heard. It’s my ghost story, and it’s true. It happened here in the house on Blackmore Island called Wild Fell, in the inland village of Alvina, Ontario on the shores of Devil’s Lake. Like any ghost story, it involves the bridges between the past and the present and who, or rather what, uses them to cross from the world of the living into the world of the dead.

But I’m getting ahead of my story. I did say the bridge is between the past and the present. Although I’ll tell you this story in the present, I would be remiss if I didn’t start with the past—specifically my past. Time is, or ought to be, linear. Sometimes it’s anything but linear, which brings us back to ghosts.

I shook my head. What I was reading was gibberish. There was nothing here about Alvina Power, or the phone company, or the names and numbers of any of the contractors or cleaning companies that had been engaged by Mrs. Fowler in the preparation of Wild Fell for sale. There were no directions to and from Alvina. Furthermore it was
old
gibberish. These pages must have been written in the heyday of Wild Fell, in the nineteenth century.

Why had Mrs. Fowler—or whoever was pretending to be her—taken the time to put them in a folder she’d claimed was full of practical information, only to have it be the preamble to an elaborate practical joke involving what appeared to be a fledgling nineteenth-century authoress’s attempt at a ghost story—an attempt that had somehow survived almost a hundred years, likely in some drawer or trunk in this old house?

And then, in the trembling light of my flashlight, I saw my own name in the ancient violet handwriting, and I felt my heart shudder in my chest.

My name is Jameson Browning. In the summer of 1971, when I was nine, I went to Camp Manitou, the summer camp deep in rural eastern Ontario where edges of towns yielded to woods and marshes and rolling farmland hills.

I hadn’t wanted to go at all. I deeply distrusted boys of my own age, all of whom had proven themselves to be coarse and rough and prone to noise and force. It would be tempting for anyone reading this to imagine a socially isolated, lonely boy with no friends—a loner not so much by choice, but by ostracism or social ineptitude. But the conjured image would be an inaccurate one. I wasn’t a lonely boy at all, not by any stretch.

I read the words again.

“No,” I said aloud, reasonably. “No, no.” I read the paragraph twice more, then laid it down on the bed beside me. “Not possible. This is not about me. I am not in a ghost story written a hundred years ago. This is a trick. Someone is tricking me.”

The hysteria felt like jubilation, as though the fact that someone would take such an enormous amount of care in setting up this elaborate ruse to drive me insane was a proof of love beyond anything I had ever experienced in my life. Perhaps I really was extraordinary at long last, extraordinary enough to warrant the time it had taken to execute this cruelty.

“
GREAT TRICK!
” I screamed into the darkness of the house, laughing at the echo that skipped across Wild Fell like a stone.

And then I heard the most welcome sound in the world: the one sound that represented any possible chance I might have at salvation. I heard the front door open with a bang and the heavy tread of work boots on the hallway floor.

“Jamie!” Hank’s voice blasted up from downstairs. “Jesus fucking Christ! Jamie! Where are you? You scared the shit out of me! I got your message from yesterday and I came right away. I’ve been driving all night!”

I shouted,
“Hank! I’m up here! Stay there! I’m coming down!”

I swayed on my feet when I stood up, dropping the flashlight to the floor. It rolled beneath the bed, the light vanishing beneath the dust ruffle, then winking out altogether.

I’m going to pass out from sheer relief
, I thought giddily.
Sweet God in Heaven, thank you.

I laughed as I stumbled out of the yellow bedroom into the darkness of the hallway, high on narcotic relief and thundering adrenaline. In the air above me, I heard the fluttering of the moths. They circled my head; they brushed against my face and hands with fairy skeleton bones of legs and wings like strands of milkweed in the wind. They alighted on my forehead; they caressed my eyes, their touch like dry snowflakes against my skin. I brushed them away, pinwheeling my arms in the air and swatting frantically to keep more from landing.